In recent decades, the proliferation of information technologies has given rise to the so-called ‘digital turn’ in geography and cognate social science disciplines.¹ The continuously renewing repertoires aim at grasping how digital tools, platforms, and interactions shape our perceptions of phenomena mediated through them. In carefully capturing the specificities of digital mediation, however, these efforts have sometimes under-emphasised: (1) the wider milieu of digital and non-digital elements involved in empirical contexts; and (2) what digital and analogue mediations have in common and could thus be consolidated under a shared framework.

This chapter considers an ongoing policy debate in Estonia as a case study to explore the significance of forest’s conceptual disparity for environmental conflict resolution. Through fieldwork snapshots from the ‘Forest War’, the chapter looks at how different versions of forest are generated and shaped via digital and analogue mediations. Empirical observations reveal how forest is experienced and (re)produced in sacred groves and institutional vlogs, behind a harvester’s dashboard and over a mushroom basket. These competing and converging conceptualisations of forest reaffirm the epistemological and ontological multiplicity of nature, space, landscape, and environment – as conceived in Indigenous ecologies and certain strands of political ecology.² Such multiplicity gives rise to what Jennifer Gabrys and colleagues have termed ‘political forests’ – environmental governance entities co-constituted by historical and modern technologies.³ As the fate of forest – whether as a biogeographical or cultural entity – depends on its perception and communication, a deeper empirical inquiry into how people engage with it is due. A better understanding of how people relate to forest can help us fathom how this conceptual and experiential diversity can hamper conflict resolution.

Online and offline observations of digital and analogue technologies and practices will shed light on the diverse material relations and myriad ways of knowing forest. To interpret these conceptualisations, a rejuvenated framework for digital ecologies scholarship is needed – one that can simultaneously account for digital/analogue, discursive/material, and tangible/ethereal mediations of phenomena. In media studies, a well-established body of work conceives of media as a ‘hybrid system’, where so-called analogue media (posters, placards, protests chants, radio shows) are entangled with a range of digital platforms, in ways that collectively shape, constrain, and mediate protest.⁴ This chapter’s observations of different forest users’ day-to-day activities, stakeholders’ websites, and forest and forestry events bring some of these insights into conversation with digital ecologies. This affiliation paves the way towards an at least partially shared language on digital and analogue mediations beyond anthropogenic communication systems.⁵

The first part of the chapter sets the contextual and epistemological stage for the case studies, sketching out a more-than-digital ecology approach with a focus on mediations. Mediation is conceptualised as an ontogenetic event forging all phenomena. The empirically driven second and third parts revisit a selection of everyday and organised forest-mediating events amid Estonia’s heated forest policy debate. It appropriates the concept of mediation for more-than-human encounters, using notions of attunements and conductivity; mediative loops; augmented and compressed realities; synchronies and sequences; and multimodal complementarity. The chapter proposes a movement from digital towards mediated geographies that also accommodate the analogue. It concludes with five theoretical premises for any future research that wishes to pursue a holistic framework of mediations in the context of more-than-human worlds.

Forest in the forest war: following the shifting notion

Covering approximately 50% of Estonia’s land area, forest is an important habitat, economic resource, and recreational space for the country’s inhabitants. Forest and wood industries have consistently contributed about 4% of Estonia’s GDP,⁶ and, in 2021, provided 4.5% of the country’s employment.⁷ So, despite the lack of correlation between felled timber volume and employment (oft purported in industry lobby),⁸ the sector’s service for the workforce and the state’s budget remains significant. This argument has been behind a series of relaxations in forestry regulations. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the law has undergone the highest number of individual property-related liberalisations across the European Union,⁹ and the felling volume has more than doubled since 2008.¹⁰ These legal concessions cast doubt on the effort to balance ecological, economic, social, and cultural needs,¹¹ as prescribed by the national Forest Act. While environmental organisations criticised the law in the 1990s, the numerous deregulations since have brought concern to the masses. Alongside its economic and ecological functions, forest plays a central role in Estonian culture and identity. Residents enjoy free access to public and private forests – whether for foraging, leisure, or to draw energy from one of the country’s sacred groves – hiied.¹² As clear-cut sites have proliferated and moved closer to settlements, public discontent has intensified in sync with logging.

