Siberian Tiger Census - a newspaper article

More than 2,000 people are combing Russia’s far east for signs of the elusive wild cats to find out whether efforts to reverse their decline have been a success...

Read the full illustrated article in The Guardian at:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/18/siberian-tiger-census-in-russias-far-east

Call for Papers "Resistance, protest and criticism in the name of nature: USSR and post-Soviet states, 1950-2010"

Call for Papers

Resistance, protest and criticism in the name of nature: USSR and post-Soviet states, 1950-2010

Conference in Moscow, 8-9 October 2015

EcoGlobReg | DHI | CFR

To view this information as a pdf, click on http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1906/files/2015/02/CfP_Resistance_Nature_2015_en.pdf 

To view this information in Russian as a pdf, click on http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1906/files/2015/02/CfP_Resistance_Nature_2015_ru.pdf

This conference will look at resistance in the name of nature against industrialist and transformist projects in the Soviet and post-Soviet space from the 1950s to the present. How did people at local and regional levels mobilize nature in their practices of discontent (open protests, passive resistance, lawsuits and others) when confronting industrial interests, state projects and rampant transformations that impacted their lifestyle and violated their conception of a proper environment? 

In the environmental history of the Soviet Union we usually emphasize the unstoppable bulldozer of progress that turned the rivers into dam cascades, irrigated dry steppes, drained peat bogs, placed nuclear power stations and highly polluting industries near densely populated areas, and destroyed natural and traditional landscapes. Most of the time we present the productivist thrust of the Soviet state as advancing unchallenged, with the force of quasi-historical necessity. Although ecological activists from urban areas have been closely studied by historians (Weiner, Josephson), we have little research on the protest culture of the people affected by these transformations and how they confronted the risks and nuisances associated with them in the Soviet and post-Soviet world: peasants and landowners, indigenous peoples, nomad herders, workers at polluting plants, inhabitants of contaminated areas, hunters and fishermen, “unorganized” tourists and so on. 

We wish to put three groups of actors to the fore: first, we want to give a voice to those social actors who refused the obligatory direction of history toward the industrial control of nature (understood as natural resources) and cherished modes of interacting with their local or regional environment other than what “modernization” dictated, or more modestly tried to avoid the most disastrous transformations. How did they express their concerns and what alternative conceptions of nature did they defend?

Second, we study the interaction of state actors informed by visions of a tamed and useful nature with the people who felt directly concerned by their projects. How did Party leaders and state administrators take these challenges and checks into account if at all, whether crushing, ignoring, compensating or integrating them? What compromises in their initial plans were they prepared to make in the name of differing conceptions of the use of nature and a healthy environment?

Third, scientific and technical experts played an important mediating role between local people and decision-makers. How did they create, frame and advocate environmental issues? Or alternatively, how did they make environmental change appear acceptable and desirable to the people it affected?

By drawing attention to bottom-up resistance on behalf of nature from the 1950s and how it was suppressed, incorporated or bypassed in the USSR and its successor States, we hope to go some way in explaining the upsurge of environmental activism in the perestroika years and understanding the significance and limits of its decline in the post-Soviet period.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of possible topics:

·         What role did international contacts and globalized environmental concepts play in formulating ecological issues and mobilizing opinion around them?

·         How did industrial pollution impact workers and their families?

·         How did opposition to nuclear power and other industrial sites arise, up to the mass rallies of the 1980s?

·         How did usage conflicts develop, especially in the agricultural and tourist sectors (soils, forest, water, pasture)?

·         How did state actors take account of the risks of progress in planning?

·         How were nature and related concepts (landscape, life, environment, ecology) mobilized in the negotiations around industrial implantation and transformist projects?

 

Organization

The conference will be held on 8-9 October 2015 in Moscow (exact location will be announced later). Working languages will be Russian and English.

Abstracts (in Russian or English, no more than 400 words) should be submitted by email to in-the-name-of-nature@ecoglobreg.org by 15 March 2015. The organizers will respond by 15 May 2015. 

All queries should be sent to Melanie Arndt and Laurent Coumel.

