The forest as a taskscape: seeing through the good forest owner’s eyes

ABSTRACT

This article is a reanalysis of interviews conducted in 2006 and 2009 with forest owners and their families. It gives a complementary interpretation of the forest owners’ decisions to replant spruce despite strong criticism from the public and from experts. The interviewees’ visual conception of the forest landscape and how they relate to it through their forestry practices is analysed. The results show that the forest owners prefer landscapes that are clean and tidy, showing characteristics indicative of forestry skills. At the same time they remain sensitive to the existence of other value systems among the public. The forest owners’ way of looking at the forest was characterized by the fact that they worked with the landscape; for them the forest is not only a symbolic project linked to identity, but also a taskscape, an imprint of performed work. In the discussion, the forest owners’ aesthetic value system is discussed and a supplementary answer is given to why forest owners refused to heed warnings about the replanting of spruce, a question that earlier studies generally attributed to forest owners’ wish to avoid short-term economic risks.

KEYWORDS:

• Forest owners
• aesthetic evaluation
• forestry economics
• forestry practices
• economic risk

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable input and comments to earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tobias Linné http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3799-8682

Additional information

Funding

This paper was written as part of the research project Family Farm Enterprises after the January Storm in 2005: When Future is Struck by Disaster supported by a grant from The Swedish Research Council [Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas] for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning [grant number 2005-621].