Biodiversity loss is recognized as part of the global environmental crisis. There is a broad scientific consensus that with the loss of biodiversity, we are not only losing the variety of species, habitats, and entire ecosystems, but we are also endangering our food security, health, climate system, and economy. As part of the European Green Deal, the European Union adopted the 2030 Biodiversity Strategy and the 2030 Forest Strategy. Both strategic documents propose several measures with which the EU and its member states have made a commitment to stop the loss of biodiversity and put biodiversity on the path to recovery by 2030. In Slovenia, international and European nature conservation requirements and recommendations have in principle been adequately integrated into forestry policy and legislation, and to a large extent also into modern forest management practices. This is primarily the result of historically established principles of sustainability as well as close-to-nature and multipurpose forest management. Nevertheless, certain forest species and habitats have an unfavourable conservation status. Therefore, additional action is needed and a number of important forest management questions must be answered: When is a beech tree old? Are forest production cycles primarily an economic or an ecosystem category? Should mechanized timber harvesting adapt to forests or the other way around? How do we deal with climate change? How do we deal with non-native and invasive species? How do we strengthen supervision/control in forests? How do we strengthen cooperation, communication, education, knowledge transfer, and data gathering systems?

This lecture focuses on the future of the protection and development of urban forests and trees as our cities confront the effects of climate change. Simoneti stresses that contemporary urban forest management challenges need to be tackled with complex and broad-based methods that go beyond a narrow view of forestry and also include the interested public. These methods can be inspired by good practices from the past: the traditions of Slovenian forestry – known for its sustainable forest management – and organized nature conservation, which is closely linked to the activities of nature lovers. Simoneti compares the concept of the urban forest to the public park, the latter being the result of the planned conservation of natural resources and the spatial planning for the common good in both the European and Slovenian traditions.
The extent and complexity of urban forest management challenges nowadays speak to the necessity of building strong (cross-sectoral and civil society) alliances, and drawing on our knowledge and other resources in order to provide for the most effective protection and development of forests and trees in the urban environment. The future is always marked by the past, and the knowledge of past management methods could help us to more quickly find optimal solutions.

“Nature” and “natural” are culturally constructed terms that carry many historical and social connotations and contradictions. Similarly, the opposition of forest and city, much like the opposition of wilderness and control, are long-standing paradigms that perpetuate the distance between these systems and support the exploitation of valuable resources and various groups of people. The concepts of the “jungle” and the “wild” were created by the imperial and colonial imagination to reject both the Other and Other spaces as being outside of its system of control.
In her talk, Borbála Soós presents the international group exhibition Ecologies of the Ghost Landscape: The Word for World is Forest that she curated at tranzit.sk in Bratislava in 2020. The exhibition considered a number of quickly disappearing species, both human and non-human cultures, and nature put to the service of border control policies. It also foregrounded the idea of rewilding as a revolutionary ecosystem management strategy – also in the social, political, and activist sense – that has the potential to give voice to the unwanted and erased, the subjugated and oppressed, the indigenous and endemic, the human and non-human. Where the Wild Things Are thus came to represent the anti-hegemonic where disorder and disobedience interrupt long unquestioned narratives and practices.

This presentation draws on stories of a windstorm in the Tuchola Forest (Poland), bark beetle outbreaks in the Białowieża Forest (between Belarus and Poland) and the High Tatra (between Slovakia and Poland), and other forest disturbances. These and similar phenomena that have been increasingly observed across Europe are described as natural disasters or calamities, forest crises or the collapse of the nature management paradigm, or the end of traditional forestry. It depends on where you ask and to whom you are talking.
When pondering the question of what is happening in modern society and how to describe its contemporary dynamics, it is worth pausing to explore what is seen and portrayed as a forest, or more broadly, a natural disaster. Forest disaster narratives are not neutral or naïve. On the contrary, they reflect power relations and are related to more complex discourses, becoming exemplifications of specific worldviews. Definitions of natural disasters and questions about what climate change is, when and where disasters take place, whether something is “natural” or belongs to the “natural order”, and how specific disasters are categorized as a result, have become integral parts of social debate. These various and competing meanings constitute a platform for social conflicts, where polarizing and binary opposition-based language dividing reality into nature and culture, natural and manufactured, native and foreign no longer fulfills its dialogical function. Disaster narratives have become spaces of the struggle for power, dominance, resources, and identity. They are situated somewhere between the “old Earth” (Latour, 2017) and alternative visions of the future. They are part of our search for an (un)certain future.

This lecture introduces the forest as a complex element of cultural landscape and an important factor in cultural identity. Rather than on the ecosystemic and economic “value” and role of the forest, it focuses on the semiotics of forest’s spatial perception, and, to support this perspective, includes examples from literature, art, and landscape design. The assumptions upon which the western relation to the forest lie, and which at least partially emerge from the structural characteristics of the forest (that it is pathless, not easy to survey, dark and unfathomable), are filled with contradictions. We look at the forest as a space of freedom which evades control, but because of this it is also a space where laws do not easily apply. We look at the forest as a sanctuary and also as a place that is filled with danger, as a space of the transcendent (for example, the sacred grove), as a space of delusion and revelation, and also as a space that has experienced profane exploitation, and all of this – in addition to the fear, awe, and scientific inquiry – determines our current relation to the forest in light of contemporary ecological and social problematics.

In his talk, Giovanni Aloi explores the relationship between the forest and loss as envisioned in art across time. In Renaissance paintings, forests regularly figure as a backdrop and reminder of the darkness lurking at the edges of reason. In contrast, the well-lit human characters in the foreground embody human rationality. The nature versus culture dichotomy is thus subliminally reinforced by beautiful images that – in terms of perspective – place the human being at the centre of the cosmos. For centuries, the metaphorical and actual impenetrability of the forest in Western art has intertwined in representations designed to remind us (or convince us) that we do not belong in nature, that we left it a long time ago, and that the forest essentially is a place of loss in the sense of losing our way, our faith, our sanity, our life.
Drawing on the work of artists as radically diverse as Otto Marseus van Schrieck, Wifredo Lam, and Abel Rodríguez, Aloi explores the different ways in which artists engage with forests as sites of remembrance and recovery rather than of loss and mourning. In order to foreground an awareness of the fragility and resilience of vegetal ecosystems in the face of human intervention, Aloi focuses on a work entitled Sildewalk Forests created by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña in the 1980s.