Introduction

More and more young people are struggling with different kinds of challenges: lack of well-being, diagnoses, vulnerability and marginalization, and the group of young people who find themselves in vulnerable and exposed positions has become more and more complex (Bakken 2018; Katznelson et al. 2021; Ottosen et al. 2022). It is a broad and diverse group struggling with different experiences of exclusion and marginalization, and the pathways that lead them to the margins of society have become increasingly difficult to decipher (Görlich et al. 2019, Katznelson and Sørensen 2015a). However, in general, young people today are growing up in a world that has become challenging in many ways. Acceleration (Rosa 2020), polarization (Reckwitz 2019) and ecological crisis (Latour and Schultz 2022) have given the world a more fluid unpredictable and uncontrollable character (Woodman and Leccardi 2015). At the same time, youth life is characterized by individualization and performance culture with an increased emphasis on young people’s abilities to manage and control their lives in accordance with to ever higher ideals and narrower notions of normality. Young people’s lives are thus characterized by fundamental uncertainties while there are expectations for the individual to move purposefully and steadily through youth life, which feeds fears of failure and falling short (Sørensen et al. 2017, Madsen 2018; Petersen and Krogh 2021; Katznelson et al. 2022). Social programs targeting young people therefore face an increased need to explore new understandings and approaches that can address the diverse and complex challenges faced by young people, while at the same time maintaining an eye for the resources they possess (Katznelson et al. 2015b, Nielsen and Sørensen 2017).

In recent years, there has been an increased focus on the potentials that nature holds for young people at the margins of society. A large number of social programs in the Nordic countries have integrated nature activities into their core work in order to make a difference for exposed groups of young people (Ejbye-Ernst et al. 2018). A lot of research has already been done in the field, primarily attempting to grasp the therapeutic, recreational and enrichment-oriented potentials that the encounters with nature hold (Sørensen and Nielsen 2021). However, there is a lack of studies within nature-based social work, that emphasize a more exploratory analysis of how actions and changes unfold in young people’s encounters with nature without a priori assigning either nature or young people with inherent features, roles and outcomes in relation to each other.

In this article, we follow a line of thinking that understands the relationship between humans and nature not as given, but as connections between actors that mutually interact through intra-active processes (Haraway 2021; Latour 2005). It is a way of thinking where humans and nature are considered to be so entangled that the existence of one cannot be meaningfully understood without the other. In this thinking, humans and nature come into being by virtue of and with each other in what American theorist Donna Haraway (2021) describes as ‘sympoietic’ processes of becoming. Actions and changes are therefore not solely tied to humans or nature, but rather emerge in complex, dynamic and responsive exchanges between them (Haraway 2008, ibid).

This thinking underpins several nature and environment ethical perspectives and suggests that both humans and nature are carriers of value, meaning and agency, which are released in reciprocal interactions in their encounters. Thus, the thinking offers a rejection of an instrumentalized approach to nature that focuses on utilizing nature for specific purposes (Haraway 2021), but also rejects a deficit approach to young people on the margins of society that focuses mainly on their flaws and shortcomings. By emphasizing nature as well as young people as bearers of value, agency and change, their encounters can, on the contrary, entail countless connections with various horizons of possibility.

In continuation of this, the aim of the article is to draw a nuanced picture of the numerous ways in which value, meaning and agency can arise, as well as be overwritten and lost in the encounters between young people and nature as part of nature activities across different social programs in Denmark. The article pursues this aim by, on the one hand, examining the significant qualities that emerge in these encounters and, on the other hand, by highlighting the varied and diverse exchanges between young people and nature that simultaneously take place, and thus the diverse potentials and horizons of possibility that emerge.

