The Making of a National Park: Ruins of Nature and History in Northern Dobrudja

Introduction

In 1896, Petre Grigorescu, a seasoned Romanian forester, wryly described an encounter with the “mystery of oriental forests” ¹ in Dobrudja ² while traversing the countryside with two companions, one a local forest agent and the other a visiting hunter and forest owner. On their way, they passed by a herd of goats grazing on shrubbery not much taller than the goats themselves. Later on, they observed a herd of white cattle wandering through coppice and thicket. Up in the hills they identified sheep, barely visible among the tall grass and the young saplings growing again after a recent fire. Eventually, the forest agent could contain himself no longer and indignantly announced his intention to exact fines from all the owners of the animals. Grigorescu and the hunter were surprised. The agent explained that the animals were destroying the forest. “What forest?” the two experts wondered. Apparently, they had been walking for four hours through one of the state-owned forests of Dobrudja without even noticing. ³

Like the nineteenth-century foresters, the first time I entered the Măcin Mountains National Park (MMNP), in the summer of 2011, looking to interview a park ranger living in a former state tobacco plantation, I too kept wondering, “Where is the park forest?” I passed a large herd of goats grazing near Greci, the biggest village on the edge of the Park. Later on, I came across a pack of half-wild pigs roaming the dirt roads that run along the foothills of the Măcin Mountains. Within the park confines, not far from the rangers’ house, empty bottles, piles of garbage, and swarms of mosquitos surrounded a “healing spring” (Izvorul tămăduirii)—as well as the very same herd of goats I had encountered earlier in Greci.

There is a growing body of literature in political ecology that seeks to substantiate the complex spatial practices that initiate (or block) change and create asymmetrical political, economic, and cultural structures in nature conservation areas. ⁴ Several scholars have recently attempted to blend science and technology studies with political ecology in order to understand both strategies of exclusion, dispossession, and resistance, and the social construction of nature and wilderness. ⁵ While these perspectives are very important—and I build on them—I argue that, in order to understand how local actors interpret the emergent landscapes of national parks, scholars should pay more attention to the active presence of ruins, that is, the history of (failed) modernization projects. The ruins of previous modernization and development projects are one of the main factors that shape the ways actors dwell in antagonistically constructed natures.

In pointing to the importance of ruins in the constitution and material dynamics of national parks, I follow Ann Stoler, who coupled critical geography and environmental history to the “analytical centre of postcolonial scholarship” as she delineated processes of ruination inside various political formations. ⁶ Through these theoretical lenses, ruins morph into ecologies of debris, “epicentres of renewed collective claims, sites that animate both despair and new possibilities, bids for entitlement, and unexpected collaborative political projects.” ⁷ The sense of fragility, transience, and destruction that ruins usually evoke is present in Stoler’s project, but the focus shifts from ruins as such, to the process of ruination, and the local lives marked by ruins. Ruination is an active, ongoing, and violent process that allocates debris—uneven temporal sedimentations left over by political and historical formations—differentially. Ruins appear not only as derelict monuments but also as processes that saturate “the subsoil of people’s lives,” leftovers “blocking livelihood and health,” and as the “social afterlife” of sensibilities, emotions, histories, and things. ⁸

In this article, I explore how protected areas of natural landscape are constructed from and by heterogeneous actors, including transcripts, maps, flyers, tourists and tourist routes, peasants, goats, stone quarries, and vipers. Măcin Mountains National Park (and the areas surrounding it) is a privileged site where tensions between nature, history, ruins, and development are played out in the open. By focusing on “ruination” I want to bring to light the ambiguous activity of debris that violently unites or tears apart different temporalities and landscapes. The actors caught up in this long-term ruinous development form part of shifting identities, hierarchies, and political strategies. In the process, some are redefined and excluded and others become more entitled to the landscape. I will focus on wood, stone, and labor as parts of the critical discourses emerging from inside and around the ruins that litter the landscape. ⁹

The data that I rely on are ethnographic and archival. My research has been going on since 2011, with follow-ups in 2012, 2014, and 2015. It consisted of observation, archival work, and interviews with villagers, rangers, national park and local public administrators, tourists, and local businessmen from the towns of Tulcea and Măcin, and the villages surrounding the Park (mostly from Greci, Carcaliu, Turcoaia, and Luncavița). I became entangled, if only marginally, in the networks that brought together influential actors and shaped the exclusionary politics of local nature management. My research became, involuntarily, part of local power plays involving the control and management (or lack of it) of the local expansion of some sought-after diploma-granting courses and real-estate assets connected with a major national university. These projects eventually failed, but were a constant reminder of my own position and, most probably, opened up some threads in the landscape, while obscuring others.

