Paper short abstract:

The paper offers the analysis of the impact of knowledge transfers in the field of environmental engineering, natural sciences and environmental conservation on the local ecology of knowledges which emerged among more-than-human communities in the wetlands of Narew National Park.

Paper long abstract:

The paper offers the analysis of the impact of knowledge transfers from the field of environmental engineering, natural sciences and environmental conservation into the situated worlds which emerged among more-than-human communities in the wetlands of Narew National Park. Tracing this process, which has its beginning in 1970 and continues to this day, is possible with use of Micha Rahder’s ecology of knowledges theoretical framework – a way to conduct ethnographic research sensitive to partial connections and multiplicity of emerging, interconnected, onto-epistemologically meaningful points of view. This framework is useful especially to follow relations between institutions, infrastructures, different kinds of inscriptions and interventions conducted by human and nonhuman agents. Research reveals that situated actions of the national park team, state representatives and third sector organisations serve to restore the conditions prior to drainage interventions in the area and are based on an acknowledgement of the benefits of maintaining a sustainable homeostasis of a self-regulating, isolated system. Nevertheless, the material-discursive practices of separation exist only in the intertwining of phenomena operating on vastly different scales: planetary processes, neoliberal values adapted in post-socialist Poland and local heritage of dealing with non-human world. Hence the conclusion, that nature protection forms associated with local history of knowledge transfer processes are methods of producing a fragile equilibrium within a troublesome static frame of closed landscape system in emergent, open worlds heading towards many uncertain futures in a time of climate crisis.