Restorative ecological practice: The case of the European Bison in the Southern Carpathians, Romania

Geoforum 105 (2019) 99–108

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Restorative ecological practice: The case of the European Bison in the Southern Carpathians, Romania

T

Mihnea Tănăsescu Research Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Political Science Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Pleinlaan 5, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

A R T I C LE I N FO

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Rewilding Conservation social science Ecological restoration Animal geographies Human-animal relations Critical geography

This paper engages with rewilding practice in the particular case of European Bison reintroductions to the Southern Carpathians. In doing so, it questions traditional notions of species purity implied in wisent conservation so far, and shows how these can be problematic. The argument takes animal agency seriously and explores how incorporating the animals’ view can challenge and modify rewilding practice. It proposes the concept of restorative ecological practice as a new stage in the human relation to the environment and in the history of conservation. Nature restoration in a world of accelerating material change is best understood as rebuilding relationships between humans and their environments, and not as returning to previous states. This idea implies that we have entered an experimental phase of nature conservation where inherited notions of what counts as an animal, and what animals can and should do, need to be thoroughly interrogated. New relationships between impure species are an integral part of the future of conservation.

1. Introduction Rewilding has developed as a new orientation within conservation, while at the same time challenging fundamental practices usually associated with traditional ways of conceptualizing, and implementing, conservation projects. In particular, rewilding has developed as an experimental orientation that puts greater accent than any conservation paradigm before it on processes and becoming (Perino et al., 2019), whereas traditional conservation has usually been tasked with the preservation of particular species and/or territorial formations, specifically designed to change relatively little over time1. Instead of thematizing these distinctions at great length (see for example Lorimer and Driessen, 2013), this paper proposes to articulate the concept of restorative ecological practice as a way to understand the adaptive management evidenced when rewilding theory comes up against both traditional notions of what and how is to be conserved, and against the agency of non-human subjects themselves. It is the claim of this argument that we can best understand the great conceptual flux that conservation science has been subjected to as the pragmatic search for a new way of building relationships with non-human nature and non-

human subjects in the context of an increasingly shifting materiality (Chakrabarty, 2009, Latour, 2017, 2018, Danowski and De Castro, 2017). Engaging in restorative practices is both a way of negotiating tensions, and provides a critical vantage point for pushing practice further. I am particularly interested in cases of rewilding that rely on animal reintroductions, for two reasons. Through these, we are able to see the potential tensions between the different biopolitical modes inherent in the experimental attitude of rewilding and more conservative orientations (Lorimer and Driessen, 2013). Second, these cases afford an account of non-human agency and allow us to trace how it plays an integral part in the experimentation with new ways of being and the coproduction of common territories. Contemporary critical and animal geographies (Barua, 2014; Johnston, 2008; Philo and Wilbert, 2000; Whatmore and Thorne, 1998) have elaborated the idea that spaces, and knowledge of particular spaces, are constructed through the interrelations between human and non-human subjects. The ontological unsettling that emanates from these disciplines, placing subjects of different species on similar, if not the same, ontological plane, couples well with the increasing scholarly attention paid to the accelerating

E-mail address: [email protected]. If anything, conservation science has been highly adaptive and malleable, so this particular contrast between it and rewilding (a conservation orientation itself) is not made to signal a stark dichotomy. However, I am not alone in arguing that rewilding does break with certain fundamental tenants of conservation, particularly around the significance and meaning of purity of species, as well as the desired ecological state of particular project areas (also see Gammon, 2018, Jepson et al., 2018, Lorimer and Driessen, 2013, Jordan, 2006, Prior and Ward, 2016). Throughout, I will be as precise as possible as to the points of tensions, without wishing to create imaginary opposites. Indeed, there is nothing that would keep traditional conservation from becoming more experimental, or rewilding from becoming more conservative. 1

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.05.013 Received 4 October 2018; Received in revised form 15 May 2019; Accepted 20 May 2019 Available online 24 May 2019 0016-7185/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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management of protected areas. In the 21st century, the idea that nature has to be cordoned off in order to be saved has, however, made a comeback, most prominently through Wilson’s (2016) proposal to set aside half the earth for conservation (also see Noss et al., 2012, Wuerthner et al., 2015; for discussion see Büscher et al., 2017). On another side of the conservation debate are the ‘new conservationists’ (Kareiva et al., 2017), arguing that pristine nature is a dogmatic concept with no ecological reality and that there is considerable conservation value to be found in humanly modified landscapes. Their arguments are developed on the background of the influential novel ecosystem concept (Hobbs et al., 2006, Hobbs et al., 2009) that describes natural ecosystems in the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2010, Steffen et al., 2011, Steffen et al., 2015) as already fundamentally affected, in their composition and dynamics, by human activity. A novel ecosystem is one whose humanity-free future is still significantly impacted by past human activity (for example, by the introduction of new species). So even if we set aside half the earth for conservation, it would still be a radically human-influenced half. Both the half-earth and the new conservation ethos have been criticized for their lack of engagement with the political economy that makes them possible, and for their seemingly blind embrace of market forces (Büscher et al., 2012, Arsel and Büscher, 2012). On a parallel track, the theory of rewilding (see Gammon, 2018; also, Brown et al., 2011, Lorimer and Driessen, 2014, Jørgensen., 2015, Prior and Ward., 2016, Tanasescu, 2017a,b, Drenthen, 2018, Wynne-Jones et al., 2018) has developed as an alternative, at least in the global North, to the perceived failures of conservation efforts so far (Arts et al., 2016, Caro, 2007) and to the rural abandonment that the European continent is facing. Rewilding is often presented by practitioners as a development arising from the continuing loss of habitat and biodiversity, and focusing on key interventions (among which, animal reintroductions) in order to restore ecosystem functions. By and large, rewilding practice tries to be more interventionist in the short-term, and more hands-off in the long term, than other established conservation models. Rewilding’s relationship to dominant neoliberal political economies is itself a topic of debate (Büscher et al., 2012, Lorimer, 2015). Another important dimension of rewilding that sets it apart as an innovative conservation model is its reliance upon restorative methods. In other words, rewilding presupposes an intervention to restore to some desired state of affairs, usually defined in terms of ecosystem functions. In practice, this often involves the reintroduction of animals (see Lorimer and Driessen, 2014, Jepson, 2016, Tanasescu, 2017b, Vasile, 2016, 2018) to areas where they have become extinct, or as proxies for fully extinct species. However, rewilding projects of this type are usually aware of the fact that what they are creating is in fundamental ways new, regardless of how endemic the reintroduced species are considered to be4. For the purposes of this paper, I follow Prior and Ward (2016) in understanding rewilding as “a process of (re)introducing or restoring wild organisms and/or ecological processes to ecosystems where such organisms and processes are either missing or are dysfunctional”. I further complement this with Tanasescu (2017b), where rewilding is understood as “the practice of restoring functional habitats through the use of keystone species in order to (re)create self-sustaining nature”, as well as “the future-oriented vision of spectacular, zero-management, nature side-by-side with advanced civilization”. Together, these conceptual specifications give all of the necessary ingredients for identifying a project as rewilding. Importantly, rewilding is always part of a greater vision for the future of human-nature relations. I will argue that rewilding is therefore best understood as an experimental phase in the contemporary and tumultuous history of conservation, one potentially leading towards a new kind of restorative practice (Tanasescu, 2017a,

