Photo: Sara Jeswani.

Just like things come and go in nature, so do blogs … and now the time has come for this blog to end.

For me it’s been more than three (!) great years, blogging about what’s happening on the green front in Sweden and getting wonderful response from different parts of the world.

Thank you so much everyone for reading, commenting and e-mailing! And good luck with your own green projects, whether it’s starting a compost, raising awareness in your neighbourhood or city, or changing the whole world!

For more sustainability news and analysis from this part of the planet, I can recommend the Effekt blog written my colleagues at the climate magazine Effekt. In Swedish, but you all understand it by now, don’t you? (if not, there’s always the auto translater).

Anders Persson’s son Edvin has become the poster boy for the Swedish Future Weeks. Photo: Framtidsveckan.

It all started with the artist Anders Persson in Söderhamn (who is among other things known for drawing the classical comic strip  91:an Karlsson). Reading about climate change and becoming father can be a powerful combination. In Anders Persson’s case, it led to a lot of rather scary thoughts about how little that had actually happened during all his years as active in the environmental movement.

In order to do what he could for his son, Anders Persson organised the first Future Week in Söderhamn, where he lives, in 2009. The idea was to make people learn, reflect and talk about the different crisis that humanity is facing, to show what is actually being done about it, and that global problems often have local solutions.

A preschool in Ljusdal, which has worked during 20 years with letting the children participate in the production of their own food, both by growing vegetables and keeping animals. Photo: Framtidsveckan.

During this week, businesses, “ordinary” people and local politicians show what they do to make their society more sustainable. A few tasters from the program from one of the future weeks earlier this year: A woman opened her sheep farm to the public, showing how she produces meat and wool. People growing food together organised a potluck party with food, drinks and discussions about sustainable food production in the area. An expert talked about how the local area would cope with a major power cut. The municipal architect met locals to discuss how the area can be made more sustainable, both socially and environmentally, through its buildings.

Talking to the founder Anders Persson, he tells me the concept is spreading rapidly. This year there are Future Weeks being organised on about ten locations. The next ones (information in Swedish) are Sundsvall [map] and Örebro [map].
– The future weeks work perfectly as a lever in order to lift the ideas about transition, both locally and regionally. Now the next challenge is to fill the rest of the year with action too! Anders Persson tells me.

Another Future Week feature: People growing food together invite the public to get to know their activities, and taste the outcomes of it in a potluck dinner. Photo: Framtidsveckan.

Johan and Franz checking if the bees have a queen. The rain and the bees flying around don’t really appear on this photo, but I can tell you they were everywhere… Photo: Sara Jeswani.

“Congratulations, you’ve got bees!”

It was the beginning of July and I was sitting on a boat, far away from Stockholm, when my mobile phone beeped. I stared at the text message for several minutes. Well, I did sign up for that lottery (handing out a few of the “new” bee societies that are created when you divide big ones during summer) at my local beekeeper association’s course earlier this year. But I never win lotteries, so I reckoned nothing would happen.

I was wrong.

Honey bees are extremely interesting animals. Photo: Sara Jeswani.

Reading about the importance of bees and how they are now more and more threatened,I had decided to learn a bit more and joined a beekeeping course in the beginning of this year. I am far from the only one having got this interest lately, and the beekeeping veterans running the course were amazed to see 35 new members coming to the first meeting instead of the normal four to five.

Trying the get the loose honey bees out of the car before driving across the city. Photo: Sara Jeswani.

The thing about bees is that the more you learn about them the more intriguing they get. How on Earth does the bee queen know where to go when it’s time to mate? And how do the bees manage to tell each other where the best nectar is to be found? Why are so many of them dying all of a sudden, does it have to do with pesticides being sprayed on food crops?

I would really like to have a beehive, i thought – in a couple of years.

Who knows if it would ever have happened, if it wasn’t for this lottery. Only question: What do you do with thousands of bees when you live in a flat?

Finally the boxes are placed in the new hive, and after a few minutes the bees start flying in and out, getting to know their new neighbourhood. Photo: Sara Jeswani.