A Natural Space with Particular Potentials

The different research literature associated with the intersection between nature and social programs can be distinguished through the motives it highlights in nature-based social work. We identify three dominating motives (Sørensen and Nielsen 2021). The first motive is ‘recreation’. Here, nature is emphasized as a space that constitutes an environmental shift away from traditional habits, patterns and everyday tasks. It is a ‘high-ceilinged’ space where there is plenty of room, and where it is therefore possible to let off ‘steam’ or ‘withdraw’. Nature is understood to offer a break from the everyday bombardment of impressions from traffic, sounds, technology and other external interruptions (Jensen et al. 2015), just as nature-based activities such as walks or bonfires are believed to create special spaces for conversations, peace, reflection and new relationships (Sølvik 2013). This understanding is rooted in early environmental psychology theories such as ‘Attention Restoration Theory’ (ART) (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989) and ‘Aesthetic and Affective Responses to Natural Environment’ (ATT) (Ulrich 1983), where nature is seen as a space that in itself has a positive impact and significance for, for example, well-being and physical and mental health by making people more relaxed, more focused and less stressed (Mygind et al. 2018; Ejbye-Ernst 2013; Hartig et al. 2014; Randrup 2008; Taylor et al. 2001).

The second motive that emerges is ‘therapy’. In continuation of the above theories, nature is emphasized here as a particular space where people can develop the ability to focus attention, filter irrelevant information and impulses, and increase concentration (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989). Nature is seen as a privileged place for professionals to develop therapeutic activities for the vulnerable and at-risk (Crisp 1998). This is a motive that is particularly highlighted in studies of nature therapy, garden therapy and stress gardens (Fisker 2010; Tucker et al. 2013; Corazon 2012; Poulsen 2017; Sidenius et al. 2017) and of therapy courses that draw on neuro affective approaches, where the focus is on an embodied development of social, emotional and personality competencies, for example in initiatives aimed at people with early injuries and attachment disorders (Skytte and Einfeldt 2019). It is also a motive highlighted in studies of systemic narrative approaches, where the focus is on the construction of new narratives, habits, attitudes and relationships (Seidler and Mortensen 2018).

The third motive is ‘enrichment’. Here, the research literature emphasizes nature as a particular space for activities of a more explorative nature, where participants transcend their own boundaries, succeed at something difficult or accomplish something they did not consider to be possible. It is a motif where nature appears as a potentially risky arena (the mountains, the lake, darkness, etc.) that opens up for a special focus and togetherness in situations where participants otherwise might withdraw (Sølvik 2013), and where mastery and success experiences can occur, and behavioral changes are founded (Ejbye-Ernst et al. 2018). At the same time, the research literature also emphasizes an awareness of the risk of negative experiences where participants are exposed as inadequate (Kjeldsen 2015; Gentin 2015). This is a motive that to some extent is an extension of the previous motive, ‘nature as therapy’, but unlike this motive, the work with ‘nature as enrichment’ is rarely based on a systematic process involving diagnosis and specific treatment goals. Instead, the activities and initiatives within ‘nature as enrichment’ are typically based on broader categorizations of the participants as extroverted, boundary-seeking and unfocused or restrained, stuck and potentially avoidant in their encounters with the outside world.

Common to the three motives that emerge in the research literature is that nature appears as a space that has a special potential to do specific things for people—for example, to relieve stress and anxiety or help overcome limitations. This view of nature risks, on the one hand, simplifying the variety and diversity of nature and, on the other hand, marginalizing the diverse resources, preferences and experiences that people bring to their encounters with nature. In this way, the research literature risks to some extent obscuring the numerous and versatile exchanges and relationships that are at stake in the encounters between humans and nature, and that being ‘human’ and ‘nature’ is something that is constituted in the encounters with each other. In relation to young people in social initiatives, this means that the many different possible outcomes and transformative potentials in young people’s encounters with nature are only made visible to a limited extent.

Numerous Outcomes and Transformative Horizons

In order to make visible the wide range of outcomes and transformative potentials, this article approaches young people’s encounters with nature as a relationship between actors who mutually impact each other, and where the horizons of the mutual impacts are understood as never entirely predetermined. In doing so, the article suggests understanding young people’s encounters with nature in social programs as something that certainly contains recreational, therapeutic and enrichment-oriented optics, but which is by no means defined by these alone. It is a perspective related to a shift in social and human sciences that radically rethinks the relationship between humans and nature, and which in recent years has crystallized in a new nature- and environment-based thinking (Barad 2003; Latour 2005; Haraway 2021; Butler 2022). This thinking fundamentally does away with an ontology that views the world as being constituted by entities or species that may engage in interactions and collaborations but are fundamentally distinct from each other and bear inherent qualities and traits (Butler 2022). Instead, the thinking sees humans and nature as something that shapes each other’s history and agency and is entangled in each other and helps to create each other’s conditions of existence and possibilities of becoming. In this sense, the relationship between humans and nature is understood as something that has an emerging character and is always in the process of coming into being. Being is a ‘sympoietic’ endeavor in which humans and nature is ‘becoming-with’ each other, as one of the leading figures in this thinking, Haraway, has put it (2021). Based on this perspective, the article’s analysis emphasizes that in the encounters between young people and nature, there is an opportunity for renewal and for finding other paths in the creation processes that help to constitute today’s youth life (ibid: 21). The analysis therefore considers young people’s encounters with nature as ‘figurations’ (Braidotti 1994) that both contain a lived here and now and an ‘imagined elsewhere’ (Haraway 1991).

