Greening Europe: Environmental Protection in the Long Twentieth Century – A Handbook 9783110669213, 9783110609653

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Greening Europe

Contemporary European History

Edited by Corinna Unger and Matthias Middell

Volume 1

Greening Europe

Environmental Protection in the Long Twentieth Century – A Handbook Edited by Anna-Katharina Wöbse and Patrick Kupper

ISBN: 978-3-11-060965-3 eBook ISBN (PDF): 978-3-11-066921-3 eBook ISBN (EPUB): 978-3-11-066578-9 ISSN 2627-0366 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941879 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Chapter 3 “Europe and its Environmental Other(s): Imagining Natures for ‘Global’ Conservation” © Raf de Bont © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Knechtsand 1957, Archive Stiftung Naturschutzgeschichte Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents On the “Contemporary European History” Handbook Series

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Patrick Kupper and Anna-Katharina Wöbse 1 Introduction: Writing a European History of Environmental Protection 1

I Conserving Nature Anna-Katharina Wöbse 2 Counting Birds: Protecting European Avifauna and Habitats

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Raf de Bont 3 Europe and its Environmental Other(s): Imagining Natures for “Global” Conservation 47 Anna-Katharina Wöbse and Hans-Peter Ziemek 4 Restoring, Reintroducing, Rewilding: Creating European 73 Wilderness Peter A. Coates 5 Protecting Eurofisch: An Environmental History of the European Eel 101 and its Europeanness Astrid M. Eckert and Pavla Šimková 6 Transcending the Cold War: Borders, Nature, and the European Green Belt Conservation Project along the Former Iron Curtain 129

II Preserving Livelihoods Richard Hölzl and K. Jan Oosthoek 7 Transforming Woodlands: European Forest Protection in a Global Context 157

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Ute Hasenöhrl and Robert Groß 8 Travelling (Western) Europe: Tourism, Regional Development, and Nature Protection 185 Romed Aschwanden, Maria Buck, Patrick Kupper, and Kira J. Schmidt 9 Moving Mountains: The Protection of the Alps 217 Simo Laakkonen and Tuomas Räsänen 10 Negotiating the Maritime Commons: Protecting the Baltic Sea in a 243 European Context Heike Weber 11 Recycling Europe’s Domestic Wastes: The Hope of “Greening” Mass Consumption through Recycling 269

III Sustaining Environments Silke Vetter-Schultheiß 12 Visualizing the Invisible: Communicating Europe’s 305 Environment Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and Jan-Henrik Meyer 13 Revealing Risks: European Moments in Nuclear Politics and the 331 Anti-Nuclear Movement Arne Kaijser 14 Combatting “Acid Rain”: Protecting the Common European Sky 363 Elke Seefried 15 Developing Europe: The Formation of Sustainability Concepts and 389 Activities Liesbeth van de Grift and Wim van Meurs 16 Europeanizing Biodiversity: International Organizations as Environmental Actors 419

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Anna-Katharina Wöbse and Patrick Kupper 17 Epilogue: The Nature of Europe 447 List of Contributors Index

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On the “Contemporary European History” Handbook Series Do we need a new handbook series on contemporary European history? Asking this question leads to a range of related questions. At a time when the idea of “Europe” and the project of European integration are being questioned by some and defended by others, what is the role of historians in writing about Europe? What kind of historical accounts do they have to offer? Should they point out the complexity of European societies and histories as reasons for the difficulties in creating a “European identity,” or should they emphasize the degree to which European integration has successfully taken place on different levels? Should they analyze the tension between national, regional, and local factors in shaping the self-understanding of individuals and social groups, or should they concern themselves more with the functioning of transnational and supranational structures of Europe? More generally, is it at all possible to cover European history in a handbook format? If so, which definition of Europe should serve as the conceptual framework connecting the various volumes, which regions should be included or excluded, and which actors should stand at the center of attention? These questions are difficult to answer but useful to ask because they alert us to the challenges historical research on Europe currently faces. Fortunately, we do not stand empty-handed in front of these challenges. For one, the field of European history has developed remarkably over the past two or three decades, not only within Europe but also in many other parts of the world where Europe has become an increasingly interesting object of investigation since it suggests itself to comparisons and presents an important hub in a connected world. Secondly, the traditional identification of Europe with Western Europe has been challenged by a new generation of historians who are writing histories that leave behind narrow dichotomies like East and West, North and South. Thirdly, European history is no longer presented as a loose bundle of national entities and their predecessor states but is seen more as an assemblage of various imperial structures. These developments have resulted in a research perspective that looks at the interaction between the metropoles of the European empires as well as their colonies and other seemingly peripheral regions. European history is now understood as having been profoundly shaped by empires “striking back.” Relatedly, many historians have replaced diffusionist approaches with concepts like circulation and reception. Finally, the dialogue with global history has challenged traditional periodizations of European histohttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-001

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ry. While the Eurocentric view privileged inward-looking perspectives, the integration of transregional comparisons has produced more nuanced ideas about the relevant timeframe. Contemporary history as the history of trends familiar to contemporaries is not necessarily the history of present times. It has been argued that the history of modern globalization dates back to the mid- or late nineteenth century. Europe has played an important role in such processes, and in many ways its current shape is a product of those processes. This is not to deny the relevance of caesuras like the two World Wars and the end of the Cold War, but it highlights the complicated relationship between politics, economics, the cultural, and the social in the history of a large space like Europe. Not all pieces of this puzzle are following the same logic, as we have learned from recent historical research that has gone through the postmodern school of accepting fragmentation as a crucial feature in society. The Contemporary European History handbook series responds to this situation and draws on it as inspiration and opportunity. Instead of lamenting the difficulties of neatly defining “Europe,” the series consciously embraces a multifaceted approach to studying contemporary European history, one which is driven by an understanding of “Europe in the world” rather than considering Europe a closed entity. Without giving up the belief that some historical accounts are more accurate and persuasive than others, the series emphasizes the multiplicity of approaches and interpretations available and presents them as possibilities to be tested against future research. To live up to this agenda, this series avoids the more conventional structure of handbooks as it has been common in the past, when volumes were built on categories like “nationalism,” “violence,” “economy,” “social movements,” and “gender.” Contrastingly, the Contemporary European History series puts human activities at the center of attention: “Reading,” “cooking,” “administering,” “communicating,” “protecting,” “selling,” “working,” “protesting,” and “musicking,” to name just a few. This allows the volumes to reach across regional and temporal divides, to include a variety of methodological and conceptual approaches, and to provide the basis for comparisons that promise to shed new light on European history. In avoiding narrow and, at times, artificial categorizations, and by promoting an activity-centered view, this handbook series aims to offer a fresh view of European history that reflects the rich body of research available and the methodological diversity that mark the field. Matthias Middell (Leipzig University) and Corinna Unger (EUI Florence)

Patrick Kupper and Anna-Katharina Wöbse

1 Introduction: Writing a European History of Environmental Protection On a chilly and cloudy September morning in 1957, a huge flag was hoisted on a sand bank far out in the German Wadden Sea. It displayed a large green E upon a white field: the emblem of the European Movement. Accompanying the flag were some 300 women and men, many of them barefoot and wearing mackintoshes, who had set out to occupy this barren and uninhabited sandbank. They were protesting against the site’s use as a bombing range for British and American air forces stationed in England (see book cover). The occupation of the sandbank reveals a curious moment in European history. What had started as a local campaign by local fishermen worried about their safety and the future of their fisheries in the early 1950s had gained wider attention when some bird lovers had discovered that large numbers of waterfowl were falling prey to the military exercises. Of particular concern was the fact that the dying birds were not just ordinary resident species, but shelducks, migratory birds that came to the area for their seasonal molting. Every summer large flocks travelled from Ireland, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark to the shallow waters of the Knechtsand area of the Wadden Sea. A local and private interest in preservation now turned into a transregional affair. Backed by growing networks of activists and ornithologists, a campaign was launched to draw attention to the terrible consequences of the bombing for the “European’” shelduck population. The horde of rebels who now assembled under the European flag were a heterogeneous lot: youth and naturalists’ organizations, left-wing peace activists, conservative politicians, delegates from the regional tourist trade, traditional bird watchers, and envoys of animal welfare groups had joined forces to urge for putting an end to the bombing and turning the sands into a nature reserve. Just as their flag signalled the campaign’s pan-European ambitions, so too did the icon of the shelducks

Note: We would like to thank all authors for sharing their expertise and ideas. We are also indebted to the inspiring networks of environmental historians: The Rachel Carson Center in Munich was the place where the very first concept of this book was presented and discussed in May 2018. The European Society for Environmental History gave us the opportunity to discuss first drafts at the ESEH conference in Tallinn in summer 2019. We are grateful to Tabea Rittgerodt and Jana Fritsche of de Gruyter/Oldenbourg; Brenda Black and Katharina Middell have supported and expedited our work immeasurably with revising and editing our manuscripts. Finally, we thank Matthias Middell and Corinna Unger for initiating the handbook and for their constructive commenting. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-002

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represent European ecological relations and dependencies. To be sure, not all of the activists were enthusiastic proponents of a united Europe, but the framing seemed to help their (local) cause. The flag attached to the issue of the birds provided a convincing narrative about shared responsibilities and heritage. Its transnationality even offered an alternative interpretation of European relations and identities in times of growing geopolitical tensions between East and West. Within that very same year, the area was declared a nature reserve by the German state of Lower Saxony, and Allied forces moved to new bombing ranges. This early European environmental initiative subsequently drifted into obscurity. Some decades later, however, the site would be integrated into a large national park system. Today, the Dutch, German, and Danish Wadden Sea is protected within the framework of several European directives and international agreements such as the World Heritage Convention.¹ The snapshot of the Knechtsand occupation exemplifies the multifaceted past of actors and “non-traditional” activities which were part of the emergence of what we perceive as “Europe” today. It also shows how actors and their activities made environmental protection an issue beyond their own region and nation-state: by connecting to like-minded women and men in other parts of Europe or even beyond, by building transregional and transnational networks, which they sometimes labelled European, and by framing their concerns as being of European and sometimes global relevance. Furthermore, the example highlights how environmental activists aligned nature with political agendas in their campaigns. It was the migrating habits of the “European” shelducks, which both encouraged the activists to reach out and to make their cause European and provided them with convincing arguments to finally triumph over a powerful opponent. As this book will show, the history of the Knechtsand is just one of many historical episodes in the twentieth century which can only be fully grasped when considered in both a contemporary European and an environmental history perspective. To this end, the authors trace how people all over Europe framed natures and environments over the course of the twentieth century, and the ways their societies used, consumed, and protected them as matters of European relevance and concern. This provides us not only with insights into what certain people thought of as needing to be addressed at a European level but also how these people conceived of Europe. Indeed, some of the issues that were perceived as “European” at the time appear in a historical analysis as questions that were either much narrower (local and provincial) or broader (global and international). The book title Greening Europe: The Protection of the Environment evokes the idea of people getting involved. Taking up on the series editors’ idea of putting activities at centre stage, the volume focuses on the many ways people have in-

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teracted with nature and made it an issue of European concern. As will become clear in the course of this book, European environmental engagement is the outcome of a many diverse activities, including counting, visualizing, tracking, contextualizing, signing petitions, erecting fences, writing, networking, protesting, and anticipating. In their investigation of such activities, the book chapters ask who these actors were, what were their motives and means, and how notions of Europe mattered in these environmental activities. As such, each chapter exposes some of the many entanglements of activists across the subcontinent who set out to connect, network, and exchange knowledge, worldviews, and strategies beyond their national horizons. However, the actors and activities that this book traces are not limited to humans. Indeed, taking into account the agency of nature or the environment is at the heart of what environmental history can contribute to our understanding of European history. Thus, this book includes the eminent role nature played in “making” and “doing” Europe and “being” European. It asks how the changing physical environment affected both human and non-human activities and, conversely, how those activities affected the European environment.

1 European Environmental History Writing European history in a truly transnational and European manner that goes beyond comparative studies is challenging. Almost every scholar of European studies has been struggling to get hold of the subcontinent’s geographical, cultural, political, and socioeconomic character. Europe’s fluidity and its evershifting meanings are a constantly recurring theme in the historiographic literature.² As soon as we try to nail it down it fades, blurs, and starts to change. It is always ready to elude our definitions. Thus, most historians of Europe avoid giving a definition in a strict sense but instead point to the fluctuating nature of the subject. To the editors of European History Online, for instance, Europe is a “constantly changing communicative space which witnessed extremely varied processes of interaction, circulation, overlapping and entanglement, of exchange and transfer, but also confrontation, resistance and demarcation.”³ Such a framing describes the need for an open and process-orientated approach towards researching European history. It cannot be fixed to stable geographies or territories and the idea of Europe extends beyond a mere physical space in many ways. Recent historiographical accounts of “Europeanization” have likewise emphasized that this process should be understood as being non-linear, consisting instead of parallel and often fragmented developments.⁴

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The key feature of environmental history is its inclusion of nature in the historical analysis. It asks how societies have interacted with ecological processes in the past and how humans have related to the rest of nature.⁵ This means that humans are understood as being at once part of nature and separate from nature, and that societies are intimately connected to their environments. Environmental history explores how these dialectic relationships between humans and nature and between societies and environments evolved over time. It is most interested in the reciprocal influences that shape both societies and environments. Two basic approaches to environmental history can be distinguished: a materialist and an idealist one. The materialist approach focuses on the reconstruction of past environmental conditions and material interactions between societies and the environment. The idealistic approach is interested in how people perceived and evaluated their changing environments and how these perceptions and evaluations are reflected in the discourses, symbols, and actions of societies and individuals. While the materialist approach reconstructs and analyses human-environment relations on a structural level, the idealistic approach focuses on the human actors and how they attribute meaning and to what. In the early years of environmental history, extensive debates were held as to which of these approaches should have priority. But as the field has established itself, these debates have ebbed away and made way for the insight that not only is there room for both approaches, but both approaches are a necessary part of a comprehensive environmental history. Only by combining the two can the vision of environmental history be realized: to represent past societies in the interactions with their environments. “That vision is inclusive – neither simply idealist nor only materialist, but always necessarily both.”⁶ With its focus on human activities, this handbook leans towards the idealistic side, but it also takes into account the material dimensions of past environmental interactions as well their non-human participants. Environmental history, still a rather new field, has grown considerably over the past few decades. Inspired by the “environmental turn” in the early 1970s, it emerged in the United States and developed into a solid field of research in the 1980s, historicizing contemporary environmental problems like resource depletion and the pollution and degradation of air, water and land. In Europe, the discipline began to flourish in the 1990s and saw considerable growth of research that led to the launching of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) in 2001. Although the ESEH’s biannual conferences encompass a rich variety of research fields that examine the many European entanglements of human-nature relations on a regional, national, and sometimes transnational level, a truly European environmental history has yet to be written.⁷ This is also true for the history of European nature protection and environmental acti-

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vism. Accounts of European environmental history have emphasized the tremendous difficulties of writing anything like a grande histoire due to the heterogeneous nature of the subcontinent.⁸ The splendid encyclopaedic book series Making Europe tackled this challenge by viewing European history and its continuities and transformations through the lens of technology.⁹ Volume 3 of the series, which looks at Europe’s infrastructure transition, in particular explors how infrastructure projects fundamentally transformed the natural environments of Europe and points to some initiatives and activities that set out to channel, manage, and sometimes even stop such transformations.¹⁰ Our book takes a similar approach, which draws on the strengths inherent to environmental history, namely, offering a perspective that not only transcends traditional national historiographies but also thinks in different spaces, timeframes, and chronologies and refers to other turning points than those marked by political history.¹¹ When looking at a European environmental chronology, the most fundamental shifts in human-nature relations are not necessarily found in events on the world stage, but in changes in energy systems, exploitation of natural resources, and land-use patterns. The global transfer of species since 1500 (“Columbian Exchange”), the multiple agrarian and industrial revolutions from the eighteenth to twentieth century, and the oil-fuelled “Great Acceleration” since the 1950s are key entries in such a chronology. Looking at conservation and environmental movements, we find strong evidence of turning points at around 1910 and in the early 1970s. During the decades around 1900, there was a tremendous acceleration in the exchange of concepts, scientific knowledge, terminology and strategies. International and European conferences increased, as did the output of publications and campaigns. While the World Wars hindered collaboration and networking of activists, they did not stop these activities in the long run. The late 1960s set the stage for a new global environmental awareness, which fostered initiatives that were fundamentally European in their conception. In both cases, the preceding decades had witnessed a steady growth in activity which was then translated into political programmes and action.

2 Conceptual Approaches Conceptually, this handbook is, first, not just about environmentalism, but rather about the broader history of how women and men have protected their environments. Environmentalism generally refers to the political and ethical movement that evolved in the 1960s and incorporated various types of efforts to change human-nature relations. The history of environmentalism is part of this handbook, but it reaches beyond a genealogy of a social movement and

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is instead interested in the larger picture of how European environmental relations today are historically framed by the many ways people have questioned and managed nature in the past. Second, the focus is on contemporary history, but it does not stop there. A longue durée perspective helps to understand how environmental relations and interactions evolved over time. This becomes evident when realizing that modern European concepts of dealing with nature have their roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹² For example, the term “sustainability” was coined in the period of mercantilism in the early eighteenth century, while nature conservation as a moral endeavour and an organized enterprise emerged at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century but was influenced by earlier Enlightenment and Romantic thinking and feeling. The term “environment” was established in the early decades of the twentieth century by the zoologist Jacob von Uexküll to describe the specific settings of all living creatures including all the relations between them. It was only roughly 50 years later, in the late 1960s, that the term was endowed with socio-political connotations and became a key concept in the global ecological discourse.¹³ These examples illustrate that when thinking and writing about contemporary European history of environmental protection we would be well advised to not narrow our focus on the time post1945, but to include the long twentieth century, starting in the late nineteenth and reaching into the twenty-first century, and to occasionally extend the analysis even further back. Third, given the heterogeneous and changeable historical character of the subcontinent, we do not attempt to cover all environmental issues in all parts of Europe throughout the twentieth century. The chapters of this book display not only the diversity of European natures but also the variety of ways that actors chose to approach these natures. The chapters also highlight the actors’ search for a European nature and how they related such a nature to the one on their doorsteps as well to the ones they may have experienced outside of Europe. Most chapters have more to say about Western and Northern Europe and less on Eastern and Southern Europe. On the one hand, this mainly reflects the state of research in environmental history, which has been pursued more extensively in some parts of Europe than in others. On the other, almost all of the chapters also demonstrate how environmental issues transcend the East-West and North-South divide still common in European historiography and anticipate what new findings might derive from future research. Fourth, we would like to emphasize environmental history’s focus on mutual relations between humans and the rest of nature. This implies taking physicality seriously. An environmental historian’s perspective on European history embraces historical aspects of materiality and spatiality and the many ways people

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have interacted with the continent’s physical features and attributes and vice versa. In order to understand the particular trajectory of Europe’s environmental regimes and values we have to consider Europe as both a shared social and geographical space. We have to correlate spatial dimensions with political, socioeconomic, technical, and cultural aspects to find out how humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms as well as environmental ideas, concepts, and concerns travelled across and beyond the continent, and thereby created both a European environment and the endeavour to protect it. By correlating these activities, it becomes possible to understand the fundamental tension in European developments with regard to the environment. Consider, for example, the dichotomy evident in EU politics: We can literally watch the environmental degradation caused by European policy instruments – the EU’s system of agricultural subventions is just one of many. Yet, simultaneously the EU has created instruments to contain or at least regulate ecological degradation – like the Natura 2000 network. In order to demonstrate these ambivalences and irritations it is therefore essential, fifth, to avoid simplistic stories of either progress and consolidation or degradation and loss, but rather to look for stories of the paradoxical and the incommensurate and of the simultaneous and conflicting, which are decisive for understanding the complexity and nonlinearity of European history. Sixth, this handbook follows the paths taken by historical actors involved in diagnosing and framing fundamental problems that evolved from the use of the environment. It sets out to write environmental history by looking at those approaches which used Europe as a frame of reference for protecting the environment and by identifying those initiatives which developed Europe-wide momentum. Who were the actors who watched, measured, and questioned changes in the human-nature relation and examined the fundamental shifts in using and exploiting, exploring and protecting nature in a European context? While politicians, bureaucrats, experts, and scientists are obvious participants in these histories, who else was involved? What about hunters, birders, tourists, teachers, foresters, people living along major transit routes or near nuclear power stations, what about people who wanted to be able swim in rivers again? What about nonhuman participants such as eels, beavers, and quails? The activity-centred approach can help to overcome the vagueness that often comes with attempts to write histories of Europe. Looking for human and non-human actors in European environmental history makes it possible to reveal not only the diversity of ways of dealing with nature but also the many inconsistencies and asynchronities in the making of modern Europe. Another advantage of the activity-centred approach is that it keeps us from receding behind the passive voice that is so widespread in narratives of Europe. Europe might be an “imagined community” but

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from an actor’s point of view it is much more than just a metaphor, but a reality whose contours can be seen and traced. Seventh and finally, the chapters endeavour to identify European moments of contact and collaboration across borders and regions that were rooted in environmental concern and action. European moments may embrace individuals as well as groups of women and men who interacted across national borders, created regulatory mechanisms for their transnational cooperation, and founded organizations or established other forms of European networks. Of especial interest are those contact zones and paths of exchange of knowledge, strategies, and agendas that allowed an environmental agenda to emerge. Such agenda-building often resembled a sedimentation process. Bilateral or multilateral relations allowed for cooperation that was increasingly oriented towards Europe and understood European integration as a frame of reference. “Europe” or arguing in terms of the “European” became a kind of hallmark or promise that endowed efforts with legitimacy and helped to create a sense of something like European solidarity in civil society, but also promoted competition and rivalry among actors. This process never went uncontested and was anything but a smooth and direct journey towards European unification, modernization, and liberalization. Rather, the activities and negotiations always stirred protest, caused misunderstandings and had to confront criticism and scandals.

3 Structure of the Book This volume is about the European history of protecting the environment. It is not meant to be encyclopaedic in nature. Rather, the individual chapters offer insight into some of the key issues that proved crucial for the European history of environmental debates and activism. The 15 chapters are divided into three sections representing the main fields of activity of environmental protection: I. Conserving Nature, II. Sustaining Livelihoods, III. Preserving Environments. While the chapters of section I and II cover all of the long twentieth century, the chapters of section III focus more closely on the “environmental” decades since the 1970s. Section I Conserving Nature assembles five chapters that mainly deal with the conservation of habitats and species and refer to the concept of shared agency. All of them explore cases in which men and women started to frame species and spaces as being of European significance and what role flora and fauna played in such debates and discourses. Chapter 2 by Anna-Katharina Wöbse looks into the environmental history of European bird politics and shifting human-animal relations over the twentieth century. The activities, habits, and

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routes of migrating birds forced scientists, activists, hunters, farmers, and politicians to take into account spatial and ecological dimensions that lay beyond their spheres of influence. Birds triggered activities that were European in scope: efforts to count, watch, monitor and protect migrating birds were joined by the negotiation, and drafting of laws concerning pan-European species. Thus, the history of bird politics provides insights into the Europeanization of routines, practices and regime building that were shaped by natural dynamics as well as human-made processes. In Chapter 3, Raf de Bont explores the ways European and non-European nature were contrasted with one another, which played a prominent role in early conservation organizations that defined themselves as “international”. The European actors involved in those organizations had specific images of the wilderness in distant places abroad, which influenced the approaches they developed when framing ideals of European landscapes and the corresponding management plans and protection schemes. De Bont demonstrates how European nature was (both literally and figuratively) constructed through its others. Chapter 4 looks at the meandering narratives of “European” nature through the trajectory of rewilding and reintroduction schemes. By following the tracks of charismatic quadrupeds like beavers and wolves and anonymous molluscs like the European oyster, Anna-Katharina Wöbse and HansPeter Ziemek capture the tension between controlling wild nature and acknowledging or even promoting its specific agency. In Chapter 5, Peter Coates embraces a truly European perspective on animal-human relations. By following the fascinating story of the European eel, he sheds light on the extra-European and global dimensions of the European eel’s contemporary history, in which Europe’s disparate water bodies are shown to be particular varieties of a shared bioregion and animal landscape: the “eelscape”. The mobile creature affects multi-scalar stakeholders who have an interest in the recovery and sustainable use of the eel population as well as the conservation of local eel heritage. The complex set of animal-human relations include political schemes like the EU recovery plan and intersections with transboundary protection regimes for other “European” species of wildlife. Concluding the section, Chapter 6 by Astrid M. Eckert and Pavla Šimková turns to the spaces where the Iron Curtain once divided Europe. The military confrontation along the East-West border produced particular environments and preserved sensitive habitats. A phalanx of activists set out to use the opportunity of the end of the Cold War and the push for European integration to create the so-called Green Belt, an ecological corridor running from the Arctic Circle down to the Balkan peninsula. Their campaign coincided, as the authors demonstrate, with a paradigm shift in nature conservation that favoured the creation of ecological networks and corridors and required transboundary and pan-European cooperation.

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The chapters of Section II Preserving Livelihoods are concerned with activities mainly aimed at creating, maintaining, or restoring a healthy environment for the human population. The legal protection of forests looks back across an extraordinarily long history in Europe. In Chapter 7, Richard Hölzl and K. Jan Oosthoek survey the deep roots and many branches of modern European forestry and they show how actors, concepts, and practices travelled all over Europe and beyond. By pointing to continuities and turning points as well as communalities and particularities, they connect a rich and diverse European history of forest protection to today’s European and international policies. In Chapter 8, Ute Hasenöhrl and Robert Groß explore the close but often tense relationship between tourism, regional development, and nature conservation. Over the course of the twentieth century, ever larger numbers of Europeans began crossing borders to spend their holidays abroad. Focusing on mass tourism, the authors elaborate on the fundamental tension between consuming and preserving nature in the form of recreational landscapes and how actors in different parts of Europe have tried to accommodate these conflicting goals on the local, national, and international level. Chapter 9 by Romed Aschwanden, Maria Buck, Patrick Kupper, and Kira J. Schmidt investigates the environmental history of Alps. Arguably both Europe’s most sublime landscape and its most central periphery, the Alps have been the subject of considerable attention far beyond the region itself. In the twentieth century, the Alps became a hotspot of European tourism, a major source of European hydroelectricity, and prominent artery in the transport of goods across Europe. Through their efforts to protect Alpine nature from these international threats, several generations of nature conservationists and environmental activists contributed to the transformation of the Alpine mountain range from a European landscape into a European political space. Chapter 10 by Simo Laakkonen and Tuomas Räsänen turns to the Baltic Sea as a prime example of a historical European maritime commons. The authors show how contemporary environmental regimes emerged from industrializing coastal towns and cities. Starting in the 1960s, with the Cold War’s frontline running right through the Baltic Sea, actors on both sides of the Iron Curtain succeeded in coordinating their efforts to reduce water pollution. This cooperation later on facilitated the adoption of environmental standards of the European Union in Eastern Europe. Chapter 11 by Heike Weber explores everyday practices of recycling, and disposal to tackle the question of a distinctive European way into mass consumerism. When environmental consciousness entered political agendas and consumers’ mentalities in the 1970s and became a potent environmental movement, mass consumption had profoundly transformed Western European societies, while Eastern Europe – i. e. socialist mass consumption – took a different path alto-

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gether. Recycling provides a pertinent example of distortions between environmental hopes and everyday consumption practices. The chapters of Section III Sustaining Environments centre on the idea of the environment, which integrated elements of the concern for the conservation of nature and for the preservation of livelihoods into a common conceptual framework. Chapter 12 by Silke Vetter-Schultheiss sheds light on the visual history of European conservation and environmentalism through the series of stamps issued by national institutions to celebrate the European Conservation Year of 1970. The initiative became a decisive moment in promoting the idea of “Europe”, as the accelerating process of integration and unification of (Western) Europe met with heated debates on the state of its environment. The stamps reflect the many diverse national visual strategies to not only represent Europe’s natural heritage (or what was felt to be such) but also to raise European awareness of the need to preserve it as a common goal. In Chapter 13, Astrid Kirchhof und JanHenrik Meyer explore the European history of the promises and conflicts connected with nuclear power. After the Second World War, European politicians successfully promoted the vision of nuclear power as the energy source of the future and a unifying force that would create a strong, secure, and peaceful Western Europe. However, starting in the 1970s, a growing number of men and women began to challenge this vision. Nuclear technology became increasingly divisive, both within societies as conflicts between promoters and opponents intensified, and between nation-states as some opted out of nuclear power, while others adhered to it. Some environmental problems notoriously disregard political borders and create their own topographies, connecting emitters and recipients of environmental pollution in uneasy transnational relations. In Chapter 14, Arne Kaijser looks at one such problem, namely polluted air, and details the patterns that emerged as the result of power plants and industries all over Europe emitting large quantities of sulphur dioxide. Transported over vast distances through the air, the particles came down as “acid rain” in places far away from where the emissions had originated. After the identification of this mechanism in the late 1960s, scientists, policymakers, and diplomats engaged in international collaborations and negotiations which gradually progressed into a joint understanding and approach to protecting the shared European atmosphere from pollution. In Chapter 15, Elke Seefried shows how in the 1970s and 1980s international networks of politicians, diplomats, and environmentalists gave the century-old idea of sustainability a new meaning and succeeded in establishing “sustainable development” as the new leading concept of environmental policy in Europe and the world. Although grassroots environmental movements initially greeted this concept with suspicion, they increasingly adopted the term and set in motion bottom-up processes, which complemented and

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sometimes contrasted with the top-down programmes developed by experts in the United Nations and the European Union. In the last of the case studies, Chapter 16, Liesbeth van de Grift and Wim van Meurs discuss the historical evolution of the idea of biodiversity, which plays such a prominent role in today’s European environmental regimes and policies. By looking at debates by international organizations and the many stakeholders involved, they explain how a concept of nature protection that focused on species and their habitats developed into an understanding of biodiversity as a crucial and yet contested feature of healthy and resilient ecosystems as something fundamental for contemporary Europe. The volume concludes with a brief outlook by the editors.

Notes  Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Knechtsand: A Site of Memory in Flux”, Global Environment 11 (2013): 160 – 183; Karsten Reise, A Natural History of the Wadden Sea: Riddled by Contingencies (Leeuwarden/Wilhelmshaven: Waddenacademie, 2013); Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Space, Place, Land and Sea: The Ecological ‘Discovery’ of the Global Wadden Sea”, in Spatializing the History of Ecology: Sites, Journeys, Mappings, eds. Raf de Bont and Jens Lachmund (London: Routledge, 2017), 204– 222.  See the recent discussion in the Journal of Modern European History: Jörn Leonhard, “Comparison, Transfer and Entanglement, Or: How to Write Modern European History Today?”, Journal of Modern European History/Zeitschrift für moderne europäische Geschichte/Revue d’histoire européenne contemporaine 14, no. 2 (2016): 149 – 163, doi:10.2307/26266233 (accessed 22 July 2020); Michel Espagne, Jonas Kreienbaum, Frederic Cooper, Christoph Conrad, and Philipp Ther, “How to Write Modern European History Today? Statements to Jörn Leonhard’s JMEH-Forum”, Journal of Modern European History/Zeitschrift für moderne europäische Geschichte/Revue d’histoire européenne contemporaine 14, no. 4 (2016): 465 – 491, doi:10.2307/26266258 (accessed 22 July 2020).  EGO-Redaktion, European History online, http://ieg-ego.eu/en/ego/ego-european-history-online, Paragraph 1. For a more detailed introduction to the concept, see Joachim Berger, Jennifer Willenberg, and Lisa Landes, “EGO | European History Online: A Transcultural History of Europe on the Internet”, in European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz, 3 December 2010, http://www.ieg-ego.eu/introduction-2010-en (accessed 4 October 2020).  Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Kiran Klaus Patel, “Europäisierung”, Version: 1.0, DocupediaZeitgeschichte, 29 November 2010. http://docupedia.de/zg/hirschhausen_patel_europaeisie rung_v1_de_2010, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok.2.313.v1 (accessed 3 March 2020); Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Kiran Klaus Patel, “Europeanization and History: An Introduction”, in Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches, eds. Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1– 18.  This formulation was introduced to environmental history by William Beinart and Peter Coates, Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995), 1. For an introduction to the field of environmental history, see Andrew C. Isenberg, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (Oxford Handbooks) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Donald J. Hughes, What Is Environmental History? (second edn, Malden,

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MA: Polity, 2016); Melanie Arndt, “Environmental History”, Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 2016, https://doi.org/10.14765/ZZF.DOK.2.700.V3; Patrick Kupper, Umweltgeschichte, Göttingen: UTB, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021.  Andrew C. Isenberg, “Introduction: A New Environmental History”, in Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, 14. John R. McNeill, one of the most influential environmental historians, considers political and policy-related environmental history as an additional approach. See John R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History”, History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 42, no. 4 (2003): 5 – 43.  Martin Kalb, “Moving Beyond the Nation State? Reflections on European Environmental History”, Global Environment 12 (2013): 130 – 165; Frank Uekötter, “Gibt es eine europäische Geschichte der Umwelt? Bemerkungen zu einer überfälligen Debatte”, in: Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, 2009, www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/fdae-1487 (accessed 7 August 2020); Nils Freytag, “Nature and Environment, in Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), 2016, www.ieg-ego.eu/freytagn-2016-en (accessed 21 February 2021); Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Nature: From Protecting Regional Landscapes to Regionalist Self-Assertion in the Age of the Global Environment”, in Regionalism and Modern Europe: Identity Construction and Movements from 1890 to the Present Day, eds. Xosé M. Núñez Seixas and Eric Storm (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 65 – 82; Robert Delort and François Walter, Histoire de l’environnement européen (Paris: PUF, 2001); Kupper, Umweltgeschichte is addressing this gap.  Joachim Radkau, “Exceptionalism in European Environmental History”, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 33 (2003): 23 – 44, https://prae.perspectivia.net/publikationen/bulletinwashington/2003-33-2/0023-0044 (accessed 5 May 2020).  Johan Schot and Phil Scranton, Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850 – 2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).  Per Högselius, Arne Kaijser, and Erik van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).  Frank Uekötter, ed., The Turning Points of Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry, A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 39 – 51; Kupper, Umweltgeschichte, Ch. 2.  Nature as a European concept stretches as far back as antiquity, denoting rather ambiguously both the opposite of culture as well as the natural surroundings people live with and are part of. See Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).  Georg Toepfer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie: Geschichte und Theorie der biologischen Grundbegriffe; Band 3: Parasitismus – Zweckmäßigkeit (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2011), 566 – 607; Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, Environment: A History of the Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

Bibliography Arndt, Melanie. “Environmental History”, Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 2016, https://docupedia. de/zg/Arndt_environmental_history_v3_en_2016. Conway, Martin and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds. Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

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Delort, Robert and François Walter, Histoire de l’environnement européen, Paris: PUF, 2001. Freytag, Nils: “Nature and Environment”. Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), 2016. http:// www.ieg-ego.eu/freytagn-2016-en. Isenberg, Andrew C., ed. Oxford Handbook of Environmental History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Kalb, Martin. “Moving Beyond the Nation State? Reflections on European Environmental History”. Global Environment 12 (2013). Kupper, Patrick. Umweltgeschichte. Göttingen: UTB, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021. Högselius, Per, Arne Kaijser, and Erik van der Vleuten. Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Schot, Johan, and Phil Scranton, eds. Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850 – 2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 – 2019. Warde, Paul, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin. Environment: A History of the Idea. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

I Conserving Nature

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2 Counting Birds: Protecting European Avifauna and Habitats Abstract This chapter sheds light on the environmental history of European bird politics and shifting human-animal relations in the long twentieth century by focusing on two overarching foci: the relations and interactions between human and non-human actors and between biology, geographies, and politics. The agency of migrating birds caused activities of ornithologists, preservationists, and policy-makers and both nourished and challenged ideas of European distinctiveness. Looking at the history of bird politics not only provides insights into the Europeanization of routines, practices, and regime-building that were shaped by natural dynamics as well as human made processes, but also reflects the fundamental changes that took place in European land management during the twentieth century. Keywords birds; bird protection; wetlands; European agro-industrial transformation; Ramsar convention On 5 June 1899, the Danish schoolteacher Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen caught a starling in his garden.¹ There was nothing particularly notable about this as starlings were widespread. The medium-sized passerine birds live around human habitations, attracted by open meadows, the dung of grazing livestock, and fruit trees. Mortensen (see figure 1) neither intended to kill a bird seen by many as a pest nor make use of it for food purposes. He would set it free again almost immediately. Before doing so, however, he would put a tiny aluminium ring around its leg: light, bendable, non-rusting. On the ring, there was in inscription saying: “ADRESSE MORTENSEN VIBORG DANMARK EUROPA”.² This banding and branding was done in the name of science in order to investigate the general question of bird movements, for there was still little detailed knowledge and many unanswered questions about their migratory behaviour. Mortensen ringed the bird to determine where starlings disappeared to in the autumn and where they returned from when they came back again the next spring. In the course of that year, Mortensen ringed another 165 starlings. In parallel, friends and colleagues of his started publishing notes about the experiment in journals around Europe. Soon after the starlings left Vyborg, Mortensen received letters from Dutch and Norwegian hunters, who had shot some of ‘his’ birds and informed the Danish ornithologist about their findings: Thanks to the chains crehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-003

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Figure 1: The Danish ornithologist Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen, undated. Wikipedia Commons.

ated through ringing, hunting, and reporting, individual birds could be identified and tracked. Mortensen’s idea called into life a fast-growing system for gathering data on migrating birds.³ Previous theories about bird migration based on rather vague ideas about routes and reasons turned into validated knowledge. Birds followed their own maps – maps that differed fundamentally from European geographies characterized by national borders, territorial waters, and lands. Their flyways extended far beyond any political boundaries and shed light on the many physical entanglements and exchanges that connected the European subcontinent to other parts of the world. The agency of birds and their urge to travel back and forth would come into contact with the activities of ornithologists, preservationists, and policy-makers and would both nourish and challenge ideas of European distinctiveness. In the late nineteenth century, the interest in birds and the exploration of their lives, habits, routes, and abode had turned into a popular and quickly spreading phenomenon. While watching birds, as important cohabitants of human spheres, is an activity humans have engaged in throughout their history, it now gained a new significance: binoculars and field guides made birdwatching an accessible pastime that developed almost simultaneously in Northern America and Europe. In the course of the twentieth century, birds would become

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vanguard and flagship species in almost all transboundary environmental conservation regimes.⁴ The reason for their predominance is easy to identify. Watching, listening, and recording belongs to the “practice of play”, as sociologist Stefan Bargheer puts it: “What constitutes bird watching as a game is not the mere incidents of witnessing the presence of a bird, however far or remote, but the coordinated effort to spot, identify, and record wild birds on a regular basis.”⁵ And preserving the game pieces turned out to be an essential part of the game. The growing ornithological interest in bird migration met with evolving discourses on bird protection and management all over Europe. While there is an abundance of literature on the international history of ornithology and national histories of preservation, little has been written about the shifting European human-bird relations in the last century.⁶ This chapter sheds light on the environmental history of European bird politics and the shifting human-animal relations in the long twentieth century by centring around two overarching foci: the relations and interactions between human and nonhuman actors and between biology, geographies, and politics. How did the perception of migrating birds as a European common asset change narratives and how did the restless commuting of birds influence scientific and cultural concepts of Europe? The flyways of birds influenced the process of mapping Europe as something bigger than just national territories. Moreover, the birds triggered activities of a European scope: scientific activities like counting, watching, monitoring, and protecting migrating birds and adding these numbers to European databases were joined by actions with political consequences in the form of negotiating, discussing, and writing laws concerning pan-European species. Thus, looking at the history of bird politics can provide insights into the Europeanization of routines, practices, and regime-building that were shaped by natural dynamics as well as human-made processes. The peculiar entanglement and interaction of birds and humans helps to understand how the sense of a common European environment evolved. On one hand, the birds’ routes influenced the ways Europe was mapped and framed, as their geographies differed from those based on national considerations and borders. Watching birds would raise fundamental questions of belonging and origin. Birds and their migration patterns would continuously challenge the ways scientists, birders, and preservationists handled concepts like homeland, Europe, and the global ‘other’ (see chapter 3 by De Bont). On the other hand, human actors who were interested in imaging Europe as a specific region defined by cultural and natural conditions deliberately used migrating birds for creating European narratives and building a sense of a shared space distinct from other settings. These narratives involved a certain selectiveness in order to make the birds serve human goals. Such interactions not only served to frame the activists’ own identities of

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being part of a European constituency but also to create ideas of Europe as a natural and cultural commons. The article starts with a brief sketch of what “Europe” means to birds crossing the subcontinent and how their habits and movements gave rise to activities concerned with birds as European avifauna. It then explores the more recent history of bird protection initiatives and sheds light on the ways experts, elites, and social movements turned preservation into a moral yardstick about the state of European civilization and an indicator of the capacity to save European natural heritage.

1 Tracking Birds Birds are warm-blooded vertebrates; they have beaks and feathers and lay eggs – and almost all of them can fly. There are about 10,000 bird species living worldwide, eight hundred of which have a range that includes Europe. From a bird’s perspective, the subcontinent is both inhospitable and welcoming. For millions of years, it was mainly covered by ice sheets – a rather unsuitable environment for breeding and feeding. As the climate underwent various changes, the birds explored: As soon as the conditions for reproduction or survival were better somewhere else, they would migrate.⁷ With the ice retreating in warmer times, birds migrated increasingly to the northern parts of Europe, which provided rich feeding grounds. Today, the area we think of as Europe, which forms a sort of small appendix of the larger Eurasian landmass, is characterized by mountainous regions dividing north and south, long and fragmented shorelines, temperate climates, and winds prevailing from the west. Europe offers a great variety of landscapes and ecotones attractive for birds. Once dominated by large forests, almost all areas of the continent have been modified by human activity. Birds have adapted to some of the changes and even benefitted from the mosaic structure. Moreover, in summer there are many spots that offer abundant food and long daylight hours: perfect conditions for raising hungry fledglings. In winter, however, it is cold and dark – not at all attractive for many birds. That is one reason why birds migrate: they use their ability to travel in order to minimize risks and make optimum use of the advantages of different climate regions. Some species are partial migrants that overwinter in some parts of their summer range but migrate from places where winter is harsher.⁸ Over half a billion birds make the journey between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa twice a year. Trumpeting and rattling flocks of migrating Eurasian cranes or moving black clouds of European starlings gathering for their seasonal journeys, have always attracted humans’ attention. As we know from scientific descriptions of the nineteenth

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century, birds were a consistent feature of European landscapes and often came with a lot of noise and uproar. Many islands, dunes, and rocks were covered with large colonies of breeding birds, and so were fens and swamps. Local people made use of the eggs and plumage, hunted them for food or to keep them away from fields and vineyards. Returning birds like swallows or larks were prominent features in popular culture, songbirds were celebrated for controlling insect pests or simply because they sang. However, of the 800 bird species that are listed as “European birds”, only 445 breed here.⁹ Their transnational character has been a riddle for most of European history. There is a long tradition of studying the phenomenon of bird migration – as far back as antiquity, Aristoteles and Pliny the Elder offered some rational explanations as well as rather remarkable theories. For centuries, the legend kept reoccurring that birds hibernated and swallows spent the wintertime in flocks in muddy waters.¹⁰ One of the most popular birds in the European history of ornithology is the white stork, whose striking appearance and mysterious migration patterns gave rise to many legends. In 1822, one of the large birds was shot in North-Eastern Germany and sent to the museum in Rostock as there was something curious about it: it had an African arrow in its throat (see figure 2). Apparently, the stork had survived the attack of an African hunter before falling prey to a German shooter. The specimen offered crucial insights into the migration patterns of birds and whetted general interest in birds and ornithology.¹¹ It epitomized the myriads of questions the young science of ornithology attempted to answer: Where did the birds come from, where did they go to? Did they anticipate changing weather, did the parents teach the youngsters when to leave and which route to take? How did they survive the strenuous flight, did they use rivers as flyways, which species flew at night, and at what altitude? Studying birds meant thinking transregionally rather than in terms of national states. During the nineteenth century scholars like the German Johann Friedrich Naumann, the Swedish Johan Axel Palmén, and Alexander von Middendorf, a Russian zoologist of Baltic German origin, propelled ornithology forward by providing new theories about migration routes and distances birds were capable of travelling. The British businessman and self-taught ornithologist Henry E. Dresser published a History of the Birds of Europe and offered a fresh take on the map of Europe as he “avoided taking the limits of Europe, politically speaking, as previous authors on the subject have done”, but included the Western Palearctic region, and “thus adopted natural instead of political boundaries”.¹² Dresser referred to the concept of biogeographic realms dividing the planet’s surface: According to such zoogeographic metacategories introduced by the British zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater in 1858, these regions referred to entities characterized by a shared evolutionary

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Figure 2: The stork that carried an African arrow. Photo: Zoological Collection of the University of Rostock.

history of the living organisms they contain, including migrating birds. The socalled Western Palearctic encompassed the region composed of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa (see figure 3). Its exact boundaries, however, varied depending on the (scientific) authority in question.¹³ In the course of the nineteenth century, the situation of birds living in or crossing Europe started to change. Diminishing numbers of wildfowl and songbirds coincided with changing scientific debates and a growing interest in the birds’ nature. Industrialization in many parts of Europe, and the fast-growing infrastructure that came with it, ended the marginal status of many peripheries and would steadily shrink birds’ territories. The agro-industrial transformation of the nineteenth century altered much of the European rural landscape: Melioration and reclamation schemes turned former wastelands into fields and meadows, and new infrastructures like straight canals, roads, and utility poles exerted discipline upon meandering and seemingly disorderly topographies. While some species like sparrows, starlings, and pigeons made use of the opportunities of-

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Figure 3: Europe – just a province of the Western Palearctic. Map: Wikipedia Commons.

fered by urban spaces, others evidently suffered from the human expansion and control. Declining numbers of insectivorous birds caused insect plagues and crop losses, as noticed by farmers and foresters alike. Already in 1862, German and Austro-Hungarian agriculture lobbyists had approached their ministries to kick off an international agreement to protect birds “useful for agriculture”; although framed as “international”, it actually involved European governments only.¹⁴ In 1884, the first International Ornithological Congress gathered in Vienna. The experts and governmental delegates agreed to establish a standardized nomenclature for European species, to set up a network of field stations that would collect data on numbers of migrating birds and provide details about declining bird populations, and to draft an International Convention for the Protection of Birds.¹⁵ This convention, which would eventually be signed in 1902 in Paris, distinguished between useful and harmful birds (the latter group including corvids,

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birds of prey, and fish-consuming species like cormorants and herons), suggested closed seasons, and forbade certain types of trapping and poisoning.¹⁶ In the mid-nineteenth century, the artist and ornithologist Heinrich Gätke settled on the small island of Heligoland and was deeply impressed by the sight and sound of millions of birds passing by. The locals seemed interested in this only as an abundant seasonal supply of animal protein, but Gätke, a keen bird hunter and collector of stuffed specimens, started to systematically watch, study, and describe the birds’ mass movements. Gätke considered Heligoland one of the best places in the world to study the many unanswered questions about the habits and routes of migrating birds. Gätke’s writings echoed not only his fascination with the birds, but also concern about diminishing numbers. Throughout his book, he catalogued forms of human-caused destruction that had such great consequences for the birds: removal of bush and shrubs from fields and cutting down forests and hedges, as well as the growing number of tourists who hunted birds for fun.¹⁷ Observing the myriads of skylarks landing on the small island, Gätke compared the innumerable birds to “flakes of a snow storm”. It made him wonder about a “the diminution of numbers of birds and the necessity for protection”. For one witnessing the masses of larks “these complaints seem quite incomprehensible”.¹⁸ After describing his conflicting findings Gätke concluded: “To be sure, if after some thousand years, all the land from the Neva to Kamtschatka were to become as thickly populated and as extensively cultivated as central Europe is at the present day, it would indeed be a bad outlook for our little feathered friends […].”¹⁹ Birds were under threat across Europe, Gätke concluded, and foreign “treasure houses” and “unspoiled” regions were the only way that Europe could ensure the survival of migrating birds. In his writing, we find key components of the Europeanization of bird protection and its central paradox: It was European science and culture that valued the avifauna, but it was also the European economy and expansion that threatened it. Thus, Europe depended on non-European wilderness to keep its stock of avifauna intact. This observation anticipated a situation which would play out in colonial conservationism – the ‘Other’ nature would be expected to compensate for what had been lost or was about to be lost in Europe. In this case, however, Gätke recognized the transcontinental character of birds and drew attention to the importance of each bird-frequented site for their well-being. His observation linked the tiny island to the birds’ wider world – it was but one stepping-stone in their transcontinental territories. Gätkes diagnosis echoed the alarm being voiced by scientists and statesmen alike. The quest for collecting data gained new momentum when the Danish teacher Mortensen described at the beginning of this chapter started marking starlings with metal rings. This technique started a veritable bird-ringing craze, which led

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to a growing number of publications in journals and papers given at international conferences. The field stations that came with the activities of scientists – most famously on the Curonian Spit along one of the major flyways for birds following the coast of the eastern Baltic Sea²⁰ – were supplemented by amateurs and ornithologists who caught migrating birds or climbed trees and chimneys to mark fledglings in their nests with standardized aluminium rings. The new method came with a growing scientific infrastructure and a lot of material such as nets, boxes, pliers, and little bags in which to hold the living birds. In the twentieth century millions of European birds were caught and marked and spent the rest of their lives carrying a human-made gadget. When they were shot, caught, or simply found dead by people who knew about the meaning of the little pieces of metal, the information or the rings were shipped back to the address where the bird had been ringed – sometimes with the ring still attached to the leg or even the whole body of the bird. Subsequently the information was entered into central data sets and dots added to maps to show where the bird had been ringed and where it had been found. The individual journeys of robins, swallows, and thrushes were registered by ornithologists and turned into lines and routes joining Europe and linking the continent with locations beyond its outer borders.

2 Protecting Birds While bird ringing and ornithology were generally considered a scientific pursuit, a complementary movement arose at the end of the nineteenth century: bird preservation societies.²¹ Their emergence – and the emergence of animal welfare organizations around the same time – is indicative of a shift in attitudes towards animals’ and human-animal relations.²² Both these movements came with the rise of the middle class, and both were particularly prevalent in North America and the United Kingdom, although similar endeavours came into being in most parts of Europe. While male elites had dominated ornithology, many bird protection societies showed a more diverse profile.²³ In the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and Sweden the organizations had a strong female membership. Birds were increasingly presented as cohabitees of the civilized and domestic sphere for which females took responsibility. Birds were considered useful not only in an economic but also in a cultural sense, as they entertained humans with their singing and attractive appearance and provided role models in their diligence and caring for fledglings. Feeding birds in the winter and providing nest boxes turned into a daily life practice.

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At the turn of the century, national and imperial rivalries, increasing internationalization, and the supposed superiority of European morals and norms played an important role in the motivations and efforts of bird activists. Bird preservation served as a tool for distinguishing one’s society and country. Many organizations paired the private experience of loss of songbirds in their personal environment with campaigns against the feather fashion that paraded the reckless exploitation of birds from abroad. Fledgling bird protection societies from Northern and Western Europe, the Austrian Empire, and Switzerland in particular attacked feather fashion as an icon of decadence driven by a reckless interest in profit.²⁴ At the end of the nineteenth century, the globalization of Western fashion styles increased the pressure on global bird populations. Huge hats trimmed with masses of feathers or complete stuffed birds – the more exotic the better – signalled that their wearers were fashionable modern women. Parts or whole bodies of dead birds were sold by the ton at large fairs in Paris and London and thousands of millineries turned them into objets d’art. The avifauna of the world became visible and omnipresent in everyday life. The bird activists responded to such morbid aesthetics with campaigns that depicted the beauty of living wild birds – and the cruelty they were exposed to. To them such hats were nothing but proof of ignorance or hard-heartedness (see figure 4). In Germany, women took an oath that they would never wear bird feathers again, actresses swore to abstain from any feathers on stage, and in Britain, activists denounced ladies who wore feather hats when going to church.²⁵ A truly civilized woman, the activists argued, would refrain from any such vain consumerism. European imperialism played a crucial role in the debates of the activists: feather fashion threatened not only local birds but also those of the colonies. The initiatives to stop the import of such species entailed exporting European values and habitus – and cultivated the sense of European superiority.²⁶ The campaigns against feather fashion thus illustrate the paradoxical and selective character of those debates. European practices of exploitation were challenged and countered by norms of moral behaviour framed as equally European. A similarly firm critique was voiced by the activists regarding the practice of hunting migrating birds for food, which was still common in Italy and France. They condemned Belgium for allowing thousands of songbirds to be caught for sale as caged pets. The minutes and membership lists of national organizations around the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century give evidence of the links with related societies all over Europe and beyond. Activists connected with similar constituencies and elites in other countries, like the Audubon Society in the US. Bird protection as such was a phenomenon capable of uniting as well as dividing nations along a certain set of moral rules.²⁷ Morals might differ – the birds crossing the continent, however, stayed the same. For the birds

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Figure 4: Illustration from a German bird protection society campaign brochure against feather fashion, 1911. Picture: Archive Stiftung Naturschutzgeschichte.

and their lives, morals only had a concrete effect when these ideals began to be translated into legal action. Up to the First World War, European bird preservation networks had often formulated their concerns in international terms. In 1910, there were at least three major meetings, which gave substantial attention to the preservation of wild birds: the International Conference of Zoology in Graz, the International Ornithological Conference in Berlin, and the International Hunting Exhibition in Vienna. The term ‘international’ was blithely applied to any gathering that sent invitations to more than two countries; nonetheless, it is quite striking how many multilateral collaborations were established in the pre-WW I era. This soon ceased with the outbreak of war in 1914. Exchange of information between societies came to a halt, and scientific networks were re-structured along political divisions of friends and foes.²⁸ During the interwar period collaboration slowly resumed. The situation of wild birds was still troubling: While feather fashion was not as pressing a concern as before the war, hunting and trapping showed an increasing trend due to food shortages. In the aftermath of the war, a new environmental problem materialized that created high risks for seabirds. After the British fighting fleets had successfully introduced the new technology of oil-fuelled engines, the post-war shipping industry followed suit. In 1921, the

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German ornithologist and head of the Heligoland field station, Hugo Weigold, identified a new ‘disease’ among seabirds, which he called ‘oil plague’ (Ölpest). The British Society for the Protection of Birds took the lead in campaigning against oil pollution, which immediately turned into a European and international issue as oil pollution travelled and fouled shores all along the main shipping routes. Floating oil could not be contained – it threatened not only the maritime commons but also the migrating seabirds that the preservation societies cared about so much. The German Bund für Vogelschutz even distributed stickers in six languages to their sister organizations in Europe (and Japan) displaying a dying, oil-coated seabird saying “Stop oil pollution”. This new environmental problem was to become a perennial issue of European bird preservation societies.²⁹ In 1922, Thomas Gilbert Pearson, the president of the American Audubon Society – a US bird protection organization founded in 1885 –, visited Europe. In June 1922, the keen bird activist Pamela McKenna, wife of the liberal politician Reginald McKenna, invited him and a hand-picked circle of influential bird lovers to her London upper-class home, including Earl Buxton, Earl Grey, and the international visitors Jean Delacour (France) and Pieter van Tienhoven (Netherlands). At the meeting they founded the International Committee for Bird Protection (ICBP), today BirdLife International, “for the purpose of coordinating and encouraging the preservation of birds”.³⁰ Pearson saw bird lovers as united by fighting the risks and hazards birds faced: feather trafficking, the pollution of the seas by oil, the killing of wild birds, and the loss of habitats. When he “pled for laws throughout the world prohibiting the sale for food of all gamebirds not raised in shooting estates”,³¹ however, he found not even one European delegate of the ICBP willing to support him. Pearson pointed out double standards among activists, who seemed convinced that their campaigns and claims were leading the civilized world. At a closer look, the European morals were just as debatable. Pearson would later report the telling example of the European quail, a small, round, brownish and inconspicuous migrating bird. Ornithologists had long complained about the mass trapping in Mediterranean countries, which was fuelled by European demands. Pearson reported that in 1933 alone 440,450 living quails, caught in nets in Egypt, were shipped from the port of Alexandria: “In Italy, France and England their throats were cut and they were sold in the markets.”³² The quails were transported back to Europe’s civilized shores only to be slaughtered, cooked, roasted, or fried. He called for Europeans to take the responsibility for exterritorializing their consumption of natural assets. However, in spite of such setbacks, the interwar period also saw many panEuropean and multilateral initiatives to protect wild birds. Alongside activities di-

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rectly concerned with bird protection, anti-oil-pollution campaigns also brought the issue to the League of Nations. Another attempt was made to revive the (European) International Convention for the Protection of Birds and the ICBP established a European branch. Meanwhile ornithologists continued to amass evidence about the pan-European character of many bird species. When the head of the Heligoland field station, Rudolf Drost, published an article in 1929 on the progress of bird ringing efforts, he could present a map of Europe heavily dotted with points that bore witness to the well-organized network of bird ringers: by the end of the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of birds had been marked. Drost’s report suggested the establishment of further ringing stations not only in Southern Europe but also in Africa, as it “forms an ornithological unit with Europe”. This would be a “rewarding task for the European states owning colonies”. To him, it seemed only natural and expected that European research interests not only extended far beyond Europe and should make use of the colonial territories, but also that these interests justified any use of migrating birds for experiments. The field station in Rossitten sent grown-up and hatching storks to other parts of Europe to determine how the birds would find their way back to their traditional routes. Ornithologists constantly caught birds, caged them, clipped their wings and freighted them across the continent to find out how their orientation system worked.³³ From this point of view, birds were not so much cosmopolitans but rather objects of a European experimental set-up. Besides, there seemed to be no question that Europeans had the scientific (and moral) authority over the subject of migrating birds.³⁴ The next war meant a serious setback for any bird-related pan-European activism or research.³⁵ The Second World War had a massive impact on the birdhuman-relations in general. The fascist regimes in Germany and Italy promoted bird conservations schemes to demonstrate their cultural superiority and pretended to take the lead in nature conservation, which did not stop them from pursuing plans of draining swamps, marshes, and moors. Wartime economy, mobilization, and military infrastructure increased the pressure put on natural resources and landscapes all over Europe. Food shortages, rationing, and intensified agricultural production made the feeding and protection of birds an unusual hobby. Sparrows, which were blamed for stealing grain from the fields, were destroyed by the million. The hostilities of the Second World War demonstrated all too clearly that the birders’ alliances were fragile when national politics came into play. It was necessary to revive a sense of solidarity. The accelerating prosperity, mobility, and interconnections of the European post-war years forced the small networks to think big and get themselves organized. Activists sensed a chance to integrate their agendas into a broader European debate: What role could birds play in a

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new European setting? Phyllis Barclay-Smith, a British birder who had played a crucial role in the international anti-oil-pollution campaigns and would later administer and connect the European networks of bird experts and activists (see figure 5), saw preservationism even as holding potential for building peace among humans: “A love for nature is a link which is perhaps one of the strongest between men in the world today – for in nature one is back to essentials and political differences and difficulties fade away in the background.”³⁶

Figure 5: The bird activist Phyllis Barclay-Smith. Photo: BirdLife International.

From an environmental history perspective, the 1950s set the stage for the Great Acceleration of European economies and societies. The war had changed the subcontinent’s landscapes fundamentally. After some years of hardship and reorganization, national economies started to flourish again and the period

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of the fastest economic growth in Europe’s history began.³⁷ Homes and food had to be found for huge numbers of displaced people. On both sides of the emerging Cold War division, large-scale agricultural operations and intensifying production were initiated to preclude any future food shortages.³⁸ This included massive reclamation and drainage schemes, the increasing use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, moto-mechanization, and the removal of many traditional cultural landscape features like hedgerows, heaths, and meadow orchards. Any landscape that had escaped former cultivation schemes was now prone to reassessment. In densely populated Europe, extensively used areas like marshes, riparian stretches, alpine moors, and marshes turned into potential agricultural lands yet to be developed.³⁹ The fundamental changes in European agriculture, however, had a devastating and long-lasting effect on Europe’s bird populations – and it took some years until concern was voiced. Ornithologists and bird preservation activists had not been idle, however. 1950 had seen the signing of a new International Convention for the Protection of Birds in Paris, and in 1954, an Intergovernmental Conference on Oil Pollution of the Sea had designated zones prohibited for tankers and their discharge. Both agreements, built on pre-war negotiations and campaigns, did not slow the population decline of many bird species like white storks, quails, Brent geese and others.⁴⁰ Most problems that ornithologists and bird lovers had been warning about for decades appeared to be getting worse. The experts of the European Continental Section of the ICBP had regularly presented evidence of the negative effects of pesticides on insects and birds since the late 1940s. When the US biologist Rachel Carson wrote her book Silent Spring on pesticides and their detrimental effects on humans, flora, and fauna, the evidence she presented included extensive research from Europe. Carson, however, was the one who managed to translate a complex ecological problem into a convincing story that centred on human-bird relations. European activists seized the public awareness for human-nature disturbances created by Carson’s book and transferred her message to the old continent. The British biologist Julian Huxley, one of the most influential figures in European and international conservation networks, praised Carson for getting across what was actually at stake – not only from an ecological but also from a cultural point of view: “In fact, as my brother Aldous said after reading Rachel Carson’s book, we are losing half the subject-matter of English poetry.”⁴¹ In the course of the 1950s, it had become increasingly clear that the pressure on natural areas and resources was growing. Birds turned into indicators of the highly problematic and asymmetrical relationship between humans and their environment. Many European bird species depend on wetlands for feeding, breeding, and resting. Now, it seemed that reclamation “in Europe was proceed-

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ing at such a pace that within a few years most of the still existent wetlands would have disappeared”,⁴² as the French ornithologist Christian Jouanin later wrote about this period. This acceleration coincided with the emerging configuration of a new European agricultural market and related policies that aimed at increasing productivity through technical progress and liberalised agricultural markets.⁴³ The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy would soon lead to a large expansion in agricultural production. It was not only agriculture that transformed peripheral areas into sites of production and straightened meandering watercourses. The affluent industrial societies also built on externalising environmental costs. Swamps were used for dumping garbage or disposing of poisonous material, sewage channels carried increasing amounts of chemicals and industrial effluents, rivers were dammed to provide energy, marshland was diked to reclaim new arable land. Wherever one looked – all over Europe wetlands were seen as the last ‘leftover’ spaces that could be exploited to satisfy industrial and agricultural needs. Conservationists blamed mass tourism and the leisure industry and their significant interventions into hydrosystems. At the same time, bird tourism was growing. One sign of this interest was the popular Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe (also known as the “Peterson, Mountfort, Hollom” after its authors), published in 1954 and translated in another eleven languages.⁴⁴ It offered a systematic, well-illustrated, affordable and easily portable overview of the subcontinent’s avifauna and provided anybody interested with the knowledge necessary to identify the birds of their neighbourhood as well as any other European travelling destination.⁴⁵ While human societies tended to benefit from the Great Acceleration, wildlife suffered from it. Habitats shrank; the sound of the swamps, characterized by birds’ screeching, mosquitos’ buzzing and amphibians’ croaking, faded. Ornithologists were among the first to point out the signs of fundamental shifts in European’s ecosystems by looking at what they knew best: bird populations. In 1961, the International Union for the Protection of Nature put the loss of wetland habitats on its agenda and commissioned the Swiss biologist Luc Hoffmann to look into ways to address this problem, including the organization of a conference as the start of a wetland preservation campaign.⁴⁶ Hoffmann owned a private ornithological station in the Camargue (see figure 6). He teamed up with the initiator of the International Wildfowl Research Bureau (IWRB) in Slimbridge, Peter Scott, another key figure in European and transatlantic preservation networks. Both were founders of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in 1961.⁴⁷ They made the bold move to frame the many local examples of destruction of bird habitats as a European phenomenon, though it extended beyond continental borders.

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Figure 6: Luc Hoffmann and a European Bee-eater. Photo: Photothèque Tour du Valat.

For the first meeting, they invited some 90 people to the most emblematic bird observation site in Europe: the unique aquatic landscape of the Camargue. Located on the French Mediterranean coast, this mosaic of lagoons, saltmarshes, and ponds at the delta of the Rhône represents one of continental Europe’s most famous wetland areas. Huge flocks of migrating and resident birds rest, feed, and breed around the lagoons. Luc Hoffmann had dedicated large parts of his work to studying and protecting the Camargue’s most picturesque bird – the flamingo. As humans increasingly controlled the hydrology of the delta, the flamingo, once abundant in the marshes, had become rare. Flamingos have their main range in Africa and there are only a few habitats in southern Europe where they breed. Hoffmann thus pleaded that it was necessary to think pan-continentally, too, and became a keen promoter of such an inclusive and cosmopolitan perspective. In November 1962, the MAR conference was convened – MAR standing for wet environments in several languages like marsh, marisma (Spanish), marais (French), and maremma (Italian). The name of the conference already condensed a variety of ecosystems into a single signifier; this was a useful strategy for their upcoming campaign featuring landscapes that had been burdened by their negative images as wastelands or badlands. The MAR people found an even better

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catchall title: wetlands. It suggested that a new chapter was to begin, focusing on the story of riches and resiliencies that waterlogged landscapes offered. After days of intensive discussion, walking, and stalking birds, the delegates formulated a resolution that called for an inventory of Europe’s wetlands. Inventories require standards, norms, and reliable data. The only experts who could provide such data were the bird people. The list, published in 1965, reflected the asynchronicities and disparities among different bodies of knowledge in Europe. It identified places “of the highest importance for the conservation of European wetland bird populations at their present level”. The editors admitted that this seemed “a somewhat vague criterion”. They concluded that the best guarantee for a reliable list would be “the extensive consultation of as many experts as possible having the best knowledge of wetlands and their bird populations in their countries”.⁴⁸ About 500 experts over the whole of Europe would send back their comments. The initiative reached out to the Maghreb states and embraced Iceland, the USSR, and Turkey, which were part of the Western Palearctic region. The goal was to map Europe according to the zoogeographical rationales of migrating birds. Yet, political boundaries and conceptions also played a role in the project, as did the different levels of data available for different regions. The motherland of birding, Great Britain, would provide very detailed information about numbers, places and bird species, whereas there was only very fragmentary data available from the USSR and Turkey. Finland, Sweden, and Norway had too many wetlands to provide a concise overview but listed the most important places. Albania, in contrast, was not covered at all – due to “insufficient information at the moment”.⁴⁹ The MAR list presented Europe as a continent connected by wetlands and birds facing shared risks: Migrating waterfowl, shorebirds and waders were threatened by drainage, reclamation, urbanization and pollution. Moreover, the project with its new approach acknowledged the fact that it was not sufficient for Western European networks alone to design and decree conservation schemes because their success depended on collaboration reaching far beyond the European political sphere of influence. A brochure was printed in French and English and distributed across Europe. Its telling title – “Liquid Assets” pointed to the change of narrative.⁵⁰ In this brochure, wetlands were no longer dark, dull, and unproductive spaces but generous landscapes of resilience, supplying fresh water, recreation, food resources, and biodiversity. It promoted human-made wetlands like salt ponds, artificial lakes, and gravel pits. Appreciating wetlands did not necessarily mean to cut off swamps and ponds from human access and turn them into no-go areas of conservation. It was rather a plea for a more collaborative way to live with and alongside wetlands. There were other creatures out there who deserved to be

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able to peacefully carry out their lives. Wetlands were teeming with life – and birds were the most prominent ambassadors of this message. By introducing the positive term wetland, the conservationists made these spaces suitable for diplomacy. The young wetland community hoped that this strategy could help translate good will and talk about conservation into reliable legal frameworks and laws. The concept of wetlands served as a net to catch as many habitat types as possible and overcome their stigma of being landscapes that obstructed progress. The MAR initiative had been built around the idea that nature was organized according to rules and rationales, which differed fundamentally from national politics. It was not only about migrating birds that travel from South to North, from East to West and back again, breed here and moult there and overwinter somewhere else. It was also about the interdependencies of water bodies and the interrelatedness of natural hydrosystems. Birds were not the only thing that travelled – pollutants did, too. Drainage might be good in one area but cause flooding somewhere else. The wetland initiative called for fluid borders that ignored political gaps or walls. Hoffmann had cultivated strong relations with biologists in Eastern Europe and for a while, it seemed like such perspective would resist the deadlock of international relations caused by the Cold War. For the end of September 1968, a meeting was planned in Leningrad to prepare the final draft of an international wetland convention. But the invasion of Prague by the Warsaw Pact countries on 21 August 1968 unsettled the delegates. The Dutch government, which had taken a decisive role in preparing a legal text for the convention, almost immediately cancelled its participation and most delegates of Western European countries followed suit. Although the Soviet hosts insisted that they would stick to the official procedures of the conference, there was to be no Leningrad convention. The political freezing of all East-West relations caused frustration among members of the wetland community. Nevertheless, the conference documented the growing international range of wetland conservation and that authority over migrating birds would not only be located solely in Europe. What had started as a European initiative now extended outwards to the rest of the world. In Leningrad experts from Jordan, Senegal, India, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and West- and East Pakistan reported on the distribution of wetlands vital for wildfowl – “that had represented a blank spot for specialists studying the problem”.⁵¹ It was plain that, for migrating birds, Europe was just a province within their much larger territories. Luc Hoffmann, deeply frustrated by the frictions and diplomatic gridlock, insisted that the problems waterfowl research and protection were facing could only be tackled through close collaboration in the Western Palearctic region.⁵² Eventually, Iran would offer to help out of the awkward situation by inviting the countries willing to sign the convention to the

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small town of Ramsar at the shore of the Caspian Sea – an important spot for birds commuting between Asia, Africa, and Europe.⁵³ In 1971, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat was signed. It was a rather weak agreement as it depended on the goodwill and voluntary compliance by the individual member states. Nevertheless, it was a big step in the history of environmental legislation: it marked the first time that a habitat type was designated as an object of protection. All these lagoons, marshes, tidal flats, and alluvial forests were linked to each other by birds and provided a net of spaces connected by physical exchange. Moreover, the Ramsar Convention and its overarching and fairly unobjectionable topic of protecting migrating birds would provide an open channel of communication between Eastern and Western experts and bird activists. The International Bureau for Waterfowl Research, for instance, would send one of its employees, the Polish ornithologist Eugeniusz Nowak, on an “East Europe Mission” in January 1974. His itinerary gave evidence not only of the vast networks of contact and exchange but also of what it meant to be an active European conservation ‘diplomat’. Over a four-week journey, Nowak travelled by car, boat, night train and plane from Slimbridge to Bonn and then continued to Prague, Brno, Budapest, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Tirana, Sofia, Bucharest, Moscow, Warsaw, and Berlin (GDR) to discuss the Ramsar Convention, winter bird counts, hunting statistics and wetland manuals.⁵⁴ Bird activists’ desire to protect the wetlands of Europe turned into an international agreement of material and symbolic meaning. By signing the convention, the nation states agreed to take substantial measures to safeguard of the wetlands they listed, which de facto stopped or limited exploitation on a regional level. Symbolically, it meant becoming a member of an international community that adhered to standards and parameters recommended by bird experts. Although the convention was weak and relied largely on diplomatic prestige, it was not without effects. The countries willing to join the ratification process had to register their wetland areas of international importance according to the flyways of birds. Areas which from a national perspective were rather seen as places to be developed and industrialized now acquired a broader meaning that exceeded national interests. Moreover, the convention became a blueprint for the European conventions, which were soon to follow.

