Biography

Regardless of the length of life, a résumé is best kept short, concise… Of all your loves, mention only the marriage… Memberships in what but without why… Write as if you'd never talked to yourself and always kept yourself at arm's length.

So, Ingar Palmlund was born in 1938, in Lund, Sweden. She was married for twelve years, long ago now. Has two children and a handful of grandchildren, all of them no longer children. Worked for twenty years in the Swedish civil service and even longer as an independent scholar.

Earned a Ph.D. (Environment, Technology, Society) at Clark University in Worcester MA, USA in 1990 on her dissertation The Case of Estrogens: An Enquiry into Societal Risk Evaluation. Has been affiliated as visiting scholar or lecturer at several universities, Associate Professor at Linköping University, Sweden, and has taught international environmental politics and sustainable development at Tufts University, USA.

Her memberships have included an office workers' union, a Social Democratic party, an Amnesty International group and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She supports UNICEF, UNHCR and Save the Children. She has walked in protest marches against wars and political oppression.

She speaks several Indo-European languages and has lived in many countries — Sweden, France, The Netherlands, Pakistan, and in the USA in Massachusetts. Her home is now in London in the UK.

Born under the sign of Aquarius in a Chinese Year of the Tiger, she carries in her necklace a little gilt leaf from a Gingko Biloba tree. A Gingko Biloba is a living fossil from the middle Jurassic era some 170 million years ago. Its genome has 10.6 billion DNA nucleobase “letters” (the human genome has three billion) and about 41,840 predicted genes carrying antibacterial and chemical defence mechanisms. Its leaf, a small open fan, is a marvel of simplicity, a symbol of survival against all odds.

She learnt to read and write when she was six years old. One afternoon her father took her hand for a walk down the street to the town library. Still holding her hand, he led her past tall stacks filled with fat volumes to a low bookcase with rows of worn, tattered books for children on the shelves. He told her that she could choose three books to borrow on his library card, and when she had read them, they would return these books to the librarian who might then allow her to borrow three more books. For a child brought up on listening to stories, this was a gift beyond dreams. Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon she walked to the library, returned three books she had read and picked up new books to drink until the library's next opening hours.

She loved stories about children's adventure and verses with rhythm and rhymes. Most of the poetry was simple, a few story lines featuring an animal — a fox, or a cat, or a hen or a rabbit — so she started to hum verses to herself. Her first written opus was a poem about a fox, four lines, a simple rhythm, alliteration and rhymes ending aa, bb. When she showed her verse to her parents, they smiled. “This is good. Write more, just write,” said her father. “Just go on writing.”

Reading and writing word by word paved her way through life — at school, at university and in professional life. Working in the borderland between social sciences and life sciences, much of her reading, writing and teaching has concerned the handling of risks to human health and environment.

Reading is magic, a way to discover a new world and to learn thinking in a new way about the world and how to live. For her, writing is even more magic, a challenge loaded with discoveries, a way of being and searching for thoughts, linking word to word to word to shape images of what is or what was or what might be, a way of trying to understand life and living.