Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how the Skouries forest in northern Greece became political space as mining extraction reshaped human–forest relations, generating practices of commoning, embodied ethics of care, and "protesting with the trees" against Eldorado Gold.

Paper long abstract

How do forests become political? This paper examines the Skouries forest in Halkidiki, northern Greece, as it was transformed from an everyday landscape of livelihood into contested political terrain through struggles against the Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold since 2012. It traces how human–forest relations were reconfigured as extraction threatened both ecological systems and collective life.

The paper focuses on three interconnected dimensions of forest defense. First, it explores the forest’s “social life”: its embedding in beekeeping, foraging, logging, and intergenerational memory, functioning as commons that sustained communities through war, civil war, and economic crisis. Second, it analyzes mining infrastructure as a political border that fragmented the forest horizontally through roads, fences, and surveillance, and vertically by restricting access to water, subterranean knowledge, and archaeology, while polarizing communities along pro- and anti-mining lines. Third, it traces how resistance took the form of commoning: collective practices that reassembled the forest’s fractured worlds through memory work, grassroots governance, counter-information networks, and sustained bodily presence.

Central to this analysis is “protesting for and with the trees.” When villagers carried cut branches through Thessaloniki as banners or described 200-year-old trunks as “dead friends,” they enacted response-ability, recognizing human and nonhuman fates as inseparable. These practices generated new political subjectivities grounded in embodied ethics of care, transforming lawful citizens into state-designated “criminals” for defending what they lived as commons.

The Skouries case contributes to anthropological debates on commons, political ecology, and politics, showing how forests emerge not as passive backdrops but as participants shaping resistance.