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Instytut Antropologii i Etnologii
Urszula Magdalena Małecka
Kierunek i specjalność studiów:
etnologia, specjalność Cultural Differences and Transnational Processes,
studia w języku angielskim
Numer albumu:
43745
How to let the forest be?
Anthropology of forest activism in Poland
Jak pozwolić lasom być? Antropologia aktywizmu leśnego w Polsce
Praca magisterska
napisana pod kierunkiem
prof. UAM dr hab. Aleksandry Lis-Plesińskiej
Poznań 2023
2
Contents
Introduction 4
Between forest activism and forest: background and field 6
So what is it about? 9
First chapter. Anthropology of forest activism 12
The activist-ethnographer: role of being in the field 13
More than human anthropology 17
Science as the art of translation 23
Talking about representation 27
Synthesis: towards the anthropology of forest activism 30
Interlude. Mycorrhizal fungi 33
Second chapter. Forest activism – the activist strategist 35
Forest(s), state and transformation 37
Forest movement – values and interconnections 42
Building a structure 46
Local forest 50
New forestal order 54
Interlude. Scotch pine 56
Third chapter. Welcome in the forest – the activist’s ways of living with 58
Władek: learning from symbiosis 59
Wojtek: world-making projects 64
Different knowledges about forest 68
Forests in Poland as more than human socialities 71
Conclusion. Where does the forest end? 73
Bibliography 77
3
Introduction
I wrote this paper in the city. It wasn't easy –writing about the forest and not being able
to be inside it. Sometimes I walked out onto the balcony to my provisional office when the
sun was setting down around the corner of the apartment building. I was fortunate that there
were trees growing behind the balcony –three momentous thick-leaved lindens. I could hear
the sounds of the construction site, coming from behind the linden trees, and of car engines,
from all directions, but I could also hear the birds –pigeons, titmice, magpies and a few more
I don't recognize –I could see them jumping over the linden trees and carrying its withered
branches in their beaks. I had planted a flower meadow in pots a few months earlier, so in late
June I had bees visiting my office pollinating purple phacelia. There was also a small spider
weaving a web between the lovage and mint. At the time, I enjoyed experiencing at least a
little bit of these other-than-human worlds I was writing about, and I felt that my work had
some meaning. I felt that I was part of something bigger –this world made up of many
different worlds, a world of multi-species entanglements that I still know so little about. And
I also felt that by writing this work –despite being far away from the forest –I was learning
more about them.
— Human history is the history of logging — Wojtek, my research partner, said at our
first meeting in the forest. It was about a year and a half earlier than my writing on the
balcony. We passed bare stretches of land where trees had grown just a few weeks ago. To a
forester, the land after logging is also a forest, it's just one stage in its development. However,
for the people I walked with, it was definitely not a forest. — Now, for the first time in
human history this is reversed, people have never before fought against logging on such a
scale — Wojtek added. Moments later, someone asked us to stand on the stumps of the felled
pines while he took a photo. He handed us placards with the inscription –this forest was for
you. Was it?
When looking at the history of forests globally, Wojtek is right. Since the beginning of
great human civilizations, forests have become fewer and fewer. Wood has always been
almost indispensable to us, and certainly since we learned its miraculous properties. It is said
that the ancient Egyptians imported wood from Phoenicia (Hobhouse 2010: 19). Wood was
one of the most important natural resources for human progress. Especially as populations
grew, when hunter-gatherers became farmers, and even more so when early urban cultures
emerged (Hobhouse 2010: 19). Trees declined at different rates in different parts of the world.
4
They quickly ran out of forest in England, so they started harvesting wood from the richly
forested Americas. No one thought at the time that it might end there too. Wood was
harvested not only as fuel, but also as a material for building houses, railroads, bridges, carts,
ships or making furniture, and some forests were cleared for cultivation. Until the 19th
century, there was no planned forest management, so no new trees had been planted in
cleared areas by that time (Hobhouse 2010: 46, 64).
For a large part of human history, forests were primarily timber –a resource. And this
is still the case today. But there were and are other values related to the forest. Forests are and
have been home, tradition, shelter, knowledge, faith, food, life, peace, inspiration, fear.
Different people, at different times and in different places, have entered into different
relationships with the forest. And bringing out this great diversity of what the forest is to us is
one of the goals of my work.
My work is primarily an invitation to look at the forest from the perspective of the
people who protect it –forest activists. The forest I will show here is a living forest and a
social one, full of multi-species entanglements and processes. It is a forest in the eyes of the
people who fight to preserve it, but also in my own eyes.
When I write about the forest here, I do not have in mind its dictionary definition,
assuming that the forest is a complex of vegetation with a predominance of trees and peculiar
fauna. I look at the forest more broadly, shifting the focus from the entities that shape the
forest ecosystem to their relationships. Close to my understanding of the forest is the
definition of Jan J. Karpinski, for whom a forest is "a dynamic creation of nature in which are
united into an indivisible whole by a system of dependencies, connections and mutual
influences: specific vegetation with a predominance of woody forms, associated animals, and
the geological substrate, soil, water and climate used by plants and animals" (Karpinski,
1965). The relational view already seems to be an immanent feature of modern
anthropological studies, including those on the forest. Anna Tsing calls the forest a
multi-species landscape (Tsing 2013) noting the interconnectedness of human and non-human
entities within it. According to this approach, the forest is also co-created by humans. The
interactions of humans, wolves, pines, moss or woodpeckers –they are the forest –as I wrote
in my BA Thesis in 2021.
5
Between forest activism and forest: background and field
I began my research in January 2022, but I have been exploring the topic of perceptions
of nature, forests or forestry in Poland since mid-2019. During my field research in the
Klodzko Basin, I spoke with employees of the Forest Districts and Forest Service Companies,
officials dealing with trees in the city and residents of the National Park or eco-settlers –
these were the beginnings of me penetrating into the social world of forestry. As part of my
research for my bachelor's thesis, I took up the topic of analyzing the Model Forest project in
Oborniki Wielkopolskie1–a project that was one of the first in Poland to enable multilateral
and democratic forest management to exist. During these few years I got to know many
people involved in the situation of forests in Poland, their language, interests, relations. I got
to know visions of nature and related management structures, ideas for changing them,
external forces shaping them, and local worlds of natural connections. However, did I get to
know the forest?
In January 2022, I began to learn about the forest from the perspective of people who
protect it. There were more and more such people in Poland. We heard more and more in the
media about public interest in the issue of Poland's forests and the disagreement of parts of
society about how forests should be managed. We can trace the beginnings of this interest to
2017, when protests against logging in the Bialowieza Forest erupted on a national scale
(Małecka 2021). According to study carried out by the foundation “Forests and Citizens”
(Lasy i Obywatele/Obywatelki), in 2017 there were about twenty forest initiatives understood
as local actions directed against logging, in 2021 there were about a hundred such initiatives,
and as I write this text on the map of initiatives drawn up by the foundation there are 390 of
them2.
People are primarily protesting the excessive logging carried out by the State Forest
Holding "State Forests" (SF), an unincorporated state organizational entity representing the
State Treasury. Some of the main problems are the lack of public information about the cuts
being made, the lack of dialogue between the public and the SF on forest management, and
the lack of opportunity to influence the appearance of the forest. "Foresters do not understand
that they manage a forest that belongs to the public," activists say. The “Forests and Citizens”
2The map of forest initiatives, https://mapy.lasyiobywatele.pl/inicjatywy-obywatelskie.html, (access:
05.05.2023).
1The Model Forest in Oborniki Wielkopolskie, https://oborniki.poznan.lasy.gov.pl/las-modelowy, (access:
13.06.2023).
6
released a social map of logging in Poland in early 2021 titled "Before they cut your forest"
which illustrates all forest subdivisions from the Forest Data Bank where clearcuts are
planned in current Forest Management Plans3. The map has been created for easy access to
information about the size and location of the logging sections, which are expressed in simple
and clear language for the average viewer. "These are State Forests, that is, ours, in common.
That is why we have the right to reliable information about what is about to happen to these
forests and how they are managed," Marta Jagusztyn-Krynicka, one of the founders of the
foundation, said in an interview given to oko.press4. The logging map resonated with the
media, with SF deeming it unreliable and calling for it not to be manipulated5.
Polish forestry initiatives/movements6consist of very diverse groups of people who
usually start with a single action aimed at protecting the local forest, later on they often start
to provide their support as activists in other areas of protection, helping each other,
cooperating with other groups/non-governmental organizations, and sometimes legally
formalizing their structures. They fit into the category of new social movements (della Porta,
Diani 2009; Paleczny 2010), which have their origins in the second half of the 20th century
and, unlike the "old" ones formed in the 19th century (socialist and communist), are primarily
concerned with women's rights, ethnic issues, world peace and environmental protection
(della Porta, Diani 2009). A social movement is a form of social action aimed at a specific
goal and bringing about (contributing to) social change (Rozalska 2015: 49), and this is how I
see the forest movement in Poland. Despite the distinctiveness and specificities of action in
the Polish context, we should see it as part of the global trend towards forest protection
which can also be observed in Australia, the United States, Brazil, Germany or Austria,
among others, and which is largely due to the growing awareness of the consequences of the
climate catastrophe and disapproval of shrinking green spaces worldwide (Dunlap, Brulle
2015). The activities of forest activist movements often also include other nature protection
activities, such as fighting for animal rights or fighting for climate and energy justice. Sarah
M. Pike in ,,For the Wild. Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism'' (2017) writes,
6I will be using both names in the paper.
5Explanation of SF of the map of logging,
https://www.lasy.gov.pl/pl/informacje/aktualnosci/wyjasnienie-w-sprawie-mapy-planowanych-ciec-w-lasach,
(access: 05.05.2023).
4Article about the map of logging,
https://oko.press/zobacz-czy-lasy-panstwowe-wytna-twoj-las-powstala-spoleczna-mapa-wycinek, ((access:
05.05.2023).
3The map ,,Before they cut your forest”, https://mapy.lasyiobywatele.pl/zanim-wytna-twoj-las.html, (access:
05.05.2023).
7
for example, about her study of modern radical environment and animal rights activism in
America mostly consisting of camps established to protect old-growth forests and their
inhabitants7. Each of these movements has its own context of activity, steeped firmly in the
specifics of a country's forestry model, as well as the civil society model. Tsing (2015: 218)
calls forestry a national project. This is largely why, unlike environmental youth movements
–such as Extinction Rebellion, Fridays For Future, Ende Gelande (Lautrup 2022; Dębińska
2021; Tubacki 2020; Kocyba, Lukianov, Piotrowski 2020) –forestry movements do not rely
so much on transnational ties in its activities. However, as I will show with the example of
Polish forestry initiatives, there are international meetings prompted by transnational forestry
issues, such as the EU's proposed nature restoration law.
The social movement I will write most about in this paper is the initiative which fights
against cutting down the protective forests in/around Poznan, most notably the Tulecki Forest
(Las Tulecki) –Moratorium for the Protective Forests of Poznan (Moratorium dla drzew
w lasach ochronnych Poznania). It is the perspective of those associated with the Moratorium
that I will present in my work. Together with them, I participated in and organized nature
walks, worked to popularize knowledge about forests and took steps to expand the activist
network. I walked with activists in the forests and parks of Poznan, around Wolsztyn and
Nowy Tomysl to explore their relationship with the forest: their history, knowledge,
motivation and commitment. In addition to acting with a local activist group, I participated in
online meetings organized by forest and nature NGOs, contributed to activist groups on social
networks, and followed discourses shaping forest activism in Poland, i.e. the actions of the
State Forestry or the actions of the Polish Government, the European Union and
environmental NGOs.
7A loud and recent example is also the movement camped in the forest near Atlanta ,,Stop Cop City”,
https://stopcop.city/, (access 10.07.2023).
8
Photog. 1: The part of Tulecki Forest, author Robert Kalak.8
So what is it about?
My main research goal is to explore the relationship between forest activists and the
forest. What I have in mind is primarily their personal relationship with the forest, which is
underpinned with the idea of not treating the forest as a resource –the starting point for
their activist actions, that is the actions that protect forests from logging. This work is
therefore a critical description (Tsing 2015) of these relationships conducted on the basis of
my research among the activist forestry community in Poland, mainly among people
associated with the group Moratorium for Trees in the protective forests of Poznan. I will
present here the more-than-human worlds I experienced in the field, that is, worlds created by
both humans and plants, animals, fungi, mosses or other living elements. The perspective I
8Robert Kalak is one of the activists from Moratorium. He is the author of most of the photos in this paper.
9
adopt assumes that non-human entities are, like humans, living and causal subjects and
creators of reality (Tsing 2015, Latour 1991, Kohn 2013, Haraway 2008, 2016, Ingold 2013,
2017, et al). I describe them from the perspective of the more-than-human anthropology
(Tsing 2015), which I supplement with the tool of translation (Latour 1983), through which I
will show the strategic dimension of activist actions.
The above perspectives build my proposal for an anthropology of forest activism,
which I complement with the methodology of engaged anthropology and theory from the
field of social movements and representations of non-human entities. Forest activism is not a
well-described phenomenon in anthropological literature, but there is a wealth of literature on
the social study of nature and the forest. Although I chose a more-than-human perspective
and translation as the lens for my research, the topic of forest activism could also be
developed through the theories of other researchers.
One of these is Eduardo Kohn's (2013) anthropology beyond human, which I write
about in the first chapter of the paper, as well as other approaches presented by researchers
associated with the ontological turn, such as Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
and Arturo Escobar. These anthropologists ground their research in the perspectives of the
aboriginal peoples of the Americas. Escobar, for example, a representative of political
ecology, writes about how viewing the elements of nature as resources is the dominant
perspective in the modern world (1996). In one of his latest books "Designs for the
Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds" (2018) he argues
for the development of "autonomous design" that avoids commercial and modernization
goals in favor of more collaborative and place-based approaches. He bases his approach on
research among mobilized grassroots communities in Latin America. One of the
anthropological researchers of the forest is also Andrew S. Mathews doing research in
Mexican or Italian forests, among others. In his 2011 book, he developed the topic of the
institutionalization of nature and knowledge, referring among others to Escobar or James
Scott (1999; an anthropologist working on the state and resistance). The perspective of Jason
W. Moore, who writes about the inseparable connection and intertwining of capitalism and
nature (2015), may also be useful for the development of forest anthropology. According to
him, our perception of nature, as well as the struggle for it, is embedded in the framework of
capitalism, and in order to blur the line between nature and culture, he proposes alternatively
to use the phrase "the web of life" (2015: 14) to the word "nature”.
Also on Polish ground we have social scientists working on nature and forest. The
anthropologist who initiated the anthropological study of the forest in Poland is Agata A.
10
Konczal. Her book "Forest Anthropology. Foresters and the Perception and Formation of
Images of Nature in Poland" (2017) was an inspiration and great theoretical support for me
both in my research for my bachelor's thesis and the research I describe in this thesis. Other
works worth mentioning are those of Krzysztof Niedziałkowski, a Polish social scientist
working on such issues as conflicts related to the use and perception of nature in the
Białowieża Forest, wolf conservation, public participation or the relationship between
biodiversity conservation and sustainable forest management (Niedziałkowski 2016, 2018,
2020).
I treat many of the above works as my research inspirations, some of which I also use
for analysis. I describe why I choose particular approaches in my research and not others in
the first chapter of my work. It is there that I put forward a proposal for the anthropology of
forest activism. I explain why my main research perspective is more-than-human
anthropology (Tsing 2013, 2015) and why I supplement it with the tool of translation (Latour
1991). This way, I show two ways in which activists relate to the forest –by building a
personal and social relation with and inside the forest and by building strategic allies and
mobilizing knowledge to defend it in other spaces, outside the forest. The first chapter will
therefore be a discussion of each section where I also give a justification for building my
perspective and choosing particular analytical tools (or tools of description). It is also a place
where I presented the strongest inspirations coming from the anthropology of forest activism.
In the second part of the work, I present the strategic dimension of activism as
translation. I begin with a description of the political and economic order of forest
management dominated by foresters. I show the forest movement as a disruption of this
order, and I show the course of this disruption at the national and local scales –the values and
strategies that comprise it. Finally, I present my proposal of an approach to look at a ‘forestal
order’ in Poland.
Chapter three will be about entering the forest with activists in the perspective of
more-than-human anthropology. I will introduce my research partners –guides to the worlds
of the forest –as individuals aware of their interspecies connections and bring
more-than-human socialities of which they are a part. I will also present activist knowledge
as translation, and a Polish model of forestry that takes into account the multiple visions of
the forest as a more-than-human sociality.
In between the chapters I will include "interludes" in which I will zoom into the stories
of species that proved to be relevant to my research partners. These will include stories about
the world of mycorrhizal fungi and pine trees.
11
First chapter. Anthropology of forest activism
“As a result we are not able to see the myriad
ways in which people are connected to a broader
world of life, or how this fundamental connection
changes what it might mean to be human. And
this is why expanding ethnography to reach
beyond the human is so important.” (Kohn
2013:6)
In this chapter, I offer my approach to anthropology of forest activism. I begin with
how I understand anthropology and field engagement. I then move on to my main research
perspective, which is more-than-human anthropology in the approach of Anna Tsing (2013).
