Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History

ISBN 978-1-912186-16-7
(Cambridgeshire: The White Horse Press, 2021)

This book offers new perspectives on the environmental history of the lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule by paying attention to ‘place’ and ‘nature’ in the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them. Through a series of carefully selected, linked case studies, the book highlights the importance of local environments and the specificities of individual places in understanding the human-environment nexus. This focus is accentuated by the fact that the authors have travelled extensively in the places they write about. They have first-hand experience of the specificities of local natural systems, and have gained a sense of how these places look, sound, taste, feel and smell. They have met, talked to, interviewed and in other ways engaged with members of the local populations, including the specialists in a variety of disciplines who study these places and ecosystems and the people who manage and administer them. In this way, our collective research also makes an important methodological intervention to the research and practice of environmental and perhaps also other fields of history: that to write robust history, historians need to embed themselves in the places and environments they study. In this way, our work underscores that ‘place’ and ‘nature’ are both topics of study and theoretical models and methodological approaches for scholarship.

The essays primarily consider the period from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries and, where appropriate, delve back further in time. They investigate continuity and change across multiple political systems: from the rise of modern Russia under the tsars, through the Soviet era and into the first decades of the post-Soviet Russian Federation. These centuries saw Russian imperial expansion into the far reaches of Eurasia, greater human mobility as a result of developments in transportation infrastructure, more intensive exploitation of natural resources with the onset of industrialisation, which gathered pace in Soviet times, and a growing sense among some scientists, political figures and members of the wider public of a need to protect and conserve ‘nature’. The geographical focus of the book is more distinctive and serves to complement and enhance the scope of existing works on the environmental history of this part of the world. The chapter studies are located in two important, diverse and, in the context of environmental history, relatively under-researched regions: 1) the Northwest and the European North of Russia, extending from St Petersburg through Karelia to the White Sea and Kola Peninsula; and 2) Siberia and the Pacific Far East.

Moon, David, Nicholas B. Breyfogle, and Alexandra Bekasova, eds.
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Investigators

Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Associate Professor, Director of the Goldberg Center

David Moon, Alexandra Bekasova

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