3 Institutionalizing European Nature The wetland activists had crucially opted to tell a story that expanded their scope of influence and built alliances that reached beyond the traditional expert net-

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works. One of the new allies was the Council of Europe, based in Strasbourg. Founded in 1949, it was the first European intergovernmental organization– not to be confused with the European Communities (EC) or the European Union (EU) – including members like Switzerland, Yugoslavia, and Turkey but excluding Soviet bloc countries. Its aim was (and still is) “to achieve a greater unity between its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principles which are their common heritage”.⁵⁵ It took time, however, before nature was included under such a common heritage umbrella. The British mentor of European nature protection and IUCN member Max Nicholson admitted that naturalists and conservationists had been “disillusioned by the long experience of the dilatoriness and ineffectiveness of European governmental participation in conservation”.⁵⁶ The Council had sent a delegate, Miss Vaughan Thomas, to the MAR conference in the Camargue in November 1962. Immediately after her return, the Council of Europe created a European Committee for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources to advise the Council’s Committee of Ministers on the subject. The Secretary General of the Committee, the Belgian Jean-Paul Harroy – long-time head of the IUCN and an influential figure in postwar conservation – seemed the person “of the right calibre” to ensure that the European initiative would function accordingly to the rules of international conservation.⁵⁷ The bird and wetland initiative was immediately taken up in the Council’s agendas⁵⁸ alongside soil erosion, oil pollution, water and air pollution, transboundary parks, and protection of threatened species in general. The Committee of Experts sent out questionnaires to survey the situation of threatened birds and of fauna and flora generally, and also asked about landscapes of European and international importance.⁵⁹ This procedure was to clarify the status quo of conservation in the member states. It followed the well-known pattern of gathering expertise to prepare directives and frameworks for future initiatives as long as political and financial opportunities for concrete action were still lacking. A second, no less important goal was to create European identity by collecting information: the knowledge of experts was integrated into a European body interested in the nature that the subcontinent was made of. In 1965, the Council launched an award and diploma recognizing outstanding landscapes of European importance – and the first areas endowed were the wetlands and bogs along the Belgian-German border, the Hohe Venn, and the Camargue. The making of Europe in an institutional sense coincided with the rise of political ecology and environmental politics. The Council of Europe had fostered the formalization of human-nature relations that started to reach beyond symbolic politics like the European Conservation Year in 1970 (see chapter 12 by Vetter-Schultheiß). As Europeanization grew on a political level, so too did the scope of environmental inclusiveness and legislation. Now the Council’s drafts

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and initiatives on European conservation frameworks turned into blueprints for the fledgling European Commission (EC). The first Environmental Programme of the EC, however, fell short of the earlier aspirations of environmental discussions in the 1960s, when the wetland people had used birds to navigate towards schemes that encompassed habitats, flyways, and hydrological nexuses. While the overall programme encompassed a wide variety of environmental problems, such as industrial pollution and depletion of natural resources, the issue of preservation of species had been reduced to protecting migrating songbirds from hunting: Hundreds of millions of migratory birds and songbirds are captured and killed in Europe every year provoking worldwide protests against the countries which allow the trapping of birds. This massive destruction provokes a serious threat to the ecological balance in Europe, because it causes plant parasites to proliferate.

Such ecological imbalance would result in the “use on a bigger scale of insecticides which are sometimes harmful to man and to the natural environment”.⁶⁰ Italian hunters were thus portrayed as being responsible for European bird loss on a scale similar to that described in Silent Spring. In hindsight, the passage on bird protection – the only type of fauna to which a chapter of the declaration was explicitly dedicated – seems a peculiar mixture of moral reasoning and economic arguments. A hastily written report ordered by the EC on the status of bird protection focused on the hunting of birds which had no particular value to the nations’ economies compared to the increasing use of pesticides due to the loss of avifauna.⁶¹ Such economic justification was used “because it fit the requirement of European law for intervention of into the sovereignty of its member states”.⁶² During the further procedure and debates, activists of more radical animal protection initiatives teamed up with initiatives of NGOs focusing on the practice of hunting birds in Southern Europe and lobbied for a separate agreement focusing on birds, which would eventually become the 1979 Birds Directive.⁶³ One of its authors, the Irish EC lawyer John Temple-Land, a keen birder himself, inserted a provision requiring the creation of specially protected areas of international importance for the populations of migrating birds.⁶⁴ This meant that it could be adapted to the Ramsar Convention. The future network of European reserves was thus arranged based on the birds’ flyways and breeding grounds.⁶⁵ The making of the directive has been described as the result of clever planning. According to one of the protagonists, the German commission’s lawyer Claus Stuffmann, “the legislation would not have come into being without the many like-minded actors who collaborated behind the scenes, traversing the adminis-

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trative boundaries of European institutions, national parliaments, and non-governmental organizations”.⁶⁶ Ultimately, however, it was the outcome of compiling and aggregating individual experiences, public debates, and responses to the tremendous environmental changes in the post-war years. This directive reflected the diversity of arguments and rationales that had surfaced over some 100 years of European bird protection activities and discourses on human-environment relations, reaching from stewardship to ecological dependencies. The bird activists had turned into seismographs recording the future of nature in general. In 1979, the member states of the Council of Europe signed the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (or the Bern Convention for short), which not only covered birds but all threatened wildlife – “plants, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and natural habitats, as well as, at a later stage, fishes and invertebrates”.⁶⁷ No species should be left behind. The Bern Convention served as the basis for the development of much more far-reaching, comprehensive nature conservation legislation. Along with the Habitats Directive, it was implemented through Natura 2000, a network of protected areas covering almost one-fifth of the EU’s entire land territory plus large marine areas. In fact, these somewhat abstract directives developed into one of the most influential instruments for concrete nature conservation in general and bird protection in particular (see chapter 16 by van de Grift and van Meurs).⁶⁸

Conclusion It seems as if a history of human-bird-relations in Europe inevitably ends with the various treaties that play such a prominent role in the lives and activities of anybody involved with use of the subcontinent’s environment. However, this would give a misleading impression of the heterogeneity of the many entanglements of birds and humans in Europe. European environmental history seeks to identify the subcontinent’s boundaries and its transboundary relations, to understand the patterns and structures that connect its many different cultures and ways of life. It also means looking for the process of getting in contact, of finding common grounds, of setting up networks. Birds were essential objects and subjects of such processes. They helped to answer one of the core questions of European environmental politics: “Whose is it?” With the help of binoculars, rings, statistics, and a set of moral values, an answer eventually emerged: Europeans share and must care for the global environmental commons. The nature of birds triggered the early Europeanization of conservation politics and yet kept challenging a rather narrow concept of Europe. The birds’ habits forced European activists to constantly consider their position in a network of political and

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physical relations and to adapt to the fact that Europe was not necessarily the centre but rather one of many and temporary sites the animals made use of. Moreover, birds turned into indicators of the loss of biodiversity, of pesticide loads and pollution. This would play out in diplomatic and collaborative negotiations. The administrative apparatus that came with this conservation needed to be standardized, manageable, and reliable. The condensation of practices, emotions, norms, and laws also reflected a Europeanization that was closely linked to the nature of birds. Birds were the feathered all-rounders in public debate: appreciated as resources and pest control, as indicators of environmental change, as containers of moral reflection, as companions, supporters, as objects of science and jukeboxes of joy. In the course of this process, the view of birds as enemies, pests, or prey diminished. While the horizons of many birds exceeded those of humans by far, they also knew borders – but their borders clearly differed from national territories. Watching and trying to understand birds is one of the many threads that make up the fabric of Europe. But did the process of political Europeanization change birds’ lives in any way? Today, there are 27,800 Natura 2000 sites in Europe securing the habitats of the Eurasian bittern, Northern gannets, Brent geese, and other fauna and flora. The Water Directive has led to considerable improvements in the ecological quality of many rivulets and streams. Hunting laws restrict the numbers of birds shot down during their migratory journeys: white storks and cranes have returned in vast numbers. This is not to say that the rules go uncontested. Birds formerly considered harmful to human interests – cormorants, grey herons, and rooks – that had all but disappeared from Europe have returned thanks to European legislation and multiplied so much that fishers, farmers, and allotment gardeners complain about their omnipresence. The campaigns of conservationists condemning the numbers of birds being killed, especially in Italy, on Malta, and in Balkan countries hoping to join the EU, reflect deeply engrained prejudices against the ‘uncivilized’ South as potentially unfit for admission to the EU community. In return, the environmental directives of the EU are often criticized as being high-handed, invasive, and bureaucratic. After all, the numbers of many bird species are declining rapidly.⁶⁹ The numbers of partridges have dropped by 94 per cent of the ones counted some 40 years ago. Even the formerly abundant starlings, the birds used by Danish teacher Mortensen to start a new system of tracking individual birds in 1899, are becoming less common. Since the 1980s, as the directives guiding the process of European integration picked up pace, numbers of common birds like swallows, lapwings and even sparrows are suffering from another result of the European unification process: the end of the periphery. The web of roads, streets, and freight distribution hubs, often co-fi-

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nanced by European funding, connect the different regions of the continent but they cut across migrating routes and breeding grounds. The Common Agricultural Policy of the EU leaves its omnipresent mark on the landscape. Recent findings of a decline in insects aroused attention that – once again – the declining numbers of birds were just one indicator of the miserable state of the subcontinent’s environment and the risks the climate crisis brings to societies.⁷⁰ As I am writing the last passages of this article, a bunch of noisy sparrows is attacking the thick layers of insulation material under the tiles of my roof, which complies with the EU directive 2010/31/EU on the energy performance of buildings. They are about to build their nest to breed. What is to be done? Displace those birds in spite of their declining numbers? Or let them destroy the ecologically sound insulation and undermine the endeavour to save the climate? Offer nesting boxes? As this overview of a century of European bird politics and activities reveals, Europe’s human-bird and human-nature relations are characterized by deep ambivalences and conflict about the use of its nature.

Notes  Niels Otto Preuss, “Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen, Aspects of his Life and of the History of Bird Ringing”, Ardena 89, no. 1 (2001): 1– 6.  Rudolf Drost, “Die Europäischen Beringungszentralen”, Ornithologische Monatsberichte 37, no. 6 (1929): 161– 173.  Richard Vaughan, Wings and Rings. A History of Bird Migration Studies in Europe (Penryn: Isabelline, 2009); Ernst Schüz and Hugo Weigold, Atlas des Vogelzugs nach den Beringungsergebnissen bei paläarktischen Vögeln (Berlin: Friedländer, 1931).  Einhard Bezzel, “Vogelwelt und Vogelschutz im Wandel der Zeit”, in Taschenbuch für Vogelschutz, ed. Klaus Richarz, Einhard Bezzel, and Martin Hormann (Wiebelsheim: Auls, 2001), 3 – 18.  Stefan Bargheer, Moral Entanglements. Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 7.  Friedemann Schmoll, Erinnerung an die Natur. Die Geschichte des Naturschutzes im deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2004); Bernd Brunner, Ornithomania. Geschichte einer besonderen Leidenschaft (Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2015); Valérie Chansigaud, All About Birds. A Short History of Ornithology (London et al: New Holland, 2009); Tim Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds. An Illustrated History of Ornithology. (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Raf de Bont, Stations in the Field. A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870 – 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).  Marius Somveille, Martin Wikelski, Robert M. Beyer, Ana S. L. Rodrigues, Andrea Manica, and Walter Jetz, “Simulation-based reconstruction of global bird migration over the past 50,000 years”, Nature Communications 18 (2020): 1– 9.  Mike Unwin, The Atlas of Birds. Diversity, Behavior, and Conservation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 77.

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 W. J. M. Hagemeijer and M. J. Blair, The EBCC Atlas of European Breeding Birds, Their Distribution and Abundance (London: Poyser, 1997).  Joachim Seitz, “Rückblick – Geschichte der Zugvogelforschung”, in Zugvögel im Wattenmeer. Faszination und Verantwortung, ed. Peter Südbeck, Franz Baierlein, and Reno Lottmann (Wittmund: Brune-Mettcker, 2018), 274– 275.  Ragnar F. Kinzelbach, Das neue Buch vom Pfeilstorch (Rangsdorf: Basiliken Press, 2013).  Henry E. Eeles, A History of the Birds of Europe: Including All the Species Inhabiting the Western Palaearctic Region (London: Published by the Author, 1871– 1881), VII.  Céline Chadenas, L’Homme et l’oiseau sur les littoraux d’Europe occidentale, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008; Nancy Jacobs, “Africa, Europe and the Birds between Them”, in Eco-Culture Networks and the British Empire, ed. James Beattie, Edward Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 92– 120.  Thomas Gilbert Pearson, “Der europäische Vogelschutz-Vertrag”, in Bulletin des Internationalen Komitees für Vogelschutz, ed. Thomas Gilbert Pearson (New York and Bern: ICBP, 1927), 7, 17.  Ornithologischer Verein Wien, Sitzungsprotokolle des Ersten Internationalen OrnithologenCongresses, 7. bis 11. April 1884 (Wien: Bergmann, 1884).  Ecolex. “Convention for the Protection of Birds Useful to Agriculture, Mar 19, 1902”, https:// www.ecolex.org/details/treaty/convention-for-the-protection-of-birds-useful-to-agriculture-tre000067/ (accessed 12 January 2020).  Heinrich Gätke, Heligoland as an Ornithological Observatory: The Result of Fifty Years of Experience (Edinburgh: Douglas, 1895), 15.  Ibid., 355.  Ibid.  Raf de Bont, “Poetry and Precision: Johannes Thienemann, the Bird Observatory in Rossitten and Civic Ornithology, 1900 – 1930”, Journal of the History of Biology 44 (2011): 171– 203.  Bargheer, Moral Entanglements; Schmoll, Erinnerung.  Mieke Roscher, “Tierschutz- und Tierrechtsbewegung. Ein historischer Abriss”, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 8 (2012): 34– 40.  Raf de Bont, Nature’s Diplomats. Science, Internationalism, and Preservation, 1920 – 1960 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press 2021), 85 – 100.  Valérie Chansigaud, “L’origine de la protection des oiseaux en France”, in Une protection de l’environnement à la française? (XIXe – XXe siècles), ed. Charles-François Mathis and Jean-François Mouhot (Seyssel: Editions Champ Vallon, 2015), 210 – 222.  Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Als eine Mode untragbar wurde – Die Kampagne gegen den Federschmuck im Kaiserreich”, in Federn kitzeln die Sinne, ed. Dorothea Deterts, Michel Gautier, and Andrea Müller (Bremen: Überseemuseum, 2004), 42– 50; Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature. Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 116; Tessa Boase, Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather: Fashion, Fury and Feminism – Women’s Fight for Change (London: Aurum Press, 2018).  Bernhard Gissibl, “Paradiesvögel: Kolonialer Naturschutz und die Mode der deutschen Frau am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts”, in Ritual – Macht – Natur. Europäisch-ozeanische Beziehungswelten in der Neuzeit, ed. Johannes Paulmann, Daniel Leese, and Philippa Söldenwagner (Bremen: Überseemuseum, 2005), 131– 154.  Schmoll, Erinnerung.  Raf de Bont and Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Disruption and Reorganisation: International Preservation Networks and the First World War”, in Environmental Histories of the First World

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War, ed. John R. McNeill; Martin Schmid, Richard P. Tucker, and Tait Keller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2018), 266 – 267.  Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Oil on Troubled Waters? Environmental Diplomacy in the League of Nations”, Diplomatic History 32, no. 4 (2008): 519 – 537.  Thomas Gilbert Pearson, Adventures in Bird Protection (New York and London: AppletonCentury, 1937), 383.  Ibid., 416.  Ibid., 417.  Ernst Schüz, “Alte und neue Versuche über das Sich-Zurechtfinden der Vögel”, Der Vogelzug 2 (1931): 19 – 28; Ernst Schüz and Hugo Weigold, Atlas des Vogelzugs nach den Beringungsergebnissen bei paläarktischen Vögeln (Berlin: Friedländer, 1931).  Nancy Jacobs, “Africa, Europe and the Birds between Them”, in Eco-Culture Networks and the British Empire, ed. James Beattie, Edward Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 92– 120.  Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “International Conservation after the Two World Wars”, in The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War, ed. Simo Laakkonen, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017), 300 – 301.  Phyllis Barclay-Smith, Garden Birds (London and New York: King Pinguin, 1946), 20.  Carin Martiin, Juan Pan-Montojo, and Paul Brassley (eds.): Agriculture in Capitalist Europe, 1945 – 1960: From Food Shortages to Food Surpluses. Routledge: London, 2016. David Symes and Anton J. Jansen (eds.), Agricultural Restructuring and Rural Change in Europe (Wageningen: Agricultural University, 1994).  Frank Westerman, De graanrepubliek (Amsterdam: Querido Fosfor, 2018); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature. Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: Norton, 2007).  Martin Stuber and Matthias Bürgi, Vom “eroberten Land” zum Renaturierungsprojekt. Geschichte der Feuchtgebiete in der Schweiz seit 1700 (Bern: Haupt, 2018).  ICBP, VII Bulletin of the International Committee for Bird Preservation (London and New York, 1958), 11.  Julian Huxley, Preface to Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (London: Pinguin Books 1963/2020), 20.  Christian Jouanin, “The MAR Project – 1961– 1971”, in Richard van Osten (ed.), World National Parks. Progress and Opportunities (Brussels: Hayez, 1972), 161.  Rosemary Fennell, The Common Agricultural Policy: Continuity and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); N. Piers Ludlow, “The Making of the CAP: Towards a Historical Analysis of the EU’s First Major Policy”, Contemporary European History 14, no. 3 (2005): 347– 371.  Roger Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort, and Philip Hollom, A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe (William Collins, 1954)  John Gooders, Where to Watch Birds in Britain and Europe (Worcester and London: Trinity Press, 1970), 13; K. H. Voous, Atlas of European Birds (New York: Nelson, 1960).  Robert Boardman, International Organization and the Conservation of Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 160 – 168.  Alexis Schwarzenbach, WWF. Die Biografie (München: Heyne, 2011).  IUCN, Project Mar. The Conservation and Management of Temperate Marshes, Bogs and Other Wetlands, Vol. II, List of European and North African Wetlands of International Importance, IUCN Publications new series 1965, n°5: 8.  Ibid., 21.

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 IUCN, Liquid Assets (Gland: IUCN, 1963), 16.  Yuri A. Isakov, ed., International Regional Meeting on Conservation of Wildfowl Resources (Europe, Western Asia, Northern and Tropical Africa), Leningrad, USSR, 25 – 30 September 1968: Proceedings (Moscow: Ministry of Agriculture, 1970), 5.  Letter by Lukas Hoffmann to Eugeniusz Nowak, 11 November 1968, private archive of Eugeniusz Nowak, Bonn-Bad Godesberg.  Geoffrey V. T. Matthews, The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands: Its History and Development (Gland: Ramsar Bureau, 1993).  “Dr. E. Nowak’s itinerary on his East Europe IWRB mission in January/February 1974”, private archive of Eugeniusz Nowak, Bonn-Bad Godesberg.  Council of Europe, “Statute of the Council of Europe”, London, 5 May 1949, European Treaties Series No. 1, https://rm.coe.int/1680306052, 1 (accessed 28 January 2020).  Max Nicholson, The Environmental Revolution. A Guide for the New Masters of the Earth (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1970), 205.  Ibid., 206.  Council of Europe, Rapport du Comité pour la Sauvegarde de la Nature et du Paysage sur sa Première Session, qui s’est tenue à Strasbourg du 22 au 25 janvier, CM 29 (1963): 7.  Questionnaires and incoming answers see archival records of Council of Europe, Exp/Nat/ WP2 (63): 4.  Council of the European Commission, “Declaration of the Council of European Communities and of the Representatives of the Governments of the Member States Meeting in the Council of 22 November 1973 on the Programme of Action of the European Communities on the Environment”, Official Journal of the European Communities 16 (C112).  Bernhard Conrad and Conrad Poltz, Vogelschutz in Europa (Greven: Kilda, 1976).  Bargheer, Moral Entanglements, 225.  Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Zivilgesellschaftliche Mobilisierung und die frühe europäische Umweltpolitik. Die Vogelschutzrichtlinie der Europäischen Gemeinschaften von 1979”, in Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, 2013, www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/fdae-1590.  Historical Archives of the European Union, Florence (HAEU), Interview with John TempleLang, 15 February 2011, https://archives.eui.eu/en/oral_history/INT277 (accessed 15 January 2020).  Andrew L. R. Jackson, Conserving Europe’s Wildlife. Law and Policy of the Natura 2000 Network of Protected Areas (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).  Claus Stuffmann cited by Bargheer, Moral Entanglements, 225.  E. J. Ausem, “Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats”, Environmental Conservation 7, no. 2 (1980): 142– 144.  Jackson, Conserving, 3.  Richard Inger, Richard Gregory, James P. Duffy, Iain Stott, Petr Vorisek, and Kevin J. Gaston, “Common European birds are declining rapidly while less abundant species’ numbers are rising”, Ecology Letters (2014): 1– 9.  Roel van Klink, Diana E. Bowler, Konstantin B. Gongalsky et al., “Meta-analysis reveals declines in terrestrial but increases in freshwater insect abundances”, Science 368, no. 6489 (2020): 417– 420.

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Selected Bibliography Bargheer, Stefan. Moral Entanglements. Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. Birkhead, Tim. The Wisdom of Birds. An Illustrated History of Ornithology. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Boardman, Robert. The International Politics of Bird Conservation: Biodiversity, Regionalism and Global Governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006. Boase, Tessa. Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather: Fashion, Fury and Feminism – Women’s Fight for Change. London: Aurum Press, 2018. Brunner, Bernd. Ornithomania. Geschichte einer besonderen Leidenschaft. Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2015. Chadenas, Céline. L’Homme et l’oiseau sur les littoraux d’Europe occidentale. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. Chansigaud, Valérie. All About Birds. A Short History of Ornithology. London et al: New Holland, 2009. De Bont, Raf. “Poetry and Precision: Johannes Thienemann, the Bird Observatory in Rossitten and Civic Ornithology, 1900 – 1930”. Journal of the History of Biology 44 (2011): 171 – 203. De Bont, Raf. Nature’s Diplomats. Science, Internationalism, and Preservation, 1920 – 1960. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2021. Hagemeijer, Ward J. M., and Michael J. Blair. The EBCC Atlas of European Breeding Birds, Their Distribution and Abundance. London: Poyser, 1997. Jacobs, Nancy. “Africa, Europe and the Birds between Them”. In Eco-Culture Networks and the British Empire, edited by James Beattie, Edward Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman, 92 – 120. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015. Matthews, Geoffrey V. T. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands: Its History and Development. Gland: Ramsar Bureau, 1993. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. “Zivilgesellschaftliche Mobilisierung und die frühe europäische Umweltpolitik. Die Vogelschutzrichtlinie der Europäischen Gemeinschaften von 1979”. Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, 2013. www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/fdae1590. Vaughan, Richard. Wings and Rings. A History of Bird Migration Studies in Europe. Penryn: Isabelline, 2009. Wöbse, Anna-Katharina. “Oil on Troubled Waters? Environmental Diplomacy in the League of Nations”. Diplomatic History 32, no. 4 (2008): 519 – 537.

Raf de Bont

3 Europe and its Environmental Other(s): Imagining Natures for “Global” Conservation Abstract Conservationists working in international organizations have often ascribed meaning to European nature by comparing it with geographically distant environments. Over the past century, the tropics have played a prominent role in these cross-geographical comparisons – serving as Europe’s environmental other. This chapter argues that the dichotomy between European and tropical nature has influenced conservation discourse in various ways. For a long time, it has contributed to the marginal position of European nature in international conservation imaginaries, which have usually focused on the supposedly wilder tropics. In the conservationist narratives of some institutions (such as the Council of Europe), European nature gained a more prominent place, but without questioning the dichotomy between Europe and the rest of the world. In these contexts, the idea of European environmental exceptionalism has helped to build identity, looking for the ‘European genius’ in the rural environments produced by the continent’s civilization. More recently, cross-geographical comparisons have been mobilized to support initiatives to rewild the continent. Here, geographically distant primeval nature served as a model for what could be ‘restored’ in the European context. Keywords environmental other; tropics; wilderness imaginaries; rural landscapes; rewilding In 1928, the British novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley published an essay entitled “Wordsworth in the Tropics”. In the essay, Huxley took issue with the conception of nature as promoted in the work of the celebrated romantic poet William Wordsworth. More specifically, Huxley opposed the idea that “Nature is divine and morally uplifting”. In Huxley’s view, Wordsworth had mistakenly come to such a conclusion because he had only experienced “the Gemütlichkeit, the prettiness, the cosy sublimities of the Lake District”. “A voyage through the Note: I like to thank Simone Schleper, as well as the editors and the reviewers of this handbook for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. The research for it was sponsored through the VICI project ‘Moving Animals’ (VI.C.181.010), funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Open Access. © 2021 Raf de Bont, published by De Gruyter. the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-004

This work is licensed under

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tropics”, Huxley added, “would have cured him of his too easy and comfortable pantheism”. If only Wordsworth had traded Europe for the jungles of Malaya or Borneo, he would have experienced the “diversity and utter strangeness of Nature”. Such jungles were indeed not only “marvellous”, “fantastic”, and “beautiful” but also “terrifying”, “profoundly sinister”, “foreign, appalling, [and] fundamentally and utterly inimical to intruding man”. Huxley wondered whether “in the damp and stifling darkness, among the leeches and the malevolently tangled rattans”, Wordsworth would still have hailed nature’s “divinely anglican character”.¹ Among the many things that are striking in Huxley’s argument, one is certainly the rhetorical power of cross-geographical comparison. In the essay, European landscapes only appear as “well gardened”, “tamed”, and “temperate” by contrasting them to faraway and “occasionally diabolic” rainforests. The nature of Europe in general, and the Lake District in particular, receives meaning and value by being compared with its environmental other. The tropics, Huxley suggested, show nature’s true character: its “disquieting strangeness”. The European landscape, to the contrary, has nothing on offer but “a work of art”.² Huxley’s literary strategy was neither original nor limited to the toolbox of essayists. For centuries, authors of various kinds have given meaning to landscapes, environments, and ecosystems through cross-geographical comparison. In many instances, such comparison has become crucial to the ways in which these landscapes, environments, and ecosystems are experienced, understood, valued, and dealt with. In this chapter, I will explore the mechanisms of such cross-geographical comparison by focusing on one context in which they have held particular sway: the world of non- and intergovernmental conservation organizations that define themselves as “international”. Conservationists, of course, have been pre-eminently involved in assigning value to nature. Furthermore, the international conservation circuit has always been dominated by men (and some women) who – unlike Wordsworth – are well travelled and, thus, hold a privileged position to make cross-geographical comparisons. International organizations for the protection of nature have been established from the 1910s onward, growing in size and importance as the twentieth century proceeded. For a very long time, Europeans were clearly overrepresented in these organizations, but in spite of this, they certainly did not devote excessive attention to European nature. Rather, their work concentrated on remote wildernesses that captured their imagination as more authentic and genuinely “natural”. This imagination about distant others, however, fed back into the approaches they developed when they did zoom in on European landscapes. Whether the far-off wilderness became a model or an antithesis, it would certainly inform ideas about how to think of nature in Europe. This chapter follows

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the logic of these two forms of imagining. Firstly, it looks into the (European) imaginaries of the (non-European) environmental other. Secondly, it discusses how, from the early twentieth century to today, comparisons with far-off wildernesses have impacted on the understanding and valuing of Europe’s own nature. Obviously, the leading actors in the conservation organizations discussed here were Europeans of a particular kind. Most of them hailed from Western Europe. Many, furthermore, operated from cities that, until the mid-century, were at the centre of colonial empires. A majority of them shared a distinct social and educational background – belonging to cosmopolitan upper-middle classes and having received academic training, typically in the natural sciences. As will become clear in this chapter, all of these aspects mattered for the ways they imagined both Europe and its environmental other. This chapter is ultimately about ideas rather than practices. It focuses on the discursive framing rather than the actual managing of nature, on imaginaries rather than policies. Yet, the two are, of course, not entirely separable. Conceptualizations of nature, its meaning, and its value self-evidently shape practices of protection and management. This makes cross-geographical comparisons of particular importance. They not only fulfil a literary function but also have performative power. As such, these comparisons are integral to decisions about which nature to protect and how to protect it. European nature, this chapter suggests, is not only figuratively but also literally constructed through its others.

1 Preserving the Other For a long time, scholars working in the tradition of Edward Said have used the concept of otherness to describe European imperialist representations of non-Western cultures.³ Since the 1990s, however, cultural geographers and historians have broadened the concept, devoting growing attention to the othering of non-Western natures. With their research, they have shown that various geographical spaces could serve as an antipode of Europe’s natural environment. Europe’s counter-image could be found, for example, in the “empty” Arctic tundra, or in in the “strangeness” of North America’s Rocky Mountains.⁴ Most studied, however, is how, since the fifteenth century, “the distinction between temperate and tropical lands” has become “one of the principal manifestations of environmental otherness in European thought”.⁵ The European explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries constructed the New World as an alien land and its nature as both opulent and dangerous. The travel writing of later centuries by the likes of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin only reconfirmed this ambivalent “tropicality” (see figure 1). They stressed not only

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Figure 1: Alexander von Humboldt is one of the influential authors whose work constructed “the tropics” as Europe’s environmental other (Eduard Ender, Alexander von Humboldt und Aimé Bonpland in der Urwaldhütte, Berlin, Akademiearchiv/BBAW P/BON-1053).

the grandeur and diversity of tropical nature but also its wild and chaotic character, putting all this in strong contradistinction to what they had observed in Europe. Thus, the idea of the tropics’ environmental otherness, developed and reinforced over centuries, became strongly entrenched in Western culture by the nineteenth century. In many ways, it still resonates today.⁶ The encounter with the environmental other has been crucially important in the development of ideas about nature in Europe. Most notably, it played a critical role in the rise of conservationist thinking. Historian Richard Grove has shown how the ecological destruction of tropical island “Edens” (as the author calls them), raised early environmental consciousness among the eighteenthcentury European scientists who witnessed the consequences colonial capitalism had on the ground.⁷ Others have noted how the new imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries intensified both the ecological impact of the colonial economy and the cultural anxieties it generated.

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An imperial conservationism took shape, which, alongside the spread of civilization, saw the preservation of at least some of the last patches of “untouched” wilderness as a core duty of European rule. Social-evolutionist conceptions of history buttressed these ambivalent ideas of civilizational self-regulation. Social evolutionism implied that Europe was the spearhead of modern civilization, whereas “primitive” non-European populations and landscapes were remnants of a distant past. Such a “denial of coevalness”, to use the phrase of Johannes Fabian, was crucial to the discourse of the imperial societies for fauna preservation that were established around 1900. The rhetoric of these societies focused on presumably “empty” and “primeval” landscapes and the charismatic mammals these landscapes contained. Ironically, it turned the European “civilizers” into the stewards of the “natural museums” that remained untouched by civilization.⁸ The old colonial imaginaries still reverberated when, in the early twentieth century, “international” organizations for nature protection were founded in Europe. This was the case for the short-lived Consultative Commission for the International Protection of Nature, set up by the Swiss naturalist Paul Sarasin in 1913, as well as for the International Office of Documentation and Correlation for the Protection of Nature (later the International Office for the Protection of Nature), established in 1928 under the leadership of the Dutch insurance agent Pieter-Gerbrand van Tienhoven. Sarasin, strongly influenced by his expeditions to SouthEast Asia, focused his attention on what he saw as the vanishing wildernesses at the world’s fringes.⁹ Apart from the Arctic regions, he singled out Africa as a continent where animal populations and their supporting ecologies had remained “almost untouched since prehistory”. Given the extension of these last surviving majestic ecosystems, Sarasin stressed that their protection preferably took the form of “large-scale reserves”.¹⁰ Van Tienhoven perpetuated similar visions in the interwar years. He aimed at internationalizing the management of natural resources in the colonies – or “those wild countries”, as he called them on fundraising tours.¹¹ Just as Sarasin, he believed most of the remaining “primeval” nature could be found in the imperial periphery, where approaching modernity constituted an imminent threat. In 1931, in a letter to his preservationist friend Harold Coolidge, Van Tienhoven warned about the extent of potential future destruction: “In the wonderful world of tropical climate in which are to be found the Primates, the Giraffes, the Rhinos, the Elephants, the Antelopes, a loss of unfathomable deepness will be felt when all those species are gone for ever.”¹² Within these imaginaries, sub-Saharan Africa took a central position. The pessimism with regard to this continent was partially informed not only by modern extinctions, like that of the bluebuck (1800) and the quagga (1883), but also

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by the paleontological record. Palaeontologists, such as the American Fairfield Osborn, indicated that several continents had already experienced an extinction wave that wiped out most of their large charismatic mammals in earlier geological epochs. In 1920, he wrote: “We palaeontologists alone realize that in Africa, the remnants of all the royal families of the Age of Mammals are making their last stand, that their backs are up against the pitiless wall of what we call civilization.”¹³ Increasingly, the environmental other was understood to be in need of urgent protection. In the interwar years, the international conservation network probably came closest to realizing its ideals of such protection in one specific African colony: the Belgian Congo (see figure 2). Two subsequent directors of the International Office for the Protection of Nature, Jean-Marie Derscheid and Victor van Straelen, combined that function with the directorship of the Congolese Albert National Park (and later the Institute of the National Parks of Belgian Congo). Operating from Brussels, they actively shaped the management of Congolese nature along the ideals of the international nature protection movement. In their view, the national park was to be a “natural laboratory” of “pristine” nature run for and by scientists – an ideal that legitimized the evictions of substantial groups of the indigenous population. An exception, however, was made for Twa hunter-gatherers (or “Pygmies”, in the parlance of the day), which could be framed as an integral part of the “primitive” ecosystem.¹⁴ This type of management echoed earlier calls of Sarasin, who had explicitly pleaded for the inclusion of Naturvölker [Natural peoples] – “the noblest of all free living natural creatures” – in schemes of global nature protection.¹⁵ The tropics, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, clearly took on a special place in preservationist imaginaries of unspoiled wilderness. Other parts of the world, however, could fulfil similar functions. The Arctic islands of Spitsbergen, for example, were the focus of Sarasin’s (failed) attempt to create a first “European reserve” that could serve as “a large museum of Arctic nature”.¹⁶ The great outdoors of the North American West, likewise, could function as a counterpoint to Europe’s civilized landscapes. For instance, the Berlin zoo director Lutz Heck, both a National Socialist and an important player in the international nature protection network, found an environmental other in the Canadian landscape while he was on an expedition for the zoo in 1935. Decades later, he still remembered how he entered this “virgin land full of the enchantment of untouched nature which works so powerfully on us in this over-urbanized age”. Canada’s “Wild West”, he added, resembled “the primeval state of our homelands before they were transformed by man”. Lutz Heck believed that across the Atlantic he had encountered the Europe of a deep past, still populated by large mammals and characterized by majestic landscapes. In such imageries,

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Figure 2: The Albert National Park in the Belgian Congo was actively managed to match imaginaries of a humanless and timeless wilderness (Postcard, 1930s, personal collection).

Canadian nature was not unlike African wilderness: it enabled Europeans to travel in time by travelling through space.¹⁷ While the interwar circuit of international nature preservation focused much of its attention on non-European Edens, the hubs in its own networks were in (Western) Europe. Admittedly, some Americans, such as the aforementioned Coolidge and Osborn, played significant roles, but the large majority of its most active members were Europeans. Not surprisingly, imperial capitals such as Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam were most important in this respect. Such urban centres constituted the antipode of the far-off wildernesses the preservationists sought to protect. At the same time, they also comprised the cities where scientists accumulated knowledge of such wildernesses, alongside the dead and living organisms that sprung from them. The people active in international preservation societies and committees were often closely associated with these imperial accumulation projects, either through natural history museums and zoos or through their private collections and menageries. The fascination with disappearing primeval nature that drove preservation efforts equally propelled the desire to collect the animals and plants that resided there.¹⁸ Both the mental and social constellation of early twentieth-century international organizations advocating nature protection proved to have a long-lasting

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influence. While World War II shook up conservation circles, it also reconfirmed much of its networks and inclinations. Founded in 1948, the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN; later the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN) visibly built on its interwar predecessors. It was no coincidence that its first secretary-general was the Belgian Jean-Paul Harroy, whose major credentials included management of the national parks of Belgian Congo. The Union’s first executive board was, furthermore, clearly dominated by Europeans, who took up eight out of twelve positions (or even nine, if one would include the director of the Lima Natural History Museum, who, despite residing in Peru, was a French national). Most of these board members were naturalists associated with universities, national parks, or natural history museums. Virtually, all of them had colonial travel or work experiences.¹⁹ It should be of no surprise, then, that the Union perpetuated the colonial gaze that characterized its interwar precursors. Within the global aspirations of the IUPN, there was clearly a special place for the distant and romanticized environmental other. A good illustration of this can be found in Destruction et Protection de la Nature (1952), published by the then vice president of the IUPN, Roger Heim. In the book, much cited within the Union, Heim took stock of the state of tropical nature worldwide. As a well-travelled naturalist of the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, he could illustrate his story with personal experiences from the colonial empires stretching over Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Through the book’s pages, it becomes clear that tropical nature held a strong but ambiguous appeal for Heim: “Like the indigenous woman, she is fragile, delicate, incomprehensible, astonishing and complex in her physiognomy.” The fact that Heim used the image of a (native) woman to represent tropical nature was, of course, no coincidence. The metaphor repeated the well-worn cliché of the ambiguous seductions of the tropics. In line with long literary traditions, tropical wilderness was not only described as “chaotic”, but also as having its own kind of “harmony” and “freedom”. Apart from wild and free, the woman incarnating the tropics was also “fragile” and, thus, in need of the protection of a (male) saviour. Indirectly, Heim seemed to be writing about himself – as well as about the almost exclusively male leadership of the IUPN. When discussing European landscapes, to the contrary, Heim did not need the metaphors of female seduction and fragility. Nature on the European continent, he indicated, was “shaped according to Man’s will” – “like a field”. Looked at through the eyes of the tropical traveller, it could hardly be considered nature at all. ²⁰ Such imageries of nature mattered for the actual functioning of the IUPN/ IUCN, as they clearly had an impact on the geographical prioritization of its projects. Much of the early missions of the Union’s staff ecologists concerned tropical

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Asia and Africa. Moreover, its most high-profile scheme during the first two decades of its existence was the Africa Special Project (1960 – 1963), which was set up to convince the leaders of soon-to-be independent countries of the importance of the Union’s approach to nature protection. This at least partially explains why, in the mid-century, Western conservationists increasingly framed African wildlife as an important natural resource, crucial for the provision of both meat and tourist revenue. In this way, they linked the conservation of wildlife resources in the Global South with an emerging agenda of global development.²¹ At the same time, however, the Africa Special Project clearly also stemmed from a concern within the Union’s leadership that political chaos in the wake of decolonization might destroy the last remaining majestic, yet fragile, Edens on the African continent. After all, it is not hard to see that many of them worried that Western conservationists would lose access to (and control over) the places they considered to be the most “untouched” in the world.²² From the 1980s onwards, scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds have questioned the truthfulness of the established environmental imaginaries in which faraway lands were envisioned as containing vast expanses of empty wilderness. These scholars argue that many of the landscapes that travelling Europeans interpreted as “wild” were in fact substantially shaped by human presence. While European conservationists understood local farming, the grazing by domestic livestock, and the use of fire as threats to nature, these practices were in fact often constitutive of the “Edenic” landscapes they encountered. Furthermore, in several regions of Eastern and Southern Africa, the European colonizer interpreted the relative emptiness of the landscape as a timeless natural condition and a relic of a deep past, whereas in reality it could be ascribed to recent demographic impacts of slavery and rinderpest. Such misinterpretations, in turn, informed preservationist policies that aimed at separating nature from (indigenous) human populations. These policies, finally, reified the idea that “true” and “unspoiled” nature could only be found in the non-European landscape. ²³ In many respects, international organizations institutionalized the dichotomy between a cultural Europe and a natural other. Apart from IUCN’s mid-century conservation projects, the World Heritage scheme of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), launched in the 1970s, offers a case in point. In her analysis of the genesis of the World Heritage List, Andrea Rehling has shown how UNESCO’s expert committees approached the selection of cultural heritage sites and of natural heritage sites in quite different ways. Whereas the former needed to exemplify “authenticity” and represent “local” cultures, the latter had to be “integral” and provide “universal” examples of global ecosystems. The result was not only that more cultural sites than nat-

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ural sites were nominated, but also that (at least originally) the latter tended to be non-European ones. Two of the first selected natural World Heritage Sites, the Galápagos Islands and Yellowstone National Park, came to serve as prototypes for further selection.²⁴ Both covered expansive areas. Both also had an iconic status as natural laboratories and places of wilderness. Both, lastly, shared histories of resettlement and evictions of local populations in order to establish such a status in the first place.²⁵ Their UNESCO label once again reconfirmed a European preconception that true nature concerns expansive, timeless, and humanless places that are far away. In the second half of the twentieth century, especially from the 1970s onwards, Europeans gradually lost their dominant position in global conservation. This partially had to do with the ascendancy of North American conservation science and the US dominance of newly established environmental non-governmental organizations, as well as with a gradually growing prominence of representatives of the Global South in organizations such as the IUCN and UNESCO. Since the 1980s, furthermore, conservationists partially abandoned the traditional wilderness rhetoric for a discourse that centred on biodiversity.²⁶ These developments certainly complicated ideas of environmental otherness, but without making a clean break with the past. While international conservation organizations now concentrate on “biodiversity hotspots” and “ecozones” and use new surveying technologies in selecting them, their focus remains largely on pristine and unpeopled areas, most of them situated in the Global South. In line with a very long history, the mental geography of global conservation remains very uneven indeed.²⁷

2 Differentiating Europe Imageries of the environmental other not only shaped the interaction of international conservation organizations with non-European landscapes but also clearly fashioned the ways these organizations thought about and dealt with nature in Europe itself. While the prominence of wilderness ideals prioritized non-European environments for urgent protection, Europe was certainly within the purview of international conservation as well. In conceptualizing conservation action in Europe, then, two strategies stand out. The first consisted in stressing Europe’s distinctiveness by highlighting how intensive and age-old human activities had shaped its landscape. The second, to the contrary, involved projecting distant Edens back on the European continent and thus looking for (and occasionally creating) landscapes that reflected wilderness ideals. The two opposing strategies, of course, generated highly diverging ideals and practices.

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The first strategy, which consisted in differentiating Europe from the rest, had old roots. From the late nineteenth century onwards, several European countries witnessed the rise of national and regional nature protection organizations that sought to preserve pre-industrial rural landscapes. The more influential among these included the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or National Beauty in the United Kingdom (founded in 1894), the Société pour la Protection des Paysages de France (1901), and the Bund Heimatschutz (1904) in the German Empire. Upholding nostalgic images of a past rural idyll, such organizations typically represented the landscapes they sought to protect as “gentle” and “harmonious”, rather than “wild” and “dangerous”. Additionally, in a nationalist or regionalist logic, they tended to tie the natural landscape to human history – instead of separating human activities from a timeless wilderness. In this historicizing approach, the protection of human-shaped Arcadian scenery, consisting of meadows, fields, or heathland, easily blended in with the preservation of built monuments. Furthermore, unlike the logic of wilderness protection, the national and regional preservation societies founded around 1900 did not necessarily focus on the grandiose or the extensive. Preservation initiatives could single out a scenic rock, a hedge, or a particular tree.²⁸ Such a focus developed in self-conscious distinction of what was happening overseas. In 1909, Hugo Conwentz, director of the highly influential Prussian Central Institute for the Care of Natural Monuments (Staatliche Stelle für Naturdenkmalpflege in Preußen), distanced his approach explicitly from the American tradition of extensive national parks. Not only did he believe it was “quite impossible to make reservations of land of such considerable area in any part of Central Europe” but he also indicated that a focus on small-scale “natural monuments” would be “more suited to the purpose in view”.²⁹ To some extent, the international organizations for nature protection founded in the early twentieth century took over the Arcadian interests of national and regional preservationist societies. This should not be a surprise since there was quite some overlap in membership, with the national and regional societies often having representatives in international bodies. All this notwithstanding, a crude division of labour took shape in which the first specifically focused on local culturally mediated landscapes and the second specialized in “untouched” wilderness overseas. This was, for instance, very clear in the work of Van Tienhoven, who strongly engaged in several Dutch preservationist societies, apart from his work for the International Office for the Protection of Nature. In the first institutional context, he focused on protecting expansive rainforests and charismatic mammals such as orangutans; in the second, he devoted much of his attention to heathland, country estates, and windmills. Cultural landscapes, so it seemed,

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were tied much closer to the logic of the nation-state (or the region) than the uninhabited wilderness.³⁰ Despite the continuing legacy of the sketched division, international nature conservation did develop a gradually expanding interest in European landscapes after World War II. When, in 1951, the IUPN held its first technical meeting, it chose the protection of nature in “densely populated countries” as its focus, an expression that, for both the conference’s organizers and attendees, just seemed to refer to Western Europe. The meeting revived a traditional focus on cultural landscapes by linking it to the concerns of post-war landscape planning and theories of plant ecology. Dutch and British ecologists such as Victor Westhoff and Max Nicholson, respectively, took the lead by indicating how human activities had shaped Western Europe. They argued that its landscapes hardly contained the so-called climax vegetation (or the final stage of the succession of plant associations) but did maintain interesting forms of “semi-nature”. The latter term was used to refer to areas in which anthropogenic factors such as mowing, burning, or pasturing had halted the normal succession of associations, resulting, for instance, in heath- or moorland. Yet, IUPN ecologists embraced this artificiality. Natural conditions, they argued, were impossible to attain in Western Europe, where large wild herbivores had gone extinct, dikes kept out the floods, and forest fires were suppressed. The semi-nature that replaced it, however, still contained valuable ecosystems, and in the 1950s, ecologists believed the maintenance of these semi-natural ecosystems required an interventionist management. Unlike far-off wildernesses, so they argued, European semi-nature did not need to be shielded from humans. Rather, it called for continuous and careful human interference, supervised by ecologists like themselves.³¹ While in the 1950s European nature became the object of some reflection within IUPN/IUCN, it never acquired a central position in the Union’s global projects. It would take the foundation of other institutions as part of the European integration process to engender a true Europeanization of nature conservation. While the European Parliament and, later, the European Community played an important role in this, the initial impetus came from the Council of Europe (CoE). In 1970, the CoE set up the European Nature Conservation Year, with events throughout the year raising environmental awareness across Europe (see chapter 12 by Vetter-Schultheiss). The programme was a promotional success. The heritage scholar David Lowenthal even sees it as the starting point of an institutionalization process that created a “shared sense of patrimony” (see figure 3).³² Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the CoE indeed strove for such an institutionalization, subsequently setting up the Environment Committee (1962), European Diplomas for Protected Areas (1967), European Environment

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Centre for Nature Conservation (1967), and European Network of Biogenetic Reserves (1976). Such initiatives strove for an integration of European nature in the mind, but also for a physical integration on the ground.³³ Several ideals of nature resonated in the activities of the CoE, but among these, the Arcadian vision was certainly an important one. In 1978, Westhoff explained in Naturopa, the journal of the European Environment Centre for Nature Conservation, that “from the Middle Ages until the first half of the twentieth century, semi-natural ecosystems predominated in western and central Europe”. He added that “the long-established, historical, agrarian landscapes with their small-scale diversity are indispensable for the maintenance of much of the European flora and vegetation”.³⁴ Westhoff’s notion of semi-natural landscapes echoed not only in outward communication but also in the actual selection of sites for the European Network of Biogenetic Reserves, which included areas that “may have been modified to a greater of lesser extent by human activities”.³⁵ The following decades saw a reconfirmation of this choice. The CoE maintained the “semi-nature” concept for its Pan-European Ecological Network (1996), and the European Union borrowed it for its Habitats Directive and Natura 2000 projects.³⁶ While semi-nature was ultimately an ecological concept, its focus on human-altered ecosystems also proved popular in other disciplines. The projects of the CoE that focused on European landscapes fostered collaboration with folklorists, ethnologists, architects, and landscape planners, who conceived of “harmonious” landscapes as including traditional villages and architecturally valuable monuments. In such a context, it was only logical that the CoE set up the European Architecture Year (1975) as a follow-up to its European Nature Conservation Year. Meanwhile, authors publishing in Naturopa cast traditional human activities in a positive light, whether they resulted in hedges and heathlands, in the landscapes shaped by Alpine transhumance, or in healthy urban ecosystems.³⁷ With such a rhetoric, preservationists sought a sense of Europeanness in the diversity of the man-made landscapes that the continent contained. In 1976, for instance, the French botanist Gérard-Guy Aymonin stressed that “mostly home to ancient civilizations, the countries of Europe often display diversity of another kind [than that of its natural landscapes] […]: that wrought by man on the environment as a result of his manifold activities”.³⁸ In Naturopa, the Belgian botanist Albert Noirfalise equally sought the “European genius” in its rural civilizations while discursively linking “the incomparable diversity” of Europe’s habitats to that of its “ethnic sub-divisions”.³⁹ Noirfalise’s voice, for that matter, was far from marginal in Europe’s discussions on nature protection. When, in the

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Figure 3: The European Nature Conservation Year (1970) was important in promoting the idea of a shared natural heritage across the continent (Archive Council of Europe).

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1980s, the European Community took over the conservation initiative of the CoE, he was the botanist to draft the list of habitat types of the Habitats Directive.⁴⁰ Thus, within the context of European institutions, several players believed nature protection should focus on the diversity of “harmonious” and “historical” landscapes shaped by human civilization. Yet, as historian Aurélie Gfeller indicates, this conception was not always easy to sell on a more global scale. She describes how, in the 1980s, European governments tried to create openness within the UNESCO to accept “aesthetical” Arcadian landscapes (such as the French vineyards) for possible inclusion on the World Heritage List. Building on the momentum, the British actually proposed the Lake District as a World Heritage Site. However, the IUCN experts, who were called on for advice, resorted to global ecological standards, indicating there existed more remarkable examples of glaciation and wild fauna elsewhere. On top of that, an insider to the selection procedure later admitted that “the Third World questioned the importance of Wordsworth in world terms”. For the time being, the nomination of the Lake District thus ended in failure. Over time the UNESCO increasingly accepted “cultural landscapes” as World Heritage Sites, but it specifically sought to include non-Western indigenous perspectives by refocusing from Western aesthetic notions of harmony to, for instance, religious and archaeological values that could be associated with landscapes across the world.⁴¹ The British, nonetheless, kept trying to get the Lake District included. In 2017, they finally managed to have the region classified as a World Heritage Site. Amongst other things, the UNESCO website highlights that “the most defining feature of the region, which has deeply shaped the cultural landscape, is a long-standing and continuing agro-pastoral tradition”.⁴² As such, the UN specialized agency eventually did buttress the old Arcadian ideal of human-managed landscapes, which traditionally had played such a prominent role in differentiating European nature.

3 Importing the Other The strategy of seeking the value of European nature in its specific humanized character was never the only tactic of the nature protection movement. In parallel, and often in combination with this strategy, some twentieth-century conservationists also tried to emulate aspects of a more untamed and foreign nature on the European continent. Such emulations could take various forms. The first and probably best-known source of inspiration from overseas was the nineteenth-century Yellowstone model. The Yellowstone National Park was set up in 1872 to protect an expansive mountainscape that lived up to roman-

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tic aesthetic ideals of the “sublime”.⁴³ As Anna-Katharina Wöbse has shown elsewhere, the US model of the national park did catch on in Europe – be it belatedly and often in a somewhat adapted version. In the early twentieth century, both European preservationists and policy-makers were captivated by what Wöbse calls the “spatial Leitbild” that Yellowstone provided, envisaging national parks as “typically large areas, mostly undisturbed by human action, that offered spectacular scenery, abundant wildlife and unique geologic features”.⁴⁴ The model proved inspirational in Sweden, where nine parks were gazetted in 1910, and in Italy, where the Abruzzo National Park was founded in 1922 after the American example. The Swiss equally took inspiration from the Americans when setting up the Swiss National Park in the Lower Engadine in 1914, but they more clearly added their own accents. Rather than catering to tourists as the Americans did, they imagined their park primarily as a place of science. More prominently than their American counterparts, furthermore, the Swiss park managers believed that wilderness was something they needed to restore. Starting out from the idea that primeval nature (Ur-Natur) had already disappeared in the Alps, they set up management schemes that would bring back the natural state of a prehuman past.⁴⁵ It was a variance on Fabian’s “denial of coevalness”. According to many preservationists at the time, non-European wilderness just needed preservation, thus wilfully ignoring and erasing indigenous presence; European wilderness, to the contrary, could only result from active intervention. Part of the project to recreate wilderness in the Swiss National Park concerned the reintroduction of ibex. This was no coincidence. As Wöbse and Ziemek argue elsewhere in this book, large charismatic mammals became important symbolic markers of wilderness in twentieth-century Europe (see chapter 4 by Wöbse and Ziemek). The breeding and reintroduction of those mammals became a major ambition among European preservationists from at least the 1920s onwards. The projects of Lutz Heck and his brother Heinz – zoo directors in Berlin and Munich, respectively – probably offer the most imaginative and controversial example. Not only were they closely involved in transnational preservation schemes of the European bison, but they also set up experiments to “back-breed” the extinct aurochs and the European wild horse from primitivelooking domestic stock. Notably, Lutz Heck associated these animals with a primeval Germanic past in line with National Socialist ideology. Yet, the projects of the Heck brothers equally built on imageries of far-off wildernesses such as that of the American West or the African savannah, which – much more than Europe’s densely populated landscapes – boasted charismatic megafauna. In this way, schemes aimed at restoring Europe’s wild past also mirrored images of a distant environmental other.⁴⁶

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Unlike the imageries of Arcadian semi-nature, of which the Netherlands and England provided iconic examples, the international conservation circuit sought European wilderness mostly in the continent’s “periphery”. Białowieża forest, for instance, counted as the almost mythical last “primeval forest” of Europe but also Spitsbergen, Lapland, the Carpathians, or some more remote parts of the Alps took on an aura of primitiveness (see figure 4). It was in those regions that, from the 1930s through the 1960s, the most sizeable national parks on the continent were established.⁴⁷ After World War II, organizations such as the IUPN/IUCN further stimulated a focus on extensive protected areas. At the first International Congress on National Parks (1962), participants indicated that reserves needed to “be large enough to be self-contained units”.⁴⁸ Over the following decades, ecosystem ecology and island biogeography reinforced the argument that size was critically important to preserve “undisturbed” ecosystems. Originally, the IUCN had accepted the relatively low minimum size criterion of 500 hectares for national parks in densely populated countries. In 1972, however, despite protest by some European representatives, the Union decided on a universal threshold of 1,000 hectares. The decision contributed to marginalizing an approach that focused on relatively small “natural monuments” to the benefit of a model that centred on more expansive wilderness.⁴⁹ Unlike the IUCN, European institutions such as the CoE did not prioritize “undisturbed” nature. Yet, alongside the promotion of Arcadian landscapes, they equally saw value in peripheral “empty” lands such as the Arctic (“Europe’s last vast wilderness”) or the Scandinavian and Eastern European “virgin” forests.⁵⁰ Both views, of course, could be combined. In 1981, for instance, the leading British conservationist Derek A. Radcliff used an article in Naturopa to issue a call to “ensure the protection of a wide range of country, from truly natural kinds with high wilderness value such as alpine mountain systems, through the various types of landscape owing their character in increasing degree to human intervention”.⁵¹ Sometimes, however, the logic of Arcadian and wilderness ideals clearly clashed. Adherents of the former, for instance, saw the late twentieth-century depopulation of rural Europe as a threat to the “original” landscape, whereas defenders of wilderness ideals believed the phenomenon offered great opportunities to revert to “ecologies in which man will only be a spectator”.⁵² And, while some took far-off wilderness as an ideal to be emulated in Europe, others, such as the CoE environmental expert Peter Baum, bemoaned the “disease to visit the national parks of America, Canada and Africa to look for models” as these were deemed unsuited to be applied to “European situations”.⁵³ While the defenders of Arcadian and wilderness ideals both managed to have their visions translated into directives, plans, and managerial regimes, it

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Figure 4: Białowieża forest has often been represented as one of the last remaining wildernesses in Europe, and as such received many international accolades (Adrian Gyrcuk, Wikimedia commons).

was the second group that, from the late 1980s onwards, managed to gain momentum. It did so by partially adapting its message. Scholars such as Henk van den Belt even see a “paradigm shift” in which traditionally defensive strategies of wilderness preservation gave way to more offensive approaches of actively developing “new nature”. A generation of young Dutch ecologists, van den Belt shows, played a pioneering role in this reorientation. In a country with just a few small and heavily managed semi-natural reserves, these ecologists developed plans for restoring extensive landscapes where nature could “take its course”. The first project with which they managed to convince policy-makers was the so-called Operation Stork. With this plan, presented in the early 1980s, they sought to “renaturalize” river beds by moving dikes further inland, reintroducing species such as beavers and black poplars, and releasing surrogate species for extinct herbivores (such as Galloway cows and Konik horses). In 1990, then, the Dutch government officially launched their National Ecological Network, a land-use plan that had to link up ecosystems across the country and facilitate a “natural” exchange between these systems. The most discussed achievement of the new generation of “nature developers”, however, concerned the so-called Oostvaardersplassen – a reclaimed polder near Amsterdam that

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was originally destined for industrial development. Neglected during a time of industrial downturn, wild plants and a great number of greylag geese colonized the area. The site management team, under the leadership of the influential ecologist Frans Vera, saw an opportunity to develop a fully natural ecosystem. In order to achieve this, Heck cattle and Konik horses were released in the 1980s and red deer in the 1990s. The hope was that such introductions of ungulates would help recreate a Pleistocene landscape, which Vera conceived of as a park-like mosaic of forests, scrubs, and grassland. While controversial, the project certainly stirred the imagination, and it drew substantial national and international attention (see figure 5).⁵⁴

Figure 5: The Dutch reserve of the Oostvaardersplassen is often represented as a “new wilderness”, of which the grandeur is comparable to Yosemite or the Serengeti (Picture: Jac. Jansen, Wikimedia commons).

The presentation of the Oostvaardersplassen project in both the national and international media shows how “new nature” was often sold with old rhetoric. The German magazine Der Spiegel, for instance, featured an article in 2001 that presented the reserve as nothing less than a “Serengeti behind the dikes”.⁵⁵ In 2013, a feature-length film entitled De Nieuwe Wildernis (The New Wilderness) came out that mimicked the visual language of wildlife documentaries set in distant Edens.⁵⁶ In order to copy the original as closely as possible, views (and

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sounds) of the close-by highway and railway track needed to be filtered out. It shows that, at least in the imagination, the Dutch landscape could be morphed into its environmental other. In interviews, the director of the film, Mark Verkerk, was quite explicit: What we wanted to do with this project is to present the special aspects of nature around the corner in a grand way. To show that it is just as special as the Amazon, Yosemite National Park, or the Serengeti – those grand stars of the world of nature.⁵⁷

Oostvaardersplassen proved inspirational. Following the Dutch example, the non-profit organization Rewilding Europe, launched in 2010, lobbied to give “more room to wild, spontaneous nature” throughout the European continent. While the reclaimed lands of the Netherlands offered a laboratory for such an ambition, the organization saw most possibilities in the newly depopulated areas in Southern and Eastern Europe, where it became involved in releasing large mammals and birds.⁵⁸ Using prototypical imagery, its managing director explained in an interview that the ultimate objective of Rewilding Europe was to create “our own iconic natural landscapes, like America has its Yellowstone and Africa has its Serengeti”.⁵⁹ This endlessly returning cross-geographical comparison was more than just a hollow reference. Ecologists, in fact, closely studied the African example in order to bring its “fire ecology” to European landscapes, stressing how wildfires play a crucial role in “wild” ecosystems. Similarly, they hoped to import an African-style “ecology of fear” in Europe, in which predators influence the ecosystem by inducing fearful behaviour in their prey.⁶⁰ Even tourist companies tried to bring the environmental other closer to home. In 2016, Dutch entrepreneurs started the European Safari Company. On their website, they state that “while the word ‘safari’ has become synonymous with Africa, we offer equally as wild adventures right here in Europe, from the Arctic north to vast eastern forests and rugged Mediterranean coast”.⁶¹ Europe could not just be wild; it could be as wild as Africa.

4 Conclusion The long tradition of contrasting European with non-European environments has served particular narratives that are, at least partially, deceptive. Firstly, it has stimulated a misreading of the most iconic landscapes that represent the environmental other. While crucial to their representation, places such as the Yellowstone National Park and Serengeti are not “untouched” – nor were they at any moment over the past centuries. Creating the illusion of a timeless and human-

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less wilderness required the erasure of indigenous populations. More recently, it also required an ignoring of the fact that tourists, park managers, game wardens, and veterinarians continue to clearly leave their marks. Cross-continental comparison, however, not only led to misrepresentations of non-European landscapes but also has bolstered one-sided visions of European distinctiveness. Europe, of course, is not the only continent with historical and semi-natural landscapes. Yet, the idea of a European environmental exceptionalism helped in identity building, to the extent that some ecologists sought the “European genius” in the rural environments its civilizations had produced. A third and final misleading narrative was created when still other ecologists aimed to escape European history by returning to a prehistoric wilderness modelled after geographically distant primeval nature. Like its model, the new European wilderness is, of course, neither timeless nor humanless. Also in its rewilded state, European nature is an integral part of the twenty-first-century Anthropocene.⁶² Of course, what European nature should look like in the twenty-first century is still an object of discussion. The Lake District – hailed by Wordsworth for its “beauteous forms” and ridiculed by Huxley for its safe “Gemütlichkeit” – has finally received its UNESCO World Heritage status, but arguments over its “natural” status continue. Traditionally the iconic example of Arcadian nature, it has recently caught the attention of Rewilding Europe. The organization’s first project in the Lake District is set in Ennerdale, the place that inspired Wordsworth’s poem “The Brothers”, and aims at making the region wilder by “relying more on natural processes”.⁶³ Yet, George Monbiot – author, journalist, and rewilding enthusiast – believes much more needs to be done. In 2017, he indicated in The Guardian that modern agriculture destroyed everything that was interesting in the Lake District, calling it “a sheepwrecked monument to subsidized overgrazing and ecological destruction”.⁶⁴ Two years later, he returned to the topic in the same newspaper. He stated: In the name of “cultural heritage” we allow harsh commercial interests, embedded in the modern economy but dependent on public money, to complete the kind of ecological cleansing we lament in the Amazon. Sheep farming has done for our rainforests what cattle ranching is doing to Brazil’s. Then we glorify these monocultures – the scoured, treeless hills – as “wild” and “unspoilt”.⁶⁵

Monbiot’s vehement tone indicates that the debates about which nature to protect and how to protect it have far from ended. In these debates, cross-geographical comparisons continue to hold their rhetorical power.

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Notes  Aldous Huxley, “Wordsworth in the Tropics” [1928], in Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will: Essays (London: Whatts & Co, 1937), 90 – 103, on pp. 90 – 91 and 102– 103.  Ibid., 93 and 102– 103.  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).  See, for instance, Selagh D. Grant, “Arctic Wilderness – and Other Mythologies”, Journal of Canadian Studies 33 (1998): 27– 42; Terry Abraham, Mountains so Sublime: British Travellers and the Lure of The Rocky Mountain West (University of Calgary Press, 2006).  David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 142.  The literature on tropicality is wide-ranging. Apart from the above, see Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, eds., Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Paul S. Sutter, “The Tropics: A Brief History of an Environmental Imaginary”, in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 178 – 204.  Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600 – 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); David K. Prendergast and William M. Adams, “Colonial Wildlife Conservation and the Origins of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire”, Oryx 37 (2003): 251– 260; William Adams, Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation (London: Earthscan, 2004), 22– 30; Bernhard Gissibl, The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016); Corey Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).  On Sarasin and his Commission, see Anna-Katharina Wöbse, Weltnaturschutz: Umweltdiplomatie in Völkerbund und Vereinten Nationen 1920 – 1950 (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2012), 36 – 53; Bernhard C. Schär, Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015); On Van Tienhoven and his Office, see Raf De Bont, Nature’s Diplomats: Science, Internationalism and Preservation, 1910 – 1960 (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).  Paul Sarasin, Ueber die Aufgaben des Weltnaturschutzes (Basel: Verlag von Helbing & Lichtenhahn 1914).  “Report for the Second Annual Meeting of the American Committee for International Wild Life Protection”, 17 December 1930, Amsterdam City Archives, Van Tienhoven Papers, 1283 – 50.  Van Tienhoven to Coolidge, 3 January 1931, Amsterdam City Archives, Van Tienhoven Papers, 1283 – 50.  Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Foreword”, in Carl E. Akeley, In Brightest Africa (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1920), ix – x.  Raf De Bont, “‘Primitives’ and Protected Areas: International Conservation and the ‘Naturalization of Indigenous People”, Journal of the History of Ideas 76 (2015): 215 – 236; Idem, “A World Laboratory: Framing the Albert National Park”, Environmental History 22 (2017): 404– 432.  Sarasin, Ueber die Aufgaben, 55.  Ibid., 23.

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 Lutz Heck, Animals: My Adventure (London: The Scientific Book Club, 1955), 113.  De Bont, Nature’s Diplomats, 45 – 82.  International Union for the Protection of Nature, established at Fontainebleau 5 October 1948 (Brussels: IUPN, 1948), 28 – 29.  Roger Heim, Destruction et protection de la nature (Paris: A. Colin, 1952), 100 – 103.  Martin Holdgate, The Green Web: A Union for World Conservation (London: Earthscan, 1999), 68 – 74. On the relation between the discourse of international development and conservation, see Stephen Macekura, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press 2015). On the rationale of the Africa Special Project, see Raf De Bont, “Eating Game: Proteins, International Conservation and the Rebranding of African Wildlife, 1955 – 1965”, British Journal for the History of Science, 5 (2020): 183 – 205.  Such fears are explicitly expressed in letters by leading conservationists. See, e. g., Tracy Phillips to Charles Elton, 7 March 1956, M. C. Bloemers to Heim, 11 February 1960, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle [MNHN], Roger Heim Papers, Box Nº 46.  Richard H. V. Bell, “Conservation with a Human Face: Conflict and Reconciliation in African Land Use Planning”, in Conservation in Africa: People Policies and Practice, ed. David Anderson and Richard Grove (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 79 – 102; The Ecology of Survival: Case Studies from Northeast African History, ed. David Anderson and Douglas Johnson (London: Lester Crook, 1988); Roderick Neumann, “Ways of Seeing Africa: Colonial Recasting of African Society and Landscape in Serengeti National Park”, Ecumene 2 (1995): 149 – 169; James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).  Andrea Rehling, “Universalismen und Partikularismen im Widerstreit: Zur Genese des UNESCO-Welterbes”, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 3 (2011), https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3 – 2011/4649.  Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 199); Elizabeth Hennessy, “The Politics of a Natural Laboratory: Claiming Territory and Governing Life in the Galápagos Islands”, Social Studies of Science 48, no. 4 (2018): 483 – 506.  David Takacs, The Idea of Biodiversity: Philosophies of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Holdgate, The Green Web, passim; Adams, Against Extinction, 47– 48, 118 – 119; Simone Schleper, Planning for the Planet: Environmental Expertise and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 1960 – 1980 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019), 26 – 60, 135 – 172. See also chapter 15 by van de Grift and van Meurs.  William Adams and Jon Hutton, “People, Parks and Poverty: Political Ecology and Biodiversity Conservation” Conservation & Society 5 (2007): 147– 183.  Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885 – 1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Paul Readman, “Preserving the English Landscape, c. 1870 – 1914”, Cultural and Social History 5 (2008): 197– 218; Caroline Ford, Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Nature: From Protecting Regional Landscapes to Regionalist Self-Assertion in the Age of the Global Environment”, in Regionalism and Modern Europe: Identity Construction and Movements from 1890 to the Present Day, ed. Xosé M. Núñez Seixas and Eric Storm (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 65 – 82.

