Tasmanian forests and their people: Self-narrative,forests and temporalities

Abstract

This paper explores the role of forests in the formation and maintenance of self-identity, drawing on the experiences of 27 people from Tasmania, Australia. Specifically, I argue that forest experiences play an important role shaping some people's ‘self-narrative’ – the biography of their personal experience of the familiar past and anticipated future – framed through three temporal forms: ‘personal’ time, ‘external’ time and ‘ontological’ time. Participants’ recollections show how forest help make time ‘knowable’, in terms of one's own self-trajectory, and time scales which far exceed individual human lives. This link between forests, time and narrative has important implications for the ongoing conversation about temporality in the social sciences, contextualising the reciprocal, subjunctive relationship between humans and nonhumans. This article closes with an invitation to further the ongoing conversation about temporality in the social sciences, particularly in the field of qualitative environmental sociology.

Introduction

I’ve always walked. Even since … ever since I was a kid … So it's something I’ve always done, and enjoyed. So I just … I don’t know. Maybe it's just in the, in the psyche. [laughs] (James)

Telephones demand to be answered, deadlines must be met, obligations fulfilled. The clock rules … In the forest there is an entirely different, slower timescale [and Tasmanian forests] are a refuge from the rattle and clamour of working life … Forests, like plankton in the sea, are the planet's lungs. They take in our waste carbon dioxide and return to us live-giving oxygen. But we’re chopping them down at an insane, unsustainable rate for monetary gain. (Bobby, written response)

For some people, engaging with landscapes forms an important part of the story of who they are. This paper explores the role of forests in the formation and maintenance of self-identity, drawing on the experiences of 27 people from Tasmania, Australia. Forests – and conflicts over their management and use – are a key part of the cultural and social fabric of Tasmania, Australia's southernmost and only island state (Lester, 2007). Here I individualise this process, arguing that forest experiences also play an important role in the formation of some people's self-narrative: the biography of their personal experience of the familiar past and anticipated future. As the quote above from James (a participant) indicates, relationship with the nonhuman can become internalised as a significant part of who someone considers themselves to be.

The Tasmanian setting is crucial to this research: it is a place where forests and trees are easily accessible, politically significant and integral to cultural life and economy. Lester and Cottle (2015, p. 103) describe Tasmania's ‘forestry wars’ as ‘Australia's longest running environmental dispute’, forming a key part of Australia's environmental political history. Conflicts over specific sites – including Lake Pedder and the Franklin River – prompted the formation of arguably the world's first Greens group (the United Tasmania Group) and led to fierce battles in Australia's High Court (Banham 2019). Integral to my argument here is that these political and legislative dimensions of conflict are comprised of individual experiences: it is the profound connections that people have with Tasmanian forests, and the personal histories and futures that forests represent, that have mobilised these disputes and activist movements.

The theoretical core of this paper is about how temporality – past, present and future – is profoundly intertwined with self-narrative and ontological security. I draw the concept of self-narrative from Giddens’ (1991, p. 243) model of ‘ontological security’, which is commonly defined as a ‘sense of continuity and order in events’. A classic setting of ontological security research concerns ‘home’ and housing – for example, how tenancy type or housing security impact a person's ability to feel they ‘know’ themselves and what their future holds (Dupuis, 2012). Rather than physical dwellings, my research explored how experiences with/in forests are implicated in the formation of a sense of ontological security (or, in the case of environmental destruction, ontological insecurity). Tasmanian forests are not the only forests that contribute significantly to ontological security, but they are an exemplary example, and central to my own self-identity as a researcher and person.

My fundamental stance here is that humans do not simply visit forests (and other landscapes), and leave untouched; rather, human–nonhuman engagement is a complex process that shapes all actors – human and nonhuman – involved. As human activity relentlessly threatens landscapes across the globe, it is more crucial than ever to explore and appreciate the intricate details of the significant relationships between humans and their (multiple) homes – or between forests and their people. In this article, I use this position to think through how forests enable us to think more deeply, and more easily, about three different forms of time: ‘personal’ time, ‘external’ time and ‘ontological’ time.

For many participants, the forests they knew played a key role in the stories of their lives, with bushwalking (hiking) functioning as a means of engagement with life passages and personal and communal trajectories. ‘Ontological security’ is a theoretical framing that contextualises the relational and emotional life of the individual within broad time spans and cultural settings. Regardless of the specific content of a participants’ self-narrative, my interest is in exploring how the emotionally and socially meaningful space of ‘the forest’ operates as a symbol of significant aspects of an individual's story of their past and future, contributing to a sense of ontological security. As such, forests are not ‘just trees’, but rather can play an active role in contributing to a sense of ‘living well’.

