Human Lives and Tree Species in Experiments: The Case of István Bánó’s Work with Pine Species

By foregrounding the interaction between tree species, researchers, and the institutional context of their research, this chapter aims to elucidate the roles of science and actors within scientific research that have been at play during the Great Acceleration phase of the Anthropocene. Presenting researchers of the post–World War II decades as obedient soldiers of either Stalinist violence or modernist ideology is an unrealistic picture. The pine project shows that one of the specificities of environmental history in state socialist Hungary was the way research sites emerged in conversation with personal biography, limitations on freedom, the regime’s political goals, and transnational knowledge production.