Sverker Sörlin
Biographic Data
| ID | 292401 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sverker Sörlin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sverker |
| FAMILY NAME | Sörlin |
| SIGNATURE | SÖRLIN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | KTH Royal Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2864-2315 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1204 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 66 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Notes from the Icehouse
This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The great dispersal: The fall and rise of global environmental governance
This article presents a new way of understanding Global Environmental Governance (GEG), historically and functionally. We outline a revised analytical framing, which connects the post-WWII moment of early globalizing conservation with the intensifying attempts to govern the human-earth relationship through an ever-growing assemblage of governable environmental objects and their quantifiable indicators as proxies . Our argument is as follows: (1) …
Planetary environing: The return of boundaries as a category in global environmental governance
Global Environmental Governance (GEG) has been a growing phenomenon since the middle of the 20th century, although the concept itself and its acronym are more recent and were in fact rarely used before 2000. The early interest in GEG was much preoccupied with environmental diplomacy and international legal agreements from the Stockholm UN conference 1972 onwards. The addition of the 'global' reflected the general rise in awareness of the signific…
The mediated planet: Datafication and the environmental SDGs
Over the past half century, the global environment has become subject to an accelerated pace of mediation and datafication. This ongoing transition has become so comprehensive that the knowledge, management and governance of the Earth system is dependent on enormous flows of data from a “vast machine” of measuring tools. These processes combined have formed what we call a “mediated planet,” subject to interpretation and shared human decision-maki…
Hybrid Humanities—Integrative Approaches to Humanities Histories
Recent history has been unusually eventful in the humanities, with harshening political circumstances in some countries but also attempts to carve out new missions and link the humanities to agendas of relevance on environment, climate, energy, digitalization, migration, and other contemporary challenges. In this context, might there be cause to review the history of humanities as informed by the ongoing rethinking of humanities futures? The poin…
Sport, Performance and Sustainability
This book examines the logic of ‘faster, higher, and stronger’ and the technoscientific revolution that has driven tremendous growth in the sports economy and in sport performance over the last 100 years. It asks whether this logic needs revisiting in the light of the climate crisis and sport’s environmental responsibilities. \n \nDrawing on multi-disciplinary work in sport history, sport pedagogy, sport philosophy, sport science, and environment…
Grön humaniora: Vad, när, varför och varthän
Better knowledge of the emergence and growth of the environmental humanities is important for the future direction and vitality of the field. In this article I argue, against a backdrop of a so far not so coherent historiography of the field, that it is possible to discern two complementary perspectives, one emphasizing internal factors within the humanities, the other emphasizing external factors. In the former I stress theoretical and normative…
Pathways: Exploring the Routes of a Movement Heritage
Subarna
Resource Extraction and Arctic Communities: The New Extractivist Paradigm
For decades, a post-Cold War narrative heralded a 'new Arctic', with melting ice and snow and accessible resources that would build sustainable communities. Today, large parts of the Arctic are still trapped in the path dependencies of past resource extraction. At the same time, the impetus for green transitions and a 'new industrialism' spell opportunities to shift the development model and build new futures for Arctic residents and Indigenous p…
David Lowenthal’s archipelagic landscape of learning
This article discusses David Lowenthal's last book, Quest for the Unity of Knowledge, which was published posthumously by Routledge in 2019 (available in print from November 2018). The book is based on a series of lectures that he gave while a visiting fellow with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm in 2012. Aimed at a general academic audience, it is an erudite and passionate overview showing …
Work in Progress: Economy and Environment in the Hands of Experts
The environment as seen through the life of a journal: Ambio 1972–2022
Emerging after World War II “the environment” as a modern concept turned in the years around 1970 into a phase of institutionalization in science, civic society, and politics. Part of this was the foundation of journals. The majority became “environmental specialist journals”, typically based in established disciplines. Some became “environmental generalist journals”, covering broad knowledge areas and often with an ambition to be policy relevant…
Wisdom of affect? Emotion, environment, and the future of resource extraction