In the country, where the closest forest from whichever starting point is no more than a short bicycle ride away and internet access is near ubiquitous, the forest debate continually switches between online and offline environments. Since 2016, the sharpening polarisation between industry advocates and critics has manifested in the foundation of a series of environmentalist citizen movements, protests, petitions, court cases, and incessant media and Facebook debates. The profound incommensurability between stakeholders’ concepts of ‘forest’ hampers the outlook for conflict resolution, begging for better apprehension of how the notions emerge and evolve. Forest is socially co-constructed – regarding its cultural meanings, as well as materiality: every story, image, and experience of forest is conducive to how it is governed and used. Forest concepts differ widely between individuals, who define the ‘forestness’ of land by its purpose, appearance, dimensions, species composition, or history. But forest is also phenomenologically constructed – its affective expressions in each embodied experience shape its physical and discursive manifestations in the future.¹³ The material semiosis of embodied and discursive ingredients comprise versions of forest that can, but do not always, have geographical coordinates or physical presence.¹⁴ These versions of forest are challenging to reconcile intellectually and in governance. For example, forests are multiple, and can be understood in many forms (Table 11.1).

The lack of universal reference points problematises the singular reality of forest and complicates research that would resonate with all stakeholders. How to understand how something emerges, disseminates, and wanes if there is no ‘thing’ to follow but a mere ‘family resemblance’ between the uses of the concept?¹⁵ Political ecology’s notion of ‘pluriverse’ captures the ontological multiplicity of nature,¹⁶ but its tendency to focus on macro-level power dynamics risks carving a static image of parallel worlds (usually Indigenous/colonised vs neoliberal/Western/colonising) that do not leave much room for transformations and variations across and within these worlds. To fathom the diverse conceptions, experiences, and manifestations of an elusive phenomenon, we must find a way to follow the shifting notion. Applying Leszczynski’s articulation of spatiality as ‘always-already mediated’ to all phenomena,¹⁷ forest becomes a processual socio-environmental artefact – a concept continually redefined by material and symbolic mediations. It manifests in images and utterances, policies and myths, maps and statistics, flying squirrels and bilberries. This definition lets us include more evasive forest perceptions alongside those already sharing a touchstone. Viewing forest as an ontogenetic process, rather than a static object viewed from different angles, pushes us to let go of ‘the thing’ and look for new reference points.

The ways to conjure images and tell stories of forest have proliferated through technological developments such as forest and forestry apps, digital media and digital tools, making it ever more urgent to review the epistemologies of nature and environment. Understandings of digital(ised) knowledges to date carry a risk of content reification. Despite the oft-attributed omniscience, digitally born or mediated knowledges are not immune to discursive path dependencies, offline contexts, or the affordances and constraints of the technologies themselves. Prompted by digital developments and concomitant data optimism, an array of epistemological writing disputes the new and revamped old cognitive regimes that order our engagements with nature.¹⁸ Explicitly or implicitly drawing from hybrid and assemblage theories, these studies reject distinctions between representation and reality or between nature and technology. Digital structures and content are parts of more-than-human, socio-technological entanglements¹⁹ – encroached but not solely defined by binary code – which put into question the ontological security of digital (research) objects.²⁰ The vagrant agencies and classificatory ambiguities in such topologies necessitate new, processual epistemologies that include offline worlds and embodied practices in explorations of (digitally) mediated phenomena. This chapter does not hunt for stable definitions of forest. Instead, it seeks to decrypt forest in its transformational moments – mediative events – not its essence.

A word on terminology

The digital

The design, affordances, and reputation of ‘the digital’ create and legitimise space, socio-spatial relations, and the environment.²¹ Unlike in early digital geographies, dualistic perspectives of parallel ‘digital/virtual’ and ‘real’ worlds are increasingly rare in recent scholarship.²² Most agree that the two are effectively a hybrid,²³ or ontologically inseparable.²⁴ Building on colleagues’ critiques, Jessica McLean observes how ‘terms like “virtual reality” reinforce the seeming non-realness of digital geographies’.²⁵ After all – as Tom Boellstorff exemplifies – German learnt over the Internet gets you by in Germany and money lost through online gambling is real money.²⁶ Conversely, in light of dynamic conceptions of landscape, nature, and space as socially constructed,²⁷ and becoming,²⁸ it should be added that terms like ‘reality’ reinforce the deceptive realness (or ontological security) of non-digital geographies: spatiality is always already mediated.²⁹ This chapter concurs with the recent scholarship, conceiving ‘the digital’ as more-than-digital: a dimension of contemporary reality that alters but is inseparable from (material and semiotic) analogue phenomena.

