CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Thalhammer, Martin |
|---|---|
| Title | Among Bark Beetles, Humans and Spruce Trees. A Multi-Species Political Ecology of Bark Beetle Outbreaks in Upper Austrian Forests |
| Summary | There is turmoil in and around Austria’s forests. On the one hand, the escalating climate crisis; on the other, increasing biotic disturbances such as insect pests. In the midst of these upheavals: A European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus). An insect with the power to make humans despair, spruce trees die, and forest landscapes change; a creature responsible for 4 million cubic meters of damaged wood in 2023 in Austria, one fifth of the annual timber harvest; a natural disturbance agent that has challenged human forest management to an unprecedented extent, that has shaken the Austrian forest sector with its fixation on Norway spruce (Picea abies). That epidemic bark beetle outbreaks occur is nothing new, and forest ecology has come a long way in identifying the drivers and conditions of such outbreaks. However, a closer look at the dominant approaches to bark beetle research and management also reveals a dangerous anthropocentrism (of problematizing bark beetles only when they threaten managed forests), and a depoliticizing reductionism (of explaining outbreaks by the actions of a single creature). As a result, bark beetle outbreaks are seen as inevitable natural disturbances, ahistorical disasters, and apolitical management problems. In contrast to such perspectives, this dissertation applies a more-than-human political-ecological perspective to approach bark beetle outbreaks as cosmopolitical Muli-Species gatherings, arguing that it is a historically contingent constellation of actors, relationships, practices, histories, and ecologies that makes bark beetles proliferate, spruce trees susceptible, and humans economically vulnerable. Rejecting an apolitical perspective, I will show that bark beetle outbreaks are political; political not only in the sense that outbreaks have political consequences and implications (for humans), but also that they lead to and/or exacerbate (world-making) conflicts between different beings, that they disrupt how species assemble in and through forests. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research on bark beetle outbreaks in the federal province of Upper Austria, and bringing together approaches from Multi-Species studies, political ecology and forest ecology, the dissertation explores the question of how spruce trees, humans, bark beetles and other beings assemble through bark beetle outbreaks and how these outbreaks trigger and/or exacerbate conflicts across, between and among these assemblages in and beyond Upper Austrian forests. As I will show, Multi-Species conflicts related to bark beetle outbreaks are rooted in and feed into a complex politics of world-making, belonging, (bio)security, responsibility, and conservation. Be it in the Sauwald where bark beetles spark a blame game and disrupt the region’s moral economy, in the Kalkalpen National Park, where conservation divides proponents and opponents of bark beetles, or in the Upper Austrian Bohemian Forest, where bark beetle outbreaks re-securitize a charged post-borderland borderscape – in all of these places, bark beetle outbreaks function as a proxy, pretext and driver of struggles over the question of whose forest-making interests, strategies, coalitions, practices, and projects prevail, repoliticizing the question of what to do with forests; whether to use them for provisional purposes, or to place them under strict(er) protection. |
| Supervisor | Aistara, Guntra A.; Steger, Tamara S.; Netherer, Sigrid |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/thalhammer_martin.pdf |
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