mutations of the materiality of nature itself (also see Latour and Lenton, 2019). In other words, humans increasingly find themselves both in an environment that is not a given, and interacting with participants that are not merely ‘animal’. The transition from a stable universe with humans as the only agents to an infinitely more complex one is, of course, not a smooth one. This paper engages, precisely, with the inevitable tensions that arise in this movement. The case that anchors the wider theoretical discussion is the reintroduction of European Bison (or wisents, Bison bonasus2) to the Southern Carpathians, Romania. There, Rewilding Europe, WWF Romania, and the Romanian Wilderness Society (SRS) are involved in remaking a viable population of the locally extinct animal. This project is part of a wider effort to rewild abandoned agricultural land3, and the wisents are supposed to rediscover their role of ecosystem engineers within the mountains (van de Vlasakker, 2014). In the long run, rewilding theory would want to establish autonomous herds in the Southern Carpathians that can manage both themselves and the mountains, without any human interference. In order to explore the depth and breadth of the struggles of this project, it is crucial to include the individual wisent itself as equal partner in the project. We tend to think of reintroductions as taking an animal from here and moving it to there. There is always a flat animal, a thing of sorts, that is moved about, made to conform to what we want of it without being given the opportunity to dissent. But this is a false picture, because in fact there are always individuals being moved. It matters where it comes from and where it is going; what’s more, it matters differently for different individuals. I want to show, in the case discussed in this paper, how the agency of animals – or rather, the articulation of interrelation between humans and animals (Ingold, 2002, Latour, 2000) – comes to redefine common practices. The paper develops its arguments in five substantive sections. It starts by situating itself within the broader relevant literatures, and developing the theoretical framework of restorative practice. It then presents a brief history of the wisent, picking out those elements that link problematic notions of purity with the politics of conservation. After having presented both the theoretical framework and the relevant animal history, it moves on to detail the general practice of reintroduction, followed by the case of the reintroduction of wisents to the Southern Carpathians. This case is split into two sections, following the logic of the evolving management plan implemented on the ground. I end with an extended discussion of the implications of this case for broader thinking about co-produced territories and knowledges in this new era of relations to the natural world.

2. Background and theoretical context Intellectually speaking, it is a good time for nature conservation. In its relatively short history, it has developed into several orientations, from the classical top-down fortress conservation dominant during the 19th and 20th century (Büscher and Whande, 2007, Hutton et al., 2005) to increasingly human-inclusive models. Whereas the original idea of conservation was predicated on a separation between humans and the natural environment (Jordan, 2006), the idea of community conservation (Adams and Hulme, 2001, Boudreaux and Nelson, 2011) broke with the assumption of an incompatibility between (local) people and nature protection, and instead aimed to include people within the 2 Throughout this paper European bison and wisent will be used interchangeably, as is the custom. This is to distinguish them from American bison, also known as buffalo. 3 The land in question in this project is not abandoned in the sense that local inhabitants have relinquished property rights, or no longer feel themselves to be owners of the land. Rather, abandonment here is to be understood in cultural terms, as it relates to changing land-use patterns. Though ownership endures, people no longer use the land for past productive purposes.

