Katja Malmborg

an island summer, part IV: Stora Karlsö

Every year in September, the whole office relocates to Stora Karlsö for a couple of days, to bond and strategize and eat-sing-dance. Stora Karlsö is an island in the Baltic, off the coast of Gotland. After Yellowstone, it is the oldest protected nature area in the world. In spring and early summer, thousands upon thousands of birds come to nest, the island is particularly known for the big colony of common guillemot, but in September most of the birds have flown away. What is left are ash trees heavy with huge, skeleton-like bird nests, grazing sheep and breathtaking views from the high cliffs.

One could not wish for a more magnificent place for a kick-off.

It is a strangely intense event, the office retreat. Constantly being surrounded by people. The strategizing blending with friendly (awkward) chitchat and eating, walking, drinking alcohol, even waking up with colleagues. Don’t get me wrong, I have amazing colleagues. Such incredible people, you wouldn’t believe. But groups make me uncomfortable, I do not balance professional, personal and private well, I need room to breathe between takes, recharge. Time that isn’t available during an office retreat.

I had a nice time at Stora Karlsö. I got to know some colleagues a bit better, had some inspiring conversations, sang a Finnish tango with an impromptu band of colleagues, an accordion, a cello and a guitar, in front of the whole office (the exhibitionist and introvert in me in constant conflict), I danced like there was no tomorrow at the party.

And I was utterly exhausted once it was over.

blue food, or the obsession with immortality

I read a book about food (quite a long time ago now, actually, I’m so behind with everything, it’s embarrassing). The book was written by Niklas Ekstedt, a chef, and Henrik Ennart, a journalist, and it is called “Den blå maten – Recept för ett långt och lyckligt liv” (“The blue food – Recipes for a long and happy life”). It is about the blue zones, places in the world where the chances of getting older than a hundred are statistically the highest. An island in Japan, a group of mountain communities on Sicily, the tip of a headland in Costa Rica, and a couple more. What all of these places have in common is that they are remote, where people’s lifestyles have stayed the same even through modernization – except for access to modern medicine. People work with their bodies and they have strong beliefs in a religion or their community, close relationships with family and neighbors. And they care about food. A lot of it they even produce themselves. Little meat, a lot of vegetables, good fats. Each chapter centers on one of the blue zones and ends with a handful of recipes based on their traditional food.

It is an interesting read, although the academic in me found it a bit shallow. But it’s not fair to ask for too much. It’s a cookbook, after all. However, it made me think: What’s this obsession with getting old? The book is written like it’s a good in itself, turning a hundred. And maybe it is, if the life has been good. If you’ve had those close relationships with family and neighbors, if you’ve cared deeply, and eaten a lot of good food. But there is also something so contradictory in this. The self-centeredness. Having the power and freedom to choose to live in a way to turn a hundred, and using it do just that. When the world is full of people who don’t have that choice. Shouldn’t old age be a reward after a life spent making the world a better place, and not a goal in itself? Maybe I have a savior’s complex, but there’s just something with this healthy lifestyle and superfood obsession of current western middle-class culture that makes me uncomfortable.

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However, I do love food. Inspired by the book, I created my own blue recipe. Rhubarbs from the back yard (I’ve really been obsessed with rhubarb the past year) and strawberries bought at the market turned into a tart sauce, thick oat yogurt with some vanilla powder and fairtrade walnuts. Organic, vegan, mostly locally produced, rich in micro-nutrients. Very similar to something my grandmother used to make for me when I was a kid.

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an island summer, part III: Öland (mid-August)

When I was invited to speak at the Burkina Faso day on Öland, I thought it could be a perfect opportunity to also do some vacationing. I convinced Ashley, a dear friend and Canadian in great need of seeing more of Sweden than just Stockholm, to come with me. So, for our shared brief, but lovely summer trip, we brought sleeping bags and a tent, rented bikes and spent three days cycling around the southern half of the second largest island in Sweden.

Our main interest was the UNESCO world heritage site Agricultural Landscape of Southern Öland. It is a perfect example of a social-ecological system. Humans have lived and farmed there for more than five thousand years, adjusting their practices to the unique conditions on the island. This in turn means that the landscape and its vegetation has co-evolved with the humans.