The “Arctic Uchronotopias” special issue of Polar Record is an important contribution to scholarly reflection on resource extraction. The ideas, perspectives, and empirical cases that we encounter have significance for extractivism wherever it takes place, both inside and outside of the Arctic region. To see extractivism through an Arctic lens is particularly useful since it brings up many of the issues that are often at stake in extraction activ…
Pathways to the trail – landscape, walking and heritage in a Scandinavian border region
Can walking trails be understood not only as routes to history and heritage, but also as heritage in and of themselves? The paper explores the articulation of trails as a distinct landscape and mobility heritage, bridging the nature-culture divide and building on physical and intellectual movements over time. The authors aim to contribute to a better understanding of the geography of trails and trailscapes by analysing the emergence of the Swedis…
Synchronizing Earthly Timescales: Ice, Pollen, and the Making of Proto-Anthropocene Knowledge in the North Atlantic Region
The Anthropocene concept frames an emerging new understanding of the human-Earth relationship. It represents a profound temporal integration that brings historical periodization on a par with geological time and creates entanglements between timescales that were previously seen as detached. Because the Anthropocene gets this role of a unifying planetary concept, the ways in which vast geological timescales were incorporated into human history are…
Hägerstrand as historian: Innovation, diffusion and the processual landscape
Torsten Hägerstrand explored innovation and diffusion as chorological processes but also as chronological processes. His strong interest in time brought him closer to the field of history which he saw as a key dimension of geography. His early work was founded on detailed studies of regional migration and innovation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout his career, he returned to historical dimensions of cities, regions, landscape…
Decline and diversity in Swedish seas: Environmental narratives in marine history, science and policy
Before the mid-twentieth century, there was no comprehensive narrative about empirical conditions in Swedish seas. Around 1970, this view changed profoundly. In line with growing research and the emergence of ‘the environment’ as a defining concept, conditions in Swedish seas were framed as a ‘narrative of decline’. Marine scientists have since recorded more diverse developments than are described by an overall declensionist narrative. Data show …
Teaching the Environmental Humanities
This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasizing important differences in cultural and pedagogical contexts. The second part is a critic…
Swedish environmental history of the Baltic Sea: A review of Current Knowledge and Perspectives for the Future
In Western culture, oceans have traditionally been perceived as timeless, separate from society and practically boundless in resources and absorptive capacity. As a result, the entangled histories of people and marine environments have largely been neglected in historical research. This is changing with the development of marine environmental history together with increasing recognition of oceans’ vulnerability and importance in earth systems. Ag…
Co-existing Notions of Research Quality: A Framework to Study Context-specific Understandings of Good Research
Notions of research quality are contextual in many respects: they vary between fields of research, between review contexts and between policy contexts. Yet, the role of these co-existing notions in research, and in research policy, is poorly understood. In this paper we offer a novel framework to study and understand research quality across three key dimensions. First, we distinguish between quality notions that originate in research fields (Fiel…
Environing technologies: A theory of making environment
The central proposal of this article is that environing technologies shape and structure the way in which nature becomes environment, and as such used, perceived and understood. The argument builds on the understanding that environment is the result of human intervention. Technology is here understood broadly as a terraforming practise, materially and conceptually. We suggest that the compound environing technologies enable us to see environmenta…
The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change
This anthology provides an historical overview of the scientific ideas behind environmental prediction and how, as predictions about environmental change have been taken more seriously and widely, they have affected politics, policy, and public perception. Through an array of texts and commentaries that examine the themes of progress, population, environment, biodiversity and sustainability from a global perspective, it explores the meaning of th…
Stratigraphy for the Renaissance: Questions of expertise for 'the environment' and 'the Anthropocene
This article examines the short history of scientific decision-making and expertise in deliberations about the validity of the term 'Anthropocene' by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Contrary to fears that the Anthropocene debates constitute a politicisation of proper scientific practice, it argues that periodisation and categorisation in science (in stratigraphy, in this case) typically draws on expertise and information outside cor…
Science, Geopolitics and Culture in the Polar Region: Norden Beyond Borders