4 Also see Jepson et al 2018 for the genesis of this kind of rewilding in the Dutch idea of ‘nature development’.

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conservation, as the standard for judging whether an animal is or is not a European bison at all. The original surviving animals are called founders, recalling the name usually given to those that put the bases of nations. Reading the history of the wisent is reading the history of the slow disappearance of the founders. We learn that the cow F 89 BILMA, though one of the original 55, failed to have any offspring, and therefore remains a mere photograph. Out of the 12 founders, 11 were part of the B. b. bonasus subspecies, and the pedigree book decided to breed them as a closed line (meaning that only those individuals and their descendants could breed among themselves), known as the Lowland line. In practice, this is a line reserved for animals whose pedigree is associated only with those derived from and currently populating the Białowieża forest. The 12th founder was the last specimen of the B. b. caucasus subspecies, and so the society tasked with its protection decided that any of his offspring will be managed as a separate line, dubbed LowlandCaucasian. This means that in practice all extant wisents are divided in two separate lines. M 100 KAUKASUS is therefore singlehandedly responsible for an entire line of wisents, having been the last specimen of his kind. Any wisents alive today that can trace its ancestry to that one surviving bull is, for that reason, part of a separate line, the LowlandCaucasian. All other individuals that can trace their ancestry to the founders save Mr. Kaukasus are part of the Lowland line. The first edition of the EBPB came out in 1932 and numbered 177 animals. Since then, the wisent has had a continuous increase, reaching around 7000 individuals today (estimates vary but, according to the EBPB, there were 7180 wisents in the world at the end of 2017, of which 5036 defined as “free living”). This counts only animals whose genetic purity, as defined by the European Bison Conservation Center (EBCC) itself, can be proven, and which can therefore be included in the EBPB. In this sense, the EBPB and EBCC are conservation organizations tasked with the survival of a particular species understood in narrowly genetic terms. This approach takes a very conservative view of what the species is, as evidenced by the insistence on breeding two separate lines. The inherent goodness of genetic purity goes unquestioned: it is simply taken to be undeniably and inherently valuable. The idea that the genetic purity of an animal is paramount to its preservation is both widespread, and increasingly challenged (see Rohwer and Marris, 2015, Pearce, 2015, Friese, 2010). As the editors of the EBPB argue, “many breeders had played with hybridization between European and American bison, an easy enough feat to accomplish, as it turned out, and a “dangerous” one, since the hybrids are fertile from the first generation, and can also breed successfully with the original species. Hybrids of this kind, and back-crosses with a significant amount of wisent blood in particular, look so similar to true, pure-blood European bison that there is no effective way to tell them apart”. The problem is not the fitness of the animals6, but that there is no way of discerning between true and fake wisent, the fake being defined as anything that is not entirely pure, from a genetic point of view. This is exactly the “process of naturalization” that Friese (2010) shows to be active in the classification systems of species more generally. The animal is not that which it is in virtue of looking, or behaving, a certain way, but rather in virtue of its genes. This implicit classification sutures “social and material orders” (p. 149) in such a way as to define both the being of the animal, and how it is to exist in the world (displayed, cared for in a certain way, corralled, and so on). On this account, the Lowland line represents a direct link to the lost purity of the original wisent (Tokarska et al., 2015). Whether the wisent is in fact devoid of human interference, on account of its genetic purity, is itself debatable (see below). Parallel with the efforts of saving the wisent from extinction in

Jordan, 2003). Building upon Jordan’s idea of restoration (2003), Tanasescu (2017a) proposes to understand it as the creation of mutually beneficial ecological relationships. “To restore […] is to relate to the land in a way that promotes the endurance of certain ecological processes and the self-conceptualization of humans as beneficial parts of the environment. [The] mutualism of the ecological relationship implies that restoration is a normative relation, that when humans relate to the environment as restorers they at the same time can improve their moral lot, by becoming beneficial members of a natural community.” Restoration understood in these terms invites us to think of the restorer as acting to create a relationship whereby her actions are beneficial to the natural community, and through them she becomes part of that community. Tanasescu, and Jordan (also see Oelschlaeger, 2007), build the argument by referring to the generic relationship to nature, but the case presented here can further specify the ecological relationship as also obtaining between species. To be precise, the ecological relation to the land obtains, in this case, through inter-species relations. The reintroduction of European bison can therefore be seen as a case of restoring a relationship not just to the land, but between animals and their land, and between humans and wisents. The multiplicity of relations allows for the idiosyncrasy of the individuals involved and demands an experimental attitude that suspends judgment as to how exactly a beneficial ecological relationship is to come into existence. I will show how the history of wisent conservation, the experimental, constantly shifting rewilding management, and the agency of all individuals (wisent and human) involved, interact to co-produce a territory and a new set of practices. The idea of restorative practice allows us to interrogate this case in novel ways. 3. The wisent: a short history The chaos and instability of World War I killed off the two last remaining wild populations of the European bison, the largest extant land mammal on the continent. Historically, there had been three subspecies of bison: B. b. bonasus, of the Białowieża forest, Poland; B. b. hungarorum, of the Carpathian Mountains, now extinct; and B. b. caucasicus, of the Caucasian Mountains, also extinct. Of these three historical subspecies, B. b. bonasus survived in the Białowieża forest, Poland, until 1919 when, at the end of the war, the last specimens were killed, an act characterized by the European Bison Pedigree Book (EBPB), the gold standard for wisent conservation, as poaching (Raczyński and Bołbot, 2009). The second free roaming population in Europe lived in the Western Caucasus mountains, and was composed of individuals of B. b. caucasicus, also known as mountain bison. They disappeared in 1927, due to “civil war episodes and heavy poaching” (Pucek et al., 2004, Pucek, 1991). War, administrative and legal regimes, and the power of the aristocracy, became the most important factors affecting the wisent’s fate, both in terms of its demise and its eventual comeback (Sipko et al., 2010). The disappearance of the Polish wisent (i.e. the Białowieża group) prompted the formation of a society for its conservation, the International Society for the Protection of the European Bison, started in 1923 in Berlin. In 1924 it counted 66 individuals left, but without yet knowing which of those would turn out to be, genetically speaking, true wisents. After weeding out the individuals whose pedigree could not be vouched for5, the Society established that there were 54 pure wisents left in the world, none of which in the wild. Of those, only 12 managed to provide genetic material to present generations (Slatis, 1960, Pucek et al., 2004). These 'founding members', as they are called, are listed in the EBPB, the document that has acted, since the beginning of wisent 5 This means that there were animals that looked like European bison in all relevant respects but that had no documentation attesting to their being authentic specimens.

6 If anything, the genetic bottleneck that B. b. bonasus was subjected to might itself be a survival problem (Karbowiak et al., 2014a,b; Majewska et al., 2014; Panasiewicz et al., 2015).

