Elin

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I listened to another biography, while tending to the sprouting kale in my allotment garden. Elin Wägner (1882-1949), an early Swedish feminist, journalist and author, environmentalist, educator and outspoken pacifist during the world wars. She wrote about how our industries and our burgeoning consumption were degrading ecosystems, decades before it became a an issue on the political agenda. Wägner was worried about people losing touch with our food systems, with the clothes that we wear and things that we use. That the knowledge of the hand would soon be dead. She had a cottage built in the rural Småland, with a garden and room for a loom, she was interested in organic farming and argued for the benefits of handcrafting. That everyone should learn some. That through being a producer, of food or clothes or other use items, we are also able to be more knowledgeable and responsible consumers. And that our knowledge and demand for good quality also has to encompass a demand for good living and working conditions for the craftspeople and workers producing the things that we buy.

I have read some of her novels before, but I must pick up a couple of her non-fiction books too. Particularly “Alarm Clock” / “Väckarklocka” (1941), one of her last books and where she formulates her environmentalist ideas. Some days, being reminded that I have joined a movement with a long history, that I stand on the shoulders of many brilliant environmentalist thinkers of the past, feels nice. On other days, it feels heavy. Wägner started writing in the very beginning of the 1900s, and she died seventy years ago. However, her ideas appear progressive and radical even today – but still, very much in line with the kind of research I and my colleagues are doing. Change can be so slow. Or, put a different way, ideas have to be shared at the right time, for people to wake up to them. Wägner sounded the alarm clock, but was half a century ahead of her time.

Photo: People learning how to grow stuff, in Glasgow Botanic Gardens, Scotland, May 2017. Posted on Instagram August 13, 2020.