Media and mediations

Digital geographies and anthropologies have enlivened conversations about media, mediations, and human perception. The myriad ways in which objects, spaces, and other phenomena manifest through different software, hardware, and on-the-ground contexts have introduced volatility to mediations, which earlier, pre-digital geography alone is inapt to envisage.³⁰ The governance of material landscapes or ‘spatialities’ has always been contingent on how they are perceived.³¹ But due to the cardinally changed and changeable tempo, networks, trending and attention economies, contexts, technological affordances, and dispersed authorship in the increasingly digitalised world – perceptions need to be regarded as parts of lively mediation events. This chapter expands upon Leszczynski’s take on mediation as an ontological claim whereby everyday spaces are produced at the ‘conjunctions of code, content, social relations, technologies, and space/place’.³² These conjunctions include, but are not limited to, media – that is, socio-technological communication structures. Viewing mediation as an event helps reveal its components’ interplay and changing prevalence, as perception takes shape. Digital developments have heightened and highlighted the dynamism of communicated objects and spatialities.

Conductivity

When I was listening to my fieldwork recordings, I often heard sounds I had not discerned while in the forest with participants. Sometimes a conspicuous birdsong had gone unnoticed, sometimes my own small talk with mushrooms, as I was engaged with my non-auditory senses. A single-minded search for mushrooms, the smell of moss, and uneven ground under my feet had shut my attention to background noises from further afield, whereas the taped birds only had to compete with an intermittent conversation between the participants and me. In an interplay of senses and thoughts, signals from some channels became foregrounded while others stepped aside. I call this variable prominence of channels their conductivity. A channel’s conductivity is contingent on technology’s (or any medium’s) affordances, and affective and discursive distractions from other channels. When a roamer opens a plant identification app or Wikipedia in the forest, the prevalence of the information they register changes. Their peripheral vision may narrow upon focusing on the screen; their thoughts might start switching between their native language and English or Latin. At the break of a rainstorm, articulated ideas, perhaps, take a backseat altogether while bodily sensations become more pronounced. The conductivity of mediating channels such as senses, weather elements and other affective phenomena, media and social media, digital and analogue tools, and other humans and non-humans fluctuates constantly, calling for methods that appreciate the complexity of perception’s mutable composition and, consequently, the intricacy of (mediated) phenomena.

Empirical axis: an approximated human perceiver

Like forest, any spatiality – and any (digitally) mediated space, nature, phenomenon, or object – is a processual artefact. How, then, to observe and describe these fleeting notions? While political ecology has rightfully emphasised digital materiality,³³ the meaning of a digital object is larger than the sum of its silicon and syntactic parts and the economic forces driving them. As the computer engineer and philosopher Yuk Hui remarked, deconstructing a digital artefact down from programming languages and binary code to signals generated by voltage values and logic gates ‘doesn’t tell us much about the world’.³⁴ Just like deconstructing bodies down to chemical elements and electric currents is limited in what it can tell us about humans and human society. The social life of humans and objects cannot be explained solely in material terms. And understanding the infrastructures’ economic drivers helps us apprehend the received, but less so the perceived phenomena. Perceived objects do not equate with what is communicated. They are composed through an interplay of digital data and infrastructure, history and memory, aesthetic and computational rationalities, neurotransmitters and selves. Bringing the analogue/digital, material/discursive, and living/non-living onto an even ground continues to be rehearsed in more-than-human scholarship, but these structurally liberating non-atomic assemblage philosophies pose a problem: how do we study something in perpetual ontogenesis – incessantly reinvented through material, discursive, algorithmic, and embodied mediations? We want to avoid reifying research objects before the inquiry even begins, but how to do so without surrendering our entire analytical ammunition? To find our feet in this fickle landscape, this chapter employs an artificially stable starting point – the perceiving human. While tacitly acknowledging non-human actants’ interventions, as well as humans’ multispecies, cyborgian composition,³⁵ it pragmatically approximates the agency of a human perceiver for studying protean natures. Of course, human perception is but one in a series of manifestations of phenomena, but – considering its impact on the world – it holds prime airtime for a reason.

