Description
This contribution draws upon a chapter of my PhD thesis on the everyday embodied engagements of youth with urban and natural landscapes in the city of Foca, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Situated in the lower Drina valley, at the edge of Sutjeska national park, Foca serves as a small urban centre for a mountainous, sparsely populated region. As with many of these smaller cities in post-socialist and post-war BiH, Foca's economy and population is dwindling. The town survives on the abundance of forests and adventure tourism, not only economically but understood through the lived experiences of Foca's citizens. In this paper, I attempt to understand the politics of these lived experiences in 'natural' Foca, through the engagements of local youth with these everyday landscapes of nature and natural riches. Inspired by political ecology, I understand power to produce environments into meaningful spaces: natural, beautiful, clean, spoiled, essential. In a methodology of participant observation and walking interviews among the rivers, parks, forests and beaches of Foca, this paper discusses the contestation of 'nature' in town. Essentially, I show the mundane-yet-intense relationship of my interlocutors and the green landscapes, which for them on the one hand predate current 'rotten' politics, and on the other whose precarious existence depends on it. These local attachments relate to the politics of the 'natural' that are simultaneously local, national and global: the erased remnants of recent war violence in physical environments, ecological degradation as a result of illicit hydropower dams, and the contested balance between tourism as a way of living and exploitation of natural resources.
