By Jen Holzer, Technion Socio-Ecological Research Group
After three days in and around Tulcea, we journeyed by car to the City of Braila, a city of about 200,000, famous as a node for the textile, shipbuilding, and shipping trades, and a surprisingly underdeveloped tourism industry. When our hosts told us this was not a travel destination, we were incredulous and inquired with the hotel reception. But the hotel proprietor confirmed that most hotel patrons are businessmen, mostly people from the Netherlands and England involved in the textile and shipping trades; they advised us to vacation in Brașov, the mountainous, “most beautiful part of Romania”
After a tour of the University of Bucharest’s beautifully refurbished laboratory facilities in the city, we toured the Faculty’s pontoon on the Danube, complete with laboratories and sleeping quarters, and sat with local environmental managers and scientists for interviews and discussions.
The next day, we drove to Stăncuţa to meet with the mayor of this communa, a collection of local villages bordering the protected Small Island of Braila, a LTSER platform. Interviewing the mayor and his colleagues at the Town Hall was illuminating for understanding the interplay of stakeholder interests – from EU funding requirements and opportunities to the situation of the veterinary technician who moved back to the hometown of his grandparents but was struggling to make ends meet, to wide local opposition to limits on grazing in the protected area on the Small Island of Braila.
We were generously hosted for a fantastic lunch by the Mayor at a new research facility on the shores of the Danube, and set out on a short boat tour of Braila Island.
Coming from Israel, I am no stranger to a dynamic and fraught history of political conflict and transition, nor to a reality of contested natural resources. While the purpose of our trip was to understand the progress and barriers made by socio-ecological research in Romania, I was hardly expecting the depth of cultural exchange that took place on every level. I want to express my gratitude to our hosts, not only for their thoughtful hospitality down to the last detail, but also for their incredible patience in answering our questions – from the role of macrophytes in the Danube Delta ecosystem to the residual effects of the Communist period on environmental management to the role of ecologists as educators. As social ecologists, the social context of science is always relevant, on every level, including the personal.
Jen is a PhD student in the Technion Socio-Ecological Research Group in Haifa, Israel and is affiliated with the Israeli LTSER network, with whom she is currently writing an article about applying transdisciplinary action research at the Negev Desert platform. Her research evaluates impacts of the transition in ecological research toward transdisciplinary socio-ecological research in Europe. Her trip to Romania was funded by an eLTER Transnational Access research exchange grant. She is happy to receive your comments, feedback, and suggestions for trivia questions about Romania at jholzer@technion.ac.il.