Few environmental sociologists have conceptually engaged with ontological security, despite its aptness in understanding the emotional and ethical significance of human–nonhuman engagements (Banham, 2020a). Specifically, ontological security offers a useful framework for understanding how engagement with the nonhuman does significant ontological ‘work’ for people. Here, I am exploring a specific aspect of that process – self-narrative – to illustrate why I call for a renewal of appreciating what nonhuman spaces do for us, extending an argument I have introduced previously (in a brief format which did not engage with the three forms of time described above) (Banham, 2017). Although my previous work on ontological security (seen in publications referred to throughout this paper) has explored other aspects of participants’ experiences, including routine and environmental ethics, this paper investigates the temporal dimensions of ontological security in far greater depth than previously done. Key to this contribution is uncovering ways in which temporality (or temporalities) are ‘translated’ into the present through the development of self-narrative and environmental ethics.

People do specific things in forests that allow them to comprehend and trust their own identities and the material world around them – that is, to pursue a sense of ontological security – and these practices map clearly onto these three forms of time introduced above. ‘Personal time’ relates to cycles and change as they pertain to the individual – experiences of forests that involve personal memories and negotiating life stages. ‘External time’ involves engaging with the cycles of the forest that connect different people's experiences (such as annual seasons), whereas ‘ontological time’ refers to temporal understandings that connect an individual to the far past and future – for example, respecting the ‘wisdom’ of old-growth trees. Forest encounters help individuals to understand their own lives and being, through these ‘layers’ of temporality.

For almost all participants in this study, the forests they knew played a key role in the stories of their lives – their self-narratives – expressed through each of these three temporalities. Self-narrative is an easy (or easier) way to articulate the benefits of forests for people and the reciprocal relationship between forests and people, providing a means for people to understand and articulate the intractability of the future. In this way, participants’ stories of bushwalking reflected the forest's role in making time knowable, not only in terms of one's own self-trajectory, but also of the time scales which far exceed individual human lives. I extend this discussion in the final sections of this paper.

Background

The nonhuman and identity

First, a note on terminology: aligning my work with the vast social theory literature problematising human–nature binaries (see White et al., 2016), I use the term ‘nonhuman’ – rather than the common ‘more-than-human’ – to retain an acknowledgement of the power dynamics and distinct identities embedded within relationships between humans and what one might term ‘nature’ (Banham, 2020b).

Varied literature, including in sociology, social work and psychology, explores the links between human identities, the nonhuman and (more rarely or less explicitly) temporality. Authors have explored collective identity, particularly in relation to environmentalism and activism (Ackland & O’Neil, 2011; Saunders, 2008; Taylor, 1996); links between national identity, political identity and nonhuman environments (Harvey, 1996; Tranter, 2011); and links between Indigenous identities and the nonhuman, including Australian Aboriginal and Māori identities and narratives (Clément, 2017; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; O’Connor & Macfarlane, 2002; Prehn, 2021). There is also a significant body of social psychological literature exploring identity, environmental behaviour and place attachment (Clayton, 2012; Whitmarsh & O’Neill, 2010). Another, emerging body of work involves ‘ecocultural identity’, which aims to understand ‘identity ecologically in tandem with cultural and social modes of consideration’ (Milstein & Castro-Sotomayor, 2020, p. xviii). Other researchers still explore consumer behaviour, environmental ethics and identity, including in non-western countries (Khan & Thomas, 2023; Lavuri et al., 2023; Zaman et al., 2023).

As such, perceptions and experiences of the natural world have an intimate and multifaceted relationship with identity, including self-identity. Cheng et al. (2003) suggest that personally meaningful places provide a sense of order in the individual's world, differentiating ‘place’ from ‘space’; as Egoz (2013, p. 272) puts it, ‘landscape [builds] identity … in response to the basic human need to belong’. Numerous scholars have explored the links between aspects of self-identity, and engagement with the nonhuman, commonly detailing the process of (often environmentalist) identity-making that takes place in situ (Cianchi, 2015; Lien & Davison, 2010; Trigger & Mulcock, 2005; Urquhart & Acott, 2014). These examples illustrate that there is a varied and established body of knowledge exploring the negotiation and experience of self-identity in relation to the nonhuman environment. The theoretical core of this paper – ‘self-narrative’ – is a specific conceptualisation of self-identity.