Design and Methodology

The article is based on a qualitative study that examined young people’s encounters with nature across four social programs focused on strengthening social integration and well-being among young people on the margins of society in Denmark. The programs and the groups of young people they targeted were very different, but they shared a common goal of using encounters with nature as an element in a broader social work with young people. One NGO-program offered therapy and counselling for young people who grew up in families with alcohol or drug abuse. Nature encounters were primarily anchored in an overnight stay in a national park for a small group of four to eight young people and two professionals twice a year. Another program was part of a municipality’s family center and offered social activities to vulnerable young people mainly from socio-economically disadvantaged families. Nature encounters were often part of weekly one-on-one activities with a professional going for walks, etc., but the encounters also included more organized excursions and overnight field trips with small groups of young people. The last two programs involved young people in special schools. One of them, a primary and secondary school for young people with severe mental health disorders, organized nature encounters around a specific weekday, where a group of 8–10 young people spent the whole day in a nearby national park. The other, a post-secondary school spanning young people with a variety of social and mental difficulties, anchored the nature encounters in whole class activities for around 15–20 young people often as day excursions to nearby beaches, woods, rivers and lakes, etc., and sometimes as longer overnight trips.

The young people included in the study were between 14 and 28 years old, with a predominance of young people between 14 and 18 years old. One program (the therapy and counselling program) involved only girls, the municipality program had a 50–50 gender population, while both special schools had a predominance of young men. The young people lived in small size cities or villages, a few of them in the countryside, in different regions of Denmark. They were used to having nature and nature-like settings (beaches, lakes, rivers, parks, the sea, small woods and agriculture) close by, and some of them used these settings frequently in their spare time alone, with friends or with family.

The data collection was divided into three phases. In the first phase, we conducted life history interviews (Felman 1992) with young people who previously had been part of nature encounters in three social programs (two of the programs where part of phase two and three). We did this to gain a better understanding of which aspects the young people in different kinds of programs highlighted, when looking back at the nature encounters, and the role they played in their lives afterwards (Nielsen and Sørensen 2017). In the second phase, we conducted field observations in connection to excursions and trips in nature and semi-structured individual interviews with young people and professionals currently in four programs. In the third phase, we re-interviewed part of the same young people from phase two 6–9 months after our first interview using journey mapping, where they looked back on their encounters with nature and outlined their significance for us (Nielsen and Sørensen 2018). Using the open-ended method journey mapping allowed for multiple and unpredictable ways of entanglements and interconnections of young people to emerge (Cosgriff 2023). The data collection consisted of 6 life history interviews with young people, 5 focus group interviews with 13 professionals, 9 observations of full-day activities with all young people and professionals in the initiatives, 15 individual interviews, and 7 follow-up journey map interviews with young people. All interviews were conducted and transcribed in Danish. Quotes were translated into English during the preparation of the article.

In the analysis of the data, we identified patterns and connections in the young people’s narratives across the four programs. It was an analytical process in which we were particularly concerned with identifying common denominators in the young people’s experiences and narratives, while at the same time being curious about the differences and variations that also appeared in them (Haavind 2000). While much of the research literature in the intersection between nature and social work has focused on highlighting the agency and potential of nature, our analytical ambition was to capture the mutual connections and diverse types of entanglements that emerged in the encounters between young people and nature. At the same time, following Haraway (1991), it was our analytical ambition to explore how tangible experiences of the here and now emerging in the encounters between young people and nature gave rise to ideas, thoughts, imaginaries, feelings and actions that could open up new paths and horizons with the potential to affecting the young people’s processes of becoming. In order to achieve this, the analytical process did not only involve identifying and establishing common denominators and variations in the material once and for all, but was also characterized by a continuous search for openings and displacements in these. We thus continuously returned to the common denominators and variations we had identified in the material and tried to challenge and reconceptualise them. Not to make them more perfect and irrefutable, but rather to open up their range and horizons of possibilities. The analysis process was thus inspired by Haraway’s analytical concept of ‘diffraction’, which is ‘the production of difference patterns in the world’ (1997). It was not about creating fixed and unambiguous representations of the world, but opening up for ambiguous and dynamic descriptions of it.

