An Autoethnography
of a Disappering Forest
Solastalgia is the homesickness you feel when your home is no longer what it was.
― Glenn Albrecht
Over recent years, I have watched the forests around my home in the Bergisches Land slowly die. Thousands of spruce trees are turning grey and skeletal, eaten from within by the bark beetle. These forests have long shaped my sense of place. I walked there, cycled through them, and came to associate their presence with the landscape I belong to. The rupture became unmistakable when I returned from a world trip in 2020. Before leaving, I had already noticed sickness at the margins, the tops of many spruces browning or greying as early signs of bark beetle infestation. From the ground the collapse was not yet fully visible because infection begins at the crown and only later moves down. Returning a year later, I faced a landscape I could hardly recognize. The forest of my childhood was gone. The absence registered as ecological loss and as a personal one was raising questions about memory, loss, and how we relate to the land that orients us.
Research question: How does experiencing the disappearance of a familiar landscape reshape place, memory, and self and how can an autoethnographic film make that experience thinkable and shareable?
Introduction
Wall of verticals: densely packed grey trunks repeating into the distance, the pattern of monoculture collapse made visible.
My Motivation
This project grew out of that rupture. I wanted to understand how the disappearance of a familiar landscape affects memory, orientation, and identity. Quantitative accounts like statistics and environmental reports could not carry what I felt while walking through these scars in the land. Film became the medium through which I could process and share. Recording sound, image, and voice together enabled a personal yet communicable account.
The forest I mourn was largely a postwar spruce monoculture rather than a pristine wilderness. Yet these woods are where I learned to be alone, to feel at home, to grow roots. Acknowledging this complexity matters. What is lost is not nature in the abstract, but a lived environment that shaped identity and memory.
The Forest
The forests of the Bergisches Land in North Rhine-Westphalia are undergoing one of the most severe ecological transformations in their history. Once dominated by Norway spruce (Picea abies), these landscapes are now marked by empty slopes and grey, skeletal trunks. The change is not only visible but measurable. According to the Waldzustandsbericht NRW 2024, between 2018 and 2024 around 48 million cubic meters of spruce wood were lost to a combination of drought and bark beetle infestations, equivalent to roughly 60 percent of the state’s spruce stock. In 2024 the report noted that the mass reproduction of spruce bark beetles had finally ended, with only 0.3 million cubic meters of new damage recorded (Waldzustandsbericht NRW 2024, pp. 6–8). In the Bergisches Land specifically, the Regional Forestry Office estimates that at least 90 percent of local spruce stands have been destroyed. These figures frame a crisis that is both ecological and cultural.
Memories
Lower trunks of vivid spruce with mossy bases.
Große Dhünntalsperre 2017
The Große Dhünntalsperre, located in the Bergisches Land, is the largest drinking-water reservoir in North Rhine-Westphalia and the second-largest in Germany.
The Same Area 2024
In Spring time normaly the forest in Bergisches Land is still widely green, but there are only a few spruce cultures left despite being planted in such a water rich enviroment.
© Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis
© Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis
Autoethnography as method
Analytically, I approach the film SCARS through autoethnography, which combines personal experience with cultural analysis. Following Ellis, Adams, and Bochner, autoethnography describes and systematically analyzes personal experience to understand cultural experience; it is both process and product (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011, 1). Leon Anderson’s account of analytic autoethnography further emphasizes that the researcher is a full member of the setting, remains visible in the text, and is committed to theoretical understanding (Anderson 2006, 373). In that spirit, I made my own walks, recordings, and memories the core material while engaging concepts of place, placelessness, and ecological grief.
I also treat artmaking as a way of doing theory in practice. Following Holman-Jones, Adams, and Ellis: editing, pacing, shot length, and the use of different music are not decorative but constitutive of reasoning (Holman-Jones, Adams, and Ellis 2013, 22). The film’s formal choices serve as method and argument.
Autoethno-graphy as method
Analytically, I approach the film SCARS through autoethnography, which combines personal experience with cultural analysis. Following Ellis, Adams, and Bochner, autoethnography describes and systematically analyzes personal experience to understand cultural experience; it is both process and product (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011, 1). Leon Anderson’s account of analytic autoethnography further emphasizes that the researcher is a full member of the setting, remains visible in the text, and is committed to theoretical understanding (Anderson 2006, 373). In that spirit, I made my own walks, recordings, and memories the core material while engaging concepts of place, placelessness, and ecological grief.
I also treat artmaking as a way of doing theory in practice. Following Holman-Jones, Adams, and Ellis: editing, pacing, shot length, and the use of different music are not decorative but constitutive of reasoning (Holman-Jones, Adams, and Ellis 2013, 22). The film’s formal choices serve as method and argument.
Concepts of place and loss
The spruce collapse turned a once familiar place into uncertain ground. In Relph’s terms, placelessness arises when existential insideness erodes, when a place no longer holds you in easy orientation. Returning to trails now lined with stumps or standing dead trunks fits that description. The routes remain on the map, yet walking them feels altered enough that orientation and belonging loosen (Relph 1976, 142).
Albrecht’s solastalgia names the homesickness one can feel while still at home when the character of a place has shifted beyond recognition. It captures conversations with neighbors and friends in my community who seldom use the word grief, yet describe a discomfort that lingers in the background of routines. Public talk focuses on clearing, safety, and replanting. There is less language for the affective dimension of change. I aim to open room for feeling Solastalgia in my film (Albrecht 2005, 45).