It is first and foremost my main research method –it allowed me to see the multiplicity of
worlds in the forest and to view my research partners as one of the many creators of these
worlds. In the next section, I present the perspective of Bruno Latour's (1993)
translational/actor-network-theory, which I later use to analyze the strategic aspects of
activists’ work and how they weave knowledge and relations to protect the forest. I
complement the discussion between these two perspectives with the perspective proposed by
Eduardo Kohn (2013) –anthropology beyond the human and the debate on the representation
of non-human entities.
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The activist-ethnographer: role of being in the field
From the very beginning of my experience in the field of anthropology, I treated it as an
engaged science. I learned how to analyze reality, how to approach it critically, how to break
down the obvious, how to discover diversity and complexity, and I saw that these tools could
be useful for improving the world we live in. That's why all approaches related to engaged
anthropology fascinated me the most. Many of them have their roots in the second half of the
1970s and stem from challenging the authority of the researcher and his fieldwork (Geertz
2000; Clifford 2000), as well as the role of the text (Clifford, Marcus 1986; Marcus, Fischer
1986). Anthropological engagement manifests itself in a variety of ways: in collaborating
with local communities (Tax 1975; Hummel 2017; Ortner 2019), being critical of the market
economy (Mauss 2001; Sahlins 2003), joining the struggle for global justice (Graeber 2009),
collaboratively producing scholarly texts (Lassiter 2005; Hummel 2017), or giving pen to the
community at large (Bawaka et al. 2015). It also implies the role of anthropology as the
science that connects different disciplines, with methods and tools to create spaces to fill the
discursive gaps that appear in the attempted consensus of different disciplines (Fortun 2012),
properly equipped methodologically to extend the debate on the future shape of society
beyond the walls of the university (Tubacki 2022), and "to contribute to the realization of an
ecological utopia" (Anderson 1974, after Lockyer, Veteto 2015: 3, after Hummel 2017: 310).
Anthropologists point to the role of imagination in the creation of new better futures, the
resonance of various stories from around the world and the diverse inspirations standing
behind them (Tsing 2013, 2015; Haraway 2016), and how important emotions are in these
stories: hope, love, as well as a sense of loss or mourning (van Dooren 2014). They also point
out the impacts that fieldwork has on ourselves, how we become (becoming with, Haraway
2008; Ingold 2013, 2017) with our partners and research partners, and even create new selves
(new self, Haraway 2008) in relationships with people and non-human entities.
So the types of field engagement are plentiful. There is also a lot of debate among
anthropologists about the validity of this approach, what benefits it entails, and what dangers
it brings with itself (Friedlander 1988). One of the biggest risks is that the researcher becomes
too ideologically saturated, which can obscure his/her critical position. Hubert Tubacki
(2020, 2022), in framing his proposal for activist anthropology, therefore writes about the
important role of autoethnography –constant reflection on the role and motivations of the
activist anthropologist (Tubacki 2022: 66). However, supporting only one side of a conflict
13
(even the most subjugated and oppressed) can close the way to understanding the other side.
Michael Herzfeld therefore proposes a "militant middle position" (1996), in which the
anthropologist acts in the position of mediator and creates opportunities for dialogue.
All these inspirations guided me when I began my research among the forest
movements. I entered the field with commitment, and my motivations and goals were not just
to do research, but they were very personal –related to my own relationship with the forest.
From the very beginning of my research, I was an anthropologist-activist.
I was involved in activist work –nature walks, meetings with other organizations and
initiatives, helping to create an activist network –not only for research, but also to protect the
trees in Tulecki Forest from logging and to learn about the methods that are most effective in
this protection. The Tulecki Forest, which grows near the eastern border of the city, was not
particularly close to me (either geographically or personally). The first time I was in it was
during a walk where I learned about the Moratorium, so I didn't have the opportunity to see it
before the first cuttings. Instead, I saw the clear-cutting spaces where the forest had
previously stood, and I could understand the feeling of loss of those who knew this forest. I
myself experienced this feeling in other circumstances, when the familiar non-human worlds
in the Notec Forest, the City Forest in Gniezno and the old chestnut trees in my hometown,
Czarnków, disappeared9. Despite my lack of strong ties to the forest I was fighting for, I knew
it was a fight for more than that single piece of forest. The logging in the Tulecki Forest was
merely the fuse, and the Moratorium initiative was intended to protect not only it, but all the
protective forests around the city. One of the goals was to establish a law that would protect
the forests from future logging. In addition (and perhaps most importantly), I saw an
opportunity in activist efforts on behalf of the forests for more and more people to see the
forests beyond its form as a resource. I believe that noticing in the forests their plural life and
our dependence on them has the potential to change human attitudes toward nature and thus
imagine a future in which we do not exploit it, but cooperate with it. My research-activist
motivations are therefore full of hope (Miyazaki 2004).
9At the beginning of my research with the Moratorium, I thought about assembling an activist group to protect
the forests of the Notec Forest (Puszcza Notecka), which at the time were threatened by massive logging
(according to the LiO cutting map), but decided to focus only on actions in Poznań. At the end of 2022, on the
other hand, I learned about plans to cut down chestnut trees and other over 100-year-old trees growing along the
streets of Czarnków, and together with several people, we acted to prevent logging. Unfortunately, despite many
different attempts to change the decision of local authorities, the trees were cut down.
14
It is also important to me to look for solutions in which the academy occupies a more
environmentally sensitive role, and I wanted this to be reflected in my research. For the
scientific conference we organized with the Student Scientific Circle of Ethnologists at the
Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology in Poznan, I invited several activists associated with
the Moratorium as speakers and one as a guide for a nature walk in Morasko. Among
representatives and representatives of the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities and
arts, we talked about the Anthropocene and the ways in which the academy can engage
environmentally. There was also discussion of the forest, the human relationship with it, its
functions, activism or the inclusion of society in its management. At this conference,
anthropology was a unifying discipline, providing a field of understanding for many sciences
(Fortune 2012), and committed to the future of the world we live in (Haraway 2016, Hummel
2017, Tubacki 2022).
Two people with whom I conducted research I refer to in the text as my research
partners10 – Wojtek and Władek (I refer to others as interviewees and interlocutors). These are
people with whom I openly discussed my position in the field and my motivations, talked
about the anthropology and approaches I use, and consulted with them about parts of my
work. Our conversations often came down to the problem of hope – what are the chances that
the situation of forests in our region will change; how much will the activist movement affect
the appearance of forests in Poland; is it possible that the way of looking at the forest and
nature that we share will be a global perspective? This showed me that although our roles and
activist motivations are different, we share the hope of increasingly seeing greater agency and
beauty in the non-human worlds. At the same time, I realized that the relationship between
researcher and the researched is almost never entirely a partnership. It takes a lot of time and
commitment on both sides to develop such a relationship, which is difficult to achieve with
limited resources for a master's thesis project. Although I don't see my relationship with
Władek and Wojtek as a one hundred percent partnership11. I refer to them as research
partners to emphasize that they are not just my interlocutors, but have contributed a great deal
to the appearance of my work, as well as to the development of my relationship with the
forest.
11 By this I mean that they do not see me as their research partner.
10 I understand the term research partner following Rydzewski, who argues that he does not use words such as
researched, informant or interviewee in the text, "because the first two presuppose an unequal relationship
between the researcher and the research partner, and the third implies interviewing as a research method. [...] It
is an attempt to give subjectivity to research participants, which presupposes the welfare of the community
among which the research is conducted (Rydzewski 2017)."
15
Also, my role as an anthropologist-activist came with many limitations. Because of my
research position, I was not allowed to participate in all activities organized by
representatives of forest movements12. At the time, I wondered if it would have been easier to
enter the field if I had been an activist first and then started doing anthropological research, or
if my activities were seen as more activistically engaged. I also sometimes had dilemmas
about whether I wanted to engage in particular activities because I felt they made sense
activistically, or maybe just for research reasons. I also did not feel that I was a member of
the Moratorium, who is taken into account in deciding the next activist steps and who is
given the opportunity to be involved in all activities. Some of these limitations may have
been related to the degree of my involvement, some to my research position, some to the
methods and activity profile of the forest initiatives, but they are certainly related to my
dual/liminal role in the field, which carries both advantages and disadvantages (Filip 2012).
I do not close my anthropological-activist approach to one perspective of engaged
anthropology. I draw from many of them. Also, the perspective of more-than-human
anthropology that I adopt in my work is an engaged anthropology, as I write about in the next
section of the paper. My commitment manifests itself in my motivations and activist activities
that I share with the group I am studying, my pursuit of collaboration and partnership at all
stages of my research, and my activities leading to the dissemination of scientific knowledge.
I also want to emphasize that although my work explores the relationship between forest
activists and the forest, it is not my intention to show that their perspective is the only valid
one, nor to criticize the perspective of foresters. The reality is too complex and diverse. I
hope that with this work I can bring out this diversity.
12 For example, I was denied participation in the forest movement convention in Bystra, which I learned about
from Władek. Despite introducing myself as an activist and researcher and being recommended to me by
Władek, when asked if I was allowed to participate, I received a negative answer and the rationale that some of
the organizers would not be comfortable with the participation of a person whose main purpose would be
research observation.
16
Photog. 2: A fungi found on a mycorrhizal walk, author Robert Kalak.
More than human anthropology
I first encountered more-than-human anthropology in my first year of anthropology
studies. I don't remember under what circumstances, but at that time I heard about Anna
Tsing's research, her book “Mushroom at the end of the world: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins” (2015), and the question she asked in one of her texts –where does the
mushroom end? Where does the mushroom end! –my brain exploded. I began to wonder
how a fungus feels its body, where is the end of it and where another fungus begins? Could
we say that all fungi are one body? If the mushroom ends in the forest or is still alive outside
of it? And where does it end in the human head? I remember that I even started reading
Mushroom [...] to learn more about the approach exploring the sensations of the fungus, but I
gave up after a few pages because that language was too difficult for an ultra-beginner
anthropologist. However, the fascination with anthropology dealing with mushrooms
remained.
17
More-than-human anthropology is my main research perspective: it is first of all a
method. More-than-human anthropology is strongly associated with multispecies studies13.
The main purpose of this approach is to better understand other forms of life entangled in
different relationships. The name more-than-human anthropology derives from Tsing's
proposal to speak of more-than-human socialites, those in which humans are just one element
of the living landscape (2013). It allows us to see the multi-species networks of social
relations that co-create the world, thus creating the possibility of imagining people as more
environmentally engaged (Tsing 2013: 28 after Kowalska 2022: 93). Tsing proposes first and
foremost to rethink the position of humans as one element in a web of dependencies and
entanglements.
As a method of seeing more-than-human worlds, Tsing proposes attention (2013). I
consider attention, like activist anthropology, as an extension/mode of participatory
observation. Humans cease to be in the center of the study, but become one of the elements of
more-than-human worlds, worlds in which plants, animals, fungi and other non-human
entities are equally causal and living subjects. She writes that through valuing
more-than-human socialities, we should expand the sense of the meaning of freedom to act
and what it can mean for humans and non-humans (2013:30). If we allow it to mean
something more than intention and planning, then it can become possible.
Tsing distinguishes between two forms of attention. One involves attention to
assemblages, or communities of co-existing plants, animals, fungi and others. She shows
them on the example of matsutake, growing, for example, in Japan's sotoyama forests (2015).
Which plants does the fungus live with? Does it grow more willingly with some and less
willingly with others? This is what is involved in paying attention to the relationships
between plants while observing them. The second approach is the attention to form:
Humans don’t always think about bodily form as an expression of sociality
because, like many animals, we have determinate body structures. [...] Many plants
13 The background to the emergence of multispecies studies is broad and includes reflections of human nature
(Fischer 2009), biology of race (Fullwiley 2007, Haraway 1995) or animal studies (eg. Fuentes and Wolfe 2002;
Ritvo 2002). Extensive writing on this subject is provided by Stefan Helmreich and S. Eben Kirksey in "The
Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography" (2010). However, as with the actor network approach, the boundaries
of multispecies studies are spilling over. Some researchers trace the roots of this trend to a time when
anthropology and biology were not separate disciplines. Such an example is Henry Morgan's 1868 work "The
American Beaver and His Works". Multispecies studies unites various disciplinary and multidisciplinary
methods that have evolved recently, like anthropology beyond human or more-than-human geographies (Van
Dooren, and others 2016: 5-6).
18
and fungi, in contrast, are indeterminate in their bodily form. They keep growing
and changing throughout their lives. Even if they can’t pick up and move to
another place, they can grow into new environments and social fields. Their form
shows their biography; it is a history of social relations through which they have
been shaped (Tsing 2013: 32).
Tsing goes on to write that both assemblages and forms are tools familiar to
anthropologists, the only novelty is to extend them to more-than-human socialites. Then the
purpose of anthropology becomes a critical description: ,,critical, because it asks urgent
questions; and description, because it extends and disciplines curiosity about life (2013:28)”.
Tsing points out that matsutake become themselves through assemblages –relationships with
other species (2015: 162). The anthropologist's task is to determine what connections emerge
and disappear within them (Tsing 2021). Małgorzata Kowalska, who uses the
more-than-human perspective in her research, writes that it is important to emphasize that
Tsing does not address the problem of representing the non-human perspective, because we
are unable to know it. "The aim of a research project carried out within the framework of
more-than-human anthropology is not to capture a perspective different from that available to
humans, but to rethink the perspective and position of humans" (2022: 100). To see humans
as related to other species, rather than external to the environment, knowledge of the natural
relationships and processes that are central to the persistence of the place is essential (Tsing
2015; 2021a). This is why more-than-human anthropology combines the art of attention,
ethnography and natural history (2015: 37).
Paying attention to other life forms and entering into relationships, triggers/expands our
imagination14. And it is the activation of imagination that is one of the main goals of
more-than-human anthropology. Tsing suggests that we used to focus only on human
societies, very often reducing our relationships to costs and benefits (2013: 40). Viewing the
elements of nature as resources is the dominant perspective in the modern world, where
everything is subordinated to humans (Escobar 1995, 2018; Moore 2015). In turn, in order to
control resources, we have learned to alienate species from their natural assemblages, to
establish plantations: trees, soybeans, bananas, wheat, potatoes, rice, etc. However, there are
ways to grow in assemblages:
14 This approach is related to the proposal to recognize imagination as an ethnographic method (Hayes,
Sameshima, Watson 2014), thereby expanding the understanding of what a research method is.
19
,,Since the time of the plantation, commercial agriculture has aimed to
segregate a single crop and work toward its simultaneous ripening for a
coordinated harvest. But other kinds of farming have multiple rhythms.
In the shifting cultivation I studied in Indonesian Borneo, many crops grew
together in the same field, and they had quite different schedules. Rice,
bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, palms, and fruit trees mingled;
farmers needed to attend to the varied schedules of maturation of each of
these crops. These rhythms were their relation to human harvests; if we add
other relations, for example, to pollinators or other plants, rhythms multiply.
The polyphonic assemblage is the gathering of these rhythms, as they result
from world- making projects, human and not human (2015: 24).”
Tsing compares the plantation model to practicing science, in which research outcomes
are assumed from the outset (2015: 9) and which is expected to be "scalable" in designing
and conducting research, that is, able to apply the research framework to larger scales (2015:
38). She wonders if listening and telling stories can be a method? The anthropologist (2010:
201) calls for “anti-plantations” and names her approach the critical intervention of science.
Then the goal of those who engage in it is to open up the public imagination to allow new
ways of interacting with nature. This science reaches out to the feelings we have for nature:
,,[...] my stories describe how mushroom advocacy can lead to projects to build democratic
science and public, inclusive well-being. It is passion for mushrooms –in all the details of
their socio-natural ecology –that makes these projects possible," Tsing writes (2010: 201).
She encourages anthropologists to immerse themselves passionately (passionate immersion)
in the lives of the non-humans under study and coming to the field without presumptions,
only with attention to other worlds. Science understood in this way becomes more involved.
Learning more about the social worlds other species build can help us if we want to know
something about environmental change (Tsing 2013: 33).
Tsing writes that her ,,ability to write about these issues depends on good company
(2013: 29)” and mentions the authors who inspired her to form her approach: Donna
Haraway, Tim Ingold, Eduardo Kohn and Bruno Latour. These are authors who, like Tsing,
understand and describe a reality in which humans are one among many living beings. I
regard their proposals as inspiring and developing my research perspective (below I will
present Ingold and Haraway's approach while approaches of Kohn and Latour I develop in
further parts of the paper).
20
For Ingold anthropology is not research about people or non-humans, but research with
them (Ingold 2013, 2017). ,,We join with, and learn from, the human and animal becomings
(2013: 21)”. He writes that his preference to think about animate beings is ,,in grammatical
form of the verb. Thus, ‘to human’ is a verb, as is ‘to baboon’ an ‘to reindeer’. Wherever
and whenever we encounter them, humans are humaning, baboons are babooning, reindeer
reindeering (2013: 21)”. In this sense all life is in motion and we become ourselves through
relating with others. The concept of becoming with comes from Haraway (2008). ,,I am who I
become with companion species, who and which make a mess out of categories in the making
of kin and kind”, she writes (2008: 19). Companion species are not just dogs, cats or turtles to
humans, humans are also companion species to dogs, cats and turtles, as well as other species
that become significant others to each other (significant others to one another). Haraway
gives the example of a scientist's relationship with a wolf: ,,If all goes well, they will become
messmates, companion species, and significant others to one another, as well as conspecifics.