Self-narrative and place

Self-narrative is a central component of ontological security. As the name suggests, self-narrative is a biographical story, the establishment of which informs the individual's sense of self and behaviour (Giddens, 1991). Reflexivity is a major theme of Giddens’ writing, and he understands the establishment of self-identity as a reflexive process through which an individual builds a sense of trajectory progressing from the past into the future. This story of the self is the ‘main event’ for the individual, taking precedence in perception over outside events, which are conceptualised and integrated as part of the ‘story’. Key aspects of self-narrative are constancy, the demarcation of personal time, life ‘passages’, embodiment, assessment of opportunity and risk, and relationships. Self-narrative is therefore the story all people have about themselves, built from the past and constructed with a vision of the future.

‘Space’ and ‘place’ are important aspects of self-narrative. Place attachment, as Degnen (2016, p. 1646) describes, is ‘a collective, relational and embodied process, caught up and experienced via social memory practices and via embodied, sensorial registers’. As people become familiar with spaces, they incorporate this relationship into the story of who they are. In this way, places (such as forests) become actors in the formation of self-narrative, present throughout important life stages and informing a person's sense of trajectory. Below, I illustrate how participants engaged with their own self-narratives through experiencing Tasmanian forests, telling stories of who they are – and who they and others may become – through their engagement with the forest nonhuman. Temporality is a key aspect of self-narrative; self-narrative is as much (perhaps even more) a person's understanding of time, as it is an understanding of their characteristics or traits as an individual. As this paper explores, my work takes ontological security and self-narrative further, to also explore how the individual uses these processes to also understand and ‘place’ themselves within relationships that extend far beyond a single lifetime (see Banham, 2020a).

Temporality and the nonhuman

This paper builds upon concepts such as solastalgia (Albrecht et al., 2007; Head, 2016), anticipatory grief (Cunsolo Willox, 2012; see also Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018; Head & Harada, 2017) and critical hope (Bozalek et al., 2014), each of which highlight the connection between temporality – incorporating both past and future – and the nonhuman world. Solastalgia refers to feelings of grief induced by changes that impact upon one's ‘home place’, where one feels a sense of nostalgia for a place that no longer exists. Here, environmental damage and destruction force a person into a present and future materially and emotionally different from one they had hoped for or imagined. Similarly, critical hope – ‘an action-oriented response to contemporary despair’ (Bozalek et al., 2014, p. 1) – although not inherently about environmentalist action, has obvious implications for those striving for radically ‘green’ solutions to environmental problems.

Environmental philosophy literature (such as Naess’ [1989] work on ‘deep ecology’), often at least implicitly invokes temporal concepts such as ontology, survival, and the unknown future. Human-nonhuman engagements are often grounded in an interaction (with the concept of) ‘something bigger’: an understanding of humanness that is contextualised by a long-ago past and far-away future, accessible perhaps only through the materiality of the nonhuman world. Self-narrative, constructed through engagement with the nonhuman world, renders such an enormous context not only understandable, but relatable.

The following sections detail the findings of my research as they relate to participants’ constructions of their own self-narrative through forest experiences. Crucially to my argument here, these self-narratives are not only about the individuals’ life, but about the far past(s) and future(s) of humans, nonhuman species, and landscapes. These stories often hold implicit ethical implications, relating to narratives of where the world has been and where it could go. The final sections of this article explore this idea in relation to temporalities, closing with some preliminary considerations of what forests ‘do’ for people in this context and what this might mean for environmental social sciences.

Methods

The participants in this research were 27 Tasmanians who self-selected in response to a call for those who ‘care about forests and forest issues’. This makes sense in Tasmania; as issues pertaining to forests and forestry have been politically salient for decades, it is easy to find people who are emotionally invested in the topic. The research was advertised primarily through Tasmanian environmental organisations and word-of-mouth, which accounts for the propensity for participants to be those who regularly engaged in bushwalking and/or opposed the practices of the state's forestry industry (although several participants were exceptions to this). The semi-structured interviews generally lasted around an hour, covering topics including opinions and feelings about Tasmania's forestry industry, past experiences in forests, and emotions associated with forests. Eleven participants also submitted materials responding to the prompt ‘What represents Tasmanian forests to you?’ Directly informed by Tasmania's environmental conflicts, I aimed to answer the following: why do some people care intensely about forests, and what is this experience like? This aim, and the adoption of ontological security as the central theoretical framing, shaped the structure and content of the interviews. Alongside this was a desire to move beyond simplistic binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ within forestry conflicts; to this end I avoided recruiting based on political affiliation or alignment with pro- or anti-forestry organisations (although the final sample skewed quite far towards those with environmentalist ethics). The final sample size was based on reaching a point of data saturation, when ‘no new information on any particular code is emerging’ (Willis, 2013, p. 353). This occurred following the final interview with Hugh, whom I spoke with over two months after the previous interview with Nick due to the intervening Christmas period.