The article is organized as follows. In the second section, I describe the institution and slow emergence of the Măcin Mountains National Park (MMNP). I understand the MMNP as part of a larger historical and geographical region that I call “the Măcin area”: the zone defined by the visual, social, economic, and cultural contours of the Măcin Mountains. In the third section, I turn to the larger historical background of the continuous state-led modernization of Dobrudja, based on the extraction of stone and wood and the colonization of a sparsely populated area. Section four takes the more down-to-earth point of view of a local terrain, rife with conflicts, where nature has condensed and counterpoised differently lived pasts and futures. Humans live among the ruins and “the environment” by continuously and critically commenting on their pasts, presents, and envisaged futures. Before I turn to some theoretical summings-up and conclusions, I touch upon the mechanisms through which geographies of exclusion and inclusion, and new relationships between livestock, locals, and nature are made visible and partially created by the presence of the MMNP. The park emerges as a moment in time and as a spatial structure that blends into the larger landscape, but also serves as a focal point in collecting historical, political, and ecological tensions.

The Making of a National Park

The background of the MMNP is one of deindustrialization: shut down or drastically downsized stone quarries and textile factories. Especially after Romania’s accession to the European Union (EU) in 2007, the villages around the park, and the small town of Măcin became wellsprings for migration to Italy and Spain. The remaining population is aged and lives off the land and other meager revenue sources such as small retirement benefits from discontinued activities in disappeared industries or socialist agriculture.

Most Romanian national and natural parks (NPs) ¹⁰ came into being in the context of a dramatically changing society. ¹¹ They were, from the very beginning, part of an emerging world made of new concepts, identities, and economic and cultural flows. In the 1990s, new NPs started as sustainable development projects. Many of them were partially funded by big “development institutions,” aimed at capturing a pristine natural landscape and national heritage. Over the years these parks have been subject to, and articulated in, a changing, post-socialist institutional and cultural milieu. Their number has grown substantially, and the old ones have been reinvented as they have gained administrative structures of their own. NPs have become autonomous from the local and county councils that administered them before. Most of this transformation was influenced by some variant of an international “standardized package,” ¹² combining theories, methodologies, expertise, and concrete examples of how national parks and reserves should look, and the local NPs became effective with the help of funding from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The MMNP had a slow start. ¹³ It was officially instituted in 1998. The mid and late 1990s were a period when many NPs were created in Romania, and all across Central and Eastern Europe, as a kind of trade-off with EU environmental standards during negotiations for European integration. NPs were easier to create and implement than other, more costly, environmental policies. The park became functional only in 2005, after it received an UNDP grant. Thereafter, the administration became effective and able to map, inscribe, and zone the park. The first tables and chairs, computers, Internet sites, tourist routes, and ranger activities became constituent parts of large-scale networks that created the park by their superposition and solidification. ¹⁴ This re-emergence of the MMNP, seven years after its official creation, was due to a wave of professionalization of nature management in Central and Eastern Europe helped by UNDP and Global Environment Facility (GEF) funding and expertise. The project was actually designed and written by a United Kingdom–based independent consultant and a frequent adviser to UNDP-supported and GEF-financed projects. This kind of global expertise—the consultant worked on a truly worldwide scale, from the Andaman Islands to Romania, Slovakia to Kazakhstan—was central to the creation of the MMNP administration and, consequently, the emergence of new forms of nature management in the Măcin area.

From 2006 to 2008, the MMNP was in open conflict with the stone quarries that operated inside the Park. At the end of 2008, the park won a long court battle in the Court of Appeals in Constanța, the regional capital. The private owners of the stone quarries were ordered to stop all activity inside the park. However, in 2009, before the quarries were to be closed, a direct government executive order, backed by the Romanian National Academy, changed the boundaries of the park, diminishing it in size so that the stone quarries could operate safely outside the newly delineated nature conservation area.

As it became a visible presence in the landscape, the MMNP became involved in the strategies and networks of other important local actors. Alcovin, a Belarusian-Romanian wine producer, with marketing interests in the framing and inventing of local histories and landscapes, edited and published at its own expense the first map of the park, on which Alcovin’s own location features prominently. In addition, they helped form “The Măcin Mountains Touristic Association,” which is coordinated by Alcovin, the University of Bucharest, the MMNP, and the Belarusian embassy. Folkloric children’s dance groups from communities surrounding the park, who are part of the MMNP’s plans for “sustainable development” and “cultural heritage preservation,” travel almost every year, sponsored by Alcovin, to a big festival in Klimavichy, Belarus.

Another big project that helped the park get started was funded by the European Union in 2011 through the “Sectoral Operational Programme Environment.” This project made it possible to change and improve the Internet site and to design new maps and calibrate old ones. The rangers’ surveillance and scientific activity increased and, eventually, the construction of a huge administrative building started in the village of Greci. ¹⁵ The park was becoming an undeniable presence on the slopes of the Măcin Mountains.

The MMNP is an area known to be enveloped by culturally rich and diverse ethnicities. Its natural riches are protected, but also threatened, by humans. For the 2011 EU-funded project, the park was described as “a place that is valued and appreciated because of the richness of its natural and ethno-cultural heritage, which contributes to the development of neighboring communities.” ¹⁶ Development (of human communities) and conservation (of nature) are twin claims the MMNP uses to legitimize its presence and authority in the area. Tourism connects both: development in this deindustrialized zone is bound to be touristically oriented, and nature conservation provides the main ingredient for tourists’ visual consumption of the scenery.