After sending e-mails to everyone I know in the area where I live, I ended up finding a nice new home for them, a local garden association where the members keep bees together. It’s reassuring to have others that will take care of the bees together with me, and last few weeks we started restoring an old hive to give them a new house.

Last week it was finally time to move the bees from their current home in a park north of Stockholm. The rain was pouring down and the bees (approximately 40.000–50.000!) weren’t exactly in their best mood when we put them in the car to cross Stockholm… But now they have a new home, which I hope they will like!

Photo from the book. An orangutan, like hundreds of other orphans, is kept at the Nyaru Menteng rehabilitation center in Kalimantan, Indonesia. The loss of dipterocarp trees in this region has led to significant reductions in the populations of many species like orangutans that are dependent on forests. Photo: Mattias Klum

Communicating sustainability isn’t easy. The story about what is happening to the planet and what we ought to do about it tends to become either so simplified that the solution to this very upsetting problem seems to be to buy the right “green” car – or so detailed and technical that very few feel it actually concerns them personally.

Coral reef in Indonesia. Photo: Mattias Klum.

So how do you unite the emotional and the “brain” understandings? In a new book, which was released during the Rio+20 meeting and will have its Swedish release next month, there’s a serious ambition to do just this.
The Swedish photographer Mattias Klum has been all over the world an taken photos of Earth, with its beautiful natural habitats, endangered species, burned rainforests and people that inhabit cities and rural areas.

To accompany these moving photos, Johan Rockström, who is the executive director of Stockholm Resilience Centre, has written texts that nail down the scientific realities behind what we see. Taking a systems perspective on the challenges that humanity faces, he explains the complexity of this system, what is at stake if we don’t learn to stay within the planetary boundaries and what he thinks must be done about this (“a sustainability revolution”).

I find this boundary-breaking approach to information, where more artistic ways of expression can meet the hard facts, very useful. To make your own opinion about it, read the e-book preview of the book here.

Tebaran, a blowpipe hunter in Sarawak, Malaysia, sees a difficult path ahead for indigenous people in Borneo, as logging operations and palm oil plantations rapidly engulf the land of his ancestors, rainforests that were abundant in plants and animals. Photo: Mattias Klum.

One of the Transition Group members talking to the vendors about the group's work. Photo: Ylva Lundin.

I know I keep going on  about the Transition Group in my childhood town Alingsås, but they just keep doing such great things!

Working with the aim to reduce the local dependency on fossil fuels can be a massive task. How do you talk about these things without being dull and annoying? How do you make people, caught up in their everyday lives, listen at all?
The members of the transition group thought they’d start simple. To reuse things is important and easy to understand for everyone. And most people have a lot of things at home that they wouldn’t mind getting rid of. So a flea market seemed like a good idea.

They got permission from the city of Alingsås to use a central avenue, where they could offer people to set up a stand for free and sell their used stuff every Saturday during this summer.

I spoke to some of them before the first Saturday. They were a tiny bit nervous. What if no one would turn up? Some of them sorted out a few things they could sell, so the place wouldn’t be completely empty.

An almost unused spade? Some nice clothes? What someone is tired of, others can get joy from. Photo: Ylva Lundin.

They hadn’t needed to worry. Every Saturday since opening, the avenue has been full, even crammed, with people. Older people who have gone through attics and cellars and filled a big table with things. Young people who have cleaned out their wardrobes for clothes they aren’t using anymore. Even children, coming with their old books and toys.
Soon the group had to ask the city for more space, since people had to put their stands in double lines.

And, as with most of these sustainability-raising activities, it’s not just about the thing in itself. Used stuff getting a new life is great. But there’s also a huge social aspect to it. When I visited Alingsås in July, the street was full of people – even if it was raining! And they were not only selling and buying, but also getting to know each other and meeting old friends they hadn’t seen in a while.

It is also a golden opportunity for the transition group to tell people why they are organising these events and in what way sustainability is about more than just reusing stuff. And there are future ideas of arranging a market where instead of bringing your used stuff, you bring the surplus fruit and vegetables from your garden. This must be an excellent way of showing the potential of people’s own food production.

Building resilience while having fun? Sounds like a good concept to me.

