Article ID: CBB149485120

War on Extinction: Wildlife as Statecraft in Interwar Poland (2024)

unapi

Situated efforts to combat species extinction mobilize a network of institutional and logistical interventions, as well as politicized ideas about indigeneity and belonging. This article maps out the knowledge exchange and circulation of animal bodies between the Zoological Garden in Poznań and the forest reserve in Białowieża during the interwar period in Poland as part of the state-building project. A focus on the reintroduction of the wisent (Bison bonasus) and the back-breeding of the tarpan wild horse (Equus ferus ferus) exposes the biopolitical logistics of infrastructuring wildlife in the age of nationalism. Through these two breeding projects, animal bodies emerge at the interface between zoological and war logistics, demonstrating how biological life becomes the target of military intervention via species conservation. Looking closely at the efforts to restore the populations of extinct and extant representatives of local megafauna, this article highlights the renewed interest in native species as an accessible resource for recrafting institutional and national identities. By analyzing the logistical strategies of a marginal zoological collection in relation to a nature reserve in the last primeval forest of Europe, it traces how these strategies impacted both local and global scientific research and its popularization. Not only does such a shared institutional history reveal the itineraries of knowledge production but also the ways in which war has shaped nature management.

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Associated with

Article Tahani Nadim; Mareike Vennen; Ina Heumann; Filippo Bertoni (2024) Logistical Natures: Trade, Traffics, and Transformations in Natural History Collecting. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (pp. 125-134). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB149485120/

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Authors & Contributors
Alagona, Peter S.
Broglio, Ron
Kabzińska, Krystyna
Pearson, Chris
Rhode, Maria
Shukin, Nicole
Journals
Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Environment and History
Environmental History
Physics in Perspective
Psychoanalysis and History
Social History of Medicine
Publishers
University of Minnesota Press
Boydell & Brewer
Brepols
Columbia University Press
Einaudi
Johns Hopkins University Press
Concepts
Human-animal relationships
Biopolitics
Science and war; science and the military
Animals
Wildlife management
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
People
Chirac, Jacques
Foucault, Michel
Malthus, Thomas Robert
Rotblat, Joseph
Smith, Adam
Time Periods
20th century, early
20th century
19th century
21st century
Medieval
Places
Poland
Austro-hungary
Germany
United States
Alps (Europe)
Great Britain
Institutions
United States. Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos
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