Monika Iskander, u6587481

Bialowieza Forest is a UNESCO World Heritage site straddling the border of Poland and Belarus, thought to be the last remnant of an ancient woodland that once spanned continental Europe.  In recent years, it has become the battleground for a heated environmental policy conflict involving forestry officials, conservationists, local communities, and the broader public.  The conflict reached its peak between 2016-2018, when the Polish government’s approval of intensified logging after a widespread, debilitating bark beetle infestation spurred protests and drew condemnation from the European Union’s Court of Justice.

To explore the issue, I spoke to Associate Professor Malgorzata Blicharska, senior lecturer in natural resources and sustainable development at Uppsala University and lead author of a recent scientific review of the Bialowieza conflict. 

When we connect over Zoom, she is taking a brisk walk through a Swedish forest.  Blicharska studied philosophy before moving on to forestry and biology.  Her research interests include biodiversity conservation policy – where people and conservation intersect – and sustainable development of natural resources. 

She explains that the heart of the conflict lies in a disconnect between forestry officials’ and conservationists’ strategies for safeguarding the forest’s future. 

The foresters believe that the “forest can’t manage itself” and requires human management to continue to persist in its current state.  Blicharska says this argument is reasonable, as there is evidence that oak trees in Bialowieza would struggle to regenerate without human input.

The conservationists, in their ideal world, would incorporate the entire forest into the existing national park and keep human management to a minimum.  This conflicts with the interests of the logging industry and local communities who rely on the forest’s firewood for affordable heating.  

Blicharska suggests that thousands of years of human disturbance, including firewood collection, should be acknowledged in Bialowieza’s conservation.  This parallels conservation in Australia, where the landscape has been shaped by tens of thousands of years of Indigenous fire regimes, hunting, foraging, and other cultural practices, and where the continuation or reintroduction of these practices could protect and restore biodiversity.  

Blicharska believes both parties’ approaches are based on assumptions about what an acceptable old-growth forest looks like: Polish foresters have strict guidelines on what species to plant and where, while conservationists want to retain as many natural processes as possible.  She suggests that they loosen their preoccupation with theory and adapt to reality, particularly as future climate change intensifies the stresses on the forest, exacerbating bark beetle outbreaks and changing species distribution.  “I don’t believe in a stable state, in which the forest will always be as we want it”. 

Blicharska’s team proposed a “mosaic” solution to the conflict, where foresters and conservationists could pursue their preferred management strategies in their allotted patches.  She recognises that parts of the forest may need to be more intensely managed in future to help it through the trials of climate change.  This cannot happen without an accessible, inclusive, and people-centred conservation strategy, because “conservation only happens if people make it happen”.