This paper reports on an archival study on childhood memories of nature in Sweden. The archival material in focus consists of themed questionnaires (directives), an archival material collected by the Folklife Archives in Sweden on different topics. Since the 1910s a writers’ panel answer themed questionnaires on a regular basis with a focus on personal experience of different themes.

The themed questionnaire in focus for the present study is “Nature for me”, a questionnaire collected by the Folklife Archives in 2010. In the study, I analyze a total of 64 people’s answers on their relation to nature, including the question about their first memory of nature. 

The aim of the present study is to understand in what ways childhood memories can be considered for thinking about the relationship between children and nature in new and productive ways, with an increased focus on the existential dimension of living in the Anthropocene. 

Archived childhood memories offers a potential to refuse adults’ projections on the next generation, stemming from a history of ideas of the connection between nature of childhood. This study seeks a less child-centered entry point into the relationship between childhood and nature. 

The archival research provides a way to consider what childhood means in relation to a damaged planet. The question of how childhood memories of nature and the planet form attachments to place, land and Earth during the Anthropocene is of particular interest, as well as how practices of archiving produce lives, selves, worlds, social identities.