Participants’ ages and occupations varied widely. Four participants lived in northern Tasmania and the remaining 23 were based in the south of the state. I transcribed and thematically analysed each interview and, following Saldaña's (2009) advice, manually coded the transcripts before moving the codes into electronic form. The thematic coding and data analysis was a deductive and inductive process, reflecting the project's theoretical framework described above; the core themes emerging from the data explored the implication of forests in participants’ sense of trust and stability, highlighting aspects of bushwalking experiences such as emotion, ontology, vulnerability and relationship. All names used are pseudonyms.

The decision to focus on forests and bushwalking relates partly to my own positionality as a researcher. Tasmania is my home, and I feel a strong connection with forests. My interest throughout this research project has been in understanding why people care about these places, grounded within an acknowledgement that I understand and appreciate their emotional ‘pull’ – a pull that is not always easily articulated. As above, forests are politically and culturally significant within the Tasmanian context. I would also argue that trees (and therefore forests) are particularly potent cultural symbols, as the ‘fate of trees is often emblematic of the wider environment’ (Jones & Cloke, 2002, p. 2). Forests are spaces of meaning-making (Atkinson, 2015), and act as one specific site and symbol of what it means to exist temporally.

Findings

Most participants in the study indicated that they related to Tasmanian forests in ways that significantly informed their sense of a coherent and stable self-narrative. The major elements of self-narrative – an internal biography delineated by life passages, reflexivity, trajectory from past to future, and the demarcation of personal time – were extremely common elements of participants’ forest experiences. The below findings are organised to reflect participants’ experiences of ‘personal’, ‘external’ and ‘ontological’ time.

Personal time: past, present and future embodiment

Participants marked personal time through forest experiences. For older participants especially, bushwalking and forest experiences had been a long-term feature of their lives, although some younger participants had also been bushwalking for a proportionately long time. James’ comment that opens this paper illustrates this. A sense of trajectory was clear when participants described having walked as children – experiencing the forest with parents and siblings – and continuing these experiences into adulthood. Some participants ‘translated’ their experiences into future environmentalist ethics or activism, whereas others described walking with their own children and grandchildren:

I think seeds were sown very early on for me. So this is why I feel very attached to the idea that nothing detrimental should happen to Tasmania's unique resource, the forests. (Ken)

Mum and Dad loved the South-West [of Tasmania] mostly, so yeah, we went and spent a lot of time out round there … we grew up soaking up the environment, I guess … I’d like [my daughter to as well], if she wants to. (Marie)

Here, Marie's simple description of passing on to her daughter the environmental connectedness she grew up with shows how past experiences directly impacted upon her family's present lives and actions. Other participants recalled memories of their own ‘special places’ in Tasmania, and places they liked to visit repeatedly – sometimes at particular times of year (discussed further below), or for particular purposes – demarcating their time with routinised engagement with the forest. For example, Catherine said she tried to visit forests every fortnight. Jack described his weekend routine of running in the forest to avoid feeling ‘stir-crazy’, and Claire said that ‘if I want to do something on the weekend that relaxes me, I’ll [go bushwalking]’.

Engagement with forests also featured in participants’ discussion of their own life stages (analogous to Giddens’ [1991] ‘life passages’). Participants described walking more or less at different times of their lives, using forests as a context through which to understand events that were particular to themselves such as work, injuries, ageing, family obligations, or retirement: ‘I’m 72 years old and I have to be careful where I go. [laughs] … and I can’t climb as well as I did, I’m just not as mobile as I was’ (Leon).

Participants also projected this sense of ‘life stages’ into the future. For example, Don, Reg and Diane – each approaching retirement – all described an anticipated future in which they looked forward to bushwalking more regularly. Similarly, engagement with forests also articulated participants’ experiences of their own ageing, where the length and difficulty of walking tracks served as a way for participants to know the limitations (as they perceived them) of their ageing bodies. As many of the participants were at or approaching retirement age, this link between walking and ageing is perhaps unsurprising.