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 Hugo Conwentz, The Care of Natural Monuments with Special Reference to Great Britain and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 44. See also chapters 8 by Aschwanden et al. and 3 by Wöbse and Ziemek.  Van Tienhoven played prominent parts in the preservationist organizations Natuurmonumenten [Natural monuments, 1907], Bond Heemschut [League for Homeland Protection, 1911], and De Hollandsche Molen [The Dutch Mill, 1923]. On the Arcadian ideals he defended there, see Michiel Purmer, Het landschap bewaard: Natuur en erfgoed bij natuurmonumenten (Hilversum: Verloren, 2018), 94– 95.  Victor Westhoff, “The Management of Nature Reserves in Densely Populated Countries considered from a Botanical Viewpoint”, in Proceedings and Papers of the Technical Meeting held at the Hague, 20, 21 and 22 September 1951 (Brussels: IUPN, 1952), 277– 282; Max Nicholson, “Rural Landscape as a Habitat for Flora and Fauna in Densely Populated Countries”, ibid., 50 – 53.  David Lowenthal, “‘European Identy’: An Emerging Concept”, Australian Journal of Politics and History 46 (2000): 314– 321, on 319.  European Conservation Year, special issue of Nature in Focus (1970); Peter Bromley, Nature Conservation in Europe: Policy and Practice (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1997), 85 – 87.  Victor Westhoff, “No Biotope, No Protection”, Naturopa 31 (1978): 7– 9, on pp. 8 – 9.  Marie-Aude l’Hyver, “The European Network of Biogenetic Reserves”, Environmental Conservation 19 (1992): 275 – 276.  Lawrence Jones-Walter, “Pan-European Ecological Networks”, Journal for Nature Conservation 15, no. 4 (2007): 262– 264; Doug Evans, “The Habitats of the European Union Habitats Directive”, Biology and Environment: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 106B (2006): 167– 173.  Georg Kahn-Ackermann, “Editorial”, Naturopa 23 (1975): 1– 2; Wolfdietrich Elbert, “Ecology and the Architectural Heritage”, ibid.: 2– 5; Paul Duvigneaud, “Urban Plant Life: Architectural Heritage and Nature Conservation”, ibid.: 9 – 11; Jean Bilet, “The Mountain Regions of Europe and their Ecological and Human Potential”, Naturopa 25 (1976): 8 – 10.  Gerard-Guy Aymonin, “Editorial”, Naturopa 22 (1975): 1– 2, on p. 1.  Albert Noirfalise, “The Heathlands of Western Europe”, Naturopa 26 (1976): 9 – 11, on p. 11.  Evans, “The Habitats”, 167.  Aurélie Gfeller, “Negotiating the Meaning of Global Heritage: ‘Cultural Landscapes’ in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, 1972– 92”, Journal of Global History 8 (2013): 483 – 503.  https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/422.  William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”, Environmental History 1 (1996): 7– 28.  Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Framing the Heritage of Mankind: National Parks on the International Agenda”, in Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, ed. Bernard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), 140 – 156, on p. 142.  Patrick Kupper, Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014).  Bernhard Gissibl, “A Bavarian Serengeti: Space, Race and Time in the Entangled History of Nature Conservation in East Africa and Germany”, in Civilizing Nature, 102– 120; Clemens Driesen and Jamie Lorimer, “Back Breeding the Aurochs: The Heck Brothers, National Socialism, and Imagined Geographies for non-human Lebensraum”, in Hitler’s Geographies: The Spatialities of the Third Reich, ed. Paolo Giacccaria and Claudio Minca (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 138 – 159; Raf De Bont, “Extinct in the Wild: Finding a Place for the Euro-

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pean Bison, 1919 – 1932”, in Spatializing the History of Ecology: Sites, Journeys, Mappings, ed. Raf De Bont and Jens Lachmund (London: Routledge, 2017), 165 – 184.  1973 United Nations List of National Parks and Equivalent Reserves (Morges: IUCN, 1973).  Alexander B. Adams (ed.), First World Conference on National Parks (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962) 95.  Michael L. Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947 – 1997 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 152– 153; Simone Schleper and Hans Schouwenburg, “Islands and Bioregions: Global Research Design Models and the Making of National Parks, 1960 – 2000”, in Spatializing the History of Ecology, 185 – 203.  “Wildlife in the Arctic”, Naturopa 11 (1971– 1972): 14– 15; Paavo W. Jokinen, “Virgin Forests”, Naturopa 43 (1983): 12– 13.  Derek A. Radcliff, “Why Protection?”, Naturopa 38 (1981): 4– 6, on p. 6.  Francesco Catalano, “Population Problems: The Role of the Council of Europe”, Naturopa (1973): 2– 6, on p. 6; Jean Billet, “The Mountain Regions of Europe and their Ecological and Human Potential as exemplified by the Alps”, Naturopa 25 (1976): 8 – 10.  Peter Baum, “No Progress Report”, Naturopa 38 (1981): 18 – 19.  Henk van den Belt, “Networking Nature, or Serengeti behind the Dikes”, History and Technology 20 (2004): 311– 333; Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen, “Wild Experiments at the Oostvaardersplassen”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (2014): 169 – 181.  Cited in: Van den Belt, “Networking Nature”, 315.  De Nieuwe Wildernis (2013), directed by Mark Verkerk. On the visual traditions of wildlife documentaries, see Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Derek Boussé, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)  “De making of ‘De Nieuwe Wildernis’”, Min. 05:02– 05:19, https://www.bnnvara.nl/denieu wewildernis/videos/21785 (accessed 11 September 2020).  Dolly Jørgensen, “Rethinking Rewilding”, Geoforum 65 (2015): 482– 488, on p. 486.  “Rewilding: Europese landschappen kunnen zoveel wilder”, https://downtoearthmagazine. nl/rewilding-europese-landschappen-kunnen-zo-veel-wilder/ (accessed 11 September 2020).  Paul Jepson, “Rewilding’s next generation will mean no more reserves full of starving animals”, https://theconversation.com/rewildings-next-generation-will-mean-no-more-reservesfull-of-starving-animals-96140 (accessed 11 September 2020).  “About Us”, European Safari Company, https://www.europeansafaricompany.com/about/ about-us/ (accessed 11 September 2020).  Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness”; Van den Belt, “Networking Nature”; David Lowenthal, “Eden, Earth Day and Ecology: Landscape Restoration as Metaphor and Mission”, Landscape Research 38 (2013): 5 – 31.  “European Rewilding Network welcomes projects from the UK, Lithuania and Denmark”, https://rewildingeurope.com/news/european-rewilding-network-welcomes-projects-from-the-uklithuania-denmark/ (accessed 11 September 2020).  George Monbiot, “The Lake District a world heritage site: What a disaster that would be”, The Guardian, 9 May 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/09/lake-districtworld-heritage-site-george-monbiot (accessed 11 September 2020).  George Monbiot, “Rewilding will make Britain a rainforest nation again”, The Guardian, 25 September 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/25/rewilding-brit ains-rainforest-planting-trees (accessed 11 September 2020).

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Bibliography Adams, Williams. Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation. London: Earthscan, 2004. Arnold, David. The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. Belt, Henk van den. “Networking Nature, or Serengeti behind the Dikes”. History and Technology 20, no. 3 (2004): 311 – 333. Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”. Environmental History 1 (1996): 7 – 28. De Bont, Raf. “A World Laboratory: Framing the Albert National Park”. Environmental History 22 (2017): 404 – 432. De Bont, Raf. Nature’s Diplomats: Science, Internationalism and Preservation, 1910 – 1960. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Gfeller, Aurélie. “Negotiating the Meaning of Global Heritage: ‘Cultural Landscapes’ in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, 1972 – 92”. Journal of Global History 8, no. 3 (2013): 483 – 503. Holdgate, Martin. The Green Web: A Union for World Conservation. London: Earthscan, 1999. Jørgensen, Dolly. “Rethinking Rewilding”. Geoforum 65 (2015): 482 – 488. Lowenthal, David. “Eden, Earth Day and Ecology: Landscape Restoration as Metaphor and Mission”, Landscape Research 38 (2013): 5 – 31. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. “Nature: From Protecting Regional Landscapes to Regionalist Self-Assertion in the Age of the Global Environment”. In Regionalism and Modern Europe: Identity Construction and Movements from 1890 to the Present Day, edited by Xosé M. Núñez Seixas and Eric Storm, 65 – 82. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Rehling, Andrea. “Universalismen und Partikularismen im Widerstreit: Zur Genese des UNESCO-Welterbes”. Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 3 (2011), https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3 – 2011/4649. Ross, Corey. Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Schleper, Simone. Planning for the Planet: Environmental Expertise and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 1960 – 1980, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019. Sutter, Paul S. “The Tropics: A Brief History of an Environmental Imaginary”. In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, edited by Andrew C. Isenberg, 178 – 204. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Wöbse, Anna-Katharina. “Framing the Heritage of Mankind: National Parks on the International Agenda”. In Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, edited by Bernard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper, 140 – 156. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2012.

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4 Restoring, Reintroducing, Rewilding: Creating European Wilderness Abstract This chapter examines changing understandings of wilderness in Europe during the twentieth century, and how these ideas took shape in relation to the reintroduction or return of wildlife. Looking at selected species provides concrete examples to the various understandings of animal agency in the restoration of an earlier natural state and shows how actors from various European states cooperated and exchanged animals and expertise. The animals produced their own dynamics, which presented a constant challenge to human actors, and did not adhere to the boundaries established by humans. This gives rise to fundamental discussions about how much wilderness is desirable in Europe and the ways in which the dichotomy of wilderness and non-wilderness is constantly being undermined. Keywords concepts of wilderness; Council of Europe; reintroduction; agency of wildlife; restoration of ecosystems Searching through photo archives for an iconic moment that captures the changes in human-nature relations in Europe in the last century, one motif quickly comes to the fore: a wild animal being released from the confines of a transport carrier into the freedom of a pristine natural landscape. Creatures like lynxes or European otters might shake themselves and then bolt away from the humans who brought them here (see figure 1). The visual history of nature protection offers countless such moments, starting from the early twentieth century. The animals serve as insignia of the restoration of wilderness, or the promise of being able to do so.¹ Such images encapsulate numerous human activities and interactions: The conservationist activists or biologists who open the carriers are themselves part of European transfer processes. Prior to the rewilding action, they travelled across Europe, shared their knowledge and experiences with other experts, gathered the necessary funds, and organized the transport. From this perspective, these animals are pan-European entities which are capable of returning a local environment to a wilder – and thus more authentic – state. The intent is for these creatures to become re-established in a region from which they were driven out or vanished decades or even centuries ago. At the same time, as active keystone species, they are meant to contribute to a new “rewilding” of the rehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-005

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Figure 1: Opening the cage: The European female lynx Bell, born in Switzerland and transferred to Germany, heading into the wild of the Palatinate Forest, April 2017. Photo: Stiftung Natur und Umwelt Rheinland-Pfalz / Martin Greve.

gion. This wilderness that they are to bring about is often vaguely defined and by no means uncontroversial. The emergence of European wilderness ideals and their interplay with the wild animals that literally embody these ideas is the focus of this chapter. Striking though it is, the moment in which a wild animal transitions from a captive state to freedom also contains, beneath the surface, the many contradictions that are part of the negotiations involved in creating wild nature in Europe. For it is precisely the separation from a wild or “primitive” state that was long considered a constitutive element of the shared understanding of Europe as a cultural space. Mastery of nature was seen for centuries as an essential feature that unified the region and set it apart from other, allegedly uncivilized parts of the world. In the course of the twentieth century, however, this contrast was reinterpreted, as Raf de Bont shows in his contribution to this volume, in which he traces the transfer of concepts between Europe and other parts of the world (see chapter 3 by de Bont). While de Bont focuses on attitudes towards the non-European ‘other’, this chapter is concerned primarily with intra-European relations of exchange and reference: National actors cooperated across Europe both professionally and materially – not least because of the transnational ranges of the

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species to be protected. Individual regional nature conservationists also developed transnational perspectives that at times extended beyond the European boundaries or transcended the East-West divide. In the course of nature protection debates, the interactions between participants led to legal support for and restoration of wilderness becoming an increasingly fundamental part of European environmental politics. In order to understand the constellations of actors (including nature conservationists and wild animals), it is necessary to first sketch how “wilderness” was understood and negotiated in European discourses. The image of the carrier from which animals were released into the wild thus symbolizes the container, which holds the many diverse and competing understandings of European wilderness. The multifaceted, changing concept of wilderness is always also a struggle to determine what the human relationship with nature should look like and how much control, activity, and intervention this requires from human societies. This contribution examines the changing understanding of wilderness in Europe during the twentieth century and how these ideas took shape in relation to the reintroduction or return of wildlife. Its starting point is the premise that wilderness is always the result of diverse interpretations of nature, or as Kirchhoff and Vicenzotti put it: “This interpretation of wilderness as not being a complex of ecosystems but a meaningful arrangement of symbolic objects renders visible the multitude of diachronic and synchronic meaning of wild nature.”² Charismatic megafauna – that is, prominent animals which possess a particular attractiveness for the public – are important symbolic objects in narratives about wilderness. From an environmental history perspective, it is pertinent to consider not just the European culture of debate about wilderness that emerged in the twentieth century, but also to look at individual actions and impacts of both the nature activists and the wild species themselves. The first section will thus outline the wilderness ideals that have been part of European discussions and how the reintroduction of vanished species gained momentum. The second section will look more closely at selected species – namely the beaver, wolf, and oyster (which, on account of their distribution, even include the descriptor ‘European’ as part of their species name) – to give concrete shape to the various understandings of animal agency in the restoration of an earlier natural state. It shows how actors from various European states cooperated and exchanged animals with one another. At the same time, the animals produced their own dynamics which presented a constant challenge to the human actors and did not adhere to the boundaries established by humans. For animals are more than just empty signs: they develop their own agency and impacts which are of particular significance in current wilderness debates.³ They give rise to fundamental discussions about how much wilderness is desirable in Europe and the ways in

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which the dichotomy of wilderness and non-wilderness are constantly being undermined.

1 Framing European Wilderness Wilderness is both one of the most important and one of the most controversial concepts in the history of human-nature relations. In a historical analysis of the term Kirchhoff and Vincenzotti argue that “what constitutes wilderness is not the biophysical properties of an area but rather the specific meanings ascribed to it according to cultural patterns of interpretation”. Wilderness functions as a canvas upon which a multitude of visions and desires can be projected – from biodiversity to the yearning for an authentic experience of nature. Thus, a wilderness is not a complex of ecosystems, but rather a “meaningful arrangement of symbolic objects”.⁴ The deconstruction of this concept is considered a foundational aspect of the discipline of environmental history.⁵ It is now widely recognized that the scenery which Europeans encountered during their colonial occupation and labelled “wilderness” was in fact very much shaped by human management and habitation: they were merely unable, in most cases, to read the signs. This is also the case for the US National Parks – generally seen as the embodiment of sublime and unspoiled nature. Accordingly, the US “invention” of the national park, starting with Yellowstone as a flagship in 1872, presented the protection of ‘“wilderness” in the American West as a modern idea that was explicitly distinguished from the European idea of culture. The socalled wilderness and the primordial qualities attributed to it were now marketed as a picturesque tourist attraction and an exclusive element of the identity of the young American nation. As Raf de Bont shows in his contribution on the influence of the ‘Other’ and the colonial impact on European ideas of nature, these experiences beyond the borders of Europe played a fundamental role in shaping how nature was understood in Europe as well. The US national park model was likewise both an important source of inspiration and a point of contrast.⁶ When the German government discussed the idea of creating such wilderness areas in the late nineteenth century, Hugo Conwentz, a state commissioner who would become a major pacesetter in the institutionalization of nature protection, rejected any such plans. In Europe, he argued, there were no such vast untouched natural spaces, for the influence of cultivation had left its mark everywhere.⁷ Conwentz therefore proposed creating a network of smaller reservations as a kind of memorials for future generations, for which he used the term, borrowed from Alexander von Humboldt, “natural monument” (Naturdenkmal). Wild animals that had become

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extinct or were endangered, such as the beaver and the musk-ox, were also included under this concept.⁸ Conwentz’s idea turned into a blueprint for the European approach to nature reservation. He travelled across the continent, from Paris to Tiflis and from Stockholm to Prague, presenting his plans.⁹ Conwentz was considered a visionary in the institutionalization and systematization of the new field of nature protection, but his rejection of wild nature also attracted criticism. Sweden established its first national park in 1909. Switzerland followed in 1914 and explicitly dedicated the reserve to the restoration of wild nature. One of the driving forces behind the initiative to create a national park in the Alpine Engadine region was the Swiss scientist and world traveller Paul Sarasin (see chapter 9 by Aschwanden et al.). Drawing on colonial experiences from his expeditions in Southeast Asia, he saw neither the interests of the local population nor the traditional usage of the region as insurmountable obstacles.¹⁰ With the help of largely privately raised funds, a nature organization purchased areas of land in an Alpine region along the Italian border with the goal of gradually returning the land into a wilderness state following strict scientific criteria. This park was to serve as a role model for a European type of national park. Although nature had been thoroughly moulded by humans, it could be restored to an earlier state through guided action, the argument went.¹¹ In these early activities, from Conwentz’s idea of networks of small reserves to Sarasin’s vision of national parks in which wilderness was to be restored, a characteristically European understanding of nature protection can be seen: precisely because of Europe’s self-image as the cradle of Western civilization, it was necessary for Europe to be able to preserve some spaces from being completely altered by humans. Nature conservationists presented their aspiration to preserve certain natural areas and the animals and plants within them in a wild state as a modern act of self-discipline – and thereby as a civilizing act that was part of the rules and norms of the European human-nature relationship (see figure 2). This concept, however, required ambassadors to promote it. In order to make the grandeur of the Swiss Alps comprehensible, activists drew on positive associations of freedom and grandeur that one animal species in particular seemed to embody: the ibex. By the eighteenth century, this species of wild goat had been hunted to extinction in nearly the entire Alpine region (see chapter 9 by Aschwanden et al.). Now it was to become an icon of the restoration of an earlier state of nature. Following an adventurous undertaking that involved the theft and smuggling of ibex kids from the royal hunting grounds of Gran Paradiso in Italy, a number of additional specimens were acquired from animal parks and returned to the wild in a photo-friendly release ceremony in 1920.¹² These photogenic animals provided a narrative imagery that was much more impressive than descriptions of phytosociological developments. Such species, which

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Figure 2: A matter of chivalry: Frontispiece of the German-Austrian initiative for nature parks, 1911. Photo: author’s archive.

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would later be dubbed “charismatic megafauna”, became an integral component of supposedly pan-European wilderness projects. Through their movements across boundaries, the individual animals claimed for themselves a much wider radius than the human actors involved in the project had envisioned for them. As it turned out, the intended ambassadors of wilderness were objects of a comprehensive regime of control. The ibexes crossed territorial boundaries, fell to their deaths from the steep slopes, were shot by hunters, or simply disappeared under unexplained circumstances. They required constant tending and monitoring. The regime of control that accompanied the release of supposedly wild animals can also be seen in another pan-European project which reveals the highly contradictory premises of early rewilding efforts: the re-establishment of the European bison. This large herbivore once ranged across much of Europe and played an important role in shaping forest ecosystems. But by the end of the nineteenth century, it was no longer to be found outside of zoos. Even the last members of a small population in Białowieża Forest in Poland, which had survived being hunted for centuries and enjoyed a certain popularity among zoologists, had been wiped out at the end of the First World War.¹³ In response to the threat of extinction facing this bovine, in the 1920s a European network of conservationists dedicated themselves to implementing coordinated breeding programmes.¹⁴ The history of this initiative is a typical example of the contradictions and shifting meanings assigned in the debates about wilderness (see chapter 3 by De Bont). European wilderness, it seemed, existed only as a memory and in a few material mementos. Yet this wilderness could be reproduced. Inspired by stereotypical images of “unspoiled nature” in North America and the European colonies, this wilderness was to be “resurrected” from the grave. New animals were “manufactured” to represent the species through a breeding programme, in which individuals from European zoos were nonchalantly crossed with imported American bison. The trans-European cooperation did not, however, prevent the individual bison from being imbued with nationalist significance in the places where they were released into expansive park enclosures. In Germany, the programme was spearheaded by Lutz Heck, director of the Berlin Zoological Garden and a Nazi party member. Released into places such as Hermann Göring’s private nature preserve in the Schorfheide heathland, the bison became linked with a “racial mysticism” which saw the aggressive expansion to the east as not only a source of Lebensraum for the Aryan race but also as a habitat for its wildlife.¹⁵ This is just one of many examples in which animals became charged with significance as embodiments of European wilderness and were in fact used for nationalist and chauvinist purposes.¹⁶ Primeval landscapes and wilderness

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were marketed by the National Socialists as sites for völkisch self-affirmation and empowerment. Accordingly, these last remaining “primordial” spaces were to be recognized in the form of national parks in Germany and its annexed lands in the Austrian Alps or the Bohemian Forest and populated with bison and aurochs.¹⁷ After the war, the focus of the debates shifted from wilderness to resource conservation issues. In 1949, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations organized a major conference to discuss issues related to global resource distribution and security, focusing on economically sustainable use and exploitation of raw materials, land, forests, seas, and mineral resources. Endangered species conservation and nature protection were pushed into the defensive and activists started to emphasize the ecological aspects of their issues.¹⁸ In this context, wilderness and “unspoiled nature” became a key category in the norms and standards negotiated by the international networks within the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).¹⁹ However, initiatives to expand protected park areas quickly ground to a halt in Europe because there were so few spaces that were not already cultivated, and claimed as someone’s property. When the Cultural Committee of the Council of Europe convened to discuss a concept for future nature conservation in 1960, the most that seemed feasible was the creation of a network of nature parks in which the recreational value of European landscapes was at the forefront and only small core zones were reserved as wild areas.²⁰ This approach was promoted by Walter Strzygowski, an Austrian geography professor who had been invited to the assembly as an expert consultant. During World War II, he had been a member of a group of scientists who created maps and land-use plans of southeast Europe for the Reich Working Group on Regional Planning (Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumordnung).²¹ What had started as expansionist planning of Nazi Germany was now adapted to the new political relations in Europe. However, while the Nazi cult of wilderness did not play an obvious role here, elements of a chauvinistic regional planning ideology shimmered through the rhetoric of a bright future in a peaceful and unified Europe. Strzygowski proposed that nature parks should be created in the vicinity of the urban centres of Europe to allow residents of the European metropoles an opportunity for “the experience of the lonely beauty of nature”. This would allow “a European feeling of home [Heimatgefühl] to grow, which would promote peace and harmony among the peoples of Europe far better than mere economic cooperation”.²² In spite of this pan-European appeal, Strzygowski did not attempt to hide his cultural pessimism and völkisch convictions. He referred to urban areas as unnatural and illness-causing (“Krankheitsherde der Unnatur”) and decried modern lifestyles and their lack of physical labour. Housewives, he wrote, would become “cosseted creatures” who subse-

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quently “even shrink from the effort of bearing and raising children. In this way the white race abandons the field to the other [races]”.²³ The plan drew on an idea of racial superiority, which in the post-war era merely needed to be formulated in European (rather than national) terms. In the future, Europeans were to be revitalized through the experience of nature. Strzygowski’s plan called for 250 nature parks across a continent that was divided into largely arbitrary categories reaching from the “forest-rich North” to the “sunny South” and the “at present regrettably closed-off East”. He assigned top priority to the creation of parks in the six densely populated industrial states of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and emphasized the urgency of conservation by stating that the ‘“Europark” would not be any less important than the “Euroatom”.²⁴ Strzygowski’s suggestion, which was extensively discussed by the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe as a blueprint for future nature conservation policy, thus reflected both the continuation of grand planning visions as well as the resistance to a genuine debate about wilderness. In nature parks, which were defined emphatically in contradistinction to the US national park concept, nature was to be protected for humans (see chapter 8 by Hasenöhrl and Groß). Only in a few small, limited core zones was it to be protected from humans for the sake of scientific tests and comparative studies.²⁵ In addition to showing the continuation of spatial planning concepts that emerged in the context of Nazi Germany’s plans for European expansion, Strzygowski’s proposal also revealed how, as Europe began to fuse together through the Council of Europe and the ECSC, negotiation continued to take place about which vision of the human-nature relationship in Europe would prevail. At the moment when a unified Europe established itself as a political vision, nature also was “Europeanized” as a reference point that served as a source of meaning and identity and a shared framework that could be fundamental to the Europe of the future. Meanwhile, in the United States wilderness became the subject of its own piece of legislation: the 1964 Wilderness Act. Although actors in Europe continued to be hesitant to use the word,²⁶ the focus of their protection goals was nevertheless precisely wilderness in the form of wildlife. Species protection was added to the agenda of the Council of Europe as a shared European task, and it ultimately paved the way for projects in which wilderness – via the protection of individual species – became the object of transnational negotiations. As Bernhard Gissibl has shown, this animal-focused debate about wilderness had its roots in colonialism and found its way back to Western Europe with the help of media portrayals of exotic wilderness as represented by African megafauna (see chapter 3 by De Bont).²⁷ Here, alongside ecological discourses and new national park debates, protection of wildlife helped add new meaning to the idea of “wilderness”. The stunning images of the Serengeti in popular documentaries

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elicited a yearning for unspoiled nature and the chance to come face-to-face with untamed wildlife.²⁸ The images fostered a renewed interest in the reintroduction of animal species that served as signifiers in narratives of a European nature which had been forgotten and was now to be revived. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, wild animals had already frequently served as central figures in wilderness narratives. Nature activists had begun keeping inventories of endangered animal species in the early twentieth century.²⁹ Conservationist storylines were commonly built on extinct ancestral species that served not only as a marker of the shared experience of loss but also as a warning when arguing for the necessity of nature protection measures. In 1964, the IUCN created the Red List, an assessment of the extinction risk of endangered animal species. What had started out as a collection of loose-leaf notes would eventually become one of the most important barometers of the state of species protection. Parallel with this development, various actors were joining forces to create a network that aimed to both popularize nature conservation and make it more scientific. This alliance included ecological scientists and international organizations such as UNESCO and the newly founded World Wildlife Fund (WWF).³⁰ The 1960s posed new, pressing questions – about global systems and the carrying capacity of the Earth, about cybernetic models and planetary connections.³¹ Classical forms of nature conservation paled in the light of these challenges. But the global perspective and the new, dramatic scenario of loss playing out on the Red Lists also gave the movement new contours. Species protection cast off its nostalgic associations as its object of concern came to be seen in the light of ecosystem science. The 1960s are also a particularly interesting era for European and environmental history because of the way that heterogeneous forms of action and interpretations came together and were linked with experiences that made the environmental changes seem comprehensible and plausible. Developments in the United States and large-scale environmental research projects such as the International Biological Program, the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme and various projects funded by the WWF transformed the interplay between traditional nature protection, science, and the nascent sphere of environmental politics³² and elevated the standing of classical nature protection in Europe. By combining nature reserves as established forms of protection with ecosystem science, conservation was able to cultivate an image of ecological modernization. In the late 1960s, a new wave of national park projects began and terms like “restoring” and “reflooding” found their way into the language used by landscape planners. Marshlands were “rewetted” and forests made to become ‘“semi-natural” (see chapter 7 by Hölzl and Oosthoek). Debates about species protection became increasingly linked with the issue of preserving or restoring the habitats of endangered animal species.

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At the beginning of the 1970s, the initiatives of the Council of Europe focused mostly on threats to individual species due to hunting and collection. Soon attention turned to the bigger picture. The Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, an initiative of the Council of Europe that was signed in 1979, emphasized the precarious state of European nature as a whole and declared the protection of habitats to be an urgent task (see chapter 16 by van de Grift and van Meurs). It also encouraged the signatory states to reintroduce “native” species and control so-called invasive species.³³ Species protection was converted to management of large-scale natural spaces – thus opening the door for debates about wilderness. These discussions joined a growing interest in individual nature tourism and strong commercial interests as the flourishing outdoor industry diversified its offerings. Wilderness became a lucrative object of yearning and desire in Europe. In the 1990s, the term “rewilding” began to establish itself in European ecological circles. The word seemed to contain an inherent contradiction, for it suggested that wilderness was not something original that had been irretrievably lost because of human activity, but rather a process that could be recreated. While seemingly a new and integrative approach to the idea of wilderness, the concept contained an exclusionary element. For these spaces were to be removed from human influence, or as environmental historian Dolly Jørgenson has put it: “Rewilding discourse seeks to erase human history and involvement with the land and flora and fauna.”³⁴ The concept is based on the assumption that by enabling ecological succession to take place in a large area of land, natural ecosystem processes will gradually be restored – given the absence of human usage. Ecologists and practicians of applied nature protection initiated renewed discussions in expert circles about “untouched” or “original” nature in Europe.³⁵ Originating in the United States, the rewilding concept developed a life of its own in Europe. Efforts relied on two human interventions: abandoning productive land and reintroducing long-vanished species – megaherbivores like the European bison and predators like the lynx, the latter playing a key role in the development of an ecosystem through trophic cascade processes.³⁶ Today reintroduction projects are considered a normal practice. Rewilding is always also a technocratic and interventionist act of environmental engineering that relies on transnational collaboration between diverse players.³⁷ Over the last several decades, the amorphous concept of rewilding has become something of an “environmentalist mantra”³⁸ that encompasses a wide range of ideas about nature – and also reveals the contradictions of nature conservation activities. Just as concepts are not static, but are constantly endowed with new meanings, wild animals refuse to stand still either. Using a number of historical examples in which wild animals play a central role, this chapter

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now turns to moments of Europeanization in the negotiations of the human-nature relationship. These cases illustrate how ideas of a wild Europe have become more diverse in recent decades, while shedding light on the agency of the human and animal actors.

2 Bringing Back the Beaver or – the Beaver Bringing Back Wilderness Wandering through Munich’s Englischer Garten, a vast city park along the Isar River, one might notice a number of trees clad in a hip-high casing of wire mesh. The mesh is a sign of the return of the European beaver (Castor fiber), whose sharp teeth represent a threat to the urban trees. By the end of the nineteenth century, the once-omnipresent beaver had all but disappeared in Europe; the remaining population, consisting of eight small enclaves, were estimated at one point to number no more than 1,200 individuals,³⁹ the result of both hunting and eradication efforts. For centuries, the beaver had been a delicacy for Lenten fast days, and the soft pelt and castoreum were highly desirable trading commodities. Later the beaver came to be considered undesirable, for its dam-building activities interfered with efforts to regulate the flow of wild waterways. For the growing water management infrastructure, beavers meant disorder and risk. As herbivores which require a steady supply of fresh fibrous plant material, beavers felled trees and caused riverbanks to undergo constant restructuring. On a regional level, the beaver had already disappeared in most regions of Europe in the modern period – in Hungary, for example, by 1865. Even in Finland with its many waterways, the mammal was considered extinct after 1868, and in Sweden after 1871.⁴⁰ In Germany, relic beaver populations survived along the middle stretches of the Elbe and in France along the Rhône. A few beavers could also be found in southern Norway. In 1922, efforts were started in Sweden to establish a new population by importing Norwegian beavers.⁴¹ Later, Finland successfully introduced Canadian beavers. After the Second World War, other European nations began to take an interest in re-establishing the species – albeit no longer for its fat or its pelt, but for its symbolic meaning as a charismatic and charming embodiment of wild nature. It seemed to pose little threat to the now nearly completely regulated river landscapes. Instead, the animal was to become a symbol of an intact nature, while simultaneously helping to bring about this state. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, “repatriation” efforts were initiated in several countries in Europe, in which actors were generally forced to look beyond the borders of their own countries to acquire animals to

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resettle.⁴² In Switzerland, for example, beavers were successfully introduced in 1956, using individuals from the French Rhône. In Bavaria, nature conservation activists began working to re-establish the beaver in the 1960s.⁴³ They identified an area along the middle Danube, which seemed to have great potential as beaver habitat, and began establishing contacts with beaver experts in Switzerland, France, Poland, Sweden, and the Soviet Union. They could draw on the far-flung networks established by Bernhard Grzimek, director of the Frankfurt Zoological Garden, Oscar-winning filmmaker, and a key player in European and international nature conservation. The activists travelled throughout Europe and across the Iron Curtain to gain first-hand knowledge about how reestablishment efforts were being handled and to discuss the possibilities of acquiring a beaver supply.⁴⁴ The species seemed to possess an astonishing power for generating dialogue and cooperation between actors in spite of political differences. In the Voronezh Nature Reserve, situated between the Don and Usman Rivers in Russia, beaver research and breeding programmes had been carried out since the 1920s. By the 1960s, the station had already delivered 3,000 beavers to reintroduction projects in various parts of the Soviet Union – from the Baltic states to the Lake Baikal. The German activists’ interchange with the Russian researchers illustrates traditions of knowledge transfer that are typical of European nature and species conservation. In the eyes of Western actors, Eastern Europe served as a reference point for a nature that was less tainted by civilization. By placing the focus on scientific questions and non-material values, the participants were able to engage in exchange that transcended the East-West divide. With such projects, nature in Eastern Europe gained a new quality: it was understood as possessing something that had long since been lost in Western Europe. Transcending the inner-European boundary, the Bavarian nature conservationists were able to equip themselves with expertise about the biology of this amphibious mammal, which had been lost during the century-long absence of beavers. In the Russian nature reserve, the German delegation saw a beaver-friendly, near-natural environment. When they visited one of the last beaver populations in southwest Europe along the Rhône near Montelimar, they found by contrast a heavily polluted and regulated river. However, in-between the barrages and concrete banks, beavers had made homes for themselves in side channels, gravel pits, and quarry lakes. These wild animals, it seemed, required less wilderness than had been assumed.⁴⁵ Wildlife such as the beaver, the European excursions demonstrated, could in fact be decoupled from wilderness environments. Following these trips through Europe, the work of reshaping some artificial ponds along the Danube in Bavaria began. The activists enclosed this 15-hectare space with fences and they acquired the hunting rights to ensure that the pre-

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cious animals would not fall prey to hunters. On 4 November 1966, the first four beavers arrived on an express train from the Soviet Union. They were wild-caught individuals from the Ostyor River region.⁴⁶ Four more beavers from the Voronezh Nature Reserve and a “French beaver lady together with her charming daughter” moved in. These last, however, were not content with the imitation wilderness they had been presented with, and soon after their arrival they, disregarding the abundant supply of apples and cabbages, got to work felling trees, which resulted in damages to the fencing. Shortly thereafter, a female beaver, dubbed “Hedwig”, arrived from Poland. Three days later, having dug her way out under the fence, she felled an apple tree in a farmyard and a large poplar on the local bathing site. Attempts to recapture her were unsuccessful. Eventually, Hedwig was run over by a car.⁴⁷ A beaver delivered from Sweden perished in a weir.⁴⁸ The reintroductions – which were always also an “expatriation” of the beavers from the European regions where they had made their homes – experienced a number of initial setbacks. Over the years that followed, these wild animals quickly asserted their agency as independent actors, travelling long distances up- and downstream. How did people respond when confronted with a wild animal they were familiar with, at most, from wildlife documentaries or zoos and which now left a wake of felled trees in the neighbourhoods? While the nature conservationists had gotten the permission of the government authorities, there had been no public discussions about the potential autonomy of the beavers. Not only do beavers have a habit of travelling long distances, they also construct animal infrastructures out of material that they harvest themselves. They are thus not only a threat to the softwood vegetation along rivers, but their dams alter the surrounding spaces, flooding meadows and farmland, and interfere with fishing spots. The animals that had been relocated to the Danube thanks to the pan-European cooperation of nature conservationists quickly continued their journeys in other directions, reproduced, and began to actively alter the character of the biotopes they interacted with. Thus, the beavers initiated unforeseen processes of rewilding which now, in turn, had to be “tamed”. What the activists had started as a form of “reparation” to nature now had to be supplemented with financial reparations paid out farmers and garden owners whose properties had been damaged by beaver activities. Eventually, this would result in the creation of a beaver damage compensation scheme (the so-called Biberfonds). At the same time, the Europeanization of nature conservation legislation proved to be a boon for the initiative. Both the Bern Convention and later the Habitats Directive of the EU listed beavers as subject to particular protection.⁴⁹ The reintroduction project, which had begun with informal cooperation and exchange of animals, was able to expand under the auspices of European integra-

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tion. A project originally geared at the protection of a single species became a matter of ecosystem creation, and the beaver was increasingly read as an important actor in the restoration of European nature. Or, as a brochure of the Council of Europe put it in 1997: “In conserving Castor fiber in Europe one should aim at both the preservation of the species itself and its ecological function as an ecosystem engineer.”⁵⁰ Hedwig, Susi, Sven, and all the other beavers who had been brought to Bavaria in 1966 from all over Europe kicked off a rewilding story so successful that it had ripple effects across Europe. Some animals travelled via the water routes to Austria and the Czech Republic.⁵¹ In the winter of 1996/ 1997, when 21 beavers were captured at key sites in Bavaria where they had caused severe conflict, they were delivered to a reintroduction project in Croatia. From there they migrated to Slovenia and Hungary.⁵² In 1998, a further 97 beavers were released in Belgium, and others shipped to Romania for resettlement along the Olt River – where today the trees are clad in wire mesh, just like those in Munich’s Englischer Garten.⁵³

3 Threatening Wildlife – Wolves Crossing Europe Like the beaver, the wolf (Canis lupus) had vanished in most parts of Europe as a result of hunting and habitat loss in the course of the nineteenth century. The howling of wolves and the fear of roaming packs that threatened the livestock disappeared from most people’s experience.⁵⁴ The wolves had been hunted down, trapped, or killed with strychnine. In myths and folklore such as the Grimm Brothers’ story of Little Red Riding Hood (Rotkäppchen), however, the wolf continued to be coded as an emblematic threat which became a powerful element of a pan-European cultural tradition: the wolf as man-eater.⁵⁵ At the end of the nineteenth century, wolves had only survived along the European peripheries. Although the wolf was considered extinct in Central Europe, its presence continued to be felt on the continent. On a map of Europe, the territories of the wolf resembled a scattering of dots, indicators of forested areas in which few people lived: isolated pockets in the Carpathians, the Baltic, Scandinavia, Iberia, Alps, and the Dinaric Balkans. Did anyone actually want to see this animal return? In the 1960s, this seemed unthinkable. In a report about endangered mammals in Europe, a survey of the member states of the Council of Europe indicated a strong consensus: Canis lupus […] has been and is considered as a species that it would be economically desirable to exterminate. Its preservation is only possible in large reserves and subject to control of its numbers; only forest areas uninhabited by man are suitable for the purpose, so

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that Scandinavia alone can be considered. Such reserves exist in Czechoslovakia and Poland, so that practical information can be obtained.⁵⁶

The wolf was manifestly not welcome as a wild inhabitant of a future Europe – or welcome at most as a resident of carefully monitored enclosures. It was an attitude that was clearly shaped by experiences in densely populated Western Europe, where coexistence with wild animals – and the threats to humans and human property which came with this – seemed to have been eliminated. However, nature conservation experts in the Council of Europe would soon abandon this negative attitude towards wolves. Early signs of this shift in attitude are evident in a 1969 brochure of the Council of Europe entitled “Animals in Danger”.⁵⁷ The document suggests a lack of certainty about where wolves were still to be found in Western Europe: “Small numbers are perhaps present in some parts of France, in the mountains of Italy, Spain, Portugal and on the Balkan peninsula.” Although there were legal provisions protecting the wolf from hunting, in light of the “popular prejudice against wolves”, the brochure suggested that additional “special arrangements” were needed, and the “establishment of large nature reserves” was recommended.⁵⁸ In 1973, with the IUCN’s creation of a “Wolf Specialist Group” headed by the Canadian wolf expert Douglas H. Pimlott, a new chapter in the protection of this species began. Pimlott travelled Europe for three months, visiting nearly every country in which there were still wolf populations in order to assess their local status. He organized a conference in which wildlife biologists from across the continent, including the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Spain, shared their experiences with wolf management and protection. Once again, it was not only the peripheries of Western Europe that could report on experiences with wilderness as represented by the wolf, but also East Europeans who had the relevant animal populations and knowledge about managing them. Together, the experts drafted a fairly radical manifesto in which they sketched an entirely new wolf policy rooted in an idea of the animal’s fundamental rights: Wolves, like all other wildlife, have a right to exist in a wild state. This right is in no way related to their known value to man-kind. Instead it derives from the right of all living creatures to co-exist in a manner unhampered by man as part of natural ecosystems.⁵⁹

Comprehensive protection, they argued, must include compensation for damages caused by the wolf’s activities. In regions in which the wolf still lived, intensive economic development should be avoided and potential habitats should be made more wolf-friendly – for example, by the reintroduction of large herbivores.

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Europe, then, was to make space for the wolf. The discussions of the IUCN’s Wolf Specialist Group are a textbook example of the transformation happening in the perception of nature and in nature protection policy. This was the voice of a new international generation of wildlife biologists, willing to use the media to push their agenda. A representative example was the Spanish expert Félix Samuel Rodríguez de la Fuente, whose animal documentaries in the Spanish radio and television had made him a media star. Thanks to him, the wolf had acquired a new, positive image among the younger, urban generation. The visual media in particular played an increasingly important role in the creation of a European wilderness narrative. The WWF as a financially powerful extended arm of the IUCN was able to fund concrete research projects and media campaigns, and as a non-government organization it was relatively unhindered by the barrier of the Iron Curtain. In the matter of the wolf, this was of crucial importance, because the largest surviving wolf populations were located in Eastern Europe. Not least, the booming field of wildlife ecology presented the wolf as an apex predator and thus as an important element in European ecosystems. The actors saw themselves as educators: one merely had to tell the story in the right way, or, as Pimlott put it: [The aim] should be to try to find ways and means of helping the people of Europe to understand much more about what kind of an animal the wolf really is. I think that we need to show what kind of a role it plays in ecosystems and what kinds of dangers and threats it poses to people. In all of these things we should be very honest.⁶⁰

In the 1970s, public opinion about forgotten wildlife species underwent another fundamental shift, in part due to changes in socio-economic relations in Europe. Pasture-based farming was on the decline, the numbers of people employed in agriculture were dropping, and a new understanding of nature emerged in the context of the environmental debates of the 1970s. As a 1976 study by the Council of Europe on the protection of threatened mammal species in Europe stated: “The object of the protection given should be to maintain the population of all mammals at its present level, or to increase it, particularly in those areas where the species originate.”⁶¹ Simply protecting remnant populations was now considered far from sufficient: Europe should be made wilder and more authentic through guided management of nature. The Bern Convention emphasized European responsibility for nature and the environment – and for protecting large predators such as the wolf, lynx, wolverine, and bear which had long been objects of fear and hatred.⁶² The fact that these animals had all but vanished in Western and Central Europe (and thus did not pose any immediate threat), surely contributed to the willingness to include them.

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Ultimately, wolves would return without the help of any major reintroduction programmes. Starting in the 1980s, many of the conditions that had restricted the movement of the wolves in Europe changed. When the Iron Curtain began to crumble in 1989, for example, the wolves which wandered into Germany from Poland found themselves in a country in which – contrary to the situation that had prevailed in the East German state – shooting wolves was prohibited. Symbolically, the first wolf pack to settle in former East Germany made their home in a former military training area. Much to the annoyance of local hunters and livestock owners, their reappearance was celebrated by the public as a sign of the new peaceful relations between opposing actors in a reunited Europe. Meanwhile, as European agricultural subsidies encouraged the spread of largescale intensive farming, rural populations began to leave the peripheries, leading to an increase in the numbers of the wildlife species that were the wolves’ main food sources. Thus, the combination of European nature protection legislation and socio-economic changes resulting from European integration paved the way for the return of the wolf,⁶³ which now entered legal spaces that granted it a fundamental right to protection. The legislative activities of European nature conservationists had substantially altered the relations between humans and wolves. The wolves’ activities, in turn, produced a shift in power relations. While nature enthusiasts welcomed the (usually invisible) presence of the wolves, local residents felt that their interests had been subordinated to the legal interests of a wild animal. Mushroom hunters, sheep farmers, and even dog owners began to fear for their individual safety; roe deer, as hunters discovered with displeasure, had become more timid and difficult to hunt due to the presence of wolves. Individual wolves learned that humans did not represent a genuine danger. While they lost their fear, other users of nature became more fearful. The autonomy of this wild nature represented by the wolf thus gave rise to new controversies that have played out in a similar fashion in nearly all parts of Western Europe where the wolf has returned. Through their self-governed return and activities, wolves have set in motion dynamic processes that can no longer be contained on a regional or national level. They do not require a wilderness to survive, but are able to adapt themselves to human-made ecosystems. The far-travelling animals have even allowed the isolated populations to merge into a larger metapopulation, as a study of a single wolf several years ago has shown. In July 2011, wolf scientists in the Slovenian-Croatian border region captured a young wolf, whom they dubbed “Slavc”, and fitted him with a tracking device (see figure 3). As is often the case in reintroduction projects, the act of naming endowed an anonymous animal with a specific individual identity. Slavc became a media

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Figure 3: The biologist Hubert Potočnik fitting Slavc with a collar in July 2011. Photo: Nina Ražen.

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sensation and an animal symbol of a new variety of European unification.⁶⁴ He began an odyssey that nobody had expected: in a journey that was tracked nearly seamlessly via satellite, he travelled northwest for more than 1,000 kilometres. The wildlife biologists who had tagged him coordinated with Austrian and Italian colleagues to ensure that he had special protection to prevent him from falling prey to hunters along his journey. Slavc crossed motorways and railway lines, passed through suburban settlements, swam across the Drava and traversed high Alpine passes in the middle of winter at altitudes of up to 2,600 metres.⁶⁵ In March 2012, he settled down in the Lessinia Regional Nature Park in Italy and together with a female wolf began to establish a new pack. For the wildlife biologists this was a sensational event: they were able to witness the joining of two previously isolated wolf populations, namely the Dinaric-Balkan and the Alpine populations. Europe was growing together in a very special way. For the wildlife biologists, the tracking project, which had been funded through the EU’s LIFE programme, also demonstrated the importance of European cooperation for both research and conservation activities.⁶⁶ The wolf is one example of the transformations that have taken place in our narratives of wild animals. While the beaver was increasingly framed as an architect and an engineer of a new wilderness, the wolf was assigned the role of the top predator responsible for restoring natural relations.

4 Diversifying Wilderness: Inviting the European Flat Oyster Back to European Waters Recent years have seen a tremendous proliferation of reintroduction projects of various kinds in Europe. Salmon, fire-bellied toads, and bearded vultures are bred in certified programmes and released into the wild in order to restore natural ecological conditions (see chapter 5 by Peter Coates). Such procedures do not aim merely at the reintegration of individual species in habitats from which they have vanished, but also at actively reshaping natural spaces with the help of wild animals. At the same time, in an era of rapidly accelerating species extinction and climate change, the production of wilderness becomes a method to counter these developments. Wilderness generates resilience, buffer zones, and carbon sinks, argue proponents of rewilding projects. One such European wilderness project aims to restore vanished reef structures in the North Sea. To do so, it relies on the help of a rather uncharismatic animal, the European flat oyster (Ostrea edulis), which was once endemic in much of the shallow coastal areas of the eastern Atlantic from Norway to Morocco. Individuals live up to

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ten years, are hermaphroditic, and produce two to three million eggs in a single breeding season, each of which can potentially grow to become a new oyster. Thanks to its fecundity and value as a source of protein, the oyster has served as a food source for coastal dwellers for much of human history. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, the balance between humans and the oyster beds had undergone a shift: as a food that spoils easily, oysters had mostly been traded locally, but with the advent of rail transport networks, both markets and demand expanded dramatically. Oysters harvested from beds in the northern Wadden Sea, for example, were packed in barrels and delivered to St. Petersburg. Modernity and new material regimes based on fossil fuels thus had far-reaching repercussions for the oysters and their life-cycle. Technical innovation made it possible to decouple material conditions from the limits to which they had formerly been subject. Instructed by the Prussian government to investigate whether – following the example of French and British oyster farms – artificial oyster cultivation could be introduced in the Wadden Sea, German marine biologist Karl Möbius undertook a thorough study of the European flat oyster. In his description of the complex relationships between the organisms of the oyster beds, he coined the term biocoenosis (Biozönose), or biological community, which would become a key term in the ecological sciences. He concluded that the local oyster population would become extinct if harvesting activities did not cease, at least temporarily.⁶⁷ By the 1920s, his prediction had come to pass: the last native oyster beds were empty and the European flat oyster disappeared from large stretches of the North Sea. Overharvesting decimated the oyster numbers throughout Europe, and most of the remaining oysters were killed by bacteria. Ninety per cent of earlier oyster beds disappeared – and with them, the memory of the importance that they had once had, both economically and ecologically. For along with the oysters, the reef structures that they had built also disappeared. Today the oyster is seen as a marine engineer, a keystone species that laid the foundations for the biodiverse ecosystem particular to the North Sea. Its “edifices” provided a physical substrate, a breeding ground, and feeding and hiding place for other species. But for the oyster to take up this role as architect once again, it must first be actively reintroduced – a conservation measure recommended by the Habitats Directive of the EU. Thus, encouraged by similar projects in the United States, the network of experts behind the Berlin Oyster Recommendation on the Future of Native Oyster Restoration in Europe (2017) kicked off a reintroduction project in the waters of the North Sea (see figure 4).⁶⁸ Only through European coordination, the resolution notes, it is possible to effectively arrange for exchange of knowledge, experience, and oyster spawn. In order to educate the public about the importance of this species, the initiative has pro-

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Figure 4: Creating maritime wilderness: European Oysters just about to be released into the German Bight by the biologist Bernadette Pogoda of the Alfred Wegener Institute. Photo: Alfred Wegener Institute/Heiner Mueller-Elsner.

duced publicity videos showing scientists and stakeholders at work, spreading oyster shells on the seabed and seeding it with oyster spawn.⁶⁹ The example of the European flat oyster illustrates a new type of rewilding, one that features a mollusc that hardly lends itself to personified and individualized representation. It symbolically captures the shifting human-nature relations in the Anthropocene. The hopes placed upon this lowly mollusc are great: if it is re-established, its filter organs will help clean the waters, and by creating reef structures it may help protect the coastline from rising sea levels due to climate change. By assigning these functions to the oyster and increasing its visibility, it may be possible to free it from its anonymity. An inconspicuous mollusc becomes humanity’s helper and at the same time a figure of ecosystem reparation. An animal’s charisma, this new portrayal of the European flat oyster suggests, is determined by the way each era interprets it and by the narratives in which it is embedded.

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5 Conclusion This overview provides a sample of the diversity of meanings and forms of the wilderness debate in Europe in the twentieth century. Wilderness serves as a container for various meanings that are negotiated or serve as codes according to the worldview and ideology that uses it. In Europe, it has been variously claimed that wilderness no longer exists, that its last remnants must be preserved, or that it is something that can be restored. In the area of species protection, however, wilderness has taken on a somewhat different form. Here animals themselves have served as embodiments of untamed nature. But they constantly resist the control of conservationists, even when they are bred or reintroduced in order to fill in ecological gaps in the physical world or at least create a visual impression of wilderness. Debates about nature conservation in Europe have constantly been shaped by the question of which nature is to be used as a guiding principle – an entirely untouched nature, a managed nature, or a restored one? Here the participants’ activities also point to specifically European moments that can be found in the debates about what characterizes European nature, but also in the coordination of knowledge and expertise or in the exchange of individuals and breeding specimens. Moreover, European communication and cooperation developed across the East-West boundary at an early stage. In conservation projects, Eastern Europe served as not only a reference point for ideas of wilderness, but also as a reservoir of experience and a source of animals that were considered important for the restoration of nature in (Western) Europe. Animals increasingly became a shared element of a specifically European nature that was subject to legal protection. Finally, we find European moments in the agency of the animals themselves, as they demonstrate their own will and independence and create a wild state of affairs by crossing national boundaries and producing new ecological relations in their destination regions. Wild species such as the beaver, the wolf, and the oyster have been given new roles in recent wilderness debates that make them actors in European rewilding processes. Symbolic and photogenic animals have been replaced by architects, engineers, and apex predators, who are to have an impact far beyond themselves as they participate in producing an environment that has been declared to be specifically European. Wilderness and the negotiation of it have become more diverse in recent decades. The conditions under which wilderness is produced are more varied and inclusive today than in the past. Alongside landscapes representing the extreme ends of the nature-culture dichotomy – a strictly protected nature reserve according to IUCN criteria versus industrialized farmland – hybrid arrangements and new forms of renaturalization have emerged. The binary of wilderness and

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non-wilderness has softened, as can be seen, for example, in the increasing attention given to urban nature.⁷⁰ As wild animals appear in many European cities, they might cause fuss and disturbance – owls taking up residence in church towers, foxes crossing through London, wild boars digging up turf in Barcelona, Budapest, and Berlin.⁷¹ In the meantime, our understanding of wilderness has also undergone a transformation. Street pigeons, rats, and raccoons are no longer seen only as synanthropes that merely follow human settlements, but as actors in their own right, representatives of a dynamic nature who take advantage of the structures humans provide. Wilderness, it seems, is no longer necessarily outside and separate from European society, but sometimes right here among us – as a significant part of European social and cultural history.

Notes  Dolly Jørgensen, Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2019).  Thomas Kirchhoff and Vera Vicenzotti, “A Historical and Systematic Survey of European Perceptions of Wilderness”, Environmental Values 23, no. 4 (2014): 444.  Mieke Roscher, “Actors or Agents? Defining the Concept of Relational Agency in (Historical) Wildlife Encounters”, in: Jessica Ullrich and Alexandra Böhm, eds., Animal Encounters (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2019), 149 – 170.  Kirchhoff and Vicenzotti, “Survey of European Perceptions of Wilderness”, 444.  Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014 [1967]); Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1996); William Cronon, “The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature”, Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 7– 28; Kirchhoff and Vicenzotti, “Survey of European Perceptions of Wilderness”; Patrick Kupper, Creating Wilderness. A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park (New York: Berghahn, 2014).  Patrick Kupper, “Nationalparks in der europäischen Geschichte”, Themenportal Europäische Geschichte (2008), www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/fdae-1472 (accessed 12 January 2020).  Hugo Conwentz, Naturdenkmäler: Die Gefährdung der Naturdenkmäler und Vorschläge zu ihrer Erhaltung (Berlin: Bornträger, 1904).  Ibid., 67– 69.  Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Naturschutz global oder: Hilfe von außen. Internationale Beziehungen des amtlichen Naturschutzes”, in Natur und Staat. Staatlicher Naturschutz in Deutschland 1906 – 2006, ed. Hans Werner Frohn and Friedemann Schmoll (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Bundesamt für Naturschutz, 2006), 625 – 727.  Bernhard Schär, Tropenliebe. Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015); Patrick Kupper and Bernhard Schär, “Moderne Gegenwelten. Ein mikrohistorischer Beitrag zur europäischen Globalgeschichte”, in Ränder der Moderne. Neue Perspektiven auf die Europäische Geschichte (1850 – 1950), ed. Christof Dejung and Martin Lengwiler (Cologne: Böhlau, 2016), 93 – 114.  Kupper, Creating Wilderness.

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 Marco Giacometti, ed, Von Königen und Wilderern – Die Rettung und Wiederansiedlung des Alpensteinbocks (Bern: Salm Verlag Wohlen, 2006); Kupper, Creating Wilderness, 166 – 174; Wilko von Hardenberg, A Monastery for the Ibex: Conservation, State, and Conflict on the Gran Paradiso, 1919 – 1949 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).  Thomas M. Bohn, Aliaksandr Dalhouski, and Markus Krzoska, Wisent-Wildnis und Welterbe. Geschichte des polnisch-weißrussischen Nationalparks von Białowieża (Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2017); Schama, Landscape and Memory, 61– 74.  Raf de Bont, “Extinct in the Wild. Finding a place for the European Bison, 1919 – 1952”, in Spatializing the History of Ecology: Sites, Journeys, Mappings, ed. Raf de Bont and Jens Lachmund (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 165 – 184.  Ibid., 175 – 178.  Ludwig Fischer, “Die ‘Urlandschaft’ und ihr Schutz”, in Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus, ed. Joachim Radkau and Frank Uekötter: (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Beck, 2002), 183 – 205, at 193.  Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen, “From ‘Nazi Cows’ to Cosmopolitan ‘Ecological Engineers’: Specifying Rewilding Through a History of Heck Cattle”, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106, no. 3 (2016): 231– 252.  Nico Schrijver, The Evolution of Sustainable Development in International Law: Inception, Meaning and Status (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008), 37– 38; AnnaKatharina Wöbse, “‘The world after all was one’. The international environmental network of UNESCO and IUPN, 1945 – 1950”, Contemporary European History 20, no. 3 (2011): 331– 348.  Raf De Bont, Nature’s Diplomats: Science, Internationalism and Preservation, 1910 – 1960 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).  Council of Europe Archive, Consultative Assembly Cultural Committee, 14 April 1960, “Nature Conservancy”, AS/Cult (11) 50, AS/Cult (12) 10.  Petra Svatek, “‘Das südöstliche Europa als Forschungsraum’. Wiener Raumforschung und ‘Lebensraumpolitik’ 1931– 1945”, in Ressourcenmobilisierung, Wissenschaftspolitik und Forschungspraxis im NS-Herrschaftssystem, ed. Sören Flachowsky, Rüdiger Hachtmann, and Florian Schmalz (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), 82– 120.  Walter Strzygowski, Introduction to Europa braucht Naturparke. Vorschläge zum Schutz der schönsten Landschaften Europas, (Horn: Ferdinand Berger, 1959).  Ibid., 11.  Ibid., 35.  Ibid., 20.  Kees Bastmeijer (ed.), Wilderness Protection in Europe: The Role of International, European and National Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).  Bernhard Gissibl, “A Bavarian Serengeti. Space, Race and Time in the Entangled History of Nature Conservation in East Africa and Germany”, in Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper, eds., Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 102– 119.  Franziska Torma, Eine Naturschutzkampagne in der Ära Adenauer: Bernhard Grzimeks Afrikafilme in den Medien der 50er Jahre (Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 2004); Tom Lekan, Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).  Mark Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).  Simone Schleper, Planning for the Planet: Environmental Expertise and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 1960 – 1980 (New York and Oxford:

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Berghahn Books, 2019); Raf de Bont, Simone Schleper, and Hans Schouwenburg, “Conservation Conferences and Expert Networks in the Short Twentieth Century”, Environment and History 23 (2017): 569 – 599.  Schleper, Planning for the Planet.  Kai F. Hünemörder, Die Frühgeschichte der globalen Umweltkrise und die Formierung der deutschen Umweltpolitik (1950 – 1973) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004).  Sandra Jen, “The Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Bern, 1979): Procedures of Application in Practice”, Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy 2, no. 2 (1999): 224– 238.  Dolly Jørgensen, “Rethinking Rewilding”, Geoforum 65 (2015): 482– 488.  Nathalie Pettorelli, Sarah M. Durant, and Johan T. du Toit: Rewilding (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2019). See the homepage of the Organization Rewilding Europe: https:// rewildingeurope.com/ (accessed 4 April 2020).  Jørgensen, “Rethinking Rewilding”, 7.  Tom Wilkinson, An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650 – 1950 (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Dolly Jørgensen, Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2019).  Jørgensen, “Rethinking Rewilding”, 9.  Duncan Halley, Frank Rosell, and Alexander Saveljev, “Population and Distribution of Eurasian Beaver (Castor fiber)”, Baltic Forestry 18 (2012): 168 – 175; Rachel Poliquin, Beaver (London: Reaktion Books, 2015).  Duncan J. Halley and Frank Rosell, “Population and Distribution of European Beavers (Castor fiber)”, Lutra 46, no. 2 (2003): 91– 101.  Göran Hartmann, “Beaver Management and Utilization in Scandinavia”, in Beaver Protection, Management, and Utilization in Europe and North America, ed. Peter E. Busher and Ryszard M. Dzieciolowski (New York: Springer Science, 1999).  Cor J. Smit and Anne van Wijngaarden, Threatened Mammals in Europe, ed. European Committee for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, Council of Europe (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1981), 34– 38.  Gerhard Schwab and Markus Schmidbauer, “Beaver (Castor fiber L., Castoridae) management in Bavaria”, Denisia 9 (2003): 99 – 106.  Hubert Weinzierl, Projekt Biber. Wiedereinbürgerung von Tieren (Stuttgart: Franckh’sche Verlagshandlung, 1973), 10 – 22.  Ibid., 18.  Ibid., 22.  Ibid., 26 – 27.  Ibid., 31.  Barbara Petersen et al., Das europäische Schutzgebietssystem Natura 2000. Ökologie und Verbreitung von Arten der FFH-Richtlinie in Deutschland. Vol 2: Wirbeltiere (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Bundesamt für Naturschutz, 2004).  Bartholomeus Andreas Nolet, Management of the Beaver (Castor fiber). Towards Restoration of Its Former Distribution and Ecological Function in Europe (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1997), 5.  Gerhard Schwab and Markus Schmidbauer, “The Bavarian beaver re-extroductions”, in The European Beaver in a New Millennium. Proceedings of 2nd European Beaver Symposium, Bialowieza, Poland, ed. A. Czech and Gerhard Schwab (Kraków: Carpathian Heritage Society, 2001), 51– 53.

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 Hubert Weinzierl, Biber: Baumeister der Wildnis (Lauf an der Pegnitz: BN Service, 2003), 60. On various reintroduction projects across Europe, see Peter E. Busher and Ryszard M. Dzieciolowski, Beaver Protection, Management, and Utilization in Europe and North America (New York: Springer Science, 1999).  European Union InterregDanube Transnational Programme, Best Practise Manual: Beaver Management (2019), http://www.interreg-danube.eu/media/download/29119 (accessed 18 April 2021).  Garry Marvin, Wolf (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 83.  Jack Zipes, Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).  Council of Europe, Committee of Experts for the Conservation of Nature and Landscape, September 1964, Appendix IV: List of Mammals threatened with Extinction in Member States, EXP/ Nat (64) 10, 6.  Council of Europe, Animals in Danger (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1969).  Ibid., 44– 45.  Douglas H. Pimlott, Wolves. IUCN Publication Series, New Series, Suppl. Paper 43 (Morges: IUCN, 1975), 11.  Douglas H. Pimlott, “The Wolf in Europe in 1973”, in Pimlott, Wolves, 17– 27, at 17.  Smit and Wijngaarden, Threatened Mammals in Europe, 9.  Council of Europe, “Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats”, 9 September 1979, European Treaty Series, no. 104.  Guillaume Chapron et al., “Recovery of large carnivores in Europe’s modern human-dominated landscapes”, Science 346 (2014): 1517– 1519, at 1518.  Henry Nicolls, “Celebrity wolves stir controversy with yet more cubs”, The Guardian, 19 August 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/science/animal-magic/2015/aug/19/wolf-lessinia-italypack-cubs-livestock (accessed 4 April 2020).  James Cheschire and Oliver Uberti, Die Wege der Tiere: Ihre Wanderungen an Land, Wasser und in der Luft – in 50 Karten (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2017), 58 – 61.  Nina Razen et al., “Long-distance dispersal connects Dinaric-Balkan and Alpine grey wolf (Canis lupus) populations”, European Journal of Wildlife Research 62 (2016): 137– 142, at 137.  Karl August Möbius, Zum Biozönose-Begriff: Die Auster und die Austernwirtschaft [1877]. Mit Einleitungen und Anmerkungen von Günther Leps und Thomas Potthast, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Harri Deutsch, 2006).  Bernadette Pogoda et al., “The Native Oyster Restoration Alliance (NORA) and the Berlin Oyster Recommendation: bringing back a key ecosystem engineer by developing and supporting best practice in Europe”, Aquatic Living Resources 32, no. 13 (2019), 1– 9.  https://noraeurope.eu/restoration-projects/scotland-deep-the-dornoch-environmental-en hancement-project/; https://noraeurope.eu/film-hope-for-the-european-flat-oyster/ (accessed 10 May 2020).  Maciej Luniak, “Synurbanization – adaption of animal wildlife to urban development”, in Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Urban Wildlife Conservation, ed. W. W. Shaw (2004), https://cals.arizona.edu/pubs/adjunct/snr0704/snr07041f.pdf (accessed 1 June 2020); Timothy Beatley, Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning (Covelo: Island Press, 2010).  Bernhard Warner, “Boar Wars”, in The Guardian, 30 July 2019, https://www.theguardian. com/world/2019/jul/30/boar-wars-how-wild-hogs-are-trashing-european-cities (accessed 15 May 2020); Bernhard Kegel, Tiere in der Stadt (Cologne: Dumont, 2013).

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Bibliography Bastmeijer, Kees, ed. Wilderness Protection in Europe: The Role of International, European and National Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Benson, Etienne. Wired Wilderness. Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Cheshire, James, and Oliver Uberti. Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics. Manchester: Norton, 2017. De Bont, Raf. “Extinct in the Wild. Finding a place for the European Bison, 1919 – 1952”. In Raf de Bont and Jens Lachmund, eds. Spatializing the History of Ecology: Sites, Journeys, Mappings, 165 – 184. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2017. Gissibl, Bernhard, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper. Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective. New York: Berghahn, 2012. Hardenberg, Wilko von. A Monastery for the Ibex: Conservation, State, and Conflict on the Gran Paradiso, 1919 – 1949. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming 2021. Isenberg, Andrew C., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Jørgensen, Dolly. “Rethinking rewilding”. Geoforum 65 (2015): 482 – 488. Jørgensen, Dolly. Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2019. Kirchhoff, Thomas, and Vera Vicenzotti. “A Historical and Systematic Survey of European Perceptions of Wilderness”. Environmental Values 23, no. 4 (2014): 443 – 464. Kupper, Patrick. Creating Wilderness. A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park. New York: Berghahn, 2014. MacFarlane, Robert. The Wild Places. London: Granta, 2017. Marris, Emma. Rambunctious Garden. Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Marvin, Garry. Wolf. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Monbiot, George. Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life. London: Penguin, 2013. Pereira, Henrique M., and Laetitia Navarro. Rewilding European Landscapes. Cham: Springer, 2015. Radkau, Joachim. Nature and Power. A Global History of the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Knopf, 1996. Stott, Rebecca. Oyster. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.

Peter A. Coates

5 Protecting Eurofisch: An Environmental History of the European Eel and its Europeanness Abstract The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is the only truly pan-European fish. Distributed across Europe, from Iceland to Sicily, the species consists of a single breeding stock. Today, this species of geographically and genetically unparalleled Europeanness – labelled Eurofisch – faces a Europe-wide crisis. Its numbers have fallen by up to 95% over the past half-century. Studying this cosmopolitan yet critically endangered creature – as well as the Europeans who have caught/eaten/traded/researched it, worried about its decline, and tried to improve its future prospects – opens up fresh dimensions of environmental protection in European history. A fish widely perceived as snakelike and devoid of the Atlantic salmon’s charisma unexpectedly serves as a valuable tool for illuminating what Europe means and what it means to be European, geographically, environmentally, politically, and culturally. These meanings are explored in sections on Europe’s eel heritage, Europe’s eel problem, European eel solutions, and the eel’s European future. Keywords European eel; Eurofisch; migration; freshwater; ocean

1 Introducing Europe’s Fish In sharp contrast to the “noble” and “elegant” Atlantic salmon, the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is widely perceived as a slimy, snake-like fish, devoid of charisma. Part of the salmon’s appeal lies in its epic journey from ocean to freshwater. The European eel follows an equally spectacular migratory regime, though in reverse. The ocean-dwelling salmon goes back to its freshwater origins to reproduce (anadromy). But the eel inhabits freshwater, returning to its oceanic provenance to spawn (catadromy), after which, like the salmon, it dies. Area of natural distribution represents another key point of difference between them. The Atlantic salmon’s territory is trans-continental, spanning the North Atlantic, its European breeding grounds confined to the continent’s colder, more northerly freshwaters. The European eel populates a far wider latitude, with a broader temperature tolerance. But, as its common name suggests, it is European, not Atlantic. As such, its habitat ranges from southern Iceland, northern Scandinavia, and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-006

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Russia’s Kola Peninsula down to the Mediterranean’s southern shores and, on the Atlantic coast, as far south as the Canaries. In fact, the European eel’s name does not reflect the full extent of its southerly distribution, which embraces the rivers and lagoons of North Africa, such as the Nile and Lake of Tunis. Absence of suitable habitat on the Saharan coast determines the southern limit of distribution, not ocean temperatures. From west to east, distribution stretches from the Azores to Georgia (via the Black Sea). Occasionally, through canals, individual eels reach the Volga drainage from the Baltic, just as strays have entered the Red Sea through the Suez Canal. The Europeanness of the European eel is most vividly demonstrated, however, by its genetic makeup. Whereas the Atlantic salmon exhibits a high level of genetic diversity and reproductively discrete local populations (assortative), all European eels belong to the same breeding population (panmictic).¹ This singular European identity is rooted in their shared birthplace in the Sargasso Sea, in the West Central Atlantic. In the Sargasso’s genetic melting pot, every member of the opposite sex is a potential breeding partner. And home for the next generation could be anywhere within their European range.² Lacking the salmon’s homing instinct, the offspring of parents that spent their adult lives in Norwegian and Tunisian waterbodies respectively – if it survives the one to threeyear journey to Europe – might settle in Wales. Alternatively, this progeny could end up in Portuguese freshwaters, or wherever the currents happen to carry the tiny, willow leaf-shaped larvae (leptocephali). The European eel is not only unique among Europe’s fishes because of its single breeding stock and population. It is also singular within Europe’s inland fisheries in that this stock spawns entirely in a region beyond European national jurisdictions.³ The European eel, in short, is the only truly pan-European fish: a cosmopolitan creature we might label Eurofisch. “Eurofish” is a term also recently used by Dutch eel scientist and historian Willem Dekker. In contrast to my usage, Dekker’s is based on the eel’s commercial value historically and its current status as luxury food. His point of reference is the European currency, the Euro. To distance myself from Dekker’s use, I adopt the German spelling, fisch. ⁴ Eurofisch faces a Europe-wide crisis. When the leptocephali reach western Europe’s coasts, they change into glass eels – transparent mini-eels measuring a few centimetres. Shoals of these baby eels (fry) – also known, confusingly, as elvers in the United Kingdom – “invade” the estuaries of southern Europe in late winter/early spring, the runs up rivers further north and east occurring later in the spring (see figure 1).⁵ Glass eel “recruitment” has been monitored since 1976 by the Working Group on Eel (WGEEL), a collaboration (since 1993) between the European Inland Fisheries Advisory Commission (EIFAC) and the world’s oldest intergovernmental science organization, the Copenhagen-based

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International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES).⁶ Having noted declining recruitment since 1985, in 2012, WGEEL reported that numbers had fallen by up to 95 per cent since circa 1970 (the span of two to three eel generations).⁷

Figure 1: Elvers wriggling upstream at Bradford on Tone, Somerset Levels, UK. Photo credit: Andrew Kerr (2 April 2014). Reproduced by permission of the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG).

This chapter explores how Eurofisch serves as a valuable if unexpected tool for illuminating what Europe means and what it means to be European, geographically, environmentally, politically, and culturally. I have taken a multiple actor approach to agency in which the nonhuman agency of the eel shares centre stage with human agents in co-producing the past. My thinking is also shaped by micro-historical perspectives and commodity histories that select a “thing”, whether coffee, cotton or cod, to serve as a springboard to explore larger themes and developments.⁸ At the same time, I have tried to avoid the hyperbolic claims of many book subtitles, about how certain things “changed the world”. The European eel did not “change Europe”. Nonetheless, attending jointly to the species itself and those who have caught it, eaten it, traded it, studied it, worried about it, and tried to improve its condition, opens up fresh dimensions of environmental protection in European history.

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One of those new dimensions is the focus on a fish. Just as mammals are often privileged by those who seek to protect wildlife, these are also the species that historians have mainly studied. At the same time, the terra firma environments in which most mammals live have also received the bulk of conservationists’ and historians’ attention, though the genre of river history has been growing recently. Looking at fish and their living conditions necessarily involves engagement, if less directly, with the state of their non-terrestrial, watery habitat. So why, of all the fish that spend part of their lives in European waters, choose the European eel? Whereas many fish species are confined to fresh or salt waters, the eel spans the divide between them, spending most of its life in the heart of European territory, in rivers and other waterbodies large, small, and medium. Salmon, cod, and herring also possess rich and multi-faceted European histories. But all are transatlantic in character, as suggested by their full names: Atlantic salmon, Atlantic cod, and Atlantic herring. Moreover, in terms of their distribution on the European side of the Atlantic, they are all confined to the continent’s northern waters; among them, the most southerly limit is northern Spain and Portugal. The investigation begins with the multiple causes identified for their drastic decline (Europe’s eel problem). The next section (European eel solutions) discusses the emergence of concern for the eel at various levels, scientific, political, and popular, and then investigates the management plans and remedial actions that have emerged at national and EU-wide levels. This second section finishes by looking at measures implemented since 2007 as part of the EU’s Eel Regulation, with particular attention to how trafficking in glass eels undermines efforts to increase stocks. Reflections on what lies ahead for the eel (Eel’s European future) – including the debate between those who would help the eel by not eating it and those who want to help it precisely by eating it – conclude this discussion of Eurofisch and Europeanness. The essential starting point, though, is the longstanding dietary and commercial significance of a fish many Europeans today find hard to love and cherish (Europe’s eel heritage).

