As Czechoslovakia’s communist planners continually increased norms for power and coal production in the 1950s through 1970s, the sprawling surface mines of the north Bohemian brown coal basin expanded voraciously, swallowing 116 villages and parts of several larger cities by 1980.
Bao Maohong, Carson Fellow from July to December 2011, talks about his work on landscape transformation in China.
This book discusses Marx’s ecological principles and materialistic views that can be traced back to mid-nineteenth-century social and scientific thought.
Eagle Glassheim, Carson Fellow from February until April 2012, talks about his research project on the ethnic, social, and environmental transformation of Czechoslovakia’s Border Lands after 1945.
This animated film tells the story of a family which lived in the village next to the Chernobyl reactor, and whose lives were destroyed during the 1986 disaster.
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.
Xenia Cherkaev and Elena Tipikina examine the institutions of the Stalinist state that planned the distribution, raising, and breeding of family dogs for military service. The investigate how the program affected human-dog relations.
This article examines the development of lake Ohrid in Macedonia, and the dilemma between environmental protection and the expansion of mass tourism on the lake’s fragile shores.
This case in St. Petersburg, Russia, proves vegetation to be an actor in state politics of cultural landscapes.