Six Significant Qualities

The analysis is built around six significant qualities, each of which touches upon specific aspects of young people’s encounters with nature. The qualities should be understood as an analytically generated typology of the various entanglements and connections between young people and nature that emerge in our data. The qualities are characterized by the fact that they interact, are dynamic and are realized in different ways depending on specific youth and specific nature and the ways in which the encounters between them are framed. The six qualities appear consistently across our data, but they are not equally important to all young people, nor are they important in the exact same way. However, taken together, they help to paint a nuanced picture of the diverse ways in which young people and nature interact and intertwine in the study.

In the analysis, we go through the six qualities separately. The qualities are highlighted through empirical examples that illustrate the effortless and seamless aspects of youth-nature encounters, where everything comes together, as well as the frictions and tensions they can contain. The analysis furthermore provides insights into how nature encounters can contain opportunities for renewal and for finding other paths, as well as hindrances and obstacles, and how this affects the processes of becoming that can take place.

Open senses

The majority of the young people in the study express that their senses are awakened during their encounters with nature in the initiatives. When they move out of their familiar surroundings and into nature, they suddenly notice their surroundings with a higher degree of intensity. They become aware of sounds, silence, cold, warmth, colors, light, darkness, etc. In nature, their surroundings appear to them with a power and clarity that can be surprising and take them out of their usual physical and mental state. They might want to sit still and just listen to the sound of the wind, or they might be filled with energy and start running around. Here, a young boy talks about the special sensory impressions that nature awakens in him and how it contributes to his inner peace and tranquillity:

It gives me an inner peace because it was so peaceful, it was so pleasant. I got such a good, pleasant feeling in my body. Because it was just... It was just great to be able to look so far. And it was just so quiet, and the birds were singing a little. I just got such a nice feeling in my body. It’s kind of a free space for me to get out into nature and relax. (M 16 years old)

When young people’s senses are awakened, they notice to a greater extent whether they feel comfortable or uncomfortable, awake or tired, or scared or fearless. Not all the young people in the study experience this as something positive. The senses of these young people may be heightened, but they do not find the intensified experience attractive. One young person describes his encounters with nature as ‘boring’, and to the extent that they arouse his senses at all, it is because nature is experienced as unpleasant. This young person is demotivated and annoyed by nature and would rather be taught at school, even though he has a strong dislike of everyday school life:

I: What is it, that is boring for you? U: That we have to come out here and then just be in the forest. I don’t like being in the woods. Oh, those damn mosquitoes. I: Why don’t you like being in the forest? U: All those reptiles that just crawl on you, I think that’s unpleasant, I think that’s disgusting. I can’t stand reptiles and insects and all that. I: And is there a lot of that out here? U: No, there isn’t, but the mosquitoes there, they piss me off, because when I get home, I’m scratching all the time, because I get 50 mosquito bites when I’m in the forest. I: What would you rather do than go to the forest? U: Classroom teaching. I: Regular teaching? U: Yes. (M 14 years old)

The two narratives show the range of sensory experiences that characterize young people’s encounters with nature. While the first young person experiences nature as a free space where there is room to just sense and be, the second young person sees nature as a space that is anything but free. This young person experiences that his senses are invaded by insects and bugs, and the encounter with nature is considered both ‘unpleasant’ and ‘disgusting’. Open senses is a quality that is stretched between effortless entanglements between young people and nature, where everything comes together, and violent friction characterized by discomfort and fear, which causes resistance, withdrawal and sometimes breakdowns. Encounters with nature thus open up radically different processes of becoming. On the one hand, the contours of a world in which the young person experiences being able to find peace and serenity, and on the other hand, a world where the lack of meaning, reluctance and refusal that the young person already experiences in his everyday school life is repeated and magnified through the ways in which the encounters with nature are established.

