David Moon, Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Alexandra Bekasova, eds. Place and Nature: Essays in Environmental History (2021). (original) (raw)
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Environmental studies conducted worldwide often overlook the knowledge traditions of the locales where they are conducted. Addressing this issue, I investigated the geographic journal literature of late Soviet (1980Soviet ( -1989 and post-Soviet (1990post-Soviet ( -2003 Russia. Notable trends are increasing criticism of environmental and resource management in Russia and a (re)turn to pre-socialist Russian theorizations of society-nature interactions. Specifically, the noösphere, ethnogenesis and geosystems are trends in the literature that signify how Russian geographers (re)construct environmental knowledge. For non-Russian geographers working in Russia, awareness of these trends situates place-based knowledge relative to multiple cultures (ethnic, scientific) and time periods, promoting cross-cultural understanding of different traditions of geographic inquiry.
Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe. Literature, History and Memory
Bloomsbury Academic, 2020
This book aims at examining texts, events and phenomena that help explain the environmental cultures of the former Soviet dominion and reconnect memory and environmental history through literature. A key question for this work is: how cultures make environments speak if literature serves as a source of historical knowledge? Soviet Eastern Europe represents a unique relationship between violence and the landscape, where human and ecological disasters are dramatically converged. Eastern European cultural memory reveals these ecological scars because trauma is perceived here as more than human. Literature of this period is a special kind of radar, showing how language itself was affected by the Soviet colonization of Eastern European cultures and environments; how it was contaminated by Soviet propaganda and a worldview deformed by communism. The scope of the literature I analyse demonstrates a larger argument: history must be reconsidered through memory of the Stalin era and the late stage of heavy modernity.
Ph.D. thesis CONQUERING NATURE AND ENGAGING WITH THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE RUSSIAN INDUSTRIALISED NORTH
http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-484-780-3 This thesis explores perceptions of the environment and practices of interaction with natural environments at the Northern periphery of the Soviet Union/Russia as well as concepts of nature characteristic for the official Soviet discourse. In order to extract the rich natural resources of the North, numerous new industrial towns were founded from the ground up in areas with no previous permanent human settlements and were populated by migrants from all over the USSR. The dissertation considers specific human-environment relations that were formed in the Russian industrialised Arctic, analysing how the implementers of Soviet industrialisation combined both their involvement in the extractive approach to natural resources and their lived experience of dwelling in Northern environments.
An Environmental History of Russia
2013
With the publication of a book on the environmental history of Russia, Étienne Forestier-Peyrat analyses the link between politics and environment in Russian and Soviet history, from the Czarist campaigns to expand territories to the current and highly controversial construction of the Sochi Olympic Village.
Book review: Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History
Rispoli, G. (2020). Nicholas B. Breyfogle (ed.), Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Pp. 424. The British Journal for the History of Science, 53(1), 134-136, 2020
captivity in zoos and aquaria. This could be of direct use for historians of science researching vivisection, veterinarianism, agriculture, breeding practices and biotechnology.
Pre-print draft of a chapter that appears in DeLoughrey, E.; Didur, J.; Carrigan, A (eds). Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. London: Routledge 2015 pp.286-306 In this essay, I attempt a first foray into bringing Russia into the ambit of global environmental humanities by providing an analysis of the ways in which post-Soviet literary aesthetics register the longue durée of environmental violence and resource extraction in Russia through the use of “ecogothic” tropes. Analyzing literary examples of ecogothic has relevance for environmental humanities approaches precisely because of the way in which such aesthetics can provide an entry into the social imagination of ongoing ecological crises with complex temporal antecedents, reflecting traumas and fears and intimating alternative ecological relations. Characterized by a “presumptive dystopianism” (Smith and Hughes 2013, 3), ecogothic form offers a powerful method of yoking court and longue durées, in which longer histories outside the capacity for memory of individual human protagonists manifest as apparitions that disturb the present, revenants of “undead” processes in the past which continue to shape contemporary environments, even if official narratives, such as those of the Russian state, often repress or elide these histories. The ability to figure that which is forgotten or occluded with an uncanny immediacy is one of ecogothic’s most powerful aesthetic effects.
Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History, 2019
During the Soviet period, peat extraction transformed the ecological and social space close to Saint Petersburg. Since the end of extraction in the 1980s, many former excavation sites have experienced a return of water, plants and wildlife. While for some these changes seem to prove nature's ability to recover from human use, people whose professional and private lives were connected to the peat industry see them as signs of decline. This article explores the social and ecological legacies of the peat industry in Russia and the different meanings that people attach to peatlands after the end of peat extraction.
