Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explore how forest is politicized within narrations about resources in Polish forestry. It examines notion of common property, national heritage as well as new actors, like CO2. Paper reflects on a role of knowledge in this process.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to explore how forest is politicized within narrations about resources in Polish forestry. Within the question about 'the nature of the post-socialistic nature', it refers to growing body of literature on environmental politics in countries of the former Eastern Bloc (Schwartz 2006; Cellarius 2000; Blavascunas 2008).

Paper is divided into four themes. First concerns on how a forest is turned into a category of 'national heritage' by foresters and how this figure is used to control discourses about natural resources in the country. Second part focuses on a notion of 'common property', which in this case becomes equal to 'national common'. Foresters benefit from it in a debate about (re)privatization of Polish forests and claim that only natural resources, which are own by state, can be use by all Poles. In third part, basing on two above remarks, I claim that foresters` knowledge gains a status of expert knowledge in case of natural resources managment in Poland. Last section focuses on a new actor in the forest debate in Poland - CO2, which introduces a global scale of natural resources narration. Using a statement of the new Polish Ministry of the Environment that: "forest is nothing more than accumulated CO2," and his willingness to introduce a system based on re-counting absorption of CO2 by Polish forest into CO2 emission allowances, I want to reflect, what this new view on forest can mean for forests in Poland and for discourses about natural resources management.