Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The paper focuses on contemporary environmental changes and conservation practices in the Logarska dolina (Logar Valley) landscape park, an Alpine-glacial valley in Slovenia. I visited the area as part of two ethnology camps (in 2020 and 2021) organised by the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. The fieldwork was carried out mainly through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with the inhabitants. The valley was formally protected at the initiative of the local population, who actively shape the area’s heritage through everyday practices and different land uses, with the main contribution of conservation institutions being on a discursive level. Protective legislation can therefore direct human practices in such a way that the intended image of the landscape is preserved. However, in parallel with human activities, many natural factors (some of which are human-induced) also affect the landscape. For conservation institutions, these are often unpredictable and uncontrollable. As examples, I review three recent events that had an impact on the landscape park (as well as a larger area) and on how the inhabitants carried their economic activities: the windstorm in 2017; the excessive rainfall in 2020; and the drought in 2022. I then examine how Slovenian conservation institutions are handling the consequences from such occurrences and whether they are even able to do so in a way that maintains the landscape’s supposed features.