Routines and Repetitions

For some young people, nature can be overwhelming and intimidating, and to get out and be present in nature can be a significant challenge. The programs we have followed therefore often organize the encounters between young people and nature through strong frameworks, not least routines and repetitions that help create structure, predictability and unity during the encounters. The routines and repetitions make certain activities and practices obvious, and the young people explain that they become so familiar with them, that they feel able to contribute adequately and with ease. Here, a young boy explains how the routines and repetitions of the program of which he is part means that he knows exactly what is going to happen and what his role is, when they go on a weekly trip into nature, because the same thing always happens:

We have a little cart that we load all our things into, and then we just start walking up here after we’ve had a joint message and meeting about the things we need to do and are told to go. And then we go up here. And then we start to unpack and light a fire. And get food ready to be able to heat it up and cook it. (M 14 years old)

On the other hand, the repetitive and taken-for-granted routines can also lock the encounters with nature into specific activities and practices without questioning them, even when they are not perceived as meaningful or relevant. The routines thus silently compose the nature encounters without the young people necessarily understanding why they are important and what their meaning is. Here, the routines risk creating disorientation and indifference during nature encounters. An excerpt from our field notes illustrates how this is the case for other young people in the same program:

We gather at the school and drive in two minibuses to a parking lot 3-4 km away. On the bus are three adults and eight young people. We walk through the forest for a few hundred meters until we reach a large clearing. Here is a barn-like building with a roof and half walls. Inside the barn are tables and benches and outside is a fire pit some 10-15 meters away. The sun is shining, it’s warm and most people – both adults and young people – move inside where it’s cooler. They sit scattered around the tables. It’s the last day in the forest before the summer vacation, and this day is all about eating and socializing together. A couple of the young people are helping to cut meat for the meal. Outside, the fire is lit to prepare the food. The fire is hot, the smoke spreads over the fire pit and only one young person participates in the cooking. When the food is ready, they eat together inside the barn. A few of the young people have already left the place and walked back to the school by themselves as the rest of us leave. (Field notes June 2021)

The two examples show the range of ways in which nature encounters are characterized by routines that can both establish frictionless connections between young people and nature and contribute to friction and disconnection. In the first example, the automated and routinized framing allows the young person to contribute competently and energetically on his own. In the second example, the framework is applied aimlessly throughout the day and contributes to a lost opportunity from which to extract meaning and enthusiasm from the encounters, which causes resistance and apathy among the young people, and several of them literally end up filtering out of the nature encounter.

Together

Community is a recurring theme among the young people in the study. However, there are quite diverse narratives about how they shape their encounters with nature. Several of the young people talk about going out into nature with other young people, which strengthens their bond with each other, but also helps to create a sense of security and courage to explore nature. Here is a narrative from a young person who talks about how a program actively uses interactions with other young people to create safety and coherence in their encounters with nature:

It wasn’t like that: ‘I just keep to myself’ kind of thing, but we talked in groups. No one went off on their own, and there were always two to each other or... One to each, so it was... That’s also why it was so nice, right. (F 28 years old)

Other young people particularly emphasize the activities and practices in which they engage with professional adults in their encounters with nature. They enjoy sharing the same experiences, and a reciprocity develops between them that changes the relationship and strengthens their bond, while also opening up the young people’s curiosity about nature.

However, some young people also report that they get caught up in a setting with young people they don’t experience a community with. Here we meet a young girl who wants to withdraw, but doesn’t feel she has the opportunity to do so:

In the nature group, you have to be together or part of the community, or whatever you want to call it. So I can’t really just keep to myself and just leave... Or enjoy myself on my own. It’s kind of like, you can’t just sit with your phone in front of you. It would also be a bit rude... you’re with other young people. (F 17 years old).

The young people in the study largely experience that being together with other young people makes their entanglements with nature more effortless, just as they provide a very special feeling of belonging and being part of a positive context. Nevertheless, there are also examples of young people experiencing it as overwhelming and demanding during nature encounters. For these young people, being ‘together’ can create friction and resistance in their encounters with nature, and they consequently highlight the importance of including activities and practices that allow them to withdraw when needed.

