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Paper short abstract

This paper explores what normality means when a catastrophic event triggers the outbreak of an unprecedented epidemic and exacerbates a long-standing endemic phenomenon. Grounded in ethnography, it describes where local people draw the line of normality and talk about the “new natural”.

Paper long abstract

In 2018, the storm Vaia hit Comelico, in Northeastern Italy, and crashed fifteen million trees to the ground. After the initial shock, weeks of emotional talking and intense doing followed. Then, the still ongoing phase of “long Vaia” started, when locals had to decide what to do with/in the forest. Restoring it to the same, vast and disorderly extension it had when Vaia hit, which was the result of the post-1950s abandonment of agriculture, husbandry and forestry? Or restoring it with intensive forestry as a priority, as before the 1950s? Or letting nature restore it? In 2022, the slow return to normality was interrupted by the bark beetle, a wood-eating insect that had long been present in the area but that, after Vaia, benefited from the overabundance of dead red spruces (the insect’s favourite and the most hit by Vaia) and global warming to expand its population and attack live trees. It is in this wounded context that, in 2023, I arrived in Comelico to continue the ethnography on ticks and humans I had been conducting in other parts of the Belluno province. Locals had no doubt that, like bark beetles, ticks too increased after Vaia, for reasons not fully understood yet but likely connected to how forests have been managed in the “normality” before Vaia and, after it, in the reconstruction of a nature that seems too much – too abnormal – to describe, discuss and handle. This paper explores local discourses and newspaper articles about this ongoing crisis.