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Paper short abstract:

The paper takes a closer look at the state-forest relationship in Poland and explores how these dynamics contribute to the creation of green frontiers. Focusing on planting rather than cutting, it offers an analysis of the power relations inscribed and embodied in nature management activities.

Paper long abstract:

The paper takes a closer look at the state-forest relationship and explores how these dynamics contribute to the creation of green frontiers. It uses the example of the Polish state and Polish forest discourses to analyse how and when the state creates discourses about the forest to serve its current objectives and policies. Tracing the historical approaches of the Polish state(s) to forest restoration practices, the paper looks at past actions since 1918 through which the Polish state has restored the forest to trace the discursive practices of forest nationalisation. Combining historical perspectives with contemporary discussions of forest restoration linked to the European Union initiatives (Biodiversity Strategy, Forest Strategy) and global institutions, the text offers an analysis of the power relations inscribed and embodied in nature management activities. Focusing on planting rather than cutting, and restoring rather than deforesting, the article describes the use of environmental governance policy tools to maintain power over discursive and material actions in relation to the landscape by states and/or international institutions. It also introduces and discusses the concept of green frontiers (Konczal, 2022; Konczal&Asselin, in preparation) – areas where nature conservation is pushed out to marginal areas, that, as a result, become constructed as “nature refuges” firstly by policies and political decisions and secondly by material actions that are outcomes of these policies. This article is embodied in a forest anthropology perspective.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Irish forests' history and contemporary framing, examining how grass-roots afforestation resistance today is often understood through a land use policy and forest science lens that fails to account for ongoing acts of rural exclusion and control.

Paper long abstract:

Forests and land control in rural Ireland have a long history wherein external forces and their social and economic priorities have worked to curate a rural aesthetic and behavior. In this, marginal agricultural lands and their inhabitants have been a consistent target: first for deforestation and later for afforestation. Through British colonial extraction, Irish wood was historically used as raw material, cleared for agriculture, and removed to expose Irish rebels. However, during the 20th century, a prior focus on deforestation shifted toward a targeted afforestation campaign, resulting in forest expansion from an estimated one percent of the total national area, to closer to eleven percent today. Growth over the last century is the product of a sustained national effort to be less reliant on imported wood products while simultaneously building a forest industry from the ground up by creating a resource that has not existed in abundance for centuries. Despite the shift between forest contraction and expansion, forests remain a focus of policies that reshape rural regions and exclude rural residents. This paper explores Irish forests' history and contemporary framing, examining how grass-roots afforestation resistance today is often understood through a land use policy and forest science lens that fails to account for ongoing acts of rural exclusion and control. Ultimately I argue that the ways local problems with afforestation are officially framed not only mute local voices but draw attention away from more systemic issues like how afforestation contributes to a wider accumulation strategy and reworks the property relationship.

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Paper long abstract:

In the late 1930s, on the slopes of Monte Giano, above the town of Antrodoco in Central Italy, recruits studying at the nearby Academy of the Forestry Corps planted 20,000 black Austrian pines to spell out DUX, Benito Mussolini’s title in Latin. The outcome was an arboreal inscription so grand in scale that it is still today visible from Rome, some 100 kilometers away. This controversial formation stood intact until August 2017 when a fire – deemed an accident – burned down part of the forest, giving rise to a critical conversation about the meanings and values of politically manipulated human landscapes.

My paper charts the socio-environmental history of the DUX forest as well as the debate that has ensued about the future of this arboreal monument to Italian fascism. In analyzing the varied reactions to the 2017 fire from outsiders – some advocate its total erasure, while neo-fascist groups have begun plans to restore it – as well as within the local community, I investigate how the DUX forest is not just a spectacle but a repository of material stories, a concrete three-dimensional shared reality characterized by a series of processes and connections that weave together political institutions, human communities, and the nonhuman environment.

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Paper long abstract:

Recently, previously neglected species have taken the foreground to narrate the stories of human and non-human interspecies entanglements in times of crisis (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019; Tsing 2023). Drawing from this debate, the contribution explores the ecological entanglements and frictions generated by the presence of Eucalyptus in Sardinia (Italy), Galicia (Spain), and Portugal. Eucalyptus has been planted in Europe roughly since the 1850s (Doughty 2000). Until the 1950s, agroforestry experts praised the Eucalyptus for its high range of wood biomass and its ability to reclaim ‘empty’ lands. Later, the EU’s afforestation projects helped to expand the existence of the Eucalyptus in Europe. The overwhelming presence of Eucalyptus plants in the landscape of Sardinia, Galicia, and Portugal is raising tensions among citizens, scientists, loggers, beekeepers, and local decision-makers. In all three areas, the narration of the Eucalyptus as a ‘vegetal colonizer’ who has no right to root in the soil because it’s threatening the landscape’s cultural heritage contrasts with the visions of beekeepers, hunters, and local loggers (Meloni 2021). The latter consider the plants an environmental and economic resource for they shelter many species, provide food for pollinators, and represent a fundamental source of economic income in the paper and biomass industry.

The paper shows how the management of Eucalyptus forests reproduces local power dynamics and fuels new forms of land grabbing connected to green energy production. Finally, the contribution reflects on how the plant-human-nonhuman relationships in the above-mentioned areas produce conflicting discourses on sustainability, biodiversity conservation, and green development.