Exploring

Several of the young people describe encounters with nature which are full of hidden treasures and surprises that they can explore. Although the programs are characterized by routines and frameworks that help create structure and predictability, there are often gaps and breaks that the young people themselves, to varying degrees, give content and fill in. Some of the young people have difficulty figuring out how to use these spaces and breaks. They may drift around without purpose and meaning and express that they find it boring and meaningless. Others enter into an adventure: they may follow new paths in the landscape and find vantage points they had not noticed before. Along the way, they might collect sticks and branches that inspire them to develop games and create universes that can give shape and meaning to the rest of their journey. Other times, young people use the gaps and breaks to move purposefully toward specific places in nature where they remember a particular tree or have heard there is a large ant hill. And when they arrive at their destinations, they begin exploring their findings, unless they have gotten lost in something else along the way. The outcome is rarely predetermined. Along the way, they may encounter numerous surprises that raise new, unexpected questions and take their imaginations in new, unforeseen directions. Here is a young person who explains how an adventure can arise out of chance and bifurcate into new discoveries that take his journey in new directions:

We were just walking around and didn’t know what to do, because we had chopped some wood and the fire was going, and there wasn’t really anything else to do. So we just walk around a bit. And then suddenly, we come across one of those places where there’s a nest box. We knew there was something in there, but we had been told that there was a special kind of squirrel, so we weren’t allowed to touch them, because they were becoming extinct or something. But we went over and opened it, and we saw brand new baby birds. But they had started to grow wings and stuff. They were super cute. Then we just walked a little further around, and then of course you had to look in the others to see if any were empty. They weren’t empty at all. They were all full. (M 14 years old)

Here is another young person who explains how he gets inspiration to develop games and create universes when he goes ‘exploring’ in nature. Nature sparks his imagination and creativity, and he collects objects that he reformats and to which he gives meaning, supporting his games and universes:

I have found several sticks that have a sword-like shape. Then you can just turn it into a sword. A friend of mine found a long one with a handle like that. He turned it into a hunting rifle. (M 14 years old)

The two examples show a tension in exploring during encounters with nature, where young people are seduced and led along unknown paths toward new horizons, in which they can immerse themselves and get completely lost. At the same time, the examples show how young people give shape and meaning to nature as they explore it. Both in a concrete sense—they carve a branch that becomes a sword—and in a more figurative sense, the landscape becomes a specific landscape from a fantasy movie, a computer game or something else they invent along the way. In other words, when young people go exploring, it is both about being seduced and about formatting and giving meaning to nature during their journey through the landscapes. However, the entanglement and connections with nature do not always come through smoothly and fluently in the pauses and gaps for all young people. For some young people, their encounters with nature are so full of friction that during breaks and gaps they drift around, get bored and feel rather lost and on a wrong track, unable to improvise and give meaning to what they encounter in nature.

Food for Thought

In the young people’s narratives about nature encounters, it is not only their sense of adventure and imagination that is awakened, but also their thirst for knowledge and desire to learn new things. Several of the young people describe enthusiastically how they acquire new knowledge during the nature encounters. They emphasize the ‘food for thought’ that they receive on trips with nature guides and other knowledgeable adults. The aspects of nature that they discover during these trips are about adding new layers and aspects to their experience of being in nature. Young people talk about factual knowledge concerning certain plants and animals that they may encounter during their nature encounters. They also talk about things that cannot be seen with the eye, but which relate to biological processes and more abstract connections in nature. The young people also describe how they develop knowledge and skills that consist of gaining experience with techniques and materials in nature, such as walking long distances, felling trees, making fires or picking poultry. They emphasize when they are given the opportunity to experiment and try things out under the guidance of adults in the programs. Here they develop new competencies and skills that they are able to activate in other contexts in nature.