The scientist–wolf will send back data as well as bring data to the wolves in the forest. These
encounters will shape naturecultures for them all (2008: 15)”.
Haraway also uses the term sympoiesis to describe "being together in the world".
"Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means making with.Nothing makes itself; nothing is really
auto-poietic or self-organizing. [...] Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic,
responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding”, writes in the collection of
texts, "Arts of Living on the Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene"
(Haraway 2017: 25). Kowalska (2022) also uses it to name being together in the field –a
collaboration between an anthropologist and a research partner, an exchange of different
kinds of knowledge. In Kowalska's case, in exchange for lessons on ecological relationships,
the anthropologist introduced biologists to the work of Tsing and Haraway, and one of her
interviewees at the time called her a symbiotic anthropologist. "The sympoietic world is a
relational world, and symbiotic (sympoietic) anthropology is a practically and ethically
oriented anthropology that seeks new ways of researching and describing, and thus
imagining, reality (Kowalska 2022: 100)".
The above proposals show that more-than-human anthropology is not the only proposal
that focuses on understanding other life forms through relationships. All of these perspectives
are intertwined, and their authors inspire and quote each other. Although I will not be
analyzing through Haraway's and Ingold's categories my terrain, they shape my thinking
about it and my role as an anthropologist. In all of these proposals, anthropology appears as
collaborative in the field of research, which was also important to me during my field
21
research. My research partners and interlocutors taught me to look at the forest through the
lenses of biology, ornithology or forestry, while I told them about relationship-oriented
anthropology.
I already mentioned in the introduction of the paper anthropologists who study
indigenous perceptions of the forest and nature, such as Desocla, Escobar and Viveiros de
Castro. There are also researchers who study the perceptions of indigenous peoples in
approaches akin to more-than-human anthropology. One such researcher is Eduardo Kohn,
who I will write about later in this chapter, and Deborah Bird Rose, who has done research
with Aboriginal communities. Rose (2017) proposed the term bir'yun from the Aboriginal
language (eng. shimmer) to describe art and the world as "pulsating with life" and to
emphasize that no one is independent in their existence. Many approaches derived from
traditional ways of life involve a very strong bond with nature, which is embedded in the
structure of the community. These approaches are very easy to romanticize and exoticize15,
therefore, I believe that research with indigenous peoples is even more needed. They show
how many ways there are to enter into deep ties with nature and the forest (Tsing 2013).
The concepts of more-than-human socialities and attention help me bring out the
diversity of the forest without having to organize it, and show my research partners as
members of forest communities. Thanks to their knowledge, I learn to see the assemblages of
Polish forests: the essence of the soil and the worlds within it, including what is above
ground, the species that find it easier to grow together, or the importance of tree age in forest
communities. My passionate immersion certainly helps me discover these worlds –the
deeper I dive into non-human communities, with my human guides, the more I want to know
about them and the more I marvel at the variety of relationships they establish. Tsing writes,
“To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method. And why not make the strong claim and
call it a science, an addition to knowledge? Its research object is contaminated diversity; its
unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter (2015: 37).” The main purpose of this work is
precisely to bring out the diversity in my forest encounters and inspire them to imagine new
worlds in which this diversity has great value.
15 Which has been done for years by anthropologists studying faraway peoples (Fotiou 2016), and is often found
in mass media. In my opinion, this is a very harmful phenomenon, showing an incomplete picture and harming
the cause in the long run.
22
Science as the art of translation
,,Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory opened the door to theories of the social in
which non-humans play a central role (2013:29)”, mentions Tsing talking about Latour's
approach as one of his inspirations. It's true. The actor-network-theory16 (ANT) was one of
the most revolutionary proposals in modern science when it comes to rethinking the subject.
Before it –from the Western philosophers of the Enlightenment –the separation of nature and
culture was something obvious. Thinking of nature as something separate from human beings
and their creations has infiltrated the common thinking of Westerners to such an extent that it
seems natural to most of us. There were thinkers who tried to show the absurdity of this
division17, but none of their theories has caused such an upheaval in the social sciences as
Latour's approach.
ANT stemmed from the field of science and technology studies (STS). Its revolutionary
nature consisted in the fact that agency was extended beyond humans –agency beyond
humans –on things, policies, practices, plants, animals, ideas. The human being is removed
from the center of analysis and becomes part of a network in which various agentic elements
–actants –influence each other to create a social reality. ANT, however, offers much more
than an extended agency. In the words of John Law, ,,actor-network theory is a disparate
family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in
the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations
within which they are located” (Law 2007: 2). Everything in ANT is the result of the actions
of a network of relations –"ANT consistently replaces every essentialism with a relational
ontology. Entities no longer possess identity through certain essential qualities, but through
relationships with other entities" (Abriszewski 2010: 21). Latour points out that the actor
network is not a theory, but an approach that gives tools to look at reality differently. Law
adds that “the term, devised by Michel Callon, appeared around 1982, but the approach is
itself a network that extends out in time and place” (Law 2007: 3).
17 As early as the 17th century, Spinoza challenged Cartesian dualism, claiming that the body and mind are one
substance (Grosz 1994). However, his theory did not fall onto fertile ground. It wasn't until the
post-structuralists had introduced relationalism/relational thinking, Foucault had explained the notion of
discourse and killing of subjects and Deleuze had proposed the 'agencement' of - these propositions resonated
more in modern science. Another interesting example is Jakob Johann von Uexkull, a biologist who studied
issues of perception among animals and wrote narratives from the perspective of fleas and other small animals.
16 Bruno Latour, John Law and Michel Callon are considered the founders of ANT, but Latour is most associated
with this perspective due to its later development.
23
One of the first texts to show ANT in practice is believed to be the text of Michel
Callon's “Introduction to the Sociology of Translation. The Domestication of Scallops and the
Fishermen of the Bay of Saint-Brieuc” (Callon 1986). In the text, the author analyzes the
scallop domestication project, distinguishing different groups of actors and stages of action in
the project. Scallops are precisely one group of actors, and like the other human actors, it has
a vested interest in the project –its success will ensure their survival. Like the other groups of
actors in a project, their actions can change the course of the project, affect its success or
failure. Callon uses the same methods and uniform vocabulary for the actions of scallopers,
fishermen or scientists from the beginning, thus calling for the erasure of the boundary
between the natural and the social. The researcher also shows that in the scallop
domestication project network, the actors with the greatest agency were the scientists who
established the next steps of the project. They did not take into account the needs of other
actors, which resulted in controversy, i.e. disruption of the order established by them and
resistance from other actors. Callon shows that translation takes place in the network.
Translation is one of the analytical tools of ANT. It helps us see that science, society
and nature are intertwined, and any divisions between them, such as the formation of
scientific facts, are artificial. Latour, who began his scientific career with ethnographic
research in laboratories, claimed that scientific facts are constructed through negotiations
between things, people, the laboratory equipment, theories, measurement methods, and
organizational cultures. He showed what elements were important in the "discoveries" of
Louis Pasteur at the same time diminishing his agency in discovering the cause of anthrax
and creating a vaccine for the disease. Instead he showed the agency of farms, technicians,
laboratories, veterinarians, statistics and bacilli… ,,All of which were the effects of a set of
materially heterogeneous relations” (Law 2007: 6). In doing so, he showed the simplifications
that occur in explaining large processes by attributing them to single perpetrators.
Representatives of ANT use the concept of translation as a tool to analyze the processes
that led to various scientific controversies, the formation of scientific or social facts. In
doing so, they show that reality is more complex and intertwined than we are used to thinking
since the Enlightenment. The worlds of biology and society are mixed together in every step
and every story (Latour 1993: 2). Latour during his research in laboratories, noted that most
statements made about the world in laboratories are nebulous and indiscriminately blend the
social and the natural. A small number of these suggestions eventually transforms into the far
more difficult claims about nature that are shared in scientific papers where the social has
vanished. Thanks to ANT and the concept of translation, he deconstructed scientific stories
24
showing the intertwining of the social with the biological. In order to give a name for these
connections he was using words collectives, hybrids or monsters (Latour 1993).
The ANT/translation perspective has paved the way for approaches in which
non-human entities play a central role. It was a really important contribution to dismantling
the division between nature and culture and the "big" social facts that are based on this
division. It has been an inspiration to many researchers, although it has also faced numerous
criticisms. Tim Ingold (2013), for example, points out that actor network theory focuses more
on the actors than on the network they create. Thus, it misses the essence of the relationships
they create. Anna Tsing, on the other hand, criticizes the sociology of translation on the basis
of Callon's (1986) text I have already mentioned. She notes that Callon singled out only those
actors in the process of translation that he himself considered important, such as the Japanese
mentioned at the beginning of the text (Tsing 2010: 48). Tsing suggests that it is difficult to
call network actor theory holistic if the researcher makes choices about which actors to
include.
When applying ANT, it is easy to fall into selectivity and show the agency of only some
of the actors relevant to a given process, so I understand Tsing's criticism. However, I think
that selectivity threatens any scientific approach, because as researchers we do not have
absolute knowledge and are not able to see everything. ANT is a very analytical approach –it
takes a given process/phenomenon apart and analyzes their contribution to the emergence of
a given scientific/social fact. Its main goal is to show how we came to have the order of
things we have, showing the agency of both humans and non-humans. Therefore, this
approach is not my main research perspective. My main goal is not to show why the situation
of forests in Poland looks the way it does, but to present a perspective in which the forest is a
living organism full of multi-species relationships. However, I do find ANT useful for
analyzing activists' more strategic approach to the forest, showing their struggle against the
State Forests and for their own ideas, as well as how they use knowledge/data about the
forest. And for this very purpose I will use the Latourian approach. The perspective of
more-than-human anthropology doesn't give me the tools to show the forest beyond the
forest, which is where most of the contact between different kinds of knowledge about it
occurs.
One of Latour's latest theories is, in my opinion, the closest to a more-than-human
perspective. It is the Gaia hypothesis. I will not use it in the analysis of the research material,
but treat it as a theoretical inspiration.
25
The author of the Gaia hypothesis is James Lovelock. In its simplest form, it is a
hypothesis about the planetary autoregulation mechanisms. According to Lovelock, living
beings not only inhabit the environment, but change it to their advantage, and this is due to
interconnections between each other.
Gaia is the planetary life system that includes everything influenced by and influencing
the biota. The Gaia system shares with all living organisms the capacity for
homeostasis – the regulation of the physical and chemical environment at a level
that is favourable for life (Lovelock 200 after Latour 2017).
Lovelock was an independent scientist, a figure who combined several scientific fields.
For Latour, Gaia is more than a hybrid concept, it is both a myth and a scientific concept, it is
a combination of these two dimensions. In an interview for arte television (2021)18,he tells
us that the name Gaia was invented for the Lovelock hypothesis by his friend William
Golding, the author of Lord of Flies, and it happened after a few beers in a pub in the
Wiltshire village where they both lived. This event alone shows the intertwining of several
realities. The name Gaia (as well as the hypothesis itself) is criticized in numerous works of
both Lovelock and Latour - we might wonder, for example, whether Gaia –as a reference to
an ancient Greek goddess - anthropomorphizes nature. Latour writes "if there is a curse that
weighs on the Gaia theory, it is the one modernism has brought into the picture by insisting
on always treating our relation to the world according to the Nature/Culture schema" (Latour
2017: 84). He says we need Gaia to emerge from the inability to act in the face of climate
catastrophe. The theory shows the experience of living among other living beings in a world
created by other living beings. Thus, it is a manifestation of intertwining in time and space,
something very important for Latour to emphasize. Gaia shows as well that human beings are
something that can’t be separated from the Earth. What is important, this reflection came
from natural science but is used by the representatives of different sciences and allows them
to communicate between each other. Gaia, therefore, is a symbol of connections between
seemingly separate spaces, domains or concepts.
The concept of Gaia is akin to a more-than-human perspective, because it shows how
multiple worlds shape and shape each other into a single whole. Humans are part of a larger
whole, part of Gaia, along with fungi, air, bees, lime trees, soil, water, etc. I look at the Gaia
18 arte.tv, Bruno Latour interview, https://www.arte.tv/pl/videos/RC-022018/bruno-latour-wywiad/, (access:
10.07.2023).
26
hypothesis as an interdisciplinary project that can inspire researchers of different sciences to
work together.
Talking about representation
Among anthropologists who study the interfaces of nature and culture there exists a
debate regarding the representation of non-human entities. How do we talk about them if they
don't speak for themselves? We can't just "give them a voice," as anthropologists do when
writing about and with voiceless societies in public spaces. How to talk about non-human
entities in public space? Do non-human entities even need representation?
Eduardo Kohn, author of the book , "How forests think?" (2013), thinks they do not:
At stake is how to think about “nonhumans” –an analytical category that
Bruno Latour (1993, 2004) proposed to move the ethnographic study of
science-making practices beyond social constructivist frameworks in which
humans are the only actors. The distinction Latour makes between humans
and nonhumans, however, fails to recognize that some nonhumans are
selves. As such, they are not just represented (Latour 1993) but they also
represent. And they can do so without having to “speak (2007:5).”
The debate over representation is relevant to my work as I consider how forest activists
represent the forest. Many environmental activists draw on indigenous beliefs that interpret
Earth/Nature as mother, others portray themselves as defenders of nature, others as partners.
The forest in all these cases can be seen as a living organism, with its own agency, but yet it
is often given additional symbolism. In this section of the paper, I will show proposals for the
representation of non-human entities as seen by Eduardo Kohn and Bruno Latour, and
juxtapose this with my research area. I will bring out my own proposal of representation.
Kohn is one of the authors who isnpire Tsing. ,,The forest thinks, do representational
work”, she asserted (Tsing 2013: 29). Kohn puts forward a proposition for anthropology
beyond humans (2013) that draws on the semiotics of the Runa of Ecuador's Upper Amazon
and their relationship with other forest-dwelling entities. He writes that he places himself in
the company of two eminent anthropologists, Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de
27
Castro, who have had a great influence on his research. “Their work has gained traction in
anthropology because of the ways it renders ontology plural without turning it into culture:
different worlds instead of different worldviews (Kohn 2013: 10 za Candea 2010: 175).”
Kohn based on his research among Runa wonders what it means to be a human. Is
thinking only a human attribute? He analyzes the behavior of various forest entities, arguing
that living things include futures in what they do in the present. The anthropologist shows
how hunters want to hunt monkeys. The monkeys are hidden high in the forest canopy, out of
reach of the hunters on the ground. So the hunters cut down a tree, trying to stay hidden and
quiet. They count on the fact that the sound of the falling tree will frighten the monkeys and
pull them from their perch, while not revealing their own location. This will cause the
monkeys to disperse and become easier targets for hunters (2013: 30-34).
Kohn refers to the non dualistic representational system developed by the 19th-century
philosopher Charles Peirce, according to whom symbolic references are actually constructed
from more basic, non-symbolic sign processes that are not unique to humans (Kohn 2007:5).
Thus, the sound of a falling tree can be a symbol in both the world of humans and the world
of monkeys. Kohn shows on the basis of monkey hunting that the sound of the tree produces
meaningful effects in both the world of the monkeys and the world of the humans but in
very different regimes of experience and registers of semiosis with rather different outcomes
(Revill 2020). So, not only humans use symbols. Other entities have their own symbolic
systems, which are usually inaccessible to us-humans, and thus are capable of their own
representation. Peirce’s ideology of sign encompasses everything whether it is created by
human or not as long as it can be grasped and acknowledged by their minds (Eco, 1991 za
Yakin, Totu 2014)19.
Kohn is one of the representatives of ontological turn, which assumes the existence of
multiple parallel ontologies/worlds (Holbraad, Pedersen 2017). The anthropologist explains
this on the basis of Runa's perspective, for whom every being (human or non-human) is a
person, and its subjectivity is built through relationships with others, through becoming
(becoming) (Kohn 2013: 140). For Runa, a human being is one who, in relationship with
another being, maintains the status of predator, not prey. One of the great values for Runa is
to become a rune-puma (rune means human, puma means jaguar) ,,so that, after death, after
their human skins are buried, they enter a jaguar body, to continue on, as a self, and an I –an
I that is invisible to themselves, yet able to see others as prey, while being seen by these
19 Among other things, this is where his perspective differs from that of Ferdinand de Saussure, a linguist whose
theories are mainly used by social scientists and whose theory of the sign covers only the human mind.
28
others as predator (2013: 201).” These processes of “becoming with” others change what it
means to be alive; and they change what it means to be human just as much as they change
what it means to be a dog or even a predator (2013: 150).
