Forest futures: biopolitics, purity, and extinction in Europe’s last ‘pristine’ forest

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the ideological and material aspects of ‘purity’ play out in the environmental conflict in the Białowieża Forest that took place in Poland in 2017. I consider how ‘purity’ informs not only environmental politics but also organizes biopolitical regimes that normalize the hegemonic understanding of nation, identity, and gender. In the context of environmental change and species extinction, I pick up on Foucault’s reflection on purity and its decisive role in biopolitical societies, as it divides lives into those worth preserving and those without a future. Against such divisions, I search for ways to imagine and enact ways of surviving together: I look at the Białowieża Forest as a human-nonhuman ecology in which nature’s lively impurity inspires the affinities running between environmental actions and feminist struggles for more just futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental change
• purity
• gender
• reproductive politics
• nationalism
• Białowieża Forest

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to special issue editors, Kathrin Thiele and Christine L. Quinan, and two anonymous reviewers for their generous work of care and critique that helped me to clarify my argument and inspired new questions and research ideas. I wish to thank Turku Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Turku in Finland for the funding and an institutional home to carry out my project on the Białowieża Forest. I would like to extend my thanks to researchers involved in a project ‘Perception of European bison and primeval forest in the 19th century: Shared cultural and natural heritage of Poland and Lithuania’. Specifically, to Tomasz Samojlik, Anastasia Fedotova, Aurika Ričkienė, Piotr Daszkiewicz, and Marianna Szczygielska from whom I learnt so much about the Forest. I owe special thanks to artist Cecylia Malik for her support and our conversations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Such heterogenous nationalistic discourse does not necessarily coincide with the local understanding of who counts as ‘us.’ Locals living in the towns and villages in the vicinity of the Białowieża Forest form multi-cultural borderland communities. Many of the inhabitants identify as Belarusian or tutejszy (‘from here’), and the majority is either Roman Catholic or Orthodox.

2. For scholarship on intersections running between exploitation of natural environment, colonialism, racism, and sexism, see, e.g. Merchant, 1990; McClintock (1995); Wynter (2003).

3. Minister Jan Szyszko expressed it in the following comment: ‘the Białowieża Forest is a flagship of the whole libertarian Western Europe that believes that the human is the biggest enemy of natural resources’ (cited in Jurszo, 2017).

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Notes on contributors

Olga Cielemęcka

Olga Cielemęcka is a Turku Institute for Advanced Studies postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Gender Studies, University of Turku in Finland. She works at the intersection of gender studies, feminist philosophy, and environmental humanities. Her research focuses on contemporary environmental challenges in broader political, ethical, and multispecies perspectives. In her recent project, she ventures into territories of plant thinking, queer ecologies, and forest philosophy to explore ‘green’ politics in the Białowieża Forest in Poland.