2 Europe’s Eel Heritage The silver eel (the final life stage before departure for the Sargasso) has the highest calorific value of any fish caught in European waters, fresh or salt.⁹ The European Commission’s webpage dedicated to the European eel as a farmed species acknowledges its status as a “prized feature of culinary traditions across Europe, from the White Sea to the Black Sea”.¹⁰ This venerable and diverse culture of consumption also spans the continent from Spain to Sweden and from Ireland

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to Italy. Before cooking (with fire) was mastered, elvers from Lake Lesina, a coastal lagoon in southeast Italy’s Apulia, were laid out in shallow, water-filled pans and ready to eat when the water was evaporated by the sun. Since the early Christian era, the dish customarily served at midnight on Christmas Eve in Rome and Naples has been roasted eel (or eels with peas in a tomato sauce).¹¹ The epicentre of Italian eel gastronomy, though, is Comacchio, a small town in the Po delta. Since the 1300s (production statistics date back to 1781), Comacchio has been at the heart of a silver eel fishery based on a network of coastal lagoons (vallicoltura) that were stocked with glass eels entering from the Adriatic. Eels were skewered and then roasted before marinating in barrels with vinegar and salt. Canned Anguilla marinata was distributed across Italy.¹² La Donna del Fiume (1955, Woman of the River), a film shot in Comacchio, starred Sophia Loren as an inconceivably glamorous worker in the cannery that now houses a museum (Manifattura dei Marinati). A century ago, glass eels swept up hyper-tidal, Atlantic-facing estuaries such as the Severn, Loire, Gironde, Nalon, Minho, and Tagus in such tremendous quantities that surpluses were fed to pigs and applied to vegetable gardens and riverside fields as fertilizer.¹³ In Spain, the glut was used to make glue. In the early 1930s, 237 tonnes were sold at the market in San Sebastian, in northern Spain’s Basque country.¹⁴ More glass eels have probably been consumed here than anywhere else in Europe’s Atlantic region, with imports from France, Portugal, and Morocco supplementing local supplies more recently. On estuaries in Spanish Basque country such as the Deva and Oria, glass eels fried live in olive oil with garlic and chili peppers (angulas a la Bilbaina) remain a delicacy, especially on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Day, and the feast of San Sebastian (20 January).¹⁵ In France, they were often boiled and served cold, salad-style. French eel researcher Eric Feunteun recalls eating “spaghetti with eyes” when vacationing at his grandmother’s house on the Loire estuary in the 1960s; Pâté d’anguille (from silver eels) was also popular.¹⁶ Meanwhile, in villages along Britain’s Severn estuary, and in the nearby town of Gloucester, super-abundant elvers were traditionally fried in butter or bacon fat or scrambled with eggs (sometimes mixed with cider). In the same area, and along Ireland’s River Shannon, they were also boiled and pressed into gelatinous cakes fried in butter. In the Irish town of Killaloe, eels were known as “Killaloe Bacon”.¹⁷ Working-class Londoners (“Cockneys”) were the great exception to the British and Irish consumer’s comparatively low regard for adult eel. In Victorian London’s poorer East End, whose rapidly expanding labouring population could not afford salmon or meat, itinerant vendors of stewed and jellied eel and the “eel and pie” shop (aka “pie and mash”) were a central feature of the cityscape.¹⁸

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Responding to a dwindling supply from the Thames, Dutch traders were supplying London by 1400.¹⁹ The first shipments were barrels of salted and smoked eel but the business soon expanded to include live export in ships fitted with wells, known as scoots (schuyts). Fearing over-dependence on food supplies from a country with which England was often at war, Parliament banned eels imported by foreign merchants in 1666. But facing a shortage, Parliament exempted (1680) the schuyts, which then established a regular mooring near Billingsgate fish market.²⁰ Swarming cargos of eels weighing up to 20,000 pounds arrived more or less daily until the early 1900s (the last schuyt docked in 1938).²¹ The Dutch themselves liked their eels smoked rather than stewed or jellied. Hot smoking, which cooks as well as smokes, had superseded cold smoking by the 1880s. Amsterdam’s leading smokery, Christiaan Saur, was in full swing by the 1890s, when eel smoked over wood chips and sold whole (gerookte paling) became a prestigious commodity for well-heeled urbanites.²² Intra-European commerce (silver eels from Britain underappreciated by British consumers increasingly supplied Dutch smokeries) was complemented by glass eel translocation for restocking. In the late nineteenth-century, British ichthyologist Francis Day highlighted the mismatch between places of supply, such as his local river, the Severn, and sites of demand in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.²³ Advances in transportation (railways) and in the storage and packing of live fish rendered redistribution of infant eels from the eel-rich Atlantic fringe to eel-poorer waters feasible. But since scientists have still not figured out how to propagate European eels artificially on a commercial basis, restocking of waterbodies as well as eel farms remains entirely dependent on wild glass eels (see figure 2).²⁴ German fisheries scientists pioneered transnational relocations in the 1870s to replenish their rivers. They initially sourced elvers from French rivers entering the Bay of Biscay and then tapped Italy’s River Arno and Comacchio’s lagoons.²⁵ These supplies having proved inadequate, German attention shifted decisively to the Severn, “a river that could spare them easily”, according to Danish eel researcher Johannes Schmidt.²⁶ In 1908, the German Fisheries Union (Deutscher Fischerei-Verein) established the Epney Elver Depot (Aalbrutfangstation), providing a lucrative source of income for the Severn’s fisherfolk. Some years, the German-owned and operated depot received enough to send to Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark as well as to Hamburg and Bremerhaven.²⁷ Glass eels had previously been despatched by rail and ship but airfreighting began in France in 1952. The first shipment, despite the Cold War, was to Poland, to feed restocking projects. Eventually, though, this latest mode of transportation opened up a new market for direct consumption in Spain in the 1970s, supplied by the Severn’s glass eels.

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Figure 2: Elvers are poured into a tank for restocking on the Charente river, western France. Photo credit: Andrew Kerr (4 February 2016). Reproduced by permission of the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG).

At the time, there was little concern over levels of recruitment in the Severn. Quantities ascending the rivers of France’s west coast also still seemed “limitless”.²⁸ Within two decades, however, the first report of the joint EIFAC/ICES Working Group on Eel (which superseded the existing EIFAC Working Group

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on Eel in 1993) noted “the persistence of low catches of elvers over a wide area of the European continent”, including a 50 per cent drop in recruitment in the Severn since the late 1970s.²⁹ A quarter of a century ago, scientists already acknowledged a moment of crisis for the European eel.

3 Europe’s Eel Problem Increasingly over the past forty years, eels in their initial and final life stages have been jeopardized at sea and in coastal/estuarine waters by a combination of factors: over-harvesting, predatory pressures (growing cormorant numbers, for instance), viral infection, non-native parasites and, lastly and perhaps most seriously, disruptions to ocean currents and trophic food webs associated with global warming. Shifts in the strength and position of currents, reflecting changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation, an atmospheric pressure system, could have repercussions for breeding and larval survival and migration.³⁰ A northward shift of the Gulf Stream may be forcing larvae into longer, more northerly routes – or diverting them into Arctic waters.³¹ A British reporter’s early twentieth-century observations regarding restocking are even more relevant today: “Whatever care is taken to procure the transplanted eels as favourable conditions as possible for their life and growth, no human power can obtain for them the conditions outside in the sea which they require for reproduction.”³² Arriving in freshwater, eels face a set of difficulties pan-European in scale. Threats to adults, which inhabit a variety of brackish, lotic, and lentic waters, revolve around habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation, water pollution and abstraction for domestic use, agriculture, and industry. Comacchio’s ancient vallicoltura system has contracted since the 1970s, for instance, due to wetland reclamation to grow sugar beets and wheat. Within surviving lagoons, eutrophication and other forms of pollution further compromise eel production. In their fatty tissues, eels store PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and POPs (persistent organochlorine pollutants), as well as endocrine disruptors and cocaine residue. Contaminants can prevent the attainment of sexual maturity, trigger premature migration or delay departure; cocaine residue (“another problem eels don’t need”) increases cortisol, a stress hormone, which stimulates fat consumption, interfering with the build-up required for successful completion of the long trip to the Sargasso.³³ No matter how strong and healthy, a silver eel descending a river confronts physical barriers. An ascending glass eel that has eluded capture and is searching for a suitable place to spend its adult life faces the same obstructions. The dams and turbines of eleven hydroelectric installations punctuate the 250-km

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stretch of the Rhône between Lyon and its delta. A dam built in 1970 across the Vilaine in Brittany, at Arzal, just 10 km upstream of the river’s tidal limit, blocked access to most of the river’s catchment for all migratory fish. Europe-wide, the number of dams blocking the free movement of water totals circa 25,000.³⁴ Making matters worse, their turbines guillotine and chop up the juvenile and mature alike. In Ireland, Ardnacrusha Dam’s turbines kill 20 – 30 per cent of eels heading down the Shannon.³⁵ Other structures preventing incoming glass eels from colonizing inland waters include weirs, gauging and pumping stations, and flood defences. The country with the greatest number of obstacles to eel movement per square kilometre in 2008 was the Netherlands: 4,671 pumping stations, 8,488 dams, and 2,278 sluices.³⁶ In 2007, CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) listed the European eel under Appendix II, which is for species not yet facing extinction but in which trade must be controlled to prevent a listing under Appendix I (species threatened with extinction). Three years later (2010), the eel was added to the Red List of Threatened Species maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Its assigned status of “critically endangered” (CR) has been retained following its most recent assessment (May 2013), which noted that the population trend was still “decreasing”. This places Europe’s eel on a par with mammals such as the Iberian lynx, Mediterranean monk seal, European mink, Azorean bat, and Bavarian pine mole. Better known – and far more charismatic – non-European species such as the giant panda, mountain gorilla, and blue whale were at the time all at a level below the eel, listed as “endangered”.³⁷

4 European Eel Solutions Since Europe’s eel consists of a single population and its predicament is stockwide, solutions must also embrace Europe in its entirety. By the early 1990s, it was clear that lack of protective measures in just a single nation potentially affected Europe’s entire eel population, with consequences for recruitment throughout its habitat. Though it breeds in international waters, eel capture, unlike that of other migratory fishes such as salmon, takes place entirely within national boundaries, in inshore, estuarine, and freshwaters. Historically, measures regulating eel fisheries were mostly initiated at local, regional, and national levels. The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), adopted in 1970, applied only to eel fisheries in so-called fully marine areas; the authority to manage glass eel fisheries has resided mainly with member states. Specific management regimes adopted at a sub-European level prior to 2007 reflected whether glass or yellow and silver

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eels were the object of consumption (see figure 3). Countries mainly eating eels in adult form have tried to maximize recruitment, to the point of banning glass eel harvesting, except for re-stocking purposes, transfer within the same river system and/or aquaculture. In 1998, for example, five EU member states (Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, and Sweden) banned commercial fishing for glass eels and elvers, while a sixth (United Kingdom) operated a ban in one of its constituent nations (Northern Ireland).³⁸ Catch restrictions can be supplemented by installation of elver passes and fish ladders on dams and weirs. Other conservation measures adopted include licencing, closed seasons, restrictions on fishing gear (especially applicable to glass eel fisheries, with hand-held, box-shaped riverbank dipnets the only permissible method in the UK) (see figure 4). “Other than official licences being required of almost all fishermen”, summarized two eel scientists (one Irish and the other Dutch) in the mid-1990s, “there is little consistency in management practice, enforcement and controls across Europe as a whole, measures adopted by different countries having evolved to match their own particular fishery traditions.”³⁹ A more integrated approach to European environmental problems coincided with the emergence across the western world in the late 1960s of a sense of transnational environmental crisis as well as popular environmental movements and environmental policies and regulations. The Council of Europe, at the urging of one of its standing committees, the European Committee for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, designated 1970 as European Conservation Year (ECY) – a pan-European campaign to raise public awareness. The emphasis, notwithstanding, was on activities tailored to the national priorities of the Council’s eighteen countries. Whereas Italy, Greece, and Turkey highlighted soil erosion and reforestation, for instance, the Netherlands and Belgium focused on open space protection in thickly populated areas.⁴⁰ What emerged from ECY was a heightened appreciation of the diversity of conditions and problems within Europe. Rather than a source of weakness, this was seen as a strength. Louis Leprince-Ringuet, the chairperson of ECY’s opening conference, “Man and the Environment”, identified the “spirit of diversity in unity” as the “European spirit”. Nonetheless, “all great problems”, he contended, must be addressed “at European level”. The Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Lujo Tončić-Sorinj, hoped that ECY was just the beginning of a “purposeful and far-reaching concerted action at European level to face up to” environmental challenges.⁴¹ Thinking about the eel at a European level and in a European way was initiated among scientists and fisheries experts in 1968 at the fifth session of the European Inland Fisheries Commission (EIFAC). In 1976, with the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), EIFAC organized an eel symposium, which spawned EIFAC’s Working Group on Eel (WGEEL). At its ninth session

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Figure 3: Yellow eels in a clear limestone river south of Rome, Italy. Photo credit: Armando Piccinini (c. 2013). Reproduced by permission of the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG).

(1993), WGEEL offered recommendations for arresting further decline in recruitment, including measures to by-pass dams and prevent mortalities from electrical turbines that long thin fish readily enter. Though WGEEL found insufficient evidence to designate the fish as endangered, a turning point (a European moment) had been reached in 1993. Given that the period of recruitment “failure” now represented a time period equal to an eel’s lifespan in northern Europe – and more than that of an eel in the southern part of its range – the underlying message was that the future of eels and eel fisheries could only be improved if actions were taken “on a continental rather than a national scale”.⁴² Responding to accumulating scientific (and commercial) concerns about shrinking recruitment and deteriorating catches, the EU authorized EC Concerted Action AIR A94– 1939 (“Enhancement of the European eel fishery and conservation of the species”). Launched in March 1995, this research group represented the first attempt to establish a coordinated, supra-national programme of re-

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Figure 4: ‘Artisanal’ dipnet fishing for elvers from the bank of the Severn at Wainlode, Gloucestershire, on a spring evening. Photo credit: Environment Agency (2017). Reproduced by permission of the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG).

search, management, and monitoring. AIR A94– 1939 had three goals: to assess the condition of stocks and create a database; to protect, rationally exploit, and conserve the eel; and to set up a long-term monitoring system.⁴³ Though eel fisheries provided full-time employment for fewer than 500 individuals, circa 25,000 people across Europe were involved part-time and occasionally. Catching eels furnished a valuable seasonal income supplement in areas of high unemployment, representing a social contribution “out of all proportion to its cash value”.⁴⁴ While the initial assessment focused on the fishery (with input from twelve member states), the second round of investigation yielded a continent-wide impression of the state of the eel population in its various life stages.⁴⁵ Galvanized by continuing recruitment failures also affecting the world’s two other major eel species, the American eel (Anguilla rostrata) and the Japanese eel (Anguilla japonica), an International Eel Symposium was convened in 2003 at a meeting of the American Fisheries Society in Canada. This gathering of eel biologists from eighteen countries generated the Québec Declaration of Concern

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(14 August 2003). “Time is running out”, warned its signatories, who urged “immediate” “precautionary action” “by all parties involved”.⁴⁶ At the time, the mechanisms for Europe-wide actions on behalf of supra-national species were two EC directives. The EC Habitat and Species Directive (1992), which protects over a thousand animal and plant species and more than two hundred habitat types of continent-spanning importance, mandates protection of core areas of eel habitat (designated Sites of Community Importance) within a network of protected sites (Natura 2000). Secondly, the European Water Framework Directive (WFD, 2000) required member states to attain and maintain for water bodies a Good Ecological Status (GES) by 2015. Under this Directive, an action plan for eel management was adopted in 2003 that “considered the possibility” of including eels as a bio-indicator species for measuring the level of chemical contamination in a local body of freshwater, given the adult species’ sedentary status and tendency to accumulate lipophilic substances in its muscle tissue.⁴⁷ The EU’s main tool for securing the eel’s future has been the “Regulation for the Recovery of the Eel/Eel Regulation” (European Council Regulation 100/2007). Despite calls for the devolution of the centralized authority of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), fisheries policy remained an area of EU “exclusive competence” largely unaffected by EU adoption, as part of the Maastricht Treaty (Treaty on European Union) in 1992, of the principle of subsidiarity – that the centre does not act unless this central action is likely to be more effective than action taken at national, regional, or local level, the lowest, least centralized “competent” levels. Nonetheless, this Eel Regulation demonstrates how, the CFP notwithstanding, the doctrine of subsidiarity (or “shared competence” between the EU and member states) already governed eel fisheries policy before 1992, and how the implementation and enforcement of eel policy more widely remains within the competence of individual member states. The Eel Regulation – the landmark European moment in the eel’s policy history – was based on the latest ICES advice that the stock is “outside safe biological limits and that current fisheries are not sustainable” and the realization that a common set of factors influences this homogenous population. The Regulation instructed member states to formulate and implement Eel Management Plans (EMPs) for each river basin within their national territory by the end of 2008. EMPs’ objective was to ensure escapement to the sea of at least 40 per cent of silver eel biomass “relative to the best estimate of escapement that would have existed if no anthropogenic influences had impacted the stock”.⁴⁸ Measures suggested were restrictions on commercial and recreational fishing; restocking;⁴⁹ habitat improvements and obstacle removal; “trap and transportation” of silver eels around barriers; predator control; regulation of turbines

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and pumps;⁵⁰ and aquaculture. Applying the principle of subsidiarity and the notion of “shared competence”, the choice of means to achieve this common end was left to member states. The most obvious way to meet the anthropogenic mortality reduction target was to ban or heavily restrict fishing through quotas and closed seasons.⁵¹ Regardless of how a given member state chooses to meet the escapement target, however, the benefits of action are mainly collective, unlikely to be felt in that particular nation because of the hard biological fact that young eels do not return to where a parent lived as a matter of course. Eel Regulation compliance creates national costs without foreseeable national benefits. The benefits a given member state may enjoy in terms of increased eel recruitment in its freshwaters depends on all other member states’ actions; the benefits, in short, are collective.⁵² An EMP in an area of Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdom) close to the Irish border illustrates not just how a “trap and transport” scheme works. It also highlights the political difficulties of navigating transboundary waterways, in this case between the EU (Ireland) and former member state, the UK. On the river Erne, which connects Lower Lough Erne to the Atlantic, Northern Irish compliance with the Regulation involved not only a ban on commercial elver fishing but also the seasonal use of lorries with aerated water tanks to transport trapped eels around electricity generating company ESB’s turbines at Ballyshannon, across the border in County Donegal, Ireland, where hydro-plant intake screens and turbines had interfered with escapement from the Lough since the early 1950s. This cross-border eel journey westward to the Atlantic could have been disrupted by a no-deal Brexit scenario bringing restrictions on live animal exports from the UK to the EU.⁵³ Other measures to mitigate losses to hydropower – notably turbine redesign – were particularly germane in heavily hydro-reliant Scandinavia (see figure 5).⁵⁴ Restoring wholeness to the eel’s freshwater habitats and reducing toxic exposure are longer term processes mainly dependent on wider EU policies’ success, notably the WFD (recent data indicate that barely half of Europe’s rivers had secured “good ecological status”). Without re-connection of fragmented habitats, elvers released upstream of barriers such as Ballyshannon (also a site of trap and transport for incoming elvers) stand little chance of contributing to the next generation by journeying to the Sargasso.⁵⁵ In addition to the likes of trap and transport and turbine redesign, the Eel Regulation enumerated “measures related to aquaculture” as potential inclusions in EMPs. Whereas CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) prohibits all trade in species threatened with extinction (Appendix I), Appendix II listing allows for “non-detrimental” trade. The latter was understood to include supplying eel farms with broodstock. Since

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Figure 5: Silver eels mutilated by hydro-power turbines on the Storelva river, southern Norway. Photo credit: Frode Kroglund (2014). Reproduced by permission of the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG).

2013, member states still allowing glass eel capture must reserve a minimum of 60 per cent of this catch for restocking. In 2014, for instance, 35 million glass eels harvested by traditional, low mortality “artisanal methods” (dipnets) from the Severn and its tributary, the Parrett, were air freighted to Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Estonia. That left 40 per cent for human consumption within the EU, including “grow on” in eel farms. Europe’s modern eel farming industry began in early 1970s Italy.⁵⁶ Since 1990, eel farms have sprouted across the continent, though they are now concentrated in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.⁵⁷ As wild supplies plummet, farms have stepped in to supply most of the eels that Europeans eat. Because every farmed eel starts life as a wild creature, European eel farmers have a vested interest in a self-sustaining wild population. Complicating the achievement of that objective is the internationalization of demand for Europe’s glass eels. In the early 1970s, transcontinental trade in eels was dominated by exports of American eel to Europe (North American consumption was largely restricted to descendants of European immigrants and to the Christmas season).⁵⁸ But as populations of Japanese and American eels also

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plunged in the late twentieth century, glass eels from the Severn and Loire were drawn into East Asia’s commercial net.⁵⁹ Between 1990 and 1997, the tonnage of glass eels exported from the EU to Asia surged upward.⁶⁰ Export to “grow-out” farms in China, South Korea, and Taiwan is driven by Japanese demand for unagi kabayaki (fileted eel, marinated in a soy-based sauce and then grilled), which accounts for circa 70 per cent of the world’s farm-raised eels, and a global boom in sushi and sashimi restaurants.⁶¹ The eel sashimi consumed in Los Angeles that derives from an eel ranch in China could well have originated as a glass eel netted in a Biscayan estuary. The European Commission webpage on the eel as a wild species emphasizes a major recent change in harvesting patterns. Historically, when consumption was mainly local, fisheries largely targeted adults. Of late, though, the glass eel fishery has boomed in response to demand from Asian eel farms, “to the point where in the mid-2000s [prices] exceeded that of caviar”.⁶² In 2010, responding to scientific advice, the EU banned glass eel export outside its borders. Exports of American glass eel from states such as Maine tripled as Europe’s legal supplies dried up.⁶³ Another outcome was a flourishing illegal trade in European glass eels. By 2016, more glass eels were trafficked to Asia than were caught legally for consumption and restocking within the EU.⁶⁴ In China, a kilo of Europe’s glass eels (approximately 3,000 individuals) currently commands a price seven times higher than the legal price within the EU. Today’s black market value means that trafficking in glass eels (which includes illegal trading of half of the legal catch) is not only Europe’s equivalent to the ivory trade. In terms of value and sheer numbers, it is the world’s “greatest wildlife crime”, according to Andrew Kerr, chairperson of the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG), a Brussels-based, science-led, Europe-wide organization.⁶⁵ A creative enterprise based at the University of Plymouth, UK, observes of trafficking that “this unnatural migration is yet another surprising moment in an astonishing life cycle”. The project is called “A suitcase full of eels” because most of the glass eels that anti-trafficking operations have seized were concealed in plastic bags inside customized passenger luggage: a suitcase can contain 30 kg of elvers, a kilo fetching up to £4,000 on the black market.⁶⁶ Despite these small-scale operations, EU efforts to keep the infant European eel in Europe primarily face a sophisticated network of crime syndicates operating in Spain, Portugal, France, and the UK. Exploiting the EU’s single market, one route to China lies across the border between Lithuania and Russia; another route connects Spain to Hong Kong, the leading global hub for the illegal wildlife trade. In February 2017, customs officials at London’s Heathrow Airport intercepted a consignment of 600,000 glass eels (200 kilos) of Spanish provenance valued at €1.5 million, concealed beneath a legal shipment of chilled fish bound

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for Hong Kong.⁶⁷ In June 2019, BBC1’s “Countryfile” reported on trafficking of glass eels from the Severn. Posing as a local fisherman, presenter Joe Crowley attracted interest from Chinese and Russian buyers.⁶⁸ EUROPOL, the EU’s law enforcement agency, has run Europe-wide anti-trafficking initiatives such as Operation EEL-LICIT. But success to date has been patchy. Another approach is the campaign to secure more widespread adoption of SEG’s standard of traceability, biosecurity, and responsible sourcing throughout the supply chain.⁶⁹ Still, without a harder crackdown on trafficking, the positive impacts of protective measures enacted within the EU will be seriously compromised.⁷⁰

5 The Eel’s European Future This chapter has considered the European eel and its Europeanness with reference to material conditions, cultural and economic history, governance and policy, as well as current affairs. I have argued for its unrivalled Europeanness among fish by examining the species’ genetic makeup, distribution and habitat, importance as food and to trade, and Europe-wide decline in population. In addition, efforts to revive its numbers draw on a supranational ethos that exemplifies the idea of Europeanness. On multiple levels, the European eel is the Eurofish par excellence. Despite Eurofisch’s supreme Europeanness, mobilizing popular support for its revitalization presents a tougher challenge than that of engendering enthusiasm for the welfare of terrestrial mammals (“T-shirt” animals) such as pandas, polar bears, and tigers. Even within their own domain, eels lack the appeal of more conventionally endearing and charismatic watery species such as whale, porpoise, dolphin, otter, seal, and salmon. Few who have seen the movie version (1979) of Günter Grass’s novel, The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel, 1959), will forget the stomach-churning scene on the Baltic beach near Danzig (Gdansk) where a fisherman hauls in a horse’s head writhing with eels that he pulls out of its ears, nostrils, and throat. Those who recognize the eel’s appeal, and who are stakeholders in eel recovery and sustainable use, include biologists, NGOs such as SEG, eel farmers, and glass eel fishermen and traders. What is needed, though, to secure its long-term future, beyond the revisions to EMPs that may follow the Eel Regulation review exercise of 2018/19, is the installation of a broader and deeper form of European eel consciousness among European publics. That more people beyond the existing stakeholder groups are starting to care more about the eel (a form of inter-species connection I call Anguilla-philia) can

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be detected through Europe-wide activities to reconnect Europeans, particularly the younger generation, with their eely heritages. These activities include the creation, or revival of community-based activities. At the local level are eel festivals and juvenile eel releases involving water managers, eel scientists, schoolchildren and, sometimes, attended by politicians with environmental and fisheries portfolios. Operating at the broadest scale in advancing the eel’s interests (and those of other migratory fishes) are events such as the (World) Fish Migration Day, a now global, biennial event with roots in an EU-funded activity held in the North Sea region in 2011. For many Europeans, the best way to express this respect, affection and duty of care is simple and obvious: to stop eating eels (as the Marine Conservation Society recommends). The Dutch branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has likened eating an eel roll to eating a panda sandwich, and the main Dutch supermarket chain (Albert Heijn) stopped selling all European eel products in 2010. Meanwhile, Dutch eel fisherfolk identify themselves as another critically endangered species. And reports of “the last eel catcher” have peppered the English-language media in recent years. In 2014, for instance, the BBC World Service featured the last one (a 74-year-old man) operating on the Tiber, in the Rome area.⁷¹ On the other hand, SEG sees no contradiction between respecting and caring for a creature and careful consumption. Being caught and eaten, SEG points out, is only one of the many problems that eels face, and by no means the most serious: eel populations, SEG believes, are more likely to recover with a well-regulated commercial fishery and aquaculture industry characterized by a fully traceable supply chain than in their absence.⁷² Lough Neagh, Northern Ireland, is Europe’s biggest wild eel fishery, employing around two hundred fishermen. The main markets for these Northern Irish lake eels, which have enjoyed Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status under EU law since 2011, are the Netherlands and Germany, where they are smoked and often on sale the day after being caught. With falling recruitment, however, the fishery is increasingly reliant on glass eels from the Severn for restocking and faces an uncertain future following Brexit. As part of the post-Brexit trade deal between the EU and the UK, Northern Ireland remains subject to the EU’s trading rules to guarantee a borderless island of Ireland in accordance with the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998. As a result, Lough Neagh could switch to French supplies of glass eels.⁷³ In Ireland, commercial eel fishing was banned in 2009 as part of the national EMP.⁷⁴ Yet fishing for eels retains substantial intangible cultural if not tangible economic value in other EU countries and persists accordingly. A Swedish biol-

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ogist’s explanation for his nation’s decision to meet its 60 per cent escapement target through complex and costly alternatives to a straightforward fishing ban pinpoints the “high public” and elevated cultural value that politicians and voters attach to eel fishing. To illustrate this heritage status, he cites the persisting popularity (evident in new recordings) of the song “The Eel Fisherman’s Waltz” (Ǻlefiskarns vals) traditionally associated with Sweden’s so-called Eel Coast (Scania/Skåne).⁷⁵ According to this way of thinking, if we stop catching and eating eels, we lose our sense of intimacy with them. Celebrations of the eel are pungent reminders of an era of abundance. Eels loom large at the Aaltjesdagen, an annual festival held in June since 1983 in Harderwijk, a former fishing port on the Zuider Zee, which hosts an Eel Museum (Palingmuseum). In nearby Amsterdam, a revival of the boat-based itinerant vendor (parlevinker) purveying smoked eel reminds us of its status as Dutch gustatory delicacy. In 1999, Comacchio rediscovered its eely past by establishing an annual autumn festival (Sagra dell’Anguilla). In eastern England’s fenlands lies the eponymous city of Ely (pronounced eel-y), where Ely Eel Day has been held annually since 2004 in recognition of this key ingredient in the local sense of place.⁷⁶ Ely’s imposing medieval cathedral was built from stones delivered by barge from a quarry in Northamptonshire. The terms of payment, 8,000 eels per annum, were not unusual locally, where rents and tithes (as well as debts) were routinely paid in eels.⁷⁷ Ely’s Eel Trail includes a sculpture of a silver eel, a mosaic of a yellow eel and a memorial bench for one of the city’s last eel catchers, who died in 2012. In Frampton-on-Severn, Gloucestershire, the annual Easter Monday elver (glass eel) eating competition is woven deeply into the fabric of village life. Male contestants were required to gobble down a pound (just under half a kilo) of fried elvers. A contest for women was established in 1973, though women were only required to consume half a pound. Responding to steeply declining numbers and increasingly prohibitive prices, the event was cancelled in 1990. A quarter of a century later (2015), it was revived – but with a difference. The glass eels consumed were ersatz. Known as La Gula del Norte (or gulas), they have been produced since 1991 by a company in Spain’s Basque country, Angulas Aguinaga, an amalgamation of various family businesses that originally traded in the real thing caught in the Orio.⁷⁸ Dubbed “el-vers” in England, gulas are made out of surimi – blocks of fish paste from species such as Alaskan pollack and Pacific whiting. Winning young hearts and minds for the cause of the European eel began, in the UK, in 2010. “Eels in Schools”, an idea pioneered by Richard Cook, owner of the Severn and Wye Smokery (his first collaboration was with the Grange school, in Monmouth, a town on the Wye, a tributary of the Severn⁷⁹) involved

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giving primary (elementary) schools tanks of glass eels to look after and study for periods of up to 12 weeks before release into open waters. In 2014, Bristol Water, which supplies drinking water to 1.2 million customers, launched the largest “Eels in the Classroom” scheme to date, “Spawn to be Wild”, in partnership with SEG and the Avon Wildlife Trust and Bristol Avon Rivers Trust. Similar projects have been rolled out elsewhere in England and Wales (most of them receiving their glass eels from the Severn). Despite these efforts to understand, celebrate, and conserve the European eel, the Norwegian writer and sportfisherman, Torolf Kroglund, confronts the possibility of its extinction within his lifetime in Reise med ål Omvei hjem (2018), variously translated as Traveling with Eels: A Detour Home, The Last Eel, and The Fish That Vanishes.⁸⁰ At an Extinction Rebellion event in Yeovil, Somerset, in the summer of 2019, protestors dressed up as eels participated in a “drown in” and a “European eel” delivered a statement to South Somerset District Council.⁸¹ In June 2019, the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG) marked its tenth anniversary with a two-day meeting at the Natural History Museum, London, and week-long celebration of the European eel. A highlight was the arrival at “Dutch Mooring” in the Thames, directly adjacent to the former Billingsgate Fish market, of a reconstructed eel schuyt, absent from London’s riverscape for over eighty years.⁸² My visit to the schuyt coincided with that of Pieter Hak, the proprietor of the Noted Eel & Pie House, Leytonstone, northeast London.⁸³ Hak told the Dutch crew that his great grandfather had come to London as a crewman on a schuyt, but met a local woman. He decided to stay and married her; together, they opened an eel shop. Hak gave the crew a copy of a book on whose cover he appears, grasping a live eel: Stuart Freedman’s The Englishman and the Eel (2017), which is a paean to that cherished but now endangered London institution, the eel and pie shop. It is also worth noting that an Italian immigrant established London’s oldest surviving eel and pie shop in 1891. As Britain recently departed the EU (31 December 2020), and the supply of eels from Lough Neagh ends in accordance with the ban on export of eels outside the EU, an appreciation of this sort of fishy connection can help, in a small way, to conserve a sense of Britain’s Europeanness. London’s eel heritage can also help preserve an awareness that Britain’s eels are members of a nonhuman family of Europeans. Most importantly, perhaps, for us as Europeans living in an age of human mass migration, our European eel’s transnational and intercontinental life cycle reminds us that where we call home is not always where our parents lived or where we were born.

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6 Conclusion This case study of the European eel combines the materialist approach to environmental history – how human activities have altered its living conditions – with a cultural perspective exploring what eels mean to us. Other faunal species that have emerged as beneficiaries of environmentalist concern and remedial actions in recent European history are far better known, among them the Atlantic salmon, European bison, Eurasian beaver, and Eurasian wolf. Nonetheless, this particular species of fish exemplifies how migratory, pan-European species can lead to the framing of environmental concerns as “European” and engender transregional networks of environmental concern that possess what the editors refer to as ‘pan-European ambitions’ (see the Introduction by Patrick Kupper and Anna-Katharina Wöbse). The eel’s story also demonstrates how a single species can serve as a transnational symbol of European ecological dependency and a common responsibility and heritage that spanned the Cold War divide between East and West. At the same time, it is essential to appreciate that the European eel’s name is misleading. Considering that its eelscape extends to the waters of North Africa, salt and fresh, and its migratory regime is transatlantic, the so-called European eel serves to remind us that Europe and Europeanness are closely, even intimately connected to the world beyond Europe. In contrast to the grand geography of the eel’s movements, the scale of concern for its welfare, though equally broad, spatially, has been numerically confined. Those who have acted to protect the eel are a relatively small group, dominated by experts. A mass popular movement to save the European eel has yet to materialize. And whether a species without obvious attributes of charisma has the capacity to attract conservationist efforts comparable to those that have benefited the Atlantic salmon, European bison, Eurasian beaver, and European wolf remains to be seen. Incontrovertible, though, is that the European eel, previously a strictly taxonomic name, has acquired additional layers of meaning that are cultural and political as well as more narrowly biological and geographical. The Europeanness of the European eel in terms of its genetic makeup and distribution predated by millions of years the first signs of pan-Europeanism and movements toward European integration. As the geography and idea of Europe have shifted over time, the European eel has both remained the same and changed. Its genetic and geographic identities remained fixed. But its meaning has shifted, not least in the sense that its pan-European range, from Iceland to Sicily, now epitomizes the fundamental heterogeneity of Europe and its peoples.

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Notes  V. R. P. Sinha and J. W. Jones, The European Freshwater Eel (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1975), 3.  Johan Dannewitz et al., “Panmixia in the European eel: A matter of time”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B Biological Science 272 (2005): 1129 – 1137; Thomas D. Als et al., “All roads lead to home: panmixia of European eel in the Sargasso Sea”, Molecular Ecology 20 (2011): 1333 – 346; Stefan Palm et al., “Panmixia in European eel revisited: No genetic difference between maturing adults from southern and northern Europe”, Heredity 103 (2009): 86.  Annex E: Willem Dekker, Brian Knights, and Christopher Moriarty, “The future of the eel and eel fisheries”, Report of the Eighth Session of the Working Party on Eel, Olsztyn, Poland, 24 – 29 May 1993, EIFAC Occasional Paper No. 27 (Rome: FAO, 1993), http://www.fao.org/3/ V2976E/V2976E00.htm#TOC (accessed 20 January 2020).  Willem Dekker, “Eel, the eurofish: historical management challenges the future”, Sustainable Eel Group (SEG), 10th anniversary meeting, London, 27 June 2019 (SEG 2019), https://www.sus tainableeelgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/02-DEKKER.W-Eelthe-eurofish.pdf (accessed 10 February 2020).  F. W. Tesch et al., The Eel: Biology and Management of Anguillid Eels (London: Chapman & Hall, 1977), 140. Glass eel and elver are often used synonymously in the British Isles. Technically speaking, though, the former become the latter when, moving upriver, they begin to feed and acquire pigmentation. Within a few months, they grow into adult (yellow) eels. When the yellow (or brown) eel is ready for its reproductive journey (usually after 10 – 15 years), it metamorphoses into the silver eel.  Eleanora Ciccotti, “Interactions between capture fisheries and aquaculture: the case of the eel (Anguilla anguilla L., 1758)”, in Interactions Between Aquaculture and Capture Fisheries: A Methodological Perspective, eds. Stefano Cataudella, Fabio Massa and Donatella Crosetti, Studies and Reviews No. 78 (Rome: General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean/FOA, 2005), 199; Background Document for European Eel, Anguilla Anguilla (London: OSPAR Commission, 2010), 7. Since 2007, WGEEL has provided the data and advice for developing and implementing the EU’s Eel Regulation.  ICES, Report of the 2012 Session of the Joint EIFAAC/ICES Working Group on Eels, Copenhagen, 3 – 9 September 2012, EIFAAC Occasional Paper No. 49 (Copenhagen: ICES, 2012), ii, 19, 50. EIFAC became the European Inland Fisheries and Aquaculture Advisory Commission (EIFAAC) in 2010. The Working Group on Eel was originally called the Working Party on Eel, and the Working Group on Eel eventually became the Working Group on Eels.  Jonathan Morris, Coffee: A Global History (London: Reaktion, 2018); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2014); Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 1997).  Sinha and Jones, European Freshwater Eel, 100.  “Eel”, https://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/marine_species/farmed_fish_and_shellfish/eel (accessed 10 February 2020).  Christopher Moriarty and Willem Dekker, eds., “Management of the European Eel: Second report of EC Concerted Action AIR A94– 1939, Enhancement of the European Eel Fishery and Conservation of the Species”, Fisheries Bulletin 15 (Dublin: Marine Institute, 1997) 11, 13; “Life cycle of the silver eel: from a cookery correspondent”, The Times [London], 5 April 1965, 13; Wav-

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erley Root, “The eel: it’s a long, long story”, Los Angeles Times, 8 April 1976, 26 – 27; Gillian Riley, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 166.  “The fisheries of Ferrara”, Journal of the Society of Arts, 16 November 1877, 1048; Antonio Beltramelli, Da Comacchio ad Argenta: Le lagune e le bocche del Po (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1905), 23, 38, 49, 55.  “Elvers and eels”, Country Life (30 May 1908), 758; Francis Day, Fishes of Great Britain, vol. 2 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1884), 242.  Tesch, Eel, 150. 237 tonnes convert into 237,000 kilograms and there are circa 3,000 glass eels per kilo.  Christopher Moriarty, ed., “The European eel fishery in 1993 and 1994: First report of a working group funded by the European Union Concerted Action AIR A94– 1939”, Fisheries Bulletin 14 (1996): 17; Penelope Casas, “For the eel, it’s a long, long way to Spain and plate”, New York Times, 8 November 1992, 6, 30.  Eric Feunteun and Tony Robinet, “Freshwater eels and people in France”, in Katsumi Tsukamoto and Mari Kuroki, eds., Eels and Humans (Tokyo: Springer Japan, 2014), 75.  Brian Waters, Severn Tide (London: J. M. Dent, 1947), 7; T. Kieran McCarthy, “Eels and people in Ireland: From mythology to international eel stock conservation”, in Eels and Humans, 25.  Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1. The London Street-Folk (London: George Woodfall and Son, 1851), 3, 29, 66 – 67, 96, 99, 118, 158 – 159, 160 – 163, 195, 197, 208, 368, 476; C. David Badham, Prose Halieutics; or, Ancient and Modern Fish Tattle (London: John W. Parker, 1854), 383 – 384; Richard Schweid, Consider the Eel: A Natural and Gastronomic History (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004), 89 – 95.  “Eels in the Thames”, The Field (11 May 1918), 630; “The fleet in the Thames”, Times, 19 July 1909, 7.  Ben Jonson, The Staple of News (London: Robert Allot, 1631), 62.  Francis T. Buckland, Natural History of British Fishes: Their Structure, Economic Uses, and Capture by Net and Rod (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1891), 82; William Yarrell, The History of British Fishes, vol. 2 (London: John Van Voorst, 1836), 285 – 286.  Willem Dekker, “The history of commercial fisheries for European eel commenced only a century ago”, Fisheries Management Ecology 26 (2019): 8 – 9.  Francis Day, Fishes of Great Britain, vol. 2 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1884), 242.  After a century and a half of European and Japanese research, larvae can finally be hatched through in vitro fertilization of eggs. Yet scientists still cannot get captively-generated broodstock to complete the yolk-sac stage and develop into viable larvae, leptocephali and glass eels.  Markus Diekmann, “Glasaalbewirtschaftung und Aalbesatz in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert”, in Mitteilungen der Landesforschungsanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Fischerei: Beiträge zum Aalmanagement (Gülzow-Prüzen: Landesforschungsanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Fischerei Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Heft 58, Februar 2017), 8; Willem Dekker and Laurent Beaulaton, “Faire mieux que la nature? The history of eel restocking in Europe”, Environment and History 22 (2016): 269 – 270.  C.T.R., “Johannes Schmidt (1877– 1933)”, ICES Journal of Marine Science 8 (1933): 148.  In 1914, the British government requisitioned the depot. In 1924, it reverted to German ownership and operation, which continued until 1939, when the plant was re-requisitioned and never returned: F4811/1919 (Epney Elver Depot), MAF (Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries) 41/1212, The National Archives, London.  Tesch, Eel, 153.

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 EIFAC/ICES, Report of the 1994 Session of the EIFAC/ICES Working Group on Eel, Oviedo, Spain, 26 September – 1 October 1994 (EIFAC Occasional Paper No. 30) (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1994), ii, 1– 3. See also Report of the EIFAC/ICES Working Group on Eels, Ijmuiden, The Netherlands, 23 – 27 September 1996 (EIFAC Occasional Paper No. 33) (Copenhagen: ICES Anadromous and Catadromous Fish Committee, 1997), 1, 8; ICES, Report of the EIFAC/ICES Working Group on Eels, Silkeborg, Denmark, 20 – 24 September 1999 (Copenhagen: ICES, 1999), 1, 2.  EIFAC/ICES, Report of the 1994 Session of the EIFAC/ICES Working Group on Eel, 1– 2; Kevin D. Friedland, Michael J. Miller, and Brian Knights, “Oceanic changes in the Sargasso Sea and declines in recruitment of the European eel”, ICES: Journal of Marine Science 64 (2007): 519 – 530.  Brian Knights, “A review of the possible impacts of long-term oceanic and climate changes and fishing mortality on recruitment of anguillid eels of the Northern Hemisphere”, Science of the Total Environment 310 (2003): 237– 244.  G.A.B., “The geographical distribution of the eels”, Country Life (4 March 1911), 301.  Anna Capaldo, et al., “Effects of environmental cocaine concentrations on the skeletal muscle of the European eel (Anguilla Anguilla)”, Science of the Total Environment 640 – 641 (2018): 862– 873; Jacob Jarvis, “Cocaine in the River Thames ‘is another problem eels don’t need’, says expert”, London Evening Standard, 27 January 2019; “Some European rivers are so drug-polluted, their eels get high on cocaine”, National Geographic, 20 June 2018, https://www.nationalgeo graphic.co.uk/animals/2018/06/some-european-rivers-are-so-drug-polluted-their-eels-get-highcocaine (accessed 20 January 2020).  Eels will benefit alongside other migratory fish as Dam Removal Europe, a pan-European partnership of six NGOs, expands its efforts to emancipate the continent’s rivers.  Manchan Magan, “Wriggling out of EU eel fishing ban”, Irish Times, 1 June 2013, 22.  Guido E.E.J.M. van den Thillart, “European eels: Dutch fisheries, culture and eel migration”, in Eels and Humans, 61.  D. Jacoby and M. Gollock, Anguilla anguilla. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2014, https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2014– 1.RLTS.T60344 A45833138.en (accessed 20 January 2020). The Red List’s categorial scale ascends from Least Concern to Near Threatened and then into three Threatened categories: Vulnerable, Endangered, and Critically Endangered (CR). The top two categories are Extinct in the Wild and Extinct. IUCN’s European Red List indicates that 37 per cent of Europe’s freshwater fishes are Threatened at a continental scale, of which 12 per cent (63 species in total) are CR, https://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/con servation/species/redlist/fishes/status.htm (accessed 20 January 2020).  Joint answer to written questions P-3994/97 and E-4001/97, by Mrs Bonino on behalf of the European Commission, 30 January 1998, Parliamentary questions, European Parliament, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getAllAnswers.do?reference=E-1997- 4001&language=EN (accessed 20 January 2020); Stéphane Ringuet, Fumihito Muto, and Caroline Raymakers, “Eels: their harvest and trade in Europe and Asia”, TRAFFIC Bulletin 19 (2002): 10.  Moriarty and Dekker, “Management of European Eel”, 9 – 10, 16.  Henry A. Raup, “European Conservation Year”, The Professional Geographer 21 (1969): 353; “European Conservation Year 1970”, House of Commons, 10 March 1969, Hansard 779, cc1127– 1128.  Louis Leprince-Ringuet, “Editorial”, “Nature in Focus: European Conservation Year”, special issue, Bulletin of the European Information Centre for Nature Conservation (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, Summer 1970), 1; “Four days of debate”, ibid., 2.

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 X. Eel Recruitment and Stocks, Paragraph 54; XII. Recommendations, Paragraph 58; Annex E: Willem Dekker, Brian Knights and Christopher Moriarty, “The future of the eel and eel fisheries”, in Report of the Eighth Session of the Working Party on Eel, Olsztyn, Poland, 24 – 29 May 1993 (EIFAC Occasional Paper No. 27) (Rome: FAO, 1993), http://www.fao.org/3/ V2976E/V2976E00.htm#TOC (accessed 20 January 2020).  Moriarty and Dekker, “Management of European Eel,” 5; Rijk van Dam, “Eel fisheries in Europe,” Parliamentary questions, European Parliament, 14 January 1998, http://www.europarl. europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+WQ+E-1997- 4001+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN (accessed 20 January 2020).  Moriarty, “The European eel fishery in 1993 and 1994: First report of a working group funded by the European Union Concerted Action AIR A94– 1939”, 1, 29.  Moriarty and Dekker, “Management of European Eel”, 5 – 6.  “Québec Declaration of Concern” (“Worldwide Decline of Eel Resources Necessitates Immediate Action”), Fisheries Forum 28 (2003): 28; John M. Casselman and David K. Cairns, eds., Eels at the Edge: Science, Status and Conservation Concerns. Proceedings of the 2003 International Eel Symposium, Québec City, Canada, 11– 13 August 2003 (American Fisheries Society Symposium, vol. 58) (Bethesda, MD: American Fisheries Society, 2009).  Background Document for European Eel, Anguilla Anguilla (London: OSPAR Commission, 2010), 19. “Good status” was to be achieved through development and implementation of River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs), drawn up in 2009, and for review every six years. The second round of RBMPs (2015) provided the opportunity to prioritize measures such as removal of blockages to migratory fish.  “EU (European Union), Council Regulation (EC) No. 1100/2007 of 18 September 2007 establishing measures for the recovery of the stock of European eel (Brussels, 18 September 2007)”, Official Journal of the European Union, 22 September 2007, L. 248/17– 23, https://eur-lex.europa. eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32007R1100&rid=1 (accessed 20 January 2020). The non-existence of data from the Sargasso – the spawning act has never been observed, nor have the eggs and larvae when they hatch – and the scarcity of information about departing silver eels fuelled a €4 million EU project (2008 – 2012) that evoked the Homeric proportions of its odyssey. EELIAD (European eels in the Atlantic: assessment of their decline) has informed recovery plans by filling knowledge gaps in our understanding of population structure, length of larval stage and duration of inshore migration.  Annual recruitment in European waters between 2005 and 2010 consists overwhelmingly (96 – 98 per cent) of restocked eels as distinct from “natural immigrants”: Uwe Brämick et al., “Stocking is essential to meet the silver eel escapement target in a river system with currently low natural recruitment”, ICES Journal of Marine Science 73 (2016): 91– 100.  For a scheme (2011– 12) to make pumping stations “silver eel friendly” involving commercial and sports fishermen, water boards and provincial governments, see Magnus van der Meer, Eels over the Dykes 2012: Trap & transport of silver eels in the Netherlands (Wageningen: DUPAN, 2012).  Moriarty and Dekker, “Management of the European Eel”, 1.  Jesper Stage, “The value of the Swedish eel fishery”, Marine Resource Economics 30 (2015): 26 – 27.  Patrick Smyth, “Border is a sideshow, if you’re an eel”, Irish Times, 12 May 2018, 6; ibid., “Ireland faces the very real threat of a no-eel Brexit”, Irish Times, 11 April 2019, https://www.irish times.com/news/world/europe/ireland-faces-the-very-real-threat-of-a-no-eel-brexit-1.3856130 (accessed 3 August 2020); McCarthy, “Eels and people in Ireland”, 35.

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 Håkan Wickström, “Non-detrimental findings for the European eel – the Swedish case”, International Expert Workshop on CITES Non-Detriment Findings (NDF), Cancun, Mexico, 17– 22 November 2008, NDF Workshop Case Studies, WG 8 – Fishes. Anguilla Anguilla. Country – Sweden (Washington, DC: CITES, 2008), 4, 5.  Gretchen Vogel, “Europe tries to save its eels”, Science 329 (30 July 2010), 505 – 507.  Eleanora Ciccotti, “Interactions between capture fisheries and aquaculture: the case of the eel (Anguilla anguilla L., 1758)”, in Interactions Between Aquaculture and Capture Fisheries: A Methodological Perspective, eds. Stefano Cataudella, Fabio Massa, and Donatella Crosetti (Studies and Reviews No. 78) (Rome: General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean/ FOA, 2005), 193.  Suzanne Rindom et al., “Eels in culture, fisheries and science in Denmark”, in Eels and Humans, 47; ICES, Report of the ICES/EIFAC Working Group on Eels, Nantes, France, 2 – 6 September 2002 (Copenhagen: ICES, 2002), 5 – 6.  Judith Ann Yablonky, “American eels jetted to Europe as delicacy”, Washington Post, 31 August 1974, B1– 2.  Tesch, The Eel, 153; Guy Fontenelle, “Annex 4. Observations on the glass eel fishery in 1997,” in Moriarty and Dekker, “Management of European Eel,” 108 – 109.  Ringuet et al., “Eels: their harvest and trade in Europe and Asia”, 8 – 9, 13 – 14.  Mari Kuroki, Martien J. P. van Oijen, and Katsumi Tsukamoto, “Eels and the Japanese: An inseparable and long-standing relationship”, in Eels and Humans, 99.  “Eel (Anguilla Anguilla)”, https://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/marine_species/wild_species/eel_ en (accessed 28 January 2020).  David M. P. Jacoby et al., “Synergistic patterns of threat and the challenges facing global anguillid eel conservation”, Global Ecology and Conservation 4 (2015): 325 – 326. For a report on how the global coronavirus pandemic of 2020 could disrupt this trade, see Bill Trotter, “Coronavirus could reduce Asian demand, and the price, for Maine’s baby eels”, Bangor Daily News, 5 March 2020, https://bangordailynews.com/2020/03/05/news/hancock/coronavirus-outbreakcould-reduce-asian-demand-and-the-price-for-maines-baby-eels/ (accessed 3 August 2020).  Emma Bryce, “Illegal eel: black market continues to taint Europe’s eel fishery”, 9 February 2016, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/world-on-a-plate/2016/feb/09/ illegal-eel-black-market-continues-to-taint-europes-eel-fishery (accessed 27 January 2020).  Lewis Smith, “Trafficking makes eel ‘as valuable as cocaine’”, inews, 8 December 2017, https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/trafficking-makes-eel-valuable-cocaine-516631 (accessed 27 January 2020); Peter Walker, “Why saving the European eel matters”, The Ecologist, 16 July 2019, https://theecologist.org/2019/jul/16/why-saving-european-eel-matters (accessed 3 August 2020)  https://eels.cargo.site/Suitcase (accessed 20 January 2020). On 20 June 2018, Eel Suitcase artwork was displayed during SEG’s “Save the European Eel: Europe’s Own Ivory” (event at the European Parliament in Brussels), https://eels.cargo.site/Guide-to-Brussels (accessed 20 January 2020); Jay Rana, “Illegal elver fishing and how we tackle it”, 3 May 2018, Environment Agency, https://environmentagency.blog.gov.uk/2018/05/03/illegal-elver-fishing-and-how-we-tackle-it/ (accessed 20 January 2020).  Goolistan Cooper, “Thousands of endangered eels worth £1.2 million prevented from being illegally smuggled from Heathrow Airport”, 3 March 2017, https://www.mylondon.news/news/ west-london-news/thousands-endangered-eels-worth-12million-12686227 (accessed 20 January 2020).

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 “Illegal eel exporters exposed by Countryfile”, BBC, 16 June 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-england-gloucestershire-48647168; “Eel trafficking in the EU is ‘the largest wildlife crime on earth’”, NDTV, 21 November 2018, https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/eel-traffickingin-the-europe-union-is-the-largest-wildlife-crime-on-earth-1950751 (all accessed 20 January 2020).  Sustainable Eel Group, The SEG Standard: A Code of Conduct for a Responsible Eel Sector (Brussels: Wetlands International European Association, June 2018).  Lewis Smith, “Trafficking makes eel ‘as valuable as cocaine’”, inews, 8 December 2017, https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/trafficking-makes-eel-valuable-cocaine-516631 (accessed 20 January 2020); Willem Dekker, “Protecting the European eel”, 15 January 2020, The Ecologist, https://theecologist.org/2020/jan/15/protecting-european-eel (accessed 20 January 2020).  “No more endangered eel at top Dutch supermarket,” Reuters, 10 December 2009, https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-dutch-eel-supermarket-idUSTRE5B91VR20091210 (accessed 22 January 2020); John Tagliabue, “Dutch fishermen join their catch on endangered list”, New York Times, 16 February 2010, A9; Alessia Cerantola, “The last eel catcher of Rome”, 8 October 2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29425984 (accessed 22 January 2020).  Julia Platt Leonard, “Wide Sargasso Sea”, Country Life, 15 July 2020, 68.  Conor Macauley, “Brexit: Lough Neagh eels can’t be sold in Britain”, BBC News, 27 January 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-55818519.  Magan, “Wriggling out of EU eel fishing ban”.  Stage, “Value of Swedish eel fishery”, 25.  Kees van Unen, “Smoked on the water: the eel trader reviving an old Amsterdam tradition,” The Guardian, 6 June 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jun/06/smoked-on-thewater-the-eel-trader-reviving-an-old-amsterdam-tradition (accessed 22 January 2020); Brett Westwood (presenter) and Sarah Blunt (producer), “Eels”, BBC Radio 4 (Natural Histories), 22 August 2017.  Charles William Stubbs, Historical Memorials of Ely Cathedral (London: J. M. Dent, 1897), 19; H. C. Darby, The Medieval Fenland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 31– 32.  Mark Kurlansky, “Baby eels: Look at the eyes before you bite,” International Herald Tribune, 27 May 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/27/style/IHT-baby-eelslook-at-the-eyes-beforeyou-bite.html (accessed 3 August 2020).  Richard Cook, e-mail message to author, 27 January 2020.  Torolf Edgar Kroglund, Reise med ål Omvei hjem (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2018); Kroglund, Reise mit Aal: Auf den Spuren einer aussterbenden Art, trans. Martin Bayer (Hamburg: Edel Books, 2019).  Stephen D’Albiac, “Extinction Rebellion: Watch the moment protesters storm council meeting and stage ‘drown-in’”, SomersetLive, 20 July 2019, https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/ somerset-news/extinction-rebellion-watch-moment-protesters-3115254 (accessed 22 January 2020).  The idea was hatched in 1999, construction began in 2005 and the “Korneliske Ykes II” was launched in April 2009: “Eel barge history/Palingaak geschiedenis,” poster, SEG 2019.  Mark Wincott, “Inside the East London pie and mash shop that hasn’t changed since the 1960s,” Londonist, 19 September 2019, https://londonist.com/london/pie-and-mash (accessed 22 January 2020).

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Bibliography Beaulaton, Laurent, and Willem Dekker. “Faire mieux que la nature? The history of eel restocking in Europe”. Environment and History 22 (2016): 255 – 300. Dekker, Willem. “The history of commercial fisheries for European eel commenced only a century ago”. Fisheries Management Ecology 26 (2019): 6 – 19. Knights, Brian. “A review of the possible impacts of long-term oceanic and climate changes and fishing mortality on recruitment of anguillid eels of the Northern Hemisphere”. Science of the Total Environment 310 (2003): 237 – 244. Palm, S., J. Dannewitz, T. Prestegaard, and H. Wickstrom. “Panmixia in European eel revisited: No genetic difference between maturing adults from southern and northern Europe”. Heredity 103 (2009): 82 – 89. Schweid, Richard. Consider the Eel: A Natural and Gastronomic History. New York: Da Capo Press, 2004. Sinha, V. R. P. and J. W. Jones. The European Freshwater Eel. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1975. Svensson, Patrik. The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World. Trans. Agnes Broomé. New York: HarperCollins, 2020 [2019]. Tesch, F. W., et al. The Eel: Biology and Management of Anguillid Eels. London: Chapman & Hall, 1977 [1973]. Tsukamoto, Katsumi, and Mari Kuroki, eds. Eels and Humans. Tokyo: Springer Japan, 2014.

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6 Transcending the Cold War: Borders, Nature, and the European Green Belt Conservation Project along the Former Iron Curtain Abstract This chapter highlights the connections between borders and the natural environment, taking the European Green Belt as an example. It highlights the project’s dual origins along the Finnish-Russian and the inter-German border. The authors argue that the opportunities for nature protection provided by the end of the Cold War and the subsequent push for European integration are best understood if considered alongside a parallel paradigm shift in nature conservation itself: a move towards the creation of ecological networks and corridors that required transboundary cooperation. This chapter addresses this synchronism in a case study of transboundary conservation along the Czech, German, and Austrian borders, focusing on the national parks of the Bavarian Forest/Šumava and Thayatal/Podyji´. The European Green Belt ‘invented’ neither transboundary collaboration nor ecological networks, but its symbolic valence as a profoundly European space, both in historical and political terms, has made it a prime example of these approaches and has helped popularize them. Keywords European Green Belt; nature conservation; ecological networks and corridors; Iron Curtain; nature and borders In September 2004, seventy conservationists from seventeen European countries gathered in the Fertő-Hanság National Park on the Hungarian side of Lake Neusiedl. Capitalizing on the success of the German Green Belt project along the former inter-German border, they announced what they considered a watershed project for nature conservation in Europe: a plan to create a corridor of protected landscapes along the entire course of the former Iron Curtain, reaching from the Arctic Circle down to the Balkan Peninsula.¹ Aside from the primary goal of preserving sensitive biotopes that had benefited from the seclusion the Iron Curtain had provided, the European Green Belt was, in the words of the President of the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (Bundesamt für Naturschutz), supposed to “harmonize human activities with the natural environment”, “foster transboundary cooperation between the old and new EU member states”, and “enhance sustainable regional development” in Europe’s border areas.² The https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-007

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project was thus tasked with uniting both the continent’s human and nonhuman inhabitants. The idea of the Green Belt is tied to the end of the Cold War like no other European nature protection effort. For a start, it is part of a larger conservation windfall brought by the end of the Cold War. The termination of the global conflict and its permanent state of military preparedness freed up some 1.5 billion hectares of military training ground in Europe, a significant portion of which was transitioned into protected areas although (or rather because) they were contaminated with unexploded ordnance.³ The collapse of state socialism also ushered in new political regimes in formerly socialist countries that provided a boost to nature conservation. New protected areas thus became part of the “peace dividend” of the concluded conflict. Further, the Green Belt occupies the space where the Iron Curtain once stood.⁴ The Iron Curtain was the iconic symbol of Europe’s Cold War division: it separated military blocs and competing ideologies and was a deadly obstacle for anyone seeking to migrate westward. By protecting the strip of land where this infamous border once meandered, the Green Belt leverages significant symbolic capital for its marketing efforts. Its stakeholders have skilfully harnessed the prevalent post-Wall optimism and pro-European sentiment of the 1990s with slogans such as “From Death Strip to Life Line” and “Borders Separate, Nature Unites”. Whereas the first slogan references the political transformation of Europe after the events of 1989 – 1990, the second evokes the continent’s subsequent political and economic integration. The conservationists reconnected here to earlier plans from 1990 that had considered ecologically valuable areas along state borders in Central and SouthWest Europe as the “ecological bricks” for a new “House of Europe”.⁵ Not coincidentally, the conference at the Fertő-Hanság National Park was convened in 2004 when the first Eastern Enlargement of the European Union extended European environmental legislation to the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Tying their nature conservation project so closely to the political project of European integration should not come as a surprise because from the beginning the founders of the European Green Belt looked to the European Union for future funding.⁶ Still, the initiative points beyond “political” Europe since it tied together member and non-member states. Today, the European Green Belt (EGB) presents itself as a 12,500 kilometres long ecological corridor that runs from the northern tip of the Norwegian-Russian border to the Adriatic Sea near Trieste, and on through the Balkans along the eastern border of former Yugoslavia, forking eventually at the border between Bulgaria and Greece toward the Black Sea in the east and at the border between Greece and Albania toward the Adriatic in the west (see figure 1). The European

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Green Belt consists of four organizational units: the Fennoscandian part, the Baltic coast, the Central European stretch, and the South-Eastern European, or Balkan, segment.⁷ It touches 24 countries and runs for the most part along current state borders, thus creating the need and opportunity for transboundary cooperation among protected areas within a circa 25 kilometres deep zone on either side of the respective borders.⁸

Figure 1: The European Green Belt and its organizational units. First printed in Jarmo Kortelainen, “The European Green Belt: Generating Environmental Governance – Reshaping Border Areas,” Quaestiones Geographicae 29, no. 4 (2010): 32. We thank Dr. Kortelainen for allowing us to reprint his map.

Using the European Green Belt as an example, this chapter highlights the connections between borders and the natural environment. It addresses the dual origins of the Green Belt on Finland’s border with Russia and along the inter-German border that laid the groundwork for the European dimension of the project (for the Baltic see chapter 10 by Laakkonen/Räsänen). We argue that the opportunities that the end of the Cold War and the push for European integration provided for the protection of nature are best understood if considered alongside a parallel paradigm shift in nature conservation itself: a move toward the creation of ecological networks and corridors that requires transboun-

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dary cooperation. In this context, it is worth remembering that many protected areas that became subsumed under the Green Belt label predate this pan-European initiative and have deep individual histories. This chapter therefore offers a case study for transboundary conservation along Czech borders, focusing on the national parks of the Bavarian Forest/Šumava and Thayatal/Podyjí. Their stories also highlight both the achievements and challenges of transboundary conservation. The European Green Belt ‘invented’ neither transboundary environmental collaboration nor ecological networks, but its symbolic valence as a profoundly European space, both in historical and political terms, turned it into a prime example of these approaches and helped publicize them to a wider public.

1 Borders and the Environment The last decade has brought increasing scholarly attention to the interplay of geopolitical borders, borderlands, and the environment.⁹ The character of a border, the degree to which it is enforced and securitized, signifies the political relationship of neighbouring states. For example, the borders within the Schengen area are intended to be fully permeable, whereas those delimiting EU territory are not. The nature of the relationship between neighbours that is embodied in shared borders influences their transboundary environmental entanglements as well. Negotiations over the damage of environmental goods, from the infringement of fishing rights to the release of sulphur dioxide plumes or spills into transboundary waters, are more likely to be amicably resolved by good neighbours than by hostile neighbours.¹⁰ In Nancy Langston’s words, “many pollutants ignore national borders but the effects of exposure are still mediated by those borders”.¹¹ As the global coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has shown all too well, borders do indeed play a key role in mediating exposure; across the globe, they snapped shut. Yet borders not only mediate environmental engagement between neighbours in a diplomatic and legal sense. They also play an ecological role on the ground. More often than not, politically demarcated territory and biogeographical regions do not coincide, and borders themselves cut across terrestrial and marine habitats. Since state borders demarcate the extent of state sovereignty, they frequently also delimit different (national) practices of land use and natural resource exploitation, as well as water and fire management, differences that can literally inscribe the border into the landscape as changes in vegetation.¹² The effects of a border’s presence in the terrain vary according to landscape type, species, and the border’s physical appearance. Border fences, designed to control human movements, fragment habitats and inevitably hamper

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and even prevent wildlife migration and biological exchange.¹³ Tightly patrolled contemporary borders like the one between the United States and Mexico bring military-grade infrastructure into remote areas, from off-road vehicles to floodlights and helicopters.¹⁴ But even a non-militarized border like the one between Canada and the United States is starkly visible in the landscape: a denuded 20foot deep zone known as “the slash” is continuously kept free of trees even within the transboundary Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.¹⁵ Historically, governing authorities have regularly designated topographic features such as coastlines, mountain ranges, and rivers as boundaries in order to “naturalize” territorial claims.¹⁶ Historians have debunked such claims across time and space, all but gutting the idea of “natural borders”. For example, the idea of the Hexagon as the natural and therefore legitimate shape of France betrays late eighteenth-century geopolitical goals, since such ideal(ized) limits marked by the Rhine in the east and the Pyrenees in the southwest still presupposed further expansion at the time. Instead of settling territorial competition and pacifying mutual relations, the allegedly “natural” border river with Germany – the Rhine – became a bone of contention among nationalists on both sides.¹⁷ Indeed, rivers make remarkably bad “natural” borders because they move with the flood season, expanding and contracting, even giving rise to temporary islands. “When such wandering rivers come to mark an international border”, Willem van Schendel writes, “they are bound to create mayhem”.¹⁸ If, in turn, the river is forced into a corset to contain its movements and make it play its role as a border more reliably, the riverine ecology is irretrievably altered.¹⁹ The historical penchant for topographic features as border markers helps explain, however, why border areas are likely to be of ecological interest: they are by definition ecologically significant landscapes. They preserve their ecological value because economic activity and population density decrease in the vicinity of state borders, making many borderlands both a geographic and an economic periphery.²⁰ Regardless of individual national trajectories, there is a global trend that buffer zones tend to emerge alongside international boundaries.²¹ The Iron Curtain fits well with this trend because a buffer zone was actually an integral part of the Soviet border security model. The security template, developed in the 1920s for the western border regions (pogranichnyye rayony) of the Soviet Union, called for a restricted zone along the border that was at least seven kilometres deep. The border zone came under intense surveillance and was cleansed of “unreliable” residents.²² After the Second World War, this border security regime made an appearance along the fault line of the budding Cold War. On the 1,250 kilometres long border between Finland and the Soviet Union, the security belt was at least 30 kilometres deep, hindering logging efforts

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in old-growth boreal forests on the Soviet side.²³ In divided Germany, the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) introduced a rigid security regime along the inter-German border in May 1952 that entailed a five kilometres deep prohibited zone. From here, too, allegedly unreliable residents were deported, entrance to the zone was strictly regulated, and economic development was kept to a minimum.²⁴ Czech authorities had militarized their border with Bavaria a few years earlier. After the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948, they installed high-voltage electric fences and planted landmines more than ten years before the East Germans did. The borderlands on the Czech side had already undergone a major demographic shift at the end of the war when ethnic Germans (Sudeten Germans) were forced to leave, thinning out the population along this part of the Iron Curtain.²⁵ The border between Bulgaria and Greece, established after 1919, lost its permeability already during the Second World War. After the war, Bulgarian authorities joined the effort to remove people they considered untrustworthy, especially those with relatives in Greece or Turkey, from the border areas while Greece maintained a 15–45 kilometres deep “surveillance zone” on its side of the border.²⁶ From the western side, the Iron Curtain also acquired a buffer zone, albeit a rather unintentional one. There were no prohibited zones and no one was deported from border regions. But the border traversed areas that were often rural and had been economically weak and hence sparsely populated in the first place. It thus exacerbated peripheral tendencies in regions like the Harz Mountains and the Bavarian Forest in West Germany and the Oberes Waldviertel in Austria, adding to a perception that these regions had literally become “dead ends”.²⁷

2 Dual Origins: The Finnish-Soviet Border and the Inter-German Border Protection of nature along stretches of the Iron Curtain started before the fall of state socialism, and in the case of Finland and the Soviet Union even in a transboundary setting. Although sharing the same Precambrian bedrock geological formation and thus the same flora and fauna, the political border between Finland and the Murmansk Oblast and the Karelian Republic inscribed itself into the landscape due to variances in forest management.²⁸ Differences in land use along this border were exacerbated during the Soviet era when agriculture and forestry in the Karelian Republic were collectivized and its forests slated for paper production according to centrally determined needs. Yet Karelia’s remoteness from processing facilities saved some of the primeval taiga forests

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from being logged. What made this outcome a visible line especially from an aerial perspective was the contrast to forests on the Finnish side, where post-war logging had been paired with reforestation and subsequent industrial forest management. The Finnish evenly-aged economic forests formed a stark contrast to the unintentionally preserved old-growth backwoods on the Soviet side.²⁹ Oldgrowth forest on the Finnish side, by contrast, survived only in patches, and more so in the north where forests were state-owned than in the southern part of the country where private ownership and smaller parcellation prevailed.³⁰ Not surprisingly, the differences in forest age and stocking along the border also translated into differences in biodiversity. The Karelian forests and bogs featured different wildlife communities and a higher overall species diversity than the managed forests on the Finnish side. Equally important, the security zone on the Soviet side of the border “functioned effectively as a huge nature reserve” and played a key role as a “source zone” for wildlife (re)appearing on the Finnish side.³¹ Already in the 1980s, conservation concerns centred on the indigenous boreal forests because they were considered the only standard by which to judge the human impact on the forest environment.³² In the mid-1980s, Finnish and Soviet conservationists began joint studies of mammal migration. This collaboration paved the way for the creation of a transboundary Friendship Park in 1990.³³ The largest part of the shared park is the Kostomuksha Nature Reserve on the Russian side that had been founded as early as 1983 as a zapovednik, a strictly protected area accessible only to scientists. The Kostomuksha zapovednik owed its existence to a Soviet-era push for the industrial modernization of the Republic of Karelia. As part of the effort to modernize the region, a new industrial town named Kostomuksha was established in 1977, some 30 kilometres from the border with Finland. From 1982 onward, the Karelskiy Okatysh iron ore mine became the town’s main employer and, incidentally, its main polluter too. Granting a zapovednik only a year after the start of iron ore production should be understood as a compensatory measure, albeit a substantial one: Kostomuksha Nature Reserve covers 47,000 hectares and is twice as large as the five Finnish reserves combined that make up the western side of the Friendship Park.³⁴ With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the boreal taiga forests of Karelia came under immediate pressure. Finnish companies were allowed to start logging in Russian Karelia, including in the previously closed border zone. At the same time, however, state-employed conservationists in both Finland and Russia went public with the idea of preserving the border zone as a “green belt” (vihreä vyöhyke) in January 1994, thus introducing the term to a wider public for the first time.³⁵ Based on forest inventories assembled by environmental NGOs, activists like the now defunct Taiga Rescue Network (TRN) launched a publicity campaign

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with the goal of convincing the leading Finnish forest companies to stop logging the old-growth forests in Karelia and to stop purchasing timber from there. When the leading Finnish company Enso-Gutzeit agreed to a moratorium in 1996, other companies fell in line.³⁶ The moratorium bought time for the conservationists to develop the idea of a green belt at a moment when EU funding (Finland joined in 1995) was becoming available for this purpose. Thanks to these funds, the initial idea of a Green Belt of Karelia evolved into the Fennoscandian Green Belt that also included the 195 kilometres of border between Norway and Russia.³⁷ These developments were independent of the simultaneous launch of the Green Belt concept along the former Iron Curtain in Germany. In view of the special relationship between Finland and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Finnish conservationists actually reject the Iron Curtain label for their border.³⁸ The inter-German border had a very different character than the FinnishSoviet one. As a fresh border between two antagonistic states, it was militarized and continuously refined from the 1950s onward. Yet before any “respite” came to the border areas, the construction of the military infrastructure significantly degraded its environs. With the ground ripped up and corridors cut through thick forests, western observers perceived the border in the 1960s as a “scar” in the landscape.³⁹ The ecological footprint of the ever-evolving infrastructure differed by species and landscape type. Ground-breeding birds benefited from the lack even of foot traffic in the immediate border areas. The genetic exchange of large mammals, on the other hand, was hindered by the border’s fences and, during the 1960s, such mammals frequently died in the minefields.⁴⁰ That the border-induced landscape changes were eventually appreciated for their ecological value needs to be understood against the backdrop of growing environmental concerns during the 1970s and 1980s. Familiar landscapes and species once common in West German regions fell victim to industrialized agriculture and urban sprawl. The “discovery” of the biodiversity alongside the border was thus predicated on a growing sense of loss. The border, usually vilified in West German political discourse for its violence and illegitimacy, turned into an unlikely mirror of these developments as conservationists began to use the biotopes along the divide as control areas.⁴¹ The discovery of the unintended ecological consequences of the border regime started in the late 1960s. The ornithologist Rudolf Berndt made the first effort to protect a landscape because it had been altered by the border regime. In 1968, he proposed turning the western part of a wetland, the Drömling, into a nature reserve. The Drömling, located in northern Germany east of the city of Wolfsburg, had been converted into agricultural land from the late eighteenth century onward and required continuous hydrological management to remain arable. The introduction of the East German border regime divided the wetland

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and made this hydrological management impossible. By the late 1960s, western farmers gave up on their fields and the wetland was allowed to return to a less disturbed state.⁴² Berndt seized the opportunity to propose the protection of the wetland’s extensive reed beds, native pines, spruces, and grey alders, as well as its littoral vegetation alongside boreal flora. Although his proposal was ultimately unsuccessful, the example reveals that the border was starting to be recognized as an agent of landscape change that offered possibilities for nature conservation.⁴³ Up and down the inter-German border, western conservationists began to focus on border habitats over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Bund Naturschutz (BN) started to purchase select tracts of land on the demarcation line. In 1988, the wildlife documentary filmmaker Heinz Sielmann dedicated a whole episode of his popular TV show Expeditions into the Animal Kingdom (Expeditionen ins Tierreich) to “animals in the shadow of the border” to highlight the border’s ecological role.⁴⁴ But western conservationists were not the only ones who came to appreciate the border’s diverse ecological communities. On occasion, East German border guards engaged in birding and made some regionally significant discoveries, like the confirmation of the return of the eagle-owl (Bubo bubo) as a breeding bird in Eisenach county.⁴⁵ By the mid-1980s, nature in the border strip became an issue in West German politics as well. Uwe Barschel, the governor of the northernmost federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, launched a conservation programme on the south-eastern edge of his state that shared 132 kilometres of border with the GDR. The language in which this programme was announced was not unlike later conceptions of the Green Belt. The partition of Germany, it stated, resulted in “enforced tranquillity”, thereby creating “spaces of refuge and retreat for those plants and animals [that were] endangered in other regions”. With the same biota on both sides of the fence, Barschel hoped that the East German government would consider designating the corresponding eastern sections as protected areas. Barschel’s initiative was picked up on the federal level and became part of an official West German proposal to develop cross-border nature preserves as part of the strategy to improve inter-German relations. These relations, however, were more acrimonious than those between Finland and the Soviet Union; the East German Politbüro swiftly rejected the idea of shared nature conservation.⁴⁶ The unexpected opening of the inter-German border in winter 1989 exposed the previously restricted security areas to human activity. Convoys of cars rolled across improvised border crossings, farmers ploughed grassland, borderland politicians called for economic development, and hikers explored the formerly forbidden zone. “From the Baltic to the Frankenwald”, wrote an observer at

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the time, “the excursionists are chugging and traipsing through an almost intact flora and fauna”.⁴⁷ Given the threats to the biotopes along the border, West and East German conservationists initiated cross-border alliances that advanced the efforts begun in the 1980s. The initiative of the Bund Naturschutz (BN) and the German Friends of the Earth (Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland, BUND) became the most influential one. In December 1989, these two groups issued a resolution that called for the conservation of the border strip as a “green belt”.⁴⁸ The initiative benefited significantly from the East German National Park Programme that the first freely elected East German government created shortly before reunification in October 1990. Some of the 14 areas the programme protected, such as the Harz National Park, the Biosphere Reserve Middle Elbe, the Rhön Biosphere Reserve, and two nature parks at Schaalsee Lake and in the Drömling wetland, were right on the border.⁴⁹ Despite significant local opposition and challenges, the conversion of the border strip into a green belt moved ahead swiftly.⁵⁰ Today, the Green Belt is Germany’s most prominent nature conservation project and has garnered numerous accolades, from being named National Nature Heritage (2005) to being honoured with a postage stamp (2020) (see figure 2).