Kohn's perspective of anthropology beyond human not only extends the meaning of the
symbol to non-human entities, but also reconsiders the concept of the human, points out its
connection to non-human entities, and shows that they have their own worlds, their own
ontologies. This approach is very close to more-than-human anthropology, but it relies
heavily on linguistic aspects, which is difficult to extract from my research. Kohn is
concerned with indigenous peoples' pre-colonial understanding of the world, and although
many activists, including my research partners, also see the forest as an entity, indigenous
perceptions differ from contemporary ties to the forest by their long-standing inscription in
the structure of the entire community. Therefore, the more-than-human perspective also fits
more with my research –as Tsing also conducted research with people raised in a neoliberal
system. Kohn shows the world of the forest as full of symbols and meanings not only in the
human world, but also in the non-human world, thus pointing out its representativeness, and
this is something I want to emphasize in my work. The forest in my research also represents
itself. However, this does not mean that it does not need human representation in the human
worlds.
Kohn criticizes Latour's proposition of the concept of "non-humans," for its lack of the
idea of self-representation by non-human entities. He also criticizes the category of a
"spokesperson" introduced by Latour in "The Politics of Nature" (2004). According to
Latour, it is an active figure of intermediation. An actor who represents others is a
spokesperson, he represents both human and non-human actors. The figure of the
spokesperson itself can also be a non-human entity ("the lab coats are the spokespersons of
the nonhumans <2004: 65>"). Latour justifies his proposal to introduce the spokesperson –“I
do not claim that things speak “on their own”, since no beings, not even humans speak on
their own, but always through something or someone else (2004: 65)”.
Kohn shows the figure of the "spokesperson" only as representing non-human entities,
which is not quite how Latour defines the category. Spokesperson is a figure that is meant to
distribute the agency of humans and show that our words and actions are the product of many
factors and the influence of both other humans and non-humans. The human may, in this
sense, be the spokesperson of other species whose speech we do not understand, but who are
present in shaping our species. Spokesperson can become a useful actor in public debate in all
spheres where non-human entities are debated: in the formation of laws on nature and climate
29
protection, in the economy, agriculture, architecture, education, media, etc. These are the
instances when we need to represent the non-human world in some way. And this is how I see
forest activists –as representatives of the forest in the forest dispute. They point out the
self-representative nature of the forest, but are aware that in the human world the forest will
not defend itself. They speak for the forest, and some hope that in the future the forest will
speak for itself.
Synthesis: towards the anthropology of forest activism
My proposal for the anthropology of forest activism is a combination of a critical
description of the intimate and complex relationship between forest activists and the forest in
a more-than-human perspective (Tsing 2013, 2015, 2019) and an analysis of strategic
activist actions, for which I use the tool of translation (Latour 1983). The more-than-human
perspective allows me to bring out the more-than-human communities co-created by my
research partners and thus show relationships other than those based on profit. Telling the
stories of people establishing such relationships with the forest can inspire imagining a more
relational and inclusive world (Tsing 2019: 201). By the same token, it is an engaged
approach in which doing science is not reduced to assuming the effects of research from the
outset (2015: 9) and to trying to exert control over human and non-human landscapes (2019:
201), but instead draws attention to what is of no scientific value in neoliberal reality. This
perspective teaches to see anew the worlds of plants, fungi or animals easily overlooked in a
human world where too much is reduced to profit and loss, and which lacks the tools to value
individual relationships.
Through translation, I analyze the forestry order in Poland built by foresters, and show
activists as actors disrupting the existing network and establishing their own network of
relationships. Combining the more-than-human perspective and the conclusions developed
through translation, I propose that the forestry model in Poland can be treated as a
more-than-human community in which both the needs of humans and non-human entities are
met. What these two approaches have in common, despite the difference I describe above, is
a recognition of agency in the non-human worlds, thereby erasing dualisms and pointing out
the entanglements of the human and non-human worlds, science and society, culture and
nature, or reason and emotion.
30
For my approach, the debate on the representation of non-human entities is also
important. I see forest activists –all those who take action to protect forests from logging –as
representatives of forests in Poland, Latourian spokepersons (2004), who speak for the forest,
but are also aware of the self-representation of the forest that Kohn (2013) points out. They
also strive to learn to understand multiple ways in which forests represent themselves through
an intimate, physical immersion into it.
The anthropology of forest activism also contributes to the methodology of engaged
anthropology and theory regarding social movements. An engaged approach to the field
consists of activist motivations and actions consistent with the group I am studying, the
pursuit of collaboration and partnership at all stages of research, and actions leading to the
dissemination of scientific knowledge. I do not close myself to a single engagement
perspective, but draw from many streams (Graeber 2009, Haraway 2008, Tsing 2015,
Hummel 2017, Tubacki 2020, 2022, etc.). I see the forest movement in Poland as a new
social movement (della Porta, Diani 2009; Paleczny 2010), which, despite its national
specificity (Tsing 2015), is a part of global activities.
Also encouraging to my perspective are the inspirations coming from the works of
social scientists working on forest and nature, such as Escobar (1995), Moore (2015),
Niedzialkowski (2018, 2020) and Konczal (2017). They show that my research area and the
proposal for an anthropology of forest activism could be looked at from different
perspectives, and could focus on other issues emanating from the field, e.g., the framing of
social participation and civil society, the relationship of activism with law or capitalism, the
intimate relationship of foresters with the forest, the impact of forest activism on Forest
Service workers, the perception of the forestry movement by foresters, etc. Therefore, I
believe that the anthropology of forest activism has further potential for development, both
theoretically and ethnographically.
When I write in the work about the relationship between activists and the forest, I
primarily mean a relationship in which the forest is not seen as a resource. I call this
relationship variously in the work, as activists themselves call it variously –as a sensitivity to
nature/forest, as an intimate bond, love, a personal relationship. I realize that foresters also
have their own intimate bond with the forest, and in their case we can also talk about love for
the forest, but unlike activists, they see the forest primarily as a resource (I mean foresters as
servants of the National Forest institutions), so in this work I do not study their relationship.
I refer in my work to plants, animals, mosses, fungi, bacteria, lichens and all other
living elements of nature as non-human entities/beings. Scientists use different terms to
31
name natural worlds –non-human actors, non-humans or other-than-humans (Latour 1993,
Tsing 2013, 2015, Kohn 2013), many use these terms interchangeably. There is no ideal name
for naming the living elements of nature, the term "nature" implies that humans are not
natural beings, the term "elements" takes away the fact that they are alive, in turn, all others
with prefixes non or above contain a negation.
32
Interlude. Mycorrhizal fungi
The forest is also where the human eye does not reach. Underground. Many species of
plants, animals, fungi, protists or bacteria meet there, and they enter into very different
relationships with each other. Many interspecies encounters occur in the root zone, which
man has called the rhizosphere. "The rhizosphere is characterized by exceptional biodiversity.
In a teaspoon of root soil we find genomic signatures testifying to the simultaneous presence
of more than ten thousand species of microorganisms. These are the most species-rich
habitats on Earth (Polcyn 2023: 19)."
Mycorrhizal fungi are microscopic fungi that live inside root tissues. Their relationship
with trees is symbiotic, meaning that it benefits both trees and fungi. "Fungi receive carbon
extracted from the air by photosynthesis from plants, and plants gain in return expanded
access to the soil water supply along with the minerals dissolved in it (Polcyn 2023)." With
fungi, plants also have access to larger areas of soil. However, if one side of the symbiosis
stops supplying components to the other for some reason, the other will also stop the transfer.
The older a tree is, the greater the volume of soil it enriches with carbon through the
symbiotic pathway. The older the forest grouping, the more resistant to external factors.
It's not as if one tree enters into a symbiosis with one fungus. "The intricate
underground networks built by forest mycorrhizae can stretch for kilometers in dense twists
and turns and connect diverse shrubs and trees (Polcyn 2023)." Mycorrhizal networks
respond to changes in the environment and concentrate their efforts in the most desirable
areas, such as where there is water. Shoots growing in an area poor in food or water get
support from tissues living in a richer part. Fungal networks also transfer nutritional value to
other plants in the network. Plants do the same by distributing resources to other plants that
are no longer capable of photosynthesis themselves, such as felled tree trunks. Some felled
trunks live for up to fifty years, as their root zone does not die and continues to participate as
a node in the forest transfer network.
— A felled forest primarily loses its mycorrhizae. Studies done on Swedish pine
forests, i.e. similar to ours, show that species composition can be disturbed even in the
perspective of ninety years — Władek recounted.
From this point of view, the trees in the forest are not individuals.
33
They are the nodes of a network through which they can carry their genetic
identity, even when their uprightness comes to an end. [...] Trees retain the capacity
for vegetative regeneration throughout their lives, they respond to injuries with
regrowth, and a young shoot and root form can emerge from an apparently dead
trunk. Fungi that coexist with trees are also endowed with the clonality trait. No
other terrestrial organism beats clonal colonies of plants and fungi in terms of size
and longevity (Polcyn 2023: 23).
Rys. 1: Mycelium, author Urszula Małecka
34
Second chapter. Forest activism – the activist strategist
“We go to show that in the fabric of life everything is
interconnected: forests, water, man are threads intertwined
and dependent on each other. Breaking one of them,
brings with it the loss of the others. [...]
We are going to put down roots and show that just as the
forest and water protect each other, there we too can
gratefully and reciprocally stand up for wildlife [...] ( part
of the motto of the Wspólny Las action)”.20
This chapter is an analysis of the activists' strategic approach to the forest. In addition
to their intimate relationship, those who protect the forest engage in a struggle for it: a
struggle for their own ideas, a struggle directed against the policies of the State Forests. The
forest, with which they have a close relationship, becomes a played-out element, a forest of
documents, strategies, new meanings. In capturing this phenomenon, I use translation to help
me capture the network of activist activity around the forest and the change that is taking
place in the meanings of the forest. I will start by showing the forest from the perspective of
the State Forests to answer the question of what the activists are rebelling against and to
understand the order of the forest proposed by foresters. I will show the main values that
foresters assign to forests and the network of forest order in Poland, which for years has been
dominated by a forestry perspective. I will present the forest movement as a group of actors
disrupting the existing forest order in Poland –actors who introduce controversy (Latour
1993). The forest movements are building their own alternative network around the forest, in
20 Original version: ,,Idziemy, by pokazać, że w tkaninie życia wszystko jest ze sobą połączone: lasy, woda,
człowiek stanowią nitki przeplatające się ze sobą i od siebie zależne. Zerwanie jednej z nich, niesie ze sobą
utratę pozostałych. [...] Idziemy, by zapuścić korzenie i pokazać, że tak jak las i woda chronią się nawzajem,
tam my również możemy z wdzięcznością i wzajemnością stawać w obronie dzikiej przyrody [...]”,
https://wspolnylas.pl/, (access: 10.07.2023).
35
which it appears in a completely different role than in the State Forests. Beginning with the
phenomenon of forest movements on a national scale –their values, the specifics of network
formation and methods of struggle –I will move on to a local forestry initiative in which I
participated. I will present the new forestry order that is forming in Poland.
Photog. 3: A human and a tree, author Robert Kalak.
36
Forest(s), state and transformation
In order to understand why an increasing number of the Polish public is protesting the
protection of forests, it would be necessary to look at the forest constructed by those who for
years have been the main actors establishing the forest order in Poland –the foresters. For the
purpose of this work, I am creating a certain archetype of the forester, whose image is
primarily reflected in the policies of the institutions of the State Forests. Therefore, when I
write here about foresters, I mean this archetype, and not all foresters and all foresters in
Poland. This is very important, because I will only approximate here some of the values that
the forester gives to the forests, which I consider to be the most important in the formation of
the axis of conflict over the forest.
Since activists and foresters can't get along, their visions of the forest must be very
different. Activists fight for their forest, while foresters defend theirs. Agata A. Konczal
argues that we are dealing with different forests here, also in an ontological sense (Konczal
2017: 152). The anthropologist in her book "Forest Anthropology. Foresters and the
Perception and Formation of Images of Nature in Poland" (,,Antropologia lasu. Leśnicy a
percepcja i kształtowanie wizerunków przyrody w Polsce”) shows the forest as a certain
value for the forester. It can be said that at this level the activist and the forester are in
agreement –for both of them the forest is valuable. However, what lies behind the term value
flows from the actions of individual actors, so it is not definitively defined (Konczal 2017:
127). Value has different dimensions. They flow out of the language used to talk about the
forest, the image of the forest, and the actions we take with the forest.
In this part of the work, using the tool of translation, I will show the network of
relations that has been formed in Poland around the forest, in which foresters have been the
main actors. The forest in this network has a position given to it by forestry values: it appears
first and foremost as a national resource and symbol. The position of the SF in the network is
stabilized by the functioning of the state institution in the network and the nationality
discourse that is present in Poland, and the functioning in the network is disrupted by all
actors who undermine this position (activists, European Union bodies21). As my ethnographic
research was conducted mainly with forest activists, here I primarily use data taken from the
work of Konczal (2017, 2023), which I supplement with my own experiences and
observations from the field.
21 Court of Justice of the European Union, European Commission.
37
The SF is a state institution overseen by the Ministry of Environment and Climate. It is
therefore subordinate to the country's government and thus representative of the dominant
political thought in the country (Małecka 2021). Institutionality is an important element that
stabilizes SF's positions in Poland. It allows it to refer to categories such as history or the
nation and justify its actions with them. The State Forests are almost a hundred years old, and
many elements since their establishment shape their appearance today. One of them is the
political transformation.
"What is taking place within Polish forestry after 1989 is a constant negotiation of what
is to be not only the State Forests, but also the forests and the state and the nation. I believe
that foresters have seized on the importance of the issue of state ownership of forests and the
national character of natural resources, and tied them not so much to the Polish state, but to
their entity –the State Forests" (Konczal, 2017: 119), writes the anthropologist, showing the
process of creating a Polish national myth, in which the history of our country is merged with
the history of the forest and forestry, and the activities associated with it materialize the
nation in the forest22. Konczal calls foresters the gatekeepers of the morning of
transformation, as they took advantage of the opportunity provided by the new social and
political context (2017: 74). A definition of permanently sustainable forest management was
introduced into the Forest Act of 1991, the most important document regulating forest
management in Poland in 1997, and its model changed to multifunctional23 (Małecka 2021:
23). However, the multifunctional forest management brought by the new law was not the
only goal of the forestry changes. The new law assumed that forests would finance
themselves. ""The 1991 law, in the discursive layer, kept forests in the hands of the State
Treasury, and in the practical layer it created an independent entity, giving it a number of
powers that carried the slogan of 'financial self-sufficiency'" (Konczal 2017: 81).
23 In addition to the economic (production) function, there have been natural and social functions, as specified in
a document issued by the Ministry of Environment in 1997 - the State Forestry Policy,
https://www.katowice.lasy.gov.pl/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=506deebb-988d-4665-bcd9-148fcf66ee02&
groupId=26676, (access 15.06.2021).
22 "Examples of such actions include: the first "Freedom Oak" planted by the Director General of the State
Forests together with President Bronislaw Komorowski in front of the headquarters of the General Directorate
of State Forests in Warsaw, the "Forester's Monument" in Szarlota in Pomerania "commemorating the foresters
of Gdansk Pomerania exterminated and persecuted by the Gestapo and NKVD for their loyalty and service to
the Fatherland[...] (Konczal 2017: 45)." Wearing a forester's uniform is also such an action: , "Wearing it in
certain situations is intended to evoke the symbolic connection between the ideas of the forest and the nation.
[...] is to recreate a situation in which the forest, foresters and the nation define each other (2017: 53)."
38
Wojtek, my research partner, recalls these times as an attempt to "fix that previous poor
reality." From the enactment of the Act and its entry into force, until roughly 1995, there was
no certainty that such a model had a chance of sustaining Polish forestry in the long run.
After World War II, Poland's forests accounted for only about 20% of the country's land area.
The post-war period was all about rebuilding forest cover, and involved underfunding,
inexperience in the new situation and a lack of people willing to work under harsh conditions.
"And yet it was then that the most valuable natural parts of the country were protected, thanks
to people who were in large part true nature enthusiasts," Wojtek recalls. The 1991 law was
supposed to put this situation in order. At that time, a lot of conservation work was
introduced, threats were forecasted, the state of air quality was monitored –"then it was
known that it's not that this forest is eternal - that we can't manage the same way all the time.
And then it was forgotten" (field notes, 11.05.2023). According to Wojtek, the idea of
conservation was distorted in the LP after the transformation period: "Money attracted people
who should never have dealt with forests –a living organism. There was a lack of vision for
the future and such a non-economic view of the Forests" (field notes, 20.05.2023).
Konczal (2017: 119) describes it similarly:
[...] the time of the greatest (image and financial) strength of the State Forests did
not coincide with an increased awareness of the need for new attitudes. The time
from 2004 to 2015, the time of necessary changes, was slept through. The focus
was exclusively on the struggle to maintain financial and organizational
sovereignty, and the issues of change in society were trivialized, believing in its
unwavering and unchanging support for foresters.
After the transition period, the forest in SF discourse was mobilized primarily through
neoliberal values, as a resource. And this is still the case today. The economic function of
forests leads in forest management over the other natural and social functions. The same goes
for the other non-human creatures that make up the forest. Along with the felled trees, many
animals die in the forest, and many of them also lose their habitats24. Protective forests, which
are theoretically supposed to perform non-productive functions, account for approx. 40% of
the forest area without Nature reserves, but in practice, in many protective forests foresters
carry out forest management with the inclusion of clear cuts, i.e. that is, cutting down all trees
24 A separate topic to explore would be Polish hunting (primarily as an institution), which operates on similar
principles to forestry. Animals are also viewed mainly in the category of a resource.
