Presentation short abstract

This paper analyzes the development of oil infrastructure in Yugoslavia, arguing that the photographs in Man and Oil exhibitions did not merely depict oil infrastructure but projected it as a public good, co-constructing a petronatureculture in conjunction with other technologies of extraction.

Presentation long abstract

This paper analyzes the development of oil infrastructure in Yugoslavia and examines how the region of Vojvodina was mediated as an extractive zone through photography. The case study focuses on a series of photographic exhibitions titled Čovek i nafta (Man and Oil), held from 1978 to the late 1980s with the support of the Pančevo Oil Refinery and its cine-photography club, “Bušač” (“Driller”). Pipelines, refineries, and other industrial structures were thoroughly aestheticized, becoming legitimate subjects of artistic representation and mediating the processes of oil extraction, refinement, and transportation. The photographs did not merely depict oil infrastructure but projected it as a public good, co-constructing a Yugoslav petronatureculture in conjunction with other technologies of extraction.

Presentation short abstract

The presentation looks at the forms and practices of political ecology in post-imperial Yugoslavia (1919-1940) by looking at the modes of extraction of state-owned forests by private enterprises.

Presentation long abstract

The paper analyzes the political ecology of Southeastern Europe by examining the interplay between (global) capital flows, nature, and state governance in Yugoslavia's post-imperial state-building between 1919 and 1939. It does so by analyzing the so-called ”forest affair”, a nationwide political scandal involving the (mis)management of long-term contracts for export-oriented exploitation of state-owned forests by (foreign) private capitalist enterprises. At the center of economic, political, and environmental debates was the question of legitimate exploitation of forests as Yugoslavia's most important natural resource. The emergence of different transformative visions of forests and the role of foreign capital in them coincided with major natural disasters, including two bark beetle epidemics that caused extensive damage to economically important forest areas. Conflicts between politicians, forestry experts, and private capitalist entrepreneurs over modes of extraction and responsibility emerged and were shaped by domestic political developments, a fluctuating global timber market, and the agency of nature in the region.

The paper brings the history of Southeastern Europe into dialogue with environmental perspectives that emphasize ecology as a condition of governance and capitalism. It proposes a longue durée perspective on both the governance of nature and the ways in which nature sets limits and possibilities for this governance and its (re)configurations across different political regimes.

Presentation short abstract

This article explores socio-environmental conflicts in a Greek wildfires case study. It shows how official fire suppression clashes with Traditional Fire Knowledge and undermines local participation. Furthermore, it explores the marginalization of local forest labor and environmental degradation cau

Presentation long abstract

Rural Mediterranean areas often become the stage of big wildfires with severe impacts on landscapes and livelihoods. This article explores socio-environmental conflicts concerning fire and forest management through the case study of 2021 North Evia island wildfires. Using a political ecology analytical framework, it analyses how official fire suppression tactics clash with local values and Traditional Fire Knowledge of resin collectors and forest workers and undermines local participation, which used to be a vital part of older firefighting strategies. Furthermore, it examines opposition to new policies on fire prevention and climate mitigation through forest thinning, to highlight the marginalization of local forest labor by big contractors and perceptions of further environmental degradation caused by mechanical forest understory removal. Finally, it echoes calls for a radical reconsideration of fire and forest management in the Mediterranean, based on social needs, values and environmental justice.

Presentation short abstract

The ethnography of the game management practices in the National Park Đerdap in Eastern Serbia serves as an entry point to discuss the impact of state-organized, post-socialist public management techniques on the formation of social relationships and environments in a periphery of Eastern Europe.

Presentation long abstract

In 1974, the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia promulgated the National Park Đerdap (NP) on the southern banks of the Danube, where it forms the Iron Gorge canyons. NP Đerdap was Serbia’s first National Park and lacked institutionalized management until 1989. From 1991, a period characterized by legal insecurity during the transformation from socialism to capitalism, a resource frontier emerged in which locals poached and logged the forests and practiced charcoal burning for regional markets. The NP reacted by enforcing its management structures. Its new management plans envisioned large swaths of less protected NP territories as resources to generate funds for maintaining specially protected zones and ecological patches. The article homes in on the game management plans and specific techniques that the NP’s rangers used to create pyramidally shaped population funds of game animals to provide well-remunerated hunting tourism experiences. Especially the revenues from three trophy-bearing game animals, red deer, roe deer and wild boar, helped finance conservation measures and scientific research for strictly protected species, such as lynx. To win over the local population and curb illegal poaching, the NP simultaneously encouraged the foundation of local hunting associations. Thus, the locals could engage in cheap and legal but supervised hunting of the game animals, while also supporting the rangers’ management practices such as feeding and counting animals. The paper shadows how the game manager and his rangers, a lynx scientist, and local hunters navigated these environmental zonings and management techniques and co-shaped the ecology and politics of the NP.

Presentation short abstract

Because of the large scale and increasingly accurate map-making of the area, the delta gradually emerged as a terra economica, a passive repository of free resources (Goldstein, 2012), somewhere in between the "officially valued" and the "reserve army" (Collard and Dempsey, 2016) in the hierarchy of

Presentation long abstract

Reedbeds became visible not only as a "green sea" but also as a potentially reachable treasure chest to be soon opened in a land starting to be modernized. It was no longer the sign of "inhospitable" and "uncivilized lands", as it became a potentially civilizing resource, ready to upgrade the Danube Delta region to the higher agro-industrial socialist status, but becoming unexpectedly internally differentiated, both biologically and technologically.

The economic development of large wetlands through biological and technological research and interventions was and still is deeply entangled with plants' lives and histories, and their multiple ontologies, all of them coping with overlapping legislative layers. How reeds entwined with technology profoundly reshaped the local human communities, redistributing them alongside new extractivist projects and strategies to resist them through material and discursive plant-human alliances.

In the Danube Delta, agriculture is spreading on the large socialist ruins of the fisheries, and former cattle and pig raising socialist cooperatives. The landscape is a mix of nature[s], socialist ruins, tourism installations (sometimes using parts of the socialist remnants), and ecological restoration projects. The switch from productive socialist development and nature, to a post-socialist touristic-environment nature, involved processes of destruction but also creation of landscapes and natures.