Julia Nordblad has received a grant from the Swedish Research Council

Julia Nordblad has been awarded funding from the Swedish Research Council for the project “The Rainforest in Sweden: The Emergence of a Grassroots Concept of the Planetary, 1980–2000.” The project will begin in 2026 and run for three years.

Project description:

The rainforest is today a well-known symbol of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. But the imagery of lush green spaces of global importance is a recent cultural phenomenon that emerged in the 1980s alongside the rise of international activism to preserve rainforests. Activists mobilized the public with arguments about it being “the lungs of the earth” and an aesthetically awe-inspiring place. The rainforest concept was in other words planetary in two ways: it presented arguments about the rainforest’s key role in planetary systems like oxygenation of the atmosphere, and it generated planetary-scale networks of organizations and activists. This study historicizes the emergence of the rainforest through the case of Swedish rainforest activism and its network of partner organizations in the global north and south. The study contributes to our understanding of the history of planetary thought by examining how transnational social movements practiced planetary environmentalism.