Here is a narrative from a young boy who talks about the new insights into biological processes and connections in nature that he has acquired through nature encounters, which means that he sees and experiences the forest in a new way:

Well, I think it’s fun to know something about nature. What do plants live on? Actually, they are almost the same as humans. We get vitamins from the sun, they get vitamins from the sun. They grow in the sun, so do we. When we get vitamins, our bodies get stronger. How do we get water? For example, if we don’t have a water bottle, I’ll borrow yours if we’re out in the forest. Plants do the same. They borrow from each other. (M 16 years old)

Here is another narrative where a young boy talks about acquiring new practical skills by experimenting and trying out techniques and materials in his encounters with nature:

U: Then we went mushroom picking with the guy who owns the place there. Then we sat down here and just cut up a bird. And then we ate duck breast. And then we cooked mushrooms for some sauce. I: Did you have to sort of... U: Pluck them and then cut them up and take what we needed from them. I: What was that like? U: It wasn’t something I had done before. It was fun to try to see: “Oh, that’s why it has that point on the feathers” and stuff like that. You learn a lot. I: How did you react when you had to do it? U: It was a whole new world, I didn’t know before how the hell it worked, but it was fun to try. (M 16 years old)

The two narratives show how the young people in the program acquire knowledge about nature through books and conversations with adults on the one hand, and on the other hand by doing certain things with animals and plants. In their accounts both the cognitive and tactile activities and practices give rise to an appropriation and immersion that helps to entangle young people and nature. In this sense, ‘food for thought’ can expand and strengthen the connections between young people and nature and make nature encounters more effortless and meaningful.

Big Questions

Nature encounters often provoke thoughts about life and existence, and many big questions arise for young people when they think back on them. They involve both psychological and philosophical reflections on the relationship between the self and the world, shifting the focus away from the young people themselves and easing the pressure and responsibility many of them feel toward performing their lives the right way. For some young people, encounters with nature sharpen their awareness of their own histories and their being in the world, which can create an awareness of their own limits, but also of their dreams and visions for the future. Here, a young boy talks about getting close to his family history when he is in nature. Nature is almost written into him, and it is both his own family history and the desires associated with an imagined future that he unfolds when he is in it:

U: Four generations ago, all the men in my family were lumberjacks. So I don’t think I would be able to leave the forest or nature behind at any point. I: So you also think of it as part of your family history? U: Yes. It’s passed to me through the genes, because the first time I had to use an axe, I was a natural talent at it. I: Would you want to be a forestry worker? U: No, but I would actually really, really like to have a farm with a piece of forest. I: So the forest can be a part of your life in that way? U: Yes. (M 14 years old)

For other young people, the encounters with nature liberate them in ways that allow them to immerse themselves in more general reflections on life, the world and what it means to be human. These may be questions about the environment, climate, society and existence that go beyond the specific situation and the young person’s own experiences and background. In the account below, a young girl talks about how familiar scales change in encounters with nature, and that in the resulting lack of significance she experiences, she finds the courage to make a difference and thereby gain a new meaning:

I think it’s the fact that I’m not constantly thinking about the things that are happening in my life. I can especially get very nervous about the things that are constantly happening in my life and then feel sad that it’s not good enough and that I’m not doing things well enough. I think nature helps with that because I feel smaller in a good way. In a way, nature makes me feel irrelevant, kind of indifferent in a calm way, but I think it also makes me feel more independent because I kind of realize that things can do things. Things happen all the time and I can do things too. I’m a human being and I can make a difference and stuff like that. (F 17 years old)

In some of the accounts, the big questions are facilitated in the programs, but usually, they arise in connection with specific experiences during the nature encounters and are not necessarily something the young people share with other young people or adults. While the big questions for the young person in the first quote are about how the encounters with nature help define himself in relation to his family history and imagined future, for the young person in the second quote, they are about how feelings of wrongness and inadequacy are erased. In both cases, youth and nature are intertwined in new ways in the big questions. Through the strong lines of connection that are established, young people gain a right to exist and act in the world. Either by gaining a special capacity, a special identity and a special horizon as the first young person, or by being released to explore what it means to come into being as a human being with capacity, identity and horizon as in the case of the second young person.

Conclusion

The aim of this article has been to create a more nuanced understanding of what happens during young people’s encounters with nature. Based on qualitative interviews and participant observation among young people during nature-related activities in four social programs, the article has highlighted six significant qualities of the encounters, as well as the range of potentials and horizons of possibility that emerge. The qualities should be understood as an analytically produced typology of special types of entanglements and connections between young people and nature, which are implemented in different ways depending on the specific young people and nature in question, and not least how the programs frame the encounters.

