High Tatras in the Late Anthropocene

Global warming and weather extremes are causing greater and greater losses to the winter industry in the High Tatras every year. Ski resorts struggle with the lack of precipitation or unsuitable temperatures, which they then try to compensate with technical snowmaking, accompanying services or archiving of last season's snow. However, despite the increased costs, the industry is accelerating its use of the landscape to generate profits. Land acquisition and dispossession together with deforestation are creating opportunities for the construction of new cable cars, hotels and services, increasingly at higher altitudes. Tourist enclaves are being created, mass tourism is straining existing infrastructures, raising the price of basic services to unaffordable levels and creating local social conflict.

Paradoxically, this intensification also threatens the industry itself. Development projects over cave systems are eroding the cave relief, reducing their attractiveness and thus the number of paying visitors. Artificial snowmaking and the building of reservoirs contribute to soil instability and the likelihood of erosion, threatening both new development and existing infrastructure. Extreme weather fluctuations, high winds, intense heat waves of cooling disrupt the business as usual. Declaring new protected zones or species also disrupts developers' dreams and plans. In the Tatras, modernist visions and development plans clash with undesirable natural reactions.

While analysing these contradictions, unexpected agents and various forms of alliances between humans and more-than-human entities begin to emerge in the Tatras. For instance, the spruce beetle, is on the one hand the archenemy of developers who want to eradicate it along with the harvested timber. On the other hand, it is an ally of conservationists who argue with it in favour of forest protection. The brown bear crosses over the settlements' boundaries and becomes the subject of a militarised discourse in which politicians declare war on it. Tourists, on the other hand, either cancel their stays out of fear or seek out bears for sensationalism as soon as news of their presence appears in the media.

My research draws on contemporary environmental anthropology and multispecies ethnography. I focus on issues of power, inequality and the operation of capital. My aim is to explore the conflicts between modernist visions and their so-called weedy refusals (Bubandt and Tsing, 2018), as well as the networks of political responses involving both human and non-human actors. I am interested in the political networks that emerge when local authorities declare war on bears or when conservationists join with the lycanthrope in the fight against encroachment on forests. How and for what purpose is the image of the bear, the chamois or the marmot instrumentalised and shaped in the protection of nature or, conversely, in its exploitation? What systemic inequalities, power hierarchies, injustices, and material and social conflicts emerge in these multispecies assemblages? Finally, how to ethnographically approach the politics, power and resistances that are part of these assemblages?