The approximated human perceiver grounded the fieldwork observations amid the ongoing Forest War in Estonia. The socio-environmental conflict is trapped in a conundrum: how to resolve a forest policy dispute when the variously mediated ‘forest’ is conceptually and experientially so divided that stakeholders cannot so much as agree on the object of the debate? The remainder of this chapter considers how humans experience forest through everyday and organised events. The empirical observations form the bedrock for a conceptual quest for variously perceived natures in a way that accommodates (more-than-)digital, as well as analogue mediations.³⁶

Mediative events

Strands in new media studies have flagged the need to pay more attention to media’s experiential and material aspects³⁷ and historical contexts.³⁸ Participant observation in media and mediations that encompasses online and offline realms can address this need and avoid techno-determinist conclusions divorced from heterogenic offline circumstances. Carefully contextualised, on-the-ground case studies can unveil the configuration of phenomena through mediative events, in a dynamic interplay of channels, messages, and technologies. The following sections exemplify the latent potential of studying everyday mediative events through participant observation, awaiting to be incorporated into new conceptual frameworks.

Attunements and conductivity

The dancing beings Riho – a forest dweller nicknamed Forest Troll – observed were not an anomaly, but merely one of many reported sightings of forest fairies in Estonian collective spiritual consciousness. Some years ago, life-changing personal affairs and environmental injustice had impelled Riho to look for new alliances. Local animist tradition and forest’s affective properties attuned him to find them in the ‘more-than-human’ territory. Ever since their first encounter, various ethereal forest beings have offered Riho moral guidance and, he asserts, punished environmental wrongdoers. Intangibly but surely, they mediate a version of forest and environmental ethics that Riho abides by. Of course, Estonian folk belief is not the only forest discourse Riho has been exposed to.³⁹ He has encountered the paper industry’s publications, ecologists’ articles, environmentalists’ outcries, and artists’ expressions. But not all information lands on fertile ground, just like not everyone would have identified the translucent balls as living creatures. Even Riho only spotted them thanks to his camera. It took digital mediation and Riho’s disposition to recognise and classify them as such.

Alongside the geographical and cultural context, the camera’s technological affordances and Riho’s attunement to the ethereal co-determined how the moment by a forest spring was mediated between formats and locations (from the forest to a digital desktop to Riho’s eyes and memories). Paraphrasing the influential media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s idea that ‘the medium is the message’ (i.e. mediative technology is more formative than content to a message),⁴⁰ we could say that the recipient is the (co-)mediator is the message. Riho’s perception is not defined solely by forest discourses circulating the society, nor by mediative technology, nor by forest as material, independent externality. It is a configuration of all of the above, plus Riho as a mediating agent in his own right. In reply to a question about which information channels he uses to keep up to date with developments in the forest, Riho replies, ‘You go, look, listen to what the forest has to tell. If you go in the direction where you are guided, you’ll find [what you need]’. By ‘listening’, Riho and several other research participants seemed to mean openness to non-visual, non-articulated signals that do not neatly fit into our familiar scheme of five independent senses. This generative listening is reminiscent of synthesisers turning mushrooms’ internal bioelectronic signals into sounds, the videos of which can be found on YouTube.⁴¹ While the ordinarily imperceptible ‘mushroom music’ is foregrounded by synthesisers, Riho practises silent attentiveness to amplify forests’ stories out of inconspicuous vibrations and signals. His attunement is his amplifier. ‘You must be quiet and listen to what the forest is telling’, he teaches his children.

Riho’s evident mediative agency that can alter the strength of signals available to him emphasises the audience’s active role in meaning-making and cautions against the technological determinism some media studies have been criticised for.⁴² It demonstrates that the salience of a message is not decided merely by mediating channels and technologies but also by the perceiver’s disposition and attunements. Message, conductivity, and attunements shape each other.