One example of this is the alvar, a sparsely vegetated grassland limestone plain where grazing animals have allowed a diversity of herb and shrub species to establish, some of which cannot be found anywhere else in Sweden. It is especially known for its orchids. Even though most of the alvar is protected now as nature reserves, it is still being grazed by sheep and cows at a low intensity, to keep the social-ecological open landscape from getting overgrown.

However, it is not only the long history of human-environment interactions that makes Öland unique. Öland also has special soils, compared to most other parts of Sweden, with a much higher lime content and, therefore, soil fertility. Combined with the slightly higher temperatures than in mainland Sweden, this has made Öland one of the more important agricultural areas in the country even today.

We cycled past fields of wheat, oats, barley and forage, potatoes, peas, beans, onions and maize. It was harvest season, so there was a lot of activity in the fields. In the afternoon of our second day, dark clouds started building on the horizon and by evening, we had to race through a wall of rain. It was incredible, the drama of the sky and how the sea mirrored its color – but we got soaked and would probably have had a really unpleasant night in the tent. Luckily, at dusk, we happened upon a hostel with an empty double room. After a hot shower, dry clothes and some warm food in our stomachs, having experienced the ferocious rain only improved our memories of the day. And the next morning, the sun was shining again.

On the southern tip of Öland stands Långe Jan, a lighthouse. This is one of the most important resting places for migrating birds in this part of the Baltic. No birds had started migrating yet when we were there, but there are also plenty of birds permanently living and nesting on the surrounding beaches and waters. And Ashley got excited like a child when we saw some weird gray shapes out in the water and realized it was a complete flock of grey seals enjoying the sun on some rocks.

Öland is a beautiful place with a large variety of interesting landscapes – but also so flat that cycling takes very little effort. There are even a couple of bike trails that cross and encircle the island, meaning that you rarely have to share the road with cars. I can really recommend going on a cycling holiday on Öland!

spreading the word (mid-August)

In mid-August, I was invited to talk about my research at the yearly Burkina Faso day at Öland’s college. The day was organized by the local UN association and the Sweden-Burkina Faso friendship association, and consisted of a series of presentations about Burkina Faso by different professionals: a social anthropology professor who studies local democracy reform, a doctor who has built a hospital, a law student who wrote her thesis on female genital mutilation from a human rights perspective, a documentary maker who was filming a movie about young female mechanics in Ouagadougou, a representative from the Burkinabe consulate in Copenhagen, and me.

It was strange, trying to put together a presentation for an audience I didn’t know anything about. I expected many of them to have a connection to Burkina Faso, meaning that they would probably know a lot about the country already. On the other hand, the sustainability science proficiency would probably be limited, meaning that the particulars of my research and the concepts I’ve used would be more or less new to them. This meant that the expected profile of this audience was the complete opposite of the one I’ve been used to present in front of for the last couple of years: highly educated environmental scientists with (often) limited knowledge of my specific case study area.

I really didn’t know how to approach this new challenge. On the one hand, I wanted to make the talk interesting and not have too much of that scientific mumbo jumbo. But I also didn’t want to oversimplify things and seem like I thought that the audience was stupid. There’s a fine balance between the two. I was working up some serious nerves.

In the end, I chose to tell the story about the multifunctional landscape. How small-scale farmers in northern Burkina Faso actively manage their village landscapes to integrate several different uses in both fields and shrublands, forest patches and depressions. That focus isn’t only on maximizing the production of cultivated crops, but also on harvesting wild plants for food, medicine and spiritual uses, and managing vegetation so that there is enough of both fodder, fire wood and building material, while still protecting the sacred groves where ancestors reside. Many photographs, but very little about methodology and nothing about remote sensing or ecosystem services theory. I did include some maps, but mostly just to show what my actual research results looks like, I didn’t get into detail about what they actually meant. And all in Swedish! A lot harder than one might think.