The selected speakers will have their travel and accommodation expenses covered.

Papers will be requested by 15 September 2015 so as to be circulated among speakers in advance of the conference.

 

Institutional and financial support

The German Historical Institute (www.dhi-moskau.org) and the French-Russian Research Center (www.centre-fr.net) in Moscow contribute to financing the conference and provide essential organisational support.

 

Initiators

EcoGlobReg is a joint French-German historical research project financed by Agence National de la Recherche (ANR) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). It is devoted to understanding how ecological concerns shaped society and politics in the late Soviet Union and the post-Soviet space. We analyse the sometimes tumultuous processes associated with the ecologization and de-ecologization of politics and society in the last three decades of the 20th century. By “ecologization” we mean the social dissemination and deepening political use of scientific knowledge on the state of the environment. We isolate three main vectors for spreading ecological preoccupations in society and political discourse: social activism and protest for the protection of landscapes and life conditions; environmental disasters understood as catalysts of discontent and revealers of failed relationships between society and nature; and sensitization and popularization (in the media and education) of nature seen as threatened by economic development.

The project takes ecologization and de-ecologization to be essentially globalized processes. It shows how environmental issues acquired a global character at the turn of the 1960s-1970s and what role Soviet citizens played in this process. From there the project moves to asking whether the Soviet Union entered an “environmental turn” comparable to the one identified for capitalist countries. But transnational and globalizing trends are only one aspect of ecologization. The project pays attention to the regionalization of power dynamics: strengthened national and regional identities fired ecological mobilization in the perestroika years; well before that point in Soviet history, they played a major role in shaping environmental protest. Last, the apparent de-ecologization of public discourse in the post-Soviet era, marked by green activists withdrawing from the political scene, will be examined to see how environmental practices have evolved and taken on new forms.

www.ecoglobreg.org

EcoGlobReg’s Team:

Alexander Ananyev
Melanie Arndt
Laurent Coumel
Marc Elie
Klaus Gestwa
Raphael Schulte-Kellinghaus

Soviet Union collapse 'affected region's wildlife'

Research suggests that the socioeconomic shocks following the collapse of the Soviet Union also affected the region's wildlife.

An international group of authors from Russia, Germany and the USA have published a paper to this effect in the journal Conservation Biology.

Read the paper at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cobi.12450/full


See the report by by BBC News Environment Reporter Mark Kinver at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30886952

EcoGlobReg

Contemporary environmental history of the Soviet Union and the successor states, 1970-2000. Ecological globalization and regional dynamic

http://ecoglobreg.hypotheses.org/

This cooperative Franco-German project in the field of (post) Soviet contemporary environmental history will move beyond national borders in terms of both its research and its organization.

In its research, the project will analyze the sometimes tumultuous processes associated with the ecologization and de-ecologization of politics and society in the last three decades of the 20th century. The individual studies, with their overlapping global and regional historical perspectives, will contribute to a more in-depth analysis of a) the reciprocity within processes of cross-border interaction, b) the formative powers of centralized state politics, and c) practical activities at the regional level. In doing so, they will provide an innovative and highly insightful perspective on the contemporary “East Side Story” of global environmental history.

The project has five primary research goals:

1. To look more closely at the social importance and scope of environmental politics and environmental awareness by examining the role of political ecology in the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras (= ecological structural change of environmentalism)
2.  To determine the role played by the Soviet Union and its successor states in global environmental history by analyzing cross-bloc interactions and global institutions (= ecological globalization)
3. To re-conceptualize the collapse of the Soviet Union and the post-communist transformation by questioning conventional periodization and characterizations from an environmental history perspective (= reconceptualization of late Soviet and post-Soviet history)
4.  To gain new insights into the changing dynamics of power during this period by studying Russian, Siberian, Central Asian, Caucasian, and Baltic border regions and domestic contexts (= regional ecological dynamics and the reconfiguration of power and space)
5.  To underscore the socio-political relevance of environmental history scholarship for the post-Soviet states by historicizing current environmental problems and ecological debates (= history of current ecological issues).

