Clichés about Italy are numerous. Henry James once wrote that Italy was tired of being admired for its eyelashes and its pose. Nowadays the country is trying to shake off a do-nothing image regarding nature conservation. But an environmental movement has existed in Italy for more than a century. In 1924, the chief naturalist of the U.S. National Park Service said that Italy was far ahead of the rest of Europe in protecting nature. By the outbreak of World War II, Italy had four national parks covering over five hundred thousand acres. Of course, a lot went wrong with Italian nature protection, too. Fascism, war, and the unbridled consumerism of the economic miracle sent conservation into a tailspin from which it only began recovering in the 1990s. This book is the first effort in English to document the rise, fall, and recovery of nature conservation in Italy. Part one covers the environmental degradation of Italy's wetlands, mountains, and forests due to unification, industrialization, and the rush toward modernization. Part two looks at the ups and downs of Italy's conservation movement in the 1900s: who were the players, what were their motives, where were they active, why did they succeed and sometimes fail?

Marco Armiero is Senior Researcher at the Italian National Research Council and Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Aut(noma de Barcelona. He has published extensively on-Italian environmental history and edited Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World. --

Following the industrial revolution and post- war exponential increase in human population and consumption, conservation in myriad forms has been one particularly visible way in which the government and its agencies have tried to control, manage or produce nature for reasons other than raw exploitation. Using an interdisciplinary approach and including case studies from across the globe, this edited collection brings together geographers, sociologists, anthropologists and historians in order to examine the degree to which socio- political regimes facilitate and shape the emergence and development of nature states.

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Since their first designation in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s they have become a global phenomenon.

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