Mediative loops

Sepo hangs up the phone. Irregular beeps, creaks, and clatter join the harvester’s low droning as its jaw-like head chomps through trees, making the cabin shake whenever it encounters a rebellious knobbly trunk. A GPS device had guided Sepo to the workplace a few days ago. With GIS software, the forest had already been turned into management plots, whose straight boundaries cut across the land’s wonky topology.

At the start of the day, the harvester’s computer interface prompted Sepo to divide the forest into a table of dominant tree species and size classes and ignore whatever did not fit into the pregiven categories (see Figure 11.1). The computer is programmable, but as a rule, out of the fifty-one native tree species in Estonia, six at the most make it to the interface. The software then converts trees into financial returns, guiding the operator’s decisions about cutting and sorting the timber as the harvester chunters up and down the plot, leaving a clear path behind.⁴³ Sepo’s forest concept is almost entirely defined by his work. Fourteen-hour days and long commutes at weekends leave him short of time and desire to experience forest in any other way in the little time he has off. To a question about which forests he likes, Sepo responds, ‘straight [trees and] little variety’. Smoothness and homogeneity of trunks mean efficiency and more money.

Figure 11.1Harvester cabin. (All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

Riho and Sepo should neither be seen as types nor anomalies in the widely heterogeneous participant sample I worked with. They appear in this chapter merely for their strikingly different forest experiences – so we can judge whether a conceptual common ground for such diverse cases can be achievable. To do so, let us contemplate some of the co-mediating channels and filters that contribute to Sepo’s forest experience, displayed in Table 11.2.

Despite entirely different technologies and the proportion of digital and analogue engagements with forest, the mediative compositions of Riho and Sepo’s experiences are comparable. The next step would be to evaluate the dynamics between each mediative event’s components that make the encounters so different. As days unfold, media channels and other components of perception alternate in their influence; neither digital nor any other aspect is pre-eminent by default. The parallel channels may enhance or hinder each other’s conductivity and the salience of a particular broadcasted (or unicasted) version of forest. Let us, for instance, consider Sepo’s harvester computer as a mediator. The kinaesthetic dialogue between Sepo, the computer, and the dashboard fuses the external discourses with mutually embodied attunements to manage the land and tree cover according to the industry’s definition of forest. The encounter is managed through software and hardware, but its rationale can be seen on crunched-up printouts and heard in occasional oral instructions. While code, indeed, increasingly mediates processes – in this case by delimiting, hierarchising, and quantifying forest species and their qualities – its role is sometimes over-emphasised in digital geographies. Not only must we remember that every experience and manifestation is co-mediated by numerous channels (not least the recipient’s cognitive agency), but also that there is no set precedence between technology and discourse.⁴⁵ Instead, they feed back to each other in a continuous mediative loop. So, too, the harvester’s software draws its forest parameters from the industry’s (on-the-ground) priorities, while workers operating the computer may internalise this model in their own forest articulations and reinforce it in their future communications. But these feedback loops are not closed. They are continuously negotiated between perceiving selves and various mediating channels, calling for conceptual avenues that entertain processual mediations.

Augmented and compressed realities

Among anthropologists, and to a lesser extent in digital geographies, studies have emerged that accommodate processual conceptualisations of mediation. Mark Graham and colleagues call digitally co-designed moments ‘augmented realities’:⁴⁶ changeable, subjective realities arising from partly digitised relationships with the world. However, we must not assume that realities are infinitely augmentable – being consumed by an increasing wealth of information, attention is a limited resource.⁴⁷ Like coins accumulating in a penny pusher, augmented realities build pressure along their edges, and something has got to give. We are not necessarily seeing collective experiential enrichment, either. While digital and hybrid events appear to create more stimuli and perceptual possibilities, these part-digital experiences generate both perceptual diversity and assimilation. Consider a mushroom identification app. It reveals information not apparent when encountering a specimen in the forest: who are their taxonomic relatives,⁴⁸ what do they look like when they are older or younger, and are they poisonous or edible? But scrolling and clicking through this information, mushroom aficionados may overlook other aspects relevant to the specimen: what do they smell like, how do they feel against the skin, who are their symbiotic companions surrounding them, or indeed, what do they sound like? Mobile digital interfaces and app content homogenise encounters with different specimens in diverse offline contexts. Distracting from the on-the-ground context, they part-standardise human–mushroom encounters. Thus, talking about augmentation without regard to compression, simplification, and other possible transformations can only give us a partial picture of the mediated artefact’s evolution in (digital) transmission. Visions of infinitely augmentable realities turn a blind eye to what is omitted or blurred in the mediation process. In Riho’s encounters, perhaps, the socio-economic dimensions of forest went unnoticed; for Sepo – forest’s spiritual manifestations. Conversely, analysing attention deficit without regard to multi-channel complementarities fails to acknowledge the strategic ways political actors make digital/analogue and discursive/affective communication channels support each other. The final sections of the chapter will exemplify this point, but let us first consider one more aspect of multi-channel mediations – time.

