This is the fifth post in a series about global environmental history and the World Congress of Environmental History published in collaboration with the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO). The fourth World Congress was held this past August in Oulu, Finland.
Sunday, 18 August
Finland bound! I arrived in Helsinki, worn out by the vagaries of cheap airline travel, but not too tired to appreciate the beauties of Europe’s best airport. I’m not sure whether it was the verdant rock garden, the bleak grandeur of the railway station, or the multitude of easily accessible charging points that delighted me most.
As I watched the beautiful countryside trundle by on the train ride northwards, I nervously tweaked my presentation slides. I’d submitted an abstract to the intimidatingly named WORLD CONGRESS long ago in 2023, when getting to Oulu from Australia seemed unlikely, and August 2024 was a far-off dream. My extended exchange program in England had made the journey to Finland a financial possibility, August 2024 had arrived with startling speed, and now it was really happening—I was off to my first international conference.
I made it to my accommodation at midnight, so my first impression of the beautiful town of Oulu was murky. Daunted by hotel costs, I had arranged a modest Airbnb, which turned out to be a great choice, save for a lack of blackout blinds (I tried to reframe this as an inducement to seize the day at 4 a.m.) and no Wi-Fi (an encouragement to live in the moment). The morning commute from my accommodation to Yliopisto P, Oulu University, on Finland’s miraculously efficient and peaceful buses, offered a steadying moment to reset before the busyness of each day at the conference.
Monday, 19 August
The conference began with failure: a PhD and early-career session deconstructing understandings of “failure” in academia and looking for more compassionate approaches. It was an invigorating and inclusive way to begin a conference for a cohort who know all too well the fears and realities of the f-word, and I’m not surprised the turnout for this “pre-conference” event far exceeded the organisers’ expectations. I was struck by Marco Armiero’s thoughts on ensuring that slippery ideas like “success” or “failure” do not determine who we are as scholars or people. Normalizing and sharing the universal experience of failure in academic settings was a running theme, though, as several participants pointed out, shared resilience and reframing can only go so far when livelihoods and visas are riding on job or grant applications.
(Sidenote: I had my first brush with environmental history celebrity when I realized the woman commenting wisely on her experiences of failure was none other than Dolly Jørgensen.)
At the bustling welcome reception, Oulu’s mayor reminded conference participants that we were in one of the happiest mid-sized cities in the world, located in the happiest country in the world, so if we didn’t have a good time, it would be our own fault! Bearing this in mind, my friend and I headed to PowerPoint Karaoke. Thus ended my first night at the Congress, sipping a cider and enjoying colleagues’ creative interpretations of unfamiliar presentation slides.
Tuesday, 20 August
Tuesday brought new intellectual delights, as I settled into the swing of things at the biggest conference I’d ever attended. Spoiled for choice of panels, I attended two sessions on “Moving animals, developing expertise.” Eight excellent papers got us thinking about the intentional and unintentional transit of animals across borders, and this mobility’s relationship to scientific expertise—or lack of it. The tensions in deciding which animals “belong” in certain landscapes became a thematic through-line. A dark-dwelling mole, though native to England, could still appear troublingly extreme in Victorian understandings of the natural world. Meanwhile introduced muskox seem to represent the authentic “wildest of the wild” in Norway’s Dovrefjell National Park, even as they threaten the habitats of native wild reindeer.
The tensions in deciding which animals “belong” in certain landscapes became a thematic through-line.
Meanwhile, leading figures in environmental and animal history kept jumping from their place in my thesis draft footnotes and materializing in human form in front of me. Putting aside my regret about not thinking of something intelligent to say to Harriet Ritvo in advance, it was a real pleasure to meet so many of the generous scholars whose work I have long admired, as well as many whose work I was lucky to encounter for the first time in Oulu.
I wasn’t organized enough to have signed up for the enticing Arctic Food Lab or dinner at Maikkula Estate, so I bussed home after the final panel session, mulling over more-than-human forced migration and fish that “fight for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Photos by Ruby Ekkel.
Wednesday, 21 August
Sometimes I find the days and sessions of academic conferences start to blur into each other, names and concepts scrambling in my head. Not Wednesday, 21 August though, because that was the day I first met a reindeer.
I admit that, for me, reindeer had long ranked alongside Santa Claus as subjects of Christmassy myth, so to watch the graceful creatures emerge from the woods, furry antlers and all, was a thrill.