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Paper long abstract:

Tree heather (Erica arborea) is a shrub species whose hard root is used for making smoking pipes and dog toys which are sold globally. The whole material for these industries comes from its collection in specific, relatively humid mountain forests around the Mediterranean. Since that collection in the wild is usually carried out by precarious local workers on their own, this supply chain is a good example of what Tsing (2015) terms “salvage accumulation”. Approaches to this concept up to now have hardly dealed with the practical and somatic experiences of the human-environmental relations involved. In this paper we try to further its analytical potentialities and, drawing on the case of heather uprooting in the Andalusian mountains (Spain), ask: What is, in practice, involved in these relations? Which ecologies, overlapping temporalities, human skills and social arrangements make possible heather collection? In that sense, through a phenomenological lens, we explore the operations and work rythms put into practice in what we term person-pickaxe-heather system following Bateson (1973). Likewise, within an ethnographic context characterised by the predominance of large estates, we show the relevance of land access through a focus on workers’ movements and their tensions and (tacit) agreements with landowners. They seem to build on a moral economy operating as a long-lasting (and unstable) balance. In short, we explore uprooting in order to address some of the roots of current more-than-human worlds in the Mediterranean mountains.

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Paper long abstract:

Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain), similarly to other European regions, is witnessing a process of afforestation, particularly since the second half of the 20th century, driven by the decline of agricultural, livestock, and forestry practices among local populations. While the expansion and increased density of forests can contribute to mitigating the effects of climate change at a global scale, they also present a pivotal challenge: an elevated risk of catastrophic wildfires, as witnessed in many Mediterranean areas in recent decades. This communication presents an ethnographic case study centred on the Serra de Tramuntana Natural Site in Mallorca. Though ethnographic research, I explore how the afforestation process that has been undergoing for more than seven decades lies in the centre of many social tensions regarding the environmental management strategies implemented in the protected area. Notably, the aftermath of the 2013 wildfire -the largest ever recorded in the Balearic Islands- emerges as a critical juncture that intensified these tensions. Such insights on the multiple and complex ways in which forest and forest transformations are experienced can contribute to creating more fire-resilient landscapes and communities.

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Paper long abstract:

Across France, efforts to reclaim abandoned farmland are multiplying. Policies and tools are being developed to identify plots of land that have remained uncultivated, neglected for decades by modernised agriculture. Seen as a way of freeing up land for organic farming or green energy development, reclamation projects often involve the mechanised clearing of large areas. They are based on the argument that the spontaneous vegetation growing on abandoned farmland is “too homogeneous” and that biodiversity would be improved by opening up the environment.

This is a hotly debated issue in conservationist circles, where farmland abandonment is increasingly seen as an opportunity for free forest growth. Environmentalists are torn between condemning clearances as disguised deforestation or supporting the “environmentally virtuous” projects developed on cleared land. They argue over the correct characterisation of the spontaneous regrowth: hybrid forms of “scrub” or “thicket”, reluctantly called true “forest”. Their forest potential is constantly being questioned, putting theories of ecological succession to the test. Echoing naturalists’ discomfort in dealing with “overgrowth”, I explore the political and conceptual issues at stake.

Focusing on the case study of a pioneering scheme to reclaim a significant amount of abandoned land in a coastal village, this paper examines the unplanned “doing” of forests on the margins of agricultural modernisation, and their paradoxical “undoing” by new green politics. Drawing on a multispecies ethnography, I also consider how these processes of foresting affect property regimes, and frame human action on the environment.

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Paper long abstract:

The paper illustrates key events in the history of Austrian spruce trees over the last 600 years. Arguing for a look back further in time than most contemporary theories working on the topic propose, it encourages to view the histories of Austrian spruce trees as neither rooted just in the last 200 years nor apolitical. Tracing the interconnection of changes in forests with the fight for labor rights and land ownership it argues that the history of trees is far from being apolitical and, in fact, is a result of historical processes spanning through the different phases of capitalism.

In an interconnected world where national states frame the so-called-health of forests as purely a matter of a more mindful individual choice of forestry strategies the present racist structuring within the Austrian forestry sector is largely ignored.

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Paper long abstract:

French forests are now at the crossroads of multiple dynamics and expectations: while they are supposed to be managed to ensure their multifunctionality, they are pointed out as a major carbon sink by national policies, and as the remedy for climate change mitigation. Simultaneously, French forests are increasingly impacted by on-going climate change (droughts, bio-aggressors, fires), which alters their functioning and survival. In this context, how is the injunction to multifunctionality, at the heart of French forest policies, translated into practices at local level? To what scale is multifunctionality implemented and by whom (which forest manager’s profiles)? How is the discourse on multifunctionality used and distributed among forest actors?

First, through collective workshops and qualitative surveys in three French regional natural parks (Pyrénées ariégeoises, Luberon and Morvan), we shed light on the choices being currently made in an attempt to undo the current forests and create tomorrow’s forests. Second, within this multifunctionality framework, our study shows that (1) while the mitigation function is strongly mobilized in political discourse at regional and national scales, the ones of wood production and biodiversity protection are more so in practice, (2) mitigation discourse and policies (e.g. low-carbon strategies and the national forest renewal plan launched in 2020), however, reproduce and reinforce existing power dynamics in French forest management (institutional forests and forestry cooperatives vs citizen forest groups).

Our research highlights the continuities and discontinuities in both discourses, practices and coalitions regarding forest management in the face of the multifunctionality challenges.

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Paper long abstract:

Planting trees is a key “nature-based solution” to climate change and biodiversity loss around the world. This includes bringing woodlands back into landscapes that once hosted them—a reversal sometimes called a “forest transition.” Yet creating new forests entails much more than just planting trees. It also entails significant and sometimes contested cultural and political work. This paper elucidates some of this work through analysis of woodland creation efforts in the North of England—one of the least forested parts of Europe and a focus of new woodland creation. It points to the limitations of new subsidies and other policies meant to incentivize tree planting in landscapes that are valued for being largely treeless. In so doing, it illuminates woodland creation in the Anthropocene as a political process that extends far beyond tree planting.