1. Muth, Robert M. and Bowe, John F. Jr., “Illegal Harvest of Renewable Natural Resources in North America: Toward a Typology of the Motivations for Poaching,” Society and Natural Resources 11, no. 1 (January/February 1998): 9–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pendleton, Michael R., “Taking the Forest: The Shared Meaning of Tree Theft,” Society and Natural Resources 11, no. 1 (January/February 1998): 39–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. See Caedmon Staddon, “Localities, Natural Resources and Transition in Eastern Europe,” Geographical Journal 165, no. 2 (July 1999): 200-208 for a more general treatment of noncommodity forest extractive processes, and Caedmon Staddon, “Towards a Critical Political Ecology of Human-Forest Interactions: Collecting Herbs and Mushrooms in a Bulgarian Locality,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (in press) for a more specific one on mushroom collecting.

3. Forsyth, Tim, Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

4. Braun, Bruce and Castree, Noel, eds., Remaking Reality-.Nature at the Millennium (London, 1998)Google Scholar; Darier, Éric, ed., Discourses of the Environment (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Rival, Laura, ed., The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar; Thrift, Nigel, “From Born to Made: Technology, Biology and Space,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 4 (December 2005): 463-76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nigel Thrift, “Performance and…,” Environment and Planning A 35, no. 11 (2003): 2019-24; and Demeritt, David, “Science, Social Constructivism and Nature,” in Braun and Castree, eds., Remaking Reality, 172-92Google Scholar.

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6. Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Porter, Catherine (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).Google Scholar Political ecology as a subfield was established in the 1980s with the publication of key texts such as Blaikie, Piers and Brookfield, Harold, Land Degradation and Society (London, 1987)Google Scholar. As formulated there and elsewhere, the key analytical idea was to marry the abstractions of Marxist political economy with an almost anthropological attention to the real decisions and lifeworlds of land managers.

7. Hinchliffe, Steve, Kearnes, Matthew B., Degen, Monica, and Whatmore, Sarah, “Ecologies and Economies of Action: Sustainability, Calculations and Other Things,” Environment and Planning Ail, no. 2 (February 2005): 260-82Google Scholar; Thrift, “From Born to Made”; John Wylie, “A Single Day's Walking: Narrating Self and Landscape on the South West Coast Path,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 2 (June 2005): 234-47; and Thrift, “Performance and …”

8. Staddon, “Towards a Critical Political Ecology”; Staddon, Caedmon, “Foreign Direct Investment in the Bulgarian Wood Products Sector: Working with the Grain?” in Turnock, David, ed., Foreign Direct Investment and Regional Development in East Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union: A Collection of Essays in Memory of Professor Francis “Frank” Carter (Burlington, Vt, 2005), 225-42Google Scholar; Staddon, Caedmon, “Restructuring the Bulgarian Wood Processing Sector: Linkages between Resource Exploitation, Capital Accumulation, and Redevelopment in a Postcommunist Locality,” Environment and Planning A 33, no. 4 (April 2001): 607-28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Staddon, Caedmon, “Restitution of Forest Property in Post-Communist Bulgaria,” Natural Resources Forum 22, no. 3 (2000): 237-46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Staddon, “Localities, Natural Resources and Transition in Eastern Europe”; and Caedmon Staddon, “Democratisation and the Politics of Water in Bulgaria: Local Protest and the 1994-5 Sofia Water Crisis,” in John Pickles and Adrian Smith, eds., Theorising Transition: The Political Economy of Post- Communist Transformations (London, 1998), 347-72.

9. From the outset, I would like to make clear that I am using the terms subject and subjectiviity in the technical, grammatical, sense to mean only the entity giving rise to some sort of action. No claims about “consciousness” are being made here.

10. Latour, Politics of Nature, 20; see also 238.

11. Carter, F. W. and Turnock, David, eds., Environmental Problems of East-Central Europe, 2d ed. (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Feshbech, Murray and Friendly, Alfred Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Roger Manser, The Squandered Dividend: The Free Market and the Environment in Eastern Europe (London, 1993); and Peterson, D.J., Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction (Boulder, Colo., 1993)Google Scholar.

12. Burawoy, Michael and Verdery, Katherine, eds., Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (London, 1999)Google Scholar; Pavlinek, Petr and Pickles, John, Environmental Transitions: Transformation and Ecological Defence in Central and Eastern Europe (London, 2000)Google Scholar; David Turnock and Chad Staddon, eds., “Think Global Act Local? Negotiating Sustainable Development under Postcommunist Transformation,” Geojournalbb, no. 2 -4 (December 2001): 477-84.