Figure 2: The German Green Belt was honoured with a postal stamp in March 2020. Photo: Klaus Leidorf; Design: Annette le Fort and André Heers.

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3 Late Twentieth-Century Shifts in Nature Conservation The beginnings of the Green Belt coincided with a slow-forming paradigm change in nature conservation – a shift from the preservation of culturally significant landscapes in nature reserves to the preservation of biodiversity in connected habitats and biotopes (see chapter 16 by van de Grift/van Meurs). The shift sought to address the causes of biodiversity loss, namely intense land use and the fragmentation of landscape that gave protected areas the character of inaccessible islands. “Our nature preserves”, lamented the German conservationist Horst Stern in 1990, “are hopelessly isolated, trapped between chemically contaminated landscapes of intensive use and therefore ineffectual for migratory species and their essential genetic exchange”.⁵¹ Since vast protected areas on the scale of American national parks were not an easy proposition in densely populated Europe, in the 1980s the Netherlands, Denmark, and Czechoslovakia started to experiment with the idea of ecological networks: buffer zones around protected core areas would soften transitions between natural and semi-natural biotopes, and these areas would then be connected with corridors, greenways, and “stepping stones” to provide landscape connectedness and biological connectivity between them.⁵² The concept gained further traction in view of climate change that renders habitats unsuitable and that forces many species to adapt by moving to different ranges.⁵³ Although the concept of ecological networks was not without its critics,⁵⁴ the idea caught on politically. A number of network initiatives and programmes emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. The Council of Europe used the Bern Convention of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (1979) to establish the Emerald Network in 1989 to safeguard biodiversity beyond national boundaries. In 1992, the European Union launched Natura 2000, a programme based on the Birds Directive (1979) and the Habitat Directive (1992). Since its inception, Natura 2000 has grown into the largest network of protected areas worldwide, covering some 18 per cent of EU territory.⁵⁵ However, national and regional ecological networks do not automatically jell into a European network. Additional players, like the European Centre for Nature Conservation and its Pan-European Ecological Network (PEEN), therefore seek to promote a certain coherence across the continent.⁵⁶ The fall of the Iron Curtain burst into these ongoing policy developments. In Germany, the GDR border regime had unwittingly produced a narrow, 1,393 kilometres long north-south corridor that connected different landscape types. Fully attuned to the network approach, the founders of the Green Belt wanted to turn it

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into the “ecological backbone of Central Europe”.⁵⁷ Observers in the West German Environmental Ministry instantly thought of the new project as the German contribution to the EU agenda: “[The] inter-German border strip with its adjacent areas is predestined to provide a major contribution to NATURA 2000.”⁵⁸ Similarly, once the project moved onto the European scale, stakeholders pitched the initiative as “backbone of a European habitat network” and a “valuable contribution to the Natura 2000 network”.⁵⁹ The European Green Belt was an obvious fit for both the new paradigm in nature conservation and the policies that sought to implement it. These developments again put borders front and centre and provided a significant push for transboundary cooperation in nature conservation.

4 Transboundary Conservation Due to its location, the European Green Belt inadvertently marked the seam between different national approaches to nature conservation and the site of efforts to achieve coherence in conservation practice.⁶⁰ It was both a tool of and a potent symbol for transboundary cooperation, although the impetus for cooperation across borders often developed independently of the European Green Belt initiative. In fact, as the examples of the Bavarian Forest and Šumava national parks on the Czech-German border and the Thayatal and Podyjí national parks on the Czech-Austrian border show, many instances of cooperation along the former Iron Curtain pre-date the Green Belt initiative and have deep national, regional, and local histories. Yet they have been subsumed under the Green Belt label. Their history challenges the notion of the European Green Belt as a European landscape, suggesting instead that its history might in fact be more of a history of regions. The parks also highlight both the achievements and the challenges of transboundary conservation. In the early 1990s, the number of transboundary conservation projects increased noticeably. In 1988, the inventory of transboundary parks listed 70 such sites, but by 2007 this number had grown to 227.⁶¹ As prominent organizations such as IUCN, EUROPARC, Peace Parks Federation, and UNESCO became involved, by the turn of the millennium transboundary cooperation began to look, in the words of geographer Juliet Fall, like “the current Big Thing in nature conservation”. However, as Fall notes, the personal and institutional complications of transboundary cooperation have been underestimated and poorly understood. Cooperation itself has too often been identified in abstract terms that offered little assistance in actually practicing cooperation.⁶² Within the Central European segment of the European Green Belt, two projects showcase the successes and the challenges of transboundary coopera-

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tion: the Bavarian Forest/Šumava national parks on the Bavarian-Czech border and the Thayatal/Podyjí national parks between Austria and the Czech Republic. They are the most prominent parts of the 800 kilometres long Czech section of the European Green Belt, which accounts for about 9.5 per cent of its total length. More than half of this section, or approximately 550 kilometres, consists of protected areas.⁶³ The two national parks on the Czech side were both established in 1991 as part of the conservation windfall after 1989. Their origins, however, reach farther back in time. The Podyjí and Thayatal national parks extend for 40 kilometres along the Thaya/Dyje River valley in the Czech region of South Moravia and the Austrian federal state of Lower Austria. Although the river’s ecology is affected by a dam several kilometres upstream of the national parks, the Thaya valley still represents one of the last unregulated river segments in Central Europe. The steep wooded slopes of the valley and the surrounding moorlands are home to rare plant and animal life.⁶⁴ After 1945, the largely German-speaking population of the South Moravian borderlands was expelled from Czechoslovakia, leading to a dramatic regional depopulation.⁶⁵ Moreover, the Thaya valley soon became part of the largely inaccessible border zone between Czechoslovakia and Austria.⁶⁶ In 1978, the Czech side was turned into a protected landscape area. Ten years later, the Czechoslovak government slated the Thaya valley to become a national park, a process that could have taken many years. The opening of the border, however, accelerated the creation of the Podyjí national park: it was founded in 1991. The Austrian side of the valley followed suit: Austria declared two nature reserves in the area in 1988 and 1991, and a national park connecting with its Czech counterpart in 2000.⁶⁷ Before state governments became involved, the Czech-Austrian cooperation began with informal contacts between Czech conservationists and Austrian activists in the 1980s following their joint opposition to the Czechoslovak government’s plan of building a dam in the area.⁶⁸ After the creation of the Austrian park, bilateral relations grew closer. Although the two parks at one point even contemplated a joint management of the area, their cooperation has not been unproblematic. This is partly because the parks have played different roles for tourism in each country. While the rather remote Austrian Thayatal has struggled to attract tourists, the Czech Podyjí has sometimes been overwhelmed by its function as a recreation area for the nearby city of Znojmo. Other recurring issues have been the uncertainty of continued government support on the Czech side, lack of timely information about projects the “other side” was planning, a conflict over the management of fishing in the Thaya valley, and differences in management policies that have plagued the relationship between the two parks for the last two decades.⁶⁹

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The commitment of these two parks to the European Green Belt project has been lax at best. The initiative barely plays a role in the parks’ day-to-day operations or their self-description.⁷⁰ Their history highlights several “lessons” in transboundary cooperation of protected areas: first, that cooperation often grows out of and relies on personal contacts rather than formal treaties; second, that despite official proclamations, actual cooperation on the ground often proves difficult when it comes to specific measures like park policies; and finally, that the pan-European initiative often seems irrelevant in protected areas that have been established with the idea of conserving a specific space in a specific region. The European Green Belt along the Czech-German border has always been overshadowed by the “original” Green Belt at the former inter-German border, at least in the German perception. The 358 kilometres of the Bavarian-Czech border mostly consist of protected areas on the Bavarian side, like the nature parks of the Upper Palatinate Forest (Oberpfälzer Wald) and the Bavarian Forest (Bayerischer Wald). On the Czech side, the borderlands feature the spacious protected areas of the Bohemian Forest (Český les) and Šumava. Similar to the Czech-Austrian case, this large swath of protected landscapes includes two adjacent national parks: the Bavarian Forest and Šumava. Both parks consist of forested mountain landscapes that offer refuge for endangered species such as the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) and the western capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus). The Bavarian Forest and Šumava national parks have a history that long predates the European Green Belt. Nature protection on the Czech side of the border goes back to the nineteenth-century private initiatives of aristocratic landowners who put parts of their land under an early form of conservation. The idea of creating a national park first appeared in the 1910s and kept resurfacing during the twentieth century.⁷¹ The post-war expulsion of the German population and the inclusion of large parts of the Šumava mountain range in the border zone had a similar effect as in the case of Podyjí: it forcibly depopulated large areas and thus opened them up for potential protection. This development led to the establishment of a protected landscape area in 1963 and of the Šumava national park in 1991.⁷² The Bavarian state’s first attempts at conservation also date back to the early twentieth century. The Bavarian Forest national park was designated as such in 1970, mainly as a measure to attract tourists to the remote region.⁷³ Although the two national parks together form one of the largest continuous forest areas in Central Europe, their cooperation was marred almost from the start. Official memoranda did not prevent U-turns in the management policy of the Šumava national park which, in 1995 and again between 2011 and 2014, chose not to adhere to cooperation agreements signed with the Bavarian side, problematizing any notions of linear development of cooperation from zero to

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united management.⁷⁴ The status of Šumava as a symbolic and highly prominent landscape where conflicts about conservation and environmental protection are habitually fought out within the Czech Republic made its management difficult and dependent on the politics of the day.⁷⁵ At times, the transboundary cooperation almost came to a halt due to differences in management policies, especially when dealing with bark beetle infestations. The Czech side resorted repeatedly to aggressive measures including chemical spraying and clear-cutting to control the spread of the insects. This met with disapproval of the Bavarian park management which, after much conflict with the forestry industry and local landowners, has been pursuing a non-interference policy since the early 1980s. Since 2014, however, cooperation has improved significantly, brought about by a new government in the Czech Republic and, in its wake, by changes to the park’s leadership. Both parks have taken part in numerous international conservation initiatives, including Natura 2000, the Ramsar Convention, and EUROPARC. The European Green Belt, however, seems as if it is merely an afterthought to the park management on both sides of the border. Although they are formally part of the initiative, their focus lies much more on transboundary cooperation than on their role as a link in the European Green Belt chain. Activities related to the initiative take place outside the national parks, for instance in the Austrian village of Leopoldschlag close to the Czech border or at the Centrum Bavaria Bohemia in the border community of Schönsee.⁷⁶ In Czech public discourse, the European Green Belt is largely understood as a scheme aimed at attracting tourists to remote border regions rather than as a conservation effort. The national parks are almost never perceived through the lens of the European Green Belt. “People don’t come to Šumava to see its Iron Curtain heritage”, remarks ecologist Michael Bartoš, “but to enjoy its nature”.⁷⁷

5 Conclusion The idea of a green belt in the space formerly occupied by the Iron Curtain positioned this conservation project as a temporal node between the continent’s past and its future. Whereas the national segments of the Green Belt were propelled forward by the collapse of state socialism, the European Green Belt aligned itself closely with the continent’s subsequent political and economic integration. Facilitating cooperation between old and new EU member states has been part of the European Green Belt’s rationale from the beginning. For good or ill, the initiative is closely tied to European Union politics, a connection that has thus far benefited its trajectory “from vision to reality”.⁷⁸ Whether the sharp uptick in anti-EU sentiments from 2015 onward will affect European programmes for

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nature conservation in general, and this pan-European effort in particular, remains to be seen. However, the recent conflict between Poland’s governing Law and Justice (PiS) party and the EU over logging in the old-growth Białowieża Forest – a Natura 2000 and UNESCO World Heritage Site – suggests that anti-European politics can play out in nature reserves, too.⁷⁹ Although the metaphor of a green belt implies a coherent corridor, geographer Jarmo Kortelainen points out that the European Green Belt consists of “scattered protected areas in the vicinity of the border”. Rather than a “material thing on the ground”, Kortelainen sees the strength of the project in its conceptual framework as a tool of transboundary environmental governance.⁸⁰ As the examples of protected areas along the Czech borders to Germany and Austria indicate, transboundary cooperation in nature conservation comes with regionally specific challenges, not least because individual parks and preserves along the former Cold War divide have their own histories and regional identities to which the Green Belt label can appear ancillary. Still, it is not hard to see that the evocative name of the European Green Belt and its marketing metaphors contribute significantly to the success of this pan-European initiative. As Brendon Larson reminds us, metaphors in environmental science – including “alien species”, “ecological integrity”, and “ecosystem services” – influence our perceptions, guide our inquiries, and catalyse anticipated outcomes.⁸¹ Harnessing the symbolic power of the erstwhile Iron Curtain, Green Belt stakeholders regularly refer to the European Green Belt as a “living memorial landscape” that allows people to commemorate the continent’s partition through the material traces that the militarized border left in the landscape.⁸² Scholars have thus far followed these cues and frequently discussed the conservation project as a Cold War relic and as a memorial landscape.⁸³ Here, too, differentiation by countries and regions would be advisable since the Iron Curtain and its meaning were not uniform throughout Europe. The border regime between Finland and the Soviet Union was not as confrontational as the one between the two German states, and the borders between Czechoslovakia and its western neighbours (or between Greece and Bulgaria) have deep histories that predate the Cold War. Perhaps the most promising approach to the understanding of the Green Belt as a site with both historical and ecological meaning has been taken by the geographers David Havlick and Sonja Pieck who have merged conservation ecology and memory studies into a new concept called “mnemonic ecosystems” to address the particular challenges of an “emotional geography” like the former Iron Curtain. They argue that conservation projects in memory-infused landscapes need to take those memories on board to foster local acceptance and, ultimately, to be successful. In fact, through the lens of the mnemonic ecosystem

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approach, the restoration and conservation efforts themselves turn into memory work.⁸⁴

Notes  Andrew Terry, Karin Ullrich, and Uwe Riecken, The Green Belt of Europe: From Vision to Reality (Gland and Cambridge: IUCN, 2006). The book documents the 2004 conference at FertőHanság National Park.  Hartmut Vogtmann cited in ibid., viii.  Götz Ellwanger and Karin Reiter, “Nature Conservation on Decommissioned Military Training Areas – German Approaches and Experiences”, Journal for Nature Conservation 49 (2019): 1– 8.  The path of the Green Belt on the Balkan peninsula does not fully correlate with the former Iron Curtain but still coincides with state borders.  Hanns Langer et al., eds., “Ecological Bricks for our Common House of Europe”, Politische Ökologie, Special Issue 2 (October 1990); Hans-Dieter Knapp, “Nationalparke in der DDR. Bausteine für ein gemeinsames europäisches Haus”, Nationalpark 67, no. 2 (1990): 4– 9.  Andrew Terry, “Financial Mechanisms for the Green Belt and Ecological Networks”, in The Green Belt of Europe, 181– 95.  Descriptions of the EGB in Liana Geidezis and Melanie Kreutz, “Green Belt Europe – Structure of the Initiative and Significance for a Pan European Ecological Network”, in Ilke Marshall et al., eds., The Green Belt as European Ecological Network: Strengths and Gaps. Proceedings of the 1st GreenNet Conference (Erfurt: University of Applied Sciences, 2012), 12– 21.  In 2009, over 3,200 protected areas were clustered within this 25-kilometre zone. See ibid., 18.  Andrew R. Graybill, “Boundless Nature. Borders and the Environment in North America and Beyond”, in Andrew C. Isenberg, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 668 – 687; Hillary Cunningham, “Permeabilities, Ecology and Geographical Boundaries”, in Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, eds., A Companion to Border Studies (London: Blackwell, 2012), 371– 386; Peter Coates, “Borderlands, No-Man’s Land, Nature’s Wonderland”, Environment and History 20, no. 4 (Nov. 2014): 500 – 516; Anna Grichting and Michele Zebich-Knos, eds., The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes (London: Anthem Press, 2017).  For an example of effective transboundary cooperation, see Arne Kajser and Jan-Henrik Meyer, “‘The World’s Worst Located Nuclear Power Plant’. Danish and Swedish Cross-Border Perspectives on the Barsebäck Nuclear Power Plant”, Journal for the History of Environment and Society 3 (2018): 71– 105; for poor transboundary environmental cooperation between East and West Germany, see Astrid M. Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 125 – 158.  Nancy Langston, “Thinking like a Microbe. Borders and Environmental History”, Canadian Historical Review 95, no. 4 (2014): 595.  Graybill, “Boundless Nature”, 672– 673; Stephen J. Pyne, “Burning Border”, Environmental History 12, no. 4 (2007): 959 – 965; on the history of territory as a space “empowered by borders”, see Charles S. Maier, Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2016).  Arie Trouwborst et al., “Border Fences and their Impacts on Large Carnivores, Large Herbivores and Biodiversity: An International Wildlife Law Perspective”, Reciel 25, no. 3 (2016): 291–

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306; John D. C. Linnell, “Border Controls: Refugee Fences Fragment Wildlife”, Nature 529, no. 156 (13 January 2016), DOI: 10.1038/529156a; John D. C. Linnell et al., “Border Security Fencing and Wildlife: The End of the Transboundary Paradigm in Eurasia?” PLoS Biology 14, no. 6 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002483.  These issues antedate the most recent efforts by the Trump administration to extend the border wall but received renewed attention because of them. Robert Peters et al., “Nature Divided, Scientists United: US-Mexico Border Wall Threatens Biodiversity and Binational Conservation”, BioScience 68, no. 10 (October 2018): 740 – 743.  Catriona Mortimer Sandilands, “‘The Geology Recognizes no Boundaries’: Shifting Borders in Waterton Lakes National Park”, in Sterling Evans, ed. The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests. Essays on the Regional History of the 49th Parallel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 309 – 333.  We borrow the term “governing authorities” from Paul Readman, Cynthia Radding, and Chad Bryant, “Borderlands in a Global Perspective”, in Readman, Radding, and Bryant, eds., Borderlands in World History, 1700 – 1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1– 23.  Peter Sahlins, Boundaries. The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 34– 49; Peter Sahlins, “Natural Frontiers Revisited. France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century”, American Historical Review 95, no. 5 (1990): 1423 – 1451; Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, Cartophilia. Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-German Borderland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Andrew S. Tomkins, “Binding the Nation, Bounding the State: Germany and its Borders”, German History 37, no. 1 (2019): 81– 83.  Willem van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 58.  The Rhine largely acquired its profile as a canal over the course of the nineteenth century for reasons of transportation, to generate power, and because it suited contemporary approaches to river engineering. Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815 – 2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: Norton, 2006), 77– 119; Christoph Bernhardt, Im Spiegel des Wassers: Eine transnationale Umweltgeschichte des Oberrheins, 1800 – 2000 (Köln: Böhlau, 2016).  Markus Leibenath, “Natura 2000 – Transboundary Challenges of EU Enlargement”, in Crossing Borders – Nature 2000 in Light of EU Enlargement. Proceedings of an international workshop held in Dresden, 7 May 2004, ed. by Markus Leibenath et al. (Leipzig: European Centre for Nature Conservation, 2005), 7.  Greg Bankoff, “Making Parks out of Making Wars. Transnational Nature Conservation and Environmental Diplomacy in the Twenty-First Century”, in Erika Marie Bsumek, David Kinkela, and Mark Atwood Lawrence, eds., Nation States and the Global Environment. New Approaches to International Environmental History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 82– 86.  Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923 – 1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 314, 329 – 330; Andrea Chandler, Institutions of Isolation. Border Controls in the Soviet Union and its Successor States, 1917 – 1993 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1998), 75, 82; Muriel Blaive, “Border Guarding as Social Practice. A Case Study of Czech Communist Governance and Hidden Transcripts”, in Janet Ward and Marc Silberman, eds., Walls, Borders, Boundaries. Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 98 – 99.

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 A 1955 CIA report delivers an exhaustive topographical description of the border. See CIA, Geographic Intelligence Report: The European Borders of the USSR (CIA: Office of Research and Reports, May 1955), esp. 56 – 58.  Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge. How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 97– 125; Gerhard Sälter, Grenzpolizisten. Konformität, Verweigerung und Repression in der Grenzpolizei und den Grenztruppen der DDR 1952 – 1965 (Berlin: Links, 2009), 24– 37; William E. Stacy, U.S. Army Border Operations in Germany, 1945 – 1983 (Heidelberg: Military History Office, 1984), 178 – 195, https://history.army.mil/documents/BorderOps/ content.htm (accessed 23 March 2021).  Comparison of Czech and GDR border fortifications in Markus A. Meinke, “Zweimal ‘Eiserner Vorhang’? Die tschechoslowakisch-bayerische Grenze in vergleichender Perspektive zur innerdeutschen Grenze”, in Meinke, ed., Die tschechisch-bayerische Grenze im Kalten Krieg in vergleichender Perspektive: Politische, ökonomische und soziokulturelle Dimensionen (Regensburg: Staatsarchiv, 2011), 55 – 68; Tomáš Jílek, “Spezifika der Bewachung der tschechisch-bayerischen Staatsgrenze zu Zeiten des ‘Eisernen Vorhangs’ 1948 – 1989”, ibid., 47– 53; Eagle Glassheim, “Unsettled Landscapes: Czech and German Conceptions of Social and Ecological Decline in the Postwar Czechoslovak Borderlands”, Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 2 (2015): 318 – 336, esp. 324.  Rossitza Guentcheva, “From Banishment to Ascribed Residence: Controlling Internal Movement in Socialist Bulgaria, 1944– 1989”, CAS Sofia Working Paper Series 2 (2009), https://www. ceeol.com/search/gray-literature-detail?id=513077; on the Greek “surveillance zone”, see Lois Labrianidis, “The impact of the Greek military surveillance zone: on the Greek side of the Bulgarian-Greek borderlands”, IBRU Boundary & Security Bulletin 7, no. 2 (1999): 82– 93.  Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain, 21– 27, 49 – 51; Andrea Komlosy, An den Rand gedrängt: Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte des Oberen Waldviertels (Wien: Verlag Kritische Sozialwissenschaft, 1988).  Raimo Heikkilä and Tapio Lindholm, “Achievements of Finnish-Russian Research Cooperation in Friendship Park Research Center”, Trudy Karel’skogo nauchogo tsentra RAN 2 (2009): 91– 102, 92.  Ari Aukusti Lehtinen, Postcolonialism, Multitude, and the Politics of Nature: On the Changing Geographies of the European North (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006), 71, 174, 178 – 179, 186. On the history of Finnish forestry, see ibid., 23 – 35; Heikki Roiko-Jokela, “Finnish Forestry in a Long-Term Perspective”, in K. Jan Oosthoek and Richard Hölzl, eds. Managing Northern Europe’s Forests. Histories form the Age of Improvement to the Age of Ecology (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 288 – 317; on the history of Russian forestry, see Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905 – 1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).  Timo J. Hokkanen et al., “The Emergence of New Approaches in East-West Relations. Combining Nature Protection and Local Development along the Green Belt of Fennoscandia”, in Maria Lähteenmäki, ed., The Flexible Frontier: Change and Continuity in Finnish-Russian Relations (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, 2007), 209 – 210; Roiko-Jokela, “Finnish Forestry”, 301.  Harto Lindén et al., “Large-Scale Forest Corridors to Connect the Taiga Fauna to Fennoscandia”, Wildlife Biology 6, no. 4 (2000): 179 – 188, quote on 183; Lehtinen, Postcolonialism, 103.  Andrei M. Gromtsev, Pjotr U. Litinskiy, Tapio Lindholm, and Juri P. Kurhinen, “The State and Problems of Indigenous Forest Preservation in Eastern Fennoscandia”, in Tor Kristian Spidsø and Ole Jakob Sørensen, eds., The Last Large Intact Forests in Northwest Russia. Protection and Sustainable Use (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2009), 55 – 65, 64.

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 Hokkanen et al., “New Approaches in East-West Relations”, 214– 215; Heikkilä and Lindholm, “Finnish-Russian Research Cooperation”, 92; Lehtinen, Postcolonialism, 172, emphasizes the parallel beginnings of conservation of both Karelian culture and nature.  Lehtinen, Postcolonialism, 172, 174; on the origins of zapovedniks see Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature. Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988).  Lehtinen, Postcolonialism, 75.  Ibid., 185 – 188; Eeva Berglund, “From Iron Curtain to Timber-Belt: Territory and Materiality at the Finnish-Russian Border”, Ethnologica Europaea 30 (2010): 23 – 34. Both Lehtinen and Berglund raise the issue that much of the forest activism was carried out by actors from outside the region.  Heikkilä and Lindholm, “Finnish-Russian Research Cooperation”, 93 – 96; Lehtinen, Postcolonialism, 75 – 78; on EU funding, see Hokkanen et al., “New Approaches in East-West Relations”, 22; on Norway, see Lassi Karivalo and Alexey Butorin, “The Fennoscandian Green Belt”, in The Green Belt of Europe, 43.  Karivalo and Butorin, “Fennoscandian Green Belt”, 38.  The Green Belt marketing frequently refers to a 30-year-long “respite” for nature along the inter-German border. The metaphor is misleading in that it projects a narrative of human non-interference with the land that is ahistorical. For a “respite” reference, see e. g. “Das Grüne Band: Vom Todesstreifen zur Lebenslinie”, https://www.bund.net/gruenes-band/ (accessed 23 March 2021). For perceptions of the land as being “scarred”, see for example David Shears, The Ugly Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1970), 9; Sepp Binder, “Die Narbe der Nation: Zwischen Touristen und Tretminen”, Die Zeit, 13 June 1969, 8.  Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain, 162– 168.  Ibid., 171– 74.  On the East German side, by contrast, agricultural use of the Drömling continued. See Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic in East Berlin, Memorandum 19 July 1988, Bundesarchiv Berlin (BArch) B295/21672.  Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain, 169 – 171.  Ibid., 171– 175.  Ibid., 175 – 176.  Ibid., 176 – 179.  “Reservat für Wendehälse”, Der Spiegel, 29 January 1990, 81.  Kai Frobel, Uwe Riecken, and Karin Ullrich. “Das ‘Grüne Band’ – das Naturschutzprojekt Deutsche Einheit”, Natur und Landschaft 84, no. 9/10 (2009): 400.  Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain, 190 – 197.  Ibid., 188 – 189, 195 – 196; Sonja Pieck, “What Stories Should a ‘National Nature Monument’ Tell? Lessons from the German Green Belt”, Cultural Geographies 26, no. 2 (2019): 195 – 211, esp. 204– 207.  Stern cited in Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain, 190 – 191. See also Carsten KolbeWeber, “Spatial Connectivity of Biotopes: A Foundation of Nature Conservation”, in Leibenath, ed., Crossing Borders, 43 – 48.  Sandra Rientjes and Mihály Végh, “Ecological Networks: From the Continental Level to the Regional, and Back”, ibid., 49 – 54; the distinction between landscape connectedness and biological connectivity in Otars Opermanis et al., “Connectedness and Connectivity of the Natura 2000 Network of Protected Areas Across Country Borders in the European Union”, Biological Conservation 153 (2012): 227– 238, here 228. On the scientific basis behind the network idea,

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see Marie Bonnin et al., The Pan-European Ecological Network: Taking Stock (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2007), 14– 16.  Ibid., 9, 15.  Luigi Boitani et al., “Ecological Networks as Conceptual Frameworks or Operational Tools in Conservation”, Conservation Biology 21, no. 6 (Dec. 2007): 1414– 1422, consider ecological networks as “at best working hypotheses that cannot be evaluated on a practical level”. See also Markus Leibenath, “Biotopverbund und räumliche Koordination”, Raumforschung und Raumordnung 68 (2010): 91– 101.  “Emerald Network of Areas of Special Conservation Interest”, Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, https://www.coe.int/en/web/bern-convention/emer ald-network (accessed 23 March 2021); Andrew L. R. Jackson, Conserving Europe’s Wildlife. Law and Policy of the Natura 2000 Network of Protected Areas (London: Routledge, 2018), 1– 7, 140 – 141; Douglas Evans, “Building the European Union’s Natura 2000 Network”, Nature Conservation 1 (2012): 11– 26.  Bonnin et al., Pan-European Ecological Network, 5; Rob H. G. Jongman et al., “The Pan European Ecological Network: PEEN”, Landscape Ecology 26 (2011): 311– 326; Jonathan Verschuuren, “Connectivity: Is Natura 2000 Only an Ecological Network on Paper?, in The Habitats Directive in its EU Evironmental Law Context. European Nature’s Best Hope?, ed. by Charles-Hubert Born et al. (London: Routledge, 2015), 285 – 302.  Frobel, Riecken, and Ullrich, “Naturschutzprojekt Deutsche Einheit”, 400.  Referat N[aturschutz] 1, Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherheit (BMU), Vermerk (3. Entwurf), Zusammenarbeit im Bereich des innerdeutschen Grenzstreifens, 5 February 1990, BArch B295/20498; idem, Vermerk GUA-Sitzung am 20. 3.1990, 15 March 1990, ibid., Nr. 20492. This is not to suggest that Germany was a pioneer in implementing Natura 2000. Germany had to be sued twice (in 2001 and again in 2003) for not proposing sufficient sites for the programme. See Axel Ssymank, “Cross-border implementation and coherence of Natura 2000 in Germany”, in Leibenath, ed., Crossing Borders, 25 – 39, here 27– 28; Jackson, Conserving Europe’s Wildlife, 6.  Hartmut Vogtmann, “Preface”, in Barbara Engels et al., eds., Perspectives of the Green Belt: Chances for an Ecological Network from the Barents Sea to the Adriatic (Bonn: BfN-Skripten 102, 2004), 5.  The Habitat Directive calls for cross-border coherence of Natura 2000 sites. The creation of the Natura 2000 network has, however, by no means been a “coherent” process, since the Habitat Directive remains vague on some core concepts and definitions. For a useful documentation of the myriad challenges, see Leibenath, ed., Crossing Borders.  Juliet Fall, Drawing the Line: Nature, Hybridity and Politics in Transboundary Spaces (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 2; “Global Inventory”, Global Transboundary Conservation Network, https://www.tbpa.net/page.php?ndx=21 (accessed 23 March 2021).  Fall, Drawing the Line, 3; Juliet Fall, “Beyond Handshakes: Rethinking Cooperation in Transboundary Protected Areas as a Process of Individual and Collective Identity Construction”, Journal of Alpine Research 2 (2009): 73; Maja Vasilijević and Tomasz Pezold, Crossing Borders for Nature: European Examples of Transboundary Conservation (Gland: IUCN, 2011), 3 – 5.  Michael Bartoš et al., “Green Belt – nejdelší systém biotopů v Evropě” [Green Belt – the longest biotope system in Europe], Životné prostredie 40, no. 5 (2006): 240. For an English version of the article, see http://www.iale.cz/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/00144.pdf (accessed 23 March 2021).

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 “Příroda a péče o území” [Nature and area care], Správa Národního parku Podyjí, https:// www.nppodyji.cz/pece-o-uzemi (accessed 23 March 2021).  Glassheim, “Unsettled Landscapes”, 318 – 336.  Kateřina Vnoučková, “The Iron Curtain Could Stop People, But Not the Environment”, Der Donauraum 59, no. 1– 2 (2019): 48.  Ibid., 54; Martin Škorpík, “Národní park Podyjí okem pamětníka” [Podyjí National Park through the eye of a witness], Ochrana přírody 5 (2016), last modified 20 October 2016, https://www.casopis.ochranaprirody.cz/kuler-zpravy-aktuality-zajimavosti/narodni-park-podyjiokem-pametnika/.  Vnoučková, “Iron Curtain”, 52.  Johannes Matt, “Grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit zwischen Nationalparken: Eine Faktorenanalyse anhand der Nationalparke Bayerischer Wald – Šumava, Thayatal – Podyjí und Sächsische Schweiz – České Švýcarsko”, (Master’s thesis, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 2014), 36 – 49.  In the case of the Austrian park, the EGB is mentioned on its website among other cooperating initiatives, including the IUCN and Natura 2000, but it seems to play next to no role in the park’s day-to-day functioning or in its self-image. There is no mention of the EGB on the website of the Czech park, except for an article about a cycling trail that traces the route of the Iron Curtain. See “Kooperationen”, Nationalpark Thayatal, https://www.np-thayatal.at/de/pages/koo perationen-41.aspx (accessed 23 March 2021); “Projeďte se kolem železné opony, první kilometry celoevropské trasy jsou vyznačeny v Podyjí” [Ride along the Iron Curtain, the first kilometres of the pan-European route are marked in Podyjí], Správa Národního parku Podyjí, last modified 9 April 2013, https://www.nppodyji.cz/projedte-se-kolem-zelezne-opony-prvni-kilometry-ce loevropske?highlightWords=zelen%C3 %BD+p%C3 %A1s.  Jana Piňosová, Inspiration Natur. Naturschutz in den böhmischen Ländern bis 1933 (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2017), 187, 204.  Miloš Anděra, Šumava. Příroda – historie – život [Šumava. Nature – history – life] (Praha: Miloš Uhlíř – Baset, 2003), 342; Zdenka Křenová and Hans Kiener, “Europe’s Wild Heart – Still Beating? Experiences from a New Transboundary Wilderness Area in the Middle of the Old Continent”, European Journal of Environmental Science 2, no. 2 (2012): 115 – 124.  Bernhard Gißibl, “A Bavarian Serengeti: Space, Race and Time in the Entangled History of Nature Conservation in East Africa and Germany”, in Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, ed. Bernhard Gißibl, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 102– 122; Ute Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft und Protest. Eine Geschichte der Naturschutz- und Umweltbewegung in Bayern, 1945 – 1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 235 – 256; Sandra Chaney, Nature of the Miracle Years: Conservation in West Germany, 1945 – 1975 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 213 – 242.  Fall, Drawing the Line, 8; Pavel Bečka, “Ein Lichtstreif am Horizont des Šumava! Bekommt die Natur dort wieder ein Lebensrecht?”, Nationalpark 165, no. 3 (2014): 27– 29; “Šumava, quo vadis?”, Nationalpark 85, no. 4 (1994): 32.  Saska Petrova, Communities in Transition: Protected Nature and Local People in Eastern and Central Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 132– 133.  “Fotowettbewerb Grünes Band”, Bavaria Bohemia Online, https://www.bbkult.net/projekte/ kultur-ohne-grenzen/fotowettbewerb-gruenes-band/; “Natura 2000 Infozentrum Grünes Band Europa Leopoldschlag”, Green Belt Center, http://www.greenbeltcenter.eu/checkpoints-greenbelt-erkunden/natura-2000-informationszentrum-gruenes-band-europa-leopoldschlag/ (both accessed 23 March 2021).

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 “Zelený pás – dědictví železné opony” [Green Belt – the legacy of the Iron Curtain], Ekolist.cz, 25 January 2008, https://ekolist.cz/cz/zpravodajstvi/zpravy/zeleny-pas-dedictvi-zelezneopony.  The volume documenting the conference constituting the European Green Belt bears this name. See note 1.  Eunice Blavascunas, Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles. The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 153 – 186; see also Case C-441/17: EU Commission vs. Poland (Białowieża Forest), 17 April 2018. To clarify, the Białowieża Forest is not part of the European Green Belt but is located on Poland’s border with Belarus.  Jarmo Kortelainen, “The European Green Belt: Generating Environmental Governance – Reshaping Border Areas”, Quaestiones Geographicae 29, no. 4 (2010): 27– 40, quotes from 32– 33, 38.  Brendon Larson, Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability. Redefining our Relationship with Nature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).  The term is part of the mission statement of the EGB, https://www.europeangreenbelt.org/ (accessed 23 March 2021).  Maren Ullrich, Geteilte Ansichten: Erinnerungslandschaft deutsch-deutsche Grenze (Berlin: Aufbau, 2006), 201– 208; Coates, “Borderlands”, 504– 506; David Havlick, “The Iron Curtain Trail’s Landscapes of Memory, Meaning, and Recovery”, Focus on Geography 57, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 126 – 133; David Havlick, Bombs Away: Militarization, Conservation, and Ecological Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Václav Šmidrkal, “‘Železná opona’ jako české místo paměti” [The ‘Iron Curtain’ as a Czech place of memory], Střed/Centre 4, no. 1 (2012): 56 – 79.  David G. Havlick and Sonja K. Pieck, “From Iron Curtain to Green Belt: Considering Central Europe as a Mnemonic Ecosystem”, Society & Natural Resources 32, no. 11 (2019): 1312– 1329. The authors borrowed the term “emotional geography” from Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, eds. Emotional Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). See also Sonja K. Pieck, “Conserving Novel Ecosystems and Layered Landscapes along the inter-German Border”, Landscape Research 45, no. 3 (2020): 346 – 358.

Selected Bibliography Bankoff, Greg. “Making Parks out of Making Wars. Transnational Nature Conservation and Environmental Diplomacy in the Twenty-First Century”. In Nation States and the Global Environment. New Approaches to International Environmental History edited by Erika Marie Bsumek, David Kinkela, and Mark Atwood Lawrence, 76 – 96. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cellarius, Barbara A. In the Land of Orpheus. Rural Livelihoods and Nature Conservation in Postsocialist Bulgaria. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Christopoulou, Ioli, and Vivi Roumeliotou. “Uniting People through Nature in Southeast Europe: The Role (and Limits) of Nongovernmental Organizations in the Transboundary Prespa Park”. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 6, no. 3 (September 2006): 335 – 354.

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Coates, Peter. “Borderlands, No-Man’s Land, Nature’s Wonderland”. Environment and History 20, no. 4 (Nov. 2014): 500 – 516. Coates, Peter, Tim Cole, M. Dudley, and Chris Pearson. “Defending Nation, Defending Nature? Militarized Landscapes and Military Environmentalism in Britain, France and the United States”, Environmental History 16, no. 3 (2011): 456 – 491. Curry, Andrew. “The Green Curtain”. Atlas Obscura, 19 September 2019. https://www.atlas obscura.com/articles/iron-curtain-green-belt-park. Eckert, Astrid M. West Germany and the Iron Curtain. Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Eckert, Astrid M. “Transboundary Natures. From the Iron Curtain to the Green Belt.” In Military Landscapes, edited by Anatole Tchikine and John Davis, 123 – 145. Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks, 2021. Fall, Juliet. Drawing the Line: Nature, Hybridity and Politics in Transboundary Spaces. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Frobel, Kai, Uwe Friedel, and Georg Baumert. Traces of the Past Along the German Green Belt. Nuremberg: BUND, 2017. Harlov-Csorta´n, Melinda. “From the Borderland of the Iron Curtain to European and World Cultural Heritage”, Folklore. Electronic Journal of Folklore 70 (2017): 193 – 224. https:// doi.org/10.7592/FEJF2017.70.harlov_csortan. Havlick, David G. Bombs Away. Militarization, Conservation, and Ecological Restoration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Havlick, David G., and Marion Hourdequin, eds. Restoring Layered Landscapes: History, Ecology, and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Havlick, David G., and Sonja K. Pieck. “From Iron Curtain to Green Belt: Considering Central Europe as a Mnemonic Ecosystem”. Society & Natural Resources 32, no. 11 (2019): 1312 – 1329. Kowarik, Ingo. “The ‘Green Belt Berlin’: Establishing a Greenway Where the Berlin Wall once Stood by Integrating Ecological, Social and Cultural Approaches”. Landscape and Urban Planning 184 (2019): 12 – 22. Křenová, Zdenka, and Hans Kiener. “Europe’s Wild Heart – Still Beating? Experiences from a New Transboundary Wilderness Area in the Middle of the Old Continent”. European Journal of Environmental Science 2, no. 2 (2012): 115 – 124. Lethinen, Ari Aukusti. Postcolonialism, Multitude, and the Politics of Nature. On the Changing Geographies of the European North. Lanham: University Press of America, 2006. Pearson, Chris. “Researching Militarized Landscapes. A Literature Review on War and the Militarization of the Environment”. Landscape Research 37, no. 1 (2012): 115 – 133. Pieck, Sonja. “What Stories Should a ‘National Nature Monument’ Tell? Lessons from the German Green Belt”. cultural geographies 26, no. 2 (2019): 195 – 211. Terry, Andrew, Karin Ullrich, and Uwe Riecken. The Green Belt of Europe: From Vision to Reality. Gland and Cambridge: IUCN, 2006. Ullrich, Maren. Geteilte Ansichten. Erinnerungslandschaft deutsch-deutsche Grenze. Berlin: Aufbau, 2006. Vasilijević, Maja, and Tomasz Pezold. Crossing Borders for Nature: European Examples of Transboundary Conservation. Gland: IUCN, 2011. Vnoučková, Kateřina. “The Iron Curtain Could Stop People, But Not the Environment”. Der Donauraum 59, no. 1 – 2 (2019): 47 – 58.

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Zmelik, Katharina, Stefan Schindler, and Thomas Wrbka. “The European Green Belt: International Collaboration in Biodiversity Research and Nature Conservation along the former Iron Curtain”. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 24, no. 3 (2011): 273 – 294.

II Preserving Livelihoods

Richard Hölzl and K. Jan Oosthoek

7 Transforming Woodlands: European Forest Protection in a Global Context

Abstract This chapter discusses protection of forests as material resources, ecosystems, and sites of cultural appreciation. It inquires into the ideas, policies, actors, and effects of protecting forests that have emerged during the last 300 years. The “long twentieth century” of nature protection in Europe is thus embedded within a long-term global perspective. How did wood and timber conservation transform into more holistic, ecological modes of protection? When did heritage and recreational objectives begin to shape forest protection? How were European protection policies connected to more global changes? After a brief outline of the material development of forests in Europe from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, this chapter summarizes the major policy trajectories and cultural outlooks on forest protection in European countries up to the 1960s. Another section examines major shifts in policy, knowledge, and cultural appreciation during the age of ecology, including joint European and global efforts in forest protection. Key words forest history; sustainability; European forests; forest conservation; forest policy Has modern forestry come full circle to its origins in the eighteenth century? This puzzling question historians ask themselves when reading the latest strategy paper of the European Forest Institute, an international think tank supported by a wide range of agencies and research organizations to promote common European forest policies. The paper highlights three main goals: bioeconomy, resilience, and governance.¹ Forest ecosystem services, their role within the world’s natural and cultural heritage, or their importance for biological diversity are only mentioned in passing under the heading of resilience. The paper then quickly returns to the task of understanding how forests, as a vital bioeconomic resource, are resilient in the face of adverse environmental factors. Modern European forestry – be it the reforms of Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619 – 1683) in France,² the contemporary silvicultural discourses of John Evelyn (1620 – 1706) in England,³ and Hanns Carl von Carlowitz’s (1645 – 1714) idea of sustainable yield in Germany⁴ at the beginning of the eighteenth century – started out as a quest for the conservation of timber and fuelwood, the key resources of the pre–fossil fuel age. The modes of conservation envisioned more than 300 years ago were central state https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-008

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governance and knowledge production by scientific experts, undeniably not only a very influential but also a conflicted and long-term endeavour. It seems that the trajectory and force of climate change and the discourse engendered by it have shifted the agenda of global environmental policies. Climate change has also brought back the materiality as well as the wood and timber bias into our view of forests. Policy-makers and scientists alike underpin their argument with a ready-made historical matrix: For the last 200 years we have relied on a fossil-based economy, which has delivered unprecedented economic and population growth, technological development and social prosperity. However, this has also resulted in great environmental and social challenges which threaten the wellbeing of existing and future generations. A sustainable future requires a systemic change in our economy, to ensure it prospers within the renewable boundaries of our planet. We need to move from a linear fossil-based economy towards a circular bio-based society.⁵

Is the cultural appreciation of forests, together with the interpretation of being habitats for a wide range of animal and plant species or recreational space for humans, mere outpourings of the fading fossil fuel age, epithets to the shortlived post-material era, or the baroque to a new classical period? To historians of human-nature relations, the story is more complicated, and it is the objective of this chapter to expand the perspectives on the protection of forests and – also – on what forests, as an ecosystem, helped to protect for societies throughout European history. We ask which ideas, policies, actors, and effects of protecting forests have emerged during the last 300 years, thus situating the “long twentieth century” in a long-term and global perspective. How have concepts of wood and timber conservation transformed into more holistic, ecological modes of protection? When and how did heritage and recreational purposes begin to shape forest protection? How were European protection policies connected to larger global changes? There is no singular history of European forests. However, the histories of European forest protection have been interconnected at least since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they became the object of scholarly exchange and of intensified state-making. The plurality of forest histories is due to a diversity of natural conditions and uneven economic demand, as well as a variety of approaches and imaginaries with regard to forests as part of local, national, or regional cultures and identity-making.⁶ Moreover, in contrast to other policy areas, such as agriculture (e. g., the Common Agricultural Policy, 1962) and some areas of environmental protection (e. g., Natura 2000), the European Union (EU) has no coherent policy and legal framework for forests and their protection.⁷ The existing EU Forestry Strategy is non-binding; neither are

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the aims of the bodies extending beyond the EU, such as Forest Europe (with 46 signatory states and the EU), the European Forest Institute (extending to Norway, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Serbia, and Turkey), or the International Union of Forest Research Institutions (700 member organizations globally). The protection of forests – even though regarded as a worldwide obligation, for example as part of climate change abatement and biodiversity strategies – remains firmly within national legislative frameworks. One answer to why this is the case may be found in the diversity of national forest traditions and a variety of conceptions in European societies of how forests figure in the overall layout of the cultural and economic landscapes of the respective countries. Yet, forest ecosystems are not simply confined to political and cultural boundaries. Moreover, the trend towards global environmental policy-making may induce a more concerted European effort to forest protection. The chapter starts with a brief outline of the material development of forests in Europe from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. This is followed by a summary of major policy trajectories and of cultural outlooks on the protection of forests in European countries and their entanglement with other global regions up to the 1960s. The chapter then examines major shifts in policy, knowledge, and cultural appreciation since the beginning of the Age of Ecology and summarizes the common European and global efforts towards the protection of forests.

1 European Forest Transition(s): Returning Forest Cover, Ecological and Social Transformations From an early stage in the history of forestry, narratives of decline and destruction have dominated the debates on the future of forests. Climate change has renewed this concern. Until recently, the perspective on the development of forest cover in many areas of Europe during the last 250 years was a different one, that of a “forest transition”.⁸ The term sums up a process of several stages whereby forest cover first declines and reaches a minimum before increasing again. In many places in Europe today, the forest area is larger and denser than it was at any point during the past 250 years. Examinations based on fairly recent data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (from 2000 to 2012) show that such an increase has been most significant in Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Estonia, and Portugal (> 2 % gross forest gain in relation to the national area) – followed by Spain, Ireland, Belgium, and East-Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Slovakia, Belarus, and the Czech Republic), with an increase of

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1– 2 % and a slower increase of 0.5 – 1 % in Germany, Denmark, Austria, Russia, Ukraine, and France. Britain, Norway, Italy, the Netherlands, and Romania did not see any significant increase.⁹ While most of the recent gains in European countries are based on natural regeneration, often caused by depopulation, for example in the Alpine region (see chapter 8 by Aschwanden et al.), earlier restoration efforts were the result of plantations of industrial forests (often with fast-growing conifers in monocultures). Current exceptions are Ukraine, where agro-forestry is the main mode of reforestation; France, with almost an even share of agro-forestry and natural regeneration; Denmark, with marked plantation efforts; and Finland, Belarus, and Poland, with a mix of natural and artificial regeneration.¹⁰ Historically, the increasing demand for timber in combination with new industrial technologies and production facilities drove the rise of industrial forests. This characterized Germany,¹¹ Poland,¹² the Alpine countries,¹³ and the Northern European countries from the late nineteenth century onwards, complemented by a moving timber frontier towards the northernmost parts of the continent and further encroachment into Sámi lands.¹⁴ In Russia, clear-cutting for industrial purposes reached the far north around 1900, while clearing for agriculture transformed the south, both having dire ecological consequences as the geographical locations prevented speedy afforestation.¹⁵ Over-exploitation and the quests for resource autarchy during both world wars increased the plantation efforts in many European countries: in Germany (East and West), where actual and imagined losses through reparations to Allied countries triggered spruce plantations, as well as in Norway, Denmark, and Poland, where German occupational administrations had plundered forests during the Second World War.¹⁶ Wartime experience finally brought larger-scale afforestation to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands after the first and second world wars. Since the Middle Ages, both countries had primarily relied on timber imports safeguarded by market and maritime power, initially from Northern and Central Europe and later also from colonies and dominions.¹⁷ A particular focus of the concept of forest transition is the turning point where population growth and forest decline are decoupled, that is to say when forest cover increases again despite ongoing population growth. From an environmental history point of view, however, forest transition has been complemented by an energy transition from a solar-based to a fossil fuel–based regime. This was connected to the use of coal during nineteenth-century industrialization¹⁸ and greatly accelerated with the introduction of oil and gas in the twentieth century (the “1950s syndrome”¹⁹), which substituted forest products at least as energy resources. This does not imply that wood and timber have not continued to be utilized as a source for fuel and building material.²⁰

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Interpreting forest transitions must consider the increasingly transregional distribution of forest resources first within Europe and then on a worldwide scale. Sustainable or even increasing forest cover in European countries has to be interpreted within the context of large-scale imports of forest resources or forest-based products during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from Northern and Eastern Europe and from the tropics.²¹ Germany, one of the European countries with the strongest claim to long-term forest protection and sustainability with regard to forestry, became a net wood and timber–importing country already in the 1870s²² and has remained so during most periods in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Imperialism, European warfare, and uneven trade relations were central to implementing resource and commodity chains that allow for the sustainable management of European forests and over-exploitation in other parts of the globe. Another important factor is the ecological transformation of forests, that is to say taking into account their role as a habitat for animal species, the variety of plant species to be found in them, and not least the density of forest cover and the availability of ecotones (providing for biodiversity).²³ In very general terms, forestry transition in Europe brought with it the turn to (or return of) a dense and often coniferous forest landscape with a significantly lower diversity of animal and plant species (which often depend on sunlight for their metabolism). It is important to understand that this forest transition was neither a simple linear process from depletion to conservation nor one from an environmentally sound multipurpose forest to industrial forest plantations with a low degree of biodiversity. Rather, there was a complex and multifaceted transformation of the relations of humans and the rest of nature, including the separation of arable land and woodland, that is to say agriculture from silviculture, and a much greater intensity of land use accompanied by a variety of intended as well as unintended consequences. These included not only much higher productivity of agriculture, in the end more and denser forests, but also the spreading of pests and diseases in monocultures, thus increasing the need for chemical intervention and the accelerating decline of biodiversity.²⁴ In addition, not only the increased amount of forests that were planted after 1945 due to war-related over-exploitation but also new industrialized modes of production (both in silviculture and in the forest-related industrial sectors, namely pulp and plywood) seem to have be particularly vulnerable to climate change. Beyond these general trends, the field of historical ecology gives more specific data about the change of local forest ecosystems within the past 200 years. Historical ecologists focus on historical changes within a given local ecosystem, thus providing detailed information and historical reconstructions, as well as a

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differentiated picture of ecological effects of forest transitions and conservation policies. Three exemplary studies on different European forest ecosystems may illustrate this diversity. The historical development of the extensive oak woodlands in southern Spain – which resisted the tendency towards deforestation in the Mediterranean long before the modern age – is an illustrative example. Several historical factors aided their preservation: specific natural conditions; the situation at the medieval frontier between Muslim and Christian rulers (preventing agricultural development); the invention of cork stoppers for wine bottles (around 1750), which made oak woodlands valuable enough to be preserved; and a governmental forest service that introduced management plans from the 1890s. While production forestry kept forest cover stable, or even slightly increased it, it also resulted in changes to the ecology of the area, for example by eliminating ancient oak (160 to 200 years old), which were deemed unproductive, and also entire oak varieties such as the Quercus canariensis. The latter was used for acorn feeding of pigs but became less economically profitable after the 1950s. Following the establishment of Los Alcornocales Natural Park in 1989, emphasis has been put on ecological development and ecotourism.²⁵ Another case study located in the Swiss lowlands indicates a different set of changes to forest ecology. Here forests with a high share of coppices and coppices with standards (single large trees) were gradually transformed into high forests from the 1820s onwards, with a significant increase of forest area from the 1830s to 1870s and a very marked increase of forest density (in particular, tree size) from 1925 to 1985. From the 1820s to the 1860s, pine was first planted for reforestation; later in the nineteenth century, spruce became the species of choice. During the twentieth century, there was a surge of deciduous trees (beech) owing to a new focus on “natural forestry”. Towards the end of the twentieth century, natural regeneration substituted planting as a mode of regeneration, while other forest uses such as wood pasture, litter collecting, and small farming were discontinued since around 1900. As a result, it is argued that forests became denser and darker, with adverse consequences for plant societies, insects, or cavity-nesting birds. The discontinuation of minor agro-pastoral uses led to an increase in soil quality at the cost of biodiversity regarding plants specialized for poor soils.²⁶ Karelia, to add an example concerning boreal forests, provides an interesting case study for the impact of political boundaries on regional ecologies. While the Finnish part developed into an intensively managed (continuously replanted) industrial forest exploited for paper production, the Russian part was integrated into the northward moving timber frontier (where logged areas were left to natural succession). Due to the large distances to production centres, defence con-

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siderations, and depopulation of former Finnish territory after 1945, considerable tracts of Karelia have remained in extensive use and allowed for a diverse plant and animal life to develop. In 1983, a first protection site was opened by the Soviet Republic of Karelia. Joint protests by Russian and Finnish ecologists and environmentalist groups brought the initial push of logging companies after 1990 to a halt in 1996, and parts of the Karelian forest have become a cross-border protection site (see chapter 6 by Eckert and Šimková).²⁷ Summing up the material development of forests, we see a process of forest transition that encompasses a significant decline of forest cover in connection with population growth up until the nineteenth century and a gradual increase of forest cover and density since the second half of the nineteenth century. This forest transition is connected to an energy transition to fossil fuels, a globalization of forest resource use with Europe as an industrial production and consumption centre, and a transformation of forest ecosystems that has not always worked in favour of biodiversity functions of forests.

2 Conservation and Sustainable Yield: Forestry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Conservation efforts have been part of local and regional politics in Europe for a long time. At least since the Middle Ages, cities, monasteries, and princes have drafted legislation to allow the regeneration of local forests and to keep endeavours such as salt or ore mines and population centres going. Roughly from the fifteenth century – as part of state-building processes – the European princes increasingly passed forest legislation.²⁸ Most of it referred to wood and timber scarcity as a general threat to the well-being of the respective territory’s subjects – forests being an economic necessity and often paramount to security interests. The legislation before the nineteenth century was often case specific, contradictory, and repetitive, but it contained a variety of legal prohibitions and a body of knowledge about wise use of natural resources. The French Ordonnance des eaux et forêts (1669) devised by Colbert was perhaps the first modern forest law in the sense that it was rather effectively underpinned by assessment and implementation measures. It intended to secure the ready availability of shipbuilding timber for France’s maritime expansion in competition to the British and Dutch empires. At the same time, it promised to make the crown’s forest profitable by improved management and to keep them so by introducing a regular system of forest reserves for regeneration.²⁹

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The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw fundamental changes to the concepts and policies regarding forest exploitation and conservation. Three trends worked in combination. The first was the rising demand for resources for a growing population, a score of large-scale and increasingly global wars, and imperial expansion. The second was state legislation that was actually meant to be implemented throughout whole territories by a new class of loyal, well-paid, and educated civil servants – for example, comprehensive forest laws were enacted in Denmark (1805), France (1827), Lombardy-Venetia (1839), Finland (1851, by the Russian tsar), Bavaria and the Habsburg hereditary lands (each in 1852), Norway (1863), and Russia (1888).³⁰ The third was the establishment of best-practice rules of forestry that were based on scholarship (according to supposed empiricism, truth, and practical viability) and were spreading from the new outposts of progress (academies, scholarly societies, and universities).³¹ The combination of the fear of resource scarcity, new state power, and scientific acclaim had considerable appeal, and the idea of a new science-based, state-centred forestry was adopted and adapted to varying degrees throughout continental Europe, from Oslo to Venice, from Paris to Prague, and from Madrid to St Petersburg. The goals of this forestry may be summed up as a quest for material sustainability with a strong focus on the conservation of wood and timber resources, while pushing aside many so-called minor uses that forests provided for local populations (forest pasture and litter collection, the gathering of foodstuff, or specific materials for crafts in small quantities). A growing number of experts and administrators intended to protect forests against perceived threats (unauthorized users, corrupt or inept foresters, animals, pests, or fires), to set in motion wood-saving innovations, and to make concerted efforts at regeneration by planting seeds and saplings.³² Modern forestry reached a European scale in the 1760s, when forest conservation became part of the new scholarly endeavour of putting empirical methods to work for improving the economy. Examining forest soils; evaluating the merits and measuring the growth rates of tree species; assessing adverse effects of agropastoral uses, weather, insects or pests, professional education of forest personnel, and effective commodification of timber; and fixing property borders and mapping forests are only a few of the tasks professional foresters began to take on. This was a transterritorial phenomenon. The European “republic of letters” and its network of correspondence, academic journals, textbook translations, itinerant scholarship, and student university hopping helped in disseminating the narratives and practices of modern forestry and in fostering discussions on the value of forests for state-making and the need for conservation.³³ Despite the tendency to adopt approaches concerning forestry from the centres of knowledge production in France and German-speaking countries, debates

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soon arose about the need to adapt the new scientific forestry to local needs and natural environments. By the end of the eighteenth century, “sustainable yield” had emerged as a key concept, the exact definitions of which varied between securing the permanent material production of timber and fuel, preserving a necessary area covered by regular high forest against conversion into arable land, and securing the long‐term fiscal stability of the respective forest departments. Ongoing debates throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concerned modes of reproduction, from a costly artificial plantation system to various forms of natural reproduction. Renowned German academies and experts advocated artificial reproduction of mostly coniferous monocultures and very long rotation cycles (of 200 years and more), resulting in high forests, which were to be harvested according to various clear-cutting systems. Planning horizons of two centuries and more as well as targeted management plans for individual forest patches detailing reforestation, cleaning, and sustainable timber and fuel harvesting schemes were first envisioned by the end of the eighteenth century and realized gradually during the nineteenth century. This conservation regime, known as German scientific forestry, brought thousands of forestry students from all over Europe to German academies and provided career opportunities for German experts in other countries, including the United States,³⁴ or in the British and Dutch colonies.³⁵ The costly and intensive managerial approach was not adopted widely throughout Europe. Even within Germany, natural succession and stem-bystem harvesting remained important in many regions, all the more so in the Northern timber-rich countries with low population density, in the Alps, in Southern countries, and in overseas territories with differing climate and ecologies. In late imperial Russia, the influential forest scholar Georgij Morozov (1866 – 1920) began to criticize the German model at the end of the nineteenth century and demanded a locally adapted Russian style of scientific forestry, which was quite similar to foresters in the British Raj at same time.³⁶ In Sweden, there were two kinds of state forestry in the nineteenth century: while southern Sweden followed the trend of intensive maintenance (plantations, detailed management, and sustainable yield considerations), forestry in northern Sweden effectively meant to push the timber frontier northwards by creating new roads, floatways, and sawmill operations. After 1900, however, aims and challenges began to converge when northern Sweden saw the depletion of its timber resources and the calls for restoration grew stronger.³⁷ One important factor for the non-proliferation of the nineteenth-century model of scientific forestry was the social conflicts that its implementation entailed, be it in Europe or in overseas colonies.³⁸ Some conflicts reached far

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into the twentieth century. In Spain for instance, scientific forestry was implemented following the foundation of the Escuela Especial de Ingenieros de Montes (School of Forest Engineers) in 1848, which intended to follow the model established in Germany, where the first generation of the school’s professors had been trained. The aim of modern forestry in Spain was afforestation, for example in the common montes (woodlands) of Galicia – a pastoral landscape where shrubs and small-scale common uses dominated. The environmental conflict about the reorganization of the socionatural landscape (including privatization and afforestation with pine for industrial purposes) reached its peak during the authoritarian Franco era. Only by the end of the 1960s had industrial forestry and afforestation with pine won the day, and most local agriculture worked without drawing on the resources of the montes. ³⁹ Initial resistance of local populations often thwarted radical implementation of forest conservation following the modes prescribed by early scientific forestry as well as engaged foresters and governments in long-term negotiations on forest change.

3 Science, Heritage, and Recreation: New Trends in Forestry in the “Long Twentieth Century” Apart from the central aspect of resource conservation (sustainable yield), three other considerations may be identified that became increasingly important in the field of forest protection during the “long twentieth century”: ecological forestry, forests as national heritage, and recreational forests. When did the type of forest protection known today as ecological, natural, or close-to-nature forestry emerge? One may argue that pre-industrial forestry was close to nature because it relied on natural reproduction, mixed species, and mixed-age groups forming a diverse ecosystem, allowing for light and the growing of lower-level plants and providing habitats for insects and other animals. For analytical purposes, however, it is more precise to situate the beginning of ecological forestry at the start of a “long twentieth century”. At that time, ecological reasoning became embedded in scientific forestry, and the first silvicultural programmes were based on ecological arguments. Individual scholars had argued about the ecological functions of forests long before, for example putting forward the idea that endless monocultures of the same species would deplete soils and that rigid clear-cutting rotation would lead to erosion, avalanches, or inundation. The Russian tsar Peter I (1672– 1725) decreed that those forests that serve vodookhrannye (hydrology) are to be protected.⁴⁰ The debate on the prevention of inundation had already become heated around 1800 in Alpine

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countries and beyond,⁴¹ while the term Schutzwald (protective forest) was introduced into the Bavarian Forest Law (1852) in an attempt to prevent deforestation in those areas that were important for the water table, on mountain ridges and at wind entry points.⁴² Karl Gayer (1822– 1907), a Munich professor of forestry, defined sustainability as “the conservation of the means of production of forestry” and advocated mixed species, uneven stands, the cutting of small patches, and natural reproduction. The aim was to make forests resilient against windfall, drought, pests, soil depletion, and erosion.⁴³ During the 1930s, Dauerwald (eternal forest), which proposed similar ecological outlooks intermingled with chauvinist ideology, became a lead concept under the Nazi regime.⁴⁴ Around 1900, forestry transformed into an experimental science, with early labs in the woods measuring precipitation, oxygen, ozone, or carbon levels, water absorption, and soil chemistry.⁴⁵ The European peripheries and colonies became the sites of a heightened sensitivity to the ecosystemic effects of forests.⁴⁶ Here climate effects of deforestation and the transformation of grassland into arable land were observed by locals, settlers, scientists, and administrators.⁴⁷ Joseph Stalin’s (1878 – 1953) Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature (1948) – focusing on erecting a forest barrier in the steppe of southern Russia to protect water resources and counter climate change and desertification – is one very prominent example at the very periphery of the European continent. Although it was scrapped after Stalin’s death in 1953 and is now largely considered a failure, it represents perhaps the “most ambitious example” of Soviet modernism.⁴⁸ It also carried an undercurrent of earlier attempts to change the steppe landscape and ecosystem of southern Russia to resemble the dense and dark forests of the Moscow region. Nevertheless, such extraordinary but short-lived mega attempts at ecological reparation do not tell the whole story of the Soviet approach to environmental protection. Environmental historians of Russia and the Soviet Union underline that the patterns and processes at the core of tsarist/Soviet environmental history “match very closely other parts of the globe”.⁴⁹ Scientific forestry was no exception to the trend around 1900 towards scientific internationalism. Accordingly, a new sort of natural scientists began exchanging methods and results at international conferences. Forest academies at Nancy or Tharandt were important hubs of exchange, hosting a large number of international students. With the foundation of the International Union of Forest Research Institutions in 1890, the first attempts at regular exchange of knowledge and European-wide data collection on forestry were initiated. Founding members came from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. After 1900, Belgian, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese, and Scottish nationals also contributed to the new trend of experimental and internationalized research.⁵⁰

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In addition, the trend towards ecology and the sciences, during and following the nineteenth century forests became part of nation-building processes. European nations, to a varying degree, took forests, woodlands, or types of cultural landscapes that included trees to signify their alleged national characteristics, often in (adverse) comparison to their immediate neighbouring countries. Finland is a case in point: in the country, which was struggling for independence (separating from Russia in 1917), as the cultural anthropologist Roiko-Jokela explains, “nature protection leaned heavily on nationalism”. Conservative intellectuals strongly criticized forest capitalism and saw the “integrity of the nation” to be at stake. For them, “wilderness and forests represented aesthetic, ethical and symbolic values”, in short, “original Finnishness”.⁵¹ A conservative outlook dominated German perspectives on forests during the bourgeois struggle for nationhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the post-Napoleonic restoration period onwards, a variety of complex symbolic functions were attributed to forests. They were seen as a kind of natural heritage bequeathed by the old Germanic tribes but, at the same time, symbolized a source of rejuvenation for a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing country. In addition, they served as a marker of difference towards perceived Western European competitors such as France and Britain, which allegedly had destroyed their own forest heritage. Over time, the ideology of German(ic) forests served a number of different, often imperialist, political trajectories – from the appeal to popular unity after 1848/49 to the Germanification project in Polish-speaking parts of the German Empire, to racist fanaticism during the Nazi regime, and not least to a rallying cry for conservatives during the post-1945 reconstruction period.⁵² France, Britain, or Italy followed other paths of integrating forests into the respective narratives of national integration. For England, for instance, the Lake District conflict is a telling episode. The Lake District is an area of mountains and lakes in the north-west of England, and it has been a popular tourist destination since the early nineteenth century, being made famous by the socalled Lake Poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772– 1834), Robert Southey (1774– 1843), and William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850). The romantic nationalist view valued the open and pastoral landscape of the Lake District. In 1933, the Forestry Commission purchased land in Upper Eskdale for the creation of a large conifer plantation. Many locals and visitors saw this as an assault on a very English landscape, and a massive public campaign was mounted by the Friends of the Lake District and the National Trust to preserve it. After the interventions from the parliament and intense negotiations, a new agreement was reached in 1936. As a result, plantation forestry was banished to the Scottish up-

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lands, far away from the population centres of England and the English countryside.⁵³ While parts of Italy, Spain, and France look back on somewhat similar traditions of highlighting a garden landscape as national heritage, there are traditions that present an even starker contrast to the dark and dense forests often championed in Northern Europe: the “traditional Mediterranean polycultural landscape” and its “agro-silvo-pastoral complexity”, as it has been described recently by Italian scholars.⁵⁴ While the contrast is rooted in the different biomes, agro-silvo-pastoral landscapes existed everywhere in Europe well into the twentieth century. Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, they signified forest destruction. Yet today they emerge as wooded landscapes worthy of protection. At the turn of the twentieth century, the recreational potential of forests became an issue in urban environmental debates. In contrast to remote, seemingly primeval forests favoured by heritage advocates, or those forests that would deliver sustainable yield of timber and wood as a part of the resource infrastructure, recreational forests were located near the rapidly expanding urban areas. The task was to retain them despite urban expansion and to convert them to new ends. Bauhaus planners and other schools from the 1920s onwards even began to plan modern (high-rise) cities from scratch that included urban recreational forests, for example Bruno Taut (1880 – 1938) in Berlin in the 1920s, Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885 – 1967) in Detroit in the 1950s, or much later Boeri Studio’s futurist Bosco Verticale in Milano in 2014.⁵⁵ In the 1930s, European modernist city planners, taking part in the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, contemplated garden city ideas. In the 1950s, ecological ideas had become central to city planning.⁵⁶ The social and political background was quite diverse. Romantic love for nature and a mounting anxiety about physical health among the urban bourgeoisie were certainly drivers for urban forest projects. Yet, after 1900, nature recreation also became a concern for workers’ movements, which demanded “people’s parks” to keep growing cities habitable. The twin cities of Hamburg and Altona turned three large forests into city parks from 1910 to 1930 by opening them to the public; creating traffic infrastructure; opening up grass playing areas, a sports stadium, children’s playgrounds, flower gardens, and an open air stage; and providing spaces for public sculptures by contemporary artists.⁵⁷ Berlin’s Grunewald was transformed “from below”: as a hunting ground for the Hohenzollern nobility since the sixteenth century and the site of the ceremonious Hubertus Hunt, which celebrated the abilities of the Prussian princes, Grunewald increasingly became from the 1860s onwards the recreational space for ordinary Berliners, and the kaiser’s hunt involuntarily turned into a spectacle and fest for the crowds. The monarch and his hunting

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entourage moved to Eastern Prussia in 1903, and by 1914, the grounds had become a people’s park.⁵⁸ Working class people and their advocates in the organized labour movement had entered the arena of forest protection policies.