The following account from Leon is a particularly striking example of personal time. In this passage, Leon makes clear associations between forest materiality, his first home in the USA, his family relationships and emotional experiences thereof, and his adopted home of Australia:

When I was growing up, every comic book I read, you’d open it up – the trees were always green, you know. Big, fluffy, green trees. And that's how Tasmanian trees and Australian trees generally are. [I remember] my dad died the first year that I came [to Australia]. I came here in September, and he died in December and I went back, I was back for a month. And of course, you know, in 1600 metres above sea-level on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains in January, it's cold and snowy and grey, and there are leaves on the evergreens but all of the deciduous trees, there's nothing on them. And it was absolutely… absolutely bare. And of course there was all the grief tied into that as well. And so you come back, you come back to Sydney, and all of a sudden it's like you’ve been dropped into a comic book. [laughs] Yeah … it took some years, really, to get used to just the green, if you like. Because if you grow up some place where in the Autumn the trees change colour … well that was my first life you know, just have to get on with life now.

Leon's story above underscores the importance of forest materiality in experiences of home, belonging and life trajectory.

External time: cycles, seasons and familiarity

Participants’ descriptions of forest experiences indicate that forests also act as a way to relate ‘external time’ – rhythms and cycles common to all humans – to their own self-narrative. That is to say, personal engagement with forests acted as a way for participants to encounter and articulate ‘larger’ time scales as a part of their own, biographical experience of time. In much the same way as calendrical rituals such as Christmas or Ramadan mark annual time, participants used forest experiences to observe and experience external time in the context of their self-narrative.

Different spots are good at different times of the year, like… this time of the year, you’re in the Spring … out looking for Spring flowering orchids, so a lot of those are in coastal heath-y type vegetation. But in the Autumn, we go looking for fungi. (James)

My wife and I go to Cradle Mountain every year, not Easter but around that time … for the last three years we’ve done it. And I don’t see [any reason] to ease off, we look forward to it very much. (Ken)

A particularly Tasmanian example of this process is travelling to see the blooming of Nothofagus gunnii, colloquially known as the Fagus. It is Tasmania's only deciduous native tree, which shines with bright orange leaves around April every year. As Marie described:

Most years we go [to see the Fagus] … we like to. Because it's a seasonal show, I suppose. So yeah, I guess one of our routines would be – according to the seasons, certain things are happening. So we like to go and see those things, and be a part of those things, in that season.

Although these descriptions of repeat and ritualised forest experiences connote a sense of sameness, cycles and familiarity, seven participants discussed their repeat trips in terms of the forest being ‘different every time’. Participants described these changes as a valued aspect of their forest experiences: ‘The thing I like about bush is it's completely random, it's not predictable and it's always changing’ (Lara). This does not contradict the above recollections of familiarity and cycles, nor does it undermine the concept of bushwalking contributing to a stable self-narrative. Rather, for these participants, change operated as a form of familiarity; by immersing themselves in these spaces over multiple years these participants were able to really know the forest and mark their personal time by it. Participants then incorporated these changes into their internal biographies, as seen in comments such as James’:

Over time you build up knowledge of Australian plants … You never stop learning, every time you go out in the field you learn something … we always say, doesn’t matter where we walk, doesn’t matter how often we’ve been there, we always find something really interesting … it's something I’ve done all my life.

Here, the ‘boundaries’ between personal and external time blur, with participants marking their own time and self-identity through engagement with the cycles and seasons that link them with others.

Ontological time: elements of the past and future

A large majority of participants referred in some way to the long-term time scales – hundreds to thousands of years – represented by forests or trees. In contrast to personal and external time, these examples involved time frames beyond human life spans, but were nonetheless often described as relating to the individual in some way. Ontological time is highly relational, as it is through relationships between people and forests that time is contextualised. This extends beyond the individual, and even beyond known others, to include a much more generalised sense of human (and nonhuman) life as shaped by forests. This pushed participants to see environmental threats (such as habitat loss) not as nebulous, slow-burning problems, but as concrete issues grounded in the material and relational dimensions of their forest experiences.

Some participants described a past ‘made visible’ by the age of the forests that are still standing:

You know, Captain Cook wasn’t even born when [these trees were] coming up out of the forest … it's 500 years old, it's … what was happening 500 years ago? Shakespeare was … You know, that sort of thing! It's still there. I can stand under a tree, look up – wow! This has been here for that long. (Ken)

We went all the way through that sort of big area of reserve on South Bruny [Island] … that is probably my favourite walk anywhere … everything's so old. And so you get that sense of, like, you can feel that it's, there's, things have happened there. (Zoe)

The age of forests acted as a grounding mechanism that makes the past ‘knowable’:

