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Paper short abstract

This intervention explores the uneven geographies of conservation frontierization in the Southern Carpathian Mountains of Romania by discussing nested forms of environmental injustice deepened by recent conservation projects.

Paper long abstract

In Europe’s mountain areas, from the Carpathian to the Cantabrian Mountains, conservation interventions are being integrated into the EU’s strategies to relaunch the economy by addressing the joint climate-biodiversity crisis. Rewilding, private wilderness reserves, and the expansion of strict protection of biodiversity are framed as such urgent fixes to the polycrisis and promoted as opportunities to reverse rural decline in win-win scenarios that obscure complex environmental injustices stemming frontier-like extractive processes. A notable example of an emerging European conservation frontier is taking place in the Carpathian Mountains. Over the last three decades, this mountain range has witnessed a spur of complicated changes in the governance of natural resources coupled with intense forms of extractivism, including illegal logging, harmful hydropower developments and contested mining. More recently, the Carpathians are reimagined as one of Europe’s last strongholds for developing ambitious conservation projects including emblematic national parks, private wilderness reserves, and experiments in rewilding and carbon offsetting. Building on political ecology approaches, and grounded in over ten years of ethnographic engagements in various regions of Carpathian Mountains of Romania, this intervention will examine the spatial contours of wilderness protection initiatives across this emerging green internal periphery to contextualize how green growth by conservation deepens existing environmental and social injustices while reinforcing historical marginalization and vulnerabilities.