As an alternative to the failed socialist, industry-based development, many local administrators, entrepreneurs, and professionals imagine tourism to be the Măcin area’s future and primary agent of development. Tourism is sometimes seen as a panacea, capable of creating wealth while at the same time sustaining the MMNP’s strict scientific and conservationist rules that keep nature “pure” and relatively untouched. The high pressure put on tourism-induced development tends to disrupt its own chances of success, however, as large sections of local communities grow estranged from institutions and discourses that restrict access to familiar landscapes (and resources) by promising development that is actually very slow in coming. The MMNP is becoming an important factor in this development drama. It contains not only natural landscapes but also moral and economic ones, as it is a space where local hopes and frustrations tend to coalesce and also confront one another.

Wood, Stone, and Modernization

The post-socialist period in Central and Eastern Europe has witnessed widespread uncertainty and a deeply felt ambiguity about rural resources. As hectares “vanished” ¹⁷ during the privatization of former collective agricultural properties, forests gained a newfound appreciation in “the mad scramble for forest access throughout Central and Eastern Europe.” ¹⁸ The wood became a harshly contested and much sought-after asset, as the forests were one of the very few valuable and marketable natural resources available in rural areas.

The creation of the Piatra Craiului National Park in 1990 in Romania took place in parallel with the beginning of the restitution of forests to their local historical owners. ¹⁹ This double process, in various local and national manifestations, owing to the different land reform policies and ways of regulating property rights in the countryside, reshaped the landscapes across Central and Eastern Europe. Complex and protracted conflicts and negotiations ensued between local private owners, state agents, national and global environmental agencies, and political elites. Land and forest restitution policies re-embedded property rights in personal identities, and family and community relations. ²⁰

Reborn property rights and environmental policies were not the only things that molded nature reserves or individual and collective identities. The power of scientific, cultural, and ethno-national representations to shape nature was at work in many other cases. ²¹ In the Białowieża National Park in Poland, myths of endangered primeval forests, and pristine scientific and ethnic nature, legitimized some collective interests while delegitimizing and blocking others. The Białowieża Forest, Franklin Stuart argues, “is neither dying nor being destroyed through forestry practice” and “its social and ecological history has been mythologized.” ²² The (failed) attempts to expand the national park, and its regulatory regime, to the entire forest had two functions: to atone for pollution elsewhere in Poland, and to make the border between the Belarusian minority and the Polish (and Catholic) majority clearer, by encroaching on the lands of Orthodox Belarusian peasants. ²³

But in the small Dobrudjan national park under discussion, a method of allocating rights, myths, and historical debris is at work that is different from those found in other protected areas in Central and Eastern Europe. These forests do not emerge as valuable and easily marketable objects made available through new forest property rights. The “oriental forests” of Romania surface, in my fieldwork and from the archives, less as valuable objects in themselves and more as parts of various overlapping modernization projects, ²⁴ and areas intimately articulated with stone and labor. The focus of conflict is not so much on property but on the ways forests can be used and on what kind of pasts and futures this makes possible.

The MMNP assembles, frames, and partially congeals the historicity of a dramatically changing nature: massive deforestations at the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth centuries; waves of reforestation after 1878, particularly during the socialist period; the rise of stone quarries at the fin de siècle, and their decline in the 1990s; and the so-called “gardening” forestry strategies of the 2000s. It inherits and shapes the ongoing ruinous development of the landscape. Functioning as an object and discourse legitimized by the protection of wild nature, the park creates a certain type of naturalness that covers these dramatic histories. Consequently, the history of the forest, captured and incorporated in the MMNP, is barely visible.

The modernization of these lands was an objective of the Romanian state from the late nineteenth century. Dobrudja was considered an empty space or, at least, one of the most “programmable” and easy-to-intervene-in provinces of Romania. It was a potentially vital commercial outlet that granted access to the Black Sea. From a demographic point of view, it also “served as an ‘internal America,’ a dynamic frontier zone of new settlements for expanding the national economy and ethnic boundaries.” ²⁵ In 1882, the Romanian state invested heavily in a major bridge over the Danube in order to complete the railway link between Bucharest and Constanța (Kustendje), providing the shortest route between Asia Minor and Western Europe. In 1896, the Romanian government began the construction of a major harbor for redirecting grain exports from overland and riverine routes to the Black Sea. ²⁶

The Northern Dobrudjan stone quarries—from which high-quality granite could be extracted—were deemed necessary for the huge construction works taking place at the Constanţa seaport, the Cernavodă Bridge over the Danube, and during the architectural modernization of Bucharest. Italian workers and stonemasons from northern Italy, mainly Venice and Friuli, were encouraged to emigrate to the village of Greci and to form worker colonies in order to extend and develop these quarries.

