Moving Animals

Monica Vasile discusses the problematic, complicated, and ambivalent ‘success story’ of the reintroduction of European bison in Romania and Poland in her Open Access article in the journal Environment and History. “From Reintroduction to Rewilding: Autonomy, Agency and the Messy Liberation of the European Bison” documents the reintroduction of European Bison into the South-Western Carpathians of Romania in the 2010s and compares it with long-term recovery efforts in the Białowieża forest in Poland. The article focuses on tensions between hands-on conservation practice predicated on control on one side, and hands-off practice predicated on autonomy and agency, on the other side. It shows how averting the extinction of a species entails a painstaking process in which human-animal relations are constantly revisited and recalibrated.

Monica discusses her article on the White Horse Press Blog here: https://whitehorsepress.blog/2022/08/05/the-messy-liberation-of-the-european-bison/ 

Image: One of the first bison released in the rewilding program in South-Western Carpathians, 2014. Credit: Silviu Matei.