With the inspiration from a variety of nature- and environment-based thinking, the analysis highlights young people’s encounters with nature as figurations (Braidotti 1994) that contain both a lived here and now and an ‘imagined elsewhere’ (Haraway 1991). The analysis emphasizes the tangible and lived connections between young people and nature as they are played out here and now, as well as the thoughts, feelings, actions and imaginations they generate. Essential to the analysis is that these thoughts, feelings, actions and imaginings can both open up new paths and horizons and reinforce experiences of exclusion and meaninglessness in their lives.

When analyzing across the six significant qualities of the encounters between young people and nature, two noteworthy horizons emerge. Even though the outcomes of the encounters are not given, they clearly offer a potential to constitute pace, movement and orientation in ways, which can disturb experiences of acceleration, polarization and ecological crisis, that have given the world in which young people grow up a more fluid unpredictable and uncontrollable character (Reckwitz 2019; Rosa 2020; Latour and Schultz 2022). As it appears in the analysis, the qualities ‘routines and repetitions’, ‘food for thought’ and ‘exploring’ give way to patterns of movement defined by repetition, immersion and improvisation, where pace can vary, movement is not an already given, orientation can emerge on the way and approaches be refined over and over again. By this, the analysis shows that the anxiety and resignation often associated with the fluidity, unpredictability and uncontrollability of the world potentially can be displaced by excitement, curiosity and a sense of manoeuvrability through young people’s encounters with nature.

The other noteworthy horizon that arises when analyzing across the six significant qualities of young people’s encounters with nature concerns their potential to constitute agency and transformative capacity in ways, which can disturb the young people’s experiences of individualization and performance culture with an increased emphasis on young people’s capacities to control their lives in accordance with high ideals and narrow notions of normality, which have fed fears of failure and falling short (Sørensen et al. 2017, Madsen 2018; Petersen and Krogh 2021; Katznelson et al. 2022). As it appears in the analysis, the qualities ‘open senses’, ‘together’ and ‘big questions’ give way to agency and transformative capacity defined by closeness to nature, community orientation and a transgression of an understanding of the individual as the sole source of doing and changing, wherefore agency and transformative capacity to a greater extent appear as collaborations between the individual and the surrounding world. By this, the analysis shows that the fear of failure and falling short associated with individualisation and performance culture potentially can be displaced by a sense of strength associated with mutual reciprocity and connectivity with the world.

However, the analysis of the six significant qualities shows how the encounters between young people and nature can connect in countless ways and have many different outcomes. The same quality can be characterized by both effortless harmony and resistant friction. The point is that young people’s encounters with nature in the social programs depend on how the six qualities are framed, and whether the connections and entanglements between young people and nature are supported and strengthened, rather than disconnected and counteracted in ways that close down new thoughts, feelings, actions and imaginations.

In this article, we have shown how a nature- and environment-based thinking offers a perspective that changes the discourse of scarcity that surrounds large parts of the social field, where young people on the margins of society are either deprived of resources and agency or seen as someone whose resources and agency are going in the wrong direction. This discourse of lack also spills over into the social discourses that more generally surround youth life. These discourses position and problematize the contemporary youth generation as fragile, hypersensitive and disoriented. However, they overlook that young people today are growing up in a world that has become more challenging in many ways. As mentioned above, acceleration (Rosa 2020), polarization (Reckwitz 2019) and ecological crisis (Latour and Schultz 2022) have made the world a more fluid, unpredictable and uncontrollable place for young people to grow up (Woodman and Leccardi 2015). At the same time, youth life has been increasingly characterized by an individualization and performance culture, which has increased the pressure on young people to live up to increasingly narrow and relentless normative ideals (Katznelson et al. 2022). Thus, young people grow up in a world in which the common frameworks are slipping and there is an increased focus on the individual’s ability to create order in life, which requires considerable resources and agency from the individual (Rosa 2020). This may contribute to blurring our view of how it is possible to gather around and mobilize a shared understanding of what a meaningful and liveable life means for young people (Butler 2022; Latour and Schultz 2022). In this article, through an analysis of young people’s diverse encounters with nature, we have endeavored to make visible how young people’s entanglements and interconnections with the world have the potential to mobilize resources, agency and imaginaries, and pave the way for a reformulation of their processes of becoming and horizons of possibility, which radically transgress the dominant individualistic neo-liberal notion of young people and youth life.