Contribution short abstract:

The paper integrates environmental history and world-ecology approaches to investigate recent processes of frontier-making in Eastern Europe. Here wilderness becomes a new resource aimed at fixing global environmental crises as the region shifts from extractivism to strict protection of nature.

Contribution long abstract:

The incorporation of Eastern Europe (EE) within global green capitalism is an unexplored phenomenon. This paper argues that EE is currently redefined as a green internal periphery of the European Union, where newly discovered wild areas act as a new resource that becomes an instrumental element in the EU’s strategies for promoting green growth and addressing climate change mitigation. The paper integrates environmental history and world-ecology perspectives to investigate recent processes of frontier-making from extractivism to strict protection of nature. Discovering, mapping and designating biodiversity hotspots as untouched nature facilitates the creation of wilderness into a new resource that can be commodified towards sustaining the green growth agendas fostered by the European Green Deal. Seen within the global efforts to secure extensive land areas for green growth, this wilderness momentum emerges as a process of re-territorialization, raising significant questions about environmental and social injustices. On the ground, conservation interventions which advance capital accumulation, such as rewilding, restoration and expanding protected areas are intimately connected with land abandonment and depopulation, triggering transformations of traditional agricultural landscapes, a decline of sylvopastoral systems, and an imminent demise of local ecological knowledge. As the frontier shifts, logging in old-growth forests ceases in favour of wilderness reserves, marginal agriculture makes room for rewilding, and pastoralism declines while large carnivores return. This frontier shift is an abrupt phenomenon and involves processes of criminalization where states' attempts to tackle illegal logging, mining or hunting lead to new forms of violence and marginalization of the most vulnerable.