Wood was an important and scarce resource in this project, but not in the same way as stone. From the nineteenth century, the area had been left with small patches of forest and large areas of rock, mud, and sand. The Măcin Mountains had few remaining forests even as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. ²⁷ Local woodlands, enhanced by reforestation projects, were considered important for the successful settlement of war veterans in new villages. While this (mostly imagined and projected) wood was not a direct part of the larger infrastructural modernization project of fin-de-siècle Romania, ²⁸ it was seen as being able to sustain modernization by creating an agriculturally efficient and demographically thriving province. ²⁹

The attempts to plant more forests were largely ineffective, as they proved to be expensive, badly managed, and disorganized. In 1890, Dumitru Boiarolu, supervisor of the Romanian Reforestation Service, wrote a scathing “Report Regarding the Reforestation of Dobrudja,” in which he affirmed that he could not take responsibility for continuing on the same path, spending money with no results whatsoever, and betting on grandiose but impractical projects. He asked for the creation of a new commission that would “know Dobrudja well, visit all communal lands that are to be reforested, and write down a general plan.” ³⁰

The reforestation projects of the interwar period continued those of the fin de siècle but focused primarily on the newly acquired provinces, ³¹ especially Transylvania, and on the huge problems caused by commercial woodcutting and the depletion of the Carpathian Mountain forests. In that context, Dobrudja lagged behind. ³² Only the projected forest shelterbelts, which were designed to protect arable lands from strong winds and sand, were better financed and managed.

Dobrudja’s modernization strategy was continued, even if in a different framework, during the socialist era. Wood and stone were once again packaged together as resources for a reborn modernization project. The program of large-scale industrialization, including the construction of the Danube–Black Sea Canal, irrigation systems, sea resorts, and the extension and modernization of the Constanța seaport, “was comparable in scale with the modernization of Dobrudja that followed its earlier annexation to Romania (1878–1913).” ³³ Fast-paced collectivization and nationalization—which ignited peasant revolts in the villages near Măcin in 1958, when agricultural fields and vineyards were threatened—proceeded swiftly in the forests, as most of them were state property. Still, some rebel peasants were able to take refuge in the “mysterious oriental forests” of Northern Dobrudja and in the swamps that interlaced them.

Most of the large-scale reforestation of the Măcin area was a result of the politics of direct intervention put into practice by the socialist state. Dobrudja’s nature, sparsely inhabited, was something to build on, to mold by human will, to transform into a socialist reality. For socialist planners, the prospect of human intervention subduing and transforming the ancient, geological Dobrudja, and the “ruined” and poor “bourgeois” province, was an irresistible ideological and pragmatic challenge. ³⁴

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the forest was replanted in waves. The intervention was framed not just as technical forestry but also as a popular and pedagogical project. Schools were mobilized, and children were brought to the arid slopes of the Măcin Mountains to plant trees. One informant, who took part in the reforestation efforts of the 1960s as a schoolgirl, remembers that “everything was covered in a yellow dust, there was almost no grass to be seen, just scorched earth, not even a small flower.”

The emergence of the MMNP, in the mid-2000s, created an ambiguous and tensioned relationship with this enduring modernist and socialist nature. The park’s rangers and administration officers criticize the intrusiveness and “unnaturalness” of the socialist approach to nature, forest, and animals alike. To these contemporary stewards, direct interference with nature is to be avoided at all costs. Nature should not be made and remade but “gardened” and exploited through controlled tourism, pasturing, and sustainable development. They claim that even if socialist-era reforestation is the origin of many stretches of today’s forest, “nature regenerates itself” and the effect of direct human intervention is now almost gone. This indirect, “gardening”-type creation of the environment transforms troubled socialist history into apparently serene national-park nature. It is as if socialism can be cured in time by this strange power residing in nature—as place, climate, earth, and (national) continuity—a genuine genius loci.

The MMNP’s forests are made up of patches of woodland, unevenly distributed, with most of them situated on the less accessible slopes of the mountains. The most frequented tourist trails are in the southern part and pass through scantly forested areas or else through visibly man-made forests. Under the umbrella of a “regenerated nature” that can be consumed by disciplined tourists, the park administration is attempting to create equivalences between forests that originated differently. The socialist forests—which are highly visible inside the park—are being naturalized by their mixture with the less visible, and touristically less important, older forests from the northern part of the mountains. The so-called “Valea Fagilor” (Beech Forest Valley)—a strictly protected area inside the park—functions like a kind of symbolic core of greatest value. The history of the trees and their historical relations with local human stewardship and economic activities is naturalized and submerged within a “self-regenerating” nature.

A new nature/society divide is slowly emerging alongside and inside the old socialist one, engendering different political, economic, and cultural effects. This replacement of one way of working with nature by another—from heroic socialist intervention to careful gardening—has been neither swift nor clear. The MMNP administration, besides receiving grant money from big development institutions that support “gardening” and “sustainable development” discourses and policies, is still on the payroll of an institution with a modernist ³⁵ approach: the National Forestry Administration (Romsilva), which survives mainly by cutting and selling trees, not by tourism and forest gardening.

