Lajos Racz on "An Environmental History of Hungary"
Lajos Rácz, Carson Fellow from June 2010 to June 2011, talks about his research project, “An Environmental History of Hungary.”
Lajos Rácz, Carson Fellow from June 2010 to June 2011, talks about his research project, “An Environmental History of Hungary.”
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.
Is a world without waste truly achievable? The essays in this volume of RCC Perspectives discuss zero waste as a vision, as a historical concept, and as an international practice. Going beyond the motto of “reduce, reuse, recycle,” they reflect on the feasibility of creating closed material cycles and explore real-world examples of challenges and successes on the way to zero waste.
This essay examines practices in socialist Hungary in the 1950s that can be considered a historical antecedent to contemporary zero-waste programs. The experiences and challenges of implementing waste collection and reuse programs can offer lessons for us today.
This chapter of the “Wilderness babel” exhibition, written by historical ecologist and environmental historian Péter Szabó, looks at Hungarian notions of “wilderness.”