By Tarja Salmela & Outi Rantala
Writing a blog post to sustainable change research arena in June 2020 seems almost impossible without situating it to these troubling times (we obviously share this experience with the authors of the previous blog posts in this channel). COVID-19 pandemic has shaken our world as we have come to know it, and it has thrown us into the unexpected and unknown. Here in the north, we are to be grateful for many things during this crisis. For example, while the type of social life that is defined in anthropocentric terms did come to a standstill, north has provided us with a place where the connection with nature kept many of us sane. We have had the possibility to continue engaging with nature, forests, rivers, lakes, and hills during the pandemic, and not to experience lockdown in a way that we have seen in many countries. As such, the crisis here in the north – perhaps – has even widened our common understanding of what counts as ‘social’.
This writing is situated in Finland, Lapland. Part of it is written outside, by the flooding Kemijoki river, with foam heads, twirls, floating ice, different colours, tones, sounds, and rhythms passing by and continuing their way into the sea, out of our eyes’ reach. The river embodies constant transformation, motion, on top and under the surface of the water. Life goes on, and we must find ways to live again, even when we have been hurt or our faith has been tested. During this spring, the wooden shelters, ski tracks, winter hiking routes, and our proximate forests have been visited actively by local people. Many of us have taken a good look at the core values of our lives, and deliberated what the life in the north actually includes and enables. Living in the north is living in, with, beside and as part of nature. But living in-with-beside-part of nature does not come without trouble (as already hinted by Toni Ruuska and others in the previous blog post).
Consequently, we decided to name this piece of writing after a question of trouble and its causality. Perhaps the trouble we are going through right now indeed is a transition to something good. We also suggest that to face and live-with the trouble demands the type of engagements that are post-anthropocentric by their nature. We cannot find solutions to problems facing our societies by just staring at the end of the tunnel, relying on our partial vision and trying to measure, evaluate and calculate what is waiting for us at the end of it. We need imagination, hope and good skills of listening. We need to learn to listen to the wider, unimaginably large group of all forms of life that is inhabiting this planet with us – listening even though it is difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to translate the voices from the margins (Höckert, 2018).
As researchers working with tourism studies, we suggest that during these troubled times, it is important to talk about tourism – not only in the context of mobility restrictions and economical losses, but as a certain practice that has its historical roots, cultural dimensions and spatial orderings. Here in Finnish Lapland, historically tourists arrived wandering up the fells or rowing up the rivers – detached from the mundane work related to these landscapes. Currently, tourism relates here both to the masses of jobs that are in danger due to COVID-19, but also to the large variety of practices in which locals partake in the proximate nature. Through these practices the multiplicity of lives in this planet mesh and form complex networks. This complexity communicates the necessity of considering life – and consequently tourism – as profoundly, ontologically, more-than-human
Abhik Chackraborty (2020) writes how the engaging of non-human others in the tourism landscape is utmost necessary for “addressing wicked problems, the complex nature of which preclude anthropocentric solutions”. Indeed, the COVID-19 virus forms a wicked problem for the humans, but it is definitely not only a problem for a humankind. Instead, its consequences can overshadow “much graver problems”, to put it in Tuula Helne’s words in an earlier post in this blog, such as climate change. COVID-19 is a more-than-human challenge that extends in time and space to the past as well as to the possible futures, and originates in itself from transcorporeal relations. Thus, we have no other chance than to approach it in ways that go beyond the Anthropos. This holds true with troubles with tourism respectively.
During the past months, our research group at the University of Lapland has been working with local tourism and photography entrepreneurs to enable a slow and patient formation of relation with the non-human residents of the northern nature. On June 15-16th we organize an international research meeting, which had to be moved to a safe online environment. In order to create the type of environment that enables slowing down, accompanied by the presence of the non-human inhabitants of the Pyhä-Luosto National Park, the local entrepreneurs have produced visual narrative material for the meeting. The materials will be presented at our website – www.ilarctic.com – at the time of the meeting. The material includes, for example, a Slow-TV broadcast from Pyhä-Luosto. The collaboration has not been generated in order to only ‘keep the system going’ and to create a possibility for income to the entrepreneurs during these challenging times. Instead, it is a part of a bigger, long-term project. This collaboration is about putting care into effect – to act instead of feeling sorry. Together, we are creating something new, helping each other out, and extending this collective effort to learn to live during these troubling times together with and in nature. Our modest hope has also been that, perhaps, we can all – our collaborators as much as us researchers – learn something new from the process, and create new imaginaries. This process has been about forming new kinships (Haraway, 2016) in a more-than-human world. By making kin, we grow determinacy to make a change and to live with the trouble – and learn from it.
Literature referred to in the text:
Chakraborty, A. (2020). Emplacing non-human voices in tourism research : the role of dissensus as a qualitative method. Tourism Geographies, 0(0), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1713875
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying With the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Höckert, E. (2018). Negotiating Hospitality. Ethics of Tourism Development in Nicaraguan Highlands. London: Routledge.