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species and sub-species. In other words, the Lowland-Caucasian animals, which include the last surviving caucasicus bull among their ancestors, are in a sense hybrid. So why, if genetic purity is the ultimate value here, was M 100 Kaukasus allowed to breed at all? It also begs the question of why his descendants are not to be included in the extant subspecies bonasus, but in a separate, non-Polish line. It would seem that the strong relationship between a supposedly pure bonasus and Polish Białowieża mythology8 should not be discounted as a possible explanation. Natures and nations are intrinsically interrelated. The attempted recreation of the aurochs by the Heck brothers, documented in the above cited work of Lorimer and Driessen (2016; see also Driessen and Lorimer, 2016), was intimately related to the national socialist imaginary. Ideas of purity, whether put to work for disturbing human practices or for nature conservation ones, easily traverse national and natural geographies, suturing them securely. The dominant role of particular national mythologies in the saving and propagation of a species should give us pause to interrogate the uncomfortable historical links that, regardless of the intention of practitioners, are nonetheless present. What, in the final analysis, justifies breeding separate lines of wisents, as if we were respecting some pre-ordained natural order? Both the Lowland and the Lowland-Caucasian lines are extremely inbred. Whereas the Lowland line is managed as a closed population, meaning animals can only breed with animals from the same line, the Lowland-Caucasian line is an open one, meaning that breeding with Lowland animals is allowed. In other words, given that Mr. Kaukasus has ruined Polish purity through his genes, his line is freer to breed, whereas the pure Polish one should stay purely Polish, no matter the costs. As the IUCN states for both lines, “no free-living herd is safe (genetically or demographically) in the long term because of the low level of [genetic] variability” (p. 10). The idea that the two lines of wisent sanctioned by the EBPB are pure animals is not a scientifically sound one. Węcek et al. (2016) show that “the notion of wisent subspecies purity is flawed in the sense that founding Lowland individuals were in fact admixed with Caucasian wisent to varying degrees.” They further argue that admixture occurred before the extinction of wisents in the wild, which then raises the question of why conserving the wisent would require the breeding of two separate lines and their strict separation in reintroduction sites. Lastly, it is very likely that wisents cross-bred with cattle or with aurochs in the past, and “such admixture is widespread across wisent, including both modern genetic lines, representatives of the original founding herd, and also extinct Caucasian wisent.” This would imply that, in the deep past of human-wisent relationships, we left marks on each other’s bodies. As I will argue in the following sections, we are still leaving marks, whether acknowledged or not.

Europe, in the Western Caucasus Soviet scientists were trying to save their own sub-species, the mountain bison (B. b. caucasicus). The Caucasian wisent went extinct and therefore scientists tried to recreate the sub-species by breeding animals that traced their lineage to M 100 KAUKASUS. Some of the animals they bred were hybrids between wisents and American bison (Sipko et al., 2010), and therefore have never been recognized as true wisents by the EBCC and EBPP. In the Western Caucasus mountains, there remains today the largest free-roaming (and unfed) herd of wisents in Europe, still called mountain wisents and surrounded by controversy as to whether they are to be considered wisents at all. These ‘hybrids’ unsettle the sharp distinctions between species, as well as the sharp separation of humans from their environment (also see Figari and Skogen, 2011; Friese, 2010). In other words, hybrids made by humans are somehow inferior to the possibility of ‘natural’ hybridization, though humans do everything in their power to minimize the occurrence of this latter kind. At the beginning of the 1990s this herd numbered 1500 individuals (Sipko, 2009, Sipko et al., 2010; Pucek et al., 2004). It is currently estimated that these animals are 5.24% American bison, but any amount is enough for disqualification. The latest IUCN report on wisent conservation decries the existence of these animals: “unfortunately, hybrid animals were later released in the Caucasian Biosphere Reserve and are now an established free-ranging herd” (p.3). This herds originate in five hybrid animals that were introduced in 1940 and later allowed to breed with Lowland-Caucasian animals. The IUCN’s stance on these animals is surprising given that the supposedly fake wisents form the largest European herd that is entirely self-sustaining and autonomous. The Białowieża group, in Poland, the pride of wisent conservation, has always been, and continues to be, fed in winter, in part in order to avoid conflict with people. The fact that the EBPB would rather feed pure animals in the winter than accept ‘hybrids’ that can survive on their own implies a view of individual animals as essentially tied to their genetic makeup and essentially devoid of a wider context. During WWII, the EBPB was not published. Following the war, known hybrids were diligently eliminated. Nazi scientists, the same ones responsible for the attempted recreation of Aurochs7, had also played with different combinations of wisents, and the EBPB set to work destroying the results (Lorimer and Driessen, 2016; Driessen and Lorimer, 2016; Sipko et al., 2010). It is interesting that the IUCN report recounts this with pride, while ignoring the species-essence undertones involved in its own quest for purity. The editorial office of the EBPB post-WWII moved to Poland, a nation which had been at the forefront of saving the species. Indeed, the editors of the EBPB point out that Poland and the European bison resurrection effort were both started together, after the First World War. The Białowieża forest appears in the literature as the truest example of free wisents and, since 1993, the forest and the pedigree book are even more closely related, as the publication of the EBPB has moved to the Białowieża National Park. The underlying assumption of the wisent preservation movement as defined by the EBPB is therefore that the target animal is supposed to be pure, and the history of wisent conservation reflects this assumption in practice. Given that the EBPB has decided to document, and breed, two distinct lines of wisents, based on the existence of one Caucasian bull, it begs the question of the connection between the breeding lines and the prominent role of Poland in the European bison restoration plan. The decision to consider the extant B. b. bonasus animals a separate line, namely the Lowland one, does not follow the distinction between

4. Reintroductions in context The former range of the European bison included western, central, and south-eastern Europe. Its first reintroduction in the wild happened in 1952, in Białowieża forest, Poland. Since then, it has been reintroduced to several countries in its former range, including to another prominent site in Poland, Bieszczady Mountains, in 1963. This population is free-roaming and relatively large, currently at around 300 individuals. Other reintroductions happened in the former USSR, including in the Caucasian republic of North Ossetia in 1964 (Klich and Perzanowski, 2012). Rewilding Europe, one of the largest and most ambitious rewilding organizations on the continent (see Tanasescu, 2017b), aims to have “large herds of bison […] roam Europe, living side by side with other keystone species like wild horses, Aurochs, deer and predators like the wolf” (Action Plan). To this end, and in partnership with WWF and SRS,

7 The Heck brothers were the first to attempt the back-breeding of the extinct Aurochs, declaring victory in just 12 years and bequeathing upon us the ‘Heck Cattle’, roaming the famous Oostvaardersplassen reserve in the Netherlands. Today, there are several organizations attempting the recreation of the Aurochs, the most prominent among them being the Tauros Foundation, affiliated with Rewilding Europe (see Tanasescu, 2017b).