13. For examples of “postcommunist environmental catastrophism,” see Feshbech and Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR; Manser, The Squandered Dividend; and Peterson, Troubled Lands. For the “changing environmental cultures” approach, see Mirovitskaya, Natalia, “The Environmental Movement in the Former Soviet Union,” in Tickle, Andrew and Welsh, Ian, eds., Environment and Society in Eastern Europe (Harlow, Eng., 1998), 30–66 Google Scholar and Oldfield, Jonathan D., Russian Nature: Exploring the Environmental Consequences of Societal Change (Burlington, Vt., 2006)Google Scholar. And for the discourses approach, see Darier, ed., Discourses of the Environment.

14. Altvater, Elmar, The Future of the Market: An Essay on the Regulation of Money and Nature after the Collapse of “Actually Existing Socialism,” trans. Camiller, Patrick (London, 1993)Google Scholar.

15. Hayter, Roger, Barnes, Trevor J., and Bradshaw, Michael J., “Relocating Resource Peripheries to the Core of Economic Geography's Theorizing: Rationale and Agenda,” Area 35, no. 1 (March 2003): 15–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pickles and Smith, eds., Theorising Transition; Staddon, “Localities, Natural Resources and Transition in Eastern Europe”; Staddon, Caedmon and Cellarius, Barbara, “Paradoxes of Conservation and Development in Postsocialist Bulgaria: Recent Controversies,” European Environment: The Journal of European Environmental Policy 12, no. 2 (March-April 2003): 105-16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Barnes, Hayter, and Bradshaw, , “Relocating Resource Peripheries“; James O'Connor, “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, no. 1 (November 1988): 11–39 Google Scholar; and O'Riordan, Timothy, “The Challenge for Environmentalism,” in Peet, Richard and Thrift, Nigel, eds., New Models in Geography: The Political Economy Perspective (London, 1989), 82–110 Google Scholar. In the 1970s, French Marxists shifted focus away from the general structure of capitalism toward the ways in which “modes of production” “articulate” with “modes of social regulation.” The place of the natural environment in this literature is contested, but nonetheless it is now commonplace in economic geography to focus on the ways in which macroeconomic formations (e.g., the banking system) “articulate” with specific factions of labor or the natural environment.

17. Barbara A. Cellarius, In the Land of Orpheus: Rural Livelihoods and Nature Conservation in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Madison, 2004); and Sanders, Irwin Taylor, Balkan Village (Lexington, 1949)Google Scholar.

18. Some authorities believe that upwards of 50 percent of timber cut around the world may be cut illegally, so the task of properly understanding it is of utmost importance See Tacconi, Luca, ed., Illegal Logging: Law Enforcement, Livelihoods and the Timber Trade (London, 2007)Google Scholar.

19. Staddon, “Towards a Critical Political Ecology”; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (1984; reprint, New York, 1989); and Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979)Google Scholar.

20. Woolgar, Steve, “Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials,” in Law, John, ed., A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination (London, 1991), 57–102, esp. 63Google Scholar.

21. Latour, Bruno, Pandora's Hope: Essays in the Sociology of Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar; Latour, Politics of Nature; and Michael Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” in John Law, ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1986), 203; my emphasis.

22. This realization is not new, having been near the heart of the “hermeneutic” turn in social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s—see Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; and Derek Gregory, Ideology, Science and Human Geography (London, 1978)—for just three among the many expositions on this theme in philosophy, history, and geography, respectively.

23. Muth and Bowe, “Illegal Harvest of Renewable Natural Resources in North America”; Pendleton, “Taking the Forest”; and G. Ogletree, ”Preventing and Prosecuting Timber Trespass,” Forest Landowner 63, no. 1 (2004): 30-32.

24. Pendleton, “Taking the Forest.”

25. Indeed this was the position taken by anti-logging protestors in western Canada in the early 1990s. 26. Star, Susan Leigh, “Power, Technologies and the Phenomenology of Conventions,” in Law, , ed., A Sociology of Monsters, 26–56 Google Scholar.

27. Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998)Google Scholar.

28. Jonathan Murdoch, “Inhuman/Nonhuman/Human: Actor-Network Theory and the Prospects for a Nondualistic and Symmetrical Perspective on Nature and Society,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15, no. 6 (1997): 731-56.

29. Parenthetically one can note that there are certainly other ways to achieve this critique of ontology, including a more Foucauldian emphasis on biopower and govemmentality (see Agrawal, Arun, Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects [Durham, 2005]Google Scholar; and Darier, ed., Discourses of the Environment) and/or a Heideggerian emphasis on processes of becoming (see Theodore Schatzki, R., Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space [Stuttgart, 2007]Google Scholar).

