Caring for forests between attitude and platitude. Social relationships with nature in industrial forestry in Äänekoski, Finland

Abstract Forests play a pivotal role in sustainability transitions. This article explores how people's relationships with forests, particularly how they care for or take care of them, shape and reflect broader tendencies and tensions in forest utilization and governance. How individuals relate to forests, manage them or express concern for them is crucial to the future of forests. This article focuses on modern, industrial, high‐tech, large‐scale forest utilization in a Northern European country, exemplified by Metsä Group's bioproduct mill in Äänekoski, Central Finland—a flagship of the currently dominant bio‐based economy model aimed at combining economic growth, technological innovation and sustainability. Empirically, the article draws on interviews conducted during three field visits (2019–2021) in Äänekoski with forest owners, industry professionals, entrepreneurs, and other residents. Conceptually, it combines a care perspective with a qualitative and relational sociological approach. The in‐analysis combines Eversberg's relational framework of ‘social relationships with nature’ (SRN) and a positioning within the ‘space of SRN’ with Tronto's conceptualization of care, allowing a relational reconstruction of the local constellations of SRN. The study analyses tendencies and tensions regarding (un)caring practices, as well as attitudes embedded in the different constellations of SRN within the context of industrial forestry in Äänekoski. The investigation identifies a constellation of four distinct types of SRN: (A) progressive management of nature, (B) traditional utilization of nature, (C) community‐oriented views of nature and (D) pro‐ecological appreciation of nature. While some types of SRN reflect instrumental and economically driven ‘care’ practices towards forests, other types express discomfort with the dominant management systems, yet their adherents often remain only peripherally involved in actual forest work. The findings show that ostensibly caring practices in human–forest relationships aligned with possibly unsustainable tendencies in the industry may obscure hierarchical views of nature and systemic tensions. More genuine caring dispositions are often found outside the core forest sector and tend to lack transformative agency. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.