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The forest is routinely referred to as 'primeval' (e.g. Pucek et al., 2004 p.8).

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The site of the reintroduction in the Southern Carpathians was chosen based on feasibility studies that concluded the area was fit as European bison habitat (also see Catanoiu and Deju, 2016). The Țarcu Mountains recommended itself as a reintroduction area based on relatively low anthropic impact. In other words, compared to other mountainous areas, these mountains had relatively low intensity land use. The area chosen for the reintroduction, though representing one of the least humanly modified ones available, is relatively anthropic nonetheless. Some abandonment has occurred, but mostly in terms of former land uses: people no longer gather hay in the mountains like they used to, but they still have rights to the land, as well as a cottage that they could, at any moment, use again. Logging trucks have not abandoned the territory, and they continue to hum and harvest. Within this wider area, the team leaders at that moment settled on the village of Armeniș as the center of reintroductions, for human reasons: the mayor of the village was very interested in the project, and locals overwhelmingly approved13 of the reintroduction project. The animal was present in people's imagination despite having been extinct for so long: it had survived in toponymy, and the project leaders cleverly exploited this by transforming the name of the reintroduction site from 'măgura' (i.e. the hillock) to 'măgura zimbrilor' (i.e. the wisent's hillock). The same name is used for an association of locals (The Wisent Hillock Armeniș Association, AMZA), which includes two of the locals that were trained as wisent rangers. The association aims to develop activities related to wildlife in the area. So far, it has not had much success in this endeavor. The animals that have until now been reintroduced to the Țarcu mountains come from several different European zoos and breeding centers, each with its own management style. Given the genetic bottleneck discussed above, it is necessary to take precautions as to which animals can live together. The team in charge of wisent selection check the animal’s pedigree with the EBCC in order to introduce least genetically similar individuals. The different management styles of the breeding centers where animals are sourced make it so that individuals are socialized differently and have widely different tolerance of human interaction. This diversity of provenance also means that, when first introduced, the animals have no shared experiences and memories, and therefore no shared culture14 to help them deal with their environment. As Aaltola (2018) suggests, “species are not rigid entities the identity of which stays the same throughout time”. She continues: “it is not only genes that make species or individuals into what they are, but rather, also the complex and intricate relations that they share with each other and the external world”. This structure of relations is what I term culture, and scholarly developments in ethology, and particularly primatology, over the last decades lend further support to the claim that animals live in their environments in culturally specific ways. Furthermore, poststructuralist animal studies as well as human ecology (Latour, 2000, 2004a,b, Haraway, 2003, 2010, Ingold, 2002, Ingold and Palsson, 2013) suggest that being an animal is itself inseparable from sharing in the dense network of relations with conspecifics, other species, and environments. Lastly, conservation biology has itself begun to pay attention to individual behavior, in the relatively recent disciplinary fusion under the umbrella of conservation behavior (Sutherland, 1998, Caro, 1999, Buchholz, 2007, Berger-Tal et al., 2011; for animal

it has introduced European bison (of the Lowland-Caucasian line) to the Țarcu Mountains, Romania9. The last wisent in Romania had been killed in 1762 according to Pucek et al., 2004 (p.14) or around 1800, according to Deju (2008). The last surviving European bison originating from Romania died in the Schonnbrun zoo, in Vienna, in 1830. After this considerable absence from Romanian territory, a small herd was released in May 2014. The project, in implementation since 2014 and ongoing at the time of writing, proposes to introduce a new group to the same area each year, until a self-sustaining herd can be achieved. As of June 2018, eight reintroductions have taken place, totaling 73 released animals. In May 2018, a second reintroduction site also received animals (fourteen individuals in two separate reintroductions). The two sites are close enough for animals to eventually meet, though one busy national road between them poses some challenges. The idea here, as in other reintroduction projects (e.g. Kuemmerle et al., 2010, Ziółkowska et al., 2016), is to create a self-sustaining population. What self-sustaining means, given the history of the species described earlier, is that animals can reproduce with other animals outside of their own group, thus ensuring maximum genetic diversity. Declaratively, the same idea has been pursued in the Białowieża forest, though it is yet to be achieved, for several reasons. The Polish and Belarusian populations are separated by a border fence, making population interactions impossible. Furthermore, the herds in Poland are fed, which reduces the pressures of natural selection and makes it impossible for animals to be self-sustaining. Indeed, culling is common in the Białowieża forest10, as a way of maintaining, through management, ‘optimal’ populations. Even in the best of cases genetic diversity will be extremely reduced, given the EBPB's insistence on purity and the harsh reality of the species’ history11. I will now describe the relevant details of the reintroduction sites in the Southern Carpathians in order to trace changes in management practice that allow us to see an emergent restorative practice, with room for both human and non-human agency.