39
from an area of up to four hectares (such a situation occurred in the Tulecki Forest in
Poznan). No National Park has been established in Poland for 22 years, and their total area is
about 1%25. Foresters also have the tools to make the case for the social function of forests:
public consultations on Forest Management Plan issues, and, as of July 5, 2022, forests with
increased social function. Here again, according to activist statements, legal solutions mostly
fail to exemplify practice. Consultations are often announced at the last minute, and the
suggestions of local residents are rarely taken into account, while social forests are absolutely
decided by the Forestry Commission, and some Forest Districts do not designate such forests
at all26. The foresters I spoke with often boasted that forest cover in Poland is increasing, and
until recently this was true if we look at a forest as a forest crop whose main function is to
harvest timber. State Forests are also abandoning the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)
timber certification (and are often unable to meet the conditions to get the certificates in
question), an internationally recognized non-governmental organization that certifies that
timber has been harvested through responsible management27.
Foresters mobilize the forest as an actor by giving it the value of a resource and a
national symbol. For many years, such a forest has strengthened their position as people who
have a monopoly on knowledge of the forest, and thus on deciding and creating it according
to their own rules. The SF's ally is state institutionalism, which helps foresters "defend" their
forest. The posts in the top positions in the structures of the State Forests from few years are
decided by politicians of the Sovereign Poland/Solidarity party28 (previously, this was
decided by other party units). In March of this year, LP, together with Sovereign Poland,
launched the action "In Defense of Polish Forests," which was an objection to the union's
proposal to add forestry to so-called shared competencies29. "An additional reason why
Solidarna Polska wants to "defend Polish forests" is the March 2, 2023 ruling of the European
Court of Justice. The CJEU found that Poland is violating EU regulations in two important
areas. First: forest management carried out in accordance with the guidelines of the State
29 The changes would apply to Article 4 of the EU Treaty, which stipulates that shared competences between the
EU and member states apply to areas such as the internal market, transport and the environment, among others.
Forestry has so far not been among the "shared competences." MEPs have proposed that this be changed.
28 The party changed its name to Sovereign Poland on May 19, 2023 without changing its profile.
27 Some furniture companies, such as Ikea, require such certificates from their suppliers.
26 I wrote about the criteria for social participation/participation in institutional/state structures in my
undergraduate thesis (Malecka 2021). This problem is pointed out, for example, by Latour - criteria for
participation can be established in such a way that many actors drop out in the run-up before even being heard
(Latour 2004: 11).
25 It is worth mentioning that most of the National Parks established over the years were created on the initiative
of foresters. This shows that forestry did not look the same all the time.
40
Forests within the framework of the so-called Code of Good Practice does not guarantee
nature protection. Second: Polish law violates EU regulations by preventing nature protection
organizations from being able to go to court to demand an examination of the legality of
forest management plans," reads oko.press30. The bill drafted by Sovereign Poland that would
amend the Forest Law begins with the words: "Guided by the constitutional duty of public
authorities to protect the environment, recognizing the momentous role of generations of
Polish Foresters in Poland's independence and the contribution of the State Forests to the
successful development of the Republic of Poland [...] the following is enacted [...]."31 The
words underscore the essence of forests as a national symbol and the contribution of the LP to
nation-building. Jozef Kubica, director of the LP at the Sovereign Poland press conference,
emphasized the political nature of the institution he represents with the words: "We are ready
to win the election battle. I think the Polish right will show its great power."32
The forest is transformed from a material entity into an actor through which its –
forestry –position in the network is strengthened. It is given the values of a national resource
and symbol, which are embedded in the systemic values represented by the state (especially
the right-wing discourse) and the neoliberal economy. The translation that Tsing writes about
in the case of matsutake occurs here. Mushrooms go from being a non-capitalist value, to a
path in which they become a capitalist value (Tsing 2015: 63). The same is true of the forest -
a living element of nature that existed before man and was subsumed by him and filtered
through the values he represents. Values that, in a different economic, political, cultural
context, could be quite different.
For years, the network of forest order in Poland represented by foresters was doing
well. In this network, in addition to the forest, there was the nation, the state, profit, resource
or knowledge, but also society, which was to benefit from the forest as the forester created it.
However, relatively recently, this order has been disrupted. Society/activists have gained
more agency and are proposing an alternative vision of the forest, a different order of
relations. The actions of forest movements in this sense are an attempt to take away the
foresters' narrative about the forest, to undermine their knowledge and thus their values,
Konczal writes (2023: 27). I look at this phenomenon as a controversy that ANT
32 Article for gazeta.pl, , "LP director talked about winning election battle,"
https://next.gazeta.pl/next/7,172392,29584266,dyrektor-lasow-panstwowych-mowil-o-wygraniu-batalii-wyborc
zej.html, (access: 17.06.2023).
31 Draft law in defense of Polish forests, https://wobroniepolskichlasow.pl/projekt_ustawy.pdf, (access
30.06.2023).
30 Full access to the article: https://oko.press/ustawa-o-obronie-polskich-lasow, (access 30.06.2023).
41
representatives write about. For a long time, foresters were the actors with the greatest
agency, they were the ones who established the future of the Polish forests and the actions to
lead to it. They did not take into account the needs of other actors, and as a result there was a
controversy, that is, a disruption of the order established by them and resistance from other
actors. This is a conflict between the forest and the people, in which the forest is played out in
many ways. In it, activists present an intimate relationship with the forest, in which loss,
delight, connection or love are present –elements so far absent from the forest order
dominated by the State Forests.
I would like to emphasize again that the resource and the people are not the only values
that foresters see in the forest. They appear most strongly in the discourse presented by the
SF, but many foresters and foresters have their own intimate relationships with the forest.
These relationships remain undiscovered to me and could be a good field for separate
anthropological research.
Forest movement –values and interconnections
"The key concept over which the discussion breaks down is, of course, the forest. The
official interpretation of Polish forest sciences does not take into account, and therefore does
not understand, the concept of loss after an old forest has been cut down," Marta
Jagusztyn-Krynicka writes for Autoportret magazine in an issue devoted to the forest (2023).
"The definition of a forest also does not take into account the complexity and diversity of a
mature ecosystem, the processes that connect its various elements."
Marta is the originator and one of the founders of the Forests and Citizens (LiO)
Foundation, one of the most crucial NGOs for the forest movement. It has formally existed
since June 2021. The foundation's website reads:
Where did the idea for nationwide action come from? It was born thanks to local
experience. The State Forests wanted us in Shumin, in the Nadbuzhany Landscape Park
to cut down the forest. And this was done by the method of clear cutting, i.e. "to the bare
ground". The risk of logging in the immediate vicinity of the village mobilized our local
community. We started talking to the State Forestry Service, and set up a local
association.
42
I met people from other parts of Poland protecting their forests. People called with
questions about how to do it. I decided that it was worth starting to document knowledge
about the scale of the social movement for forests in different parts of Poland, and to
create a platform to share experiences.
And so Forests and Citizens was created.
Forest activists are actors who disrupt the forest network. They are adding notions of
loss, awe, diversity, connection, weaving, love or struggle to the Polish forest discourse –
notions that were not present in the previous forest order or appeared in other contexts and
meanings. The common value of activists is that they do not view forests in the category of a
resource. Therefore –using the language of the SF –they focus on defending the natural and
social function of forests. What does it mean? “The forester is supposed to be the executor of
the will of society," I once heard from Wojtek. Activists emphasize that we have a right to the
forest as we like it, and that foresters have a duty to respect the voice of society in forest
management. State forests, that is, our common forests, they say. Marta Jagusztyn-Krynicka
(2023: 48-49) calls this "the collective weaving of a polyphonic story about the forest," that
is, not allowing one vision of the forests to dominate forest management. Activists are not in
favor of stopping logging altogether; they know that wood is needed by humans. However,
they demand greater agency in deciding the forest and the exclusion of larger forest areas
from economic functions33.
Many activists love the forest. At one of LiO's webinars the question was asked, why
do you get involved in protecting the forest? The most common answers were "because they
cut it down", "because I love it", "because I feel sorry for the lives". This does not mean that
all activists see the value of the forest in itself. Many are aware that they are defending the
forest for themselves –to defend a space that suits their various needs. These needs are
diverse: spiritual, wilderness, spending time in nature, feeling safe for themselves and their
children, peace, inspiration. Many people combine many different needs for the forest, and do
not exclude the fact that the forest has a double value: for itself and for human.
I have also encountered the claim that the forest is a value in itself, but Polish society is
not ready to think this way. Therefore, it is necessary to look for such values that relate to
man –what benefits can man have from the forest other than wood? Answers to this question
33 Recently, Forests and Citizens conducted a poll among its supporters and sympathizers on which forestry
demands they consider most important. The largest number of people voted to exclude 20 percent of forests
under LP management from forest management.
43
are frequent arguments of activists who want to convince the larger part of society of the
rightness of the cause they are fighting for.
The motivations for forest activism are also influenced by the age of the activists. Many
of the new social movements fighting for environmental and climate protection are young
movements34.Forest movements, although they have young members/members in their ranks
(18-30 years old, often associated with other youth movements), are largely formed by
mature people who have a permanent place of residence. Many activists begin to work for the
protection of the forest, resisting the cutting of "their" forest –the forest that grows close to
their home, the forest with which they are connected, as they often reside in it. Perhaps this is
why forest movements are not youth movements –more mature people have stronger ties to a
specific place, and thus a specific forest, and therefore resist when that place is taken
away/changed for them. However, answering this question would require more quantitative
research.
NGOs supporting forest movements emphasize the connection between humans and
forests –they pay attention to our multi-species relationship. The first value of the LiO
Foundation is: "We work for forests because we feel part of nature and depend on it. We
protect the forests so that they can protect us," while the Pracownia na rzecz wszystkich Istot
writes on its website: "We believe that caring for a high quality natural and cultural
environment is an action for all beings, both nature and people".35 Human-non-human
connections were also highlighted this year by Wspólny Las (The Common Forest) initiative,
the organizer of Ogólnopolska Akcja Inicjatyw Leśnych (The National Community Initiatives
Campaign), which aimed at forest walks to celebrate the civic festival of the forest –their
motto, an excerpt of which I begin this chapter, encourages, among other things, the
exchange of power and experience "with forests, groves, squares and each other," and thus
become part of a network. Many of these organizations and initiatives emphasize the
importance of rethinking being human and working on the relationships we as humans have
with each other. LiO lists among its values, for example, treating each other as partners, as
opposed to "the legacy of ossified patriarchal hierarchies”.
The forest movement is therefore not just fighting for the forest. Its actions are often
also feminist, pacifist or defending human rights, including the rights of
35 Website of Pracownia na rzecz wszystkich Istot, https://pracownia.org.pl/o-pracowni/o-nas, (access:
03.07.2023).
34 What is written about in Poland by Tubacki 2020; Kocyba, Łukianow, Piotrowski 2020; Dębińska 202 and
others; or in the United States by Sarah M. Pike (2017) and others.
44
minorities36,Therefore, they fit into the category of new social movements (della Porta, Diani
2009; Paleczny 2010). This shows that it is difficult to categorize the forest movement as a
homogeneous group whose goal is to protect the forest. Many forest activists are involved in
other forms of social engagement, related to nature conservation (political, educational or, for
example, species-specific urban conservation activities), but also for other causes that are
important to them, such as the struggle for women's rights or democracy in urban politics.
The forest movement is thus a very diverse phenomenon, and the web of values,
motivations and actions it weaves goes far beyond the forest. It is not always the case that
activists look at the forest as an equal human entity, but despite their differences in perception
of the non-human world, their different approaches are not mutually exclusive. It is not,
however, that they always agree with each other. Even at the level of building a local group,
there are various inconsistent actions and conflicting ideas that flow from differences in
values and needs. Everyone has an individual relationship with the forest, and the vested
interests of individuals can eclipse the common struggle for the goal (I write about it in the
next chapter). Undoubtedly, however, in the previous forest order, love and sensitivity to
non-human worlds was not a large part of the discourse, which began to change when this
order was disrupted by activists. The forest is mobilized by activists as an actor in various
ways, the most prominent of which are –the forest is our right and the forest is alive. The
forest becomes an element to be fought for, but also an element of ourselves, the community.
Forest movements, as the name suggests, are mobile. It is a dynamic phenomenon with
a fluid framework. Its emergence arose from resistance to the SF's forest management
policies and, as the SF refuses to have a fair dialogue, the persistence of the forest movement
is also conditioned by resistance. Depending on various factors –other actors, such as the
State Forests, but also European Union bodies, climate catastrophe, war, bark beetle,
international politics –the network of forest movements will shape itself differently (and is
shaping itself, as I discuss further in the text). To capture this phenomenon, the tool of
translation is useful, which shows that no phenomenon is a finite thing. All actors translate,
new actors join the network, and others cease to be relevant. The forest that activists present
is a controversy in the existing forest order –foresters did not foresee that their knowledge
and experience would be disrupted, and yet the public has begun to demand the possibility of
greater involvement in the future of Poland's forests. The network of the existing forest order
has thus been disrupted and altered by the actions of activists. In the next section of this
36 LiO also draws attention to the Forest Service's mistreatment of Forest Service employees.
45
paper, I will show the strategic dimension of the forest movements' actions and the course of
this controversy.
Building a structure
The forest movement usually arises reactively, as an action in opposition to logging.
Initially, it is one or a few people for whom the cut forest is important and who want to
protect it. Some of the first actions are collecting signatures on a petition to the local
government (which is also a method to mobilize more people willing to act), publicizing the
issue in the media or getting local authorities interested in the matter. It is important to
recognize the natural and social values of the forests and specifically set goals for action.
The creation of the logging map "Before they cut down your forest", as well as the map
of forest initiatives by the Forests and Citizens Foundation was intended to assist local
activists in their first steps (the LiO website also offers instructions for those who are just
starting to protect their forest). One of the most difficult things activists face is the lack of
easy access to forest data. In theory, the SF provides a Forest Data Bank37, however, there is
no information on the planned cuttings, and the specialized language makes it difficult to
understand the content. On a forest activist group on Facebook, many activists also write that
LPs refuse to provide them with information on logging. The #BeforeTheyWillCutYourForest
map makes it easy to access information such as the type of forest in the forestry
classification, the type of cutting and, most importantly, the approximate time of the planned
cutting. In May of this year, LiO led the campaign "Let's Free the Forest Data" –collecting
signatures on a petition to the Ministry of Climate and Environment, aimed at involving the
public side in the work on a new version of the Forest Data Bank.
The choice of methods of action depends on the qualities of the forest and the
willingness of the forest district to cooperate with the community. Does the forest meet the
requirements to establish a small form of nature conservation in it, such as an ecological land
use, a natural monument or a landscape-nature complex? Are there hollow trees in it? Is the
law broken in it, e.g. is felling done during the breeding season or are cuts made in it that are
incompatible with the forest type38? According to the values of the forest, specific
conservation measures are chosen, e.g. steps are taken leading to the establishment of a
38 For example, according to the Forest Law, clear-cutting is not allowed in protective forests.
37 Forest Data Bank, https://www.bdl.lasy.gov.pl/portal/, (access: 03.07.2023).
46
reserve or a small form of nature protection, legal action is taken, the Forest Stewardship
Council's timber certification system is used, or consultations are held with the forest district,
regional LP directorates and local authorities. Sometimes activists test several methods at the
same time or, if a particular method is not effective, try another. In the case of larger forest
areas that are particularly valuable in terms of nature and threatened by large-scale logging –
such as the Bialowieza Forest, the Beech Forest, the Carpathian Forest –activists decide to
protect the forests with their own bodies. They organize nationwide actions of civil
disobedience called "blockades" which involve, among other things, camping in a forest
threatened with logging (sometimes for weeks or even years, like the Kolektyw Wilczyce -
Wolf Collective) or erasing markers on trees designated for logging (Dziki Ruch Oporu -
Wild Resistance). The choice of measures and course of action is also influenced by the
location of the forest. For example, initiatives protecting forests around cities tend to be
larger than those working to protect forests around towns and villages. This is influenced by
many factors, including the size of the city or the social capital of its residents.
For many forestry initiatives, formalization of structures into the shape of associations
and foundations is the next stage of development. They often cooperate with other
conservation NGOs in the fight for a common goal (some of them formalize into collectives,
e.g. Wroclaw Climate Protection Coalition). In addition to the Forests and Citizens
Foundation, other NGOs with a national focus on forest activism are, for example, the
Natural Heritage Foundation (Fundacja Dziedzictwo Przyrodnicze), Pracownia na rzecz
Wszystkich Istot or the MODrzew Association. Together with other forestry and nature
initiatives, they organize grassroots meetings to discuss either next steps or specific issues,
e.g. pro-forestry activities during an election campaign. In June of this year, there was also a
meeting of the Forest Movement Europe in Bialowieza, attended by forest NGOs from all
over Europe, including Polish forest movements, with the aim of exchanging knowledge and
experience, as well as a joint appeal for support for the EU law on nature restoration39.