The wood has partially been transformed, through national park practices and discourses, into natural forest with protected species living in it. The stone is more resilient, and the conflict between the park and the stone quarries—or between wood and stone—has loomed over the MMNP since its formation, shaping also its muted conflicts with local communities.

Ruins, Stories, and “the Environment”

The local history of modernization, sketched in the previous section, which packs together wood, stone, and labor by drawing crisscrossing and tensioned lines between nature and society inside and around the MMNP, is reconsidered in what follows from a more ethnographic perspective. I focus on the conflicts between socialist and post-socialist “natures” and on how locals inhabit a tensioned historical and political natural landscape by telling different stories.

In the village of Greci lives one of the largest human communities around the park—with approximately five thousand inhabitants. From this village originate the most important entry points into the park. Moreover, the headquarters of the MMNP will be relocated, eventually, to its outskirts. Here is one of the places where the park’s nature is being constituted and articulated in different, sometimes antagonistic, ways. The contact between the park (and its forests) and the stone quarries has a direct, visible materiality. Two trails start from Greci and lead into the Park. The first is marked by the construction site for a huge building that is supposed, in the near future, to house the Park administration, and a museum. The building is erected on one of the former communal pastures and made of concrete, steel, and glass. It indexes the Park’s success in attracting EU money by its stark departure from the humble houses nearby and its architectural indifference to the landscapes it is supposed to administer. Some of the rangers that I have talked to see this tension as just a lack of architecture–landscape integration. Most of the neighbors—poor peasants living in small, dilapidated houses on the outskirts of the village and near the soon-to-be-operational administration block and museum—are keenly aware of the irony of the presence of this alien-looking building in the landscape.

The second trail appears to head straight for the two stone quarries that dominate the mountain slope. Both quarries are silent now, having been shut down at different times, but look as if they are ready to resume work at any moment. Just before arriving at the plateau leading to the quarries, the road takes a sudden right turn, and a totally different view emerges. This is a place where stone quarries are only present in the shape of the ruins of former administrative buildings and workers’ lodgings, all of which have been transformed into concrete skeletons, adorned with touristic signs showing the Park’s official trails. Goats inhabit most of these abandoned buildings during spring and summer. Two large rectangular buildings—one without a roof, the other without doors and windows—mark this major access point.

The park and the quarries are co-present in an intimate mixing of nature, economics, and history. Large boulders of granite lie in patterns made by the process of granite extraction from the mountains; they now blend almost indistinguishably into the natural setting of the park. The derelict buildings point to earlier diggings and to an extinct but formerly vibrant local social life; at the same time, they signal the entry point to the MMNP.

The dilapidated stone quarries stand as a kind of still active, historico-natural debris ³⁶ that distils and condenses histories of the region that the park is now a part of. The park is not only contained in these histories but is also a center that produces and rearranges memories, hopes, and anxieties, some of them born long before the park came into existence. The future MMNP headquarters and the former stone quarry buildings condense alternative senses of history and different ways of coping with nature; the goat-inhabited ruins provide the most visible commentary on the protracted construction of the park’s different but still modern- (and alien-)looking administrative building and life.

After Sunday mass at the Greci Catholic Church, in the summer of 2014, some of the few remaining old stonemasons of Greci gathered at one of the bars close by. A brand new map, recently glued onto one of the wooden walls, showed, in various shades of shining, beautiful green, the contours and areas of the nearby park. It made a stark contrast with the rocky and deserted mountain peaks that could be seen from the dusty street outside the bar. The discussion between the old men, the owner of the bar, and the pub regulars quickly pitted one against the other the image of the former thriving socialist village of Greci and what was called with almost audible scare quotes, “the environment”, brought into the landscape by the park.

The village of Greci was quite a prosperous place during socialism—especially from the late 1960s on—as the local workforce, who were closer to being higher-status industrial workers than peasants, exploited the area’s stone quarries. Around two hundred people worked directly in the granite quarries in the 1970s and 1980s, but their numbers went down to seventy-eighty in the 1990s. Most of the stone quarries went bankrupt during the Yugoslav wars, especially in the aftermath of the bombing of the Danube bridges in 1998–1999. Because the circulation of ships transporting stone was interrupted, many of the quarries, which were already having financial problems, went bankrupt and became silent parts of the Măcin Mountains’ historical landscape. At least, that is one of the stories supposed to make sense of the destinies of people, wood, and stone in the area. It is the story usually told by people who worked at the stone quarries or in intensive horticulture, as well as by some of the local intellectuals. The “good times”—those connected with stone and an urban-like, affluent life—have been unsatisfactorily replaced by “the environment,” meaning nature protection policies and the MMNP. This story usually imagines the “good socialist times” by ignoring the conflicts between local urban-like lifestyles and more peasant ones; Italian and Roman Catholic stonemasons and Greek Orthodox Romanian peasants; stonemasons’ wives simply doing their household chores and peasant women working the fields; homegrown peasants and stonemasons and more recently arrived ones; and, more generally, the tensions and frictions that agricultural and industrial life was fraught with in socialist times.

