Anthropocene Scholarship and Communist Legacies of Conservation

• In Event: Conceptions of National Parks and Nature Reserves under Socialism and in Post-Socialist Societies

Abstract

Conservation discourse in the age of the Anthropocene has changed the way practitioners think about what they preserve. If national parks cannot stop extinction and humans cannot maintain nature for target species then what role will national parks have in the future? This paper explores an aspect of this thought-avenue at the Polish-Belarusian borderland, in an area frequently touted as "Europe's last primeval forest," Bialowieza (Poland) and Belaveskhaya (Belarus). What is the role of the communist past in mediating a relationship with changing landscapes and altered species composition within these two famous national parks? Drawing upon ethnographic research from the last twenty years, I weave together on-the-ground perceptions of natural resource relationships with recent scholarship about wildlife in the age of the Anthropocene. I show how a legacy of state socialism and the specter of communism continue to trouble nature conservation even as conservators and other resource actors muddle through best practices. Reframing local concerns in relation to a world in which nature and culture lost their dichotomous difference can open up new possibilities for imagining emergent ecologies and for living with processes of evolution when the target is unclear. This paper explores a host of interrelated issues in the Polish and Belarus Parks all of which draw upon imaginaries of state socialism and primeval European forests. I take a multi-species approach to this question showing how non-human agents, such as bark beetles and bison, respond to human dramas rooted in the communist past.

Author

• Eunice L Blavascunas, Whitman College