Old-growth forest should remain, because its value is in that it has survived … Even if it might tell more of a story if you cut it through its trunk so you can count the rings [laughs] – just leave it there, where it is! … It's important to have survivors, because they are the history of what was. (Jane)

Forests are therefore a highly tangible way of knowing that the material world will continue, and the desire to feel confident in this fact – that is, the desire to see these places protected – directly translates the possibilities of the future into present feelings and behaviour (‘it should remain’). Further, ancientness is not static. Rather, the age of forest also acted as a frame for participants to think about the long-term future in a concrete way:

These places should be left alone, because in 10,000 years they could still be there. Obviously I won’t be, we won’t be, but perhaps … I don’t know how things will change. (Leon)

[Smoko Creek] used to be just a most beautiful, beautiful rainforest that [they] trashed, along with a lot of the other places around there. And it takes generations to recover … you wipe out a 400-year-old forest, 400-year-old trees – well you’re not gonna see the forest, anything like it, for another 400 years, at least. (Peter)

Several participants identified the need for ‘long-term thinking’ in managing and protecting forests, and the threat to Tasmanian forests posed by short-term thinking (as encapsulated by electoral cycles and economic models; see also Head [2016, p. 47]):

But whole environments and ecosystems can’t be suddenly reproduced. You know, it's a little bit like processes that are causing climate change – fossil fuels are the outcome of coal and oil [accumulated] over hundreds of millions of years. And we go and put it all into the atmosphere over the course of a hundred years … seeing the destruction of the forests is one way of appreciating that in just one, one view, just one look. (Matthew)

These responses conceptualise forest conservation as a means of protecting the past time encapsulated by ecosystems. Most participants discussed their contemplation about the planet's environmental future. The concept of future generations – often grandchildren specifically – was a discursive device by participants to voice these views. Usually, participants’ future narratives contained concerns and desires to conserve forests and other ecosystems for the sake of future generations’ ability to live well.

I feel embarrassed, I suppose, with the legacy that we’re leaving for our grandkids. Because I think we’ve made a bloody mess of things, overall. And continue to do so. (James)

I don’t like the old idea [of] clearfelling old-growth forest … it's a lovely repository of lovely things for our kids and our kids’ kids, and our kids’ kids’ kids. (Don)

Where appropriate, I asked participants whether conservation matters if the planet's environmental future is bleak. According to participants, it is our human duty to continue the ‘battle’:

Well done to the people trying to save the penguins and the Orange-Bellied Parrot and all that … it's those little achievements that make us fine, in my opinion. Our saving grace, as a creature. (Jane)

You do what you can. You don’t put your gun down simply because it looks like the enemy is going to run you over. You keep shooting. (Leon)

It's kind of like when you go on a diet or something, and then you have two pieces of chocolate and then you’re like, ‘well fuck, I’ve already had two pieces of chocolate I might as well eat three blocks’ … If we all died out tomorrow, then I don’t know whether or not the Earth would recover [but] I would like to hope it would. (Zoe)

These sentiments return to the argument above that forests are not ‘just trees’ but rather contribute to a sense of ‘living well’; it is in protecting the forest and fighting for nonhuman species that humans can show tenacity and compassion. Head (2016, p. 6) argues for the need for ‘symbols and themes that allow us to work towards possible futures as well as acknowledge a grieved-for past’, and ecosystems such as forests – representative of material constancy, the future and the fates of precarious species – can operate as such a symbol.

Discussion

These findings – that is, the details of participants’ forest-informed self-narratives – represent the three distinct, but interrelated, temporal forms described above: ‘personal’ time, ‘external’ time and ‘ontological’ time. To reiterate, ‘personal time’ is a form of temporality that combines cycles and change as they pertain to the individual (and the human/nonhuman people around them); ‘external time’ is largely concerned with cycles, situating the individual within their social-structural context; and ‘ontological time’ is a form of temporality that connects the individual to the far past and the far future in a way that is informed by ethics and relationality. As such, forest encounters help individuals to understand their own lives and being, through these ‘layers’ of temporality. The following section highlights further theoretical depth of the participants’ stories above as they relate to these three forms of time, leading to suggestions of the implications this has for qualitative environmental social sciences more broadly.

Experiences and memory – personal time

For participants, forest experiences worked to symbolise memories, experiences and personal changes. Leon, for example, described the vibrant green trees of his childhood, contrasted with the bare trees of his grief. Similarly, several participants spoke of the ways that the material conditions of their life – such as relocation, ageing or raising families – were reflected in how they interacted with forest landscapes, with the forest acting as a symbol of a knowable self-trajectory. Kidner (2012, p. 232) argues that although memory is often categorised as a ‘cognitive function, it is of course also an embodied quality’; as such, visiting a forest and engaging with its materiality can form a powerful connection between one's past, present and possible future.

