In this recent lecture, dr. Agata A Konczal explores how policy discourses and narratives about forest ‘collapse’ and ‘disturbances; reflect power relations and exemplify specific worldviews. Take a look at this presentation (on youtube)!

This presentation draws on stories of a windstorm in the Tuchola Forest (Poland), bark beetle outbreaks in the Białowieża Forest (between Belarus and Poland) and the High Tatra (between Slovakia and Poland), and other forest disturbances. These and similar phenomena that have been increasingly observed across Europe are described as natural disasters or calamities, forest crises or the collapse of the nature management paradigm, or the end of traditional forestry. It depends on where you ask and to whom you are talking. When pondering the question of what is happening in modern society and how to describe its contemporary dynamics, it is worth pausing to explore what is seen and portrayed as a forest, or more broadly, a natural disaster. Forest disaster narratives are not neutral or naïve. On the contrary, they reflect power relations and are related to more complex discourses, becoming exemplifications of specific worldviews. Definitions of natural disasters and questions about what climate change is, when and where disasters take place, whether something is “natural” or belongs to the “natural order”, and how specific disasters are categorized as a result, have become integral parts of social debate. These various and competing meanings constitute a platform for social conflicts, where polarizing and binary opposition-based language dividing reality into nature and culture, natural and manufactured, native and foreign no longer fulfills its dialogical function. Disaster narratives have become spaces of the struggle for power, dominance, resources, and identity. They are situated somewhere between the “old Earth” (Latour, 2017) and alternative visions of the future. They are part of our search for an (un)certain future.