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Contribution short abstract

The paper investigates the paradox of nature conservationists who care for more-than-human species and about local landscapes, but are opposed to renewable energies and neglect the planetary climate crisis. It intends to make sense of the nature conservationists’ imaginaries of nature and belonging.

Contribution long abstract

Nature conservationists in Germany who adhere to the ‘classical’ or ‘traditionalist’ idea of nature and landscape conservation, which developed in the course of the 19th century and which was considerably shaped by ideas of Romanticism, seem to be a paradox: on the one hand, these actors and groups care intensively for more-than-human species and about local landscapes, thus genuinely ‘loving nature’ in Milton’s (2002) words, but on the other hand, many of them are sceptical of or even resist renewable energies and wind power in particular and therefore seem to ignore or to neglect the planetary climate crisis. This paper intends to make sense of the nature conservationists’ imaginaries of nature and belonging, thus navigating the activist-sceptic divide. By de-essentializing the opposition to wind power and investigating the diverse ideas and motivations of its actors, the paper moreover seeks to explore the transformative potential of such research. More specifically, the paper scrutinizes the nature conservationists’ imaginaries of nature and belonging and asks what distinguishes these perspectives from publicly and academically more acknowledged views on human-environment relations and on the various planetary crises as interpreted by environmental and climate protection activists. I argue that the main differences relate, first, to a divergent assessment of what constitutes ‘the human’ in relation to the more-than-human environment; and second, to the question of which cognitive and political scales matter most in human-environment relations in the Anthropocene.

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Contribution long abstract

This presentation aims to challenge the prevailing image of environmental governance as a cohesive techno-scientific field, revealing it instead as a battlefield marked by deep epistemic fractures. It examines contemporary environmental polarization through the political construction of the imaginary of social sustainability, driven in large part by the activism of environmental professionals specialized in the participatory processes. This reflection seeks to illuminate how professional practices situated at this intersection challenge the myth of a unified corporate environmental science. By navigating tensions between managerial models and participatory ideals, these actors constitute an overlooked form of social activism within environmentalism, redefining expertise from within the field. Drawing on ethnographic research with environmental impact assessment practitioners in Brazil and Canada, the analysis recenters attention on these pivotal mediators. Challenging their stigma as neoliberal co-optees, I argue they are resilient agents whose strategic agency is obscured by a simplistic tripartite framework—corporations, communities, state—that renders mediation invisible. In an era marked by polarized environmental extremes, their nuanced negotiations offer a critical counterpoint. Far from passive, these professionals deploy sophisticated tactics to reshape the environmental field. Their resistance is most visible in advocacy for more authentic participatory practices, contesting market-driven norms and redefining sustainability beyond narrow ecological and economic metrics toward a more humane environmental capitalism. Rather than a binary of co-optation or rejection, they pursue a nuanced path: the moralization of deliberative processes. Through ordinary and silent resistance, everyday professional practice becomes a key site for reimagining sustainable expertise in contemporary environmental politics.

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Contribution short abstract

This contribution demonstrates how forest owners' and forest professionals' practices relate to public polarised forest discourses in Finland. We argue that the coexistence of competing ideas about forests creates tensions but also enables innovative, ambivalent, and at times paradoxical practices.

Contribution long abstract

Public debate on forests in Finland—one of the most forested countries in Europe—is highly polarised. This polarisation is commonly framed as a conflict between actors who emphasise forest conservation, biodiversity, and climate change mitigation, and those who prioritise rural livelihoods and the economic value of forestry. By examining how forest owners' and forest professionals' interaction and management practices relate to these polarised discourses, this paper complements studies that have focused on public discourse strategies surrounding forest management in Finland.

We show that many forest owners and professionals refrain from publicly articulating their views due to fear of social and professional backlash. Yet their practices continue to evolve within this contested landscape. We argue that the coexistence of multiple, competing ideas about forests creates tensions in decision-making processes, but also enables innovative, ambivalent, and at times paradoxical practices that do not align neatly with dominant public positions. Furthermore, forest owners and professionals highlight different understandings of forests across social contexts, demonstrating how silence, selectivity, and context-dependent articulation operate as practical responses to polarisation. The contribution is based on the authors' ethnographic research.

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Contribution short abstract

A community on the Danube in southern Romania is a “quiet place”: climate change is materially embedded in everyday life yet remains weakly articulated as a political concern. I ask what might be obscured if such places fall outside an analytical frame that privileges the activist-sceptic divide.

Contribution long abstract

In a community on the Danube in southern Romania, once the home of a synthetic fertiliser plant, climate change is not debated, denied, or protested but lived. Droughts and increasingly hot summers shape routines, livelihoods, and relations to the river. I describe it as a “quiet place”: the dominant framings of climate politics do not manifest overtly. Climate activism and climate scepticism circulate largely as mediated, distant phenomena rather than as locally grounded positions. As a result, climate change remains present but politically muted: sensorially and materially experienced but discursively marginal. The recent collaboration between a capital-city environmental NGO and local residents to establish an eco-itinerary along the Danube offers one of the few instances in which environmental concerns become locally visible, framed less through protest or controversy than through an outsider group’s invitation to reconnect with nature and the river. I ask what might be obscured if such places fall outside an analytical frame that privileges the activist-sceptic divide. Do they appear as lagging behind—less informed or less concerned—or do they instead point to alternative modes of relating to climate change that are neither activist nor sceptic? What imaginaries of nature circulate in such contexts? Do they matter? Do these places count in the formulation of contemporary climate politics, or in the ways we research and conceptualise it? Attending to such sites, I argue, is essential for understanding the uneven, situated, and often understated political lives of climate change beyond the usual arenas of confrontation and mobilisation.

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Contribution short abstract

Looking at the Italian case of la famiglia nel bosco (‘the family in the woods’), this paper explores how right-wing populism mobilises enchanted ideas of nature to defend neo-rural family models, contest state authority, and produce racialised hierarchies of belonging.

Contribution long abstract

In November 2025, an Italian juvenile court removed three children from the off-grid woodland home of a UK-Australian couple in Abruzzo, citing inadequate living conditions and lack of formal schooling. The case of la famiglia nel bosco (‘the family in the woods’) rapidly moved beyond child welfare to become a national political flashpoint. Right-wing populist actors – most prominently Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini – defended the parents’ choice to raise their children ‘in nature,’ framing the intervention as an attack on parental sovereignty and authentic ways of life. Using this case as an entry point, the paper explores how nature is mobilised within Italian right-wing populism. Rather than approaching right-wing environmental politics solely through extractivist policy or climate denialism, I look at nature as a symbolic and moral resource used to legitimise alternative family models, contest state authority, and articulate exclusionary forms of belonging. In political commentary and popular media, the woodland home is cast as a romanticised space of moral purity, self-reliance, and ‘natural’ upbringing, resonating with longer-standing far-right ecological imaginaries. While family separation demands utmost care, the populist defence of the case reveals a striking asymmetry: off-grid life is celebrated as virtuous and authentic, while other marginalised forms of dwelling – most notably Roma camps, often located in peripheral or environmentally marginal spaces – are framed as sites of neglect and social failure. Rather than disrupting political binaries, such imaginaries reorganise them, aligning neo-rural lifestyles with whiteness, family normativity, and broader anxieties about autonomy and social order.