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Paper short abstract

This talk explores eco-possession in Polish forest politics, examining how activists speak for forests. It asks how humans can rebuild relationships with forests, fostering co-becoming and blurring boundaries between nature and culture, beyond merely representing the forest.

Paper long abstract

In this talk I wonder what the eco-possession mean in Polish forest politics, where the question of who (and how) speaks for the forest becomes urgent and contested. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that while humans must inevitably speak for forests, the deeper task is to cultivate relationships with them—relationships that force us to reconsider what it means to be human.

In the context of Polish forest politics, the spokesperson (Latour 2004) for forests is mainly forest activists. They often formulate their calls not in terms of giving forests a voice, but by emphasizing human needs associated with them. Although many perceive forests as entities in their own right, they recognize that such a narrative is politically ineffective. But is this narrative effective in the long run? Does it not replicate the dominant narrative in the Western world, which separates humans from nature?

I take up Kohn's (2013) argument that forests represent themselves, without the need to speak. The claim that we, as humans, are supposed to represent forests is, in a way, objectifying. Assuming that forests want to exist, we still refer to our human need. Therefore, the key question is not what the forest says, but what can rebuilding our relationship with the forest contribute to? In my work, I argue that more than the need for representation, we need stories and language in which people become with (Haraway 1991) and through relationships with other species, in which the boundary between nature and culture becomes blurred.