Giddens’ (1991) work – including his conceptualisation of ontological security – is often concerned with the role of reflexivity in how contemporary (western) humans live their lives. In terms of forest experiences, participants’ acknowledgement of ageing offers a particularly interesting example of reflexive embodiment. Here, acknowledgement of the difficulties of being an older bushwalker were not simply mundane or flippant observations of the inevitability of ageing – although the presence of humour does suggest a certain distancing of oneself from the negative aspects of ageing. Rather, making concessions for ageing – that is, bushwalking differently, but bushwalking nevertheless – operated as a form of negotiation between the known past, the embodied present and the predicted trajectory of the future. Svarstad's (2010, p. 104) work supports this association between identity and trajectory, suggesting that ‘hiking provides a sense of continuity not only in a long-ago, historic perspective but also [in an individual's life]’. Participants used bushwalking not only to mark these life stages, but also to understand, experience and negotiate these life stages. Establishing an internal biography requires a method of contextualising time in a personal way, and bushwalking appeared as a common means for participants to achieve this.

As I have argued elsewhere (Banham, 2020a), relationships and emotion are integral to the construction of ontological security, and it is significant that participants regularly invoked family relationships when discussing their memories of Tasmanian forests. Degnen (2016, p. 1649) argues that not only do people become attached to places, but that place ‘also works to tie individuals to each other’. Similarly, Svarstad (2010, p. 105) suggests that ‘[hiking] provides opportunities for people to create a sense of continuity and belonging in their own lives and with their close family’. These ‘human-to-human’ experiences of the forest clearly draw a thread from an individual's past to their present and future.

Cycles and narratives – external time and ontological time

Participants also used forests and bushwalking as a means of framing the passing and rhythms of external time and incorporating these experiences into their self-narratives. Repeat trips – returning to a forest multiple times, whether daily, monthly, yearly or intermittently – are a good example of this process. These repeated visits worked to mark various aspects of external time such as years, seasons and growth cycles. This ‘marking’ is sometimes explicit, reflecting a sense of routine or ritual – Marie, for example, described her trips to see the Fagus as a ‘routine’ that she and her family liked to be a part of. It can also be less explicit, such as through the desire to revisit spaces because they are, in some way, different every time; as described above, Priscilla, Jack and Lara each highlighted the novelty and unpredictability of their forest experiences. In this way, time is marked not through sameness but a sense of consistent newness; a kind of reliability in the knowledge that one can be familiar with a space, but it will always be changing in exciting, predictably unpredictable and distinctly nonhuman ways. In turn, ontological security is reinforced, by knowing a space/place across time, not in one static state but in a more ‘natural’, fluctuating way. As such, these experiences are perhaps as much about remembering the past as they are about predicting the future in a ‘personalised’ way. Referring to food production, Barry (2012, pp. 111–112) argues that ritualised engagement with the environment

evoke[s] a different temporal pace and rhythm which is in direct opposition to the ‘24/7/365’ industrialized version of time in modernity. Whether at the scale of [‘ecological time’, ‘biological time’, or ‘political time’] this focus on rituals and ceremonials stands … in an attitude of resistance to the homogenizing discipline of administered time organized around efficiency, productivity, and maximization.

Participants’ forest experiences balanced constancy and change, predictability and surprise, and the self and others. Although the future is not truly knowable, the role of forests in establishing a stable self-narrative created a space through which participants could experience a sense of ontological security. Subsequently, the diminishment or destruction of these places – particularly through human actions, such as fire or forestry – undermines self-narrative and, therefore, ontological security. This points to the theoretical contribution of ontological security: to understand how a person feels stable, it is crucial to understand how this stability is pursued multidimensionally, both relationally (seeking stability for both the self and others) and temporally (seeking stability through the past, present, and future).

Forests, self-narrative and temporality in the social sciences

This link between forests, time and narrative has important implications for the ongoing conversation about temporality in the social sciences. I suggest there are three key aspects of this, each of which is echoed in the themes present in participants’ responses, discussed above: (a) the threats of climate change and biodiversity loss; (b) the difficulties of engaging with ‘deep time’; and (c) contextualising the reciprocal, subjunctive relationship between humans and nonhumans. The following discussion is intended as an invitation to push this conversation further, particularly in the field of qualitative environmental sociology.

