Paper short abstract:

Report's based on two contradictions: State nature protection ignores local communities’ interests for the benefit of country's citizens. But nature preservation only fuels the decay of Soviet infrastructures, which are not maintained because they are dangerous to the pristine purity of nature.

Paper long abstract:

The preservation of landscapes combining different historical layers, traces of decayed infrastructures, is intricately linked to the natural dominants of these landscapes, through which they initially acquire symbolic significance. This tangle of the natural and socio-historical confuses formerly simple premise: what is the state tries to preserve? The pristine nature or those traces of adaptation to it? The first paradox of my report is that in remote villages of Western Siberia, the preservation of man-made elements of the landscape is actually the preservation of the "ruins" of the Soviet past.

Conservation policy here involves not so much the allocation of special zones of nature reserves, but the recognition as protected of those places that were previously saturated with transport and industrial infrastructure and were embedded in the history of the settlement in a special way. Such a preserve "absorbs" ruins and works in a new way with temporalities: it supports the decay of settlements, and the flourishing of nature that recovers from anthropogenic stress of the Thaw period.

Thus, conservation policy involves maintaining and nourishing simultaneously the germination and the final decay of the remains of the Soviet. That’s why wild in this case must be substantially reconsidered and a slightly different optic must be found. The second paradox shows that State protects nature for the whole country, ignoring the importance and resourcefulness of nature for the local community. This is made possible by the downscaling of the map, which lies at the heart of the imagination generated by governmentality.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores disconnects in Bhutan’s high-value low-impact tourism policy as the country negotiates wider networks of capitalism, aspirations of modernity, tourist imaginaries, shifting geopolitics, social media webs, narratives of neoliberal development, and received wisdom of conservation.

Paper long abstract:

In the remote Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, the ground-breaking policy of high-value, low-impact tourism exemplifies conservation, nature tourism, degrowth, and embodies Gross National Happiness (GNH), a living development alternative that challenges GDP-growth metrics. Intended to limit tourist impact on the country’s pristine environment and unique cultural practices, the policy provides valuable foreign revenue for national development. Based on spiritual-ecological understandings of human-environment relations, it is founded on Buddhist cosmological understanding and respect for all sentient beings. This paper overviews Bhutan’s distinct tourism policy in relation to conservation, degrowth and GNH, while exploring newfound fractures and fissures as the country is threatened by wider networks of capitalism, aspirations of modernity, tourist imaginaries, shifting geopolitics, webs of social media connectivity, and at times, uncritical received narratives of neoliberal development. Three domains of enquiry throw into sharp relief disconnects between GNH/degrowth and GDP/capitalism, as well as loopholes in tourism policy and conservation practice: suspension of the tourism policy due to COVID19, the politics of regional tourism, and in less-travelled and conservation regions; co-option and misrepresentation of Bhutan’s environment, culture, and history by foreign journalists and professional bloggers for personal gain and self-aggrandisement; and the colonization of the tourism and exploitation of nature tourism sector by foreign tour companies for personal profit. Such unchecked trends will likely result in high-volume, low-value tourism that distorts GNH through narrow GDP-business models, mass-consumer marketing, web-based apps, online-user sociological behaviour research, hyper individualism, and the paradoxical hallowing out of context-specific indigenous environmental knowledge, Buddhist ethics and wellbeing.

Paper short abstract:

The abandonment of mountain agriculture led to significant growth in wildlife population across the Italian Alps. Describing the case of an impoverished mountain valley in Trentino Province, this paper addresses the entanglements of hunting, tourism, and re-wilding in processes of conservation.

Paper long abstract:

In some of Italy’s least accessible Alpine valleys the progressive abandonment of mountain agriculture over the past half-century led to an ongoing process of re-wilding. As part of it, mountain pastures gave way to forests, mountain villages lost most of their inhabitants, and wildlife population grew to a level that is unprecedented in living memory. While some valleys benefitted from the growth in mountain tourism, particularly connected to winter sports, others experienced ongoing economic decline. This paper maps out an ongoing visual project focusing on hunting in a peripheral and impoverished mountain valley in Italy’s Trentino Province. Based on long-term ethnography among the valley’s small -- and shrinking -- community of hunters, and the use of camera traps, eco-acoustic recorders, as well as more traditional visual anthropology methods, we address the case of hunting tourism in the valley. Here, for a few years, a handful of chamois were “sold” to trophy hunters, and the revenues of such endeavor used for wildlife habitat restoration projects carried out by the local hunting association. Recently, however, this practice came to an end for two main reasons: the forced outsourcing of habitat conservation projects due to new provincial-level regulations, and the shrinking number of chamois as a consequence of the “return” of wolves in the valley. While small and seemingly inconsequential, this example shows the nexus of tourism, conservation efforts, and re-wilding that lies at the core of hunting practices in this region.