Death by a Thousand Small Cuts: Why Ålstensskogen is About More Than Trees
An opinion piece on belonging, public health, and what actually keeps us alive
For the third time this month, I take children and adults into Ålstensskogen for what we call “deep nature immersion”—screen-free, sensory presence with the living world that sustains us. We walk slowly. We learn to recognize plant neighbors by name. We follow animal tracks. We sit in silence and listen until the forest begins to speak back.
These are not recreational outings. They are necessary medicine for a sick society.
When Stockholm County raises alarms about mental illness among young people, when stress-related sick leave breaks records, when loneliness is described as our era’s public health crisis—we are systematically destroying the places that actually heal. Ålstensskogen is not “empty” land waiting for development. It is already full. Full of relationships, of healing, of what keeps people healthy when everything else fails.
But on December 11th, the City of Stockholm will decide on land allocation for 50 apartments right in the middle of this. Areas 25 and 44—previously promised as nature reserve—are suddenly to be built over. Without clear documentation. Without acknowledgment of what will be lost.
This is not a debate about NIMBYism or property values. It is a question about what keeps us alive.
Home is More Than Walls
We talk about housing shortage as if it were only a matter of square meters and rental contracts. But what is “home”? Four walls and a roof? Or is it also the ground beneath our feet, the trees that provide shade and oxygen, the birds that wake us in the morning, the forest trails where children learn they are part of something larger?
Our “home” is not separated from the living world that sustains it. Every breath we take comes from photosynthesis in trees like those in Ålstensskogen. Every drop of water we drink has been filtered through roots and soil. Our mental health depends on access to places where we can slow down, where our senses can rest from the tyranny of screens, where we can feel our continuity with life itself.
To build 50 apartments by destroying what makes the entire neighborhood livable—that’s not smart planning. That’s short-sightedness bordering on madness.
The Logic of Progress
“We must build for the future,” they say. But which future? One where every green space is sacrificed on the altar of growth? One where coming generations inherit only concrete and fragmented nature? One where “progress” means systematically removing what actually keeps us healthy?
This is the logic that has brought us to climate crisis, species extinction, and the mental health epidemic we now live in. A logic that treats nature as a resource to exploit rather than as the living system we depend on. A logic that can count square meters but not relationships, that can price land but not belonging, that can measure economic growth but not wellbeing.
I have spent decades working on sustainability—first in politics, then in impact investing and philanthropy. I have seen how we repeatedly choose short-term solutions that worsen long-term problems. How we build ourselves deeper into crisis instead of questioning the very logic that created it.
Ålstensskogen is a test: do we mean what we say when we talk about public health, about biodiversity, about leaving something for the next generation? Or are these just pretty words that fold when economic interests come knocking?
Death by a Thousand Small Cuts
“It’s just a small area,” a neighbor told me. “We can’t stop all development.”
But this is exactly how it happens. Piece by piece. Tree by tree. One “small” development at a time. Each time they promise “this will be the last time.” Each time they say we can build here because there’s other green space somewhere else.
Until one day it’s all gone.
This is death by a thousand small cuts. And each cut takes not just land—it takes relationships. Between people and place. Between generations. Between human and more-than-human communities that have shared this territory for centuries.
When we densify by taking forest, we also compress habitat for wild animals. We force deer and other species into ever-smaller fragments, increasing the risk of disease transmission between species. One Health research shows clearly: when we destroy buffer zones between human and wild habitats, we pay the price in the form of zoonotic diseases. COVID-19 taught us nothing if we continue down this path.
What We Really Lose
When I take children and adults into Ålstensskogen, something happens that never occurs in front of screens. They slow down. Their nervous systems find a different rhythm. They begin to notice details—patterns in bark, birdsong, how light falls through leaves.
A 6-year-old once asked me: “What’s this tree’s name?” Not because she needed information, but because she had begun to see the tree as someone, not something. As a neighbor worth recognizing.
This is what we lose when we remove wild land: the possibility for the next generation to feel themselves as part of life, not separated from it. The chance to develop what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “species kinship”—kinship with other species. The ability to experience themselves as nature becoming conscious of itself.
Without this experience—this embodied knowledge that we are woven into the web of life—how will we ever make the choices required to navigate the ecological crises we face?
The Moral Question
This is not technical planning. It is a moral question.
What right do we have to take from coming generations what took hundreds of years to grow? What gives us the mandate to break promises about nature reserves to accommodate short-term demand for housing that can be built in a hundred other places?
Stockholm has industrial areas that can be converted. Office landscapes standing empty. Parking lots that take up more space than parks. We can densify smartly—along public transit corridors, where infrastructure already exists, on land that doesn’t host red-listed species or function as green lungs for thousands of people.
Choosing Ålstensskogen is not inevitable. It is a choice. A choice that says short-term economic logic weighs heavier than long-term ecological wisdom. That exploitation comes before preservation. That we have learned nothing.
What I Ask of You
I don’t write this as someone who wants to stop development or keep people out. On the contrary. I have devoted my life to trying to create more justice, more access, more participation.
But I have also learned that real progress sometimes requires the courage to say no. To set boundaries. To acknowledge that not everything can be measured in money or square meters, that some things are sacred precisely because they are shared, because they keep us alive in ways that go beyond the material.
I ask you—politicians, planners, citizens—to pause. To actually ask yourselves: what are we really building? And what are we destroying in the process?
Fifty apartments can be built in many places. Ålstensskogen exists only here. When it’s gone, it’s gone forever. Together with all the relationships, all the healing, all the possibility for belonging that it holds.
We cannot continue to build the future by destroying what makes it worth living in.
It’s time to choose differently. To show that we are capable of long-term thinking, of wisdom, of the type of leadership that coming generations will thank us for rather than curse us for.
Preserve Ålstensskogen. Not to stop progress, but to create real progress—a city where people can be whole, healthy, and deeply rooted in the living world that is our true home.
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Shawn Westcott leads the Ecological Belonging initiative at The Wellbeing Project. He lives in Sweden and works globally to help communities remember their way home—to each other, to place, and to the web of life that sustains us all.
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