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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in the Palatinate forest (Germany), the presentation explores how the forest—conzeptualized as an intermediate zone between air, water, and soil—is narrated as an entity that both opens and closes hopes and imaginations of the future in its rural communities.

Paper long abstract

The Palatinate Forest (Pfälzerwald) is one of the largest contiguous forests in Germany. Over recent decades, its rural communities have experienced a severe decline in infrastructures such as shops, banks, and medical services. While such developments are common, the forest itself regularly becomes part of the stories people tell: as an intermediate zone between air, water, and soil, the forest and its elemental entanglements emerge as an affective environment that has shaped histories and is shaping futures.

Drawing on ethnographic research on food landscapes and infrastructures in two Palatinate communities, I explore how the forest’s presence is narrated in relation to (lost) hopes and imaginations. Outsiders often describe it as enclosing: residents lack a literal and metaphorical horizon due to the surrounding mountains, trees, and fog. Within the communities, however, the forest appears as a highly contested landscape (Bender/Winer 2001). For some, it is a source of new hopes—an environment producing oxygen and purifying water, it is imagined as an anthropocenic retreat for tourists and (future) inhabitants, making life possible even in times of climate change.

Yet these visions collide with nature protection laws that restrict required infrastructures. The forest thus opens and closes imaginations of the future at once. Weaving together these narratives of “everyday lives at the infrastructure-environment nexus” (Ojani/Ullberg/Vonderau 2024: 10), I highlight how the Palatinate Forest is not merely a setting but a dynamic actor in narrations on the possibilities and limits of living with and in a “third nature”, one despite capitalism (Tsing 2015: viii).