Toward an Environmental History of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union
2018
The essays in this book explore the rich and remarkable environmental history of tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union over the last three hundred years. And, as is often the case in writing the history of Russia, I begin with the insights of literature. The tale of two dams, built about a century and a half apart, offers a window onto the evolving ways in which human political-social-cultural structures were intricately interwoven with ecological, hydrological, and geological systems. In his autobiographical Family Chronicle, the famous Slavophile S. T. Aksakov tells a triumphant story of his grandfather, the nobleman Stephan Mikhailovich Bagrov, who set up a family farmstead in Ufa province in the eighteenth century—ousting the previous pastoral Bashkir inhabitants from their land through “savvy” imperialist trickery. In Aksakov’s narrative 1
This article examines complex patterns of interaction between human settlement and the environment in the industrialised Russian north. I analyse how new mining towns, built during the Soviet period, were located and integrated into the environment. Residents have participated in the industrial processing of natural resources in the work domain, also developing a strong emotional attachment to the natural environments while spending leisure time around the cities. In both perception of physical space and ideas about place, the main dividing principle is between the spheres of work and leisure.
Landscape And Ethnos Revisited
My 1987dissertation " On Landscape and Ethnos: An assessment of Lev N. Gumilev's theories " was marginal to mainstream 'Western Geography' and its academic discourse. Whereas, amidst an emerging Glasnost late Soviet discourse ushered in a re-emergence of several intellectual strains that encompassed aspects of Gumilev's work. Perhaps most contradictory was the Russian national ethnic identity—a proto Slavophil movement—also incorporating resurgent Orthodox religious thought and practice (about which more will be discussed later in this intervention) versus a revised Eurasianism that viewed Russia as a mix of European and Asian ethnicities. While current criticism of Gumilev incorporates a contradictions in his ethnic and geopolitical theories that synthesizes both Slavic Russian and Eurasian identities within biophysical & biosphere phenomena he labels as " passionarity ". In this intervention I will also address this issue and resolution of its seeming contradictions. Today, discussion, analysis and interpretations of Gumilev's wide ranging theories are legion, both within post-Soviet Russian and international discourses. What I adhere to is the Vernadsky based biosphere physical geography with acknowledgement of Anuchin's revised approach to a unified geography that merges evolutionary human agency into physical geography. Prior to my discovery and interest in Gumilev's theories, as a geographer, I was influenced by a sense of the factuality of humans as a species part of the planet's ecological evolution. But following an evolutionary trend in western (American) ecosystem and sociobiology, I began to see more of the broad diversified field of geography as unitarian rather than bifurcated into human and physical. American academic geography is rooted in 19 th century German theory and its universalization including its close philosophical and scientific connection with Russian academia. As a Berkeley student under the influence of Carl Sauer, I became familiar with the history and theory of geographical discourses, and a century of controversy over environmental determinism and its seemingly reasonable resolution in Possibilism. That approach does not rule out environmental influences on human agency or the reverse, but rather seeks to identify and understand mutual influences. Yet increasingly the two draw apart with the greater expansion of scientific research into convergent neurobiological processes and a unitary evolution of lifeforms within a biosphere that is more or less a product of cosmic and heliosphere influences on evolutionary earth processes. As the reader will discover, this preamble to a larger work points to the overwhelming and rationally incontrovertible evidence produced in scientific exploration and data analysis. 24 December 2017 PREFACE: So many reviews and critiques of L. N. Gumiev's theories and diverse works have originated from a social determinist perspective, both from Russian, English, and other language interventions, theses and publications. But that is the intellectual norm, especially from outside of a materialist ethos, be it dialectical materialist or generic scientific discourse. From having run across Gumilev's work on Eurasian historical geography and included a brief comment in my doctoral work, my mentor, P. L. Wagner suggested that I read deeper into Gumilev. Circulation of my initial work drew responses from senior academics urging me to shift from my theoretical and empirical work on the diffusion across Eurasia to focus on Gumilev who was known only to a small circle of scholars in areas of Soviet Geography and intellectual history. My earliest reading of Gumilev evolved with great assistance and encouragement from Wagner, Ted Shabad, and David Hooson into a successfully defended doctoral thesis, which was picked up by Soviet academicians with parts translated into Russian and published online from an Omsk