Concepts such as lifelong learning, life-wide learning and skills for the 21st century were received by heritage institutions with great enthusiasm 10-15 years ago. Archives, museums and other heritage institutions saw the chance to advocate for the organisational potential in learning through heritage in a learning society. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century the financial and economic crisis took its firm grip on all policy areas…
Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet
Crossing the boundaries in global sustainability The planetary boundary (PB) concept, introduced in 2009, aimed to define the environmental limits within which humanity can safely operate. This approach has proved influential in global sustainability policy development. Steffen et al. provide an updated and extended analysis of the PB framework. Of the original nine proposed boundaries, they identify three (including climate change) that might pu…
Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity
Rockström, J., W. Steffen, K. Noone, Å. Persson, F. S. Chapin, III, E. Lambin, T. M. Lenton, M. Scheffer, C. Folke, H. Schellnhuber, B. Nykvist, C. A. De Wit, T. Hughes, S. van der Leeuw, H. Rodhe, S. Sörlin, P. K. Snyder, R. Costanza, U. Svedin, M. Falkenmark, L. Karlberg, R. W. Corell, V. J. Fabry, J. Hansen, B. Walker, D. Liverman, K. Richardson, P. Crutzen, and J. Foley. 2009. Planetary boundaries:exploring the safe operating space for humani…
Reconceptualizing the 'Anthropos' in the Anthropocene: Integrating the social sciences and humanities in global environmental change research
Social Movements and Ecosystem Services-the Role of Social Network Structure in Protecting and Managing Urban Green Areas in Stockholm
Ernstson, H., S. Sörlin, and T. Elmqvist. 2008. Social movements and ecosystem services-the role of social network structure in protecting and managing urban green areas in Stockholm. Ecology and Society 13(2): 39. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-02589-130239
Ecosystem services as technology of globalization: On articulating values in urban nature
The paper demonstrates how ecosystem services can be viewed and studied as a social practice of value articulation. With this follows that when ecosystem services appear as objects of calculated value in decision-making they are already tainted by the social and cannot be viewed as merely reflecting an objective biophysical reality. Using urban case studies of place-based struggles in Stockholm and Cape Town, we demonstrate how values are relatio…
The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-Reading of the Field
This essay argues that environmental history has not engaged as fully with social and political theory as it might, and that once it does, environmental historians will find that their concerns are, potentially, much closer to the mainstream of thought in the social sciences and humanities than they might have expected. In fact, environmental history has the promise to be central to the most influential social thought in the academy and among pol…
Reconfiguring environmental expertise
Developing an Integrated History and future of People on Earth (Ihope)
Narratives and counter-narratives of climate change: North Atlantic glaciology and meteorology, c.1930–1955
Strategic Arctic science: National interests in building natural knowledge – interwar era through the Cold War
Co-existing Notions of Research Quality: A Framework to Study Context-specific Understandings of Good Research
Notions of research quality are contextual in many respects: they vary between fields of research, between review contexts and between policy contexts. Yet, the role of these co-existing notions in research, and in research policy, is poorly understood. In this paper we offer a novel framework to study and understand research quality across three key dimensions. First, we distinguish between quality notions that originate in research fields (Fiel…
Developing a systematic “science of the past” to create our future
Ordering the World for Europe: Science as Intelligence and Information as Seen from the Northern Periphery
This essay examines science and information networks built by European scientists, often in connection with military and/or commercial enterprises and expeditions. It is focused on Europe's northern peripheral powers, particularly the empires, or post-empires, of Sweden and Denmark. Both Copenhagen and Stockholm/Uppsala served as brokerage centers for knowledge and commodified scientific objects. Both cities also had collections, academies, and o…
Synchronizing Earthly Timescales: Ice, Pollen, and the Making of Proto-Anthropocene Knowledge in the North Atlantic Region
The Anthropocene concept frames an emerging new understanding of the human-Earth relationship. It represents a profound temporal integration that brings historical periodization on a par with geological time and creates entanglements between timescales that were previously seen as detached. Because the Anthropocene gets this role of a unifying planetary concept, the ways in which vast geological timescales were incorporated into human history are…
Toward an Integrated History to Guide the Future
Van der Leeuw, S., R. Costanza, S. Aulenbach, S. Brewer, M. Burek, S. Cornell, C. Crumley, J. A. Dearing, C. Downy, L. J. Graumlich, S. Heckbert, M. Hegmon, K. Hibbard, S. T. Jackson, I. Kubiszewski, P. Sinclair, S. Sörlin, and W. Steffen. 2011. Toward an integrated history to guide the future. Ecology and Society 16(4): 2. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-04341-160402