Tuan helps me name what changed. Topophilia is the quiet bond built by repetition: the curve of a path you could walk in the dark, the pitch of wind in the spruce, the smell after rain. It does not require a pristine wilderness. A managed forest can hold it if your body learns it over years. When the forest shifted, that bond loosened and part of my timeline moved with it. The work now is patient attention, letting new paths and species become familiar, and allowing a different attachment to grow without pretending the old one will return unchanged (Tuan 1977).
Beauty
Close view of spruce bark with evening light.
Film structure
SCARS unfolds in five movements that mirror my lived experience and support the analysis.
Intro. A top-down drone crosses living canopy and arrives over dead stands. Minimal text notes the bark beetle and drought context to situate what is seen without turning the film into an explainer.
Memories. The film shows me walking toward the forest. My presence becomes clearer in the voice-over, derived from a self-interview I conducted with my partner. I wrote the questions, we recorded a conversation, and I later re-voiced selected lines to keep the tone personal but measured.
Beauty. I show the few still-vivid stands with long takes, sunset light, and a calm pace convey attachment in sensory terms. In Yi-Fu Tuan’s vocabulary, topophilia which means “love of place” is not argued but felt (Tuan 1977).
Disruption. A still frame points to the sky while a plane crosses. The voice recounts my return after a year away and the shock from above. From there, hard cuts alternate living and dead sequences. The edit makes disorientation visible. This is where Edward Relph’s placelessness and Glenn Albrecht’s solastalgia register as experience rather than only as terms (Relph 1976, 6; Albrecht 2005, 45).
Renewal. The Music changes, saplings appear in clearings. I do not offer closure. I stay with the site in a practical way: walking slowly, noticing small growth, accepting that attachment can be rebuilt through attention. In Tuan’s terms, new bonds form through repeated experience of a place can be regained by dwelling again in a changed landscape (Tuan 1977).
Practice of walking and filming
Methodologically, walking became both observation and endurance. My walking changed with focus. Walking to look for beauty felt different from walking to register destruction, and different again from walking to search for renewal.
Repeating the same paths made disorientation concrete while opening attention to small signs of return. These observations shaped formal choices. I used long takes so the viewer can dwell rather than rush past. I alternated living and dead sequences to externalize the inner switch between recognition and estrangement.
Disruption
Dead stand after bark beetle and drought: a slope of grey, barkless trunks with green undergrowth pushing through.
Audience
At first I imagined the audience close to home. I made the film for people in the Bergisches Land who walk the same paths and, I assume, feel the same gap.
While working on SCARS, I realized the story is broader. Bark beetle die-offs and drought-stressed forests are not just our problem. They appear across Central Europe and in places like California, western Canada, and Latvia. Viewers in those regions may recognize the mix of loss, confusion, and careful renewal the film tries to hold.
In an even wider frame the audience grows again. Environmental change and collapsing landscapes are global. Many communities face disruptions that are more dramatic than ours.
Intention
My aim is simple: I want to make grief visible and shareable so people can read their own places with a little more care. The autoethnographic angle keeps the story rooted here, but the hope is that it offers a small, usable space for recognition and orientation wherever someone is watching.
Understood as a socially situated way of knowing, autoethnography can serve a small public function here, turning private experience into a cultural gesture that others can use to reflect on their own (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011, 2; S. Banks, A. Banks, 234).
Renewal
Close-up of a spruce seedling on a mossy floor.
What i learned
I initially hesitated to do autoethnography because it felt too personal. Working on SCARS changed that view. In this context, autoethnography is a straightforward and honest approach. I am not extracting other people’s stories. I am reporting from a place that formed me. That does not make my view universal, but it makes it grounded and accountable.
Conclusion
SCARS does not solve ecological loss. It aims to speak a local feeling clearly enough that others can recognize it in themselves. As a film, it opens a space where grief can be sensed rather than explained, allowing my grief to resonate with others. As research, it uses the self as a relay between individual sensation and shared experience. If the work opens a small room where solastalgia can be acknowledged and orientation gently restored, it has done its job.
Much of what interests me sits beyond this brief reflection. In a longer piece, I’d trace how images and music carry emotion; how texture, duration, and closeness make seeing feel like touch; how walking, listening, and pacing can function as method; and how speaking in the first person connects private experience to public concern. I’d also place these choices within the broader frame of climate change and home. For now, I’m keeping things simple, with the intention to widen the frame in future projects.
References
Albrecht, Glenn. 2005. “Solastalgia: A New Concept in Health and Identity.” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 3: 41–55.
Anderson, Leon. 2006. “Analytic Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35 (4): 373–395.
Banks, Stephen P., and Anna Banks. 2000. “Reading ‘The Critical Life’: Autoethnography as Pedagogy.” Communication Education 49 (3): 233–238.
Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. 2011. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12 (1), Art. 10.
Holman-Jones, Stacy, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. 2013. “Introduction: Coming to Know Autoethnography as More than a Method.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, 22–41. New York: Routledge.
Ministerium für Landwirtschaft und Verbraucherschutz des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (MLV NRW). 2024. Waldzustandsbericht 2024: Bericht über den ökologischen Zustand des Waldes in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Langfassung. Düsseldorf: MLV NRW.
Radio Berg. 2022. “Borkenkäfer: Fichtenwald bald vernichtet.” July 5, 2022.
Relph, Edward. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Audio/Text Hybrid-Version on Bookey used, therefore no exact Pages)
“What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”
― Yi-Fu Tuan
an Autoethnography
by
Manuel Hasberg
Thank You for Watching!