Search

Mitigation of climate change urges to reduce our meat consumption. This necessitates new eating practices and ways of thinking about food. In this paper we discuss how experimentative research can participate in making such changes. We introduce notions of pragmatic tinkering, speculative thinking and ethical discussion and evaluate their contribution to understanding of change in everyday practices. We investigate their prospects in relation to our experiments with sustainable school dining. In these experiments we introduced a free vegetarian choice to school meals and engaged pupils in their development. The results highlight the dynamic nature of change in everyday practices. The notion of tinkering highlights the small adjustments needed to reconcile the different goals in school dining. Our results stress that the practical adjustments easily uphold the conventional practices. Speculative thinking is needed in challenging them. In our experiments, the engagement of pupils opened places for hesitation, and eventually also to new ways of thinking about school food. The pupils also challenged our experiments. They reminded how eating is entangled to our shared cultural meanings on food, but also to our identity and understandings of gender. In future, experimentative research should build settings, which allow them becoming more multiple as well.

Kimurantteja ongelmia kukaan ei pysty ratkaisemaan yksin. Esimerkiksi ilmastonmuutos, luontokato, väestöryhmien eriytyminen ja kaupunkien maankäyttöpaineet vaativat erilaisten tavoitteiden yhteensovittamista ja yhteistyötä eri toimijoiden, kuten kansalaisyhteiskunnan toimijoiden, viranomaisten ja yritysten välillä. Oletko ongelmanratkaisuprosessin koollekutsuja? Julkaisu auttaa suunnittelemaan näiden prosessien kehittämistä yhteistoiminnallisiksi. Oletko ongelmanratkaisun muu osapuoli tai yhteistoiminnan edistämisestä kiinnostunut? Julkaisu antaa ajatuksia siihen, miten voit itse ja miten organisaatiosi tai yhteisösi voi toimia suhteessa yhteisen ongelmanratkaisun prosesseihin.

Metsätalouden ammattilaisia koskevat tutkimustuloksemme osoittavat, että kehollisuuden ymmärtäminen osana tietotyötä auttaa hahmottamaan, miten eri tavoin asiantuntijatyötä ohjataan, ja samoin sitä, millaiset seikat vaikuttavat politiikan ja uusien säännösten toteuttamiseen käytännössä.

This article explores masculine action space in transition: changes in forest work and industrial utilization of nature. The aim is to understand how the rising importance of environmental issues, such as renewable energy production, change the ways how nature is encountered in forest work. The article is based on interviews of logging contractors who have recently started bioenergy business. The key analytical concept is affordance which addresses the constraints and possibilities of actors in their social, material and natural working environments. The concept allows us to conceptualise the changing relationship between social practices, gender and nature. Affordances, enacted through the material and social practices of forest work, make visible the distinctions in the working cultures and agency of forest workers. These distinctions, and the related tensions between masculinities, are important from the viewpoint of environmental justice because they reveal the politics of forest work, and help to re-establish the connection between social and environmental issues.

Van Dijk, J., Ulvund, K., Braat, L., Sier, A., Mirtl, M., Watt, A., Peltola, T. and Delbaere, B. 2012. ALTER-Net, a long-term biodiversity, ecosystem and awareness research network - Year 8 - NINA Report 815, 36 pp. The year 2011 was used to restructure and organize our work towards ALTER-Net after April 2012, when external funding for holding the secretariat will end. Early 2011 Council elected a new chairman for Council – Eeva Furman (SYKE) and a new chairman for the Management Board – Leon Braat (Alterra). During 2011 it became clear that all partner institutes were willing to continue with ALTER-Net in the future, that the secretariat work would be outsourced to different institutes with a rotating system for especially the financial administration as to increase institutional participation. ALTER-Net welcomed two new partner institutes to our consortium (VU-IVM and IGB). With the new structure ALTER-Net is currently scheduled to run until April 2014. During April 2011 – March 2012 the eight year of ALTER-Net our website was changed and moved to a new provider and we repeated our second Multi-Site Experiment on decomposition using 15 monitoring sites managed by 12 ALTER-Net partner institutes and 3 non ALTER-Net partner institutes. In addition ALTER-Net organized a Long-Term Social Ecological Research Workshop at SYKE in Helsinki and was actively involved in the two currently running EU projects on the Science-Policy interface, i.e. KNEU and SPIRAL. We also organized our yearly ALTER-Net summer school again. These processes help ALTER-Net to reach its objective to promote a better integrated and stronger European biodiversity research capacity. The result will be the establishment of a lasting infrastructure for integrated ecosystem research, combining ecological and socioeconomic approaches, and with greater emphasis on communication with relevant audiences.

Bioenergy is one important form of renewable energy where Finland, Norway and Sweden have considerable potential. Greatly increased use of biomass for energy will, however, have considerable effects on environmental values like biodiversity, landscape appearance, outdoor recreation, and the cultural heritage. This review concludes that positive or marginally negative effects of biomass harvesting are likely for harvesting of logging residues, clearance of trees under power lines, along roads, and from marginal agricultural land, as well as production of energy crops on arable land. Negative effects are likely from harvesting of stumps, more intensive forest cultivation on logged areas, and harvesting of biomass from currently non-commercial forests. The environmental effects of production of biomass from reed canary grass or short rotation forestry will depend on where and how such production takes place.