Even if the park had no direct impact and did not overlap, chronologically, with the demise of the economic and social life going on around the stone quarries, it is nevertheless compared, unfavorably, with bygone days when people in Greci were living “almost like in the city.” Today, the promise of development embedded in the national park looks fragile, unevenly distributed, and untrustworthy to many locals, even if they never worked in the stone quarries.

The feelings of loss engendered by Greci’s variant of post-socialist deindustrialization shape the ways “the environment” enters into the people’s lives. “The environment” is usually seen as coming from outside the region and bringing with it abstract promises and concrete dangers. “The guys with ‘the environment’”—denoting mostly rangers, Park administrators, and public officials—are seen as replacing, and usually destroying or degrading, the “good old times.” Moreover, they are destroying the old nature that was connected to agricultural and horticultural work, the stone quarries, and the urban-like life. There is also a persistent rumor that rangers are trying to (re)introduce vipers into the forests. In 2012, a local was bitten and barely survived.

The rangers did not introduce vipers into the Park—mainly because they loathe intervening in the re-creation of the pristine nature that is reemerging out of socialist history. The park “gardens” nature and helps restore it to its authentic self; as a result, the park’s viper population increases. The nature that the park claims to incorporate and “garden” is not the same as the one inhabited by the local communities. The MMNP sometimes seems unfamiliar and hazardous to locals, as dangerous and alien forms of life emerge from the still visible ruins of their former social life and infiltrate the poverty-stricken communities.

An alternative story locates the moment of peak development in the 1990s (after a decline in the 1980s), when new technologies for extracting stone from the quarries and new, huge trucks that doubled the quantity of stone transported from the mountains were both introduced. However, the main skilled workforce was smaller and no longer local, and the forty-tons trucks proved detrimental to the local fauna and infrastructure. This kind of story tends to decouple the stone quarries from the urban-like “good life” by connecting them to the ill-fated and confusing 1990s, a period of major political and economic transformation across Central and Eastern Europe. This story also connects “development” with tourism, nature protection, and the future; it is told by rangers and members of their families living in the village, some local intellectuals, businessmen, and administrators with vested interests in a future, tourist-led development of the area. ³⁷

Communal Pastures, the Park, and the Goats

The inbuilt institutional ambiguity in the structure and functioning of the MMNP (as in all Romanian NPs) is visible in the tenuous relationships between the park and Romsilva’s forest districts (ocoale silvice), which are units of administration and regulation that overlap with the NPs. The “rangers” are able and, at least until recently, willing to extract fines from their Romsilva counterparts, known as the pădurari. The term “ranger” is used in its English form and refers to NP employees; the Romanian term pădurar—meaning “forester” or “forest guard”—is used for the employees of the National Forestry Administration working in the forest districts (ocoale silvice). Two different kinds of administration are deployed in the same territory and shape different but superimposed “natures.”

The complex tensions that appear at the overlap points between different natures—that is, the MMNP’s and Romsilva’s—are never far from the surface. In the summer of 2014, in the village of Greci, one of the new signposts at the main entrance to the Park was defaced and overwritten, apparently by one of the local shepherds. Instead of the Park logo and the map representing the park, the sign now read: “Communal pasture no national park!” (Islaz comunal nu Parc național!). The meaning of and background to this semiotic revolt are not as straightforward as it may seem. The disputed place, now part of the area of the MMNP where grazing is restricted, has not been communal pasture for quite a long time. In the 1980s, during the last wave of socialist reforestation, the area was partially planted with trees and incorporated into a Romsilva forest district (ocol silvic). As part of that national forestry administrative unit, grazing was likewise forbidden in this area.

During the socialist period, the ways in which Romsilva’s foresters dealt with nature was by enrolling peasants from neighboring villages to help them with the quotas of wood, wild fruits, and hay they were required to deliver each month or year. Turning a blind eye to small-scale poaching, wood gathering, and grazing in forbidden areas usually created diffuse but enduring alliances between peasants and Romsilva’s local administrators. The modernist command system of a large state institution like Romsilva was based on a clear-cut set of rules and the ability to break those rules at the lower levels of the productive echelons. This mixture mirrored, in a way, the organization of the socialist economic system ³⁸ and enabled the incorporation of (wild) nature into the socialist economy.

During socialism the locals were able to negotiate, to some degree, the handling of the forest and, at the same time, were involved in the safeguarding process. In the post-socialist period, there is much less room for negotiation and cohabitation from the point of view of the MMNP. The locals do not sign up as voluntary rangers, and their entitlement to be in the landscape, on their own terms, is fragile.

