Our man in Bergen: Scott Bremer's Calendars project on rethinking the seasons

Scott Bremer, senior researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and Humanities at the University of Bergen in Norway, where spring is bursting into flower. Photo / Supplied

THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW

It's springtime in Bergen, where Scott Bremer is head of an international research project working with communities in Norway and the Coromandel — and asking whether we're so out of sync with the seasons that our traditional calendars have gone past their use-by date.

Bergen doesn't really have four seasons. There's the light half of the year and the dark half of the year. It's one of the wettest cities in Europe and in winter, everything is kind of rotting and grey and brown under the snow. It's not light before 10am and then it's dark again by 3pm. But people say that spring in Bergen is at full speed. The light comes back and you get this wonderful period when the whole city comes alive.

We work in a lovely old building that used to be a bank, right next to a big park on the hill where the university is clustered. Looking out my office window, the little pond isn't frozen over anymore and the fountains that were put to sleep for the winter have started up again. I can see little crocuses emerging and buds swelling on the trees. And I can see people. As the days get lighter, there's almost an obligation to be outdoors. It's quite a strong social pressure.

Bergen is a very old city on the west coast of Norway — the gateway to the fjords. It's a city of culture; one of the first orchestras in the world was in Bergen and the national theatre is here. Ringed by mountains, it's also defined by its nature and outdoor activities. I've got two little girls, aged 3 and 5, and one of the things that struck me when I first came here was walking around in winter and seeing kids playing outside in the rain and dark on a playground. Now I do the same.

Norwegians once used carved primstavs as calendar sticks, marked with symbols for winter on one side and summer on the other. Photo / Elisabeth Schoyen Jensen

Coming from New Zealand, it took me 10 cycles to finally get in touch with the seasonal rhythms and cultures of this place. When I think about the seasons growing up, a lot of it was what we did at different times of the year — playing rugby on the racecourse in winter, spending summer at the beach. So I felt a little disoriented. For years, I had dry, cracked gouges in my knuckles in December and January because I wouldn't put on gloves.

You can study seasons according to a place's climate or plants and animals, but the Calendars project is studying seasons as cultural calendars that guide what we do at different times of the year. For example, we talk about the hunting season, the flu season or the mushroom season. Some are natural, some are social and some are mandated by law.

Communities make sense of annual rhythms — the warming and cooling, the dark and the light, the hatching birds — by cutting them up into periods and calling them seasons, as a framework for activities like the harvest. But with climate change, with environmental changes, with loss of biodiversity, but also migration and new technologies, we've fallen out of sync with our seasonal calendars because we don't live by the same natural or social rhythms we did 200 years ago.

Part of the project is looking at what changes are happening to some of the traditional calendars that we've inherited, comparing Bergen — a metropolitan city — with the Coromandel, where the seasons are inverted and it's obviously a very rural landscape. We're working a lot with school kids, going on walks with them in the bush and thinking about what the seasons actually look like — being conscious of it, as we would have had to be not that long ago.

Bremer, who's originally from New Plymouth, felt disoriented when he first moved to Bergen. "It took me 10 cycles to finally get in touch with the seasonal rhythms of this place." Photo / Supplied

When you think of the traditional symbols we use, Christmas is winter. Christmas is snow. Yet that's meaningless in the Southern Hemisphere. It's even meaningless in most parts of the UK where they haven't had snow at Christmas since the 70s.

That globalising of the seasons interests me. I'm involved in another research project, in East Africa, trying to provide seasonal forecasts to farmers. What I'm really struck by is that within the world of meteorological science and climate science, the standard is a four-season model. That might fit European and North American realities, but if you live in Kenya or Djibouti, it might make no sense to you at all.

How do people respond to changes in these seasonal calendars? At one end of the spectrum, you've got people who kind of season-proof themselves — they get a bigger water tank for summer and grow more stuff in greenhouses and do everything they can to eliminate the fickleness of our natural seasons.

At the other end of the spectrum, people are advocating for a reconnection to some of those natural rhythms, rather than divorcing from them. If we're going to re-sync ourselves ... that's a conscious decision we have to make and with climate change, those rhythms are changing fast. That might mean being a bit more agile and not thinking that we have to lock ourselves into a four-season calendar from hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

— as told to Joanna Wane

* A senior researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities at the University of Bergen, Scott Bremer heads the Calendars project (www.uib.no/en/calendars-project). Funded by the European Research Council, the five-year study compares Bergen, Norway's second-largest city, with four townships on the Coromandel Peninsula to explore how local communities are shaped by the seasons and how well they're adapting to change.