I don’t know how well I did, in the end. I tend to forget presentations the moment they’re over. Nervousness playing games with my mind, I guess. Several people approached me afterwards, though, and told me that my talk had been interesting, so probably I didn’t embarrass myself. But I’ll really do have to practice all steps of popular science public speaking for the future, if I want my research to reach further than being stuck in rarely quoted scientific papers.

Öland’s collage (Ölands Folkhögskola)

an island summer, part II: Koster (early August)

In the beginning of August, I went to Koster with my dad to spend a couple of windy days on those ragged isles.

Koster is a group of islands off the west coast of Sweden, right on the border to Norway. My great grandfather’s family comes from Strömstad, the closest town on the mainland to Koster, and that side of my family have been spending their summers on the islands for generations. And so did I, a couple of weeks almost every summer between ages 10 and 19. Since then, I’ve only been there a couple of times, but still I feel a connection to this harsh, rocky coast, a feeling of kinship with the landscape that few other places can evoke in me.

Big parts of the islands are protected for their unique environments, and in 2009 the waters around the islands were turned into the first marine national park in Sweden. In the fjord that separates the islands from the mainland, and Sweden from Norway, you can even find the only Swedish coral reef! It is an incredible boundary ecosystem, on the edge between land and sea, creating a multitude of habitats for a big variety of species. Around every bend on the trails that cover the terrestrial nature reserves, there is something new to see, a new view to admire.

In this austere, windy environment, the trees grow in strange ways. Rowans, pines, juniper, birches. Especially the birches, growing sideways instead of straight. The life-force in these trees, to grow so big despite the harsh conditions of wind and poor soils and rainy, cold weather, it is inspiring.

On the last two days, a storm came. Winds of up to 27 meters per second, waves as big as buildings, the air misty from all the spray. But also, the sun was shining. Our last afternoon, walking on the high, round cliffs, with the sea roaring beneath, the wind tearing at my clothes and hair, making movements feel like flying. The enormity of it all. An incredible experience.

Austere, wild, beautiful. One of my favorite places on Earth.

a different kind of soil

While lying in the sun outside the fisherman’s hut on Björkskär, with my bare toes running through the grass, I read a book of poems by the Swedish poet Athena Farrokhzad, “Vitsvit”. A year ago, I saw a play based on that same book of poems, and wrote about it on the blog. It is a thought-provoking poem about the immigrant’s experience from a diverse set of perspectives, and I liked it even better as a book.

And I don’t know, maybe it’s the physical geographer in me, all the years of studying soil and landslides and plant succession, but I really fell for this image:

[An attempt at a translation:]

My brother said: All the seeds that got the verdict

to fall in this earth and never sprout and bloom

It is for them that the earth shall crack

~ * ~

Poetry. Art. If done right, so much more powerful than any statistics or science. We’ve got to join forces if we’re going to get anywhere with this world in turmoil.

an island summer, part I: Björkskär (early July)

When going through the photographs from the past summer, I realized that all the trips that I went on took me to islands in different parts of Sweden. I guess it’s not that far-fetched, with the water and open horizons, islands make sense in summer. But still, that I only went to islands, by chance. I find it a little extraordinary. I had an island summer.

The first island I went to was Björkskär, a smallish island in the Baltic outside of Valdemarsvik some 300 kilometers south of Stockholm. There, my friend Hanna’s boyfriend’s parents own two small fisherman’s huts from the 17th and 19th centuries, respectively. A beautiful setting for a weekend away, flowering meadows, soft cliffs warmed by the sun down by the water, and elaborate dinners served with sparkling wine. Three couples and me. (Honestly, more and more I’ve started to feel I should find a partner, like, NOW, just so that I wouldn’t be the constant odd person at social events. Most of my Swedish friends are in stable, healthy relationships now, how did that happen? … But then I remember how tedious I tend to feel dating is, and how I have so many other, way more interesting things to spend my time on, and I decide I don’t feel that stressed anymore. Fitting in is a truly bad reason to enter into couplehood.)

The brunch view from the front deck.