4 Ecological Transformation of Forestry since 1970 Ecological concepts, practices, and policies have been present in forestry since the nineteenth century. Conservation issues have been paramount for much longer. Yet, the beginning of the Age of Ecology after 1970 produced a number of new challenges to forestry in Europe that accentuated and brought to the centre earlier marginalized approaches: (1) transboundary environmental problems such as accelerating global deforestation, air pollution (acid rain), biodiversity loss, or climate change; (2) increasing public awareness of ecological problems underpinned by social movements and an accelerated media circulation; and (3) a new level of international cooperation in the field of environmental policy that included forests to a varying degree (see chapter 15 by Seefried). Notwithstanding the forest transition, the exploitation (and destruction) patterns of a global economy took on new dimensions in the second half of the twentieth century: When the mid-point of the [twentieth] century was reached, the world forests were broadly divided in to two kinds. There were those that were managed carefully for production and/ or environmental protection and leisure […] and there were those that were hacked and felled either to create land to grow food or to provide a source for ready cash. […] What the temperate world lacked it bought with its superior wealth from the tropical, often, as in the case of Japan and several European countries, in an effort to conserve national timber supplies and forests while depleting those of the exporting countries.⁵⁹

These kinds of uneven relations are still ongoing, even though some of the timber and wood supply chains were redirected to the temperate forests of Eastern Europe (Russia and Ukraine) after the fall of the Iron Curtain – often in combination with a crisis of state forest governance in these countries.⁶⁰ Global deforestation not only continued but also accelerated, with a high point in the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1960 and 1990, forest areas the size of India were cut or burnt and converted to other uses.⁶¹ Since 2000, the loss of forest cover has slowed down somewhat, but remains alarming in scale and momentum.⁶² The efforts and successes of forest protection in Europe must be reviewed in relation to European consumption patterns and destruction in other regions.

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Since the 1970s, forest protection has become connected to further global environmental problems. Of particular concern to scientists and to an increasingly aware public in many European countries has been the vulnerability of forests to air pollution and acid rain (sulphurous gases as a by-product of fossil fuel use, particularly severe in the industrial belt from the north of Britain to Poland and the Czech Republic).⁶³ The Nordic countries, Sweden in particular, first warned of acidification in 1971, when a report on transboundary air pollution was published. Nevertheless, other European countries were reluctant to implement mitigation measures when the topic was discussed at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE). The Eastern bloc countries boycotted the conference altogether. Yet, within a few years, Norway and Russia had negotiated an agreement, and in 1979, most European countries, the United States, and Canada signed the Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (see chapter 14 by Kaijser). For West Germany and other European countries,⁶⁴ the Waldsterben (dying forests) debate was pivotal for agreeing on measures against air pollution, for bringing the transboundary quality of environmental issues to the attention of a broader public, and for pushing the ecological transformation of scientific forestry.⁶⁵ In fact, when the Waldsterben debate started in 1981, scientific forestry was in the process of adapting the ecosystem approach developed earlier in biological sciences.⁶⁶ Not least, the debate also brought into existence the first forest-focused EU regulation in 1986, which prescribed forest health monitoring (against atmospheric pollution) within member states.⁶⁷ While the Waldsterben debate was initially characterized by apocalyptic scenarios of a large-scale destruction of forests caused by the intake of sulphuric acids, international discussions increasingly integrated a whole range of culminating adverse environmental effects – including the forests’ vulnerability to pests, NOx emissions, storms, or global warming – within a holistic scenario of an ecosystem on the brink of collapse. This led to a renewed call for a “natural turn” in forestry and to the integration of ecology as a subfield of scientific forestry.⁶⁸ Natural forestry has been a factor in scientific forestry since the nineteenth century but became much more important in the 1970s, not least through the Zurich forestry school of Hans Leibundgut (1909 – 1993), which refined natural succession silviculture, becoming recognized throughout Europe.⁶⁹ In the eyes of the public and according to their own self-understanding, foresters turned from conservationists to environmentalists during this period. The scientific field since this time has become more tentative with this multifactorial approach – especially since climatic conditions have become more volatile and dynamic. Forestry models began operating with dynamic climatic models, with forests and climate being understood as dynamic interactive systems.⁷⁰

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It is important to note that the Waldsterben debate was based on material facts and partially valid scientific scenarios. Successive forest evaluations have underlined the continuing duress forests were put under by various environmental challenges. It is noteworthy that, at least for West Germany (Europe’s largest car-manufacturing country), the Waldsterben debate had a significant impact upon the breakthrough of catalytic converters and other technological measures against air pollution (see chapter 14 by Kaijser). However, there is yet another important feature of the debate that puts a spotlight on human-nature relations in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Scientific production of environmental knowledge as well as environmental policy-making have been bound together by mass media campaigns and increasing, often critical, awareness of publics, especially social movements around the globe.⁷¹ The Waldsterben debate resembled classic media scandals, starting in November 1981 with a series of articles in Germany’s leading political weekly of the time that envisioned large-scale destruction in the German forests and the beloved dark and dense conifer stands. The narrative was taken up by radio, television, newspapers, and the determined and active environmental organizations in West Germany. Consequently, it triggered a whole series of state commissions and financial support for research and was followed by the institutionalization of an annual report on the state of forests.⁷² This important new coalition of actors in the field of environmentalism – scientists, journalists, activists, and politicians from new Green parties or factions within existing parties – is a key topic of study in the environmental history not only by looking at forests, but also by broadening the scope of true or false environmental alarms.⁷³ Accordingly, it seems important to examine the complexity of problem selection and deselection (silencing), the practices of creating attention for or directing attention away from issues, and the way local or regional issues circulate in science and policies groups and become viral subjects of global discourse. The deforestation of tropical forests, for instance, draws a considerable amount of global attention, and the loss of biodiversity as well as forest cover is regarded as a global problem. Deforestation events at European protected sites – for instance, the logging operations within the World Heritage Site of Białowieża Forest (Poland/Belarus)⁷⁴ or the Carpathian Mountains (Romania)⁷⁵ – are not receiving the same amount of consideration internationally. They remain a regional problem, even though the Białowieża Forest and the Carpathian Forest boast charismatic megafauna which draw public attention such as bison (in the Białowieża Forest), bear, lynx, or wolf. The upsurge in global environmental politics after the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (also known as the Rio de

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Janeiro Earth Summit or the Rio Summit) has happened with the involvement of European countries and has had a considerable impact on the development of environmental protection policies in European countries and on the EU level. Global environmental politics has also integrated forests to a degree. United Nations member states, however, failed to agree on a forest convention during the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development process.⁷⁶ Since 2000, the United Nations Forum for Forests has advocated less binding international cooperation – which has resulted, among other things, in the United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests 2017– 2030. It promotes six Global Forest Goals for 2030. These goals include, among others, increasing global forest cover by 3 per cent and improving the livelihood of forest-dependent peoples.⁷⁷ A range of other international agreements also relate to forest protection (see table 1⁷⁸). Table 1: International Agreements relating to Forest Protection Trade-related agreements

Traditional nature conservation

Related to the Rio Summit

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES, )

World Heritage Convention (WHC, )

Convention on Biodiversity (CBD)

International Tropical Timber Agreements (ITTA, , , )

Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar Convention, )

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

World Trade Organization (WTO)

Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)

General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT)

International law provides an indirect framework for the use and protection of forests. As forests have become a global resource, that is to say timber is traded as part of global chains of production and consumption, trade regulations have become a central issue for protection. Moreover, the global environmental movement and policy networks have underlined the importance of forests (from mangroves and floodplain forests to tropical forests or Asian steppes) for biodiversity. Furthermore, tree planting has been considered an important instrument to combat desertification, while forest biomass has been hailed as a key carbon sink in the battle against climate change.⁷⁹ A lot of scientific energy has been directed at evaluating the ability of forests to bind carbon for two reasons: Firstly, climate scientists rely on data about forests to properly model carbon cycles. Secondly, after carbon trading schemes

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were introduced (2005, in the EU), forests have been part of equations under the assumption that carbon emissions could be offset by capturing carbon elsewhere, for example in tree plantations. The understanding of how forests operate within the carbon cycle has considerably deepened in the process – while the success of carbon trading and carbon offsetting schemes await assessment. A prominent instrument to promote forest protection within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Kyoto) process is REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries). It aims at redirecting funds from carbon emission trading to countries in the Global South with the intention of preventing deforestation and improving the livelihoods of forest-dependent people. Yet, the programme, launched in 2007, is still at a developmental stage.⁸⁰ In reaction to the outcome of the Rio Summit, non-governmental organizations introduced the Forest Stewardship Council in 1993, based in Bonn (Germany) since 2003. The Forest Stewardship Council is a non-governmental association that certifies products, production chains (chain of custody), and producers who subscribe to sustainable development standards, including the following provisions: the protection of biodiversity and ecosystem functions; the maintenance of forests of high conservation value; the safeguarding of the rights of indigenous and local communities as well as workers; and the creation of management plans as well as assessment and monitoring processes.⁸¹ The efforts of the United Nations towards global sustainable development are currently focused on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the period of 2015 to 2030. These goals act as benchmarks for forest policies in the member states and the EU. Forest policies may contribute to the goals of ending poverty and hunger (SDGs 1 and 2) by distributing resource access to poor forest-dependent groups and by stabilizing the food production via the provision of ecosystem services (e. g., prevention of drought or erosion) and agro-pastoral-forestal production options (mixed/shifting cultivation). Because women are intricately involved in forest work around the globe, forest policies have an impact on the goals to achieve gender equality and empower women in the economic process (SDG 5). Because of the vital role of forests in the water cycle, forests contribute to the availability of water and sanitation (SDG 6). Moreover, forests are a key resource for sustainable energy, material production, and consumption (SDGs 7 and 12). Urban forests may improve the quality of living in cities and human settlements (SDG 11), and forest biomass has a key role in binding carbon emissions, whereas deforestation may aggravate emission considerably (SDG 13). SDG 15 aims at restoring and promoting the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, and forests are not only a very significant part of it (one-third) but also key

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sites for halting biodiversity loss and desertification.⁸² Social ecologists, however, criticize that SDGs prioritize “economic growth over ecological integrity” and that they see only limited transformative powers.⁸³ The pan-European and EU levels not only are part of the international process but also mirror the wider international situation. There is no legal body or treaty governing forests, whereas an increasing number of forest-related regulations indirectly influence and bind national forest governance, including biodiversity, climate change, and energy and agricultural development considerations. While the EC Treaties (1957) treated forests merely as a matter of the Common Agriculture Policy (e. g., concerning plantations), regulations on forest health monitoring and forest fire prevention as well a Standing Forest Committee to the European Commission were established during the second half of the 1980s. In the following decade, action plans on forestry were developed, and measures were increasingly financed through the instruments of rural development planning. Successive treaties have integrated environmental concerns into the legal framework of the EU, for example the important clause on “sustainable development” (Treaty of the European Union 2007, Art. 3; Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union 2007, Art. 11). These environmental provisions laid the groundwork for the implementation of international treaties on the environment at the EU level.⁸⁴ In 2005 (and revised in 2009), the EU initiated a carbon Emission Trading System and a related Biomass Action Plan that underlined carbon offsetting capabilities of forests. In 2006, the EU adopted a Forest Action Plan to enhance coordination and cooperation beyond national policies, which, however, did not (yet) result in a common policy and legal framework focused on forests. The EU Forest Action Plans are, however, not solely geared towards protection and sustainable development, but often primarily towards retaining “the long-term competitiveness of the forest-related sector” of the economy.⁸⁵ Forest protection features indirectly in two main pillars of EU environmental policy, the Birds Directive (1979) and the Habitats Directive (1992), which both form the Natura 2000 – an ecological network of protected areas (see chapter 16 by van de Grift/van Meurs). To date, the Natura 2000 covers about 18 per cent of the EU’s land area: 30 per cent of the sites designated as having “Community Importance” are forests; another 30 per cent partly contain woodland and related species. Natura 2000 has indeed set up a large network of protected sites, including a good share of forests and woodland. Notwithstanding, critics have voiced concern about the actual implementation of protection measures because the Habitats Directive only provides guidelines and recommendations. EU monitoring found

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that only about 14 % of the Natura 2000 forest habitats have a good conservation status (2013 – 2018).⁸⁶ On the pan-European level, an intergovernmental panel, since its founding in 1990, has gathered together 46 member states, known as Forest Europe (since 2009). It acts as a common discussion platform for ministers, experts, and nongovernmental organizations. Its resolutions aim to foster common outlooks and cooperation between national level policy-makers.⁸⁷ Forest protection is also part of sub-regional agreements, for example the Alpine Convention (1995) and the Carpathian Convention (2003), which both mention forests. The latter, signed by seven Central and South-Eastern European countries, has added a Protocol on Sustainable Forest Management including provisions on increasing the forest cover as well as social and economic value for local communities; enhancing the production and ecosystemic capacities as well as biodiversity and climate impact of forests; and managing protected areas.⁸⁸ Forest protection at the European and international levels is a cross-sectorial problem. It is tackled indirectly by a variety of forest-related treaties, conventions, and policy measures. At neither level do specific forest-focused legal instruments exist. Forests are treated as integral and decisive parts of human-nature relations and of terrestrial ecosystems, rather than as separate entities, quite in agreement with the emerging ecological thinking in forestry since the late nineteenth century.

5 Conclusion: Forest Protection in the Long Term The protection of forests in Europe has a long tradition with local conservation policies dating back many centuries. These long-term efforts may be regarded as successful. After all, a large share of woodland has been preserved despite population growth, industrialization, exponential increase in consumption, and destructive patterns of warfare. European forestry today is deemed sustainable, with forest cover increasing in the middle and long term. Would it therefore be fair to regard European forest protection as a model for global forest governance and protection? European scientific forestry has developed a number of policy tools that aid conservation and protection, not least the sustainable yield concept, various management practices from low-maintenance natural reproduction to intensively managed plantation forests and from sites of heritage to areas of recreation, or forest ecosystem approaches. A very characteristic coalition of advocacy for conservation and protection of forests was forged in the eighteenth century between scholars and administrators integrating media communicators and social acti-

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vists (in a controversial process) during the twentieth century. Privatization endeavours, however, brought a backlash against state-centred conservation policies to increase revenue during the liberal era of the early nineteenth century in many countries,⁸⁹ similar to the way commercial state holdings of forests have tended to act since the neo-liberal 1990s.⁹⁰ Resource conservation has increasingly been important since the eighteenth century, with intensive forestry management being implemented to varying degree. Often, natural conditions and social resistance have slowed and altered the course of modern forestry, for example on the global scale in the European overseas colonies; within Europe in the very Northern or the Southern countries; and even within Germany, which is often seen as the locus classicus of the coniferous plantation forest. Ecological reasoning entered forestry early on, and Enlightenment scholars already worried about the connection between deforestation and climate change. Be that as it may, close-to-nature forestry underpinned by scientific ecology has become the centrepiece of professional forestry only in the last third of the twentieth century. Debates about air pollution, climate change, or biodiversity loss have brought about a new image of forests as key pieces in a fragile global ecosystem. International and European policies have taken up forest protection as part of larger-scale efforts of environmental protection. Yet, within Europe and its individual regions, the built-in tension of production and protection has hardly been resolved during the past centuries. Questions surrounding forest protection and resource conservation remain contested: What must forests be protected for? What must forests be protected from? What do forests help protect? If anything, the conflict between the exploitation of a renewable resource (bioeconomy) and the protection of forest ecosystem services has deepened in recent years. Europe’s image as a model of global forest protection is even more difficult to uphold against the background of a history of imperialism and uneven global economic relations. Many societies around the world are reminiscent of the roles that forest policies, exploitation, and protection had for imperial rule. Grossly uneven trade relations concerning natural resources in the post-colonial period have perpetuated and, in combination with increased consumption, even exacerbated the imbalance in forest exploitation, forest cover, and abilities to protect forest ecosystems and related livelihoods. While Western (including most European) societies have retained and even increased forest cover and have converted production forests into protected and recreational areas, production and consumption based on forest resources have also increased. Raw materials are sourced from other regions of the planet, where forest destruction continues. In addition, because forest protection has

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been increasingly linked to climate change abatement, global environmental justice claims have been influential: because the bulk of global carbon emissions have originated in the North, abatement must also come from this region. Claims to the contrary are seen as neo-colonialism or a new form of “green imperialism”⁹¹. In sum, a detailed and long-term look into the European history of forest protection reveals a diversity of forest ideals, ranging from open wood pastures to dense and dark coniferous forests, depending on time and place. This history reveals the diversity of protection aims, including cultural heritage, recreation, biodiversity, ecosystem services, and resource conservation. It also highlights a continuing tension between the triad of exploitation, conservation, and protection. Finally, this history underlines the need to look for entanglements and the connectedness of European forest exploitation, conservation, and protection to other world regions. This should discourage easy claims of accomplished sustainability and protection, but it may also lay the basis for honest engagement with the global issues at hand.

Notes  The European Forest Institute, Strategy 2025, https://efi.int/sites/default/files/files/about/efi_ strategy2025_14112016.pdf. See the EU bioeconomy strategy: https://ec.europa.eu/info/researchand-innovation/research-area/bioeconomy_en.  Keiko Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669 – 1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ch. 1, 2.  K. Jan Oosthoek, Origins and Development of State forestry in the United Kingdom, in Managing Northern Europe’s Forests. Histories from the Age of Improvement to the Age of Ecology, eds. K. Jan Oosthoek and Richard Hölzl (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2018), 132– 133.  Richard Hölzl, “Historicizing Sustainability. German scientific forestry in the 18th and 19th centuries”, Science as Culture 19, no. 4 (2010): 431– 460.  The European Forest Institute, Strategy 2025, https://efi.int/sites/default/files/files/about/efi_ strategy2025_14112016.pdf (accessed 29 April 2021).  Richard Hölzl and K. Jan Oosthoek, “National Histories, Shared Legacies: State forestry in Northern Europe in comparison”, in Managing Northern Europe’s Forests, 359 – 392.  Helga Pülzl and Karl Hogl, “Forest Governance in Europe”, in Forest Governance in Europe, ed. Helga Pülzl et al. (Bonn: European Forestry Institute, 2013), 11– 18.  Alexander S. Mather, “Forest Transitions”, Area 24, no. 4 (1992): 367– 379.  Sara J. Wilson, John Schelhas, Ricardo Grau, A. Sofía Nanni, and Sean Sloan, “Forest ecosystem-service transitions: the ecological dimensions of the forest transition”, Ecology and Society 22, no. 4 (2017), https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09615 – 220438, Tab. 1, who give the 52 countries worldwide with the highest increase rates of forest cover (2000 – 2012). Among them are also the United States, Canada, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile, or South Africa.  See Wilson et al., “Forest ecosystem-service transitions”, Tab. 1.

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 Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Richard Hölzl, “Forestry in Germany, c. 1500 – 2000”, in Oosthoek and Hölzl, eds., Managing Northern Europe’s Forests, 32– 34.  Anna Majchrowska, “The History of State Forests and Forestry in Poland”, in Managing Northern Europe’s Forests, 318 – 351.  Marco Armiero, Rugged Nation. Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (Isle of Harris: Horse Press, 2011); Marcus Hall, Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration (Charlottesville/London: University of Virginia Press, 2005), Ch. 2; Simone Gingrich et al., “A Forest Transition: Austrian Carbon Budgets 1830 – 2010”, in Social Ecology. Society-Nature Relations across Time and Space, ed. Helmut Haberl et al. (Springer: Cham, 2016), 417– 427.  Lars Helge Frivold and Asbjørn Svensrud, “State Forestry in Norway”, in Managing Northern Europe’s Forests, 228 et seq.; Per Eliasson and Erik Törnlund, “Swedish State Forestry, 1790 – 2000”, in ibid., 248 – 287.  Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest. Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905 – 1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), Ch. 1.  Grewe and Hölzl, “Forestry in Germany”, 39 et seq.; Bo Fritzbøger, “State Forestry in Denmark from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century”, in Managing Northern Europe’s Forests, 166 – 200; Frivold and Svensrud, “State Forestry in Norway”; Majchrowska, “Forestry in Poland”.  Oosthoek, “Origins and Development”; K. Jan Oosthoek, “State Forestry in the Netherlands: From Liberalism to Nature Creation”, in Managing Northern Europe’s Forests, 66 – 91.  Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2001); Rolf-Peter Sieferle et al., Das Ende der Fläche. Zum gesellschaftlichen Stoffwechsel der Industrialisierung (Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2006); Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).  Christian Pfister, “The ‘1950s Syndrome’ and the Transition from a Slow-Going to a Rapid Loss of Global Sustainability”, in The Turning Points of Environmental History, ed. Frank Uekötter (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 90 – 118.  Joachim Radkau, Wood: A History (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).  Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Brett M. Bennett, Plantations and Protected Areas: A Global History of Forest Management (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015).  Radkau, Wood, 249.  Wilson et al., “Forest ecosystem-service transitions”; Matthias Bürgi, “Historical Ecology – An Interdisciplinary Approach, Exemplified by Historical Use of Forest Litter”, GAIA 17, no. 4 (2008): 370 – 377.  Frank Uekötter, Die Wahrheit liegt auf dem Feld. Eine Wissensgeschichte der deutschen Landschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010).  Teodoro Marañón and Fernando Ojeda, “Ecology and History of a Wooded Landscape in Southern Spain”, in The Ecological History of European Forests, eds. Keith J. Kirby and Charles Watkins (Wallingford/New York: CAB, 1998), 107– 116.  Matthias Bürgi, “Habitat Alterations Caused by Long-term Changes in Forest Use in Northeastern Switzerland”, in Kirby and Watkins, Ecological History of European Forests, 203 – 212.  Aapo Rautiainen, Tarmo Virtanen, and Pekka E. Kauppi, “Land cover change on the Isthmus of Karelia 1939 – 2005: Agricultural abandonment and natural succession”, Environmental Science & Policy 55 (2016), 127– 134.

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 See Richard Hölzl, Umkämpfte Wälder. Die Geschichte einer ökologischen Reform in Deutschland, 1760 – 1860 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010), 139 et seq. on Bavaria; Paul Warde, Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), on Württemberg; Karl Appuhn, “Inventing Nature: Forests, Forestry, and State Power in Renaissance Venice”, Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 869 – 881.  Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France, 34– 38.  Hölzl and Oosthoek, “National Histories, Shared Legacies”, 374– 377; Brain, Song of the Forest, Ch. 1.  Best described (for Switzerland) by Martin Stuber, Wälder für Generationen: Konzepte der Nachhaltigkeit am Beispiel des Kantons Bern, 1750 – 1880 (Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2008).  Hölzl, “Historicizing Sustainability”.  Andre Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, and Martin Stuber (eds.), Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century, 2 Vols (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Hölzl and Oosthoek, “National Histories, Shared Legacies”, 369 – 372.  E. g. Bernhard Fernow (1851– 1923) at Cornell and Carl A. Schenck (1868 – 1955) at Biltmore, see Henry Lowood, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany”, in The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heilbronn, and Robin E. Rider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 341– 342.  K. Jan Oosthoek, “Worlds Apart? The Scottish Forestry Tradition and the Development of Forestry in India”, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 3, no. 1 (2010): 61– 74; Richard Hölzl, “Der ‘deutsche Wald’ als Produkt eines transnationalen Wissentransfers? Forstreform in Deutschland im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert”, Discussions 7 (2012), https://www.perspectivia.net/publikationen/ discussions/7-2012/hoelzl_wald; Christian Lotz, Nachhaltigkeit neu skalieren. Internationale forstwissenschaftliche Kongresse und Debatten um die Ressourcenversorgung der Zukunft im Nordund Ostseeraum 1870 – 1914 (Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2018), 50 – 56; Peter Boomgaard, “Forest Management and Exploitation in Colonial Java, 1677– 1897”, Forest & Conservation History 36, no. 1 (1992): 4– 14.  Brain, Song of the Forest, 30 et seq.; Hölzl, “Der ‘deutsche Wald’”.  Eliason and Törnlund, “Swedish State Forestry”, 261– 269.  Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France, Ch. 6.; Giacomo Bonan, The State in the Forest. Contested Commons in the Nineteenth Century Venetian Alps (Winwick: White Horse Press, 2019), Ch. 4; Hölzl, Umkämpfte Wälder, Ch. 5; Bernd-Stefan Grewe, Der versperrte Wald: Ressourcenmangel in der bayerischen Pfalz, 1814 – 1870 (Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2004), Ch. 2; Brain, Song of the Forest, Ch. 1; Thaddeus Sunseri, “Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874– 1915”, Environmental History 8, no. 3 (2003): 430 – 451.  Ana Cabana Iglesia, “La política forestal an la España contemporánea. Un diseño para la desarticulación de monte communal en Galicia”, in Von der Gottesgabe zur Ressource: Konflikte um Wald, Wasser und Land in Spanien und Deutschland seit der Frühen Neuzeit = De la Conservación a la Ecología. Estudios históricos sobre el uso de los recursos naturales y la sostenibilidad, ed. Marie Luisa Allemeyer et al. (Essen: Klartext, 2007), 173 – 186.  Maria Avxentevskaya, “The Leviathan and the woods. Translating forestry policies under Peter I of Russia”, in Translation in Knowledge, Knowledge in Translation, eds. Rocío G. Sumillera, Jan Surman, and Katharina Kühn (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2020), 189 – 208; Brian Bon-

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homme, “A Revolution in the Forests? Forest Conservation in Soviet Russia, 1917– 1925”, Environmental History 7, no. 3 (2002): 411– 434.  Christian Pfister and Daniel Brändli, “Rodungen im Gebirge, Überschwemmungen im Vorland: Ein Deutungsmuster macht Karriere”, in Natur-Bilder. Wahrnehmungen von Natur und Umwelt in der Geschichte, eds. Rolf Peter Sieferle and Helga Breuninger (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999), 297– 324.  Hölzl, Umkämpfte Wälder, 474 et seq.  Karl Gayer, Der Waldbau, 2nd edn (Berlin: Parey, 1882), 5.  Grewe and Hölzl, “Forestry in Germany”, 36 – 41.  Hölzl, “Historicizing Sustainability” (on Germany); Anastasia Fedotova and Marina Loskutova, “Forests, Climate, and the Rise of Scientific Forestry in Russia: From Local Knowledge and Natural History to Modern Experiments, 1840s – early 1890s”, in New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture, eds. Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland (Cham et al.: Springer, 2015), 113 – 138.  See Gregory A. Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); David Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700 – 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Chs. 4 and 6.  See, e. g., Nicholas B. Breyfogle (ed.), Eurasian Environments. Nature and History in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).  Brain, Song of the Forest, 142.  Nicholas B. Breyfogle, “Towards an Environmental History of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union”, in Breyfogle, ed., Eurasian Environments, 3 – 19, at 8.  Lotz, Nachhaltigkeit neu Skalieren, 133 – 149, 154– 175.  Heikki Roiko-Jokela, “Finnish Forestry in a Long-Term Perspective”, in Managing Northern Europe’s Forests, 298 – 299.  Jeffrey Wilson, The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and Contestation of a National Symbol (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Michael Imort, “‘Eternal Forest – Eternal Volk?’ The Rhetoric and Reality of National Socialist Forest Policy”, in How Green Were the Nazis?, ed. Franz Josef Brüggemeier, Marc Cioc, and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 43 – 72.  See Oosthoek, “Origins and Development”, 142– 143.  Guiseppe Barbera and Sebastiano Cullotta, “The Traditional Mediterranean Polycultural Landscape as Cultural Heritage: Its Origin and Historical Importance, Its Agro-Silvo-Pastoral Complexity and the Necessity for Its Identification and Inventory”, in Biocultural Diversity in Europe, ed. Mauro Agnoletti and Francesca Emanueli (Cham et al.: Springer, 2016), 21– 48.  On Berlin: Parker Daly Evertt, Urban Transformations: From Liberalism to Corporatism in Greater Berlin, 1871 – 1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), Ch. 6; Jens Lachmund, Greening Berlin: The Co-Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013) and Sonja Dümpelmann, Seeing Trees A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (Yale: Yale University Press, 2019); on London: Matti Hannikainen, The Greening of London, 1920 – 2000 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Charles Waldheim, “Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Ecological Urbanism”, in Nature Modern: The Place of Landscape in the Modern Movement, ed. Christophe Girot and Albert Kirchengast (Berlin: Jovis, 2017), 169 – 187.  Konstanze Domhardt, The Heart of the City: Die Stadt in den transatlantischen Debatten der CIAM 1933 – 1951 (Zürich: gta, 2012).

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 Hans Walden, Stadt – Wald: Untersuchungen zur Grüngeschichte Hamburgs (Hamburg: Dobu, 2002), 581– 587.  Wilson, The German Forest, Ch. 3.  Williams, Deforesting the Earth, 394.  Ursula Lehmbruch and Gerd Lehmbruch, “Die etatistische Governance der Forstwirtschaft und ihre Krise. Deutschland und Russland im Vergleich”, in dms 5, no. 1 (2012): 193 – 214.  John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun (London: Penguin, 2000), 236.  Forest cover worldwide has declined from 31.6 to 30.6 per cent (1990 – 2015). At the same time, Europe, North America, Eastern and South Eastern Asia have added roughly one per cent of forest cover. FAO, “The State of the World’s Forests. Forest Pathways to Sustainable Development, 2018”, http://www.fao.org/3/I9535EN/i9535en.pdf, p. 59 (accessed 29 April 2021).  McNeill, Something New, 99 – 106.  Laurent Schmitt, “Saurer Regen über Europa. Ein Umweltproblem macht nicht vor Grenzen halt”, in Das Waldsterben. Rückblick auf einen Ausnahmezustand, ed. Roderich von Detten (Munich: Oekom, 2013), 86 – 97.  See the documentation in von Detten (ed.), Das Waldsterben.  Roland Schäfer, “Lamettasyndrom” und “Säuresteppe”: Das Waldsterben und die Forstwissenschaften 1979 – 2007 (Freiburg/Br.: Institut für Forstökonomie, 2012).  Doris Wydra, “The Legal Context of European Forest Policy-Making”, in Helga Pülzl et al., eds., Forest Governance in Europe: Issues at Stake and the Way Forward. Bonn: European Forestry Institute, 2013, 29 – 36, at 30.  See, e. g., Wilhelm Bode and Martin von Hohnhorst, Waldwende. Vom Försterwald zum Naturwald (Munich: Beck, 1994).  Jean-Philippe Schütz, “Close-to-nature Silviculture: Is this concept compatible with favouring species diversity in forests?”, Forestry 72, no. 4 (1999): 359 – 366. On the reception in the Netherlands and Belgium, see Oosthoek, State Forestry in the Netherlands, 78 – 79; and PierreAlain Tallier et al., “State Forestry in Belgium since the Eighteenth Century”, in Managing Northern Europe’s Forests, 111.  John Dargavel and Elisabeth Johann, Science and Hope: A Forest History (Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2013), 202.  See Frank Uekötter (ed.), Exploring Apocalyptica: Coming to Terms with Environmental Alarmism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).  Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, “Waldsterben: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Environmental Problem”, in Nature in German History, ed. Christof Mauch (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), 119 – 130.  Joachim Radkau, The Age of Ecology (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), Ch. 5.  Marc Santora, “Life and Death in an Ancient Polish Forest”, The New York Times, 9 April 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/world/europe/poland-bialowieza-forest-logging. html. While national parks became a symbol of Western modernity in post-socialist Poland, they now – after the consolidation of the PIS party’s grip on state institutions – have become sites of fierce political conflict and commerce-orientated state forestry turned into an analogy of the strong state. See Eunice Blavascunas, Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), Ch. 1, 6.  Stephen McGrath, “‘We are running out of time’: Murder and corruption threaten Europe’s last great forests”, The Independent, 9 November 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ world/europe/romania-forest-ranger-murder-deforestation-environment-illegal-logginga9193896.html.

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 Pratap Chatterjee and Mathias Finger, The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics and World Development (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), 46 – 47.  United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Resolution 2017/4: United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests 2017– 2030 and quadrennial programme of work of the United Nations Forum on Forests for the period 2017– 2020, E/RES/2017/4, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/ doc/UNDOC/GEN/N17/184/62/PDF/N1718462.pdf?OpenElement (accessed 23 March 2020).  Anja Eikermann, Forests in International Law: Is There Really a Need for an International Forest Convention? (Cham et al: Springer, 2015), 4– 5.  Dargavel and Johann, Science and Hope, 204– 208.  Ibid.  FAO, Sustainable Forest Management – Tool Box: http://www.fao.org/sustainable-forestmanagement/toolbox/tools/tool-detail/en/c/217968/ (accessed 29 April 2021).  FAO, State of the World’s Forests, 2018, Ch. 2: http://www.fao.org/3/I9535EN/i9535en.pdf (accessed 29 April 2021).  Nina Eisenmenger et al., “The Sustainable Development Goals prioritize economic growth over sustainable resource use: a critical reflection on the SDGs from a socio-ecological perspective”, Sustainability Science 15 (2020), 1101– 1110.  See Pülzl and Hold, “Forest Governance in Europe”; Wydra, “The Legal Context”.  Ibid., 30.  Winkel et al., “Forest Policy in the European Union”, in Forest Governance in Europe, 56. See the EU Natura 2000 site: https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/biodiversity/state-of-nature-in-theeu/explore-nature-reporting-data.  Daniela Kleinschmidt and Peter Edwards, “Pan-European forest-focused and forest-related policies”, in Forest Governance in Europe, 45 – 51.  Ibid., 47; see the text of the Carpathian Convention: http://www.carpathianconvention.org/ protocol_on_sustainable_forest_management.html.  Hölzl and Oosthoek, “National Histories, Shared Legacies”, 376.  See the members of the European State Forest Association (EUSTAFOR): https://eustafor.eu/.  Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600 – 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Selected Bibliography Barton, Gregory. Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bennett, Brett M. Plantations and Protected Areas: A Global History of Forest Management. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Biocultural Diversity in Europe, edited by Mauro Agnoletti and Francesca Emanueli. Cham et al.: Springer, 2016. Blavascunas, Eunice. Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. Bonan, Giacomo. The State in the Forest. Contested Commons in the Nineteenth Century Venetian Alps. Winwick: White Horse Press, 2019. Brain, Stephen. Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905 – 1953. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.

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Dargavel, John, and Elisabeth Johann. Science and Hope: A Forest History. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2013. Dümpelmann, Sonja. Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Grewe, Bernd-Stefan. “Woodlands”. European History Online (EGO), http://www.ieg-ego.eu/greweb-2011-en. Hölzl, Richard. “Historicizing Sustainability: German Scientific Forestry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”. Science as Culture 19, no. 4 (2010): 431 – 460. Kirby, Keith, and Charles Watkins, eds. The Ecological History of European Forests. Wallingford/New York: CAB, 1998. Mather, Alexander S. “The Forest Transition”. Area 24, no. 4 (1992): 367 – 379. Matteson, Keiko. Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669 – 1848. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. McNeill, John R. “Woods and Warfare in World History”. Environmental History 9, no. 3 (2004): 388 – 410. Moon, David. The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700 – 1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Oosthoek, K. Jan. Conquering the Highlands. A History of the Afforestation of the Scottish Uplands. Canberra: ANU Press, 2013. Oosthoek, K. Jan, and Richard Hölzl, eds. Managing Northern Europe’s Forests. Histories from the Age of Improvement to the Age of Ecology. New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2018. Pülzl, Helga, Karl Hogl, Daniela Kleinschmit, and Doris Wydra, eds. Forest Governance in Europe: Issues at Stake and the Way Forward. Bonn: European Forestry Institute, 2013. Radkau, Joachim. Wood: A History. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Rajan, S. Ravi. Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-development, 1800 – 1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Sieferle, Rolf-Peter, et al. Das Ende der Fläche. Zum gesellschaftlichen Stoffwechsel der Industrialisierung. Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2006. Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan. Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Stuber, Martin. Wälder für Generationen: Konzepte der Nachhaltigkeit am Beispiel des Kantons Bern, 1750 – 1880. Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2008. Sunseri, Thaddeus. Wielding the Ax: State Forestry and Social Conflict in Tanzania, 1820 – 2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Williams, Michael. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Wilson, Jeffrey K. The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol. Toronto et al.: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Ute Hasenöhrl and Robert Groß

8 Travelling (Western) Europe: Tourism, Regional Development, and Nature Protection Abstract This chapter discusses “mass tourism” in Western Europe, the most important hotspot of world tourism in the “short” twentieth century (1918–1989). Chronologically structured in three sections, it aims to untangle tourism’s tricky relationship with regional development and nature conservation. First, the rise of a Taylorist tourism model accompanied the emergence of different forms of “social tourism” in the interwar period (e.g., the socialist Naturfreunde movement and fascist tourist organization such as Kraft durch Freude). Second, the rapid rebuilding of the tourism industry and its infrastructure from the 1940s to the 1960s, joined by the establishment of a network of conservation areas, played a vital role in promoting “landscape tourism”. Third, the 1970s and 1980s, which can be characterized by a final stage of mass tourism but also growing ecological awareness, calling for more sustainable forms of “eco-tourism”. This analysis reveals that, while (mass) tourism could be called a pan-European phenomenon, its characteristics were shaped on different levels and by a diverse set of actors with distinct, but very unequal agency. Keywords tourism; regional development; nature protection; planning; actors and agency By realizing their heart’s desire, tourists actively destroy that which they seek to find, German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger argued in his much-cited treatise on tourism in 1958.¹ Many tourists long for scenic pristine landscapes. However, when they subsequently share their touristic experiences with those at home, they also create powerful imitation effects, especially if the desirability of these places is reinforced by advertising from the tourism industry. (Landscape) tourism can also be a major economic force and trigger regional development and the creation of tourist infrastructures. By doing so, tourism generates economic growth in peripheral regions affected by deagrarianization and depopulation and simultaneously threatens its very foundations through its environmental impacts. From the early days of “romantic”, landscape-based tourism, this ambivalence has also elicited vigorous resistance from nature conservationists and sparked a variety of protective measures as well as “alternative” visions of sustainable tourism. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-009

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This chapter aims to untangle the ambivalent relations between tourism, regional development, and nature conservation in (Western) Europe, focusing on the phenomenon of “mass tourism” from 1918 until the end of the Cold War. Europe – and Western Europe in particular – was (and still is) the most important hotspot of world tourism. Not only did most tourists originate from European countries, but Europe also attracted most holiday-makers, both from within the continent and from abroad (especially the US). While tourism was certainly not an exclusively European social phenomenon – Japanese “onsen” spa resorts, for example, can be traced back for at least a millennium² –, many developments in “modern” mass tourism derived from – and were concentrated within – the industrialized countries of (Western) Europe with their flourishing middle classes. As a matter of fact, the interwar years can be regarded as a turning point in the development of mass tourism and nature conservation, with more and more members of all social classes participating in both activities.³ Moreover, European governments and administrations increasingly committed themselves to supporting both. Since the 1920s, “invisible exports” from tourism were considered a vital part of national trade balances.⁴ The 1920s also saw the establishment of inter- and transnational lobby organizations which created an institutional framework for tourism and nature conservation (part 1 of this paper).⁵ In the post-war period, efforts to promote tourism as a means of economic – and regional – development intensified. We argue that, contrary to popular belief, the rise of modern mass tourism in Europe was not only a result of economic growth, market activities, and consumer choices, but also shaped by substantial political and administrative intervention. The 1950s and 1960s could even be regarded as the heyday of regional/national planning of tourist infrastructures. The nature park movement of this era also brought an intensification of efforts to “harmonize” tourism, regional development, and nature protection (part 2). In the 1970s and 1980s, these two developments converged, as tourism turned into a mass phenomenon and, simultaneously, environmentalism entered the societal mainstream, resulting in intense debates on “sustainable” tourism (part 3). These three shifts in the entangled history of tourism, regional development, and nature protection were transnational developments that spanned all of Europe. Europeans crossed borders more frequently and in ever-larger numbers to explore (new) tourist destinations. Starting in the 1970s, reactions to (mass) tourism and its environmental impact, while often rooted in local initiatives, were increasingly also part of larger trans- and international networks and discourses. Responses to the “smokeless industry”, however, remained mostly within regional and national frameworks and were directed at specific phenomena, e. g., water and air protection, waste disposal, plant and animal protection, or nature reserves. In contrast to established approaches to tourism history,

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which focus more on tourism’s cultural aspects, we argue in this chapter that nature and environmental protection activities generally refer to concretely planned or implemented, infrastructural mediated economic activities. As most works on tourism and nature conservation consist of regional or national case studies,⁶ the interrelations between tourism, regional development, and nature protection in Western Europe has been neglected so far.⁷ Post-war mass tourism with its severe environmental impact is a particular lacuna in the historical literature, especially regarding comparative, quantitative data. Some individual aspects of mass tourism have been investigated in detail, e. g. the visual history of tourism, including tourist images/branding,⁸ or tourism/recreation in the “Eastern bloc” – a complex story of its own that will only be touched upon in this chapter.⁹ This chapter scrutinizes the development of both mass tourism and “sustainable” landscape tourism in (Western) Europe, with a particular focus on the underlying driving forces and transnational discourses. This analysis reveals a certain asymmetry: while tourism as an industry has frequently been promoted on a national level, nature conservation and environmental protection were often undertaken at a local or regional level by NGOs with more limited financial resources – at least until the ecological turn of the 1970s. Therefore, this chapter deals with very unequal actors and stakeholders with different levels of visibility (an imbalance that extends to the source material). Despite such limitations, there is still much to be learned about how specific actors – from governments and tourist organizations to businesses and vacationers – shaped tourism and the environment in the twentieth century, and how these efforts and experiences varied within Europe and beyond.

1 Social Tourism and the Failed Democratization of Travel (1920s/30s) In the interwar period, tourism and recreation – formerly a privilege of the upper and middle classes – were increasingly “democratized”, albeit not necessarily in a democratic way or within democratic societies. Both socialist associations such as the transnational Touristenverein Die Naturfreunde (which were particularly strong in Austria and Germany)¹⁰ or the French Colonies des Vacances¹¹ and fascist tourist organizations such as the Opera Nationale Dopolavoro (OND) in Italy or the National Socialist Kraft durch Freude (KdF)¹² targeted the middle and working classes, (at least ostensibly) attempting to open up access to formerly exclusive destinations for larger segments of society.¹³ Both varieties of “social

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tourism” also emphasized tourism as a powerful instrument for fostering international peace and understanding – until the late 1930s, even fascist organizations paid lip service to the classic trope of intercultural learning through tourist encounters, while at the same time practising racist exclusion from holiday destinations and services.¹⁴ In these increasingly politicized discourses, nature was framed and instrumentalized as a fountain of youth that strengthened the bodies and minds of vacationers.¹⁵ Nature conservation – at least in its bourgeois variety – struggled with these developments, caught within the conundrum of promoting the protection of nature on the grounds of its importance for tourism and recreation, while at the same time lamenting the disfigurement and loss of natural beauties and “oases of tranquillity”.¹⁶ However, despite the importance of ideas and ideologies in framing tourism, tourism as an industry has always been and still is also heavily reliant on broader economic developments.¹⁷ This connection was particularly strong during the interwar period. Most European national economies, including South Eastern and Central Eastern Europe, experienced a period, however brief, of economic growth in the 1920s which triggered an expansion in (inter)national travel and tourism. In 1929, an estimated one million visitors travelled to Switzerland and a similar number to France, 1.25 million to Italy, and 1.95 million to Austria.¹⁸ As a result, holiday travel and leisure excursions became huge sources of revenue.¹⁹ Participation in tourism varied from country to country, however: while less than 15 per cent of all Germans could afford holiday trips of at least five days, almost 40 per cent of the British travelled at the time, particularly to seaside resorts.²⁰ This remarkable boom in tourism also led to the establishment of inter- and transnational lobby organizations, resulting in an institutionalization and professionalization of tourism at the European level. At the Congrès International des Organismes Officielles de Tourisme, founded under another name in The Hague in 1925, fourteen national tourism organizations met to exchange tourism promotion experiences, resulting in a joint publicity campaign for the US market in 1927 with the brochure “Europe Calling”.²¹ At its sixth congress in 1930, participants formed a formal union of national tourism organizations, the Union Internationale des Organismes Officiels de Propagande Touristique (UIOOPT), to speak with greater weight on tourist matters.²² While these organizations aimed to overcome national fragmentation in tourism marketing and planning, the growing nationalism in the countries represented hindered these efforts. In addition, the stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression also severely hurt European businesses and made international collaboration in tourism difficult.

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Even though transatlantic tourism declined by about 50 per cent between 1930 and 1934,²³ the Great Depression did not necessarily stop people from travelling. When European national economies slid into crisis, experts and politicians focused on so-called “invisible exports”, among them tourism, as opposed to the production of “tangible exports”, such as machinery or goods.²⁴ As the tourism industry was less capital intensive than heavy industries, governments all over Europe strove to boost tourism by promoting the beauty of national landscapes.²⁵ In addition, as part of this emphasis on (nature) tourism and leisure activities, several European nations passed legislation granting citizens a right to paid vacation time.²⁶ In order to enhance domestic tourism, some countries, most notably Nazi Germany, also took active measures to prevent their citizens from travelling abroad for leisure, utilizing tourism as a political weapon against “enemy states” (e. g., the notorious “1000-mark barrier” of 1933 that restricted German citizens from travelling to Austria by requiring them to pay a fee).²⁷ Thus, tourism and vacations became “site[s] for competing cultural policies and heightened political mobilization”.²⁸ Government strategies to promote domestic tourism were also intrinsically linked with the “branding” of national landmarks and landscapes, with visiting such sites being virtually regarded as a patriotic duty that could strengthen national identities along with the physical bodies of the tourists.²⁹ For example, Aruna D’Souza demonstrates how “[m]ythic constructions of place – in this case the French Mediterranean coast – were woven into various nationalistic discourses”. As a result, “a new cult of the natural guided vacationers’ notions of leisure”³⁰ emerged in the interwar years. In Ireland, the landscape became a source of national identity after independence from the UK in 1922: Irish travel writers and landscape painters actively invented Gaelic folk traditions, facilitating travels to a “pre-colonial golden age located in the rural west”.³¹ Peripheral, rural regions in particular became the focus of production of such nationalistic tourist destinations, staged as timeless antipodes to industrialized urban areas. Local reactions ranged from resentment of and opposition to the appropriation of homelands and the streamlining of local traditions – especially if the tourism interfered with other forms of land use and superimposed external (often middle-class) expectations of (seemingly) time-honoured customs on the communities –, to an active commercialization of local landscapes and customs in order to cater to tourists’ tastes. Tourism was thus often expected to fulfil political purposes: invigorating national economies, stirring patriotic feelings, and/or bringing tourists in line with state or party ideologies. This politicization of tourism was not limited to Europe’s autocratic regimes – though it was most pronounced here. The Italian OND (1925) was the first to translate Taylorist ideas of cheap, serialized production into a new mode of standardized (mass) tourism.³² Fascist organized tourism

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was an amenity tailored to the lower and middle classes (at least, if they fit the desired racial profile), a prestigious symbol of the supposedly classless Volksgemeinschaft and an attempt to win over workers who previously had not been able to enjoy holiday travels. The German KdF – which soon became the world’s largest travel organization³³ – had sold an estimated seven million vacations by 1939, one-tenth of which were ocean cruises to Norway, Madeira, and Italy, and an additional 30 million short and day trips. Yet despite these huge numbers, only onetenth of German domestic tourism was organized by KdF – and few workers, particularly families, were able to afford these trips.

Figure 1: Sketch of Prora seaside resort. Drawing by Gerda Rotermund, published in “die neue linie” IX, No. 10 (June 1938). Courtesy of Archiv Dokumentationszentrum Prora.

In order to increase its reach, KdF initiated an ambitious scheme for the creation of five seaside resorts on the Baltic Sea in 1936, which would have been able to accommodate up to 200,000 vacationers simultaneously for an estimated 20 RM per person per week, massively transforming ecosystems and landscapes in its wake. Only one of these resorts, Prora on the island of Rügen (see figure 1), was actually built: with a total cost of 100 million RM, it was at the time the world’s largest holiday resort, stretching over five kilometres with about 7,000

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identical beach-view apartments. However, it was never opened for vacationers due to the start of the war. In contrast to the Prora project – which was basically a tourist town in itself, not unlike the enormous hotel complexes in Italy or Spain of the 1970s and 1980s –, most KdF hostels were modest in size and often located in peripheral regions such as the Eifel or the Bavarian Forest. The choice of such locations was meant to stimulate economic development, but it was also motivated by the resentment of commercial tourist establishments towards KdF vacationers, who, they felt, drove off financially stronger customers.³⁴ KdF thus illustrates the ambivalent relations between “romantic” and “collective” forms of tourism. While sociability within the fascist Volksgemeinschaft was at the very heart of the fascist tourist experience, it also relied heavily on the allure of “traditional” bourgeois nature and health tourism – now transformed into a spa for the people, mitigating the vile effects of unwholesome city life through bodily and visual consumption of nature. As a tool for promoting health and loyalty as well as for pacifying potentially unruly segments of society, fascist tourism was both a variant of and a reaction to social tourism. Starting in the late nineteenth century, workers’ associations such as the Naturfreunde established a broad network of tourist facilities and infrastructures throughout Europe, including cabins, lodges, and travel agencies.³⁵ While the club’s main objectives were improving workers’ leisure and travel opportunities as well as fostering the development of socialist society, the protection and careful shaping of nature were also a vital part of the agenda of the Naturfreunde (added to its statutes in 1910), making it one of the largest transnational nature conservation organizations of the time.³⁶ At its pre-war peak in 1930, the Naturfreunde had more than 214,000 members in nine European countries, namely Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, and Switzerland, as well as the US.³⁷ Founded in Vienna in 1895, the Naturfreunde strove to democratize access to nature and the ability to travel (see figure 2). In 1906, they organized an early civil disobedience campaign to achieve right of way to mountain tops or lakesides blocked off for the public, commenting derisively in their journal: “Any man whose entire merit lies in the fact that he can list off any number of ancestors of the same sort [as himself] and wears a multi-pointed crown on his underwear can exclude thousands of working, creative, i. e. useful people from enjoying nature.”³⁸ The central idea of the Naturfreunde was “social hiking”, combining physical enjoyment of nature with the class struggle for socialism and equality. Organized hikes to rural areas were supposed to provide workers a chance to recover from their physically strenuous labour, while also offering them opportunities to experience nature and promote social democracy through their interactions with the locals.³⁹

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Figure 2: Stamp celebrating the one-hundred-year jubilee of the “Naturfreunde” organization in Austria, 1995. Courtesy of Österreichische Post AG, Vienna ©. The anniversary stamp utilizes the cover illustration of the association journal “Der Naturfreund”, published from 1896 to 1934 (Der Naturfreund 5, no. 1 [1901]: 1 [ANNO/Austrian National Library, ÖNB]).

Bourgeois advocates of nature conservation viewed such efforts to “democratize” nature with concern. Throughout Europe, most conservationists had an ambivalent relationship with the “masses”. Workers were welcome as members in most bourgeois conservation groups – who hoped thereby to shield them from the “corrupting” influences of social democracy.⁴⁰ Access to nature was something entirely different, however. Traditionally focused on preserving natural monuments and/or protecting cultural landscapes, many conservationists feared the “defilement” of sites of natural beauty if more people entered protected areas.⁴¹ They often contrasted the tasteful, “enlightened” enjoyment of nature (by themselves) with “crude” mass tourism – a distinction that was also central to later rhetorics of eco-tourism.⁴² This tension between promoting recreation in nature as a means of healing modern society, while, at the same time, fearing its destruction via mass tourism (as well as a lack of exclusivity) has been a unifying theme in European nature conservation throughout its history – and one that would become even more pronounced in the post-war period.

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2 Tourism in Regional Development and National Policy (1950s/60s) The early post-war period was the heyday of regional/national planning of tourist infrastructures and developments, although regional and tourism planning continued to shape the spatial development of tourism infrastructures in the following decades as well.⁴³ Under the conditions of the gradually escalating Cold War, tourism was regarded throughout Western Europe as a way of replenishing empty foreign exchange reserves. Accordingly, tourist infrastructures were financed from international (Marshall Plan) and national reconstruction funds (Monnet Plan, Fondo Lire, counterpart funds), as will be elaborated later in detail. Starting in the 1950s, and particularly in the 1960s, new stakeholders – regional planners and members of civil society – also engaged with tourism and reflected on the status of protected areas for recreation. One of the most prominent attempts to link tourism/recreation, nature protection, and regional development was (and still is) the nature park movement with its principle of zoning, i. e. designating specific functions to specific areas of a park or region.⁴⁴ This policy mirrored the anthropocentric strategy most conservationists employed during the “boom years”: nature was to be protected not for its own sake, but “from humans and for humans”.⁴⁵ The focus on nature parks also reflected culturally conservative aversions to “unwholesome” urban culture and, last but not least, earlier expansionist Nazi planning concepts that sought to remodel European landscapes according to völkisch ideals (see chapter 4 by Wöbse/Ziemek). After the heavy destruction and casualties of World War II, tourism and recreation were not the most pressing concerns of the immediate post-war years. However, despite unfavourable conditions such as trade balance deficits, tariff barriers, and delayed infrastructure reconstruction, Western European societies soon experienced rapid growth in tourist demand, with the established tourism regions – e. g. Italy and Switzerland – taking the lead.⁴⁶ Tourism also re-entered social and political agendas. In 1948, the United Nations codified the “right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay” in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 24).⁴⁷ In the same year, an international group of tourism experts met in Locarno, Switzerland, to discuss the prospects of international tourism in light of the newly negotiated framework for the European Recovery Program (ERP, commonly referred to as the “Marshall Plan”).⁴⁸ The implementation of the Marshall Plan was accompanied by the establishment of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), which became the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

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in 1961.⁴⁹ The OEEC was dedicated to the idea of European integration through economic growth, and the promotion of a transnational tourism industry was a key part of its activities, represented, for example, by the OEEC Tourism Committee, the Travel Development Section (TDS), and the European Travel Commission (ETC) (see figure 3).⁵⁰ In the following years, it did everything in its power to capitalize the Marshall Plan for (Western) European tourism, especially through joint advertising campaigns.⁵¹ The Marshall Plan was in effect from 1948 to 1952. During this period, a total of USD 13 billion were distributed among long-term reconstruction projects that had been drawn up by the participants under supervision of ECA and OEEC.⁵² While tourism itself was not a high priority for these projects,⁵³ the Marshall Plan proved to be crucial for the Western European tourism industry, as it supported the (re)construction of key infrastructures such as railways, roads, air ports, harbours, communication lines, cable cars, power supply lines, and much more.⁵⁴ Even more important for tourism were the ERP counterpart funds, which prolonged the national economic effectiveness of the Marshall Plan beyond the actual funding period.⁵⁵ In Austria, the ERP credits remained the most important state aid instrument for tourism projects into the 1990s (see figure 4).⁵⁶ The Italians set up the Fondo Lire to modernize accommodation and transport infrastructure,⁵⁷ and the French initiated the Monnet Plan using these funds.⁵⁸ In 1950, American officials claimed to have financed over 85 per cent of all tourism development projects in France, such as airports, skiing areas, and seaside resorts, via the Monnet Plan. The Marshall Plan marked a truly European moment in tourism history. One only has to consider that, on an organizational level, it overlapped with the activities of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), which was essentially concerned with the (infrastructural) integration of European nations and thus also contributed to the revival of the European idea. However, its role must be seen in context of the larger social and economic developments of the post-war decades. Most importantly, in the 1950s and 1960s, the economy of scarcity of the immediate post-war years gave way to an affluent consumer society. During the “boom years”, many European societies experienced a period of (almost) full employment, with noticeable increases in real wages and holiday entitlements.⁵⁹ This was also the era of mass motorization. Fuelled by low-cost petrol, cars and motorcycles in post-war Europe (much as had happened previously in the United States in the interwar period) transformed within the course of a decade from exclusive status symbols into everyday commodities, fundamentally changing mobility and recreational practices.⁶⁰ In addition to cars, many other goods and services were now being produced for the mass market

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Figure 3: Europe as you want to see it. ETC advertising campaign of 1955. Courtesy of the European Travel Commission, Brussels.

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Figure 4: Use of ERP funds to improve road connection to Lech am Arlberg. United States Information Service, 1950. Courtesy of the Image Archive of the Austrian National Library (ÖNB).

– including tourism.⁶¹ In 1950, 27 European nations had registered nearly 18 million foreign tourist arrivals (66.5 per cent of world tourism). By 1963, this number had almost tripled to 66 million arrivals (73 per cent of world tourism). Accordingly, tourist expenditures rocketed by about 75 per cent.⁶² Policy makers attempted to govern and channel these developments. In federal systems such as West Germany and Austria, regional and state administrations were particularly active. In the late 1940s, for example, “wild camping” on lakeshores and in forests had become a mass phenomenon, particularly amongst young people, eliciting heavy criticism from regional stakeholders on moral, san-

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itary, and ecological grounds. Administrative efforts to regulate illicit campsites via prohibitions and the establishment of a network of “official” camping grounds not only domesticated unruly vacationers, but also raised awareness about conflicts between recreation/tourism, nature protection, and other forms of land use and justified planning interventions.⁶³ Stakeholders frequently turned to spatial planning to utilize tourism and recreation for regional development and, sometimes, for safeguarding protected landscapes and nature reserves. Regional planning in particular was regarded as an instrument for resolving conflicts of interest,⁶⁴ particularly during the 1960s to mid-1970s, which – in East and West – were marked by an extensive “planning euphoria”⁶⁵ that went hand in hand with the institutionalization and scientification of planning processes. In tourism planning, ecological considerations initially played only a minor role. However, from the mid-1960s, the environment also started to receive greater attention in tourism planning, although the role of nature advocates was initially limited to providing advisory opinions. This development built on contemporary debates about the carrying capacity of ecosystems and landscapes.⁶⁶ One of the earliest and most influential attempts to bring together tourism/ recreation, nature protection, and regional planning in Europe was the nature park programme. In West Germany, these efforts were spearheaded by the grain trader and millionaire philanthropist Alfred Toepfer, who was president of the Verein Naturschutzpark from 1954 to 1985. Today, Toepfer is regarded as a controversial figure because of his activities in pan-Germanic networks during National Socialism as well as his employment of former Nazi leaders in his charities after the war.⁶⁷ In 1956, the West German government announced the creation of 25 nature parks. The idea was to develop about five per cent of (West) German cultural landscapes – particularly in remote areas and near urban agglomerations – for tourism and recreation, in order to improve living conditions for rural inhabitants and preserve their cultural heritage and scenery.⁶⁸ Following a concept similar to that of the national park, nature parks were divided into three zones, each of which had specific functions: a protected area at the core, surrounded by recreational zones for hiking, and finally developed areas, where most tourist infrastructure was concentrated. Nature parks were envisioned as model landscapes characterized by a (supposedly) harmonious balance between humans and nature, countering environmental and social degradation alike. Toepfer’s vision of nature and humanity – as well as that of many early promoters of nature parks – was highly reactionary, however, with a strong völkisch undercurrent and deep dislike of “unhealthy” urban life and mass culture.⁶⁹ But these culturally conservative notions, as much as they dominated early nature park discourses, were rarely translated into planning practice. In reality, there were few restrictions on economic uses of the parks.

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In little-developed areas such as the Eifel in North Rhine-Westphalia, nature parks were tailored to the needs of tourism – not surprisingly, since they were usually planned and managed by the regional authorities and subject to tremendous pressure from those with economic interests in the area.⁷⁰ Despite, or perhaps because of, these deviations from the original concept, the nature park idea proved a huge success. Starting with the rebranded Naturpark Lüneburger Heide (founded as a Naturschutzpark in 1921) in 1956, 62 nature parks had been established in West Germany by 1980, covering roughly 20 per cent of its land.⁷¹ Originally a German phenomenon, the nature park idea also spread to other European countries in the 1960s, not least because of heavy lobbying from Toepfer and his supporters. Based on a memorandum by Austrian geographer Walter Strzygowski, in 1960 the Council of Europe contemplated establishing a European network of nature parks as part of its agenda for nature protection, with a particular focus on their recreational value (see chapter 4 by Wöbse/Ziemek). In 1965, Toepfer conducted the first “European Working Conference” on nature parks, with 30 delegates from 13 countries.⁷² The nature park idea particularly caught on in France, Italy, and Austria, starting with the formation of the Parc naturel régional Scarpe-Escaut in France in 1968.⁷³ In 1973, the Europarc Federation was founded in Basel, Switzerland, in order to share experiences and promote nature parks on both sides of the Iron Curtain, with founding members from West Germany (including the ubiquitous Toepfer, the federation’s first president and primary financier), Belgium, France, United Kingdom, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Most of the federation’s activities, however, were still located in West Germany.⁷⁴ Today, most European and a number of non-European countries, including the Philippines, have nature (or natural) parks that are (at least in theory) dedicated to the idea of balancing nature protection, regional development, and tourism/recreation. While the late 1940s and 1950s might be regarded as a period of recovery for European tourism and a turning point towards the era of mass tourism,⁷⁵ in the 1960s mass tourism came into its own – with severe impacts on the environment. Due to increased (auto)mobility and falling airfares starting in the late 1960s, European tourists began exploring new holiday destinations, particularly sunny Mediterranean beaches.⁷⁶ Travel modes also changed – educational journeys in the tradition of the “Grand Tour” lost ground to more fun- and action-oriented activities. The “collective” tourist gaze interested in convivial gatherings and social entertainment gradually supplemented and supplanted the “romantic” touristic gaze focused on passive enjoyment of scenic landscapes and picturesque buildings.⁷⁷ Organized package holidays in particular targeted this tourism segment, courting potential customers with lavishly illustrated catalogues.⁷⁸ Established

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travel agencies like Thomas Cook found themselves under heavy competition from new vendors such as Club Méditerranée (1950), Touropa (1951), Neckermann (1963), or TUI (1968), which brought market innovations such as cost-saving modular options and all-inclusive offers.⁷⁹ In spite of these developments, however, most tourists still travelled on their own within Western Europe. Organized travel arrangements were even more important in the countries of Eastern Europe under communism, where holidays were rarely bought on the market, but assigned as a privilege by one’s employer, party, or state travel organization.⁸⁰ In East Germany, for example, the Reisebüro der DDR (Travel Bureau of the GDR) controlled the travel industry; it owned most hotels and coordinated international travel with the travel organizations of other states, e. g. the Soviet Intourist.⁸¹ International tourism within socialist countries, in particular to the Baltic Sea and Hungary, significantly increased since the 1960s but remained heavily regulated.⁸² Domestic tourism offered more loopholes, with a large number of citizens holidaying in their own dachas.⁸³ Despite the best efforts of governments, administrations, planning bodies, and travel agencies to enhance, control, and channel tourism, its actual development was thus still subject to a large degree of contingency – as well as a growing amount of criticism concerning its social and ecological costs. During the boom years, most conservationists – from the local to the international levels – had been eager to emphasize the economic and social benefits of protecting nature, particularly for tourism and recreation. From UNESCO’s point of view, for example, nature conservation policy was also tourism policy. As Anna-Katharina Wöbse has pointed out, “nature conservation without the possibility of tourist use, i. e. public access to natural beauty, seemed pointless”.⁸⁴ Nature was to be protected from humans and for humans – not for its own sake. At UNESCO’s first nature conservation congress in 1949, several hundred international experts discussed “how national parks should be used as tourist sites for nature experience and environmental education”.⁸⁵ Indeed, many conservationists regarded tourism and recreation as allies in their fight to preserve scenic landscapes. In some environmental conflicts, this resulted in fruitful alliances between conservationists and local tourism – for example, in movements against the construction of power plants or dams, when tourist attractions such as waterfalls or lakes were jeopardized.⁸⁶ Likewise, since the late nineteenth century, local tourist associations had encouraged landscape preservation to cater to urban middle-class nostalgia for rural landscapes.⁸⁷ However, these alliances between environmentalism and tourism often fell apart when tourist infrastructure was at stake. Cable cars were a particularly sensitive topic for most conservationists. With ready money available from the ERP counterpart funds, many mountainous regions invested in the construction of cable cars, ski lifts, and slopes

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starting in the late 1940s to enhance and strengthen the winter season. But while conservationists were still more or less alone in their criticism of the “cable car disease” and other “tourist excesses”⁸⁸ during this period, public opinion on these matters – and on the environmental impact of tourism in general – would change perceptibly at the start of the 1970s.

3 Between Mass Tourism and Sustainable Tourism (1970s/80s) The 1970s and 1980s were marked by concurrent increases in mass tourism and environmental awareness. The tremendous boom of European tourism⁸⁹ changed many tourist landscapes, particularly the Alps (see chapter 9 by Aschwanden et al.), which were affected both by being along the tourist transit route to Italy and by the creation of a winter tourism season with ski lifts and cable cars.⁹⁰ This tourism infrastructure was now cited as the cause of a general destruction of nature, including unauthorized construction projects, sprawling petrol stations, road construction, widespread advertising signboards, and littering,⁹¹ and these concerns sparked civic resistance, the establishment of protected areas and national parks, as well as debates on alternative, sustainable forms of tourism.⁹² John McNeill has argued that the “overarching priority of economic growth was easily the most important idea of the twentieth century”.⁹³ Criticism of growth did not gain significant support until the late 1960s (see chapter 15 by Seefried). Until then, economic growth was accepted as positive and desirable, and renowned European organizations (OEEC/OECD) directed their efforts towards promoting and managing it.⁹⁴ Tourism was no exception to this embrace of growth. When the UNO and the International Union of Official Travel Organizations (IUOTO) declared 1967 the International Year of Tourism, they celebrated “the spectacular growth of international tourism”, contemplating how developing countries could also benefit from tourism. UNESCO, in a series of articles in its Courier on “Sparking tomorrow’s tourist explosion”,⁹⁵ especially promoted cultural tourism as “the unexploited treasure of economic development”.⁹⁶ While spectacular growth rates were primarily a cause for euphoria, they also elicited tensions between traditional and newly-discovered tourist destinations.⁹⁷ With falling airline prices, more and more tourists could afford to visit the less developed European peripheries of the “sunny south”,⁹⁸ particularly the beaches of economically disadvantaged southern Italy (including Sardinia and Sicily), Greece, or the Spanish Mediterranean coast. In 1950, 84,000 tourists

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vacationed on the Spanish island of Mallorca. In the years that followed, the island experienced a tourist explosion, with visitor numbers growing from 362,000 in 1960 to 1.9 million in 1970. In 1975, seven million air travellers visited Mallorca; by 1995, the number had nearly doubled reaching 13 million.⁹⁹ To accommodate tourists, huge hotel blocks were erected, filling the waterfronts along the previously picturesque and rustic Mediterranean beaches. Benidorm on the Spanish Costa Brava is a particularly extreme example, transforming from an idyllic fishing village into a city with one of the highest densities of skyscrapers worldwide within two decades (see figure 5).¹⁰⁰ Tourists’ desire to explore fresh and preferably sunny locations not only troubled environmentalists, but also gave rise to concern in traditional tourist areas. To avert loss of customers, stakeholders equipped their locations with as many amenities as possible.¹⁰¹ Faced with stronger competition for summer tourism, the Alpine countries – which today host about 25 per cent of the world’s tourism – responded to the growing popularity of a second holiday for winter sports¹⁰² and invested heavily in the winter season starting in the mid-1960s. In order to manage mountain environments and make them more suitable for conspicuous consumption, local communities also intervened in ecosystems and topographies, improving dangerous slopes, manufacturing immense quantities of artificial snow, and providing easy access to high peaks.¹⁰³ In the 1990s, Switzerland had more than 1,200 ski lifts and 500 cable cars for its visitors, and Austria approximately 3,900 ski lifts and 150 cable cars.¹⁰⁴ While Austrian and Swiss winter tourism was still dominated by family businesses, Italy and France put significant effort into creating large-scale development with high-rises and linked ski arenas.¹⁰⁵ As a result of these developments, Alpine nature was not only increasingly commodified, but also reframed as a comfortable and easily accessible space.¹⁰⁶ These trends were not limited to Alpine regions, but could be seen in all forms of nature tourism, as, for example, Scott Moranda has observed for seaside resorts: “resort owners around the world transformed wetlands, controlled interior climates, and battled mosquitos and other […] nuisances to make [beach tourism] both safe and vital for tourists”.¹⁰⁷ The resulting tourism landscapes were not universally welcomed. Winter tourism in the Alps – a focus of tourism criticism since Leslie Stephen’s “The Playground of Europe” from 1871¹⁰⁸ – was especially contentious.¹⁰⁹ Opposition to cable cars and skiing infrastructures primarily took place on a regional level, led by the local sections of the German and Austrian Alpine Associations as well as a growing number of citizens’ initiatives; however, these movements were embedded in broader debates on the impeding collapse of Alpine ecosystems.¹¹⁰ Starting in the late 1960s, a number of critical reports were published by conservationists (particularly the Commission Internationale pour la Protection des

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Figure 5: Spain: Nightmare tourism. Cover picture of the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, no. 35 (1973). © DER SPIEGEL 35/1973. Courtesy from SPIEGEL-Verlag Rudolf Augstein GmbH & Co. KG.