The joint efforts of NGOs are also aimed at bringing forestry movements together. The
LiO Foundation has a strong focus on partnership and community building around forest
conservation in its structures: "We know that we are part of a larger ecosystem, both as part
of nature, part of society and as part of the forest movement. By working together we can
39 Nature Restoration Law,
https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/nature-and-biodiversity/nature-restoration-law_en, (access: 13.07.2023).
47
achieve much more than by acting alone"40.Marta, during our conversation about forest
activism and my work, emphasized that it is essential to build a community in order to "on
the basis of common concern for the forest, reform how we exist among ourselves, among
people" (field notes, 18.04.2023). At the webinar on building an activist group, one of the
issues addressed was how to act strategically, rather than just in an ad hoc and reactive
manner. It is important for a group to have common goals, even if the activist motivations of
members differ. According to LiO, a forest activist network consists of project leaders, an
activist group and a friendly public/allies (the last group includes people who sign petitions,
share activist content, but do not take more concrete activist actions). A common situation
observed by foundation members is leader burnout41, that's why it's so important to build a
group, ongoing all the time, to be attentive to each other and adapt activities to the
capabilities of the people in question. According to Marta, structured action with a common
goal is also important because the forestry movement is not so young anymore. Although
mobilizing for action is still important, a large part of the population is already mobilized –
what is needed now are structures to maintain mobilization and to act despite differences42.
Also, the response of foresters to resistance is different than at the beginning of the formation
of the first movements. As recently as two years ago, the LP was unprepared for resistance
from the public, but now it has arguments and methods with which it successfully fends off
protests.
The creation of an activist structure is a process of translation – the forest is
transformed from a material living entity into an element that is fought over and whose
various characteristics can influence the success or failure of the struggle. The more naturally
"valuable" the forest, i.e. more biodiverse, the closer the victory, the easier it is to justify the
struggle. A whole network of dependencies outside the forest is being built around the forest:
groups, meetings, methods, strategies, petitions, documents, webinars. Individuals acquire
42 The issue of mobilizing society for activism is related to the topic of civil society and social participation,
which have their origins in various national and international processes. Krzysztof Niedziałkowski, Jouni
Paavola and Bogumiła Jędrzejewska (2012) write about different interpretations of social participation. In the
case of the Bialowieza National Park, increasing social participation has been linked to Poland's contemporary
history, including the consequences of the democratization process in Poland after 1989 (2012).
41 This is part of many social activities, as I have had the opportunity to observe and experience during my
activities in study circles and volunteer work. On the subject of activist burnout write the authors of the book
"Walcz, protestuj, zmieniaj świat: psychologia aktywizmu" (Fight, protest, change the world: psychology of
activism) (2019).
40 LiO runs Facebook groups for people interested in forest conservation, which act, in a way, as a hyde park
where people can exchange experiences, successes, concerns, ideas and other thoughts on topics related to the
forest and its conservation. It also organizes periodic webinars on forest activism.
48
different roles: leaders, guides, educators, organizers, liaisons, mediators, etc. All this is done
to make the case for incorporating more of the forest's vision into its management policies
(and sometimes to demonstrate the essence of the forest itself).
The translation of forest movements has different stages: from more reactive,
little-organized actions, to larger collective actions, to advance action planning (such as
planning forest strategies before elections). Important actors in the whole process are NGOs,
which are trying to give the forest movement in Poland a certain direction and take care of
the community character of the movement. It is important to them that the process takes place
as egalitarian as possible. Despite the increasing structuring and multi-track activities – local
objections to logging, attempts to create various forms of conservation, legal actions,
international exchanges – the forestry movement remains largely spontaneous and reactive,
dependent on the actions of State Foresters. However, there is no doubt that the existing
forest order dominated by the perspective of foresters has been disrupted by the activities of
forest movements.
I look at forest activists, mainly those active in NGOs, as representatives of the forest,
Latour's spokespersons (2004). While many activists are aware that the forest represents
itself, they know that it needs human representation in human society. They fight primarily
for the inclusion of social (human) vision in the management of Poland's forests, a strategic
action. They refer to the language of the SF – fighting for social and natural functions.
Activists emphasize that in the fight for their vision of the forest, it is important to have an
attitude – to know that we have a right to the forest, we don't have to ask for it, but demand
that it be respected. Such action further disrupts the forest order proposed by foresters, in
which they are the actors with absolute knowledge of the forest. Activists show that their
knowledge – knowledge that I will call activist knowledge later in the text, which is an
intertwining of different kinds of knowledge: forest, biological, official, social – is worth as
much as that of foresters.
49
Photog. 4: A walk in Wilczy Młyn on the occasion of the citizen's forest day, author Robert Kalak.
Local forest
Getting to the meeting was not the easiest part. Tulecki Forest is located near the
eastern border of Poznan and no streetcars reach it. To get there, we had to use the streetcar
and bus, and then walk quite a bit. Both of us –along with a friend from the Youth Climate
Strike (original name: Fridays for Future)–traveled this road for the first time. The ground
was still frozen, so walking along the dirt road was easy, and the sun was also shining, a
rarity in this gray winter.
When we arrived, the walk was already underway. Professor Wladyslaw Polcyn
(Wladek) was telling something to those gathered. When he finished, he came up to greet us,
and immediately knew who I was. Thanks to Gosia, my doorkeeper, the professor who knew
that I was planning to write my master's thesis on forest activism and was interested in
working with me from the very beginning. It was he who was one of the plenipotentiaries of
the Moratorium for Trees in the Protective Forests of Poznań committee, a resolution
initiative formed in November 2021. Its fuse was the excessive felling of trees (among which
50
were more than a hundred years old) in Użytek Ekologiczny (The Ecological Use)
"Darzybór", part of the Tulecki Forest, which had already been observed by residents for
some time. In order to trigger the control actions of the Mayor of Poznan to protect the
remaining part of the mixed forest from further logging, as well as other protective forests of
Poznan, a Moratorium was created.
The Tulecki Forest and other protective forests of Poznan have representatives among
those involved in the Moratorium initiative. Like other forestry movements, the Moratorium
creates a grid of meanings around the forests with the goal of protecting them from excessive
logging.
The Tulecki Forest is a forest area with an urban protection function located in the
Marepole Forestry District of the Babki Forest District. It lies within the boundaries of the
Poznan agglomeration, and the State Forests manage the area. 350 hectares of forest
constitute the form of nature protection Użytek Ekologiczny "Darzybór" (the remaining 60
hectares of use are meadows), established by a resolution of the City Council due to its
natural value. The purpose of the resolution is to "protect well-preserved fragments of mixed
coniferous forest and meadow vegetation", "conduct correct tourist and recreational
management" while maintaining "sustainable forest management"43. Supervision of the
ecological use and implementation of the resolution is entrusted to the Mayor of Poznań.
This means that, by virtue of the Law on Nature Protection, the decision on limiting the
size of logging should also belong to the mayor. As early as May 2021, the Council of the
Kleszczewo Municipality –the municipality is adjacent to the Tulecki Forest –made an
appeal to the Mayor of Poznan to take measures to exclude production functions from forest
management carried out in the areas constituting the "Darzybór" Use. She received no
response.
Władek has developed a recommendation for the Poznań City Council entitled.
"Moratorium for protective forests in Poznań", at the invitation of the Poznań Citizens' Panel.
Soon, together with the Commission for Civil Dialogue on Environmental Protection in
Poznan, the appeal was presented as a motion to the city council. Wieslaw Rygielski, then
chairman of the Civic Dialogue Commission, was the originator of the submission. A
43 Resolution No. LXXV/1205/VI/2014 of the Poznań City Council dated 04-11-2014 on the establishment of
the ecological use "Darzybór",
https://bip.poznan.pl/bip/uchwaly/kadencja-2010-2014,8/lxxv-1205-vi-2014-z-dnia-2014-11-04,54529/, (access:
10.05.2023).
51
resolution committee was then formed, which formally had fifteen members. The resolution's
two main demands were that the LP respect the priority of the social function in the
protective forests of Poznań, and that action be taken to amend legislation to secure
protective forests for cities. The project collected 1,100 signatures in three weeks out of 300
required.
The walk where I met the professor took place shortly after the resolution was
submitted. Its purpose was mainly educational –to see with my own eyes what the
,,Darzybor" looks like and learn about the processes taking place there, but also promotional -
to maintain interest in the issue. It was also a period of waiting for the City Council to vote on
the initiative resolution, which emerged a few days later as unanimously positive44. Now it's
the president's turn to decide.
The response did not come for nearly four months, and its absence blocked further
action. Finally, the activists took matters into their own hands again and initiated meetings
with representatives of the Forest Districts and the Regional Directorate of LP in May and
June 2022. Władek in August 2022 on the Moratorium Facebook group wrote: "[...] we
received a firm declaration to abandon in "Darzybor" all previously planned type I and III
clear-cutting and replace them with thinning methods." Unfortunately, after another few
months, logging began again45. Władek decided to take legal action. At the beginning of
2023, together with Robert Kalak (a member of the Moratorium initiative and chairman of
the Civic Dialogue Committee at the Faculty of Environmental Protection and Landscaping
of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan) and attorney Filip Czelusniak, he filed a
notice to the prosecutor's office about the possibility of committing a crime, naming the head
of the Babki Forest District (Robert Okińczyc) as guilty of causing significant environmental
damage to the "Darzybór" land use. The notice was met with a refusal, which was answered
with a complaint. On June 5, 2023, Stowarzyszenie Nasz Las Tulecki (Our Tulecki Forest
Association) was registered to help in the court battle for the forest. On June 20, a meeting
was held to hear the complaint, at which the District Court upheld the prosecutor's position
that there were no grounds to look into Darzybor to see if environmental damage had
45 Article with update of the situation:
https://poznan.wyborcza.pl/poznan/7,36001,29209437,w-darzyborze-znow-tna-ale-lesnicy-deklaruja-ze-duzo-m
niej.html, (access: 10.05.2023).
44 Article about decision of City Council:
https://poznan.wyborcza.pl/poznan/7,36001,28013035,radni-zaglosowali-za-wstrzymaniem-wycinek-drzew-w-l
asach-wokol.html, (access: 10.05.2023).
52
occurred there. It expressed the belief that the mayor of Poznan and the forestry authorities
could not have committed a criminal act because they had good intentions.
Due to limited access to informants previously active in the initiative, in this work I do
not undertake to trace the history of its activities. Nor is that the purpose of this work.
However, I will cite here my observations, which I consider most relevant to understanding
the functioning of the initiative. I remember being struck at the beginning of my work with
the initiative by the diversity of the activist community, which I could not put into any
framework. People associated with the Moratorium come from a variety of backgrounds –
scientific, local government, legal, student, conservation-related and nonprofessional, and
many of them combine different functions. The Moratorium is not a group with a compact
structure. In various phases of its activities, the composition of the movement has changed,
but with the constant presence of the main initiator of its creation, Władek. Those involved in
the Moratorium function in parallel activist or local government structures, e.g., Komisja
Dialogu Obywatelskiego (the Commission for Civil Dialogue), Klub Przyrodników (the
Naturalists' Club), Koalicja ZaZieleń (the ForGreen Coalition) or Prawnicy dla Zwierząt,
(Lawyers for Animals). According to Władek, at various stages of activity, to varying
degrees, decisions on next steps were made democratically and came from people who saw
such possibilities due to their previous activist, local government experience, related to
various acquaintances. Importantly, these initiatives mainly consisted of attempts to give
direction to the local government, based on the assumption that the local government is
supposed to be the main party looking after the welfare of the forests within the city limits
and negotiating with foresters.
The Moratorium supports the creation of an activist network, and through my
acquaintances with those involved in the initiative, I learned a lot not only about forest
activism, but also about urban environmental activism. Since the Poznań forestry movement
is an urban forestry initiative, the Poznań local government was a very important actor, and
relations with it and its individual members and activists often set the course of events. The
example of the Moratorium clearly shows the fluidity of the forest movement phenomenon
and its intersection with other initiatives, groups or structures that can positively contribute to
the cause.
The Poznan forestry movement is creating a network of those interested in forest
conservation, but it is not focused on building a community –during my time with the
Moratorium, there were no meetings to discuss structure, think through measures and goals,
53
and integrate beyond forest conservation. Their strategy is more about using the
predisposition of specific people to achieve the goals set at the beginning, and expanding the
network on the occasion of nature walks and other pro-environmental events and meetings.
During my work with the Moratorium, there were also inconsistent activities that resulted
from the vested interests of individuals.
In the Moratorium network, important actors, in addition to activists and urban forests
(primarily the Tulecki Forest), are naturalists, scientific knowledge, the State Forests,
foresters of the Babki Forest District, Poznan local government headed by the mayor, the
media or NGOs. Young activists, usually students, also scroll through the network. The
network is supported by municipal structures that enable action in parallel organizations and
which provide knowledge that is then used in forest activism. The forest is mobilized first and
foremost as an element that must be protected and fought for.
New forestal order
What is the forest order in Poland now? Although foresters still have a monopoly on
the management of state forests, forest activists are very much in their way. Two networks of
meanings –the State Forests and the forestry movement –are colliding, mobilizing two
different forests into existence. One forest is a forest full of timber, and therefore money, a
forest in which the Polish nation is embodied. The other forest is an entity, but also an
element of strategic struggle. Are we dealing here with two ontological orders, as Konczal
(2017) suggests? Are they two different worlds of forests, or just two different orders of
relations?
Marta from LiO at the debate Are forests common in Poland?46 organized this June in
Katowice says:
There is no dialogue on forests, there are parallel statements. Scientists say
there is a lack of access to forest data, the State Forests say there is access. The
public side argues that social forests are a rubbish, State Forests decries the
solution as a valuable innovation. Scientists receiving grants from the State Forests
raise arguments that forest management as it stands is the answer to the climate
46 The video from the debate: https://www.facebook.com/LasyiObywatelki/videos/7048278265189270/, (access:
29.06.2023).
54
crisis, scientists independent of the State Forests criticize forest management and
especially the cutting of old-growth forests in the context of the climate crisis. The
State Forests are in denial, although they are already criticized by almost all forest
stakeholders: local communities, local governments, the timber industry, forest
service companies. By failing to adapt, they are shooting themselves in the foot.
As the SF closes itself to dialogue, the two networks of forests develop in parallel,
influence each other's persistence, but the meanings and values they give to forests do not
intermingle. Although the debate around forestry in Poland is set on two opposed sides, other
human social groups that have pivotal roles in the formation of forests in Poland should not
be forgotten here: forestry workers, scientists, civil servants, Polish and foreign
entrepreneurs, private forest owners, local residents47. They happen to be actors in the
networks of translation produced by foresters and activists, but they also create their own
networks of meaning around the forest, and exploring them would expand the picture of the
forest order in Poland.
I believe that the worlds of the LP and the forest movement are more than orders of
relationships. They have their own values and structures and strategies of action based on
them. In both networks, the forest is associated with love and security, even though this is
expressed in completely different ways. Therefore, we are dealing with two different worlds
created around the forest (two other more-than-human socialities) –a forest that also has its
own worlds, a forest in which it doesn't matter that it is within the borders of a country.
Following Eduardo Kohn, I believe that the forest represents itself (Kohn 2013). The forest
beyond the forester, beyond the activist and beyond everyone else has its own ontologies,
worlds of meaning that it constructs. We can get to know it through attention.
47I wrote about these various roles in my work on the Model Forest (Malecka 2021).
55
Interlude. Scotch pine
Let's take a look at the pine tree. In Poland, it is most often found in forest crops, not
only in "typical" pine habitats, but also in large areas where mixed or deciduous forests
originally grew. It is much rarer to find pine in tangles with other species, so our image of
pine is usually like this –a long straight trunk with a small high-set crown. Yet in the open,
old pines are lower, with a shorter trunk and a wide, flattened crown. In the Open Forest
Encyclopedia48, this is how they write about the bark of old pine trees: "Bark in old trees in
the lower part of the trunk thick, cracked taffy, brownish gray outside, dark cherry inside. In
the middle and upper part of the trunk thin, reddish yellow, peeling off in thin patches; on
young twigs smooth, gray-brown."
Why is pine so readily planted in plantations? The species is tolerant of the large
temperature fluctuations characteristic of the temperate zone in which Poland lies. It grows
well with little precipitation, is drought-tolerant, and can grow both on rock and on dry sands
or peats. However, it requires fresh, airy and fairly deep soils to grow well. , "The Scots pine,
on the other hand, has high light requirements; it is one of the most light-hungry species,
second only to birch and larch. Under favorable habitat conditions, it can withstand light
shade in its first years of life, and becomes increasingly light-wise with age" (Open Forest
Encyclopedia).
At first the pine grows upward, then its growth is stunted and it grows in thickness. Its
root system is variable: on fresh sands it is deep with a prominent tap root and
well-developed lateral roots; on dry sands with deep water levels and in swamps it develops a
surface system without a tap root. In the driest sandy soils, lateral roots branch out very
widely just below the soil surface, allowing them to take advantage of rainwater.
