"Nature Mastered by Man: Ideology and Water in the Soviet Union"
The vision of a new kind of society without private ownership, and thus profit interests, of natural resources had promised a utopia of man and nature in harmony. What went wrong?
The vision of a new kind of society without private ownership, and thus profit interests, of natural resources had promised a utopia of man and nature in harmony. What went wrong?
This paper surveys major developments in the Imperial Russian history of wild bird protection and related issues of ornithology during the century or so leading up to the First World War.
For nearly a century, we have relied increasingly on science and technology to harness natural forces, but at what environmental and social cost?
A review of a Russian language volume published by the Russian Institute of Cultural and Natural Heritage, and with a forward by the then director of UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre Francesco Bandarin. The book covers approaches to cultural landscapes, as well as to their conservation and management.
Through a series of ethnographic studies that range from Papua New Guinea to Siberia, Brazil to Namibia, Ethnographies of Conservation argues that the problem is not the disappearance of “pristine nature” or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, critical attention would be better turned on discourses of “primitiveness” and “pristine nature,” so prevalent within conservation ideology.
Earth First! Journal 23, no. 1 is dedicated to the topic of direct action: it feature a report on the 2002 Round River Rendezvous and the Eco-Bloc against the World Bank and IMF, both in Washington, and presents the Rupert Reverence, a group of dissident Cree, French Canadian locals and eco-tourist companies.
Vaclav Smil shows why energy transitions are inherently complex and prolonged affairs, and how ignoring this raises unrealistic expectations that the United States and other global economies can be weaned quickly from a primary dependency on fossil fuels.
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation” had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume, In the Name of the Great Work follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.
This essay discusses methodological difficulties of the established concept of social memory for the analysis of energo-political discourse. It examines the case study of the German-Russian energy cooperation on the natural gas market which began with the discovery of the Urengoi gas field in 1966.
The purpose of this article is to assess recent trends in Russian environmental history over the last five years. The author broadly traces its emergence from the foundation of the field in the 1970s and 1980s.