Alpes, CIPRA), Alpine clubs, and heritage organizations, as well as by the Alpine countries themselves. In 1972, the Association of Alpine States (Arge Alp) was

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founded in Mösern (Tyrol) to tackle shared problems of Alpine countries, especially regarding transit traffic.¹¹¹ It would take almost twenty years and considerable civil societal and regional pressure, however, until European governments finally addressed the issue of the sustainable development of the Alps in 1991 via an internationally binding treaty, the Alpine Convention (see chapter 9 by Aschwanden et al.) – which included a commitment to sustainable tourism. The concept of sustainable tourism emerged in the mid-1970s. In 1976, taking up a long tradition of European critique of tourism, Gerardo Budowski, general director of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), argued that tourism could be detrimental to conservation. Too large a number of tourists could overburden limited resources, “leading to physical damage, poor waste disposal, or vandalism”. He further pointed out that “other factors, however, which usually pass unrecognized, seem to be much more important – including the construction of buildings and roads and other facilities for tourist visitation in natural areas”.¹¹² Budowski identified three possible relationships between tourism and conservation: conflict, coexistence, or symbiosis. However, he concluded, “for the majority of cases at present, [this] relationship […] is usually one of coexistence moving towards conflict – mainly because of an increase in tourism and the shrinking of natural areas”.¹¹³ Budowski called for stronger alliances between tourism developers and ecologists/conservationists, arguing that they shared common goals and could both contribute greatly to regional development, “leading to a better quality of life for all concerned”.¹¹⁴ Budowski’s deliberations on how to salvage the dysfunctional relation between tourism and nature protection was only one example – albeit a prominent one – of many. In the mid-1970s, the familiar dystopian warnings and vague demands for a new kind of tourism in harmony with nature were increasingly supplemented by more concrete ideas and practices. Inspired by environmental and developmental discourses, particularly the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, the idea of “soft tourism” emerged as a socially and ecologically conscientious alternative to conventional “hard tourism”.¹¹⁵ Soft tourism, or eco-tourism, started as a niche phenomenon within Western European “eco-leftist” circles. It proposed a “responsible”, small-scale nature tourism without “artificial” tourist infrastructures or harmful ecological side effects and with the potential to directly improve the well-being of local inhabitants. According to this model, in order to reduce negative impacts of (mass) tourism, tourist flows should be regulated and channelled to remain within the carrying capacity of eco- and social systems. Eco-tourism also aimed to foster respectful interactions between tourists and locals – as well as between humans and the environment.¹¹⁶ With this agenda, eco-tourism¹¹⁷ (the term “sustainable tourism” only became popular after the Rio Earth Summit in 1992) was a child of

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the environmental and One World movements of the 1970s and 1980s, but also traced its roots back to interwar social tourism. Despite its lofty ambitions, bottom-up eco-tourism rarely translated into concrete tourism policies or practices until the mid-1980s.¹¹⁸ Amongst the first to experiment with “alternative” tourism were the Alpine Associations and their proletarian counterpart, the Naturfreunde. Both initiated pilot schemes as early as 1980, for example in the Austrian Virgental, and have continued their engagement to the present.¹¹⁹ Sustainable tourism has also often been linked to the development of national parks, e. g., in case of the Abruzzo or Tauern National Parks in Italy and Austria.¹²⁰ Another prominent variant of eco-tourism was (and is) agro-tourism. Dating back to the early nineteenth century, farm-centred tourism gained popularity throughout Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, profiting from rural nostalgia as well as financial support from the EC/EU, particularly the Leader Initiative funds set up in 1991.¹²¹ Indeed, the European Community (EC) has launched a number of schemes since the 1980s that aim at utilizing sustainable tourism for regional development, particularly in marginal areas. Prominent examples of such agro-tourism initiatives can be found in Wallonia (since 1976), Italy (since the 1950s, but booming in the 1990s due to EU funds), Slovenia and Croatia (since joining the EU), Germany, and Austria (in combination with biosphere reserves/ UNESCO).¹²² Conversely, tourism has been integrated into various national and EU initiatives for sustainable development, including the LIFE Programme initiated in 1992 as the EU’s primary funding instrument for environmental and climate action.¹²³ EU funding (e. g. European Development Fund, European Social Fund, Cohesion Fund, European Agricultural Fund, European Maritime and Fisheries Fund) also supported the creation of a growing network of thematic hiking trails and regions (e. g. on wine, cheese, olive oil, etc.) – a way of branding the cultural, natural, and culinary heritage of European peripheral regions as particularly European and sustainable.¹²⁴ These examples demonstrate that “tourism” was not a monolithic, straightforward phenomenon – and nor was its relation to nature, landscapes, and the environment: tourist interests often clashed with each other – sometimes opposing, sometimes joining forces with environmental stakeholders and demands. Eco-tourism was also not without its ambivalences, increasing environmental awareness but also fostering the commodification of nature and opening up formerly less-developed regions for “alternative” tourism (followed soon after by mass tourism). With the environmental zeitgeist of the time, the notion of eco-tourism also found its way into broader political debates of the 1970s. In 1976, Western European nations prompted the creation of a special OECD committee to investigate the environmental impact of the tourism industry. This expert group, composed

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mainly of employees of government ministries, worked out framework conditions for the member states to implement environmental politics in the tourism sector.¹²⁵ Its report assessed the general situation of tourism and the environment, including an outlook on future projects and their anticipated environmental effects as well as 19 case studies.¹²⁶ In 1980, the OECD published the summary which stated that “market mechanisms alone cannot be expected to ensure that environmental degradation will not take place”.¹²⁷ Therefore, to compensate for the environmental deficiencies of market-based developments, OECD countries would have to implement appropriate regulations, including environmental education, financing measures to limit air and water pollution, establishing environmental standards and regulatory instruments, and finally the planning and management of tourism areas according to environmental criteria.¹²⁸ Given OECD’s role as Western Europe’s most important lobby organization for economic growth, this initiative demonstrates that the issue of environmental protection had permeated to the very core of tourism politics in the late 1970s. This translated into national wastewater treatment, garbage removal, and spatial planning strategies in the 1980s, particularly in mass tourism destinations that had been transformed into urban centres within only a few decades and thus often lacked the necessary public infrastructure capacities. Changes in policy were often reactions to worsening environmental conditions as well as to vocal environmental protests from citizens and (sometimes) the tourists themselves.¹²⁹ From the late 1970s onwards, for example, a number of algae infestations plagued the waters of the North Sea, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean; caused by an oversupply of nutrients from agriculture and lack of sewage treatment, the algae resulted in declining tourism. To prevent this, tourist regions introduced regulatory measures, from sewage treatment to building rules and green taxes, and sometimes altered tourism policies in general, e. g. to encourage a more environmentally friendly “quality tourism”.¹³⁰ A certain degree of environmentalism also entered the tourism industry itself.¹³¹ Being environmentally conscientious was good business: it made individual tourist enterprises more resource- and cost-efficient (e. g., by not replacing towels daily) and gave a boost to their reputations in an especially image-sensitive business sector. Because of this strategic dimension, labelling tourist enterprises and locations as eco-friendly has frequently been accused of being greenwashing – with regard to the tourism industry and to (eco)tourists themselves, who open up scenic, remote areas to mainstream tourism and consume precious resources on site and while travelling – an inherent ambivalence of (nature) tourism that more than 150 years of heated debate have not been able to solve.

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4 Summary This chapter has explored the ambivalent relations of tourism, regional development, and nature protection in twentieth-century (Western) Europe, focusing on activities from NGOs, local, regional, national, and transnational authorities to regulate, encourage, or channel tourism as a social phenomenon, economic driver, and ecological impact factor. (Mass) tourism was (and is) a pan-European phenomenon – not least because Europeans cross borders in ever-larger numbers to reach and explore (new) tourist destinations. Reactions to tourism and its environmental impact can be located on several spatial scales, from the local to the global. The first efforts to coordinate the activities of the tourism industry at the European level were made as early as the 1920s, although most of the initiatives were short-lived. Although the global economic crisis of this period affected all countries in Europe, reactions to it were characterized more by nationalism than European solidarity and cooperation, with tourism being promoted as an instrument of national (economic and spiritual) recovery, politicizing and instrumentalizing nature and landscapes as national treasures and “fountains of youth”. At the same time, the popular transnational workers’ organization Naturfreunde demonstrates the opportunities and limits of merging leisure/ tourism and nature conservation – demanding both greater access to natural beauties and effective measures for nature protection but with no further consideration as to how to bridge the tensions between these goals. Bourgeois nature conservationists disdained such attempts at (mass) nature tourism. As part of a cosmopolitan elite, they viewed (nature) tourism through a culturally conservative lens that in turn rarely appealed to local tourism stakeholders. As a result of these factors, there is little evidence of a European moment that transcended national and social boundaries during the interwar period. In the tourism sector, at least, this lack of internationalism and inclusiveness changed fundamentally since the late 1940s. While reconstruction efforts in the immediate post-war years were largely nation-state based, both the Marshall Plan and the OEEC shaped Western European tourism for decades – not only helping finance vital tourist infrastructures, but also influencing commercial tourism, and, since the 1970s, environmental policies. Alternative forms of (nature) tourism, such as nature or national parks, established a European moment of their own – translating into a pan-European network of landscapes which were utilized for tourism but also under protection. In connection with the growing environmental awareness of the late twentieth century, these activities also pioneered new, bottom-up forms of soft and eco-tourism, which later received special EU support. In sum, the histories of tourism, regional development,

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and nature protection were not only entangled in manifold ways, but also interand co-dependent on European processes and developments. Many questions are still up for debate, however, including such fundamental ones such as the aggregated numbers of domestic and foreign tourism across Europe, or the respective quality of European tourism in global comparison. PostCold-War histories of tourism and nature protection present a particular lacuna. We know little about how the collapse of the Iron Curtain affected travel throughout and beyond Europe; in addition, the history of eco-tourism has also barely been explored. And, last but not least, there is still much to be learned about how tourism might have contributed to the creation of a shared European identity and environmental consciousness, for example by challenging national stereotypes and creating awareness for the beauty and fragility of European natural landscapes and environments, or whether it rather functioned as a (semi)colonial force,¹³² strengthening preconceived notions and socio-economic power relations between (urban) centres and (rural) peripheries as well as between classes, for tourist destinations were often socially stratified – one of the many ambivalences of tourism as a social and environmental phenomenon.¹³³

Notes  Hans M. Enzensberger, “Vergebliche Brandung der Ferne. Eine Theorie des Tourismus”, Merkur 12 (1958): 701– 720.  John K. Walton, “Histories of Tourism”, in The SAGE Handbook of Tourism Studies, ed. Tazim Jamal and Mike Robinson (London: Sage, 2012), 115 – 129, here 117.  Christine Keitz, Reisen als Leitbild: Die Entstehung des modernen Massentourismus in Deutschland (Munich: dtv, 1997).  Michael Dower, “Tourism and Conservation in Europe”, Existics 39 (1975): 192– 195.  Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Tourismus und Naturschutz – die internationale Dimension einer schwierigen Beziehung”, in Wenn sich alle in der Natur erholen, ed. Hans Werner Frohn and Friedemann Schmoll (Bonn: Bundesamt für Naturschutz, 2009), 185 – 205, here 195.  For an overview, see Scott Moranda, “The Emergence of an Environmental History of Tourism”, Journal of Tourism History 7 (2015): 268 – 289.  Exceptions include: Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Eric G. E. Zuelow, ed., Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History (Farnham/Burlington: Routledge, 2011).  Most notably: John Urry, Consuming Places (London/New York: Routledge, 1995); David Crouch and Nina Lübbren eds., Visual Culture and Tourism (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2003); Cord Pagenstecher, Der bundesdeutsche Tourismus: Ansätze zu einer Visual History: Urlaubsprospekte, Reiseführer, Fotoalben 1950 – 1990 (Hamburg: Dr. Kovac, 2003).  Heike Wolter, “Ich harre aus im Land und geh, ihm fremd”: Die Geschichte des Tourismus in der DDR (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2009); Christopher Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat: Tourismus in

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der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012); Scott Moranda, The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism, and Dictatorship in East Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Diane P. Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2013).  Bruno Klaus Lampasiak, Leo Gruber, and Manfred Pils, Berg frei – Mensch frei – Welt frei! Eine Chronik der internationalen Naturfreundebewegung von den Anfängen der Arbeiterbewegung bis zum Zeitalter der Globalisierung (1895 – 2005) (Vienna: Naturfreunde, 2005).  Laura Lee Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880 – 1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).  Hasso Spode, “Ein Seebad für zwanzigtausend Volksgenossen: Zur Grammatik und Geschichte des fordistischen Urlaubs”, in Reisekultur in Deutschland: Von der Weimarer Republik zum “Dritten Reich”, ed. Peter J. Brenner (Tübingen: De Gruyter, 1997), 7– 47; Shelley Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).  Christine Keitz, “Die Anfänge des modernen Massentourismus in der Weimarer Republik”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 33 (1993): 179 – 209.  Frank Bajohr, Unser Hotel ist judenfrei: Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003).  Susanne Ude-Koeller, “‘Um einen Rundblick zu erschließen…’: Zum Tourismus der ‘Schönen Aussicht’ im Harz um 1900”, Tourismus Journal 2 (1998): 401– 425.  Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity 1885 – 1945 (London: Harvard University Press, 2004); Clifford O’Neill, “‘The Most Magical Corner of England’: Tourism, Preservation and the Development of the Lake District, 1919 – 39”, in Histories of Tourism, Representation, Identity and Conflict, ed. John K. Walton (Clevedon et al.: Channel View, 2005), 228 – 244.  Alastair Durie, “No Holiday this Year? The Depression of the 1930s and Tourism in Scotland”, Journal of Tourism History 2 (2010): 67– 82.  Victor T. C. Middleton and Leonard J. Lickorish, British Tourism: The Remarkable Story of Growth (London: Routledge, 2005), 7.  Zsolt Nagy, Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy, 1918 – 1941 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2017), 165 – 230; Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1999).  Christopher Kopper, “Die Reise als Ware: Die Bedeutung der Pauschalreise für den westdeutschen Massentourismus nach 1945”, Contemporary History 4 (2007): 61– 83, here 61– 63.  Frank Schipper, Igor Tchoukarine, and Sune Bechmann Pedersen, The History of the European Travel Commission 1948 – 2018 (Brussels: ETC, 2018).  Ibid. After World War II, UIOOPT was restructured as the International Union of Official Travel Organizations, a non-governmental organization dedicated to improving the role of tourism in international trade; it was later transformed into the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, in operation since 1974). Jacques Lévy, L’invention du monde: Une géographie de la mondialisation (Grenoble: Presses de Science Po, 2013).  Schipper et al., “European Travel”, 42.  Heinz Wolfgang Arndt, The Economic Lessons of the Nineteen-Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944).  Baranowski and Furlough, “Being Elsewhere”, 1– 34.  Ibid., 16.

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 Gustav A. Otruba, Hitlers “Tausend-Mark-Sperre” und die Folgen für Österreichs Fremdenverkehr (1933 – 1938) (Linz: Trauner, 1983).  Baranowski and Furlough, “Being Elsewhere”, 16.  Pieter Judson, “‘Every German Visitor has a Völkisch Obligation he Must Fulfill’: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire, 1880 – 1918”, in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford/ New York: Berg, 2002), 147– 168; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Schocken, 1989).  Aruna D’Souza, “’Riviera Dreaming’: Tourist Artist Helped Create Image of French Riviera”, Art in America (July 2001), cited in: Verena Winiwarter, “Nationalized Nature on Picture Postcards: Subtexts of Tourism from an Environmental Perspective”, Global Environment 1 (2008): 192– 215, here 203.  Ibid., 204.  Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organizations of Leisure in Fascist Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).  Hasso Spode, “Die NS-Gemeinschaft ‘Kraft durch Freude’ – ein Volk auf Reisen?”, in: Zur Sonne, zur Freiheit! Beiträge zur Tourismusgeschichte, ed. Hasso Spode (Berlin: Verlag für universitäre Kommunikation, 1991), 79 – 93.  Spode, “Seebad”.  Susan Barton, Working-Class Organisations and Popular Tourism, 1840 – 1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).  Ute Hasenöhrl, “Vergessene Traditionen: Der Touristenverein ‘Die Naturfreunde’ und der proletarische Naturschutz”, in Spurensuche: Lina Hähnle und die demokratischen Wurzeln des Naturschutzes, ed. Hans-Werner Frohn and Jürgen Rosebrock (Essen: Klartext, 2017), 147– 160, here 148 – 149.  Lampasiak et al., Berg frei, 38, 42.  “Der verbotene Weg”, Der Naturfreund 10 (1906): 138 – 139, here 138 (own translation).  Hasenöhrl, “Vergessene Traditionen”; John A. Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900 – 1940 (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2007).  John Alexander Williams, “‘The Chords of the German Soul are Tuned to Nature’: The Movement to Preserve the Natural Heimat from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich”, Central European History 29 (1996): 339 – 384, here 353.  Lekan, Imagining; Hans-Werner Frohn and Friedemann Schmoll eds. Wenn sich alle in der Natur erholen, wo erholt sich dann die Natur? Naturschutz, Freizeitnutzung, Erholungsvorsorge und Sport – gestern, heute, morgen (Bonn: Bundesamt Naturschutz, 2009).  John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2011).  Cédric Humair, Martin Knoll, and Laurent Tissot, “How to Deal with Regional Tourism? (Historical and Interdisciplinary Reflections)”, Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft 9 (2017): 5 – 31.  Harald Engler and Ute Hasenöhrl, “Erholungsplanung und Nutzungskonflikte im Ost-West Vergleich: Das Rheinland und Brandenburg in den 1950er bis 1970er Jahren”, Geschichte im Westen 32 (2017): 165 – 198.  Wöbse, “Tourismus und Naturschutz”, 195.  Patrizia Battilani, “El turismo en el Mediterráneo: Una perspectiva comparativa”, Mediterráneo Económico 7 (2005): 382– 387; Annunziata Berrino, Storia del turismo in Italia (Bologna: il Mulino, 2011), 257– 265; Alexander Wilde, “Zwischen Zusammenbruch und Währungsreform: Fremdenverkehr in den westlichen Besatzungszonen”, in Goldstrand und Teutonengrill: Kulturund Sozialgeschichte des Tourismus in Deutschland 1945 bis 1989, ed. Hasso Spode (Berlin: Verlag für universitäre Kommunikation, 1996), 87– 103.

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 https://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=eng (accessed 23 March 2020).  Max Gafner, “Der Fremdenverkehr im internationalen Konkurrenzkampf”, in Tourismus und Marshallplan: Referate und Tätigkeitsbericht 1947/48 des Schweizerischen Fremdenverkehrsverbandes (Zürich: Schweizerischer Fremdenverkehrsverband, 1949), 7– 35.  Daniel Barbezat, “The Marshall Plan and the Origin of the OEEC”, in Explorations in OEEC History, ed. Richard T. Griffiths (Paris: OECD, 1997), 33 – 48, here 34– 35.  Zuelow, “The Necessity”, 5.  Schipper et al., “European Travel”, 21.  Barry Eichengreen, “The Market and the Marshall Plan”, in The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After, ed. Martin Schain (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 131– 46, here 131.  Robert Groß, Martin Knoll, and Katharina Scharf, “Where the Histories of the European Recovery Program (ERP)/Marshall Plan and European Tourism Meet”, in Transformative Recovery? The European Recovery Program (ERP)/Marshall Plan in European Tourism, eds. Robert Groß, Martin Knoll, and Katharina Scharf (Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 2020), 7– 32, here 19.  Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945 – 1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).  Counterpart funds were established to convert foreign aid into accounts in the domestic currency of the recipient countries. The US administration delivered goods and food aid to the recipient governments, which then sold the aid deliveries in local currency. The participating governments were obliged to collect the proceeds to set up counterpart funds.  Robert Groß, Die Beschleunigung der Berge: Eine Umweltgeschichte des Wintertourismus in Vorarlberg/Österreich, 1920 – 2010 (Cologne/Vienna: Böhlau, 2019), 140.  Semeraro Pasini, “Endogenous or Exogenous Recovery?”, in Groß et al., Transformative Recovery?, 45; Patrizia Battilani and Francesca Fauri, “Marshall Plan Help to the Airline Sector and Its Impact on the Development of Tourism in the Italian Regions”, in Groß et al., Transformative Recovery?, 91– 116.  Brian A. McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 113; on the Monnet plan, see Milward, Reconstruction, 101– 102; René Girault and Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, eds., Le Plan Marshall et le relèvement économique de l’Europe (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique France, 1993).  Jonathan Gershuny, Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Postindustrial Society (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).  John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the TwentiethCentury World (New York: Norton, 2000).  Ellen Furlough, “Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998): 247– 286; Christopher Kopper, “Eine komparative Geschichte des Massentourismus im Europa der 1930er bis 1980er Jahre: Deutschland, Frankreich und Großbritannien im Vergleich”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009): 129 – 148.  “1967: International Tourist Year”, 5 – 11.  Engler and Hasenöhrl, “Erholungsplanung”, 170 – 171.  Rudolf Eberhard, Aktuelle Fragen des deutschen Fremdenverkehrs (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), 63 – 90; Brian King and Michael Pearlman, “Planning for Tourism at Local and Regional Levels: Principles, Practices, and Possibilities”, in The SAGE Handbook of Tourism Studies, 416 – 431.

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 Dirk van Laak, “Planung, Planbarkeit und Planungseuphorie”, Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte 16.02. 2010, http://docupedia.de/zg/van_laak_planung_v1_de_2010 (accessed 3 April 2020).  Engler and Hasenöhrl, “Erholungsplanung”, 178; Dimitrios Trakolis, “Carrying Capacity – An Old Concept: Significance for the Management of Urban Forest Resources”, New Medit 3 (2003): 58 – 64.  Michael Fahlbusch, “Ein fragwürdiger Philanthrop: Die subversiven Aktivitäten des deutschvölkischen Stiftungsgründers Toepfer in der Schweiz”, Sozial.Geschichte 12 (2013): 39 – 68.  Jens Ivo Engels, “Rückenwind oder Hemmschuh? Tourismus und politische Optionen des Vereinsnaturschutzes am Beispiel des Vereins Naturschutzpark in den 1950er- und 1960er-Jahren”, in Frohn and Schmoll, ed., “Wenn sich alle in der Natur erholen”, 125 – 145.  Walter Strzygowski, Europa braucht Naturparke! Vorschläge zum Schutz der schönsten Landschaften Europas (Horn: Ferdinand Berger, 1959).  Engler and Hasenöhrl, “Erholungsplanung”, 171– 176.  Deutscher Rat für Landespflege, ed., Entwicklung der Naturparke in Nordrhein-Westfalen: Ergebnisse von Kolloquien des Deutschen Rates für Landespflege in den Jahren 1979 und 1980 (Bonn: Bundesamt Naturschutz, 1981).  Europarc Federation, ed., People, Passion, Protected Areas: 40 Years Working for Nature (Regensburg: Europarc, 2013), 12.  There is very little research on the European history of nature parks so far. For national studies, see, e. g. Verband der Naturparke Österreichs, ed., 20 Jahre Verband der Naturparke Österreichs, 1995 bis 2015 (Graz: Verband der Naturparke Österreichs, 2015); Romain Lajarge and Nacima Baron-Yellès, “Développement et protection à l’œuvre dans les territoires de nature: Les Parcs Naturels Régionaux face à la réforme territoriale”, Bulletin de l’Association de Géographes Français 88, no. 4 (2011): 375 – 386.  Europarc, ed., People.  Axel Schildt, Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘Zeitgeist’ in der Bundesrepublik der fünfziger Jahre (Hamburg: Hans Christian, 1995).  Peter Lyth, “‘Gimme a Ticket on an Airplane’: The Jet Engine and the Revolution in Leisure Air Travel, 1960 – 75”, in Construction of a Tourism Industry in the 19th and 20th Century: International Perspectives, ed. Laurent Tissot (Neuchatel: Editions Alphil, 2003), 111– 122; Moritz Glaser, Wandel durch Tourismus: Spanien als Strand Europas, 1950 – 1983 (Konstanz: UVK, 2017).  Urry, Consuming Places; Urry and Larsen, Tourist Gaze.  Pagenstecher, Der bundesdeutsche Tourismus.  Hans-Werner Prahl, “Die Entwicklung der modernen Touristik seit 1945”, in Moderner Tourismus: Tendenzen und Aussichten, ed. Dietrich Storbeck (Trier: Geographische Gesellschaft, 1990), 119 – 136; Otto Schneider, Die Ferien-Macher: Eine gründliche und grundsätzliche Betrachtung über das Jahrhundert des Tourismus (Hamburg: Tourcon, 2001).  Spode, ed., Goldstrand, 11– 68; Magdalena Banaszkiewicz, Nelson Graburn, and Sabina Owsianowska, “Tourism in (Post)socialist Eastern Europe”, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 15 (2017): 109 – 121.  Stefan Appelius, “Das Reisebüro der DDR”, Deutschland Archiv 09.07. 2011, https://www.bpb. de/geschichte/zeitgeschichte/deutschlandarchiv/53573/reisebuero-der-ddr?p=all (accessed 28 March 2020); on GDR tourism: Christopher Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat: Tourismus in der DDR (Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2012); on Soviet travel: Koenker, Club Red.  Banaszkiewicz, Graburn, and Owsianowska, “Tourism”.  With approximately 2.6 Mio. datchas in the 1980s, the GDR had the largest concentration of weekend cottages worldwide. See Isolde Dietrich, “Ne Laube, ’n Zaun und ’n Beet: Kleingärten

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und Kleingärtner in der DDR”, in Befremdlich anders: Leben in der DDR, ed. Evemarie Badstübner (Berlin: Dietz, 2004), 374– 414, here 374.  Wöbse, “Tourismus und Naturschutz”, 195.  Ibid., 196.  Ute Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft und Protest: Eine Geschichte der Naturschutz- und Umweltbewegung in Bayern 1945 – 1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 114– 162.  Thomas Lekan, “A ‘Noble Prospect’: Tourism, Heimat, and Conservation on the Rhine, 1880 – 1914”, The Journal of Modern History 81 (2004): 824– 858.  Otto Kraus, Zerstörung der Natur: Unser Schicksal von morgen? Der Naturschutz im Streit der Interessen: Ausgewählte Abhandlungen und Vorträge (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1966); Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft, 163 – 199.  Kopper, “Eine komparative Geschichte”; John Fletcher, “Economics of International Tourism”, The SAGE Handbook of Tourism Studies, 166 – 187.  “Alpen: ‘I fahr’ todsicher nimmer nei’”, Der Spiegel 9 (1977): 62– 79; Andrew Denning, Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).  Wöbse, “Tourismus und Naturschutz”; Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft.  Luigi Piccioni, “Pioneering Sustainable Tourism: The Case of the Abruzzo National Park”, Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft 9 (2017): 87– 113.  McNeill, Something New, 335.  Ibid.  “Sparking Tomorrow’s Tourist Explosion”, The UNESCO Courier XIX, no. 12 (1967): 13 – 14.  Ibid., 11– 13.  Sina Fabian, “Massentourismus und Individualität: Pauschalurlaube westdeutscher Reisender in Spanien während der 1970er- und 1980er-Jahre”, Studies in Contemporary History 13, no. 1 (2016): 61– 85.  Robert Bray and Vladimir Raitz, Flight to the Sun: The Story of the Holiday Revolution (London: Cengage, 2001).  Kerstin Schumann, “Grenzübertritte – das ‘deutsche’ Mittelmeer”, in Endlich Urlaub! Die Deutschen reisen, ed. Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Cologne: DuMont, 1996), 33 – 42, here 40; Sue Wright, “Sun, Sea, Sand and Self-Expression: Mass Tourism as an Individual Experience”, in The Making of Modern Tourism. The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600 – 2000, ed. Hartmut Berghof (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 2002), 181– 202.  Albrecht Steinecke, Tourismus und Luxus (Munich: DVK Verlag, 2019), 107; on Spanish tourism: Sasha. D. Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe’s Peaceful Invasion of Franco’s Spain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); on the transnational history of coastal tourism: John K. Walton, “Seaside Resorts and International Tourism”, in Zuelow, ed., Touring Beyond the Nation, 19 – 36.  “Alpen: ‘I fahr’ todsicher nimmer nei’”.  In 1957/58, only 9 per cent of German holiday makers could afford more than one vacation per year. In 1974, this number had doubled to almost 19 per cent. See: Alfred Koch, “Der Urlaubsreiseverkehr: Eine Untersuchung über das Konsumverhalten der Erholungsreisenden 1958”, Jahrbuch für Fremdenverkehr 7 (1959): 5 – 71, here 13, and Wolfgang Sauer, Urlaubsreisen 1974: Einige Ergebnisse der Reiseanalyse 1974 (Starnberg: Studienkreis für Tourismus, 1975), 10.  Denning, Skiing.  Robert Groß, “Uphill and Downhill Histories: How Winter Tourism Transformed Alpine Regions in Vorarlberg, Austria, 1930 to 1970”, Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft 9 (2017): 115 – 139.

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 Steinecke, Tourismus, 178.  Moranda, “Emergence”, 275.  Ibid., 279.  Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (London: Longmans, 1871).  Kurt Luger and Franz Rest, eds., Der Alpentourismus: Entwicklungspotentiale im Spannungsfeld von Kultur, Ökonomie und Ökologie (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2002).  Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft, 326 – 374.  https://www.argealp.org/de/arge-alp/ueber-uns (accessed 30 March 2020).  Gerardo Budowski, “Tourism and Environmental Conservation: Conflict, Coexistence, or Symbiosis?”, Environmental Conservation 3 (1976): 27– 31, here 28.  Ibid., 27.  Ibid., 31.  Jost Krippendorf, Die Landschaftsfresser: Tourismus und Erholungslandschaft – Verderben oder Segen? (Bern/Stuttgart: Hallwag, 1975); Fred Baumgartner, “Tourismus in der Dritten Welt – Beitrag zur Entwicklung?”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16.09.1978, 275 – 276; Robert Jungk, “Wieviele Touristen pro Hektar Strand? “, Geo 10 (1980), 154– 156.  Peter Haßlacher, ed., Sanfter Tourismus. Theorie und Praxis: Markierung für die westliche Diskussion (Innsbruck: ÖAV, 1989); Bundesamt für Naturschutz, Naturschutz.  The term ecotourism first appeared in the 1980s, an official definition was adopted in 1991 by the International Ecosystem Society. See Piccioni, “Sustainable Tourism”, 87; Michael Romeril, “Tourism and the Environment: Towards a Symbiotic Relationship”, International Journal of Environmental Studies 25 (1985): 215 – 218.  Haßlacher, Sanfter Tourismus; Ingo Mose, “Sanfter Tourismus: Lösung der Tourismusprobleme?”, Geographie und Schule 99 (1996): 2– 10.  E. g., ÖAV-project “Bergsteigerdörfer” (mountaineering villages), initiated in 2008, which seeks to combine regional development and “slow”, infrastructure-extensive tourism in remote Alpine areas. See https://www.bergsteigerdoerfer.org/ (accessed 30 March 2020); on ecotourism in the Alps: Dieter Kramer, Der sanfte Tourismus: Umwelt- und sozialverträglicher Tourismus in den Alpen (Wien: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1983).  Piccioni, Sustainable Tourism; Patrick Kupper and Anna-Katharina Wöbse, eds., Geschichte des Nationalparks Hohe Tauern (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2013).  In 1991, the EU published a first code of conduct for farmers offering agro-tourism. See Fact Sheet “Der Leader Ansatz”, https://www.netzwerk-laendlicher-raum.de/leader/leader-methode/, 5 (accessed 30 March 2020); Armin Ganser, “Zur Geschichte touristischer Produkte in der Bundesrepublik”, in Spode, ed., Goldstrand, 185 – 197, here 192– 193.  Irma Potocnik Slavic and Serge Schmitz, “Farm Tourism Across Europe”, European Countryside 4 (2013): 265 – 274, here 268 – 270.  https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/section/life/life-history-life (accessed 30 March 2020).  Daniela Beck, “Bedeutung von Genussregionen für Regionalentwicklung und Tourismus am Beispiel von GenussRegionen mit dem Leitprodukt Lamm”. Msc diss., BOKU, Vienna, 2017.  OECD, ed., The Impact of Tourism on the Environment: General Report (Paris: OECD Publications and Information Center, 1980), 5.  Ibid.  Ibid., 8.  Ibid.  On Spain in the 1970s: Moritz Glaser, “Urlaub als Umweltbelastung: Kritik am Paradigma ‘Wohlstand durch Tourismus’ in Spanien während der 1970er-Jahre”, Zeithistorische Forschungen

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14, no. 3 (2017): 420 – 441; on France: Patrick Young, Enacting Brittany Tourism and Culture in Provincial France, 1871 – 1939 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).  Steinecke, Tourismus, 107– 278.  Christoph Hennig, Reiselust: Touristen, Tourismus und Urlaubskultur (Frankfurt am Main/ Leipzig: Suhrkamp, 1997), 116 – 123; Steinecke, Tourismus.  Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargain: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998).  According to Rüdiger Hachtmann, the role tourism played in the birth of “modern Europe” is still a major lacuna in European historiography. See Rüdiger Hachtmann, “Tourismus und Tourismusgeschichte”, Docupedia Zeitgeschichte, 22.12. 2010, https://docupedia.de/zg/Tour ismus_und_Tourismusgeschichte (accessed 4 April 2020).

Selected Bibliography Anderson, Ben. Cities, Mountains, and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Baranowski, Shelley, and Ellen Furlough, eds. Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Barton, Susan. Working-Class Organisations and Popular Tourism, 1840 – 1970. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Berghof, Hartmut, ed. The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600 – 2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Engler, Harald, and Ute Hasenöhrl. “Erholungsplanung und Nutzungskonflikte im Ost-West Vergleich: Das Rheinland und Brandenburg in den 1950er bis 1970er Jahren”. Geschichte im Westen 32 (2017): 165 – 198. Frohn, Hans-Werner, and Friedemann Schmoll, eds. Wenn sich alle in der Natur erholen, wo erholt sich dann die Natur? Naturschutz, Freizeitnutzung, Erholungsvorsorge und Sport – gestern, heute, morgen. Bonn: Bundesamt für Naturschutz, 2009. Glaser, Moritz. Wandel durch Tourismus: Spanien als Strand Europas, 1950 – 1983. Konstanz: UVK, 2017. Görlich, Christopher. Urlaub vom Staat: Tourismus in der DDR. Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2012. Groß, Robert. Die Beschleunigung der Berge: Eine Umweltgeschichte des Wintertourismus in Vorarlberg/Österreich, 1920 – 2010. Cologne/Vienna: Böhlau, 2019. Groß, Robert, Martin Knoll, and Katharina Scharf, eds. Transformative Recovery? The European Recovery Program (ERP)/Marshall Plan in European Tourism. Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 2020. Hall, Michael C., and Stephen J. Page. The Geography of Tourism and Recreation: Environment, Place and Space. London/New York: Routledge 2007. Humair, Cédric, Martin Knoll, and Laurent Tissot. “How to Deal with Regional Tourism?” Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft 9 (2017): 5 – 31. Koenker, Diane P. Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Drama. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2013.

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Kopper, Christopher. “Eine komparative Geschichte des Massentourismus im Europa der 1930er bis 1980er Jahre: Deutschland, Frankreich und Großbritannien im Vergleich”. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009): 129 – 148. Koshar, Rudy, ed. Histories of Leisure. Oxford/New York: Berg, 2002. Löfgren, Orvar. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1999. Moranda, Scott. “The Emergence of an Environmental History of Tourism”. Journal of Tourism History 7 (2015): 268 – 289. Pagenstecher, Cord. Der bundesdeutsche Tourismus: Ansätze zu einer Visual History: Urlaubsprospekte, Reiseführer, Fotoalben 1950 – 1990. Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac, 2003. Piccioni, Luigi. “Pioneering Sustainable Tourism: The Case of the Abruzzo National Park”. Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft 9 (2017): 87 – 113. Schipper, Frank, Igor Tchoukarine, and Sune Bechmann Pedersen. The History of the European Travel Commission 1948 – 2018. Brussels: European Travel Commission, 2018. Steinecke, Albrecht. Tourismus und Luxus. Munich: UVK Verlag, 2019. Tissot, Laurent, ed. Construction of a Tourism Industry in the 19th and 20th Century: International Perspectives. Neuchatel: Editions Alphil, 2003. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage, 2011. Walton, John K., ed. Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity and Conflict, Clevedon et al.: Channel View Publications, 2005. Winiwarter, Verena. “Nationalized Nature on Picture Postcards: Subtexts of Tourism from an Environmental Perspective”. Global Environment 1 (2008): 192 – 215. Zuelow, Eric G. E., ed. Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History, Farnham/Burlington: Routledge, 2011.

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9 Moving Mountains: The Protection of the Alps Abstract This chapter analyses how throughout the long twentieth century people strived to protect the Alps. After 1900, individual critics of mass tourism were joined by the nascent nature conservation movement, which perceived the rapid growth of Alpine tourism as a threat to both the culture and nature of the Alps. The following decades saw the birth of international conservation organizations, the creation of new protected areas, and the introduction of national laws and international conventions on species protection, but also substantial growth in Alpine tourism and the rapidly expanding exploitation of Alpine waters for electricity generation. From the 1980 onwards, Alpine conservation was increasingly informed and inspired by the environmental movement and triggered by controversies surrounding the construction of large-scale road infrastructure for transit traffic across the Alps. As this chapter shows, all these developments had distinctly European dimensions. Keywords Alps; nature conservation; tourism; water power; transit traffic The Alps, a curving mountain range, 1,200 kilometres long and 250 kilometres wide at their broadest, are the most extensive mountainous area of Europe (see figure 1). While many of its mountains rise to remarkable altitudes, with the highest peaks in the Western Alps reaching well over 4,000 metres above sea level, human settlements are concentrated in the many valleys, where the climate is more temperate and the vegetation lusher. Most remarkably, the Alps are surrounded by areas that for centuries have been among the most densely populated parts of Europe. The Alps thus arguably constitute Europe’s most central periphery. As such, they present an obstacle to transport, travel, and communication between political, commercial, and cultural centres in the south and north (less so between east and west due to the Alps’ geographical east-west orientation); in particular, they separate the Italian peninsula from the rest of Europe. Consequently, there have long been efforts to overcome this barrier by facilitating transport and exchange across the Alps. Beginning in the eighteenth century, writers and travellers started to depict the Alps in a new way: as Europe’s most sublime landscape. Once merely a hindrance on the journey to Italy for young aristocrats embarking on the Grand https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-010

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Figure 1: Map of the Alps. In the political order established since World War I, eight states share the Alpine territory, from south-west to south-east: France, Monaco, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia (formerly Yugoslavia). There is no universal agreement on the exact territory covered by the Alps, since this depends on how the region is defined, and such definitions have been and continue to be contested. Map: Wikipedia Commons.

Tour, the Alps became a destination in their own right. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as the Alps were discovered as the “Playground of Europe”,¹ the noblemen were joined by others, first bourgeois travellers and later on hikers and climbers from among the social elite, as well as a growing number of “ordinary tourists”. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Alps had not only developed into a prime tourist destination, but had also become the archetype of the mountain landscape, to which all other mountainous areas in Europe and beyond were compared.² The identification of the Alps as the European mountain range by Europeans and in the European diaspora can be seen in the use of the word “alpine” as a common designation for any mountainous area. The descendants of European settlers christened hundreds of mountain ranges (and in some cases mere hilly landscapes) all over the world with the name “Alps” or “Switzerland” – for Switzerland and the Alps had come to be perceived as virtually synonymous.³

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This new status of the Alps was inspired by the experience of their overwhelming mightiness. The thrill of getting close to this uncomforting nature and maybe even exposing oneself to its dangers was (and still is) an integral part of the widespread fascination with the Alps.⁴ It was only at the turn to the twentieth century that a growing number of people started to discover that these mighty and frightening mountains not only could pose a threat to human lives, but also were themselves threatened by human actions and thus needed protection both by humans and from humans. From this moment on the Alps moved people in new ways. The protection of the Alps evolved over “the long twentieth century” in three main stages, all of which had distinctly European dimensions. The first stage occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century, when individual critics of mass tourism were joined by the nascent nature conservation movement, which perceived the rapid growth of Alpine tourism as a threat to both the culture and nature of the Alps. This burgeoning nature conservation movement grew surprisingly quickly and it successfully propelled the Alps to the forefront of European and global nature conservation. But World War I put a halt to the activities of nature conservationists in the Alps and beyond. In the interwar years, nature conservation struggled to ensure the continuation of what had previously seemed to be securely established, while after World War II conservation efforts experienced a renewed blossoming. This second stage saw, on the one hand, the birth of international conservation organizations, the creation of new protected areas and the introduction of national laws and international conventions on species protection. On the other hand, this period also saw substantial growth of Alpine tourism in both the summer and winter seasons, as well as an additional threat to the unspoiled Alpine nature: the exploitation of Alpine waters for electricity generation, although not new, was rapidly expanding. The third stage of Alpine conservation took off in the 1980s and was triggered by controversies over the construction of large-scale road infrastructure for transit traffic across the Alps; it was informed and inspired by the young environmental movement, which had emerged just a decade previously. In contrast to the earlier organizations for Alpine nature protection, which were firmly grounded in urban middle classes living mainly outside the Alpine region, this new movement recruited many spokespeople and supporters in the Alpine valleys themselves. It also no longer put the conservation of unspoiled Alpine nature at the forefront of its efforts, but rather stressed the livelihoods of the inhabitants of the Alps, their present well-being and their future opportunities. This last stage was also marked by the enlargement and economic integration of the European Communities (EC) resp. European Union (EU) and the establishment of the European Economic Area.

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1 Emergence and Consolidation of Nature Conservation In the context of nineteenth-century nation building, historical monuments and places across Europe and beyond came to be seen as sites of public value and national pilgrimage. Public campaigns aimed to preserve such sites and to make them accessible to the public. Some of these activities involved the preservation of areas of land and the protection of natural features. This was, however, a mostly unintentional side effect, e. g., when the Prussian state put the Drachenfels, a striking rock overlooking the Rhine River and containing a picturesque castle ruin, under protection in 1836. The protection of nature moved to the centre of attention only after the turn of the century, and the nature conservation movement that evolved during this time took the form of countless local and national associations but was global in its spread and ambitions. The idea of nature protection was built on a discourse that constructed nature as a limited good severely endangered by encroaching civilization. In the United States, this centred around concern about the closing of their famous “frontier”, but Europeans, too, felt that they were living at a historical turning point in which the world was being stripped of its last mysteries. Alongside continued belief in the achievements of European civilization, a growing body of dissenting voices pointed to the costs and consequences of this much-acclaimed progress. These voices suggested that, with the loss of its natural and traditional cultural landscapes, civilization was being deprived of its origins as well as its “other”, its corrective and curative outside. In the long run, it was feared, European societies would collectively lose their identity and sanity and, thus, human civilization – which for contemporary Europeans was, of course, equated with European civilization – was endangering its own continued existence.⁵ In all of Europe and beyond, the nature conservation movement was dominated by the urban middle class. The educated urban citizens who initiated and supported nature conservation read Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Darwin and met in learned societies. They did not make their living by working the land; rather, they revelled in nature and during their excursions developed a keen sense for changes in the land. Spending most of their time in cities, nature conservationists found the objects of their desire in rural areas inside and outside Europe (see chapter 3 by de Bont). Some of these areas were fairly close to the urban centres, while others were highly remote. While the former were primarily hailed as cultural landscapes, the latter were regarded as comparatively unspoiled and untouched by civilization and thus came close to embodying the evolving ideal of wild nature or wilderness. These natural areas were also

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home to rare species threatened by extinction, some of which soon became iconic symbols of nature conservation. In the Alps, the eagle, bear, and ibex received special attention as well as the edelweiss and Alpine rose.⁶ Whereas the main threats to nature in densely populated areas were generally considered to be industrialization and urban sprawl, in Alpine areas it was mass tourism and increasingly the use of waterpower to generate electricity which concerned nature conservationists most. Both these threats to Alpine nature extended across national borders and thus had clear European dimensions. Of seemingly more limited scope were conflicts that evolved around local hunting, fishing, and gathering, as well as logging and livestock farming. Such issues often induced local residents to oppose nature conservation ideas because the conservation measures restricted their land-use practices and, unless accompanied by adequate compensation, tended to have a negative effect on their livelihoods. Such local conflicts, however, were also framed by developments on the European level. As continental and global markets integrated in the wake of industrialized production and revolutionized transport, many agricultural and forestry products from the Alps were no longer able to compete. This put Alpine economies under pressure. Agriculture and forestry underwent a process of extensification and for several decades Alpine valleys saw significant out-migration.⁷ This constellation in the Alps – the combination of marginal economic value and high symbolic and emotional value as along with national and international fame – helped to make the Alps into a hotspot of nature conservation. In the absence of more powerful economic interests, the chances of being able to realize nature protection measures were considerably greater, a circumstance that has also been observed in other economically marginal parts of the world, most notably the American West.⁸ The conservation and restoration of nature that took place, however, was only partly the result of intentional human action. Nature itself reacted to the extensification of land use by reforesting mountainsides (albeit slowly, due to the harsh climate) as well as by repopulating areas with species once displaced or eradicated by humans. One example is the red deer, which had essentially disappeared from the Swiss Alps by the end of the nineteenth century only to re-enter Switzerland from the east at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many decades later, another returning migrant, this time spreading from both the southern and western parts of Alps, was the wolf, while a growing number of bears, originating from Slovenia, began to stroll through the eastern Alps. Hunting and nature conservation laws, as well as the establishment of protected areas, helped these and other creatures to return on their own. Others, most famously the ibex and the bearded vulture, were reintroduced by conservationists during the twentieth century.⁹

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The nature conservationists’ attitudes towards tourism were complex and ambivalent. While they detested and feared modern mass tourism and its infrastructures such as grand hotels and cable cars, they propagated and widely practiced so-called nature-friendly tourism, which mainly consisted of quiet and contemplative hiking with overnight stays in huts and simple hotels. This activity was seen as a way for civilized men (women, who constituted a small minority within conservationist elites, were of less concern) to reconnect and reconcile with wild nature. Alpine clubs often supported conservationists and there was a considerable overlap in membership between hiking and conservation organizations.¹⁰ In France and Italy, conservationists also teamed up with touring clubs; this was less common in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.¹¹ Sometimes these groups joined forces to counter plans for the installation of hydroelectric plants. Initiatives at the beginning of the twentieth century which saved the Krimml Waterfalls in the Salzburgian High Tauern and the Sils Lake in Switzerland’s Upper Engadin were early instances of such opposition to hydropower utilities.¹² The beginning of the twentieth century was an era of great growth in nature conservation, with initiatives popping up all over Europe within just a few years. One of the most influential figures was the biologist Hugo Conwentz, head of the Prussian state’s newly created Staatliche Stelle für Naturdenkmalpflege (an office for the conservation of natural heritage sites). Conwentz considered the selective preservation of a variety of singular features of nature, like unique trees and small sections of forests, wetlands and swamps, waterfalls and rocks, within a network of natural monuments (Naturdenkmäler) to be superior to the preservation of large stretches of land in parks. He regarded this as particularly suitable for Central Europe, where there were few places untouched by civilization and which was thus unsuitable for American-style national parks. The natural monument became a key concept in nature conservation all over Europe and also guided initiatives in the Alps. Bavaria as well as Austrian crown lands started to register natural monuments and France enacted a law to protect natural sites and monuments in 1906.¹³ Others disagreed with Conwentz and started to combine the concepts of large nature reserves and small natural monuments. At the forefront of this was the Swiss nature conservation movement under the leadership of the naturalist Paul Sarasin. While adopting Conwentz’s concept of the natural monument and engaging in the small-scale preservation of natural landscape features, Swiss conservationists soon decided that the most urgent and valuable action was the establishment of large nature reserves. In 1909, they managed to lay the foundations for the creation of the first national park in Europe, by leasing 20 square kilometres of a mountain valley in the Lower Engadin in southeast

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Switzerland. Additional land was leased in the following years, so that by 1914, when the Swiss federal state took charge of the park, it covered an area of approximately 150 square kilometres. From the very beginning, the Swiss National Park attracted substantial international attention, thanks to active promotion and an emphasis on its scientific value. As early as 1912, the journal Nature praised the park as “a great achievement” and “the most important in Europe” with a comprehensive preservation scheme that even excelled the “celebrated” American national parks.¹⁴ Whereas the United States put emphasis on public recreation and actively promoted tourism in its parks, the Swiss National Park stood for strict preservation and scientific research. For many decades, it served as the global model of what a science-oriented national park should look like.¹⁵ The Swiss model was discussed all over the world, but it was especially influential in neighbouring Alpine areas. The German-Austrian Verein Naturschutzpark, founded in 1909, worked for the creation of three parks, one in each of the “typical German” landscapes: the high mountain Alps, the low mountains of the Central Uplands (Mittelgebirge), and the lowlands of the North German Plain. The park envisioned for the Alps would be a source of cultural identity, but it was also meant to complement the habitat of the Swiss National Park. The association acquired a considerable piece of land in the High Tauern region of the Austrian Alps in 1913. In France that same year, supported by the state forest administration (Direction des Eaux et Fôrets), representatives of the Alpine Club and the Touring Club founded the Association of National Parks of France and its Colonies (Association des parcs nationaux de France et des colonies). At the association’s request, the French state purchased forty square kilometres of land in the department Isère in 1914 with the intention of establishing a national park. The conceptual plans for this Parc de La Bérarde were explicitly modelled after the Swiss National Park.¹⁶ On the international and European level, Sarasin became the counterpart of Conwentz, tirelessly campaigning for his cause and promoting the Swiss National Park as his showcase. His crowning achievement was the organization of the first International Conference on Nature Protection (Conférence Internationale pour la Protection de la Nature) in Bern in 1913, which resulted in the establishment of an international nature protection commission situated in Basel, presided over by himself. The invitations for a follow-up conference had already been issued when, in the summer of 1914, the start of the war abruptly halted this promising initiative.¹⁷ The First World War was a major turning point in nature movements. It put an enduring damper on both the civilizing optimism of the conservation movement and the movement itself. Many nature conservation projects suffered a setback, especially park projects in the Alps. In Switzerland, ideas for further na-

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tional parks were quietly shelved. The plans for the park in Austria’s High Tauern stagnated while the plans for the French Parc national de la Bérarde were abandoned. In the early 1920s, the Association des parcs nationaux disbanded and, as elsewhere, the remaining French nature protection organizations set their sights on smaller reserves. Efforts to establish larger reserves were shifted to France’s African colonies; other European colonial powers, especially Britain and Belgium, did the same.¹⁸ In Italy, the interwar years saw the end of the plans for a protected area directly adjacent to the Swiss National Park. However, a decision by King Victor Emmanuel III to donate land to the state as a public park dramatically changed the situation. In response, ideas of nature conservation revived rapidly and in 1922 the Italian state created its first national park in the king’s former hunting grounds of Gran Paradiso in the western Alps. The park was overseen by an independent scientific commission that emphasized research on and protection of the ibex. A second Italian national park, established in the Abruzzi in 1923, was dedicated to the protection of the bear.¹⁹ In Berchtesgaden in Bavaria and the Triglav in Slovenia (at the time part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia established in 1918), protected areas were created in the 1920s, with both areas serving as the nucleus of national parks established several decades later. In Switzerland and in Bavaria, nature conservation enjoyed fairly broad support in the middle classes, as manifested by each region’s League for Nature Protection (Bund für Naturschutz) founded in 1909 and 1913, which attracted tens of thousands of members by the end of the 1930s.²⁰ Such accomplishments cannot hide the fact, however, that nature conservation in the interwar years was mostly concerned with ensuring the continuation of past accomplishments, in the Alps as well as in Europe as a whole. Tourism recovered from the collapse during the war years and began to thrive again and expand activities into the winter season. Likewise during this era, the construction of dams for power production accelerated and road building for motorized traffic opened a new chapter of intrusion and conflict.²¹ Although nature conservation organizations continued to attract new members and successfully pushed for the enactment of laws and decrees for nature conservation, they were disappointed by the slow implementation and poor enforcement of these regulations. Under these circumstances, many nature conservationists welcomed Fascism and National Socialism and collaborated with the new regimes in Italy and Germany. The agrarian romanticism-infused ideologies of both regimes seemed open to conservationist ideas – and unlike the democratic governments, the authoritarian leaders seemed prepared to act quickly and undertake stringent measures. At first, the nature conservation actions of both regimes appeared to confirm this assessment. However, the impression soon proved to be deceptive. In Italy, paramilitary forces took over administra-

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tion of the national parks. They were not interested in nature conservation but in the development of the parks as tourist destinations and in their potential as highly visible emblems of Fascist Italy. This was especially the case for the two newly founded parks of Circeo (1934) near Rome and Stelvio (1935) in the South Tyrolean Alps on formerly Austrian territory.²² The Nazi regime passed an ambitious Nature Conservation Act (Reichsnaturschutzgesetz) in 1935 and created plans for Alpine nature reserves and national parks in Germany and, after 1938, in Austria. Implementation, however, fell far short of the laws, decrees, and plans. The Nazi nature conservation policy turned out to be primarily made up of empty promises and projects constantly put off until some later point in time, when there were no other more urgent needs that necessitated giving priority to matters such as overcoming the economic crisis, expanding the military power, or achieving food self-sufficiency. Eventually, this became a promise to address the issue after the war had been won. Despite this lack of any tangible results on the ground, the National Socialist era had some long-term effects for nature conservation: Most of the infrastructure projects started in the Nazi period were completed after the war under the new regimes. Likewise, some nature conservation schemes resurfaced in the post-war era, frequently put forward by those who had originally crafted them under the Nazi regime.²³

2 Heyday of Mass Tourism and Dam Building The post-war period brought an impressive surge in nature protection and conservation initiatives. The year 1948 saw the founding of the International Union for the Protection of Nature (later the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN) by eighteen nations, several international conservation organizations, and countless local and national actors; it would become instrumental in spreading the ideas of nature protection and promoting countless projects. Another important player was the Council of Europe, established in 1949 (see chapter 16 by van de Grift/van Meurs). In 1965, its member states began awarding “European Diplomas” for initiatives in nature protection and declared a European Nature Conservation Year in 1970. Later, in 1979, the Council’s Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Bern Convention) obliged its signatories to conservation of flora and fauna and their natural habitats. The convention’s list of protected animals includes iconic Alpine animals such as the ibex and the chough. One of these many European conservation organizations was dedicated specifically to the Alps: the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps

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(Commission Internationale pour la Protection des Régions Alpines, CIPRA), founded in 1952. Like others, CIPRA was founded in the booming post-war years when the Alps were undergoing their own “great acceleration” in the form of the construction of hydroelectric plants and tourism infrastructure.²⁴ The planning of “development” of the Alpine regions as well as the designation of protected areas took place on a national level. One of CIRPA’s main goals was to create a European convention that would enable the transnational protection of Alpine nature. The founders of CIPRA were mostly university professors or directors of nature museums or nature parks. Among them were Swiss botanist Charles Jean Bernard, who was also IUCN’s first president from 1948 to 1954, and German forester Wolfgang E. Burhenne. These key figures linked the organization to social networks of research and conservation professionals, to international organizations and national governments. They also played an important role in shaping the goals and ideals of CIPRA, which were rooted in the park movement from the early years of the century. Thus, CIPRA was mostly concerned with protecting natural monuments such as the (aforementioned) Krimml Waterfalls or iconic landscapes like the Alpine “hummock meadows” in Slovenia.²⁵ Even if CIPRA’s resolutions were not binding on a national level and its status at the Council of Europe starting in 1967 was only consultative, support from CIPRA and likeminded international organizations was pivotal for the establishment of new national parks in the post-war era. National experts profited from their networks and the creation of international standards. Of the 14 national parks existing in the Alpine region in 2020, 11 were established after 1960 (e. g., Triglav in Slovenia in 1961; Vanoise in France in 1963; Berchtesgaden in Germany in 1978; High Tauern in Austria in 1981– 1992). Many of these parks were only established after at least a decade of struggle. And not all such struggles ended in success. In the midst of Cold War, Angela Piskernik, director of the Natural Science Museum (Prirodoslovni Muzej) of Ljubljana and highly respected CIPRA member, dreamed of and pushed for a transnational park in the Savinja Alps and the Karawanks, but after her death in 1967 nobody continued her efforts.²⁶ Besides national parks, more modest regional nature parks were established in all Alpine countries starting in the 1960s (see chapter 8 by Hasenöhrl/Groß). Meanwhile, national governments in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia pushed the construction of hydroelectric power plants. Since World War I, hydropower, or “white coal”, a term introduced by the French engineer Aristide Berge`s at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, had become an important element in securing national defence and economic independence. Projects continued in the interwar years and during World War II.²⁷ But in the

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post-war years, the construction of hydroelectric power plants experienced a major boom. Supported by funds for European reconstruction, “the years of the great dam constructions in the Alps” began.²⁸ In 1953, the German engineer Harald Link tallied at least 200 artificial lakes in the Alps at an altitude of at least 500 metres used for power production.²⁹ The national grids were increasingly connected through high-voltage lines, several of them crossing the Alps, and the expanding system of Alpine hydraulic reservoirs and power stations took on the role of “Europe’s Battery”.³⁰ With its capacities to store power and generate it flexibly at any time, the Alpine hydroelectrical system became indispensable for covering consumption peaks and stabilizing the Western European electricity net.³¹ The Alpine countries managed to merge the Alpine myth with an ideology of modernization: Waterpower represented the mighty force of the mountains, now tamed by humans to supply the nation with energy. Thus, it was also seen as an important part of national defence during both World Wars. During World War II, the Nazi regime put much effort into construction of hydroelectric dams, using forced labour and neglecting issues of nature conservation.³² Most of the power plants were only finished in the post-war period with the aid of the European Recovery Program (“Marshall Plan”). For example, Austria invested about 37 per cent of the recovery funds in waterpower.³³ Such was the importance of hydroelectric plants, that nations were even willing to exchange territory to secure this resource: In 1962/1963, Switzerland and Italy exchanged 45 hectares land, whereby Switzerland gained the area on which the Valle di Lei dam had been constructed in the years 1957– 1962. Other power plants that cross borders, like Lac d’Emosson (France and Switzerland, 1974) or Lago di Livigno (Italy and Switzerland, 1968), operate on the basis of international treaties.³⁴ While nature conservation groups in Bavaria challenged small-scale waterpower projects in the Prealps with considerable success,³⁵ opposition to the construction of hydroelectric power plants in the high Alps remained insignificant. Even conservationists did not intervene unless projects affected iconic landscapes or already protected areas such as national parks and thus endangered endemic species. Where opposition did emerge, economic concerns were usually given priority over ecological ones. In addition, dams also elicited pride in national technical capabilities while satisfying the aesthetic taste of the age: Italy’s national narratives fused classical ideals of beautiful nature with modernist ideals of technical progress, with a vision in which humans could perfect the incompleteness of nature with their constructions of solid concrete.³⁶ Engineer Link stated in 1953 that “lakes are the jewellery of any landscape, particularly in the high mountains”, regardless of whether these lakes were natural or artificial³⁷ – a view that lived on until the 1970s.³⁸ In a few cases, a dam project

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met opposition from local inhabitants because the planned plant would affect a protected area or force an entire community to be moved. Opposition against the resettlement of villages was only successful in Switzerland (Rheinwald, 1942, Ursern 1920 – 1954), where local resistance drew on strong traditions of cultural and political autonomy.³⁹ Other Alpine villages were lost to the waters of the reservoir (e. g., Morasco, Italy, in 1940; Reschen, Italy, in 1950; Tignes, France, in 1952; Marmorera, Switzerland, in 1954; and Fall/Lenggries, Germany, in 1959). Concerns about nature reserves were similarly ineffective: no matter how forceful the arguments for conservation, they were always beaten by economic interests (e. g. in the case of the Engadine power plants [Engadiner Kraftwerke] that affected the Swiss National Park).⁴⁰ While power plant manufacturers and utilities collaborated transnationally, resistance remained local and national until the 1970s, even in cases in which power plant construction affected cross-border river systems.⁴¹ The motivations of conservationists, i. e. protecting endangered species and unique landscapes, and of local inhabitants, i. e. preserving their native soil, rarely complemented each other. Although the European-wide power supply system more and more integrated Alpine hydroelectric production, public discourses on hydropower continued to be national ones. In the 1960s, construction costs for waterpower plants increased considerably. The best spots in the Alps were already in use, while capital and labour became more expensive and legislation for the protection of nature and scenery required measures such as underground installations. Furthermore, the development of nuclear technology as an energy source made investments in the expansion of hydropower seem less worthwhile. The golden age of dam construction came to a close (landmarks in size and generation capacity, the Swiss Grande Dixence dam was finished in 1961, and the French Grand-Maison in 1985). Whereas the construction of three facilities in the Soča Valley in Slovenia had to be abandoned because of financial problems in the wake of the economic crisis of the 1970s, other dam projects such as in the Dorfertal in Austria’s High Tauern, in the Greina Valley in the Swiss canton Grison, and in the French Vanoise National Park were defeated by the burgeoning environmental movement. This movement, supported by a growing body of scientific knowledge, criticized the exploitation of natural resources and environmental degradation. It expressed the concern that the “limits to growth” were also reached in the Alps (see figure 2).⁴² The construction of dams in the Alps was only one aspect of a broader structural change that occurred after the Second World War. Small valleys emptied as people migrated to regional centres, while the landscape was restructured to support mass tourism (see chapter 8 by Hasenöhrl/Groß). After 1950, the winter resort, an originally French concept of “an artificial developed city in the heart

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Figure 2: “The Matterhorn as a hotel speculation project for the year 2075” Nebelspalter, 1975, Bd. 101, H. 1, Hans Haëm.

of the white desert”, as contemporaries stated, expanded across the entire Alpine region. To support winter tourism, entire mountain slopes were transformed into “treeless, long, obstacle-free downhills”.⁴³ While in 1945 about 30 skiing resorts existed in France, only 20 years later their numbers had grown to 200.⁴⁴ In 1975, the Swiss economist and tourism expert Jost Krippendorf warned against an impending decline of the Alps to a “suburban landscape between Munich and Milan”,⁴⁵ where mass tourism would pollute water and air, severely damage the landscape and local social structures. Krippendorf became one of the staunchest advocates of sustainable tourism. Other contemporaries also reflected critically on these structural changes and assigned special importance to the typical cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft) of the Alps, formed over centuries by extensive cultivation and transhumance. The conservationists of the IUCN and UNESCO considered this landscape part of the World Heritage of Mankind.⁴⁶ The UNESCO research programme Man and the Biosphere (MAB), proposed in 1968 at the Biosphere Conference in Paris and launched in 1971, was crucial for the production of science-based knowledge about the interconnection of humans and nature in the fragile ecosystem of the Alps. The Biosphere Conference was attended by 88 members of intergovernmental organizations and 236 dele-

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gates from the 63 UNESCO member states spanning the entire globe and bringing together East and West.⁴⁷ Austria, France, Germany, and Switzerland jointly conducted the MAB subproject No. 6, “The Human Impact on Mountain Economy”, which resulted in the designation of numerous Alpine areas as UNESCO Biosphere Reserves and countless scientific publications.⁴⁸ After 1970, the UNESCO continued to be a powerful actor in nature conservation in the Alps by designating selected areas as UNESCO Biosphere Reserves. Scientific knowledge about ecological interrelationships became a central argument for nature conservation and supplemented the arguments based on aesthetic value. While these actors and arguments remained important in the late twentieth century, an additional factor came into play: the people living in the Alps and their particular living space.