Synchronies and sequences

Compatible with a contextual emphasis in mediation analyses are the studies that have drawn inspiration from the language of sound. To counterbalance the long-standing textual and visual favouritism in cultural geographies and to coalesce human perception with technical aspects of interface design, James Ash and colleagues⁴⁹ argue that ‘[j]‌ust as sound can be simultaneously heard and felt and these sounds and feelings depend on the environment the sound travels through [⁵⁰], so are parts of interfaces experienced on multiple sensory levels depending on what they are placed in relation to’. Paul C. Adams – also inspired by sound waves – suggests viewing communications non-media-centrically as open-ended, collaborative, transformative arcs – consisting of a series of referrals and resonances.⁵¹ In line with non-representational theory,⁵² communicating subjects are transformed as resonance ripples through them. ‘Arc of communication’ as a unifying, more-than-representational metaphor that encompasses discursive, material, and performed interpretations of landscape (or other phenomena) allows us to imagine perceiving subjects simultaneously as information receivers and mediating agents in a communicative chain.

The analogy with sound waves, however, poses a limit: vibrating through space, an arc of communication is conditioned by linear time. But mediation – which is what every communication is – is both sequential and synchronic. As Adams himself notes, ‘An arc has the property of directionality but is not merely a one-way, causal or sequential link’.⁵³ A harvester operator’s conception of forest, for instance, is negotiated through various synchronous and asynchronous transmissions. It is shaped by preceding (asynchronous) communications, such as employer instructions, mainstream and social media posts, and peer conversations. But forest is also materialising through the operator’s real-time encounters with it – co-created between the harvester, forest inhabitants, and the operator at each moment of their workday. To capture the simultaneity of multiple communications in each mediation, we must also reckon with its synchronous elements.

By addressing the concerns raised in new media studies through participant observation, more-than-human and digital geographies approaches can unleash great cross-fertilising potential for digital ecologies. If the chapter so far has sought these synergies from participants’ day-to-day activities, then the following section considers forest manifestations as they are negotiated across multi-channel and multi-actor architectures at politically tinged events.

Multimodal complementarity

As touched upon above, due to competing channels and attention scarcity, mediation can result in reduced or distracted realities. Yet, the potential complementarity of discursive, affective, and embodied modes of information mediation can be and is harnessed by political actors, stakeholders, and activists.

Narrated and performed climate optimism

Estonian forest industry publicity deploys forest’s affective properties alongside narrative strategies to increase support for its activities. As a for-profit state agency, the State Forest Management Centre (SFMC) collaborates closely with the private forest industry. Long-term supply agreements and subcontracted services align the interests of SFMC and the private sector, evident in shared discourses in their public relations. Mirroring Sweden’s forestry publicity (e.g. LRF Skogsägarna and Skogsindustrierna’s Swedish Forest campaign⁵⁴), one recent trend to expand support for the industry has developed around the narrative of intensive forestry as the climate change solution. SFMC’s rendition weaves the message into Estonian national and vocational forest-related identities through discursive and embodied outputs and events. In its ‘Climate Heroes’ vlog (Figure 11.2), various forestry workers convey the industry’s carbon-optimist story, invoking authority from their ‘forestman’ identities handed down from fathers to sons. The message is reinforced with drone shots of seemingly infinite Nordic forests that the forestmen protect from nature’s perils, such as pests and rot.

