Local knowledge of woods and affective disenfranchisement: un-concordances between protected landscape and lived territories

Abstract (English)

Vast extensions of green wood, mainly red and black pines as well as oaks, cover most of the 174 km2 of the La Vansa and Tuixent Valley in the Catalan Pyrenees. Celebrated due to its “floristic richness remarkable in a European context", the protected area has been part of the Natural Park of Cadí-Moixeró since 1983 and is included within the Natura 2000 network. For many of its inhabitants, though, the woods are “filthy” and “unkempt”. High rates of outmigration in the region, especially during the 60s and 70s, left behind a scenario of depopulated landscapes and abandoned agricultural pasturelands, especially in the upper valleys. The laborious effort of generations to reclaim land from the forest and make way for large, cultivated areas is forgotten, and its obliteration is even celebrated within conservationists’ discourses. Reforestation, rewilding, and land abandonment are widespread dynamics and key to understanding the feeling of disenfranchisement and neglect expressed by the local population. Thus, the structuring of expert knowledge of woods comes hand in hand with a growing sense of slow dispossession. I will discuss the increased deployment of policies for wildfire risk extinction and prevention together with the expansion of bureaucratic institutions for forest management, resulting in the dismissal of local practices and knowledges. The long-term processual perspective gained through deep ethnographic involvement in the area can help build participatory wildfire risk management strategies with the various stakeholders involved.