This book makes a long overdue contribution to the ongoing debate on the role of nature protection organizations and networks. The editors have brought together eleven respected sociologists to trace and evaluate the links between nature protection organizations and society in eight European countries and the United States. Using analytical frameworks ranging from organization theory to social movements approaches, the authors describe the social networks that organizations promoting nature protection have woven, which, in turn, have helped many of them to survive and adapt to changing political and economic circumstances. Uncovering these strategies is crucial to understanding how environmental issues are being dealt with via new forms of governance today. The book will be very useful to scholars in organizational studies, social movements, environmental sociology, and environmental politics. Matthias Gross, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research UFZ, Leipzig, Germany By examining the evolution, role, and influence of nature protection organizations and networks in eight European countries and the United States, this book addresses a long-standing gap in comparative research on Western Environmentalism. It will appeal to all scholars and students with an interest in environmentalism, nature protection, and social movement studies. Lars H. Gulbrandsen, the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway This book offers a comparative analysis of organizations and networks involved in nature protection in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, the UK and the USA. It traces their development from their origins, more than a century ago, to the present day. Throughout this period, nature protection has remained an enduring concern to civil society and continues to be a major stream within environmentalism. However, strategies, public support, and political success vary greatly among the countries studied. Combining rich empirical evidence and theoretical analysis, the book sheds light on the important challenges nature protection faces today. Providing a detailed description of all the major nature protection organizations and networks, including overviews of their current membership, activities, and as far as available, budgets, Protecting Nature will be of great interest to lecturers and postgraduate students in social science fields, as well as researchers in the fields of environmental policy, environmental NGOs, social movements, civil society, nature management and policy. Members of nature protection, environmental and other civil society organizations who seek a better understanding of the historical development of nature protection organizations and networks, as well as the strategies employed by those organizations, will also find much to interest them in this book.

The traditional patterns of land use that have created many of the world's cultural landscapes contribute to biodiversity, support ecological processes, provide important environmental services, and have proven sustainable over the centuries. Protected landscapes can serve as living models of sustainable use of land and resources, and offer important lessons for sustainable development. Examples of these landscapes and the diverse strategies needed to maintain this essential relationship between people and the land are provided.

'Nature Unbound' is an examination of the rise of protected areas and their current social and economic position in our world. It examines the social impacts of protected areas, the conflicts that surround them, the alternatives to them and the conceptual categories they impose.

While researching Russia's historical efforts to protect nature, Douglas Weiner unearthed unexpected findings: a trail of documents that raised fundamental questions about the Soviet political system. These surprising documents attested to the unlikely survival of a critical-minded, scientist-led movement through the Stalin years and beyond. It appeared that, within scientific societies, alternative visions of land use, resrouce exploitation, habitat protection, and development were sustained and even publicly advocated. In sharp contrast to known Soviet practices, these scientific societies prided themselves on their traditions of free elections, foreign contacts, and a pre-revolutionary heritage. Weiner portrays nature protection activists not as do-or-die resisters to the system, nor as inoffensive do-gooders. Rather, they took advantage of an unpoliced realm of speech and activity and of the patronage by middle-level Soviet officials to struggle for a softer path to development. In the process, they defended independent social and professional identities in the face of a system that sought to impose official models of behavior, ethics, and identity for all. Written in a lively style, this absorbing story tells for the first time how organized participation in nature protection provided an arena for affirming and perpetuating self-generated social identities in the USSR and preserving a counterculture whose legacy survives today.

The latest concept of heritage is one that encompasses both cultural and natural forms of heritage. This publication presents the contributions of experts given at a seminar held in France in June 1999. These papers explore approaches to the environment as cultural heritage and the need for environmental protection and biodiversity.

Expanding the horizon of established accounts of Central European art under socialism, this book uncovers the neglected history of artistic engagement with the natural environment in the Eastern Bloc. The turbulent legacy of 1968, which saw the confluence of political upheaval, spread of counterculture, rise of ecological consciousness, and emergence of global conceptual art, provides the setting for Maja Fowkes’s innovative reassessment of the environmental practice of the Central European neo-avant-garde. Focussing on artists and artist groups whose ecological dimension has rarely been considered, including the Pécs Workshop from Hungary, OHO in Slovenia, TOK in Croatia, Rudolf Sikora in Slovakia, and the Czech artist Petr Štembera, 'The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism' brings to light an array of distinctive approaches to nature, from attempts to raise environmental awareness among socialist citizens to the exploration of non-anthropocentric positions and the quest for cosmological existence in the midst of red ideology. Embedding artistic production in social, political, and environmental histories of the region, this book reveals the Central European artists’ sophisticated relationship to nature, at the precise moment when ecological crisis was first apprehended on a planetary scale.