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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in Lithuanian peatlands, this paper examines how conservationists rewet bogs drained during Soviet resource extraction. It shows how care practices reassemble unstable ground, negotiate fractured memories, and rework decolonial ecological futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how conservationists in Lithuania engage with landscapes of drained and emptied bogs—former peat excavation sites—new grounds where ecological intervention entangles with unresolved Soviet legacies and imagined environmental futures. Across the Baltic region, peatland rewetting projects have become central to addressing climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet in Lithuania, these projects unfold in landscapes profoundly transformed by Soviet-era industrialisation and agricultural intensification, which produced one of the most heavily drained territories in the world. While the material effects of this transformation are well documented, its cultural and political dimensions remain understudied.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with NGO conservation practitioners and local residents across peatlands in Lithuania, this paper adopts the notion of frontier assemblage to analyse how environmental restoration care practices translate post-Soviet abandonment into decolonial world-making. Intensive drainage and peat extraction once served as tools of Soviet colonial governance, social engineering, and environmental knowledge production; their traces persist in both the landscape and local memory, foregrounding reasons for socio-ecological intervention.

Today, conservationists working to rewet these damaged wetlands navigate inherited legacies that framed peat bogs as unproductive nature to be reclaimed for energy and agricultural use. Their practices reveal how the frontier is continually reassembled through engagements with water, soil, species, and competing historical imaginaries. Through labour of care and multispecies engagement, networks of solidarity and shared imaginaries form. I argue that conservationists operating on landscapes marked by silenced or fractured memories open up possibilities for reconfiguring both ecological futures and the meaning of the peatland itself.