The new nature engendered by the park cut loose the ambiguous connections between Romsilva’s foresters and the local community. Nature management is seen, not only by the park administration and the rangers but also by some local public administrators from Măcin and Greci, not so much in productive terms but as a combination of scientific and touristic consumption of nature. The new subjects in this environment are educated and constructed more as disciplined tourists or as disciplining local tourist guides, and much less in their capacity as subsistence farmers or peasants. The park rangers are opposed to the local, so-called picnic tourism, whose practitioners are condescendingly called picnicari. I witnessed situations when rangers attempted to transform these people into regular tourists by removing them from their usual and apparently anarchic and crowded picnicking activities, dividing them into smaller groups, and sending them off to travel on the specially designated and marked touristic and scientific trajectories inside the Park.

The goats were an almost invisible part of the socialist landscapes of wild nature, as they were constitutive fragments of the working spaces where illegal but legitimate grazing and small poaching aligned and connected the local peasants with Romsilva and its foresters. They were also less numerous and visible than the herds of cattle and sheep that dominated the landscape before the 1990s.

In the 1990s, as a result of the crumbling of the irrigation infrastructure, the lands reclaimed through drainage became significantly less productive. Even so, the area of pastureland did not increase because, despite drought and lack of labor and financial resources, most households from the Măcin area cultivated their land from year to year, knowing that the harvest would not be able to contribute more than a quarter of the entire household consumption. ³⁹ As the former socialist collective farms disappeared, agriculture crumbled and both cattle and sheep numbers went down, while the number of goatherds grew significantly and they became more and more autonomous from the herds of sheep. ⁴⁰ In 2008, the goats, even though still outnumbered by sheep, made up the largest herds, with a maximum of four hundred head, compared with fifty sheep or twenty-one cattle per household. ⁴¹

Nowadays, the goats are highly visible, with some herders raising seven to eight hundred animals each, though most herds are much smaller, around twenty to thirty head or even fewer. There are approximately ten thousand goats around the MMNP, which is more than double the pre-1989 numbers. Goats have different grazing habits from cattle or sheep, which makes them more dangerous to the forests. The changed composition of the livestock, due to the steep increase in the number of goats, exemplifies the tensions between safeguarding wild nature and making ends meet inside a landscape littered with socialist ruins.

The present-day goats are, in many ways, similar to their nineteenth-century forebears. They are “out of place,” and their presence casts doubt on the coherence or even existence of a well-ordered nature. Voracious herds of roaming goats have called managed nature into question at least since the nineteenth century. History has repeated itself with some variations, however. The socialist past sheds its oppressive substance and morphs into memories, ruins, and surviving social practices. Socialist times provide the background—material and symbolic—for critical commentaries on present-day delayed development, poverty, and political insignificance. Goats, by deploying their undisciplined ramblings at the interstice of old (socialist and modernist) nature and “the environment,” make this commentary much more visible than it would have been otherwise.

The Dobrudjan Historical Escalator

In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams introduces a historical “escalator,” which never seems to stop and which has enabled successive generations of writers to locate beauty and an organic and settled agricultural—peasant and manorial—way of life in a time that has only recently passed. ⁴² The escalator, which can travel back and forth in time, is, actually, a double one. The first escalator is used by the witnesses to the peasantry’s disappearance, and the second by Williams and his readers to track the recurrent historical (and literary) perspective on the disappearance of the organic rural community.

By embarking on a similar double historical escalator, we can witness a continuous process of ruination and modernization in Dobrudja at least since 1878. When do the old forests end and when and where do the new ones begin? Ruins, nature, and “development” (or nineteenth-century “progress”) are never too far apart. However, the ruins inside the MMNP are not the usual ones, whose significance rests on the contrast between constructive human work and the destructive effect of nature. They are closer to those inhabited urban ruins that arise mostly “off the main road.” They contradict the contrast on which the regular ruins thrive.

In such cases, Georg Simmel reminds us, what is striking “is not that human beings destroy the work of man . . . but that men let it decay.” Humans become the accomplices of nature, working against their human and cultural “own essential interests.” The uncanniness of inhabited ruins rests in the fact that they blur the distinctions between nature and culture. Ruins of the usual kind create nostalgia and fascination based on the victorious assault of nature on the cultural achievements of human effort. In the case of inhabited ruins, “the work of man appears to us entirely as a product of nature.” ⁴³ Humans dwelling in and around ruins are transformed into nature through this kind of objectifying gaze.

The Greci goat- and human-inhabited ruins are not so much fascinating—in a Simmelian way—but troubling and potentially critical of present-day assemblages of labor, wood, and stone. Their signification is continuously challenged and reshaped in local historical discourses about rural–urban differences, good old times, and “environment,” as decay and development become intimately connected and shape time.

