Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the inevitable tensions that arise in reinventing a mining landscape as a site for environmental and personal rebirth. These frictions arise between the local population and a group of “newcomers”, who know and dwell in radically different landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

“I wanted to beat the ‘tam-tam’, and raise awareness for as many people as possible. That is when someone told me about this community here” – says Rareș, one of the young “newcomers” in Corna. Corna is part of a group of villages that have been trapped in a mining conflict for more than two decades, and which seemingly continues on its resigned road towards complete depopulation. This paper proposes to follow how colliding narratives of crises experienced on a personal level and those emergent in global discourses and experiences of globalisation have instilled a need in a group of young people to find community and turn to nature in a landscape that the remaining local population perceives as empty (Dzenovska and Knight 2020) as a result of discontinued mining activities. Reconfiguring the landscape, however, leads to inevitable tensions between those who wish to partner with nature and escape a prison of society (and societal problems) on the one hand, and on the other hand, those who understand the infiltration of trees, greenery and animals in former homes, households and social spaces as aggression. These places – in the process of dwelling – used to be tended to (Ingold 2001) by neighbours, friends, family, who no longer inhabit the social and physical environment, and whose absence is a testimony to the crises and trauma that local people have experienced on a personal and on a community level.