I admit that, for me, reindeer had long ranked alongside Santa Claus as subjects of Christmassy myth, so to watch the graceful creatures emerge from the woods, furry antlers and all, was a thrill. The friendly animals nibbled moss from our gingerly outstretched sticks—these were not the shy wild reindeer of Karin Lillevold’s presentation—and we learned from our hosts about the 350-year-old traditions of family reindeer husbandry in the area. On the bus back, we listened to Mathilde van den Berg’s insights on practices of castration and more-than-human care on Finnish reindeer farms. Mathilde was one of the many volunteers who gave life and personality to the conference, not to mention actually keeping it running!
That afternoon, I attended an engrossing roundtable on questions of critique and activism during environmental crisis, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Perhaps because of the specific trajectory of Australian environmental history, identified by Harrison Croft, I entered the room assuming we would be debating approaches to engagement in current-day environmental politics. Instead, the very validity of an “activist stance” was under examination. The room seemed divided between those who feared environmental historians are too ready to abandon a critical lens in the face of existential climate crises—e.g., speaking in defence of a “nature” which we should instead problematize—and those who defended engaged and ethical responses to the “urgent histories” we so often encounter. It was interesting to see scholars from different places and disciplines differ so profoundly on aspects of their work they took for granted, and it made me rethink my own preconceptions.
I ended the evening chatting about Tasmanian devils and Australian bushfires with other animal historians over an enormous serving of chips.
Thursday, 22 August
My dedicated conference notebook was filling with scribbled ideas and many, many publications and concepts I intended to follow up on. In a hurry to capture a maximum number of insights, I left my future self in the dark about some of the specifics. Unhelpful notes-to-self include “do not forget about book” or, mysteriously, just the word “Politics.”
Another challenge was the sheer volume of “not-to-be-missed” sessions stuffed into the rich conference program. Every lunch or coffee break entailed a wrenching choice: how to choose between equally appealing panels like “Soundscapes and environmental awareness,” “From farm through industry to fork,” or “Multispecies Landscapes and Culture”? On Thursday afternoon, I chose the latter and savoured concepts like the “slow carcinology” of unnamed crabs in Philippine mangroves, and the re-periodisation of history from the perspective of deer. In what seemed a theme of the conference, we were urged to look beyond what is easily visible to humans, to brackish waters and coral reefs.
In an invigorating plenary session that afternoon, four speakers guided us through the changing terrain of Latin American Environmental History. Keeping in mind Wednesday’s discussion, I was moved by José Augusto Pádua’s historicization of Amazonian deforestation, informed by his own efforts to protect the iconic forest before and after the catastrophic setback of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency.
Suddenly, it was time for the closing party. With gorgeous views over the beach, we sampled the Ravintola Nallikari’s buffet and Finland’s finest “Long Drink” before hitting the dancefloor.
Friday, 23 August
Don’t be deceived by the term “closing party,”’ because there remained a final day of the conference, including my 9 a.m. presentation. My talk on gendered notions of friendship with Australian lyrebirds was somewhat different from the one I clutched on the train to Oulu, as I had been so inspired by the substance and style of other panels throughout the week.
The whole panel on wildlife-human transformations in the Anthropocene was rich with ideas, generating memorable discussions about animal cultures, changing human emotions attached to the more-than-human world, and the meanings and utility of the term “wildlife.” I was fascinated and moved by Marianna Szczygielska’s take on contrasting imaginaries of wild boars and their porcine counterparts in American factory farms, and I won’t soon forget Jason Colby’s striking animation of grey whale lives and deaths through the centuries.
It was one of many moments when I felt the value of the conference’s international outlook and makeup.
Amal Ghazal gave a thought-provoking keynote on the network as methodology, drawing on her unique experiences as a Dean at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. It was one of many moments when I felt the value of the conference’s international outlook and makeup. After extraordinarily well-deserved thanks to the organizing committee and volunteers, I was thrilled to have dinner with some of my most admired colleagues in my field—not a bad way to round out a superb conference.
I tend to be a voluble diary-writer, but my journal entry from August 23rd (the real one) simply reads: “Wrecked. Conference over. I’m so tired. Dinner was lovely: beetroot risotto with smoked tofu. My presentation went reasonably well.” Exhausted and with a head buzzing full of ideas, I packed for my trip back to Oxford, and with apologies to the many people, places, and events I didn’t get to mention—who could forget the Screaming Men’s Choir?—here ends my Oulu Diaries. Until 2029!