Furthermore, the project aims to create a Tübingen – Regensburg – Paris research triangle with a strong international network and innovative research program that can become a gravitational center for (East) European environmental history. Joint conferences, workshops, archival research, and publications will productively bundle together German and French scholarly resources.

The Project Managers are:

Prof. Dr. Klaus Gestwa (Universität Tübingen)

Dr. Melanie Arndt (IOS Regensburg)

Dr. Marc Elie (Centre d'études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre- européen, CNRS-EHESS, Paris)

Lake Baikal field trip summer 2015

The Leverhulme international network "Exploring Russia's Environmental History and Natural Resources" will be conducting a field trip to Lake Baikal, Siberia, from 25 July – 4 August 2015.

The group will meet in Ulan-Ude and visit various places on and around the lake including the Barguzin Nature Reserve (Russia’s first Zapovednik), the Ushkanyi Islands (home to the nerpa – the endemic Baikal ringed seals Pusa sibirica), Olkhon island (with its important Buriat sites) and finishing up in Irkutsk. Workshops will be held in the Barguzin Nature Reserve and Irkutsk and local experts will be involved throughout. 

An outline itinerary and a brief bibliography of the environmental history of the area are both available on our website.

Olchon Shaman Rock, Lake Baikal. Photo courtesy of Kirsten Buerger via Wikimedia Commons

Visit to Elabuga, Tatarstan, Russia by David Moon, anniversary professor in History, 11-16 November 2014

‘We are going to be back later than I said’, I heard my host, Andrei, saying to his wife on the phone in the back of the car driving me from the airport at Kazan’ (500  miles east of Moscow) to Elabuga (a further 130 miles east). I had been invited to speak at a conference on Russian environmental history at the Elabuga Institute, part of Kazan’ Federal University. I was on the last leg of my journey from York, which started the previous evening after a full day’s teaching. We were delayed by our driver’s belated decision to observe the speed limit (after being relieved of 500 roubles by zealous traffic police), a dense fog of the sort Russians associate with ‘foggy [tumanyi] Albion’ and sand blowing from the sides of the road, which cut our visibility to a few yards as we were travelling through the dark, and road works.

It was well worth the journey. Together with an American historian, Stephen Brain from Mississippi State University, I spent the first day giving a series of lectures on aspects of Russia’s environmental history to students. We lectured in English with interpreters, sparing the students the ordeal of listening to me speaking Russian with a west midlands accent, but for immediacy of communication, we did the questions and answers in Russian. I was impressed by the students’ questions and interest in what we, as a British and an American scholar, thought about their country. Although we were in Russia, Kazan’ and Elabuga are in the autonomous republic of Tatarstan. Conquered by Ivan the Terrible in the 1550s, Tatarstan has its own distinctive history and a mixed population of Russians, Tatars and other ethnic groups, Orthodox churches and mosques, and statues of Russian, Tatar, and Volga Bulgar historic figures.

On the second morning our hosts had organised a tour for all attending the conference, including historic locations in the city dating back to its medieval past as a Bulgar and Tatar city as well as its more recent history as an important commercial centre in the nineteenth century. For me, the highlight was a visit to the Lower Kama National Park, just outside the city, expertly guided by the park’s head of research, Rinur Bekmansurov. The grey, overcast November weather could not conceal the majestic pine forests which go right up to the steep bank of the Kama river, from where we had panoramic views. The forests of the lower Kama were immortalized, as images of typical Russian landscape, by the artist Ivan Shishkin in the late nineteenth century. Our guide pointed out the locations where Shiskhin had painted some of his pictures, and later presented a formal paper on this at the conference. One of Shishkin’s most famous, ‘Morning in a Pine Forest’ is of bear cubs playing in a forest. Shishkin and his landscapes are very familiar to me. I have used them in my teaching, referred to them in my writings (including one of my lectures to the students the previous day), and even have prints of two of his paintings on my walls at home. And yet, until I was invited to the conference, I had not been aware that he was from Elabuga.

Nizhnekamsk national park: Krasnaya Gorka, overlooking the Kama River.

