I spend my last day in Norway in the dense
forest at Oslo’s northern edge. It’s the sort of
day that counts as good weather in Oslo—the
kind in which sunshine and heat seem mere-
ly to have stepped out for a few minutes, rather
than having loaded the car with beef jerky and
Pringles and lit out for the coast. I see families
hiking with young children; a bunch of buff,
mud-spattered athletes running up rocks and
down streams in something called the Ecotrail;
and two suspiciously chefy-looking guys out
foraging for ramsons, a type of wild garlic. But
I’m here for the art. In a clearing just over a
mile from the forest parking lot, I join a couple
hundred other people at the annual handover
ritual for the Future Library Forest, a project
that each year selects an author to write a man-
uscript that will not be published until 2114, a
century after the project began. Artist Katie
Paterson devised the project as a reflection on
literature and mortality, but it is also a medita-
tion on nature: The century-long waiting peri-
od, starting in 2014, is the amount of time it will
take to grow the trees that will be turned into
the paper upon which the books will one day
be printed.
Among the participants in the ceremony is
Jon Karl Christiansen, the lanky head forester
for the city of Oslo, who oversaw the planting of
the Future Library saplings. Standing among
them now, he confesses that he first thought
the project was “a little strange.” But survey-
ing the crowd of young trees under his care, he
admits to a certain degree of subdued nation-
al pride. “It makes sense to do it here,” he says
of Paterson’s project. “We Norwegians have a
special relationship with nature. We grow up
with it, we spend all our free time in it, we built
our metro not so we could come into the city
but so we could go out to nature.” He pauses to
stop a foreign visitor from trampling a small
sapling, then returns. “It’s hard to explain,” he
says, “ but we know how to care for nature.”
“Yes,” I say, before hiking off myself. “I know
just what you mean.”Contributing writer Lisa Abend wrote about
Stedsans in the Woods in the May/June 2019
issue. Photographer Emma Hardy is profiled
on page 28.Oslo’s chief forester Jon Karl
Christiansen oversees the trees in
the Future Library Forest planted
in 2014 that will become the paper
for books printed in 2114.SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019 AFAR 119