Journal for the History of Environment and Society

Rya Forest is a small area of green space in Gothenburg surrounded by an industrial district in connection with the port. This broadleaf forest was protected in 1928 based on the first Swedish Nature Conservation Act of 1909. In the decades that followed, Gothenburg underwent rapid urban expansion and modernisation, which generated conflicts of interest that culminated in the late 1950s when plans were launched to place a sewage treatment plant in Rya Forest. An extensive public debate took off and one daily newspaper even called the matter “the major nature conservation issue of this generation”. This article examines the history of the nature reserve with particular focus on the controversy over the treatment plant. Discourse analysis reveals diverging ideas about nature, society, tradition and progress. Rya Forest nature reserve is also an example of how the law of 1909 could be repealed in favour of industry and infrastructure. Furthermore, the case illustrates a growing awareness among conservationists of how seemingly wild landscapes actually have been shaped by human land use, and also how postwar modernisation meant new challenges for conservation organisations regarding the balance between local and national efforts.

This article presents a framework to map connectivity between seemingly independent crises, using as an example a moral panic and a “natural disaster” in the 1730s. The first was a wave of sodomy trials and executions in the Dutch Republic. The second was the infamous shipworm epidemic, which catalysed a water management crisis and short-lived existential panic. This paper argues that the sodomy persecution and the shipworm disaster were integral components of a “social cascade”. Rather than background conditions, social-ecological and cultural conditions in the Dutch Republic established pathways and set the bounds for causal connections that knit social, environmental, and cultural crises together. The cultural perception of crises, and its interaction with an evolving metanarrative of decline, supplied the causal link. The social cascade framework enriches our understanding of crisis connectivity and encourages new interpretations of the relationships between disaster, environmental change, and culture.