The conference was an intense two and a half days of lectures, round-table discussions, and papers, interspersed with meetings with the Director of the Institute, representatives of the Tatarstan Ministry of the Environment, and ad hoc interviews with journalists from the student and local media.

The conference was a wonderful opportunity to meet specialists on the environmental history of Russia from all over Russia. I knew only one of the Russian scholars: Julia Lajus from St Petersburg, who I have known for about a decade and is a member of our Leverhulme international network on Russia’s environmental history.  I was very pleased, therefore, to have the chance to meet other Russian specialists in our field. The Elabuga Institute has long-standing expertise in environmental history. Our host and the conference organiser, Andrei Vinogradov, spoke about his research on pollution caused by the chemical industry in the region and also the settlement of Tatarstan. Like many younger scholars, he is building an impressive track record of research, publication, and engagement with partners outside the academic world and international contacts. His former supervisor, Professor Aidar Kalimullin, spoke about his work on urban environmental history. It is unfair to single out participants, but I was impressed by a group comprising Professor Evgenii Gololubov and two younger scholars, Julia Prikhodko and Maksim Mostovenko from Surgut State Pedagogical University in western Siberia, who I would not otherwise have met and with whom I have maintained contact with since my return. Galina Lyubimova, from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy Sciences in Novosibirsk, gave a fascinating paper on peasant manuscript sources on environmental consciousness. There were also interesting papers by scholars from the regions around Tatarstan, which focussed on conservation projects as well as more historical topics. I was also very pleased to meet a Ukrainian scholar, Anna Olenenko, who had travelled all the way from Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine. She is keen to develop environmental history in Ukraine and to build collaborative links with Russian scholars despite the difficult international situation.

Thus, at least as important as the formal part of the conference were the informal contacts I made, which are already bearing fruit, and were cemented over dinner and a beer or two every evening in a cafe. 

David giving his presentation to a plenary session of the conference

http://kpfu.ru/elabuga/nachalas-prezentaciya-zhurnala-39enviroment-and.html

Call for Papers for BISA PGN Conference

Following 2014’s biggest ever BISA (The British International Studies Association) Postgraduate Network conference in Dublin, Ireland, the 2015 BISA PGN Annual Conference will be taking place at King’s College London in the heart of London. It will take place on the 30th March, 2015.

Last year, five BISA Working Groups sponsored specialist panels at PGN Conference, including the BISA Environment Working Group (WG), based on their areas of research, and BISA PGN are looking to expand the scheme this year. The BISA Environment WG have been guaranteed several panels at this year’s PGN Conference, and are now looking for papers on the following themes.

The paper topics and their panel convenors are as follows. If you are interested in submitting a paper, please contact the listed panel convenor. Each submission requires a paper title, your university affiliation, and a 250 word abstract, by the 14th January.

1. Environmental Change and Inequality: 

This panel intends to address the question of whether social and political responses to environmental change can reduce global inequality.

Panel convenor- Ross Gillard, ee12rg@leeds.ac.uk

2. Environmental Commitments and (Non)-implementation.

This panel aims to discuss problems that arise during the process of putting international and domestic environmental commitments into practice at the micro levels.

Panel convenor- Elena Gorianova, elena.gorianova@gmail.com

3. The Role of Corporate Environmental Disclosure and Reporting in the Emergence of 'Green' Economic Narratives and Accumulation Strategies: 
There is a considerable body of literature on corporate environmental disclosure and reporting as a neoliberal 'alternative' mode of governance. We welcome proposals that go beyond such an assessment of the immediate effects of reporting and examine whether and how such information production provides basic blocs for the formulation of 'green' economic narratives and accumulation strategies.

Panel convenor- Nino David Jordan, nino.jordan.13@ucl.ac.uk

Attendance at the Conference will be an ideal opportunity for PhD students to experience an academic conference and receive feedback on their research. The keynote speaker will be the Chair of BISA and Head of Department at the University of Sheffield, Professor Nicola Phillips. The event will also be followed by a wine reception at King’s College London."

General queries about the conference can be sent to Paul Tobin: paul.tobin@york.ac.uk