However, pine has some serious pests, although my research partner points out that
from a biodiversity perspective, there is no such thing as a pest. The worst pests for pine are
the leafminer species: dandelion borers, Christmas tree bark beetles, pine barnacle borers and
other borers. These are insects that attack mature pines, but there are others, such as the bark
beetle, whose females lay eggs under the bark of pine trees.
And how does pine compare to other tree species?
— Birch and pine don't like each other too much, birch is limber and will always beat
that pine, although they actually complement each other well — I once learned from Wojtek.
48 Scotch pine, https://www.encyklopedia.lasypolskie.pl/doku.php?id=s:sosna-zwyczajna, (dostęp: 04.07.2023).
56
Pine grows well in the company of spruce, which has a shallow root system, so it doesn't take
ground water away from the pine. It also complements well with beech and oak. For example,
beech, which is shade-loving when young, can be introduced under a pine stand. Pine forms
mixed forests well, and it is light-wise, so it doesn't have it easy when young, but if there is
some gap between the trees, pine will take advantage of it. It is a species that can get used to
different conditions.
Photog. 5: Scotch pines in Wielkopolski National Park, author Urszula Małecka.
57
Third chapter. Welcome in the forest – the activist’s ways
of living with
"The story of this highly complex coexistence of the
bacterial, fungal and plant worlds brings hope for a
new hand in human's relationship with Nature
(Polcyn 2023: 17)”.
"We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans
have words. Language is our gift and our duty. I
began to think of writing as an act of reciprocity
with the living world. Words allow us to remember
old stories and weave new ones, ones that reconnect
science and spirit and help us become people of the
corn (Kimmerer 2020: 410)."49
This chapter is an invitation to enter the forest of my research partners. Here I describe
the stories of their relationships with the forest and show them as members of forest
communities. In these stories, my partners are individuals learning from the forest, practicing
the art of noticing (Tsing 2015), and creating places for forest life to flourish. I look at the
forest from a more-than-human perspective and show that Władek and Wojtek share this
perspective. I also use the tool of translation here to show the fluidity of activist knowledge
and propose to look at it as an intertwining of these different types. I also show that forests in
Poland could be more-than-human communities if a polyphony of visions of the forest were
allowed in the "management" of the forest. In doing so, I combine the perspective of
more-than-human anthropology with translation.
49 Quoting from a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer –a botanist and member of the Potawatomi tribe who
combines indigenous knowledge with modern scientific knowledge to write about nature –"Braiding
Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2020)".
58
Photog. 6: Fungus found on a mycorrhizal walk, author Robert Kalak.
Władek: learning from symbiosis
— Forests are a silent company. [...] If I have been in this company for years, it is a
very strong feeling of anger when someone simply takes away this space from me, cuts it out.
We are sitting in the library of the UAM Biology Department. This department is
probably our most frequent meeting place, and meetings are usually conversations about the
forest, but for me it's also exploring a slightly different scientific world. Once I observed
Władek's student's experiment with recording the growth rate of bean roots. Laboratories,
information boards, test tubes –for me it's a contact with the production of different
knowledge than the one I know from anthropology. This time I met with Władek to inquire
about a few things that seemed important to me after listening to our previous conversations.
This is our last meeting at the department, at least so far.
— What motivates me to take action to protect the forest is the human perspective, says
my research partner. — This forest is needed by us. There's an aphorism with the rest of us,
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you know, that it's the forest that needs us need, not that we need the forest, much less the
foresters. — Władek calls his motivations for protecting the forest selfish. He talks about
"Darzybor," a forest he has been fighting for and losing for several years. — (This forest) is a
large space, but I remember it and know it in many places. Well, and now I know that I don't
want to go to those places, because I know they are not there. It's such a stifling feeling. Like
losing someone. These are the kind of things taking once and for all in a very short, violent
act.
Władek's relationship with the forest manifests itself in many ways. Before he was a
professor, the professor was a mountains climber for many years. He also used to run long
distances for a long time, including in the green areas of Poznań and around the city. He told
me that it was possible to run from one end of the city to the other without setting foot on
concrete. He camped in forests, often alone and often at night, and took part in night
ultramarathons in, for example, the Kampinos Forest, where "a person is on his own in
moving through a large space" (field notes, 03.04.2023). For Władek, being part of nature
means measuring himself against it through his physicality. Staying in it for a long time,
acting in its rhythm.
— If you want to face the reality of a river that traverses distances, then you have to do
what the river does. Well, so I ran distances worthy of the size of the river. Over a distance of
up to fifty miles in one day — he said.
It is difficult for my research partner to understand people who do not show sensitivity
to nature in their actions. That's why our conversations often descended on the attitudes of
foresters, officials, politicians or "regular" people for whom the fate of the forest is at least
indifferent. Władek once asked me if anthropology has the tools to explain these different
attitudes. "We use zoocentric patterns –we imitate the behavior of predators [...]," he wrote
for the magazine Autoportret (2023: 22).
I asked if he sees man as part of nature:
—Human has alienated himself, and to get back to nature it requires a huge effort.
Among other things, this is why Władek is engaged in the study of mycorrhizal fungi.
He sees the symbiotic relationships between fungi, plants and bacteria as inspirations for
human social projects. "[...] our existing ideas of civilization replicate only one extreme
version of interaction with non-human species – the principle of exploitation. [...] Little
thought is given to the fact that the model of a world inhabited by nine billion predators is
untenable; it is even suggested that there is no alternative to it (Polcyn 2023: 22)."
Plant-fungal networks show that other alternatives do exist. Their relationships have been
60
formed over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and colonies of fungi and plants are
the largest organisms living on Earth.
The study of mycorrhizal fungi is still a fairly niche topic among biologists. Their
research does not at first glance yield human knowledge that can benefit, for example,
medicine, and it is precisely such topics that are more desirable to the state and the market
and thus more readily funded. This research is not only difficult because of access to
underground networks, but also because of unfavorable university structures. Władek called
rhizospheres "white spots on the map of the Earth”. However, their research is extremely
important in the context of the climate crisis, as it helps develop tools to protect biodiversity
(Polcyn 2023: 21).
Last year Władek joined the international SPUN (Society for the Protection of
Underground Networks50) program, which aims to provide data for global conservation
efforts of mycorrhizal ecosystems. The project involves collecting and analyzing fungal DNA
samples from previously unexplored sites. These are sites identified on a predictive map,
created with the help of artificial intelligence, where potential hot-spots, not yet considered in
programs on the impact of climate change on the biodiversity of soil, may be located. The
researchers will use bioinformatics tools in the study – machines to massively identify the
genetic signatures of thousands of microorganisms in a single soil sample. Władek and a
group of a few people are engaged in mycorrhizal research in areas of the Bieszczady
National Park, which activists from Fundacja Dziedzictwo Przyrodnicze (the Natural
Heritage Foundation) and Inicjatywa Dzikie Karpaty (the Wild Carpathians Initiative) are
working to protect.
The project is interdisciplinary in nature. "The myconautic mission we are engaged in
in the Bieszczady Mountains also involves artists and educators from Poznań universities
gathered around the Ryzosfera project –a great network of small worlds51, Władek writes
(2023: 22). "For me, it's a combination of socio-fungal storytelling, scientific research,
environmental activism and exploration of the last (because underground) white spots on the
map of the Earth" (field notes, 20.12.2022), he added in an email to female researcher
friends, in which he shared his knowledge and joy about the project.
Building a human activist network around the forest is also important to Władek. It is
he who has been the glue between me and Wojtek, Poznan naturalists and biology students
51 This is another interdisciplinary project in which Władek participates. Link to article on project:
https://amu.edu.pl/nauka/popularyzacja-nauki/zielony-uam/ryzosfera-inspiracja, (access, 26.06.2023).
50 SPUN, https://www.spun.earth/expeditions/, (access, 26.06.2023).
61
who are not only part of my research, but also some who are becoming important people in
other parts of my life. Władek, in addition to acting with the Moratorium initiative, has been
an activist in the Carpathian Forest, and is actively involved in shaping the forest movement
nationally, meeting with Marta of LiO and participating in the forest movement convention in
Bystra, among others.
My research partner is aware of his interrelationships with the non-human worlds. The
forest is a big part of his story and his person, and his relationship with it is shaped in many
ways, including his long-term stay in the forest and his knowledge of the biological processes
that take place in it. Władek's activism stems primarily from a deep attachment to forest
spaces, but activist activities themselves are also the building blocks of a relationship with the
forest. Activism deepens the creation of more than human socialities, as the relationship with
the forest also begins to consist of other people who stand in its protection, any strategic
methods of protecting the forest or ways of talking about it. Forest activism is thus the result
of an intimate relationship with the forest, but also creates it.
I asked Władek how he would describe his relationship with the forest:
— In one word it is probably delight, in two words a sense of freedom. However, they
are now accompanied by loss and fidelity.
As in the perspective of more-than-human anthropology, Władek knows that we need a
change in our approach to nature, and in order to do so we must first rethink the position of
humans and see them as part of a network of multispecies relationships. He conducts his
research on mycorrhizal fungi by immersing himself passionately into them –he does what
Tsing calls passionate immersion (Tsing 2013). He takes care not to idealize the worlds he
learns about, but to experience them as they are.
— It's important not to indulge in imaginations. You know, the sweet kind. Symbiosis is
not exclusively friendly. It's a spectrum of relationships, and in that the whole thing is
remarkable.
From the perspective of more-than-human anthropology, it's stories like Władek's that
describe projects leading to a more democratic science, where there are no preconceived
goals we pursue, but rather there is time to stop and ask "Who does this science serve?"
(Tsing 2019: 201). Tsing calls the contemporary scientific model plantation science, that is,
science that teaches us to exercise control over human and non-human landscapes (2019:
201). It is multispecies love that can make science more oriented toward creating a more
inclusive, relational world. The SPUN project, in which Wladek participates, is a project that
challenges the contemporary scientific model and relies on international and interdisciplinary
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collaboration in the conservation of underground fungal networks. Thus, it crosses national
and disciplinary boundaries by betting on learning about different projects to produce the
world (Tsing 2013; 2022 after Kowalska 2022), and its persistence is motivated by a love of
mycorrhizal fungi.
— I am a phytophile — Władek once told me, and smiled.
The purpose of describing the stories of people –scientists and non-scientists –
motivated to action by multispecies love is to open the public imagination to creating new
ways of interacting with nature (Tsing 2019).
Photog. 7: Birches, author Robert Kalak.
63
Wojtek: world-making projects
Wojtek worked in forestry for twenty-eight years. We met on one of the nature walks in
the Tuleck Forest, where he acted as an expert on forestry. Although he had never worked as
a forester in the forest we were fighting over, he was familiar with forest management and
was able to determine what damage the foresters had done in "Darzybor". Oh, here they even
did it sensibly," he said as we approached a section of the forest that had recently been
logged. A few uncut pine trees were sticking out of the bare ground. We walked closer, and
that's when I noticed small plants sticking out of the ground, looking like weeds. "These are
pine seedlings," explained Wojtek. Preserving at least a few old trees allows the species to
spread naturally and has even more benefits in the future. They will provide shelter for many
species and thus accelerate the colonization of the young forest. They will also contribute to
diversifying the structure of the new stand, ensuring the presence of microhabitats associated
with the presence of old-growth trees.
Wojtek combined his forestry knowledge with forest activism. When he was looking
for ways to get involved in forest conservation activities a few years ago, someone led him to
Wladek and the then newly formed Moratorium initiative. He then began to support the
initiative's activities by often acting as an expert in forest knowledge, participating in nature
walks or assisting in the selection of activist methods. Wladek was our liaison –he thought I
would be interested in research from a person with a long-standing relationship with the
forest, who combines different types of knowledge in his activities. And he was right. On a
walk in Darzybor, where we met, Wojtek agreed to tell me about his forests and their shared
history, and so a few months later we made our first field trip.
The terrain was the forests near Wolsztyn and Nowy Tomysl, where Wojtek had
previously worked. In some of the areas he was a forester –the main person who "arranged"
the forest. He knows almost every part of them, even now, years later, when the forest looks
completely different.
— These were my forests. First I had one thousand hectares, then one thousand five
hundred, I ended up with two," he says as we turn off the main road into the forest. Of the
familiar tree species here, in addition to pines, I recognize birches, oaks and beeches. — In
the 1970s there were no deciduous trees in this forest.
Wojtek tells me that at a later time a man became a forester here, who "was more of a
naturalist than a forester". It was he who began to change this landscape and introduce
64
deciduous trees here. I learned that what kind of trees can be planted in a given area of the
forest is determined by habitat conditions, in which the soil plays a decisive role. In many
areas of the forest we walked through, the soil was good enough for deciduous species to
grow in. Therefore, when Wojtek came here in the 1990s, he continued the work of the
previous forester. Now there are places where deciduous trees predominate.
On the right side of the road we pass a young beech stand.
— We took out all the pine trees — says Wojtek, pointing to the grove — so that these
beech trees could grow. But the beech is not quite right, because an oak could grow here. An
oak should grow here.
We also talk about the storms of 2010, which "destroyed" large areas of forest. Wojtek
mentions that despite the destruction, the storms helped to speed up the planting of more
deciduous trees in his forest. In place of the pines broken by the winds, they just planted
deciduous ones.
— With mixed forests the target composition of deciduous it's thirty percent, but we
planted up to eighty here — he says, and laughs that he and other foresters bent the law a bit
to plant as many deciduous trees as possible. — Wherever you can see that something better
could be planted, it should be done.
We stopped by a young oak tree that Wojtek planted. He says he likes to come here and
watch everything change. We enter the forest, and my guide tells us that the threat to the
young oaks used to be deer, which probably came here from Pomerania. In order to deal with
them and block their way to the young trees, he and other foresters left a "big mess" under the
oak trees to make it difficult for deer to move. This worked. The forest inspectorate didn't like
it at first, but it was later promoted in other forest districts.
— Now these oaks can handle themselves, no deer will do anything to them anymore
— adds Wojtek, as we make our way through the trees.
Later, I asked my interviewee why biodiversity in the forest is so important. I noticed
that many of his activities while working in the forest were directed precisely at creating
conditions for biodiversity to flourish.
— There are plenty of species that have a right to live. Everything should be.
Everything is allowed in equilibrium, and it comes from biodiversity. Every species has its
enemy. This balance is when biodiversity exists and is not disturbed — I heard in response. I
also asked if, in that case, thanks to him, there are more species in the forest? — One could
say yes.
65
According to Wojtek, planting deciduous trees was a human perspective, the
perspective of a forester. It is the forester who marks the places with better soil, so as to have
the greatest benefit from it later in the form of timber. Everything is planned in the
silviculture plan, which is adapted to the needs of the stand. The forester marks the most
fertile parts of the soil to plant a forest that is as well suited to it as possible, biodiverse,
resilient and durable, and intervenes with silvicultural treatments to ensure that the timber
produced is of the highest quality. A forester learning his trade learns about natural processes
and relationships mainly for economic purposes.
— And we shouldn't quite look at the forest from a forester's perspective.
Wojtek also pointed out to me more than once that foresters are not bad. What is bad is
the lack of logic, the lack of advance planning of what is done in the forest. . What we know
about the forest's perspective is that time passes more slowly for the forest than for humans,
or at least that's what we can guess. If the forest existed on its own, it wouldn't necessarily
like humans at all. Wojtek says that most people he has met like pine monocultures because
there are no disturbing insects, no weeds. With the rest, leaving a forest alone is quite
controversial, especially because all forested spaces in the world are more or less affected by
human influence. Forests without humans could be dominated by invasive species, clear cuts
with damaged nurseries would be overgrown with opportunistic species, and it would
probably take decades before the forests that originally existed there would recover (or
perhaps change their appearance to adapt to new climatic conditions).
However, the point is not to abandon the human perspective.
— It's not about stopping forest management, but putting it in some kind of framework.
[It seems to me all the time that it is necessary to establish the needs of the economy, of man,
and furthermore not to cut any more, if one didn't know what52.
In a more-than-human perspective, Wojtek is one of the elements of forest socialities.
His actions during his work in the LP made it possible for multi-species worlds to exist. This
does not mean that the goal of his actions was only the flourishing of biodiversity. It doesn't.
He did, however, use forestry knowledge of habitat conditions to create habitat for many
species. Rather than abandoning the human perspective altogether, we can interact with the
forest in such a way that we have a benefit from it for ourselves, but also co-create places of
52 Such concepts are already being invented on the ground of economics, e.g. the concept of the donut economy
(Raworth 2017).
66
flourishing. Anna Tsing writes about such activities as "world-making activities"53 (2015: 21).
Wojtek's actions are as much a part of the forest as the actions of deer, fungi, insects or pine
trees. All living things including humans mutually make world-making projects possible
(2015: 152).
Wojtek once told me about an encounter with an entomologist who pointed out to him
that it is worthwhile to look for the unobvious and unseen in the forest. And since then
Wojtek has been doing just that. And most life and its unobviousness revolves around water
in the forest. It was not only forestry knowledge that helped Wojtek create the conditions for
biodiversity, but also attention to what was happening in the forest (and vice versa!). He told
me that when his children were young, he would take them to the forest, tell them to look at
the ground and look at how much life there was on a small piece of land. We did the same
thing. We observed small mounds of earth with a hole in the middle, which are the work of
some insects. They attract other insects there and then eat them. We watched an ant try to get
out of the trap.
