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Paper short abstract

The paper investigates how Polish wetland national parks and local activists draw on narratives of lost agrarian and amphibian worlds to ascribe distinctive values to protected landscapes, framing these efforts as practices of ‘past presencing’ (Macdonald 2013).

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how ‘past presencing’ practices (Macdonald 2013) in Polish wetland national parks and surrounding communities invoke the ‘lost’ agrarian and amphibian past to support the biocultural heritage making process and negotiate contemporary conservation governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper analyzes narrative and visual strategies deployed in two contrasting sites.

In towns near Ujście Warty National Park, ‘past presencing’ addresses a collective memory gap created by the post-1945 population replacement. Local activists reconstruct both German everyday life and the early years of new settlers. It is a way of creating a connection with an abandoned landscape. The national park integrates these reconstructions, emphasizing also Frederick the Great’s Enlightenment-era Warthebruch drainage. It helps government agents to frame the landscape as biocultural heritage. Narratives of ‘lost’ agrarian worlds legitimize conservation by portraying human labor and hydrotechnical interventions as foundational to today’s more-than-natural biodiversity.

At Narew National Park, ‘past presencing’ asserts that the wetlands are inherently part of local collective memory after the decline of extensive farming under mechanization and intensification processes. The park honours pre-1970s mowing and grazing as a “golden age,” using photographs and storytelling to root large-scale conservation practices in traditional stewardship. For residents, these representations affirm individual ownership of the land and subtly challenge the park’s governance.

Together, these cases demonstrate that ‘past presencing’ can be functionalized in multiple ways: it legitimizes conservation measures, empowers local critique of conservation governance, and reconfigures wetlands into protected biocultural heritage – valued as integral more-than-human and more-than-natural landscape.