The Politics of Ignorance: Greenwashing and Extractivism in the Continuing Destruction of Romania’s Old-Growth Forests

• In Event: Memory, Ignorance, and Forgetting: Recent Environmental Histories of Romania and Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the role that ignorance plays in the ongoing destruction of Romania’s old-growth forests. I understand ignorance not as lack of knowledge, but as a collective process of elevating certain knowledges while marginalizing others. The destruction of Romanian old-growth forests remains one of the most ignored ecological disasters of our time. At the end of socialism, Romania was one of the largest holders of old-growth (“virgin”) forests in the world, owning two thirds of Europe’s old-growth forests. By 2018, their surface was reduced to half due to both legal and illegal logging, a process that was accelerated by the global pandemic and intensified in recent years. In my paper, I use the tools of oral history interviewing, environmental history, and participatory research to document the causes of continued deforestation, local and transnational responses to this crisis, and to identify potential solutions. I argue that the European Union membership, which Romania gained in 2007 alongside Bulgaria, concluding a process initiated in the 1990s, has opened up both bureaucratic mechanisms that can curb illegal logging at the local level and markets for the extraction of Romanian labor and prime materials. However, extractivism as performed by transnational corporations, aided by greenwashing mechanisms, another form of ignorance, is likely to overwhelm any regulatory attempts. I interrogate possible responses to this crisis, from nationalist discourses to activist networks such as Forest Movement Europe, and I argue for a vision of ecological justice rooted in local histories of human-nonhuman interaction.

Author

• Ileana Nachescu, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey