Foraging Response-ability: Between Individual Profit and Multispecies Commons

In reaction to the economic and energy precarity that started in 2021, a portion of the Czech public turned to the forest as a source of wild crops and other free resources. In public debates, citizens have been encouraged to supplement their household income by collecting forest resources to partially make up for the deficiencies in social policies. Building upon ethnographic research on foraging practices in the Czech Republic and the concept of response-ability (Haraway 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Hofman 2023), this paper analyses how everyday foraging can transform forests from mere natural resources for fulfilling individual responsibility into sites of more-than-human response-ability. The analysis examines what is required to exercise a response-able approach towards forests as a commoning practice. The way in which foragers establish their relation to the forest is traced on three levels: 1) the non-linear attunement of foragers to forest collectives, 2) a non-innocent form of care for common-pool resources that lies outside the extractivist-activist binary, and 3) the passing on of non-instrumental place-based knowledge to others. The article discusses how foraging response-ability can prevent the privatisation and enclosure of the commons by means of practices that operate beyond the state-market duopoly, yet without an explicit activist agenda.