Miriam Köhler
Abstract/Description
The return of large predators to Alpine regions has intensified debates about coexistence, responsibility, and the meaning of wilderness in densely inhabited mountain landscapes. In the context of contemporary rewilding initiatives, coexistence is increasingly framed as a relational and participatory process shaped by governance arrangements, local knowledge, and everyday practices. At the same time, tensions persist between policy aspirations, management categories, and the lived realities of humans and nonhuman animals sharing space.
This paper presents a work in progress from an ongoing PhD project on human–bear coexistence in the Italian Alps, focusing on the Autonomous Province of Trentino. Following the reintroduction of brown bears through the LIFE Ursus translocation project in the late 1990s, Trentino has become a particularly instructive site for examining the long-term dynamics of rewilding and multispecies coexistence with large carnivores. Drawing on more-than-human geography and multispecies approaches within the Environmental Humanities, the paper conceptualises coexistence as a dynamic, seasonal, and spatially situated process co-produced by humans, bears, institutions, infrastructures, and cultural narratives.
The paper draws on early-stage empirical work and reflects on the conceptual and methodological challenges of studying multispecies coexistence in a highly politicised rewilding context, prior to extended ethnographic fieldwork. Focusing on the figure of the “problem bear” as an analytical entry point, it examines how individual animals become classified and governed through institutional practices, legal categories, and public narratives, and how these processes shape possibilities for coexistence, care, control, and exclusion. Particular attention is paid to emerging bear biographies as sites where nonhuman agency becomes both visible and constrained within rewilding practices.
By foregrounding multispecies relations and biographical perspectives, the paper contributes to Environmental Humanities debates on alpine rewilding by highlighting the limits of abstract coexistence models and the importance of situated, more-than-human approaches to understanding conflict and transformation in mountain regions.