Firstly, an important part of understanding one's self-narrative through forests is the way that it contextualises not only what forests do for and to humans, but also what humans do to and for forests. That is to say, seeing change across time – whether through repeat visits to forest spaces, or through thinking about how a forest has changes over tens, hundreds or thousands of years – helps to contextualise and illustrate the impacts of human actions upon landscapes and biodiversity. It also helps to individualise and personalise this process; far from dispassionate, participants’ descriptions of forest change were emotionally charged acknowledgements that although human interactions with landscapes are often violent, there is also potential for reciprocal, respectful relationships that see forest spaces flourish over many human life spans (see also Banham, 2020b). Practically, this also potentially helps to bring the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss ‘closer to home’, encouraging people to engage personally with problems that can seem unfathomably beyond the individual. As stated above, ontological security works to contextualise the individual – ontologically, relationally and ethically – within the broad time spans of the past and future. It is a way of framing and highlighting the personal connection that someone has with the world around them, including in the hope that it will lead to greater care and even political action. Basically, a desire for ontological security might push a person to care for conservation – this is evident in many of the participants’ comments about why they would wish to see these places protected.

Secondly, although numerous scholars work with the concept of ‘deep time’ – ‘the recognition of the vastness of earth's geological history’ (Irvine, 2014, p. 162) – it is often regarded as a temporal frame that is difficult for people to truly engage with and connect to (Ginn et al., 2018; Irvine, 2014). Or, put another way, although applying the label of ‘deep time’ helps to communicate these massive time spans, this distant temporality is often incredibly difficult for humans to truly comprehend and relate to. Forests do not represent the same kind of time spans that ‘deep time’ or geological time do, but I argue that these landscapes do nevertheless provide a way of thinking about the possibility of deep time in a relatively tangible way. This idea corresponds with Irvine's (2014, p. 164) assertion that deep time ‘exists not simply as an abstract concept of the physical sciences [but as] something that impacts on people at the level of experience. The encounter with deep time is part of the phenomenal world’; again, this link between theory and experience is directly evident in the way participants described Tasmanian forests as reflecting ontological time in their present lives.

Further to this, forests represent not only the past, but the future; trees represent what has happened and could happen, through a fragile but resilient living entity. In this way, forests can be understood as symbols of past and possibility, and of warning and hope. This is a deeply relational process – if forests act as a symbol of what has happened, and what could happen, they also act as a symbol of what humans have been, are and could be. This can be understood as a kind of ‘hypertime’ (inspired by Morton, 2013): a vast type of temporality that is ‘real whether or not someone is thinking of [it] … [forcing] us to acknowledge the immanence of thinking to the physical’ (Morton, 2013, p. 2). Similarly, this could be conceptualised as a sense of ‘relational time’, where physical processes are understood through a Levinasian sense of personal, ethical and interpersonal connections and obligations (Levinas, 1981). Here, forests work to not only symbolically represent human legacy and imagined pasts – and speculations, predictions and hopes for the future – but shape and are fundamentally shaped by the outcomes of these temporal frameworks. The quotes that open this article show this: to connect with the temporality of forests is to connect with how one sees what people can or should do or be. Past and future temporalities are inextricably intertwined; forests are reflections and products of human potential and limitation, and I argue should therefore be understood as potent cultural symbols that do important ontological ‘work’ for humans.

Conclusion

‘Self-narrative’ provides an easy – or at least, easier – way to articulate the benefits of forests for people, and the reciprocal relationship between forests and people. It also provides a way for people to understand and articulate the intractability of the future. In this way, participants’ stories of bushwalking reflected the forest's role in making time knowable, not only in terms of one's own self-trajectory, but also of the time scales which far exceed individual human lives.

Forests are not ‘just trees’. Participants’ responses expressed this sentiment in a multitude of ways. Many people, including most participants in this study, perceive forests as ‘more than the sum of their parts’: delicate, but enduring; complex and built upon countless interconnections; and symbolic of that which is not human but encompasses and locates human lives. However, such abstract notions can be incredibly difficult to articulate, resulting in an underappreciation of what forests potentially ‘do’ for people. Personal and emotional experiences can also be difficult to communicate to those who may not relate to such feelings. Kidner (2012, p. 235) argues that dominant western cultural and economic systems render such experiences ‘invisible’. As such, by ‘giving language’ to the unspoken and unseen, the concepts of self-narrative and ontological security provide one way to articulate the benefits that forests provide for humans, the reciprocal relationship between forests and humans, and an acknowledgement of the time that humans and nonhumans share.