Goricko, a Slovenian region bordering Hungary, is an area of coexisting but contested environmental interests and practices. With a long history of subsistence agriculture, it has been a hunting reserve since the 1960s and a park since the 2000s. The border played a significant role in its environmental history too. Between 1947 and 1989, this was a heavily guarded border, which unintentionally functioned as a biosecurity barrier, isolating wildlife across the border from Goricko fields and providing a sense of biosafety among local farmers. With dismantling of “hard border” and the rise of hunting economy and conservation, however, farmers began to feel encroached by wildlife and wildlife-associated human actors. Besides politically agitating for the protection of their existence, they developed their own practice of fencing.
Local fencing represents many issues. In a historical biosecurity perspective, it is a substitute for the bioisolation from the “hard border”, aimed to reestablish the spatial separation of biomatters. In a social perspective, however, animals are not just animals, but care and concern of certain people, primarily hunters. Moreover, the park prefers a fenceless landscape; yet it has not been active in resolving the troubles with animals, which force people to fence. Besides, family farms are declining significantly, not least because of excessive number of animals disturbing the local ecology; they are now being replaced by large farms; the latter do not fence because their aim, as local farmers see it, is not the production of crops but agricultural subsidies. Behind these troubling relations looms a problematic state.
In such a political ecology, fencing goes beyond biosecurity purpose. It is an emblem of small subsistence farmers struggling to survive. Fencing communicates these farmers’ troubles in an ecology imbued with conflicting interests. Fencing conveys a message of resistance from a declining class.