30. Thrift, “From Born to Made,” 464.

31. Cited in Murdoch, “Inhuman/Nonhuman/Human,” 740.

32. Foucault, Michel, “Governmentality,” in Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991), 87–104 Google Scholar; Latour, Politics of Nature; Warren, Mark E., “The Self in Discursive Democracy,” in White, Stephen K., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

33. Huntington, Samuel P., The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, 1991)Google Scholar.

34. Food and Agriculture Organization, “ForesSTAT Database” (2006), at faostat.fao .org/site/630/default.aspx (last consulted 30 November 2008); Natsionalen Statisticheski Institut, Statisticheski godishnik (Sofia, 1998), 219.

35. Georgiev, J., Gorite na Pirini-planina (Sofia, 1939)Google Scholar; Naidenova, K. et al., Prirofniiat i ikonomicheskiiat potentsial na planinite v Bulgaria, vol. 2 (Sofia, 1990)Google Scholar; Marin Roussev, “Ekologo-ikonomichesko razvitiie v razlozhkata Kotlivna” (unpublished paper, 1999); V. Stoyanov, Istoria na Garskoto Stopanstvo na Bulgaria (Sofia, 1968). In modern forestry, the term afforested generally refers to lands that were not previously covered with forest but were planted as part of forest management plans.

36. Kandler, Cf. Otto, “Declines and Present Conditions of Central European Forests,” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 11 (1992): 1077-93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. Also see Staddon, “Restructuring the Bulgarian Wood Processing Sector.”

38. Ibid.

39. Equivalent to one-half cubic meter of firewood for every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom!

40. Hristov, T., Vuchvarov, M., and Loboutov, G., “Ekonomicheski-geografski harakteristiki na Kyustendil okrug c perspektiv na razvitie na mikro-raional struktur,” Yearbook of the Sofia University Geological-Geographical Faculty, 64 (1972)Google Scholar.

41. Blagoevgrad Regional Statistics Office, “Statistics on Industrial Structure in the Razlog and Bansko Municipalities” (Blagoevgrad, 2000); Slaviekov, P. and Zlatonova, D., Geography of Bulgaria, pt. 2 (Sofia, 1999)Google Scholar.

42. Roussev, “Ekologo-ikonomichesko razvitiie v razlozhkata Kotlivna”; Staddon, “Restructuring the Bulgarian Wood Processing Sector.”

43. Blagoevgrad Regional Statistics Office, Danii na mestna ikonomichscki struktur (Blagoevgrad, 2006); Blagoevgrad Regional Statistics Office, “Statistics on Industrial Structure in the Razlog and Bansko Municipalities”; Staddon, “Localities, Natural Resources and Transition in Eastern Europe”; and Staddon, “Towards a Critical Political Ecology.”

44. Razlog Employment Office, “Statisticheski perspektivi na trud v Razlog” (unpublished internal report, Razlog, 2005).

45. Cellarius, In the Land of Orpheus; Cellarius, Barbara A., “Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Local-Level Resource Use and Forest Restitution in Postsocialist Bulgaria,” Geojournal55, nos. 2-4 (December 2001): 599–606 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Staddon, “Towards a Critical Political Ecology.“

46. See also Staddon, “Localities, Natural Resources and Transition in Eastern Europe”; Staddon, “Restructuring the Bulgarian Wood Processing Sector”; and Staddon, “Towards a Critical Political Ecology.”

47. Cellarius, “Seeing the Forest for the Trees”; and Staddon, “Restitution of Forest Property in Post-Communist Bulgaria.”

48. Cellarius, In the Land of Orpheus; and Mieke Meurs and Robert Begg, “Path Dependence in Bulgarian Agriculture,” in Pickles and Smith, eds., Theorising Transition, 243-61.

49. The plans and the planning process became, in Latour's terms, the “obligatory passage point” in the negotiation of the relations between the community of humans and nonhumans.

50. Staddon, “Restitution of Forest Property in Post-Communist Bulgaria.” This contrasts sharply with the much enlarged conception of private ownership and control inherent in Polish forestry restructuring legislation enacted in 1991 and 1992. See S. Wypych, “A Few Aspects of Private Forest Management in die Area of the Regional Directorate of the State Forests (RDSF) Katowice,” in Helmut Brandl and T. Olischläger, ed., Private Forstwirtschaft: Chancen und Herausforderungen für die mittel- und osteuropäischen Lander (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1995), 269-82. However, as Wypych himself notes, in the Polish case this maximalism resulted in a situation by 1994-1995 where private woodlots were measurably inferior to their state-owned counterparts. Others have suggested that this tenure structure may have contributed to the severity of the 1997 floods in southwestern Poland. Consequently the Polish statutes have, since 1995, been thoroughly revised to more carefully restrict and circumscribe the legal meaning of private ownership.

