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?
Paul Josephson discusses the project he worked on during his Carson Fellowship, from August to December 2011: an environmental history of the Soviet Arctic.
The river Zolotitsa is located in what is now Arkhangelsk province and flows into the White Sea. The 1980 discovery and subsequent open-pit mining of a large diamond deposit severely transformed the landscape and is threatening to destroy the ecosystem of the upper Zolotitsa region.
Waste is never completely or permanently “out of sight.” Once discarded, it undergoes transformations, often reappearing elsewhere in new forms. In this volume of RCC Perspectives, scholars from different disciplines—from history and art history, urban geography, environmental studies, and anthropology—investigate the traces waste leaves behind in the course of its travels.
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.
This article analyses the contribution of the Austrian-born Russian scientist, Franz Joseph Ruprecht (1814–70) to the development of geobotany in general and to the controversial issue of the origins of the very fertile chernozem (Black Earth) of the steppe region of the Russian Empire.
This volume provides new histories of Pacific whaling from untold perspectives.
Bathsheba Demuth looks at the value of whales for indigenous peoples around the Bering Strait.
Ryan Tucker Jones recounts how environmental activist organizations came into conflict with indigenous groups in the Bering Straight.
