Wilko Graf von Hardenberg (editor) - The Nature State: Rethinking the History of Conservation

This book offers a bold new concept, the nature state, intended to take its place beside useful terms such as the welfare state or patrimonial state. Building on fresh case studies from every inhabited continent, the volume explores the tangled links between states and the natural world in illuminating ways.

J.R. McNeill, Georgetown University, USA

Environmental history takes an important and imaginative stride forward with the concept of a nature state introduced here through a rich collection of unusual and varied examples. This innovative approach to theorizing state control over the natural environment in the twentieth century will serve as a productive model for future scholarship on this exciting theme.

Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa

The Nature State

This volume brings together case studies from around the globe (including China, Latin America, the Philippines, Namibia, India and Europe) to explore the history of nature conservation in the twentieth century. It seeks to highlight the state, a central actor in these efforts, which is often taken for granted, and establishes a novel concept the nature state as a means for exploring the historical formation of that portion of the state dedicated to managing and protecting nature.

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 sociopolitical regimes facilitate and shape the emergence and development of nature states.

This innovative work marks an early intervention in the tentative turn towards the state in environmental history and will be of great interest to students and practitioners of environmental history, social anthropology and conservation studies.

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, where he coordinates the working group Art of Judgement. He holds a PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge, UK, and has worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany, and the University of Trento, Italy.

Matthew Kelly teaches history at Northumbria University, where he is helping to establish the environmental humanities as a broad area of research and teaching within the university. He was an Associate Professor at the University of Southampton, UK, and a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany.

Claudia Leal holds a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley, USA, and is Associate Professor at the Department of History at Universidad de los Andes in Bogot, Colombia. She was a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany, and co-president of the Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History.

Emily Wakild teaches Latin American and environmental history at Boise State University in Idaho, USA. Her current projects include a primer on teaching environmental history and a monograph on the social and ecological regions of Amazonia and Patagonia.

Routledge Environmental Humanities

Series editors: Iain McCalman and Libby Robin

Editorial Board

Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK

Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK

Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK

Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia

Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK

Jodi Frawley, University of Sydney, Australia

Andrea Gaynor, The University of Western Australia, Australia

Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA

Jennifer Newell, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA

Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK

Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, USA

Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK

Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia

The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recognizing that todays world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture.

The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future environmental challenges has shifted the epicentre of environmental studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences.

We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of environmental change.

The Nature State

Rethinking the History of Conservation

Edited by Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, Matthew Kelly, Claudia Leal and Emily Wakild

Contents

Matthew Kelly, Claudia Leal, Emily Wakild and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg

Ian Tyrrell

Emily Wakild

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg

Siddhartha Krishnan

Emmanuel Kreike

Matthew Kelly

Claudia Leal

Frederico Freitas

Michael Hathaway

Stefan Dorondel and Veronica Mitroi