Contours of Climate Justice - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

Photo: Dag Hammarskjöld
Preface
‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to
forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.’
Albert Schweitzer
More than 75 years ago, in a letter to Rutger
Moll (probably in 1933), Dag Hammarskjöld
wrote about his emotions while
spending the summer hiking in northern
Sweden. For him, this experience evoked ‘a
feeling of solidarity with nature’ as ‘almost
the most important thing’. 1 Hammarskjöld
had a profound, intimate relationship with
the world of the sea and even more so that
of the mountains. 2 He had a deep-rooted
and conscious personal interaction with nature,
which was evidenced by, among other
things, his admiration for the work of Carl
von Linnaeus as well as his affi nity for the
fi ction of Joseph Conrad and his belief in
the ethical philosophy of Albert Schweitzer,
to mention only the obvious instances. His
posthumously published childhood memories
of his upbringing on Uppsala’s Castle
Hill provide further striking insight into his
almost spiritual relationship with the natural
environment and habitat. 3
Not the least testament of this relationship
can be found in his entries in the notebook
1 Quoted in Thelin, B. (2001), ‘Dag Hammarskjöld
– Nature, Landscape, Literature’, Development
Dialogue, Vol. 1, p.88.
2 See on the latter the magnifi cent pictorial tribute by
Grundsten, C. (2007), Swedish Wilderness. The Mountain
World of Dag Hammarskjöld. Stockholm: Max Ström.
3 Hammarskjöld, D. (2000), Castle Hill. Uppsala: Dag
Hammarskjöld Foundation.
he kept from the mid-1920s onwards. For
Hammarskjöld, nature amounted almost to a
sacred frontier. Some of the notes from 1951
show with particular clarity his deep bonds
with the wilderness, which for him was the:
…extrahuman in the experience of the
greatness of Nature. This does not allow
itself to be reduced to an expression of
our human reactions, nor can we share
in it by expressing them. Unless we each
fi nd a way to chime in as one note in
the organic whole, we shall only observe
ourselves observing the interplay of its
thousand components in a harmony outside
our experience of it as harmony. 4
Hammarskjöld’s photos, which he took with
a passion during his explorations, pictured
mostly landscape and were a visual expression
of this respect for nature. As he commented
in an essay entitled ‘The camera has taught
me to see’, he was seeking to illustrate ‘the
balance of strength and nervous sensitivity so
often displayed by nature’s own creations’. 5
4 Hammarskjöld, D. (1993, 16th printing), Markings.
New York: Random House, p.66.
5 Quoted from ‘Landmarks. Photographs by Dag
Hammarskjöld’, in Development Dialogue, Vol. 1,
1987, p.28.
Contours of Climate Justice. Ideas for shaping new climate and energy politics 5