5. Release in the Southern Carpathians: 2014–2016 The reintroduction of wisents to the Southern Carpathians12 is, at the time of writing, in its fourth year. Funding is available, through a LIFE project, until 2021. For the purposes of this analysis, I will divide the first four years of the project in two parts: the initial reintroductions, from 2014 until 2016, and the subsequent ones, ongoing since 2016. The reason for this distinction is two-fold. On the one hand, the first animals have now had enough time to overcome certain problems that were present in the beginning of the project, as detailed below. And, more importantly for the context of this paper, in 2016 a management shift occurred, in response to the agency of the animals themselves. Post-2016 we can therefore speak of an experimental phase in the history of rewilding in this area. The first reintroduction in Romania happened in 2012 in Vȃnători Neamţ. The focus of this article is not on this reintroduction project because it does not explicitly seek to apply rewilding theories. 10 The culling in Białowieża is frequently contested. See the latest such contestation at https://www.clientearth.org/lawyers-join-fight-to-stop-polishbison-cull/?fbclid=IwAR0gCvai6ams2IUC4Qa084f72eugP6J7lTxnsRz6BlynHrsdpqagav8L9k&mc_cid=206f028402&mc_ eid=0f90912e6d. The history of wisents has always been a political history, and it continues to be so today. 11 The idea that there is a pure wisent to be maintained is not universally shared among the wisent conservation community. However, the EBPB, EBCC, and IUCN, all feature an influential group of researchers that push the idea of purity through, for instance, recommending the breeding of separate lines. In other words, the tensions I describe here are also present in the scientific community tasked with conserving the European Bison. 12 The data that the case is based on was gathered by the author, through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, in November 2015 and May 2018. 9

13

When one of the team leaders approached the mayor in light of a future wisent reintroduction, he suggested that they discuss the idea in a public meeting, and not in private. The mayor agreed, and a meeting was set up where everyone in the community could participate. Therefore, the first substantive discussion of the reintroduction was public and participatory, which might be an important reason for why the reintroduction project has good local support. For the strong local support that this project enjoys, also see Vasile (2016, 2018). 14 I use culture to mean the generational transmission of learned behavior. See De Waal (2008). 103

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Fig. 1. Wisents in the holding pen, December 2015.

Fig. 2. Wisents in rewilding pen, November 2015.

personalities, see Sih et al., 2015). Partly because of the lack of common relations among the reintroduced wisents, the reintroduction site is structured in three concentric circles, to allow the animals to habituate themselves to each other and to their new surroundings. The holding pen is the smallest enclosure (see Fig. 1). Here, the wisents can be closely monitored and 'handled', though that does not mean actually touching or herding them. A gate connects this enclosure to the handling pen. Another gate connects this one to the rewilding pen, a full 163 ha (see Fig. 2). From then on, the last gate opens towards the mountains, though these have obstacles of their own, in the form of human infrastructure and new land-use practices. This triptych of enclosures15 is designed to facilitate both close monitoring of the animals and their eventual release into the mountains. The rewilding pen is doubled by an electric fence, such that wisents might learn to stay away from such contraptions. These fences are pedagogical tools, teaching them what can and cannot be done in their new surroundings. They are also means of controlling an animal classified in a way that requires such control (both legally and philosophically). Between 2014 and 2016, certain wisents routinely 'escaped' the system of enclosures (see Fig. 3), being lured back in by the prospect of easy food. Other animals had been living outside of the enclosures for months. One chose the garden of a local as her residence, while others were roaming around the surrounding area, not really settled anywhere. Others still – the majority – were mostly sticking to the handling pen. That is where, every so often, the rangers supplemented the animals' diet with hay and edible pellets. These animals therefore chose to stay put and wait for the next meal. The feeding of the animals, together with their widely different behaviors, was a deep cause for concern for those involved in the reintroduction process. The variation in behavior presented local practitioners with a stubborn and difficult problem: despite the animals’ genetic purity, they had no shared and transmittable way of independently surviving in the mountains. They did not know how to be autonomous wisents. In these early days of the reintroduction project, the animals did not easily form the herds that were supposed to naturally occur. They resembled cattle more than mythical beasts, approaching when hearing the rumble of a bucket containing their pellets. The image of the European bison, the largest land mammal of the continent, roaming free

Fig. 3. ‘Escaped wisents’, outside of enclosures, on a logging road, November 2015.

across its former range – an image routinely marketed in communications materials of this time – was highly misleading in that it did not take into account either the problem of having animals with little in common except their genes, or the reality of the transformation that had occurred to their former range. The people implementing this project in the Southern Carpathians were well aware of both these problems and tried hard to solve them, eventually leading them towards experimentation (a good example of adaptive management; see also Ziółkowska et al., 2016), or towards a more relational understanding of the human-wisent project. The dependence of the reintroduced wisents on people made the likelihood of conflict with the local population higher. Practitioners were striving for the creation of a certain kind of relation between human and non-human animals, involving respectful distance. Instead, the history of the individual animals reintroduced, and the management techniques employed, ensured a continuous dependence on human help, and a deeply problematic tolerance of human presence. This potentially explosive situation came to fruition in 2016, when a large male decided to stay in the middle of Feneș, the village closest to the reintroduction site, for three months. Local children took selfies with the animal and posted them on social media, which contributed to their parents’ anxiety. Locals became more and more agitated and, while the team leaders were waiting for the authorization to tranquilize the animal and move it elsewhere, tensions escalated to breaking point. To add fuel to the fire, a new transport of wisents was scheduled for the area in this period. Working through the maddeningly slow

15 Interestingly, the village of Armeniș is itself a triptych, composed of Plopu, a relative agglomeration of agricultural cottages, Sat Bătrân (meaning Old Village), the old village along the river, and Armeniș proper, the new village along the main national road. Many residents therefore have three different houses in three different village centers. +agency and co-production in a formerly similarly structured space.