Spending time with good friends. Old friends. Best friends, really. I can’t imagine a better way to spend a summer weekend.

for the hundredth time: recap

Time runs through my fingers. I spent autumn biking through a beautifully colorful Stockholm, trying to finalize some results to our Volta basin project while at the same time trying to come up with ideas for an advertised PhD position at the SRC. Managing those two very different stages of the research process at once, the creativeness needed for coming up with research ideas and the very rigorous and critical stage of project finalization, is hard. I’ve felt torn between interests and have found it hard to focus. But it is also something that I will have to learn to deal with, if I plan on sticking around in academia.

Winter came as a chock to Stockholm with the second week in November getting more snow than any other month of November on record. Trump was elected to be the next president of the US, and I woke up to a crying roommate at the breakfast table. And then the snow melted into a more normal, wet, gray and dark November.

Wouldn’t it be nice, then, to reminisce back to the summer – the trips, the people, the books. Allow me to enjoy my dark Sunday afternoon…

magic Midsummer at Bergius Botanical Garden (mid-June)

Just across an oak grove hill from my office lies the Stockholm university botanical garden, called Bergianska after two Swedish important botanists who established the first botanical garden in the same location in the 18th century.

A couple of days before Midsummer, I went to a guided tour of Bergianska’s herb garden, and the theme of the tour was Magical Midsummer. It was a wonderful way to get a history lesson, walking around in the garden and hearing about the powers people at different times have thought certain plants possess. And it was particularly fitting to have this tour on the day of the summer solstice, because in the olden days people believed that Midsummer was a particularly magical time when the potency of these plants was at its highest. And there is something to that, as the botanist and gardener holding the tour explained. Midsummer is usually the peak of flowering season for most herbs, meaning that the active substances in them are at their strongest.

Here are some of the plants that we were shown:

Garden thyme / Kryddtimjan (S) / Thymus vulgaris

Many herbs came to Sweden through monks from the European continent, and were first grown in monastery gardens before spreading to the general public. So is the case with thyme, that originally comes from the Mediterranean area.

Lemon thyme / Citrontimjan (S) / Thymus x citriodorus

Thyme was believed to give strength and courage, for example when using it to spice wine or putting in poultices. Young women would stich a branch of thyme into a scarf and give to their loved one before he started his journey to Jerusalem during the crusades. It was also the herb of fertility goddesses, like Aphrodite, Freya or Virgin Mary, and having it in the bed when giving birth would protect both mother and child from any evil.

It is antiseptic and good against colds, but can be harmful to fetuses and shouldn’t be consumed when pregnant.

Common sage / Kryddsalvia (S) / Salvia officinalis

Sage was believed to be one of the most potent herbs. It was dried and put into small bags that could be hung over the bed or put into the mattress, or turned into incense, and it would protect you and your home from bad spirits.

It is good against colds, but just as with thyme, it should be avoided by pregnant women.

Lemon balm / Citronmeliss (S) / Melissa officinalis

Lemon balm was believed to protect against illnesses and to keep your body healthy in general. It was also seen as a love herb – if wine was spiced with lemon balm and then given to your loved one, it would evoke love in him or her.

It has a calming, relaxing effect.

Chamomile / Kamomill (S) / Matricaria chamomilla

Chamomile was believed to be a heal-all herb. In ancient Egypt, it was dedicated to the sun. It was brought to Sweden, like many other herbs, by monks during the Middle Ages, but is now growing wild in meadows all over the southern half of the country. It was seen as a woman’s herb, believed to be good for mothers.

It can relieve pain, is anti-convulsant and calming, and is good to drink in tea.

Henbane / Bolmört (S) / Hyoscyamus niger

Henbane was a witch plant and used during medieval times to poison enemies. It was believed to be used in flying salve that witches put on their brooms before flying to dance with the devil. In small doses, it could also be given to hens, turning them drowsy and quiet, making it possible to steal them without being noticed (thereof the English name).

It is a hallucinogen and poisonous.

Heart’s ease / Styvmorsviol (S) / Viola tricolor

In ancient Greece, pansies were seen as the flower of love. It was the favorite flower of Napoleon, making it very popular in France during the years of his reign.

Heart’s ease contains salicylic acid, which is a pain killer, and is good against eczema.

