How to inherit a mountain: equivalences of life in the Balkans’ environmental struggles
This study deals with the multiplicity of ways that vital processes have been articulated in Southeast Europe‘s transition to green energy, among hydropower investors, grassroots environmental activists, and sheep herders on the Balkan Mountains’ pastures. I focus on different forms of equivalence that get articulated in the interstices of green capitalism, ecopopulism, and animal husbandry at the border of Serbia and Bulgaria, which has become a prime point for conflicting approaches to “preserve life” in local ecologies facing simultaneous depopulation and extinction. Informed both by an approach on “shared signifiers” of ecopopulist causes, and more than human relations that undergird them, this project combines economic anthropology, multispecies studies and an emerging “anthropology of life” to understand how vital processes get mutually commensurable.