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given supplementary feed in order to transition to the new vegetation in the area and to supplement their diet given the relatively small size of the acclimatization area. These new methods are akin to learning to swim by being thrown in the pool and, so far, many animals have successfully traversed the steep learning curve. Relative mortality has decreased significantly since the management switch, though it is too early to say whether it will endure. Trusting wisents to be able to learn, on their own, how to live in a new environment, seems to be a decisive step towards the restoration of autonomous herds. Since 2016, there has been no further conflict between European bison and local residents. Two calves born in the wild are confirmed alive, while a third one was, in June 2018, to be confirmed. The difficulty of confirming the existence of all calves, or of the exact numbers of wisents, is a testament to the increasing autonomy of the herds, which no longer await the pellets of a human handler. Rangers have to walk far and wide through rugged terrain and, if the animals do not want to be seen, they easily blend in with the landscape. In mid-2018 there were 43 confirmed individuals living in the wild in the Țarcu mountains, in several herds that travel quite extensively. A second reintroduction site, in Poieni, received 14 animals in two releases in May 2018, in the hope of creating a second population from which individuals might expand into the surrounding mountains, a potential total area of one million hectares. The idea of rewilding often stresses the point that, in the long run, rewilding areas should be management free. In practice, and within a context of a European continent that remains densely populated despite massive land abandonment, this means that reintroduced animals, as well as rural inhabitants, will have to learn how to live together in spaces that are essentially novel ecosystems (see Hobbs et al., 2009; also see Lorimer and Driessen, 2014, Arts et al., 2016). But besides the novelty of the ecosystems themselves, what is also novel is the humananimal co-production of wilderness in a context of accelerating urbanization. In other words, the adaptive management exemplified in this project points towards the wider experimentation in ways of living together with non-human subjects that we purposefully eliminated in the past. As Tanasescu (2017a) argues, we are witnessing the invention of restorative practices that aim to create relations that are, for all involved, both new and beneficial. It is uncertain whether the issue of consanguinity (see Tokarska et al., 2011) will be an existential threat to the project’s goals, but so far this is one of very few projects in Europe that focuses exclusively19 on natural selection as a method of establishing and ‘managing’ herds. Natural selection in this sense can also be interpreted as allowing for the agency of the wisents themselves to determine the course of the project. The break with past management techniques is not, however, a clean one. For example, the number of animals that the local team is contractually obliged to release in the rewilding area is dictated by previous assumptions and marketing objectives. It sounds good to say that 100 European bison will roam free by 2021, and it speaks to the conservation desire of seeing as many animals alive, but it is almost impossible to have that number of autonomous, self-sustaining individuals by that deadline. It would be possible to bring any wisent one could find and release it, supplement its feeding in the winter, and arrive at a Białowieża solution for the Southern Carpathians. But that is precisely what the shift towards open experimentation no longer allows. Trusting the wisents to find their own path in a new environment has given rise to unexpected behaviors. In the Țarcu mountains, herds have spent weeks at 1600 m in the middle of winter. The wisents reintroduced in 2015 have changed their behavior so profoundly that they are almost impossible to get near: within three years, fed

bureaucracy of tranquilizing a legally wild animal (doing so without proper authorizations would constitute poaching), the team leaders managed to secure the necessary paperwork just in time to stave the local’s anger, and to proceed with the arrival of a new group of European bison. The animal in the village was removed (relocated to another part of the mountains), and the situation deescalated. In the period 2014–2016 the European bison handlers expressed their hope that the animals will become wilder with every passing generation, relying on the unexamined assumption that genetic purity will eventually result in autonomous herds. All of the young born in the herd in this period have died, one even killed by a pack of feral dogs16. The environment that the wisents have been reintroduced to, though indeed part of their former range, is not in any meaningful sense the same as the environment of hundreds of years ago. The local team could not simply reproduce a bygone environment and a wisent culture adapted to it. Instead, they had to restore a relation between a new kind of animal (one that had been in zoos for the better part of a century), a new kind of place (mountains with logging trucks and feral dogs), and a new kind of human (interested in rewilding on the one hand, and engaged in highly disruptive practices on the other17). The reintroduction event of 2016, the third in the history of the project, was the last one taking place following the management techniques previously explored. The wisent consultant that was working with the team at the time had advised both on the feeding of animals and on their invasive handling during reintroductions. Under new contractual possibilities within the LIFE project (LIFE 14 NAT/NL/ 000987 LIFE RE – Bison) started in 2016, the local team decided to no longer follow these methods of wisent reintroduction and to break with the advice received from the consultants employed thus far. 6. Experimentation: 2016–2018 Since 2016, there have been five further releases and, under the contractual conditions of the LIFE project funding the reintroductions, there must be 100 animals released by 202118. Under the previous management regime, which is still visible throughout the LIFE project, the accent was on bringing as many animals as possible, keeping in line with the idea that the success of European bison conservation is in some sense represented by the number of individual animals alive. Since 2016, and with the cessation of collaboration with the consultant that managed the reintroductions in the period 2014–2016, the team in charge of releasing animals has focused primarily on the quality of the individuals brought to Armeniș, and on building a distant relationship with them. The team have also experimented with the handling of the animals. At the time of release, the animals are left to exit the trailer of their own free will. Then, after fulfilling the legal conditions for quarantine, the gates of the concentric enclosures are opened, and the animals are free to roam. No additional feeding takes place. There is one exception to this, namely in the first month of acclimatization, when animals are 16

see https://www.rewildingeurope.com/news/bison-herd-in-the-southerncarpathians-attacked-by-a-pack-of-feral-stray-dogs/ 17 Disruptive practices are to be understood as disruptive of wild animal livelihoods. For example, sheep farming in the area has changed dramatically relative to what it used to be hundreds of years ago. Whereas sheep were traditionally confined to high alpine meadows, they are now to be found everywhere in the mountains. Hay is no longer gathered close to the village, and this practice has been replaced by grazing sheep. Subsidies for grazing further augment the shepherd’s territories. This means that shepherds and their guard dogs have a greatly extended range throughout the mountains, and this affects all wildlife. 18 Jepson et al. (2018) recognize the unexamined assumptions baked into LIFE projects, arguing that these funding mechanisms “express compositionalist conservation logics that require applicants to conduct more traditional species reintroduction projects” (p.9).