Figure 11.2Frames from SFMC’s video clip ‘Harvester Operator Kaupo’. (Author’s translation. www.rmk.ee/kliimakangelane/rmk-kliimakangelased/harvesterijuht, accessed 7 July 2022. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

SFMC and the private forestry sector also mobilise the intended audience to absorb its messages affectively. Nature lovers are invited to join the ‘climate heroes’ ranks by tree planting on SFMC’s clear-cut sites. Fresh air, good company, and exercise-induced endorphins allow the volunteers to feel as if they are bringing nature into being under the guidance of mindful forest stewards. Industry-organised ‘forest days’ offer nature walks propagating a particular vision of forest and forestry. Families are encouraged to partake in multisensory activities, where they can smell wood dust from arborists’ saw-handling competitions, climb trees, make wooden toys, and operate a harvester simulator. Fist-bumping a rabbit mascot and posing with stuffed wolves, visitors are performatively co-producing a gamified, happy forest – reassured by forest owners’ badges stating ‘Estonian forest is in good hands’. These fun activities supplement the industry’s media and social media communications advocating contested forestry practices. The industry’s online discourse is performed by its audience on the ground.

Mobilisation of more-than-earthly assemblages

Organised tours to hiied similarly utilise forests and trees’ affective properties, alongside oral heritage, to performatively and discursively interlink nature conservation with ethnic and spiritual identity. Hiied are sacred groves in Estonia, revered by followers of maausk (see note 39), but also visited and respected by many others. Ahto Kaasik – a leading maausk practitioner, researcher, and campaigner – describes hiied as follows:

The tours include runic singalongs, gift-giving to forest beings, skidding down healing rocks, and trading good thoughts and silver for energy from holy springs. The tour guide dons traditional clothing elements and an Estonian flag affixed to his bag, kindling participants’ sense of shared national identity.

Hiied are simultaneously a pretext and a weapon in the Forest War. On the one hand, their preservation is of existential importance to people who habitually visit these places of worship in search of a connection with ancestors and forest beings, or physical and mental wellbeing. On the other hand, most natural holy sites are not mapped, with only scarce oral or archival heritage marking their location and history. To legitimise the protection expectation of hiied and their immediate surroundings, this heritage must endure.⁵⁷ Awareness campaigns are increasingly utilising new channels to enliven the groves’ cultural relevance, as many are no longer distinguishable from their surroundings or, indeed, even tree covered. Hiied are looped through digital infrastructures, popping up on Facebook and thematic photo competitions. Cash prizes and a GIS-navigable map of hiied encourage contestants to learn about, visit, and breathe new life into less known or perished sacred sites by connecting their photos to stories and database entries.

Figure 11.3Gathering energy and photographs from a holy oak on a sacred groves tour. (All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

By deploying a combination of technological affordances, forest’s affective properties, multisensory physical engagement, and forest-related identities, different event series mediate and weaponise versions of forest that align with the organisers’ discursive and political aims (see Figure 11.3). Further research within a holistic digital-analogue mediation framework can uncover, in more nuance, how individual, institutional, technological, and spiritual actors forge natures through competing and complementing mediative architectures: that is, more-than-human, more-than-representational, more-than-real, more-than-digital, and more-than-earthly assemblages.

Conclusion and future directions for studying mediated natures

This chapter sought to move from digital towards mediated geographies that also accommodate the analogue. It deemed all phenomena as always already mediated, and defined natures (or landscapes, spaces, places) as processual socio-environmental artefacts, which transcend their digital and analogue dimensions. To disentangle mediative assemblages and more accurately predict their outcomes, the chapter proposes five premises for future research: (1) Artefacts evolve through mediative events, where the conceptual product is negotiated between the perceiver’s disposition and attunements, on the one hand, and multiple channels of variable conductivity, on the other. A channel’s conductivity is co-determined by the affordances of the technology/medium and distractions from competing channels; (2) Technology and discourse feed back into each other in a non-hierarchical loop, continuously transforming realities; (3) Digital realities can be augmented or compressed but are not inherently either; (4) Perception is simultaneously a sequential and synchronic event, requiring a broadened interpretation of causality that transcends linear time; and (5) Mediative events entail multimodal complementarity, which political actors harness. The communicative potential of such additionalities should be recognised alongside the approaches that emphasise attention deficit in the information age.

This indefinite list of premises invites redactions and additions with the caveat that – to fit into a holistic framework – each attribute is applicable to digital and analogue, material, and discursive contexts.