Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the highly productive ecosystems of stonewort meadows as the main engineers of conservation sites rather than as valuable objects. This perspective is ecological (Bateson 1972) rather than agentic and therefore rethinks people, lakes and macrophytes as related and intertwined.

Paper long abstract:

Stoneworts are ancient and pioneering species of complex-structured algae that form highly productive meadow communities in transparent hardwater mesotrophic glacial lakes. They are an indicator of high water clarity, but they are also ecosystem engineers – dense beds of algae trap carbon and nutrients in the benthic zone, providing bottom-up control of phytoplankton. In Poland, the meadows are protected habitats under Natura 2000, but few outside the natural sciences are aware of their role as co-creators of the ecosystem.

This paper draws upon anthropological research and proposes to think of the protected site primarily in ecological terms, focusing on how the ecosystem is created and sustained by and in multi-species relations, rather than as a result of environmental management. It argues against backgrounding nature (Plumwood 1993) and asks how, by changing the narrative, scientific writing might promote thinking of humans as connected to and dependent on an ever more-than-human sociality (Tsing 2013) rather than conservation expertise.