The “mysterious oriental forests” emerged at the turn of the century as “wastelands” left by a secondhand, oriental empire inside a modernizing Romanian state that attempted to transform them into productive and progressive, commercially oriented lands. The remaining big forests became survivals, historical and natural monuments, and indicators of a formerly abundant, pre-Ottoman Dobrudja. In 1940, Vintilă Mihăilescu, a famous Romanian geographer of the interwar period, could state, proudly, that, since its integration into Romania, Dobrudja had been transformed from a “ruined” and depopulated territory into a well-developed and valuable one. ⁴⁴

After World War II, Dobrudja became a showcase of socialist modernization. The socialist state assigned substantial resources for agricultural mechanization, irrigation systems, and industrialization. The “ruins” of former bourgeois modernization were lamented, sometimes destroyed, and, tacitly, built upon. Inside the socialist modernization discourse, the contours of a poor and neglected old capitalist Dobrudja were drawn and counterpoised with a blooming socialist reality that pointed towards a utopian future.

A shelterbelt forest crisis occurred in the 1960s when the proud plantings of former, “bourgeois” modernization were discontinued and left to dwindle away, only to be resumed as important at the end of the decade. ⁴⁵ In mid-1980s, forests in the Măcin Mountains were again imagined as agents of modernization in a new but short-lived reforestation project. Even though agricultural output dramatically increased under socialism, the modernization of Dobrudja failed, and the province “returned to its traditional semi-peripheral economic and political position.” ⁴⁶ As a constructor of future ruins, but also of future forests, the socialist era was most productive.

During the 1990s, gradually, a new form of the nature–society divide arose, centered on the expanding protected natural areas. Post-socialist nature combined moral desolation, ruins created by disindustrialization, and out-migration with scientific discourses and vague hopes for a tourism-led economic and cultural reconstruction of social life.

Conclusions

The objects we meet—or stumble on while doing research—are already interpreted and part of discourses, practices, and institutions that overlap and compete with each other. Frequently, the attempt to circumscribe an object is not just a simple act of direct perception. There are always connections and overflows that cross the fragile and ambiguous border drawn around the object; the limits of the object are, frequently, just the limits of the research. The MMNP is an object that combines nature, history, ruins, and development. A mixture of agents have been involved in constructing the park, using developmental, historical, and ethnographical discourses that included maps, flyers, tourists and tourist routes, peasants, stone quarries, and herds of goats. ⁴⁷ Labor and flows of commodities, like wood, stone, textiles, and wine, have been ever-present forces that have shaped the Măcin landscape.

One of the ways in which a natural and social object-in-the-making can be apprehended is by identifying both the fragments that constitute the object, in this case the Măcin Mountains National Park, and the larger entities out of which these fragments are extracted. The MMNP emerges as a dynamic and heterogeneous entity made from fragile coalitions of institutions such as the European Union, “big development” institutions (UNDP, GEF), universities, the National Forestry Administration, economic actors (the Belarusian vineyards), and NGOs (tourist and conservationist associations). On a more ethnographic/material level, signs, maps, and roads, practices like mountain cycling, backpacking, and grazing, derelict buildings and still-active stone quarries, all draw the contours of a memory-preserving yet continually changing nature.

The MMNP is constituted by an array of threads entangled in a more or less persistent “knot.” The “knot,” especially if still in the making, as it emerged during my fieldwork, can be analytically disentangled and the Park projected onto larger spatial and temporal backgrounds. The threads run in every direction: from the city of Tulcea, where the park administration has its headquarters, to Bucharest, where Romsilva’s offices and the University of Bucharest are located, to Belarus, and to the diffuse space of the European Union and the global development institutions, the source of money, development discourses, and projects.

My field and archival work have revealed the persistence of a long-term concatenation of (failed) modernization projects that has created landscapes of ruins. I follow the broad sense of “ruin” advocated by Stoler to understand the ever-flowing dialectic of ruination and modernization—the ruinous development that connects national and local resistances, development projects, critical commentaries, and socio-technical networks. The MMNP inherited cumulative debris—starting with the still visible Ottoman past—is available for scrutiny, I argue, through an attentive analysis of the lived effects of the ruins of development scattered inside its borders and in its vicinity. By using ruins as entry points that make visible the threads that make up the Măcin area landscapes, the border between rhetorical tropes and material objects is easily blurred, but “the point of critical analysis is not to look ‘underneath’ or ‘beyond’ that slippage but to understand the work that slippage does and the political traffic it harbors.” ⁴⁸

Inside the park, old inequalities are redrawn and local natures are pitted one against the other, as in the “good old” socialist times and natures that have been, as far as some of the villagers around the MMNP are concerned, replaced with a foreign and even dangerous “environment.”

Rocks, trees, and goats are all part of a series of displaced beings inside shifting natures. The rocks are stubborn remnants; ruins left from the closed stone quarries but also disjecta membra of an organic “natural” whole. The trees are ambiguous participants in reforestation projects and actors in a regenerating forest. The goats straddle differently articulated ways of life and make ruinous developments visible. All these beings constitute a differentially ordered material terrain in which past and present are unequally lived in an antagonistically articulated coexistence of wild natures.