The flea market now attracts more people than the main shopping street of Alingsås! Photo: Ylva Lundin.

You find them on the sushi, in woks or at the barbeque… Tiger prawns and giant shrimps have become a popular ingredient on many plates in Sweden. But after increasing discussions and campaigns about the downsides of tiger prawn production (destruction of mangrove swamps, sweet water goes salty, agricultural land becomes infertile…) not to mention the long transports from the other side of the world, more and more food shops and restaurants have chosen to stop selling these big prawns.

The future might bring them back on the menu, though. Earlier this summer, Matilda Olstorpe was one of the winners at the Smart Lunch competition I have mentioned here on the blog.
Matilda Olstorpe is a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and she has developed a method for breeding giant shrimps together with the Tilapia fish, using the excess heating and sugar by-product from a papermill.

In this way, the papermill’s unwanted and unused by-products can become something useful. The sugar works as food for bacterias and yeast fungi, which in its turn feeds the prawns. The excess heat from the mill gives the water its right temperature, and since it’s flowing around in a closed system and is cleaned by micro-organisms, no infections can be spread to the surrounding sea.

To make this come true, Matilda Olstorpe has started Vegafish, and recently received a grant from The European fisheries fund to finance an initial proof-of-concept fish farming facility at the papermill Holmen in Hallstavik not far from Stockholm.

So, maybe we’ll be seeing a Swedish version of the prawn sushi in a few years time? I assume it will be made with what now goes under the name of “Swedish rice” (since rice can’t be grown in Sweden): whole grains of wheat, barley or oats. But then we just might have to come up with a new name for the sushi too…

Getting their message out in the Ojnare forest. Photo: Fältbiologerna.

“This country is like one big summerhouse”, said a Chinese man I know the other day. And it’s true, Sweden is a very calm country during summertime.

But there is one conflict which has managed to stay in the newspaper columns all through the lazy summer months, taking place in Sweden’s very summer paradise: The island of Gotland [map], where many Swedes spend their holidays among sandy beaches and picturesque houses.

Here, a limestone extraction company has been given the green light for starting a new quarry. Limestone has been extracted in Gotland for hundreds of years. This specific quarry, though, would be situated right between two Natura 2000 areas, Ojnareskogen, containing threatened species and protecting biodiversity on the island.

This made young people from the environment organisation Fältbiologerna skip their holiday plans and go to Gotland instead. Since early July they have been camping on the prospected land, where a forest management company has started clearing the forest for the future limestone quarry.

Their worries aren’t only about the endangered species living in the area, but also what might happen to the fresh water reserves iwhen the extraction starts, since a large part of the northern island gets its drinking water from this area.

The youngsters aren’t alone. Locals are joining in, among them a fairly famous financier and entrepreneur, and now the Swedish Environment Protection Agency and several environmental organisations ask the Supreme Court to reconsider the permission.

The limestone extraction company, on the other hand, argues that their case has been tried according to laws and regulations, and that they will take environmental values into consideration when opening the ground.

As always, there are more components to this conflict than environment vs mineral extraction. One thing that complicates the issue even more are the jobs – the mining company is already running a limestone quarry in Gotland, but it will run out of limestone in a few years time. According to the company, 60 of the 100 employments can be kept if the new  quarry comes true.
– It’s been an infected issue since most people here knows someone who works for the mining company. But considering what might happen to the water, many are worried and have decided to join us, says Niclas Persson, who is one of the young members of Fältbiologerna.

Some of the forest that has already been cleared. Photo: Niclas Persson.

The Malaise trap, which has given its name to the project. Once invented by the Swedish entomologist René Malaise, they are a very efficient way of collecting insects. Photo: Kajsa Glemhorn.

I know that  nature can never be entirely mapped. And I knew that there are plants and animals unknown to humanity in the vastness of the world’s jungles, but in Sweden..?

Yes, in Sweden. There are still insects that are new to Sweden, or even to the world. And loads of them.

