Monica Vasile

Maastricht University | UM · Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

"The Forest Never Ends: Timbermen, Mafias and Bison in the Postsocialist Carpathian Mountains" is my current book project, manuscript due October 2019. The monograph will be published as part of the RCC’s series on Environment in History: International Perspectives. It is built upon fifteen years of research. I draw on a large array of ethnographic and archival sources, including more than 300 collected oral histories. The book reveals the grassroots stories that shape the contemporary Carpathian forests, communities and personal life-worlds in the post-socialist period. It explores layers of interconnected human relationships and changing ecologies. The monograph takes the reader through different areas of the Carpathians and explores a large cast of characters, from timber barons to lumberjacks, from foresters to regional politicians. As an interdisciplinary project, it is situated at the confluence between anthropology, history and political ecology. The monograph will be the first in the field of environmental humanities dedicated exclusively to the Carpathian forests. The Romanian Carpathian Mountains have become an extractive resource frontier of Europe after the fall of socialism. Communities experienced boom and bust economies, while the forests were being restituted, logged, reforested, mapped, classified as ‘virgin’, or became sites of experimental rewilding. Grappling with legacies of socialism, with world-wide economic crises, or the rise of environmentalism - the post-socialist forests were shaped by continuous social and political struggles. The book is structured in three parts. The first part tells the story of ‘a moment of freedom’ in the aftermath of the fall of socialism. At this time, the mountain timbermen of the Carpathians started to log frantically, to process timber, and to carry large quantities of logs and timber towards unquenchable markets. I capture in this part a forest animated by people, by a frenzy of the free forests, and the lure of windfall gains, which enabled the timber entrepreneurs of the Carpathians to prosper. This experience of the free forests also developed a production-commodity way of looking at forests, which fitted well with an ingrained local belief that ‘forests never end’, meaning that whenever they are cut, forests will grow back even more forcefully, like hair. The second part moves to another location in the Carpathians and develops another way of animating the forest. This is the fiefdom forest, a forest of warlords and mafia fighting to profit from logging. After the frenzy of the frontier moment was over, control institutions started to be stronger, which resulted in an increase in corruption and politics entangled in resource extraction. Timber businesses grew larger as some of the small traders became big timber barons; their extraction capacity grew, which meant forests were cut down at great speed and across space. Locally, vulnerable and precarious forest workers, subjected by the barons, perceived the forests to be ‘eaten’, experiencing emerging disasters linked to logging, including landslides and flash floods. The commodity forests started ‘to end’ as valuable accessible trees started to be scarcer and scarcer. Yet the forest per se remained in people’s beliefs as ‘never ending’. The third part is the forest of rewilding, of environmentalism and of state rule. It tells two interconnected stories: the well-managed forests, cared for and spared from modern through socialist till contemporary times, gain new value as virgin corners of wilderness, spaces for reintroducing near extinct species. these are the forests of the future, as envisaged by conservation initiatives, the forests in which the little people and their 'destructive' practices have no place. Yet, they are forests layered with human histories. In this part I write from the perspective of the forestry district and forestry planners and specialists.