ABSTRACT
The Białowieża Forest is Europe’s last remaining primary forest, crossed by the border between Poland and Belarus. Its biodiversity is a source of and support for countless life forms, including many only able to survive within the forest’s embrace. It is also a site overwhelmed by capitalistic moves of the nation states that “guard” it, which include illegal logging and deathly border politics. The parallel developments associated with the COVID-19 pandemic allowed the Polish government to introduce a “state of emergency zone” and later build a border wall, which became a physical manifestation of its environmental and humanitarian violence. This chapter weaves together two case studies from the Białowieża Forest examining it as a border ecology between life and death: (1) work of the State Forest authority, who initiated controversial logging and assembled a unique DNA collection of the forest’s protected species, and (2) border politics relating to people on the move crossing into Poland from Belarus and the activist network, Grupa Granica (Border Group). The case studies uncover the forest as a site of (un)care, human and more-than-human vulnerabilities, and anthropocentric policy, leading us to take a closer look at the more-than-human solidarities that emerge in practices of resistance. .
