Caring for Shadow Places - the East Gippsland Forest Wars and the Work of Recuperation

The forests of East Gippsland in Victoria, Australia, have been site of deep struggle and contestation over how to live in and with these environments for decades. Industrial-scale logging started out there in the 1970s, when local´s discovered clearfelled coupes hidden away in remote mountain forests. Outraged about the techno-colonial violence that turned Victoria´s old growth forests, valued for their ecological integrity as well as their cultural, spiritual and aesthetic qualities, into what Val Plamwood calls ´shadow places´ for wood chips and paper pulp, a resistance movement emerged. Over three decades, activists have sought justice for the forests and their – human and nonhuman – inhabitants by means of 1) embodied protest, 2) transformative knowledge, and 3) legal action. Their struggle reflects a deeper conflict in settler society´s relationship with the Australian environment, which is at once considered a resource to exploit and a dangerous presence to fight. The “forest wars”, as ecologist David Lindenmayer calls the struggle, are fuelled by increasing, large-scale wildfires as the colonial history of extractive land use converge with the climate changed future. Drawing on the notion of care as a fundamental ethico-political task to live well in multispecies worlds, I conceptualise the forest wars as a conflict of care. After the official end to native forest logging in 2024, the struggle over how to manage Victoria´s native forests continues. Focussing on the temporal dimension of landscape loss and change, the movement now seeks to recuperate the shadow places of native forest logging, that is to restore the generativity of their ecologies.