Melting the glacial curtain: The politics of Scandinavian–Soviet networks in the geophysical field sciences between two polar years, 1932/33–1957/58
Weaving Protective Stories: Connective Practices to Articulate Holistic Values in the Stockholm National Urban Park
With rapid worldwide urbanization it is urgent that we understand processes leading to the protection of urban green areas and ecosystems. Although natural reserves are often seen as preserving 'higher valued' rather than 'lower valued' nature, it is more adequate to describe them as outcomes of selective social articulation processes. This is illustrated in the Stockholm National Urban Park. Despite strong exploitation pressure, a diverse urban …
Nature, skiing and Swedish nationalism
(1995). Nature, skiing and Swedish nationalism. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 12, Tribal Identities Nationalism, Europe and Sport, pp. 147-163
The mediated planet: Datafication and the environmental SDGs
Over the past half century, the global environment has become subject to an accelerated pace of mediation and datafication. This ongoing transition has become so comprehensive that the knowledge, management and governance of the Earth system is dependent on enormous flows of data from a “vast machine” of measuring tools. These processes combined have formed what we call a “mediated planet,” subject to interpretation and shared human decision-maki…
Pathways to the trail – landscape, walking and heritage in a Scandinavian border region
Can walking trails be understood not only as routes to history and heritage, but also as heritage in and of themselves? The paper explores the articulation of trails as a distinct landscape and mobility heritage, bridging the nature-culture divide and building on physical and intellectual movements over time. The authors aim to contribute to a better understanding of the geography of trails and trailscapes by analysing the emergence of the Swedis…
Wisdom of affect? Emotion, environment, and the future of resource extraction
The “Arctic Uchronotopias” special issue of Polar Record is an important contribution to scholarly reflection on resource extraction. The ideas, perspectives, and empirical cases that we encounter have significance for extractivism wherever it takes place, both inside and outside of the Arctic region. To see extractivism through an Arctic lens is particularly useful since it brings up many of the issues that are often at stake in extraction activ…
Hägerstrand as historian: Innovation, diffusion and the processual landscape
Torsten Hägerstrand explored innovation and diffusion as chorological processes but also as chronological processes. His strong interest in time brought him closer to the field of history which he saw as a key dimension of geography. His early work was founded on detailed studies of regional migration and innovation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout his career, he returned to historical dimensions of cities, regions, landscape…
Funding Diversity: Performance-based Funding Regimes as Drivers of Differentiation in Higher Education Systems
Shaping strategic research: Power, resources, and interests in Swedish research policy
The Contemporaneity of Environmental History: Negotiating Scholarship, Useful History, and the New Human Condition
Although a ‘product’ of the contemporary period, environmental history brings other disciplines, such as the natural sciences, to bear upon our understanding of contemporary history. It also expands our view of the contemporary era as one essentially linked to earlier epochs, linking twentieth-century ideas like the ‘environment’ to earlier special and cultural concepts. Environmental history complicates our view of contemporary history, challeng…
Planetary environing: The return of boundaries as a category in global environmental governance
Global Environmental Governance (GEG) has been a growing phenomenon since the middle of the 20th century, although the concept itself and its acronym are more recent and were in fact rarely used before 2000. The early interest in GEG was much preoccupied with environmental diplomacy and international legal agreements from the Stockholm UN conference 1972 onwards. The addition of the 'global' reflected the general rise in awareness of the signific…
Om hemförande
On Hometaking This article analyzes a topic within the field of historical study of scientific travel: hometaking, i.e. the taking home (by collecting, purchase, qonquest, theft or otherwise) of objects (artifacts, specimens, goods or other items) to, typically, the centers of learning and power located in the home countries of scientists, explorers and their patrons
Modernising the cultural landscape
In the end, landscape turned out to be a concept almost entirely devoid of content. At worst a bad painting, at best a settled area, a stretch of native soil, in which the co-operative farmers’ movement could mobilise support, or which it could protect, using arguments drawn from the cultural history of land cultivation. And then, gradually, but also instantaneously, the term passed through a developing tank, and out came a landscape that both un…
The International Contexts of Swedish Science: A Network Approach to the Internationalization of Science
Anmälningar och notiser
