| How does the past trouble ecological projects in the postsocialist context? This dissertation is an ethnographic account of how farmers, foresters, conservation biologists and nature activists selectively draw from ideas about the communist and peasant pasts to negotiate the future of rural, northeastern Poland. There are several new national parks in northeastern Poland and "too many" small farmers for the European Union's agricultural subsidy program triggering a cascade of notions about how to properly develop.;Based upon two years of ethnographic field work and over 13 years of visits to the Bialowieza Forest and Biebrza Marsh, I explore how the social life of natural spaces changed together with divergent understandings of what these pasts could mean in the transition to free market capitalism under EU structures. Engaging with literature from political ecology and postsocialist studies I look at how certain aspects of the communist and peasant pasts are celebrated, yet others fester, or are even forgotten and thus affect how land is used and preserved.;In fine-grained ethnographic detail, I argue that political ecology needs to be attentive to how notions of romantic nature have survived the socialist era to be reproduced anew in political postoscialist struggles over memory, land, and economy. Furthermore, insights from postsocialism can critically inform political ecology: Postsocialism's explicit attention to how the realities of capitalism mediate a relationship with the past must be calculated into political ecology's concern with how the past is obscured in the making of nature preserves. This study demonstrates that projections of the past are an integral part of the success and failure of ecological projects. |