51. The common property resources literature is enormous and cannot be discussed adequately here. Suffice it to say here that I am using the term common property in a general sense and not in the technical/institutional sense developed by Elinor Ostrom and others. For a specific application of common property resources models to forestry, see Lars Carlsson, “Management, Resilience and the Strategy of the Commons” (paper presented at the Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Association of the Study of Common Property, Bloomington, Indiana, 31 May-3June 2000).

52. Pendleton, “Taking the Forest”; and Muth and Bowe, “Illegal Harvest of Renewable Natural Resources in North America.”

53. Bouriaud, Laura, “Causes of Illegal Logging in Central and Eastern Europe,” Small-Scale Forestry 4, no. 3 (September 2005): 269-91Google Scholar; Georgi Rostov, Ivan Paligorov, Svetoslav Petrov, and Zhivko Bogdanov, “Illegal Logging in Bulgaria” (report prepared for World Wildlife Fund, 2005); Sophie Morris, “The Good Wood Guide: Eco-Friendly Options for Furnishing Your Home,” The Independent, 14 June 2007; and Staddon, “Restructuring the Bulgarian Wood Processing Sector.“

54. The temptation to cut extra trees is in part driven by prices of up to several hundred pounds per high quality log.

55. Bouriaud, “Causes of Illegal Logging.“

56. Kostov, Paligorov, Petrov, and Bogdanov, “Illegal Logging in Bulgaria.“

57. Staddon, Interview no. 18, Dobrinishte, July 2001.

58. Scott, Seeing Like a State.

59. Eikelund, Sveinung, Eythorsson, Einar, and Ivanova, Lyudmila, “From Management to Mediation: Local Forestry Management and the Forestry Crisis in Post-Socialist Russia,” Environmental Management 33, no. 3 (March 2004): 285-93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kostov, Paligorov, Petrov, and Bogdanov, “Illegal Logging in Bulgaria.”

60. Staddon, “Restructuring the Bulgarian Wood Processing Sector.”

61. Staddon, “Localities, Natural Resources and Transition in Eastern Europe”; Staddon, “Restitution of Forest Property in Post-Communist Bulgaria.”

62. Fonseca, Isabel, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; and Bouriaud, “Causes of Illegal Logging.”

63. It may be that some, particularly foresters or other state officials, prefer to ignore them since they are not prepared to “do anything” about these encampments. For others it is more apparent that local Roma are rendered “invisible” by the deep-rooted cultural prejudice against them. Also see Fonseca, Bury Me Standing; Staddon, “Restructuring the Bulgarian Wood Processing Sector.”

64. Cf. Fonseca, Burying Me Standing.

65. Muth and Bowe, “Illegal Harvest of Renewable Natural Resources in North America”; Pendleton, “Taking the Forest.”

66. Other legislation, which there is not space here to discuss, has also contributed, including conservation and heritage preservation legislation.

67. E.g., Myrvang, Katrina, “Understanding the Materialities and Moralities of Property: Reworking Collective Claims to Land,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32, no. 4 (October 2007): 507-22Google Scholar; Carlsson, , “Management, Resilience and the Strategy of the Commons“; and Verdery, Katherine, What Was Socialism, and What Gomes Next? (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar.

68. Most countries now maintain so-called Red Books, which are registers of endangered or threatened flora and fauna.

69. Lorimer, Jamie, “Nonhuman Charisma,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 5 (2007): 911-32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70. Bulgaria is adopting the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standard as a matter of central policy, although to date only one forest district has been certified.

71. Tom Burditt, “Field Working: Exploring Knowledge Networks in the Practice of Nature Conservation” (PhD diss., University of the West of England, Bristol, 2008); and Staddon and Cellarius, “Paradoxes of Conservation and Development in Postsocialist Bulgaria.”

72. Cf. Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation.”

73. Cf. Staddon and Cellarius, “Paradoxes of Conservation and Development in Postsocialist Bulgaria.”

74. Woolgar, “Configuring the User.” See also Demeritt, “Science, Social Constructivism and Nature.”

75. Cf. Scott, Seeing Like a State.

76. In Latour's terms: Latour, Pandora's Hope.

77. Latour, Pandora's Hope.

78. Murdoch, “Inhuman/Nonhuman/Human.“

79. Leff, Enrique, “Marxism and the Environmental Question,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 4, no. 1 (1993): 60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80. Latour, Politics of Nature, 87-90.

81. Forsyth, Tim, “Political Ecology and the Epistemology of Social Justice,” Geoforum 39, no. 2 (March 2008): 756-64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.