19 Besides the issue of winter feeding, already thematized at length, another practice that substitutes itself for natural selection in projects elsewhere is that of selective culling. This project has so far not culled any animals.

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herd (Bulacu, 2016). How they will continue to invent livelihood practices adapted to new territories (that present, for example, new elevation opportunities and changing weather patterns) remains to be seen. Engaging in a reciprocal project of spatial co-creation together with wisents can be understood as a fundamental change in the way that we relate to the natural world and to other animal subjects. The concept of restoration as involving the building of mutually beneficial ecological relationships puts practitioners’ management techniques in a different, more participatory, frame. Crucially, restoration in this sense is no longer strictly tied to baselines. The ’re’ of reintroduction (or rewilding), as Jepson et al., (2018) also argue, is better understood as reiterative and, in this sense, creative of novel practices. Vasile (2018) detailed how, in the same case discussed here, practitioners have also included the wider human community of the Southern Carpathians in the project, thereby allowing the restorative practice to reach as many members of the natural community as possible. She also shows how many human inhabitants of the mountains are already predisposed to experimenting in ways of living with a future, independent, wisent population. The necessary conditions for the acceptance of new animal members into natural communities is itself an important future line of research. Here, I showed how the animals themselves have begun to dictate parts of the terms of the restorative project. It remains to be seen how this, and other projects like it, will develop the restorative practice in the future. However, under conditions of increasing uncertainty as to the very material makeup of future territories, these kinds of experimental approaches might consider becoming exploratory instead, by engaging with the often uncomfortable assumptions buried deep inside our unreflexive classifications. I have brought out some of the tensions between Europe-wide restoration plans and national mythologies, ideals of purity and the reality of impoverished animal cultures, as well as the increasing uncertainties we are all subject to in this brave new Anthropocene. The idea of restorative practice, as the formation of mutually beneficial relationships, holds the promise of moving us from human-inclusive to subject-inclusive practices. It also allows us to reflect more deeply on what and why we are doing to and with natural subjects. Perhaps most importantly, a relationship is always a work-inprogress, and the expectation of arriving at some final destination is fatal to the dynamism of relating itself. It might be that creating practices together with wisents is how wisents will come to exist, in perpetuity. The very image of an autonomous herd is soothing in connecting us to assumptions of separation and secure identities that we can no longer afford. Going forward, we might just have to relinquish ever more control in order to recreate a space for humans within natural communities. Experimentation lies ahead.

individuals have become so shy rangers can barely see them. Within the past two years, the only wisents that had problems (one died, the other is very interested in people) were two that came from an intensely managed breeding center. The rest are charting their course through new territory. 7. Discussion and conclusion The Southern Carpathians might not have the same traditional agricultural practices common a hundred years ago, but other land uses continue today, and infrastructure is more, not less, present. The issue of land abandonment, in other words, is far from settled, inasmuch as people retain land rights and future demographic trends might as well see the mountains inhabited again. Despite the very localized nature of the site, it is subject to the same uncertain dynamics of a globalized materiality that is increasingly responding to human pressures in novel and unexpected ways. The impact of climate change in this area, whatever it might be in its specifics, will surely further contribute to the changing patterns of land use we observe today, all too easily projecting them into the distant future. If the rewilding idea is interested in the action of animals in a particular land, then there is no inherent reason to consider the reintroduction of ‘pure’ wisents as the only option. Indeed, in other project areas Rewilding Europe has introduced Tauros cattle, instead of the extinct Aurochs, for their grazing role (see Tanasescu, 2017b, Driessen and Lorimer, 2016). The desire to introduce wisents, surely connected to the local context and the survival of the animal in toponymy and collective memory, comes with the idea of genetic purity being all-important for the success of the project. If it is wisents that should be introduced, then of necessity the EBCC and EBPP need to be consulted, as they hold the keys to what is and what is not a pure animal. But the idea of a pure animal has locked within it, as I have shown, other assumptions that condition what practitioners can do on the ground. As Friese (2010) argues, via the work of Edwards (1991), “classifications do not only situate entities, but are also arguments for certain actions” (p.166). The connection between the wisents’ genetic purity and their survival potential is, if it exists at all, likely to travel in the direction of decreased fitness. Though the project has arguably moved into a phase of experimentation, trusting the animal’s agency, questions about genetic purity remain largely unanswered and unaccounted for. The idea that only pure animals can be the subjects of reintroduction demands an implicit set of control practices that can only allow so much room for radical animal agency. Practitioners on the ground have adapted their management techniques both to unexpected animal subjects, and to novel territories. The space of reintroduction as the space of the mountains, and not just that of the handling pen, cannot be controlled by the practitioners implementing this project. It is therefore in trusting the animals to, as it were, figure it out, that they can encourage the formation of autonomous social units. Arts, Fischer and van der Wal (2016) argue (in the case of a hypothetical reintroduction of wolves to Scotland) that rewilders need to engage with the issue of control, or rather with that of relinquishing control of key aspects of a reintroduction process: “the challenges for rewilding is to gradually reduce the moments and intensities of control” (p.31). The case presented here exemplifies a partial loosening of control that results in new relations between people, animals, and land. The wisents have already started rewriting what we thought we knew about how they are supposed to behave. Since they have been allowed to exist independently of human control, they have broken previous elevation records (Bulacu and Hagatis, 2018). For example, in August 2017 a herd stayed at an elevation of above 2.000 m for more than a week. Not everything the animals do is, of course, new. The dynamics of herd formation, at least so far, are fundamentally similar to those observed in other free-roaming herds. Males form small bachelor groups, while females contend for leadership and subsequently lead the

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