Within the Swedish Malaise trap project, run by the Swedish Museum of Natural History, 2003 and 2006, insects were gathered with Malaise traps in 75 different locations around Sweden. About 40 million (!!) insects were collected, and now scientists all over the world are working hard to sort them and find out what species every single one of them belong to. This is a job that will take many years, but already two years ago 1000 species that weren’t before recorded in Sweden have been found. About half of these are also unknown by international science.

´Another insect species that hasn’t been found in Sweden before, the Piogaster albina. This is an insect with a creepy story: It attacks spiders and lays its eggs on them. When the larvae comes out of the egg, it sucks the “blood” of the spider, and when the insect finally is born, the spider dies... Photo: The Swedish Malaise trap project.

The aim of this project is to create an unique scientific resource for future research on entomology (insects). In a recent interview in Dagens Nyheter (article in Swedish), Kajsa Glemhorn who leads the project, says she hopes for 5.000 insect species new to Sweden to be “discovered”.

This must be a fantastic opportunity for entomologists to make their own mark in history. Kajsa Glemhorn has for example given the name to a species until now unknown to humanity – the Platygaster Glemhornae!

Someone who seems very happy with the toy he just swapped. Photo: Retoy.

Can you create a better world by playing? One person who is sure of this is Soledad Piñero Misa, who started Retoy. The idea behind Retoy is to let children understand the value of sustainability by exchanging, borrowing, repairing and creating their own toys.

In the last issue of the climate and sustainability magazine I work with, Effekt, we interviewed Soledad Piñero Misa about her ideas.
– One of the things we really need to change is our consumption. That goes for everyone, also the children, she says.

Reading together about children's rights at a climate festival in Tensta, Stockholm. Photo: Retoy.

Soledad Piñero Misa grew up in Rosengård, in the suburbs of Malmö. After having opened her first Retoy centre in Stockholm, she also wanted to give something back to the place where she once grew up. So in 2011, Rosengård was host for a big Retoy-party.

– At the party, children could swap toys with each other, create new toys out of old and broken ones and learn about their rights by playing, drawing and do jigsaw puzzles. It was a wonderful crowd of children, dancing and singing together among toys and balloons. And not a single wallet needed to be opened, neither did any new things have to be produced, apart from balloons and lemonade, Soledad Piñero Misa says in the article.

Creating new toy out of old ones in the Retoylab. Photo: Retoy.

Eating together is more fun, and can also be more sustainable. Photo: Melker Dahlstrand/imagebank.sweden.se

Lukas Moodysson’s film Tillsammans (Together) from 2000, about Swedes living in a 1975 commune, has a tagline which has become classic. It’s the lonely retired man Birger, having a beer with the newly separated Rolf, who says:
- I’d rather eat oatmeal porridge together with others than a fillet of beef on my own.

There’s a lot of truth in that.

Today Sweden has the world’s highest percentage of one-person households. In Stockholm, where this trend is even more significant than in the rest of the country, more than half of all households consist of one single person.

Living on their own is something that a lot of people are happy with, but there are things that you can miss. Like eating with others, without having to go to a restaurant. Or just eating something you haven’t cooked yourself.

Swedish word of the day: Knytkalas (Potluck in English). Everyone brings a dish that can be shared by all. Minimal work for a maximized dinner! Photo: Marie Linder (CC: by-nc-sa)

Someone who sees a trend in this is Beatrice Lundblad, a behavioural scientist working for a construction company in Stockholm.

In an interview in the local newspaper Mitt i, she explains how more and more people in Stockolm choose to cook for eachother and eat together.
It can be a group of friends that take turns to invite the others for dinner. It can be people at the same office who cook large amounts of a dish at home and bring each other lunch boxes. Or it can be a house with shared facilities where the inhabitants are organized into dinner teams, where everyone cooks for all the others once in a while, in a large common kitchen. The rest of the time you can just come directly from work and sit down at a table ready laid.

I really like all these ideas. Not only because people are social beings and one of the most social things you can do is to share your food with others.

There is also a good sustainability thinking behind this. By cooking more food at the same time you spend less energy and waste less food than when everyone buy ingredients, cook at their own stove and forget the leftovers.

Resource efficiency and social well-being at the same time. Can’t get much better than that, I’d say.