Lovage / Libbsticka (S) / Levisticum officinale

Lovage was believed to be an aphrodisiac, and was also planted around the house to protect against witches, rats and mice.

To this day, it is still used in cooking for its taste-enhancing capacity. For example, it is one of the ingredients in Maggi, the popular dried broth cubes.

Norwegian angelica / Fjällkvanne (S) / Angelica archangelica

The story tells that during the Black Plague in medieval Europe, a monk in a Swedish monastery had a dream. In this dream, an archangel came to him and said that the Norwegian angelica wards off all evil, and that he should use it to cure the plague. It is one of the few medicinal plants that originates from Scandinavia and was exported to continental Europe, mainly during the Middle Ages when the dried and pulverized roots of the angelica were believed to cure the plague. It was also believed to protect against other, more supernatural evils.

It grows wild in many parts of Scandinavia, and is still used to flavor some foods and alcoholic drinks.

Elder / Fläder (S) / Sambucus nigra

Elder was Freya’s (Nordic tradition) and Holda’s (Germanic tradition) plant, and it was the protective tree of households and women’s crafts. It guarded against witches and other evil magic, and was often planted around the house for protection – although the potency of the tree became strongest if it was allowed to self-germinate. However, one should be careful, because killing the protective elder of a house could lead to a family member dying, and even when harvesting flowers or berries one had to offer something to the spirit of the tree in return. In addition to protecting the family of a house, it also protected the animals, and the leaves could be put under the saddle of a horse to scare off harmful insects.

Elder flowers and berries can be made into juice (delicious!!), and tea made from the berries can also help when you have a cold by increasing perspiration and urination.

Oh, I get too excited about these things. This tour made me so inspired, in fact, that I’ve made my own compilation of plants that villagers in northern Burkina Faso have told me are used for different medicinal and spiritual purposes. I’ll publish it on the blog shortly!

To summarize: In another life, I should have become an ethnobotanist. And, I really love Bergius Botanical Garden.

summer reading (June to August)

It’s become a tradition by now. In the beginning of the summer, I get that feeling, freedom bubbling in my belly, an itching in my bones – and I just have to go to the library and go bananas with my library card. This year, it was the first weekend in June and the sun was shining, I got on my bike and cycled into town. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t only the day of my big summer library visit – it was also the day of the Stockholm Marathon. Getting to the City Library with a bike turned into a logistical nightmare, with the marathon runners cutting off my access between the south and north across the entire inner city! Why would anyone want to run a marathon – and why did they have to do it when I needed to get my summer reading fix!

But I had a mission. I managed to cross, finally, and made it to the library before closing time. About an hour later, I left with 17 books in my backpack. When it comes to books, I have no inhibitions. I couldn’t wait for summer reading time to start!

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I did not end up reading all the books that I borrowed that day in early June. Some, I returned without reading, and instead picked up new ones. I haven’t read as ferociously for years. During the months of June, July and August, I read 19 books in total. Here are a couple of highlights:

When the emperor was divine and The Buddha in the attic by Julie Otsuka. The books are tiny, telling some of the stories of Japanese immigrants in the US during the 19th and 20th centuries. Amazing how much she manages to say with so few words. Every sentence pregnant with meaning, emotion, ambiguity.
My brilliant friend by Elena Ferrante. Anyone who is into books must have heard about this one by now, it’s a world phenomenon, describing the friendship between two girls in suburban Naples after WWII. It was really slow to start, but about halfway through. Like a tidal wave, the attention to detail, the complex characters. I lived in southern Italy for four intense days at dad’s cottage, the people in the book seeming more real than the sun on my skin and the breeze in the aspen trees above my hammock. I did not want to leave.
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. I love Katniss. I understand the hype. I was consumed, transported back to the teenager who lived with her nose in a book.
A visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. A novel about music that travels seamlessly between the characters, decades, styles. When a book makes you cry, just because you find the characters so touching and sincere and because you understand their desperation, that’s the mark of really good writer’s craftsmanship.

In another life, I would read way more than I have time for now – just for the pure enjoyment of it!