— The nettle indicates that the soils are fertile, oaks and ash trees could grow here, and
alder is growing — he said during the walk. In turn, another time I heard — The atmosphere
is made by spruce, it protects the soil from drying out, maintains the right temperature, well it
is great, there is enough water for everyone, spruce has a shallow root system, hence it will
never threaten the pine.
My research partner is attentive to what Tsing calls "gatherings of ways of being"
(2015: 157), assemblages of different species living together.
— When I was young, I used to lament that everything is already so discovered –
which is not the case at all. Just because we can name something doesn't mean we know it.
We are not one hundred percent sure about everything we say about the forest.
As I listened to Wojtek in this way and observed the entities of the forest with him, I
wondered, if more people knew how much life there is in the forest, if they could at least
name some of that life or look at it –would it awaken sensitivity in people like it does in us?
53,,World making can be understood in dialogue with what some scholars are calling “ontology,” that is,
philosophies of being. Like those scholars, I am interested in interrupting common sense, including the
sometimes unselfconscious assumptions of imperial conquest (e.g., Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological
deixis and Amerindian perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 469–
488). World- making projects, as with alternative ontologies, show that other worlds are possible. World
making, however, focuses us on practical activities rather than cosmologies. It is thus easier to discuss how
nonhuman beings might contribute their own perspectives (Tsing 2015: 292). ”
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Tsing writes that knowledge of nature's natural processes and relationships is crucial to seeing
humans as dependent on other species (Tsing 2015; 2021). It's about seeing the connections
between us, how big a part of us the non-human worlds are, and how we can function with
them without exploiting them to the core. In this perspective, we have more to gain than
"exploiting".
I told Wojtek about the assumptions of more-than-human anthropology, and he agreed
with this approach.
— I have always perceived that it is such a place of life, but also a way of life —
Wojtek calls the forest a living organism, next to a human, but essential to a human. He
emphasizes that we humans are not here forever and until the end, but only in this moment.
Different knowledges about forest
Knowledge of the forest manifests itself in many ways. My research partners, in
addition to knowing how to protect the forest in Poland, which includes knowledge not only
of forestry activities, but also of Polish law and administration, have learned to think in the
knowledge systems of biological sciences and forestry. This gives them additional tools to
justify their forest protection activities. However, the knowledge they have is not something
closed and fixed, but, like the networks of meaning I analyzed in the previous chapter, is
subject to translation. This knowledge is constantly changing, also influenced by the
attendance that Władek and Wojtek have to the non-human worlds.
— In the forest, I am neither a biologist nor an activist — I once heard from Władek.
Wojtek, on the other hand, said that he will always remain a forester, but he has also
always been involved in nature protection. It is impossible to isolate the moment when he
became an activist, as his approach has not changed over the years, although the knowledge
he has now serves a different purpose.
Both of them, with their acquired biological and forestry knowledge, are considered
experts, which is linked to the social valuation of different kinds of knowledge54. I wrote
about this in my work on the Model Forest, where people with different types of knowledge
participated in the nature management project: local, administrative, scientific or forestry
54 Representatives of science and technology studies, among others, Sheila Jasanoff, who, in analyzing public
participation projects, writes on this subject that only some participants are equipped with the knowledge of
"proper" (Jasanoff 2011).
68
knowledge. Representatives of local knowledge often legitimized their actions by invoking
scientific knowledge and inviting its representatives to their activities, scientific knowledge
also had a higher status among government representatives (Malecka 2021). I observe a
similar situation in the forest movement community, where Władek and Wojtek's knowledge
is treated by expert knowledge among other forest activists and is often used in confrontation
with foresters and their knowledge.
I once asked Władek if he uses his scientific knowledge in activism:
— A full handful, first of all, a scientific title is a shield, no? [...] If I have scientific
publications that report that forest management destroys mycorrhizae, I can use that as an
argument in court.
Władek's knowledge was used more than once by him (and by other activists) to justify
stopping logging –during forest walks, when he told participants about the destroyed
mycorrhizal networks at total cutting sites, or when he marked his position as a professor at
meetings with foresters. Wojtek, in turn, was seen on educational walks as an expert on
silviculture, often invited by Władek to assess the damage caused by foresters in Darzybor,
and acting as an expert witness in the court battle over the Tulecki Forest.
Foresters often refer to the expertise of their knowledge. Its possession, in their view,
gives them a monopoly on forest management in Poland, which they justify by denying
access to their knowledge and by treating people who do not have this knowledge with
prejudice (they claim not to know what is at stake when an activist use wrong word for
logging, in polish “wycinki” is less specialist language than “rębnie” (field notes,
02.12.2022). Such actions set rigid boundaries of where the legitimate knowledge ends and
lay (illegitimate) knowledge begins, when in fact the process of acquiring it is going on all
the time. Konczal calls the actions of foresters the creation of forest knowledge and forest
policy at the same time (2017: 242), because their "expertness" ends discussions and leaves
no room for a democratic approach to forest management55.
Activist knowledge is a perfect example of translational occurrence. It is the constant
acquisition of new knowledge that can help protect the forest. Sometimes –like Latour's
research in laboratories, in which scientists don't actually discover the big scientific fact, but
enter many intermediate states connected by a series of translations (1993) –activists acquire
knowledge that turns out to be useless for the forest they want to protect and reach for further
knowledge, which they then test. Activists need not only knowledge about the natural and
55 Konczal described this in detail in her book (2017) in the chapter Forest is Knowledge (Expert), in which she
writes about the course of the forest knowledge forum.
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social values of the forest and the expertise of foresters in order to communicate with them,
but also knowledge that gives them the tools for strategic struggle –administrative or legal,
local, Polish and international. Thus, their knowledge –activist knowledge –is precisely an
interweaving of different kinds of knowledge, the boundaries of which blur in the common
goal of forest protection.
A more-than-human perspective, like translation, blurs the boundaries of knowledge.
When one is attentive to the more-than-human world, knowledge of forest management or
biological science is verified in contact with the knowledge of the forest. This one is available
to us by staying long and practicing the art of noticing (Tsing 2015). Attention shapes
knowledge, and knowledge shapes attention.
Then the knowledge of the forest ceases to be a national project (2015: 217), but it can
be given a certain framework by climate, the presence of water bodies, soil or air currents.
My research partners are examples of people who learn from the forest and test their
previously acquired knowledge about it in the forest. Sometimes this is very difficult, as in
the case of underground plant-fungal networks, but still possible.
Photog. 8: The view from tower in Świętno, author Urszula Małecka.
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Forests in Poland as more than human socialities
Wojtek took me to the observation tower in Świętno. A wooden tower in the middle of
a pine forest crop. From the top, I saw from a different perspective the forest we had
traversed earlier and much more of the forest –the dark green tips of the pine crowns. I had
to admit that from this perspective the monoculture of pine trees impressed me. Being facing
east, I could see the forest stretching all the way to the horizon, far away from us touching the
blue sky.
— This is the whole being — Wojtek said as we returned from the tower. — If it was
as I told you, that ninety percent of the Earth was forests then, this is our whole world. If one
day these pine trees actually die out, we won't have any other species. It's not that you can
move away from pine trees, you can gradually plant less and less of them, but not that we
should cut them down and plant something else. These pine trees nevertheless ensure the
existence of all that lives.
The ground of the forest we saw from above was mostly sandy, almost dune-like.
Wojtek told me that the area had been degraded, sand had been deposited during glaciations,
in some places there is quite fertile meadow soil under a thick layer, but for the most part
there is nothing, just sand.
— Even a bird cherry tree wouldn't grow here, in fact, there is no chance for any
redevelopment here.
— It's different here, less lush — I say.
— But there are not all those insects — laughs Wojtek.
In many places in Poland the ground is ideal for growing pine (and it itself often grew
there before naturally), which is not bothered by sandy soil. But wherever other, more
demanding species can be planted, it should be done, my research partner once said.
Deciduous species are evolutionarily younger and they follow coniferous species.
— In Darzybor, deciduous trees could grow almost everywhere — Wojtek once said.
There is such good soil there that even oaks or beeches would grow there, not just pines. –
Changes could take place there gradually, not on the basis of deforestation of three hectares at
a time.
Yet increasing biodiversity is not a priority of the State Forests. Poland's forests are
mostly plantation forests. They grow mainly one species – the pine tree which has been
subordinated to humans, isolated from other species, because an isolated species is easier to
71
control (Tsing 2019: 201). The forest as a resource is still the dominant value that can be
seen in forest policy in Poland. The forest that makes a profit is still the most important
forest.
What if twenty percent of Poland's forests were taken out of management? What if
twenty-five National Parks were created?56 This would involve a series of changes in the
funding and structure of SF operations, a gradual exclusion of forests from economic
management and shift away from pine where possible, but above all it would involve
abandoning neoliberal hegemony. I look at forests in which – in the language of SFs – the
natural, social and economic functions are combined and equally respected as more than
human communities, in which humans satisfy their needs but do not exploit other species.
This is a shift from a perspective in which the forest is only for humans to one in which the
forest is for us and we for the forest. The model of forestry that the forest movements propose
is not only a polyphony of visions of the forest, but also the creation of conditions for a
polyphony of forest assemblages, the possibility for different rhythms of the forest to exist
simultaneously (Tsing 2015: 24).
,,[...] I make disturbance a beginning, that is, an opening for action. Disturbance
realigns possibilities for transformative encounter," writes Tsing (2015: 152). And in the
same way, spaces after clear-cutting can become a beginning to create a new model of
forestry in Poland. Disturbance of the forest order by forestry movements can be the first
step to the creation of a more-than-human forest sociality in Poland, in which the forest can
be mobilized into existence by different values – as a national symbol and a resource, as a
right, a member of the community, or new values that will emerge in the process of changing.
So how do we let the forest be? There is no single answer to this question, but certainly the
path we should take to get closer to that answer is mindfulness. I suggest looking at Poland's
new forest order as a more than human sociality, the seed of which is activist resistance, and
which is co-created both by forests and all the creatures that inhabit them, and by people –
activists, foresters, scientists, hikers, forestry workers, private owners, hunters and others.
56 A proposition of creating twenty five national parks by Fundacja Dziedzictwo Przyrodnicze,
https://przyrodnicze.org/25-nowych-parkow-narodowych-do-utworzenia-w-polsce/, (access: 03.07.2023).
72
Conclusion. Where does the forest end?
This February I spent ten days in Tenerife. The northeastern tip of the island –Anaga –
is geologically the oldest area of the island covered with laurel forests that are green all year
round. When we got there in the evening, it was raining and a thick fog hung between the
trees. These forests are called foggy because of their high humidity and condensation of
clouds resulting in frequent fogs. This is related to their high mountainous location. In the
morning, the fog was still visible, but the greenery of the forest emerged from it. We spent the
whole day walking around Anaga, and I feel the joy of being in the forest and experiencing
its greenery that I longed for over the winter. When I returned to Poznań, at the same time
getting down to the final stage of my field research and writing this thesis, I felt a greater
need than usual to explore the natural processes and relationships within nature. I was
inspired by Anaga. I brought the old biology books from my family home, bought books on
plant physiology and guides to the worlds of trees. I thought it might be a temporary delight
and I would soon get bored of reading about trees and fungi, but I was wrong. The more I
knew, the more I wanted to know.
Doing research with forest movements in Poland and my own presence in the forest
made my interest in the subject grow. Before I started my social research about the forest, I
was afraid that I would get tired of it, that I would get sick of it because of the amount of time
I would be spending on it. I experienced the contrary. Instead of being tired, I felt my
admiration for the non-human world growing. In the spring, I could enjoy the burst of green
life. I learned that lichens are two organisms that actually constitute one, and that they were
the first in the world to form symbiotic relationships. I learned about the curly ivy, crimson
buttercup and starflower, and took great joy in walking the city and naming them wherever I
met them. During the summer I learned the names of the plants that grew in the flower
meadow on my balcony, planted strawberries and tomatoes for the first time, and learned to
recognize most of the trees in my neighborhood. On my own, I felt that I was passionately
immersing into non-human worlds (Tsing 2013, 2015).
Having sent the thesis to my supervisor, I went on a trip to the Wielkopolski National
Park to relax after my intellectual work. While walking through the forest, I was reminded of
moments I had spent in the field and conversations with my research partners that I had not
included in the thesis. Even though I had not conducted research at that particular site, the
73
mere fact of being in the forest brought back the memories from the field. I returned home
and began to write down the thoughts that came to my mind in the forest.
It is impossible to separate the research process and the process of writing the text. The
text of my thesis was to a large extent created in the forest itself. The forest was therefore
agentic to the effects of my work, not only through its relationship with forest activists, but
also through the effects it had on me while I was spending my time inside it. Scientists have
been, and often still are, seen as the ones bringing knowledge from nature to society, which
then creates culture using nature (Latour 1993). Such a division isolates humans from the
natural world. By looking at the nature-society relation through the prism of translation, we
can see it as being entangled. What we call scientific facts appears to us as a result of a chain
of translations, leading through various intermediate states; an assemblage of various
processes and elements coming from both "the nature" and "the society" (Latour 1993). The
more-than-human perspective goes a step further and urges us to be present in these
entanglements –to immerse into the more-than-human worlds and be attentive to things that
happen there.
Where do bobcats fly to when it rains?
What distance does a deer travel in one year?
Does the cricket remember how to get out of the maze?
If the frog ate the cricket, would it learn to get through the maze faster?
I warmed the butterfly with my breath and thus brought it back to life. [...]
I love the grass. It grows from the bottom, not from the top. If something eats it
from the top, it doesn't kill it at all. On the contrary, she grows faster because of it.
Brilliant!57
Attention as a research method, as described by Tsing (2013, 2015), presupposes
openness to knowing different kinds of beings and curiosity about what lies behind them. It
allows us to notice the reality as more alive and more diverse, and humans as a process and
part of that reality.
The attention in the field that I employed in my research consisted largely of observing
the relationship between forest activists and the forest, looking at the ways in which they pay
attention to the forest and their modes of being in the forest with the other beings. The forest
activists I met are people whose relationship with the forest constitutes a strong,
57 Fragment from the book "Bewilderment" by Richard Powers (2021: 207).
74
long-standing bond based on many instances and moments of them being attentive to and
being with the forest.
I see contemporary forest activism as the opposition against the dominant perspective
of commodification of reality (Escobar 1995, 2018; Moore 2015, Tsing 2015), as it stems
from resistance to the perception of the forest according to the logic of profit and the
practices that follow up such a perception. Tsing points out that most of us grew up with
dreams of modernization and growth: ,,[...] we learn over and over that humans are different
from the rest of the living world because we look forward –while other species, which live
day to day, are thus dependent on us" (2015: 20-21). The perspective and actions of forest
activists show that the definition of humans does not have to be locked into a framework of
progress. In their approach, humans can define themselves through their relationship with the
forest, thus erasing the boundary between nature and culture. Their intimate relationship
flows from being in the forest, but the strategies they undertake to protect the forest go
beyond the material existence of the forest. Therefore, I used the tool of translation (Latour
1993) to capture the strategic dimension of this relationship. The activist, like the scientist,
creates his knowledge based on a particular way of being in the forest. However, they use this
knowledge to protect the forest, which gives it a more obvious political dimension. The
natural processes of the forest undergo translation to the natural and social values of the
forest and then become political tools, an argument for not cutting down/legally protecting
the forest. The activist's knowledge also flows from spheres located outside of the forest –
from the political and legal arenas and policy processes that shape forest politics, protection
and management –making all of these terms political and loaded with different values and
visions. They mobilize knowledge created within these arenas to protect the forest. The
activists thus also represent the forest outside of it.
A more-than-human perspective allows me to capture the essence of the activist
engagement –the reason why an activist is an activist. It brings out the value from entering
the forest, and answers the question of why it's worth being there. Through this perspective
the activist –the human – is seen as a part of a larger whole of the world of interspecies
relationships. The greatest difference between perceptions of the forest is visible inside of it.
How does the human presence in the forest manifest –by the act of being in the forest,
learning from it, entering multi-species relationships without changing their form, or by
shaping the forest to suit the material needs of the human? Forest activists are people who
practice the art of noticing (Tsing 2015). They notice the forest in the multiplicity of its
rhythms, which Tsing calls the multiple time-making projects (2015: 21) –through the flow
75
of the Odra River, the lifespan of individual tree species, the world of insect dependencies, or
the creation of long-term and large-scale mycorrhizal networks. These are alternatives to
looking at profit and growth world-making projects. By noticing them, I see another benefit
of entering the forest –the benefit of being inspired to imagine the future in which humans
establish themselves through non-exploitative and attentive relationships with others.
Activists are taking the forest beyond its boundaries, and since they themselves are the
forest, does the forest end somewhere? "We are what we depend on", Latour said in an
interview for arte.tv (2021). Let us be more attentive to what we depend on, and we will
notice that everything is everything.
76
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