Recension av: Åke Daun: Den europeiska identiteten: Bidrag till samtal om Sveriges framtid. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1992. Ann-Kristin Ekman: Community, Carnival and Campaign: Expressions of belonging in a Swedish Region. Stockholm: Studies in Social Anthropology, 1991 (Diss.). Gunnar Ternhag: Hjort Anders Olsson. Hedemora: Gidlunds bokförlag, 1992. Märta Ramsten: Återklang. Svensk folkmusik i förändring 1950 —1980. Stockholm, 1992 (Svenskt vi…
Antecknat: Regioner och regionalism
Nature, skiing and Swedish nationalism
(1995). Nature, skiing and Swedish nationalism. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 12, Tribal Identities Nationalism, Europe and Sport, pp. 147-163
Hur länge är samhället? Gammalt och nytt i relationen historia-sociologi
Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv
Carolyn Merchant and the Death of Nature in Sweden
Monument and Memory: Landscape Imagery and the Articulation of Territory
The argument of this article is that perceived landscapes are the results of processes of articulation of territory. Landscape features, be they mountains or rivers, nature reserves, man made monuments, or technological artefacts (roads, bridges, lighthouses etc.), have been reproduced socially and culturally through a number of text genres, art forms, media, and through scientific description, particularly the field sciences and the historical a…
Ordering the World for Europe: Science as Intelligence and Information as Seen from the Northern Periphery
This essay examines science and information networks built by European scientists, often in connection with military and/or commercial enterprises and expeditions. It is focused on Europe's northern peripheral powers, particularly the empires, or post-empires, of Sweden and Denmark. Both Copenhagen and Stockholm/Uppsala served as brokerage centers for knowledge and commodified scientific objects. Both cities also had collections, academies, and o…
Cultivating the Places of Knowledge
Science, Empire, and Enlightenment: Geographies of Northern Field Science
This article is intended as a contribution to the geography of eighteenth-century science. It analyses three cases of field science: Linnaeus's global travelling enterprise, the Danish Arabia expedition, and the early attempts in Britiain and Scandinavia to establish a North Atlantic, if not an Arctic, science. It points to the emergence of what we may wish to call domestic exteriors. Countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Great Britian carved out…
European and American Approaches to the Environment
The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-Reading of the Field
This essay argues that environmental history has not engaged as fully with social and political theory as it might, and that once it does, environmental historians will find that their concerns are, potentially, much closer to the mainstream of thought in the social sciences and humanities than they might have expected. In fact, environmental history has the promise to be central to the most influential social thought in the academy and among pol…
Funding Diversity: Performance-based Funding Regimes as Drivers of Differentiation in Higher Education Systems
Conclusion
Shaping strategic research: Power, resources, and interests in Swedish research policy
Narratives and counter-narratives of climate change: North Atlantic glaciology and meteorology, c.1930–1955
Social Movements and Ecosystem Services-the Role of Social Network Structure in Protecting and Managing Urban Green Areas in Stockholm
Ernstson, H., S. Sörlin, and T. Elmqvist. 2008. Social movements and ecosystem services-the role of social network structure in protecting and managing urban green areas in Stockholm. Ecology and Society 13(2): 39. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-02589-130239
Nature's End
Environmental History as a distinct discipline is now over a generation old, with a large and diverse group of practitioners around the globe. This book provides a reflection on the achievements, dive
A safe operating space for humanity
The World System and the Earth System: Global Socioenvironmental Change and Sustainability since the Neolithic
Henry Wasser's Higher Education in America and the United States: A Diverse Collection of Essays
Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity
Rockström, J., W. Steffen, K. Noone, Å. Persson, F. S. Chapin, III, E. Lambin, T. M. Lenton, M. Scheffer, C. Folke, H. Schellnhuber, B. Nykvist, C. A. De Wit, T. Hughes, S. van der Leeuw, H. Rodhe, S. Sörlin, P. K. Snyder, R. Costanza, U. Svedin, M. Falkenmark, L. Karlberg, R. W. Corell, V. J. Fabry, J. Hansen, B. Walker, D. Liverman, K. Richardson, P. Crutzen, and J. Foley. 2009. Planetary boundaries:exploring the safe operating space for humani…
Weaving Protective Stories: Connective Practices to Articulate Holistic Values in the Stockholm National Urban Park
With rapid worldwide urbanization it is urgent that we understand processes leading to the protection of urban green areas and ecosystems. Although natural reserves are often seen as preserving 'higher valued' rather than 'lower valued' nature, it is more adequate to describe them as outcomes of selective social articulation processes. This is illustrated in the Stockholm National Urban Park. Despite strong exploitation pressure, a diverse urban …
Political science (42 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Law (27 works) · History (26 works) · Environmental ethics (23 works) · Geography (21 works) · Politics (21 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · History (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works)