Without beer advertisement!
Eunice BLAVASCUNAS (anthropologist, USA), Website "Lesza dla Puszczy", November 15, 2005
*(The article is about the Polish part of the Bialowieza Forest, note by the website editor)
A national park is a national patrimony-that means that it belongs to all citizens of Poland and exists as a different kind of property relation than a national forest, private property or land held in common by the Gminas. To name something as a patrimony means that it is a direct inheritance from historical rulers, in this case Polish/Lithuanian Kings and Russian Czars. It stands outside of normal property relations and outside of market oriented notions of value and commodification. Thus, placing a beer advertisement in the middle of the forest at the Gluszec (Capercaille) Nature Reserve in the Bialowieza National Park is the start of an alarming trend towards turning national treasures into objects that can be sold at the discretion of the Park Director.
The finer points of the symbolic and material implications of putting a beer ad deep in the forest seem to be lost to an argument that Polish national parks need money and selling ad space within a national park is one way of earning cash. The Bialowieza National park permitted the ad in conjunction with an adventure train ride being constructed between Gluszec and Stara Bialowieza. Presumably money earned from selling this ad space will directly fund the development of this train ride. The question is not whether a beer ad in the forest can advance nature conservation, but rather how advertisements within national parks, especially within the natural area of a national park (as opposed to advertisements on restaurant tables or on brochures in the national park), change our attitudes towards nature in the parks and further enable other commercial activities that run contrary to the entire purpose of a national park.
By definition a national park can mean many things and serve multiple public functions. National Parks provide a space for society to retreat from a world of artifice and cultural manipulation. They are places to recreate, for scientists to conduct research, and for educating the public about natural and cultural history. However, national parks differ from landscape parks and city parks in one fundamental way: they protect rare nature, usually in its wild, and not manicured, form.
The fact that Capercaille have gone extinct in the Bialowieza Forest and that a beer ad supports an adventure train ride within hearing distance of the strict reserve, means that we have not paid enough attention to the needs of threatened species. Some may argue that Capercaille is already extinct and that a so-called “educational train ride” will further attention to rare nature. But if you chart the decline of any species, the lesson is almost always the same - the animal or plant in question was extirpated due to habitat loss. A train and the accompanying people who will surely form large groups that gather at Gluszec and Stara Bialowieza are serious noise and physical incursions into the habitat of all animals that live in the Bialowieza Forest.
The symbolic has material consequence. And advertisements are meant to be coercive. They convince us of the need for products that we would otherwise not use. Advertisers study psychology to better target our fears and desires in the selling of their products. A beer ad that features bison is meant to lock our associations between Zubr beer and the endangered animals that wander the Bialowieza Forest. We are meant to associate all of the qualities society has attributed to European bison (nobility, freedom, survival), with their beer. Consider the consequences - visitors to the national park are served zubr beer at either Stara Bialowieza or Gluszec. The infrastructure, built with monies from Zubr beer company, enable parties in the forest (which are almost never quiet, solemn events) and they continue doing so, only in larger numbers and in more places, which has absolutely no connection with the actual bison that roam the forest, except to scare them away from the places where groups of people gather. (I need not point out that bison do not drink beer and did not “pose” for their beer ad.)
Placing a “zubr” brand beer ad in the national park has disadvantages for people as well. With the train and more frequent beer-based parties at the two mentioned sites people lose the opportunity to quietly observe the kind of nature that is here. Sitting patiently in one place alone or with a few people for a long period of time is the best way to see wildlife. A party and adventure atmosphere limits the chances for people to experience the unique wild character of this forest that so many Polish citizens and visiting foreigners come to see.
To return to my original point about property relations. In the midst of a moment where everything is for sale, a national park is the safe haven, much like a church, where we momentarily remove ourselves and contemplate something that is much bigger and deeper than any of us combined. We cannot let the value of that which is within the boundaries of the national park be determined by capital interests whose first goal is to sell a product. And when this product is beer and partying within the national park, we compromise ourselves and the non-human nature that depends upon this property designation-national park.
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Comment to the article
Eunice Blavascunas is an anthropologist from the Santa Cruz University in California. Within ten years she is engaged in public relations connected with perception of wild nature in a region of the northeast Poland. She is an author of a section in the book "Man and Wood" (www.ekopress.pl). She has brought this text because she could not keep herself to comment what she has seen in Pushcha. She has asked to enable introducing others to this text. At the same time she has paid attention that Poles and the inhabitants of this region should be the first to express their opinion. She is a foreigner for all that. But what is to us who live here? Is it all the same?
Janusz Korbel
The Association for Landscape Protection from Hajnowka (Poland)
(The comment to the article is put on the website "Hajnówka - Niezalezny Portal Internetowy")