3 Large-scale Alpine Transit Infrastructure The third stage of Alpine conservation was characterized by controversies about transit traffic through the Alps and the infrastructure that supported it.⁴⁹ From the 1970s onwards, European integration and increasing environmental consciousness became the main forces shaping the perception and history of the Alps.⁵⁰ Politics of European integration emphasized Alpine transit corridors as important European infrastructures linking the economic centres in the north and south. Throughout the twentieth century, the Alps continued to present a natural obstacle for traffic, with passage possible only in a small number of places; they thus were seen as a barrier that slowed down Europe’s economic integration. High-speed traffic concentrated on a few “bottlenecks”⁵¹ like the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy, the Gotthard Pass between Switzerland and Italy, and the Mont Cenis Pass between France and Italy.⁵² However, while traffic was regarded as an important economic driver in the 1960s, a decade later environmentalists, scientists, and activists reframed it as the greatest threat to Alpine habitats – and a major nuisance for the people living along the thoroughfares.⁵³ Although ecological problems such as erosion, noise, and air pollution were not exclusive to the Alps, their consequences were particularly evident here due to the particular geographical and topographical conditions.⁵⁴ Following the opening of the Austrian Brenner motorway in 1971 and the Swiss Gotthard motorway in 1980, the amount of transit traffic on these routes increased dramatically. A connection was quickly established between transalpine transit traffic and the growing environmental pollution. Consequently, resistance emerged throughout the Alps: citizens’ initiatives along the transit routes were directed against the constantly increasing traffic from road freight transport and the resulting dam-

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age to people and the environment.⁵⁵ These protests were particularly strong at two of the most heavily used crossing points, Brenner Pass in the Austrian province of Tyrol and Gotthard Pass in Switzerland.⁵⁶ Initiatives like the Transitforum Austria-Tirol in Austria, the Alpen-Initiative in Switzerland, and the Transitinitiative Südtirol in Italy were very successful at fostering broad public awareness of the transit problem through the media, extending even beyond the immediate vicinity of the transit routes. This new kind of Alpine nature protection reflected broader trends in post1970 environmentalism, which no longer focused preserving natural monuments, but rather strove for ecologically and socially responsible environmental protection.⁵⁷ In contrast to the earlier organizations for Alpine nature protection, which were firmly grounded in urban middle classes living outside the Alps, this new movement recruited its spokespeople and supporters in the Alpine valleys themselves. These activists and their supporters highlighted the Alps as a cultural landscape, an economic area, and a living space for millions of people. Nature conservation was no longer at the forefront; rather, the emphasis was on the livelihood of the inhabitants, their present well-being, and their future prospects. Hence, the activists demanded a reduction in traffic to limit air pollution and noise, and end to further expansion of large-scale road and railway infrastructure, and more inclusion in political debates about Alpine spaces. These actions took place in the context of a larger transnational debate on the dying of forests due to sulphur dioxide (see chapter 7 by Hölzl/Oosthoek). In Tyrol, for example, where forests played an important role in protecting the landscape, the Forest Condition Report (Waldzustandsbericht) of 1984 initiated a tense public debate on exhaust emissions, particularly along the Inntal and Brenner route where forest damage was the most substantial. The main culprit was quickly identified as freight transport traffic. However, in spite of the ecological arguments, the concerns were also partly informed by a traditional, romantic image of the Alps: efforts to modernize the Alpine region were told as a story of decay, with the current problematic situation measured against a supposedly intact natural state.⁵⁸ In Austria, citizens’ initiatives and Alpine protection associations mainly turned to protest actions to make their concerns heard. The Tyrolean and South Tyrolean transit opponents organized blockades of the Brenner motorway, which were attended by hundreds of people and became part of the collective memory of the region. Although North and South Tyrol were linked by the Brenner Pass and thus affected by the same traffic problems, cooperation between the two regions only began in the mid-1990s. As South Tyrolean environmentalists such as Markus Lobis, chairman of the Transitinitiative Südtirol, later remarked self-critically, they had relied for too long on North Tyrolean resistance in the hope that this protest would also have positive effects on South Tyrol.⁵⁹

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Unlike Austria, Swiss transit opponents did not make use of demonstrations but instead launched a popular referendum for the protection of the Alpine area from transit traffic (“Zum Schutze des Alpengebietes vor dem Transitverkehr”) in 1989, which resulted in the adoption of legislation restricting transit traffic in 1994.⁶⁰ In Italy and France, opposition to transit traffic was less frequent. Along the Mont Blanc route, the autonomous government of Aosta Valley opposed the widening of the Mont Blanc Tunnel and in 1994 adopted a law on the control of road freight traffic (limiting speed and emissions) that was directed against the “wicked policy of land degradation”⁶¹ of the Italian state. In Chamonix, on the French side of the tunnel, people also protested sporadically against traffic.⁶² Drawing on these local initiatives and opposition groups, in 1995 members of the Swiss Alpen-Initiative founded the Initiative Transport Europe (ITE) to create a transnational network of activists from Austria, Germany, France, Italy, and Switzerland. The ITE organized annual transit conferences and actions as well as sending petitions to the European Parliament and the European Commission. A highpoint of the ITE activities was the Day of Action with coordinated protest meetings across the Alps held annually from 1996 to 2000. As a result of various difficulties, such as language barriers, an enormous administrative burden, and different national goals, ITE ended its activities in 2000.⁶³ Fritz Gurgiser, chairman of Transitforum Austria-Tirol, spearheaded the Alpine Protection Transit Declaration (Alpenschutztransiterklärung) in 2002, which laid out measures to reduce transit traffic. It was signed by many Tyrolean citizens’ initiatives as well as by South Tyrolean environmentalists like Kuno Schraffl, chairman of the umbrella organization for nature conservation and environmental protection of South Tyrol (Dachverband für Natur- und Umweltschutz Südtirol). The declaration was formulated in terms of the entire Alpine region and called for joint action across national borders and transcending political parties.⁶⁴ Even though the declaration claimed to represent the entire Alpine region, the signees mainly represented the German-speaking regions. As these examples show, activists recognized the need for cross-border protection of the Alps, but often encountered difficulties in their efforts to establish transalpine cooperation. Such cooperation was only conceivable in the context of European integration. Thus, the EU played an important and at the same time extremely ambivalent role as a discursive reference point for Alpine protection groups: it functioned as the abstract “other” in contrast to the tangible “own”. On the one hand, the Alpine environmentalists defined the Alps as an ecologically exemplary model region that contrasted with the EU’s economy-centred orientation. On the other hand, the EU served as a shared point of reference which not only suggested a unity of the Alpine region, but also discursively

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brought it about. Therefore, Alpine environmentalists raised the Alps as a political argument: they considered a coherent unity of the Alps to be indispensable for pushing through their own intra-Alpine needs and interests against claims from outside the Alps. The Alpine countries had never managed to develop a uniform strategy to reduce transit traffic. The citizens’ initiatives and Alpine protection associations were highly critical of this lack of coordination, as they believed that a common Alpine-wide policy, especially for Austria and Switzerland, could achieve more than individual national initiatives. Andreas Weissen, chairman of CIPRA, called on the politicians of the Alpine countries for joint negotiations on several occasions.⁶⁵ In spite of this lack of coordination on a national level, European integration facilitated administrative cross-border cooperation between sub-national entities. Thus, politicians from Alpine mountain regions increasingly focused on cooperation and exchange beyond national borders. For regardless of which side of the border one was on, the challenges for the Alpine inhabitants, economy, and environment were felt to be similar. And all regions of the Alps had to manage comparable natural hazards and socio-economic developments. In 1972, the Association of Alpine States (abbreviated Arge Alp, from the German name Arbeitsgemeinschaft Alpenländer), was founded on the initiative of the Governor of Tyrol, Eduard Wallnöfer. The participating regions from Austria, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland aimed to strengthen cross-border cooperation. In addition, the Alpine Convention, which entered into force in 1995, and in 2001 the Committee of the Regions’ Alpine group provided new frameworks for inter-Alpine and inter-European political cooperation.⁶⁶ The global dimension of their concerns became visible when mountain protection proponents at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 succeeded in ensuring that a separate chapter was dedicated to mountains in the sustainable development Agenda 21.⁶⁷ Furthermore, the political institutions of the EU were an important reference point for Alpine transit opponents and nature conservation movement. Besides its effects on national economies, the EU also took the lead in policy fields such as transport and the environment (see chapter 16 by van de Grift/van Meurs). In this case, Alpine conservationists saw Europe and the EU as both the place where problems originated and where these problems had to be solved. Since the 1970s, Austria and Switzerland had conducted talks with the then EC regarding the transit issue. From the mid-1980s, both countries independently negotiated transit agreements with the EC to regulate traffic flows. While the EC was mainly interested in ensuring free movement of goods, the Alpine states demanded a shift from road to rail and a drastic reduction in transit journeys in order to reduce the burden on people and the environment. While both Switzer-

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land and Austria negotiated transit agreements with the EC in 1992,⁶⁸ there were fundamental differences in the treaty terms and measures undertaken to reduce the burden of transit traffic. Austria was not able to achieve any quantitative restrictions, and the introduction of so-called “Eco-Points” was only intended to reduce emissions. Switzerland focused on expansion of the rail network as a way to increase rail transport capabilities, in particular by constructing base tunnels on the Gotthard and Lötschberg-Simplon rail lines. Construction on both tunnels started in 1999 and they were put into operation in 2007 (Lötschberg) and 2016 (Gotthard). Austria also presented plans for the construction of base tunnels on the Brenner and Semmering lines. Here, construction work, subsidized by the EU, only started in 2006 and 2012 and is expected to be finished by the end of the 2020s. Both base tunnel projects elicited protest from traffic experts and environmentalists, who criticized the high costs and the impact on the landscape. Moreover, numerous studies called into question whether the construction projects would solve the problem of transalpine transit traffic through Austria.⁶⁹ The most recent milestone in the transit traffic issue was the signing of the Transport Protocol of the Alpine Convention in 2000. After ten years of discussions, which threatened to fail several times, the environment ministers of the contracting parties agreed on a treaty text at the Sixth Alpine Conference in Lucerne. Even though transit opponents and environmentalists welcomed the signing of the protocol, there had also been an increase in critical voices doubting the effectiveness of the Alpine Convention and whether its practical implementation was in fact protecting the Alps.⁷⁰ It should be noted that the conservationists’ and transit opponents’ vision of a transnational Alpine region was embedded in a dialectic exchange with the process of European integration. It moved the Alps from an economically peripheral position into the “heart of Europe” and gave the region a new visibility at the political level.⁷¹ Thus, movements typically oscillated between regional and national poles on the one side and European concerns on the other, as well as between appreciation and rejection of the EU. On an ideological level, the emerging politicized region of the Alps served as a framework for action for transit opponents. In this context, a new awareness and self-confidence arose among Alpine residents, who now saw themselves as being able to actively participate in decision-making and shaping the future development of the Alpine region. Transit opponents emphasized the central location of the Alpine region in Europe and presented it as a zone of contact and meeting. At the same time, the Alps also served as a demarcation between inside and outside, between inner-Alpine and extra-Alpine demands and needs.⁷²

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4 Conclusion In the context of ecological debates and European integration during the twentieth century, the Alpine region became a political space in two ways. First, discussions about the development and protection of certain Alpine areas achieved a permanent place on political agendas. Second, residents of the Alps increasingly gained political weight both on national and European levels. Europe, epitomized by the EC resp. EU, became more and more acknowledged as the place and space in which the environmental problems of the Alps originated and had to be solved. However, as this chapter has shown, seeing the Alps as a European common has a long tradition reaching back to the Enlightenment. From the early 1900s onwards, it was mainly the many branches of the nature conservation movement that tried to defend the Alps against economic threats, in particular mass tourism, hydropower, and motorized traffic. This movement was mostly led by urban elites and only occasionally involved the local Alpine population. Only in the wake of the ecological revolution of the 1970s and in response to the rapid increase in motorized transit traffic Alpine communities themselves became major actors in what was now seen as a struggle to defend Alpine livelihoods. The various activists, associations, and regional and national authorities of the Alpine region each approached Alpine issues with their own perceptions of the Alps and perspectives on nature conservation, environmental protection, and socio-economic development. In particular, different groups put varying emphasis on matters of ecology versus economy. The fault lines between blessing or curse, winners or losers are not easily drawn. On the one hand, tourists brought much needed capital to the mountain valleys, but on the other hand, mass tourism threatened to destroy the Alpine landscape. Likewise, dams for hydroelectric plants meant a major disruption of entire Alpine valleys, but they provided people all over Europe – including the Alps – with comparatively clean energy. The expansion of traffic infrastructure had promised to connect remote villages with the centres of Europe but failed to deliver. Instead, transalpine freight traffic had detrimental effects on the population and nature of the Alps, while enabling Europe’s economy to thrive. The movement of ever-increasing amounts of goods through and over the Alps in turn moved and newly mobilized people in the Alps as well as in Europe and reinforced the Alps’ political significance as Europe’s most central periphery.

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Notes  Stephen Leslie, Playground of Europe (London: n. p., 1871); Wolfgang König, Bahnen und Berge: Verkehrstechnik, Tourismus und Naturschutz in den Schweizer Alpen 1870 – 1939 (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2000); Laurent Tissot, Naissance d’une industrie touristique: Les Anglais et la Suisse au XIXe siècle (Lausanne: Histoire Payot, 2000); Kurt Luger and Franz Rest, eds., Alpenreisen: Erlebnis, Raumtransformationen, Imagination (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2017).  Jon Mathieu, The Third Dimension: A Comparative History of Mountains in the Modern Era (Knapwell: White Horse Press, 2011); Bianca Hoening, Geteilte Berge: Eine Konfliktgeschichte der Naturnutzung in der Tatra (Göttingen: Vandenhock & Ruprecht, 2018).  Jon Mathieu, The Alps: An Environmental History (Oxford: Polity Press, 2019); Jon Mathieu and Simona Boscani Leoni, eds., Die Alpen! Zur europäischen Wahrnehmungsgeschichte seit der Renaissance (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005); Philippe Frei, Transferprozesse der Moderne: Die Nachbenennungen “Alpen” und “Schweiz” im 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).  Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003).  Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885 – 1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Patrick Kupper, Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park (New York: Berghahn, 2014).  For the Alpine countries, see Stefan Bachmann, Zwischen Patriotismus und Wissenschaft: Die Schweizerischen Naturschutzpioniere (1900 – 1938) (Zürich: Chronos, 1999); Friedemann Schmoll, Erinnerung an die Natur: Die Geschichte des Naturschutzes im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2004); Luigi Piccioni, The Beloved Face of the Country: The First Movement for Nature Protection in Italy, 1880 – 1934 (Winwick Cambridgeshire: White Horse Press, 2020); Patrick Kupper and Anna-Katharina Wöbse, Geschichte des Nationalparks Hohe Tauern (Innsbruck: Tyrolia 2013); Carolin F. Roeder, “Slovenia’s Triglav National Park: From Imperial Borderland to National Ethnoscape”, in Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, ed. Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 240; Caroline C. Ford, Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).  Mathieu, The Alps.  Warwick Frost and C. Michael Hall, “National Parks and the ‘Worthless Lands Hypothesis’ Revisited”, in Tourism and National Parks: International Perspectives on Development, Histories, and Change, ed. Warwick Frost and C. Michael Hall (New York: Routledge, 2009), 45 – 62.  Kupper, Creating Wilderness; Marco Giacometti, ed., Von Königen und Wilderern: Die Rettung und Wiederansiedlung des Alpensteinbocks (Wohlen: Salm, 2006). See also chapter 4 by Wöbse/ Ziemek.  Ute Hasenöhrl, “Naturschutz”, in Berg Heil! Alpenverein und Bergsteigen, 1918 – 1945, ed. Deutscher Alpenverein et al. (Köln: Böhlau, 2011), 391 – 419; Ben Anderson, Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany (London: Palgrave, 2020). On the nature conservation efforts of the international proletarian hiking organization Die Naturfreunde, see chapter 8 by Hasenöhrl/Groß.  Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, “Nützen oder Schützen? Naturverwaltung im Alpenraum im 20. Jahrhundert”, Bohemia 54, no. 1 (2014): 41 – 55.  Bachmann, Zwischen Patriotismus, 242 – 253; Christina Pichler-Koban, “Hydroelectric Power Generation in Austria: A History of Archetypal Conflicts with Nature Conservation”, Contemporary Austrian Studies 27 (2018): 183 – 202.

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 Kupper, Creating Wilderness, 29 – 34.  Nature, 90/2243 (24 October 1912), 224.  Patrick Kupper, “Translating Yellowstone: Early European National Parks, Weltnaturschutz and the Swiss Model”, in Civilizing Nature, ed. Gissibl, Höhler, and Kupper (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 123 – 139; Kupper, Creating Wilderness. The year 1909 also saw the designation of national parks in Sweden. Tom Mels, Wild Landscapes: The Cultural Nature of Swedish National Parks (Lund: Lund University Press, 1999). Swedish national parks conceived according to the US model received much less international attention than the Swiss National Park.  Patrick Kupper, “Nationalparks Transalpin: Natur und Nation in den Alpen”, Bohemia 54, no. 1 (2014): 74 – 87; Kupper and Wöbse, Geschichte.  Anna-Katharina Wöbse, Weltnaturschutz: Umweltdiplomatie in Völkerbund und Vereinten Nationen 1920 – 1950 (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2012).  Jean-Paul Zuanon, Chronique d’un ‘parc oublié’: Du parc de la Bérarde (1913) au parc national des Ecrins (1973) (Grenoble: Revue de Géographie Alpine, 1995); Raphaël Larrère, Bernadette Lizet, and Martine Berlan-Darqué, eds., Histoire des parcs nationaux: Comment prendre soin de la nature? (Versailles: Editions Quae, 2009); Ford, Natural Interests. An exception to this trend was the 100-square-kilometre nature reserve created in the Camargue along the Rhône delta in France in 1927.  Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, A Monastery for the Ibex: Conservation, State, and Conflict on the Gran Paradiso 1919 – 1949 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).  Röder, Slovenia’s Triglav; Kai Frobel, ed., 100 Jahre Bund Naturschutz in Bayern: Fragen an eine bewegte Geschichte (Regensburg: Bund Naturschutz in Bayern, 2013). Bachmann, Zwischen Patriotismus.  Kupper und Wöbse, Geschichte.  Marco Armiero and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, “Green Rhetoric in Blackshirts: Italian Fascism and the Environment”, Environment and History 19, no. 3 (2013): 283 – 311; Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, “A nation’s parks: Failure and success in Fascist nature conservation”, Modern Italy 19, no. 3 (2014): 275 – 285; Hardenberg, A Monastery for the Ibex.  Frank Uekötter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Kupper and Wöbse, Geschichte.  Robert Groß, Die Beschleunigung der Berge: Eine Umweltgeschichte des Wintertourismus in Vorarlberg/Österreich (1920 – 2010) (Köln: Böhlau, 2018).  Kai F. Hü nemö rder, “Vom Expertennetzwerk zur Umweltpolitik: Frühe Umweltkonferenzen und die Auswirkung der öffentlichen Aufmerksamkeit fü r Umweltfragen in Europa (1959 – 1972)”, Archiv fü r Sozialgeschichte 43 (2003): 275 – 296, esp. 284. Romed Aschwanden, Politisierung der Alpen. Umweltbewegungen in der Ära der Europäischen Integration (1970 – 2000) (Köln: Böhlau, 2021), 88 – 94.  Kupper, “Nationalpark Transalpin”; Isabelle Mauz, Histoire et memoires du parc national de la Vanoise. 1921 – 1971: La Construction (Grenoble: Revue de geographie alpine, 2003); Kupper and Wöbse, Geschichte; Roeder, Slovenia’s Triglav.  Marc Landry, “Environmental Consequences of the Peace: The Great War, Dammed Lakes, and Hydraulic History in the Eastern Alps”, Environmental History 20, no. 3 (2015): 422 – 448.  François Walter, Histoire de la Suisse (Neuchatel: Edition Alphile, 2009), 134.  Harald Link, Die Speicherseen der Alpen, Verbandschrift 31 (Zürich: Geschäftsstelle des Schweizerischer Wasserwirtschaftsverband, 1953), 1.  Marc Landry, “Europe’s Battery: The Making of the Alpine Energy Landscape” (PhD thesis, Georgetown University, 2013).

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 Vincent Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe: The Power of Europe in the Construction of Electricity Networks (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008).  Ortrun Veichtlbauer, “Grossdeutscher Nationalpark im NS (1938 – 1948)”, in Geschichte des Nationalparks Hohe Tauern, ed. Patrick Kupper and Anna-Katharina Wöbse (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2013), 64 – 91.  Oliver Rathkolb, “NS-Erbe, Wiederaufbau, Marshallplan und das ‘Weisse Gold’ in den Europäischen Netzwerken”, in Wasserkraft – Elektrizität – Gesellschaft: Kraftwerksprojekte ab 1880 im Spannungsfeld, ed. Oliver Rathkolb (Wien: K & S, 2012), 187 – 206.  Jean-Louis Mottier, “L’aménagement hydro-électrique franco-suisse d’Emosson”, Bulletin technique de la Suisse romande 18 (1970): 249 – 266; Robert Meier, Die Engadiner Kraftwerke: Natur und Technik in einer aufstrebenden Region (Baden: Verbandsschrift des Schweizerischen Wasserwirtschaftsverbandes, 2003).  Ute Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft und Protest: Eine Geschichte der Naturschutz- und Umweltbewegung in Bayern 1945 – 1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010).  Marco Armiero, A Rugged Nation: Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2011), 33 – 43.  Link, Speicherseen, 2 (own translation).  Erich Schwab, “Wasserkraftwerke in der Schweizer Landschaft”, Heimatschutz 3 (1970): 65 – 88.  Erich Haag, Grenzen der Technik: Der Widerstand gegen das Kraftwerkprojekt Urseren (Zürich: Chronos, 2004).  Kupper, Creating Wilderness, 176 – 184.  Ute Hasenöhrl, “‘Weiße Kohle’ oder ‘Ausbeutung der Natur’? Konflikte um die Nutzung der Wasserkraft im (Vor-)Alpenraum am Beispiel der bayrisch-österreichischen Grenzflüsse”, Bohemia 54, no. 1 (2014): 119 – 141.  Jon Mathieu, Die Alpen. Raum – Kultur – Geschichte (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2015), 179 – 206.  Andrew Denning, Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), quotes 151 and 150.  Denning, Skiing.  Jost Krippendorf, Die Landschaftsfresser: Tourismus und Erholungslandschaft – Verderben oder Segen? (Bern: Hallwag, 1975), 68 (own translation).  Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Framing the Heritage of Mankind: National Parks on the International Agenda”, in Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, ed. Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 140 – 156.  Malcolm Hadley, “A Practical Ecology: The Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme”, in Sixty Years of Science at UNESCO 1945 – 2005, ed. UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2006), 271.  Aschwanden, Politisierung, 74 – 80.  The controversies over the construction of large-scale Alpine transit infrastructures at the Gotthard and the Brenner Passes are currently being studied by the joint Austrian-GermanSwiss research project “Issues with Europe: A Network Analysis of the German-speaking Alpine Conservation Movement (1975 – 2005)” (https://www.uibk.ac.at/projects/issues-with-europe). All authors of this chapter are part of the research project.  Mathieu, Die Alpen, 191.  Beat Allenbach, “Zweite Autobahnröhre durch den Gotthard: Fällt der Bundesrat einmal mehr um?”, Tages-Anzeiger, 12 August 1987.

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 There are a total of fourteen motorways through the Alps, most of which pass through Austria; Othmar Kolp, “Die gescheiterte Transitpolitik? Der alpenquerende Straßengüterverkehr anhand des Fallbeispiels Tirol – Die Verkehrspolitik Österreichs, der EU und der Schweiz” (PhD thesis, University of Innsbruck, 2015), 49.  Martin Achrainer and Niko Hofinger, “Politik nach Tiroler Art – ein Dreiklang aus Fleiß, Tüchtigkeit und Zukunftsglaube: Anmerkungen, Anekdoten und Analysen zum politischen System Tirols 1945 – 1999”, in Tirol: “Land im Gebirge”: Zwischen Tradition und Moderne, ed. Michael Gehler (Wien: Böhlau, 1999), 94.  Peter Glauser and Dominik Siegrist, Schauplatz Alpen: Gratwanderung in eine europäische Zukunft (Zürich: Rotpunktverlag, 1997), 12; Leopold Lukschanderl, Rettet die Alpen: Europas Dachgarten in Bedrängnis (Wien: Orac, 1983), 11.  Werner Bätzing, Die Alpen: Geschichte und Zukunft einer europäischen Kulturlandschaft (München: C. H. Beck, 2015), 151.  Christoph Stadel, “The Brenner Freeway (Austria-Italy): Mountain Highway of Controversy”, Mountain Research and Development 13, no. 1 (1993): 1 – 17, Magdalena Pernold, Traumstraße oder Transithölle? Eine Diskursgeschichte der Brennerautobahn in Tirol und Südtirol (1950 – 1980) (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016).  Patrick Kupper, “Die ‘1970er Diagnose’: Grundsätzliche Überlegungen zu einem Wendepunkt der Umweltgeschichte”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 43 (2003): 325 – 348; Joachim Radkau, The Age of Ecology: A Global History (New York: Wiley, 2014).  Matthias Stremlow, Die Alpen aus der Untersicht: Von der Verheissung der nahen Fremde zur Sportarena. Kontinuität und Wandel von Alpenbildern seit 1700 (Bern: Haupt, 1998), 268; Maria Buck, “Von den bedrohlichen zu den bedrohten Alpen – Aneignungsprozesse und Identifikationsfiguren alpiner Umweltschützer”, Gebirge – Literatur – Kultur 14 (2021): 135.  Markus Lobis, “EU-Transitvertrag – eine Mogelpackung?”, Der Report, 3 December 2003, Österreichische Mediathek, V-06538.  Aschwanden, “Politisierung der Alpen”.  Claudio Giorno, “Transitkorridor Aostatal”, in: Alpen-Initiative, ed., Tagungsband der 2. Internationalen Transittagung, 17. – 18. 02. 1995 in Luzern (Altdorf/Brig, 1995), 40 (own translation).  Elio Riccarrand, “Kleine Schritte in die gewünschte Richtung”, in: Alpen-Initiative, ed., Tagungsband der 2. Internationalen Transittagung, 17.–18. 02. 1995 in Luzern (Altdorf/Brig, 1995), 23 – 24.  Aschwanden, “Opposition in den Alpen”, 265.  Transitforum Austria-Tirol, ed., “Alpenschutztransiterklärung”, in 5 nach 12 – Stop Transit. Tatort Brenner 4 (Innsbruck: TfA, 2002), 75 – 83.  Andreas Weisen, “Umwelt-Organisationen zu Alpentransit-Problemen”, Mittagsjournal, 21 May 1996.  Mathieu, Die Alpen, 198 and 215; Glauser and Siegrist, Schauplatz Alpen, 24.  Mathieu, The Third Dimension.  Volkmar Lauber, “Geschichte der Politik zur Umwelt in der Zweiten Republik: Vom Nachzügler zum Vorreiter – und zurück?”, in Umwelt-Geschichte. Arbeitsfelder, Forschungsansätze, Perspektiven, ed. Silvia Hahn and Reinhold Reith (Wien: Oldenbourg, 2001), 190; Waldemar Hummer, “Verkehrspolitische Bedingtheiten des alpenquerenden Transitverkehrs”, in Alpenquerender Transitverkehr aus regionaler und überregionaler Sicht: Rechtliche, technische und wirtschaftliche Problemlagen, ed. Waldemar Hummer (Wien: Böhlau, 1993), 3 – 12.

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 Jutta Kußtatscher, Tunnelblick: Der Brennerbasistunnel: Fakten – Argumente – Meinungen (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2008); Steffen Arora, Oona Kroisleiner, and Walter Müller, “Brenner, Semmering, U2: Österreichs größte Tunnelprojekte”, Der Standard, 1 February 2020.  Peter Haßlacher, “Aufräumen mit dem Mythos Alpen”, in Mythos Alpen, ed. Christoph Wildburger (Schaan: Internationale Alpenschutzkommission, 1996), 120.  Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset, “Mémoire alpine et construction européenne”, Revue de géographie alpine 92, no. 2 (2004): 39 – 48.  Buck, “Von den bedrohlichen zu den bedrohten Alpen”.

Select Bibliography Alpen und Karpaten. Bohemia 54, no. 1 (2014). Armiero, Marco. A Rugged Nation. Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy. Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2011. Aschwanden, Romed. Politisierung der Alpen. Umweltbewegungen in der Ära der Europäischen Integration (1970 – 2000). Köln: Böhlau, 2021. Bätzing, Werner. Die Alpen. Geschichte und Zukunft einer europäischen Kulturlandschaft. München: C. H. Beck, 2015. Denning, Andrew. Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Gissibl, Bernhard, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper, eds. Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective. New York: Berghahn, 2012. Granet-Abisset, Anne-Marie. “Mémoire alpine et construction européenne”. Revue de géographie alpine 92, no. 2 (2004): 39 – 48. Groß, Robert. Die Beschleunigung der Berge: Eine Umweltgeschichte des Wintertourismus in Vorarlberg/Österreich (1920 – 2010). Köln: Böhlau, 2018. Haag, Erich. Grenzen der Technik: Der Widerstand gegen das Kraftwerkprojekt Urseren. Zürich: Chronos, 2004. Hardenberg, Wilko Graf von. Monastery for the Ibex: Conservation, State, and Conflict on the Gran Paradiso 1919 – 1949. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Hasenöhrl, Ute. “Naturschutz”. In Berg Heil! Alpenverein und Bergsteigen, 1918 – 1945, edited by Deutscher Alpenverein et al., 391 – 419. Köln: Böhlau, 2011. Kupper, Patrick, and Anna-Katharina Wöbse. Geschichte des Nationalparks Hohe Tauern. Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2013. Kupper, Patrick. Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park. New York: Berghahn, 2014. Landry, Marc. “Europe’s Battery: The Making of the Alpine Energy Landscape”. PhD thesis, Georgetown University, 2013. Landry, Marc, Patrick Kupper, and Verena Winiwarter, eds. Austrian Environmental History. New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2018. Luger, Kurt, and Franz Rest, eds. Alpenreisen: Erlebnis, Raumtransformationen, Imagination. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2017. Mathieu, Jon. The Alps. An Environmental History, Oxford: Polity Press, 2019. Stadel, Christoph. “The Brenner Freeway (Austria-Italy): Mountain Highway of Controversy”. Mountain Research and Development 13, no. 1 (1993): 1 – 17.

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Stremlow, Matthias. Die Alpen aus der Untersicht: Von der Verheissung der nahen Fremde zur Sportarena. Kontinuität und Wandel von Alpenbildern seit 1700. Bern: Haupt, 1998. Tissot, Laurent. Naissance d’une industrie touristique: Les Anglais et la Suisse au XIXe siècle. Lausanne: Histoire Payot, 2000.

Simo Laakkonen and Tuomas Räsänen

10 Negotiating the Maritime Commons: Protecting the Baltic Sea in a European Context Abstract The environmental history of the seas and oceans has generally remained a relatively unexplored theme. This chapter addresses the environmental history of the Baltic Sea, which is a European sea par excellence and the only sea that is entirely located within the continent. We will examine the links between wider historical currents in Europe and the marine environmental history of the Baltic Sea by focusing on three environmental regimes from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1990s. The first environmental regime was developed on an urban level and prevailed from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War. The second environmental regime was developed from the 1960s until the 1970s on an international level in the Baltic Sea region. The third environmental regime, spanning the 1980s and 1990s, consisted of developing wider European cooperation. These three different environmental regimes continue to cooperate in the region even today. Keywords marine environmental history; marine pollution; environmental diplomacy; urban-industrial wastewater; Baltic Sea region

1 Introduction There is a shared understanding that marine environments are globally threatened by numerous anthropogenic factors. Nearly half of the world’s population, approximately three billion people, currently live within 200 kilometres of a coastline. Coastal zones have higher population densities than any other ecologically defined zone in the world, and most of the world’s largest cities are located along coasts. While coastal environments are important for human health and well-being, they are also sensitive to human impact as 90 per cent of the biomass of seas and oceans is concentrated along coastal zones. There are important rea-

Note: Simo Laakkonen would like to thank the Kone Foundation (https://koneensaatio.fi/en/) for the funding of the present research. Tuomas Räsänen would like to thank the Academy of Finland (decision number 330762). We are grateful for Nathan Adair for revising the language. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-011

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sons to study the relationship between seas and societies from a human perspective. Seas and oceans form an integral part of Europe and surround the continent on three sides. To the north lies the Arctic Ocean, to the west the Atlantic Ocean, and to the south the Mediterranean Sea. There are only a few land-locked areas in all of Europe. Due to these maritime dimensions, Europe can be divided into four separate zones, consisting of the Euro-Arctic, the Euro-Atlantic, the EuroMediterranean, and the Euro-Baltic areas. Europe is therefore, both in a natural and cultural sense, a maritime continent, while its maritime history also makes Europe’s past a feature of world history. European sea-borne exploration, imperialism, mercantilism, and later modernism have formulated societies and nature nearly all over the globe. Ever since European seafarers embarked on far-flung expeditions, the control of seas and oceans has been the key to global power, and the continent’s maritime culture and history have been studied from many different angles. Yet, despite growing interest in recent times, the environmental history of the seas and oceans has generally remained a relatively unexplored theme, despite the fact that these waters cover roughly two-thirds of the Earth’s surface.¹ This chapter will address the environmental history of the Baltic Sea, which is a European sea par excellence and the only sea that is entirely located within the continent. Therefore, all the littoral states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Russia) surrounding the Baltic Sea are European countries, and apart from Russia, they are also all presently member states of the European Union. In geographical terms, the Baltic Sea has an exceptionally large catchment area (1,700,000 square kilometres), which is about four times larger than the surface area of the sea (420,000 square kilometres). Consequently, the five largest lakes in Europe (Ladoga, Onega, Vänern, Saimaa, and Peipus) are located in its basin. In fact, most of Europe’s lakes are found in the Baltic Sea catchment area. Today, almost 90 million people in 14 European countries live in the Baltic Sea catchment area, an expanse that is more than three times larger than that of France or Spain. Therefore, our focus will be not only on the sea area but also on the catchment area of the sea. Because of its exceptional location on the continental shelf, the average depth of the Baltic Sea is only 55 metres, whereas the average depth of, for example, the Mediterranean Sea is 1,500 metres. Because the total volume of water in the Baltic Sea is also small, the hydrographical characteristics of the sea are greatly affected by its catchment area. Half of the water in the Baltic Sea is rainwater that has fallen directly or flown indirectly into the sea through the rivers in the catchment area. Due to the notable impact of the catchment area and the poor connection of the Baltic Sea with the Atlantic Ocean through the

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extremely shallow Danish straits, which are only ten metres deep at their lowest point, water in the Baltic Sea is neither salty nor sweet but brackish, that is to say, it is a mixture of sweet rainwater and salty seawater. Brackish water is particularly poor in oxygen and the variety of species it can sustain. The Baltic Sea is also vulnerable to pollution because it is the only sea area in the world that may, in principle, freeze over during cold winters. In brief, it is a semi-closed and shallow sea with poor water exchange, yet it receives pollutants from a particularly wide catchment area. Consequently, the coastal states of the Baltic Sea cannot blame anyone but themselves for the sea’s past and present environmental problems. Among the world seas and oceans, the Baltic Sea is an alarming yet nonetheless interesting case. Natural scientists have called the Baltic Sea a time machine through which the progressive decline of the marine ecosystems currently happening all over the world can be evaluated.² Similarly, historians can analyse the multiple ways in which human activities have affected the marine environment and how this change has influenced human ideas about its protection and related policies. The Baltic Sea is an international environment, which can only be effectively protected through cooperation among littoral states and other transnational actors. Therefore, the Baltic Sea is a lens through which cooperation and interaction among human and non-human actors and European nations vis-à-vis the marine environment can be analysed. The transnational history of the marine environment may provide fresh perspectives on the construction of the European community, policies, and identity. Taking these above-mentioned perspectives as our point of departure, in this chapter we will investigate how the environmental changes in the Baltic Sea have been perceived and what kind of responses to these developments have been instigated by individuals and institutions. We will examine the links between wider historical currents in Europe and the marine environmental history of the Baltic Sea by focusing on three time periods in the relationship between humans and the sea since the end of the nineteenth century until the 1990s. These time periods can also be conceptualized as separate environmental regimes with distinctive sets of ideas and policy options. These environmental regimes were necessarily influenced by larger intellectual and political developments in Europe, but we also argue that the reverse occasionally took place and the environmental regimes of the Baltic Sea thus, at times, affected European environmental policy. We maintain that the roots of the contemporary environmental regime in the Baltic Sea region cannot be found in the high seas. Rather we need to turn and focus our gaze at the industrializing coastal towns and cities in the Baltic Sea catchment area and take the role of their human populations into ac-

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count. It was here in the Baltic Sea that marine pollution emerged for the first time as a severe problem, when the sea started to be exploited as a dumping ground for various forms of waste. The first environmental regime we explore prevailed from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War. The urban environmental regime was characterized by vibrant discussion among various stakeholders and by the exchange of innovative political, scientific, and technical ideas across the urban-industrial Western world, despite the turbulence at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the First World War, and the Great Depression. The second regime to be studied developed from the 1960s until the 1970s in the context of the Cold War, a time when new chemicals endangered the entire sea area. The international environmental regime became a battleground for Cold Warriors on both sides, but amid all the hostilities, there were also efforts to build cooperation. We maintain that almost nowhere else in Europe were the contacts across the Iron Curtain as constructive as in the Baltic Sea region, where scientific cooperation paved the way to make political treaties and establish environmental institutions for protecting the sea from pollution. The third regime, covering the 1980s and 1990s, saw the end of the Cold War and localized reconstruction following the fall of the Soviet Union and communism in the eastern part of Central Europe. The strained political situation in the 1980s dictated a slow and difficult process of finding a common concern and response to the marine pollution problems, a challenge that lasted until the 1990s, when a renewed interest in cooperation came about. Financial assistance from the West to the East also helped the new democracies to pursue Western environmental standards. At the same time, international cooperation aimed at alleviating the difficult transition from communism towards market-based liberal democracy. The eventual expansion of the European Union was further signified by the emergence of a European environmental regime in the Baltic Sea region – with specific Baltic traits. We will focus on the beginnings of each of these three environmental regimes. Due to the scope of our theme, this chapter is based mostly on existing research literature and our own studies.

2 Beginnings of Water Protection in Northern Europe In the following, we will address the successes and failures of the beginnings of water protection in the Baltic Sea region by exploring the activities for water re-

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gimes of four cities that were/are currently located on different sides of the Baltic Sea. We will examine Danzig (present-day Gdańsk) on the southern coast, as well as St Petersburg on the eastern, Helsinki on the northern, and Stockholm on the western coasts. The presentation of these cities explores different themes that became crucial for the development of modern water protection policy and practices in the Baltic Sea region and also in the rest of Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century.³ However, due to the lack of comparative historical studies of municipal environmental policy of coastal and inland cities, the implications of the following case studies should not yet be generalized.

Danzig: Pioneering Technical Solutions A Polish ruler founded Gdańsk in the 980s at the mouth of the Vistula River on the Baltic Sea coast. The area was later taken over by the Kingdom of Prussia in the second partition of Poland in 1793. Danzig, the German version of the city’s original name, became an important military harbour in the Kingdom of Prussia, which was later annexed to the German Empire in 1871. At that time, four of the largest towns in Germany, namely Berlin, Breslau, Danzig, and Königsberg, were located in Prussia, the most urbanized area in Northern Europe. Due to the urban problems of the time, the Ministry of Trade, seeking blueprints for solving the problems of other European countries, sent three sanitary experts to English and French cities in 1860 to explore new inventions for sanitary reforms. After returning to Prussia, these experts began planning an exceptionally holistic pilot system for a centralized water supply and sewer system, including wastewater treatment in the city of Danzig, which at that time had nearly 100,000 inhabitants.⁴ Such reforms were considered necessary because Danzig’s canals and ditches were filled with excrement, and the city’s mortality rate exceeded the birth rate of its urban population, primarily due to water-borne epidemics such as cholera. In addition, the need to modernize the infrastructure of its harbour, combined with improvements that the Prussian navy had requested, impelled these reforms forward.⁵ In January 1863, Danzig elected a new dynamic mayor, Leopold von Winter. The design of the new water supply and sewerage system was initiated the same year with surveys of the existing geological, hydrological, and structural conditions. Also, detailed technical plans and estimates for construction costs were presented.⁶ After long public discussions, the City Council accepted the master plan in 1869. First, the sewerage system was constructed and the streets were paved. The main sewer collectors ended in the city’s harbour, where siphons were installed under the river beds to lead the wastewater gravitationally to a

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new pumping station on a nearby small island, from which the wastewater was finally pumped through a three-kilometre-long pressure pipe to the wastewater treatment plant built in 1871/72 on the coastal sand dunes near the contemporary Gdańsk Bay.⁷ The first wastewater treatment plant of Danzig consisted of settling tanks and filter and irrigation fields. Sand dunes were flattened and ditches were constructed on two levels. Ditches on the upper level received wastewater, while those at the lower level drained the treated wastewater. Wastewater was filtered when it trickled from the upper level through the sandy layer covered by grass to the lower level.⁸ After treatment, the wastewater was discharged into the Vistula River close to the Baltic Sea. The hygienic quality of wastewater and river water in the Vistula River was also investigated on a regular basis, and the treatment results of this method, called intermittent filtration, were largely satisfactory. Originally, the plant consisted of about 170 hectares of modified dunes, but in 1908, the fields were extended up to 320 hectares. The first wastewater treatment plant in the Baltic Sea region functioned efficiently until the plant was overloaded by increasing wastewater volume at the turn of the century. As a response, the city built another irrigation field in the nearby town of Sopot and a biofilter plant for another nearby town, Oliwa. Finally, a second wastewater treatment plant, consisting of settling tanks and a modern biological activated sludge system, was erected for the city of Danzig in 1932.⁹ In order to solve its difficult pollution problems, the city of Danzig resorted to resolute measures. The sanitary system, finished in 1872, was probably the first comprehensive water supply and sewerage system built in Northern Europe. This truly holistic network consisted of a groundwater intake, a distribution network, a piped water connection to all of the nearly 4,000 households in the city, a separate sewer system for storm water and wastewater, main collectors, a central pumping station, a wastewater treatment plant, and monitors for the discharge of treated wastewater into the river.¹⁰ This project was carefully prepared though international cooperation with experts from different cities, technical universities, and private companies. The final decision was based on the open dissemination of plans and critical public discussion in Danzig. Inspired by ideas from abroad, the modernized concept started to spread. It is hardly surprising that the treatment technology for water protection that Danzig chose was later adopted in Prussia by the cities of Bremen, Breslau, Berlin, and Königsberg.¹¹ Yet, while some European cities were progressive in sanitary reforms and water protection policy, others were not.

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St Petersburg: A Window to the West? At the mouth of the Neva River near the Gulf of Finland, Tsar Peter I (Peter the Great) established a port and military base in 1703, which then became Russia’s new capital in 1712. St Petersburg soon became the largest city in the entire Baltic Sea region. No costs were spared for the construction of canals, administration buildings, fortresses, churches, and palaces, and the centre of St Petersburg became an impressive sight: with its gilded domes, imperial Russia’s window to the West shone from faraway. On closer inspection, however, this window showed cracks. The metropolis on the Neva actually cut costs in the construction of some basic infrastructure, thereby affecting the well-being of its inhabitants. While most cities in late nineteenth-century Western Europe began to invest significant sums in water mains, sewers, and health care, St Petersburg, then the fourth largest metropolis in Europe, did not realize similar reforms. St Petersburg’s water supply system was inadequate, and the necessary public sewers had not been built in the city at all. Thus it became the only European capital without a proper municipal sewer system.¹² Finally, in 1865 – the same year that the plan for the water and sewerage system for Danzig was completed – the city of St Petersburg reacted to its growing hygienic problems by establishing a commission that announced an international competition for drafting a general plan to construct a proper municipal sewerage system. As the commission considered all received projects unsatisfactory, new competitions were launched, and the commission invited proposals from sanitary planners, including Europe’s most qualified and experienced engineers at the time. By 1917, altogether 65 sewerage system designs had been considered by various commissions established by the city. In the end, however, none of the plans were accepted.¹³ As a consequence, the waterways within and outside the city, including the Neva Bay and coastal areas, became increasingly polluted. Due to the systematic neglect of basic sanitary reforms, cholera epidemics continued in St Petersburg until the First World War, that is to say longer than in any other major European city.¹⁴ Both Russian and foreign newspapers sarcastically emphasized that the main cause of Russia’s ongoing cholera epidemics was not a disease, cholera vibrio, but rather the weak imperial society, cholera russica, and particularly its socially sick capital, cholera Petropolitana. ¹⁵ At the beginning of the twentieth century, St Petersburg was widely known as the most unhealthy metropolis in Europe.¹⁶ The case of imperial St Petersburg proves how both sanitary reforms and water protection policy were linked to the sociopolitical power structures of European towns and cities.

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Helsinki: Active Civil Society Gustav I, the king of Sweden, founded Helsinki at the mouth of a river on the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland in 1550. In 1640, the new town was transferred to a nearby windy cape by the sea. On both sides of the cape, there were large bays, and at the very centre of the city, there were small and shallow inner bays. After installing a water carriage system at the beginning of the twentieth century, the inner bays in Helsinki received a notable part of the wastewater from the city and neighbouring major industrial plants, including a sugar factory and gasworks.¹⁷ As a result, the central park ceased to attract people for Sunday walks because of the stench coming from the bays. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the area’s washing and swimming houses as well as piers had to be closed due to pollution. As the population grew in Helsinki, the pollution of the bays led to heated debates. Something had to be done, but what? Many proposals were presented for alleviating the pollution and plankton blooms of the inner bays.¹⁸ The first “natural” proposal was to simply landfill the most polluted inner bay. The second was to promote water exchange by digging a channel across the western parts of the city and thereby allowing clean seawater to flush the bays. The third was to dredge the bay, transport polluted sediments away, and increase the water volume of the bay. The fourth suggested building large collector sewers and pumping wastewater out to the sea instead of into the bay, while the fifth proposed collecting the sewage water and purifying it. The City Council selected the last and cheapest proposal, and in 1910, the first wastewater treatment plant, a biological trickling filter, was built in Helsinki.¹⁹ Despite its innovative technology, the first biological wastewater treatment was far too small to handle the increasing wastewater load. Consequently, several organizations complained that the city’s measures were far from sufficient. In 1911, complaints by swimmers’ associations and three women’s organizations were directed to the City Council because of the nuisance caused by pollution. Swimming became fashionable in towns and cities at the end of the nineteenth century, first among the bourgeoisie and then gradually among the working class. Meanwhile, water pollution emerged as a new danger to the newly erected bathing houses. The sea, which had been regarded as a source of health, became a “source of plague”, and the Board of Health had to close several of the bathing houses. In 1911, because of the pollution of shore waters, the swimmers’ associations in Helsinki demanded the construction of wastewater treatment plants and a swimming hall. In addition to swimmers, three different women’s organizations campaigned effectively against water pollution in 1911/12. The main reason for this campaign was that the pollution threatened to end the practice of rinsing clothes in the

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sea. At the time, all the laundry was rinsed in the sea because piped water was considered to be too expensive to use for that purpose. Three different complaints were made by women’s organizations representing working-class, middle-class, and upper-class women. United action was impossible due to the deep sociopolitical divisions between these organizations. Nevertheless, the campaign against pollution was protracted and intensified due to the mutual competition between these organizations.²⁰ The city of Helsinki did not immediately fulfil the wishes of the swimmers or the women, either. Instead, these complaints were used in the coming years to legitimize a long planning process for the new sewerage system. Scientific studies combined with public involvement and political debate helped the city to publish the first white paper in 1915 dedicated to solving urban water pollution problems. In 1927, the city published a master plan to treat 100 per cent of the municipal wastewater in one mechanical and six large activated sludge wastewater treatment plants. The master plan included the building of pumping stations and major collector sewers on both sides of the city. The two first large activated sludge plants were completed in the early 1930s. The construction of the third plant was interrupted on 30 November 1939 when Russian bombers appeared in the skies of Helsinki and the Winter War commenced.²¹ The Second World War began in Northern Europe with the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland, which interrupted all water protection efforts for the coming decade.

Local Newspapers versus the City of Stockholm The Swedish capital city of Stockholm is built on 14 islands. The city is characterized by a number of bays, rivers, and bridges. The third largest lake in Sweden, Lake Mälaren, is situated in its western hinterland, and to the east lies the Baltic Sea, with which it is connected to via a long fjord. In the 1920s, all municipal and industrial wastewater was still discharged untreated into the nearby watercourses, which consisted of relatively shallow bays. Over several decades, the load had gradually increased, and the situation in the city centre was exacerbated by natural conditions. In autumn 1928, Stockholm’s largest daily newspapers, the conservative Svenska Dagbladet and liberal Dagens Nyheter, wrote several reports on the water quality at the bathing places in the city’s centre. All the city’s residents could see the amounts of floating rubbish and dirt in the main waterbodies of Stockholm. Therefore, the Board of Health of the city of Stockholm studied the water quality in these areas and concluded that the risk of typhoid and paratyphoid fever was considerable. According to the newspapers, plans to shut down

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these popular facilities in the middle of the summer were justified. The papers deliberately interviewed all the party leaders in the City Council and forced them to publicly state their opinions. The papers also pointed out that Stockholm was not the only city in the world with polluted shores: for example, Hamburg, Danzig, and New York were reported to be facing similar pollution problems, and according to these newspapers, it was time to act immediately.²² Following the publicity given to these pollution questions, the Street Department in the Department of Public Works of Stockholm drafted a proposal for a new sewerage system with a mechanical treatment plant together with a general plan, which was ready in 1930. It proposed the construction of large collectors, a pumping station, and mechanical wastewater treatment plants for the central and southern areas of the city. The general plan to reform the sewerage system over the next 20 years was accepted in December 1933 by the City Council. All the political parties, including conservatives and social democrats, regarded the general plan as a necessary step.²³ Stockholm’s first wastewater treatment plant was completed in 1934, and it provided the mechanical treatment of wastewater for thousands of residents of the city. By focusing on mechanical treatment, the city of Stockholm clearly opted for a financially cheaper water protection policy, whereas cities like Danzig and Helsinki were already building more advanced and, therefore, more expensive biological wastewater treatment plants that used the activated sludge method. When the Second World War broke out, Sweden remained neutral, and Stockholm was one of the rare cities in Europe that was able to continue building water protection infrastructure during the war. However, for the rest of Europe, the Second World War signified a prolonged pause in the development of water protection.²⁴

Toward an Urban Environmental Regime The four case studies strongly suggest the importance of towns and cities in launching efforts to initiate marine water protection. These cities did so because water pollution increased in the very centres of coastal towns and cities and threatened the health and well-being of a large number of people in rapidly urbanizing Europe. This situation created, for the first time, a large and relatively well-educated and informed population that was very aware of the risks of coastal pollution. Consequently, a new regime of pollution emerged in urban Europe. A crucial element in the development of the new urban environmental regime was the establishment of local popular movements, progressive city councils, city governments, and professional boards such as boards of health and depart-

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ments of public works, which became the key organizations in the new urban environmental regime. Early urban water protection activities were based on the new sanitary ideology, developed by urban experts of the time. This ideology aimed to keep urban soil, water, and air clean by means of large-scale structural reforms that were based on social, scientific, and technical investigations and realized through political decisions. Granting municipal autonomy, together with taxing rights, provided the needed economic resources for urban water protection. The importance of the urban environmental regime only increased after the end of the nineteenth century as urban areas expanded in Europe, creating strong local, national, and international networks of urban environmental policy, media, science, and technology.

3 Building the Baltic Sea Region over the Iron Curtain A common notion among maritime historians is that the sea not only separates but also unites human societies. Rarely has this notion been so true as in the case of the Baltic Sea region during the Cold War. In the late 1940s, from Stettin on the Baltic Sea to Trieste on the Adriatic Sea, an Iron Curtain descended across the continent, as Winston Churchill famously put it; Europe became divided into two hostile realms. Churchill may have turned a blind eye to the edges of Europe, but his statement can also be read to indicate that the European seas, the Baltic Sea in the European north and the Adriatic Sea in the European south, were natural barriers that self-evidently were extensions of the new continental division. There was no need to lower imaginary curtains; the sea was a natural curtain in itself that insuperably divided the blocs. From the late 1940s until the mid-1960s, the interaction between the two hostile blocs and across the Baltic Sea was very limited as the previously free movement of people, shipping connections, and exchange of information were effectively cut off. However, there were exceptions to the rule, of which, in the context of the Baltic Sea, by far the most important was the relationship between Finland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Finland was placed in a schizophrenic position of being a Nordic democratic and capitalist society, which shared a 1,000-kilometre-long border with the new socialist military superpower (see figure 1). On the one hand, lucrative foreign trade with the Soviet Union brought significant benefits to the Finnish state, business, and society; on the other hand, freedom of speech concerning international relations, in partic-

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ular, was limited. Officially, Finland announced neutrality; in practice, though, it often bowed to Soviet interests. This position, however, gave Finland a definitive edge over other European states in fostering contacts across the Iron Curtain (see also chapter 6 by Eckert/Šimková). Largely, it was the Baltic marine environment that functioned as the formal basis for these contacts from the mid-1960s onwards. In the 1920s, a visionary Russian naturalist, Vladimir Vernadsky, declared that “change always takes place on the Earth’s surface and not in the ocean”.²⁵ Among oceanographers, this was a commonly held view even well into the latter half of the twentieth century. For Vernadsky and his contemporaries, the land was dynamic, while the sea was eternally the same. From this view, it followed that, besides the narrow strips of coastal waters, human societies could not significantly alter the chemistry of the sea. However, the Baltic Sea is not an ocean; it is hardly even a proper sea but rather a semi-closed pool of brackish water containing a relatively small quantity of water. After the emergence of highly developed societies in its catchment area, the Baltic Sea has received huge amounts of industrial and municipal discharge of pollutants, run-off from cultivated land areas, and discharge from ships. Gradually, all these factors began to take their toll on marine chemistry and biology. Oil pollution had been known since the early twentieth century, but the drastic increase of oil shipments since the 1950s evidently meant increasing oil pollution. On Swedish coasts alone, for example, three large-scale oil accidents occurred within a short period of time around the mid-1960s, while hundreds of oil spills, often intentionally released from ships, were detected annually.²⁶ In addition to oil pollution, there were also other environmental changes in the marine environment. In the late 1960s, Swedish scientists found that the Baltic Sea contained five to ten times more DDT and PCB compounds than any other studied sea area in the world. The first victims of toxic chemicals were seals and predatory birds, which were rapidly heading towards extinction. The next victims, it was feared, could be humans.²⁷ Finally, the first symptoms of the excessive growth of biomass – caused by the run-off of nutrients from factories, domestic wastewater, and farm fields (commonly referred to as eutrophication) – were observed by the end of the 1960s.²⁸ The Baltic Sea, of course, was not an exception among European seas because similar environmental changes had occurred in all regional seas. The infamous Torrey Canyon accident, which devastated the coasts of Cornwall and the Bretagne in the spring of 1967 and killed hundreds of thousands of sea birds, was at that time the worst ever tanker accident, galvanizing politicians and commentators all over the world who demanded stricter rules for oil transportation. It

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Figure 1: The Cold War divided Europe and the Baltic Sea region in the post-war period. Three socialist coastal states were members of the Warsaw Pact, the Federal Republic of Germany and Denmark belonged to NATO, and Finland and Sweden were considered as politically neutral. Because of Soviet pressure the territorial waters, on the average twelve nautical miles from respective coastline, were not included in the Helsinki Convention signed in 1974. Map: Simo Laakkonen, Environmental history of the Baltic Sea project, 2006.

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also brought the North Sea countries together to agree on a governmental treaty in 1969 for protecting the sea from oil.²⁹ The heavily trafficked Mediterranean Sea was not saved from massive oil disasters either. Over the course of only a few years from the late 1960s to early 1970s, three large oil tanker accidents took place in the Mediterranean Sea, all of which spilled more oil into the sea than had been spilled in any tanker accidents in the Baltic Sea. As elsewhere, smaller oil spills from normal tanker and refinery operations were ubiquitous.³⁰ When adding the impact of sewage water and pollution by harmful substances, by the early 1970s the state of the Mediterranean Sea was, in the words of one contemporary observer, a “sick sea”: Health of millions will be in danger. Recreational beaches will be tarred and ordured [sic]. The sea will be out of bounds for bathers. The trees will go on dying along the coasts, suffocated or poisoned by the polluted sea-winds. The quality of life will be diminished.³¹

Yet, it was the changes in the Baltic Sea, with its small water mass and poor water exchange, that caused more concern and led to more research activities than any other sea area in Europe. Already in the early 1970s, in domestic contexts as well as in influential arenas such as the United Nations, the Baltic Sea was referred to as the most polluted sea in the world – and as a warning sign for some far-seeing minds who saw in the Baltic Sea the likely future of other world seas.³² The concern for environmental changes translated rather quickly into cooperative initiatives among the Baltic Sea states to study the marine environment and prevent further pollution. For some, particularly for marine scientists and sanitary engineers, environmental diplomacy was a last-minute effort to save the dying sea. For others, primarily politicians, besides improving the wellbeing of ecosystems, environmental cooperation proved to also be a promising way to enhance contacts between democratic and communist countries and thus secure peace in Europe. These two motives were clearly apparent, when Finland and the Soviet Union agreed to cooperate on the environmental research on the Gulf of Finland. The Agreement on the Scientific Cooperation of the Gulf of Finland was signed in 1968 under the umbrella of a larger Treaty on the Scientific and Technical cooperation that had already been signed in 1955 to solidify friendly relations between these two Second World War enemies. With this cooperation, Finland aimed at minimizing the threat and interference of its mighty neighbour in its domestic affairs – peaceful coexistence was the liturgy of the day – while the USSR also sought to gain access to Western technology, such as wastewater purification methods. What ensued was a dynamic collaboration, sometimes in-

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cluding close friendships between Finnish marine scientists and their Estonian counterparts, who were mostly responsible for practical work on the Soviet side. This cooperation ensured that scientists behind the Iron Curtain became aware of the newest currents in Western environmental sciences; Estonian scientists, for example, spent significant time in libraries copying scientific journals whenever visiting Finland. The Finns, for their part, received information, though often vague, regarding the discharge of various pollutants from the USSR.³³ From the very beginning, the cooperation aimed at expanding to include a comprehensive environmental treaty covering all seven Baltic Sea states. The years around 1970 were known in the history of the Cold War as the period of détente. Negotiations between superpowers for halting the arms race increased hopes for a lasting peace, while Northern Europe saw new opportunities for contacts across the Iron Curtain after the Federal Republic of Germany, led by Chancellor Willy Brandt, adopted the “new Ostpolitik”. Under these promising new conditions, Finland and Sweden, the two neutral states in Northern Europe, pursued the role of mediators, and the marine environment was a perfect arena to begin with as it enabled actors to come together without having to breach rather delicate issues, such as human rights or state borders. Mainly due to domestic pressure, the Swedish government attempted to broker an agreement on protecting the Baltic Sea from oil pollution in two meetings held in Visby in 1969 and 1970 respectively. Both meetings ended in failure because West Germany – according to its Hallstein Doctrine, whereby there was only one legitimate Germany – would not enter into any agreement with East Germany as an equal party. The communist states, on the other hand, made the presence of East Germany their precondition for any treaty. Finland tried to overcome this dilemma by inviting Sweden to join the Finno-Russian agreement. It was hoped that the rest of the littoral states would support and enter into the new marine environmental regime when the political situation was ripe. Despite such goals, the negotiations for a trilateral agreement never materialized. The USSR remained adamant in its demand that any multilateral agreement must be signed by every Baltic Sea state, including East Germany.³⁴ Once again, Cold War politics hindered cooperative policies for saving a deteriorating marine environment. Although the early years of Baltic marine diplomacy can be interpreted as a series of failures, there was ample progress going on in both diplomatic and scientific arenas that provided a catalyst for Baltic-wide cooperation as soon as the status of the German Democratic Republic was resolved. The pollution of European regional seas was adopted as one of the key themes in the first United Nations global environmental conference (the Conference on the Human Environ-

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ment), held in Stockholm in 1972. The Stockholm conference also gave birth to the United Nations Environment Programme, one of whose early priorities was the protection of regional seas (the Regional Seas Programme), with a particular focus on the Mediterranean Sea.³⁵ Meanwhile, marine scientists were able to learn a great deal about scientific endeavours taking place in other countries via bilateral contacts as well as through meetings of international scientific organizations in which scientists from every Baltic Sea state took part. The most important among these organizations was the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas, which in 1968 launched an extensive survey on the research, sources, and volumes of land-based pollution from each of the Baltic Sea countries.³⁶ Similar surveys had been conducted in 1967/68 for the North Sea countries,³⁷ and there is no reason to doubt that information regarding the North Sea ecosystem also circulated in Eastern Europe. Moreover, marine scientists from both blocs met in other meetings of biological scientific organizations, such as the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research and the International Biological Program. When the two Germanys finally signed their Basic Treaty (Grundlagenvertrag) in 1972, which acknowledged the sovereignty of the German Democratic Republic, the existing ties between marine scientists across the Iron Curtain accelerated the drafting and later the implementation of the Helsinki Convention.³⁸ The negotiations for an environmental treaty were launched in the spring of 1973, and only one year later, on 22 March 1974, all seven Baltic Sea states signed the Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area (also known as the Helsinki Convention), which initiated a new phase in marine environmental agreements (see figure 2). While the previous agreements had been formed on a single-issue basis – for example, covering oil or, in more extensive agreements, the dumping of hazardous waste from ships – the Helsinki Convention aimed at protecting the sea from all known marine pollutants; that is to say, it compiled numerous earlier agreements under one protocol and one secretariat.³⁹ This all-inclusive principle was thereafter established as a strategic bedrock for other similar marine agreements. For example, the Barcelona Convention (Convention for the Protection of the Mediterranean Sea Against Pollution), signed in 1976 for protecting the Mediterranean Sea, was not only significantly influenced by the Helsinki Convention but also indebted to various more narrowly defined European agreements, such as the London Convention and Oslo Convention on dumping (Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter, 1972, and Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping from Ships and Aircraft, 1972), the Paris Convention on land-based pollution (Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution from

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Land-based Sources, 1974), and the work conducted under the Regional Seas Programme, within the United Nations Environment Programme. Indeed, as an all-inclusive general treaty, the Barcelona Convention went even further than the Helsinki Convention, as its protocol also included internal waters as well as pollutants transmitted by rivers. These areas were missing from the Helsinki Convention due to Soviet demands, which caused a serious setback in the quest for the more efficient protection of the Baltic Sea. Obviously, the Mediterranean environmental regime did not have to deal with the obstacle of having that particular superpower as one of its signatories.⁴⁰ In this sense, the birth of a more general marine environmental diplomacy was genuinely an all-European project that, despite the lack of a single integrative authority, unified the marine policies in different parts of the continent and defined their relationship with the underwater world. Moreover, the Helsinki Convention was the first multilateral European treaty between members from both military blocs, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact, and involving neutral states. As such, it also paved the way for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, held in Helsinki in 1975 (see figure 2). In the world of the two different realities that the Cold War had created, marine environmental cooperation helped to rebuild bridges among Europeans that, for more than 20 years, had been insurmountable.

4 Towards a European Environmental Regime By the 1990s, the use of the majority of notorious toxic chemicals had been prohibited or strictly controlled. Although the USSR secretly continued to use, for example, DDT,⁴¹ the state of the European marine environment gradually improved. The risk of oil tanker accidents was ever present, as the disasters of the tankers Erika off the coast of France in 1999 and of the Prestige in Spain in 2002 both illustrate. Significantly, the single-hulled Prestige had just visited the rocky Baltic Sea before wrecking off the coast of Galicia and spilling approximately 64,000 tons of oil into the Atlantic Ocean. However, due to technological improvements, as well as resolutions for banning intentional oil discharge (by far the biggest source of chronic oil contamination in the previous decades), oil pollution in the Baltic Sea and other seas has substantially decreased since the 1970s. Parts of the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Black Sea, for example, were designated as special areas with stricter rules for oil discharge in the International Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution from Ships (1973), signed under the auspices of the International Maritime Consultative Organization.⁴²

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Figure 2: US President Gerald Ford and USSR General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev met in a good atmosphere during the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe held in Helsinki in 1975. The days of détente and pioneering international environmental cooperation were, however, counted when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Photo: The Archive of President Urho Kekkonen.

This does not mean that the European seas were turning into unspoiled environments. The main concern, however, switched from toxic chemicals and oil pollution toward eutrophication. In both much-studied European inland seas, the Mediterranean Sea and the Baltic Sea, the nutrient concentrations in the seawater increased rapidly from the 1960s to the 1980s. In the Mediterranean Sea, blue-green algae blooms occurred much more frequently than in the previous decades, and in the Baltic Sea, beaches were tarnished almost every summer by slimy masses of blue-green algae, some of which were toxic. Moreover, when

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the algal biomass decayed, it consumed oxygen in the seawater, which made the large parts of the deep basins totally anoxic and thus devoid of any life.⁴³ Nutrients, of course, flow into the sea from the whole drainage area, but their volume depends on the forms of production and abatement measures. Nutrient pollution in the Baltic Sea is a case in point for analysing how differently the states have dealt with transboundary environmental problems. The democratic littoral countries, West Germany, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, since the 1970s had rushed to build wastewater purification plants in all municipalities and at all factories. Although huge amounts of nutrients still flowed from cultivated fields and forests into the watercourses, the use of artificial fertilizers per produced units nevertheless decreased substantially.⁴⁴ As a result of measures taken in democratic states, the total nutrient load from the catchment basin, which had peaked in mid-1980s, gradually began to decrease.⁴⁵ There was also the increasing will in communist states to build environmentally sounder societies, although the system continued to reward industrial-polluting practices. In many municipalities, for example, wastewater treatment developed surprisingly rapidly.⁴⁶ The most significant problems were evident in large cities such as Leningrad (present-day St Petersburg), where most of the industrial and municipal wastewater continued to be discharged into nearby watercourses without any purification.⁴⁷ As for international cooperation, the genuine understanding of common marine environmental problems in communist states lagged far behind that of the West. As long as the Cold War lasted, the work of the Helsinki Commission (Helcom. Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission), an intergovernmental body created in the Helsinki Convention to coordinate international actions, was seriously compromised owing to the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the USSR and its allies. The Soviet goal of contacting the West and exploiting its technologies had already been achieved in 1974 with the signing of the Helsinki Convention, and afterwards their interest in the work of Helcom declined. Even the good intentions that emerged during the period of perestroika in the late 1980s were buried under administrative disarray and economic turmoil.⁴⁸ Thus, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, the Baltic Sea area was still a deeply divided entity in terms of environmental protection. The collapse of communism did, however, breathe new life into Baltic environmental cooperation. Already in 1992, rather soon after the Soviet Union disintegrated into the Russian Federation, the Baltic Sea states re-signed the Helsinki Convention, which introduced the newly independent Baltic states as contracting parties. Perhaps the clearest sign of a new era was the extension of the scope of the Helsinki Convention. In 1974, the Soviet Union had required its territorial waters to be excluded from the convention so that other parties could not

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interfere in its internal affairs. The re-signed convention also covered these territorial waters – which, in a relatively small regional sea, such as the Baltic Sea – was a precondition for the effective implementation of this international treaty.⁴⁹ The fresh start in the 1990s allowed both politicians and scientists to direct their energies towards mitigating the marine environmental crisis, instead of mainly polishing friendly relations. By the early 1990s and especially after the horrendous environmental catastrophes in the former Soviet Union came to light,⁵⁰ it was increasingly clear that the most cost-efficient way to improve the state of Baltic ecosystems was to focus on discharge in former communist states. In practice, this meant a massive transfer of funds, technology, and know-how, through which Western environmental standards and principles could be transplanted into the post-Soviet emerging market economies. Not only were the financiers, Western democracies, and their multinational organizations – such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and increasingly the European Union – keen to support projects that addressed those problems, which were strongly in their national interests, but there was also a hidden motive to find new markets for their companies, which motivated such activities. The funding recipients, for their part, were more than happy to benefit from the funding countries’ growing concern over the marine environment.⁵¹ For example, wastewater treatment systems in St Petersburg and Kaliningrad were finally completed in the 2010s with the help of expertise and financial support from Finland, Sweden, and the European Union. A cynical reading aside, the collaboration in environmental protection could also be seen as a win-win scheme, which introduced Western environmental principles and policy norms into the former communist states. Although some commentators saw it as waste of money, at its best, the export of environmental policies could also ease tensions in and between the states and thus improve environmental security in Northern Europe.⁵² As such, environmental cooperation can be discussed as an integrating force in Northern Europe when the former communist states struggled with the transition towards creating democratic societies and, later, towards gaining European Union membership. It is no wonder that the European Union – by providing funding for multiple programmes and coordinating the implementation of the United Nations Agenda 21 (Baltic 21 programme), as well as through its regulative and directive tools such as distinctive marine strategies – emerged as an increasingly important actor in marine protection in the Baltic Sea area.⁵³

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5 Conclusions Our starting point was to attempt to understand how water pollution and protection have emerged in the Baltic Sea region, how the conceptualizations of marine environmental problems have widened over time, and what kinds of responses have developed in different societies. While most studies have focused on some specific regions, our target was to view, if possible, the Baltic Sea as a whole and, further, as a European region. The first environmental regime developed on the urban level. Modern water protection was initiated by sanitary ideology in pioneering towns and cities in the late nineteenth century and was based on the fundamental urban administrative, political, and economic reforms that modernized European towns and cities. Crucial elements of the modern awareness of water pollution including science, technology, media, and environmental policy-making were created in progressive towns and cities. Our case studies on Danzig (Gdańsk), St Petersburg, Helsinki, and Stockholm demonstrate how different the socioenvironmental situations in examined cities were. Therefore, the responses varied greatly between these cities. Generally speaking, urban industrial water protection gradually expanded in societies, becoming finally the first, the largest, and probably also the most effective sector of environmental protection in most industrialized European countries. In conceptual terms, the urban environmental regime divided the Baltic Sea into two distinct realms. Coastal waters, particularly those near cities, were seen as valuable human environments needing protection, whereas the open sea areas long remained as pristine nature outside of the human sphere. Nevertheless, the fact that water connected the Baltic Sea region provides interesting perspectives for exploring how European environmental history can be approached through water. The second environmental regime was developed on the international level in the Baltic Sea region because the first sea to face severe environmental deterioration in its entirety was the Baltic Sea. Since the 1960s, almost the whole sea was affected by different kinds of pollution. Consequently, the Baltic Sea was recognized relatively early as one of principal concerns in the environmental politics of the littoral states. Concerted efforts to improve, and hopefully revive, the state of the Baltic Sea, based on the mutual understanding of the marine problems, already began in the 1970s. Therefore, the Baltic Sea has been employed in this chapter as a negative example as well as a positive model when building institutions for managing other European seas. Environmental problems also changed the way in which people imagined the sea. The entire sea was perceived

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as a polluted environment that threatened the well-being and even health of human societies. Yet, environmental awareness of these challenges remained problem centred and utterly anthropocentric. The third environmental regime consisted of European cooperation. The entry of the United Nations and the European Union into marine policy reflects a profound change in the environmental history of European seas. In the closing years of the twentieth century, the awareness about the marine environments reached both European and global scales, highlighting the role of marine ecosystems in sustaining all life on Earth. The European regional seas called attention to this global concern by acting as a warning of the dire consequences to be faced if the marine crisis was left unrecognized.

Notes  Donald J. Hughes, What is Environmental History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006); Helen M. Roswadowski, “The Promise of Ocean History for Environmental History”, Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (June 2013): 136 – 139; Johan Cederqvist, Susanna Lidström, Sverker Sörlin, and Henrik Svedäng, “Swedish Environmental History of the Baltic Sea: A Review of Current Knowledge and Perspectives for the Future”, Scandinavian Journal of History (December 2019): 1– 26, DOI: 10.1080/03468755.2019.1692067.  Thorsten B. H. Reuch et al., “The Baltic Sea as a Time Machine for the Future Coastal Ocean”, Science Advances 4, no. 5 (2018), DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar8195 (acessed 27 March 2020).  Simo Laakkonen and Sari Laurila, eds., The History of Urban Water Management in the Baltic Sea Region, Special Issue of European Water Management 2, no. 4 (August 1999): 29 – 76.  Piotr Kowalik, Simo Laakkonen, and Ziemowit Suligowski, “Early Urban Water Management in Gdansk, Poland”, in Advances in Urban Rehabilitation and Sustainability, Conference Proceedings of the 3rd WEAS International Conference on Urban Rehabilitiation and Sustainability (URES’ 10), eds. Thomas Panagopoulos, Teresa Noronha, and Jose Beltrão (Faro: University of Algarve, 2010), 14.  “Danzig, seine Canalisation mit Rieselfeldern”, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für öffentliche Gesundheitspflege 6 (1874): 493; Kowalik, Laakkonen, Suligowski, Early Urban Water Management of Gdansk, 14.  Eduard Wiebe, Die Reinigung und Entwässerung der Stadt Danzig: Auf Veranlassung des Magistrats zu Danzig unter Mitwirkung des Civil-Ingenieurs Veit-Meyer (Berlin: Verlag von Ernst und Korn, 1865).  Piotr Kowalik and Ziemowit Suligowski, “Comparison of Water Supply and Sewerage in Gdansk (Poland) in Three Different Periods”, Ambio – A Journal of the Human Environment 30, no. 4– 5 (May-August 2001): 320 – 321.  Kowalik, Laakkonen, Suligowski, Early Urban Water Management of Gdansk, 19 – 20.  “Viermillionen-Projekt der Stadt fertiggestellt”, Danziger Sonntags-Zeitung, 1 February 1931, 25. The mechanical part, Kläranlage, was completed in 1931.  Marek Swinarski, “The Development of Waste Water Treatment Systems in Gdansk in 1871– 1998”, European Water Management 2, no. 4 (1999): 70.

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 Joseph Brix, Karl Imhoff, and Robert Weldert, Die Stadtentwässerung in Deutschland, Vol. II (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1934); Kowalik, Laakkonen, Suligowski, Early Urban Water Management of Gdansk, 15.  James H. Bater, St Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976), 182– 192, 342– 353.  K. I. Krasnoborodko, A. M. Alexeev, L. I. Tsvetkova, and L. I. Zhukova, “The Development of Water Supply and Sewerage Systems in St. Petersburg”, European Water Management 2, no. 4 (1999): 55.  David K. Patterson, “Cholera Diffusion in Russia, 1823 – 1923”, Social Science & Medicine 38, no. 9 (1994): 1171– 1191.  Koleran, Nya Pressen, 29 July 1910, 5.  Bater, St Petersburg, 190, 353.  Simo Laakkonen and Pekka Lehtonen, “A Quantitative Analysis of Discharges into the Helsinki Urban Sea Area in 1850 – 1995”, European Water Management 2, no. 4 (1999): 30 – 39.  Terttu Finni, Sari Laurila, and Simo Laakkonen, “The History of Eutrophication in the Sea Area of Helsinki in the 20th Century. Long-term Analysis of Plankton Assemblages”, Ambio – A Journal of the Human Environment 30, no. 4– 5 (May-August 2001): 264– 271.  The following description of environmental policy-making in Helsinki is based on Simo Laakkonen, Vesiensuojelun synty. Helsingin ja sen merialueen ympäristöhistoriaa 1878 – 1928 [The origins of water protection. Environmental history of Helsinki and its sea area in 1878 – 1928] (Helsinki: Gaudeamus/Hanki ja Jää, 2001).  Simo Laakkonen, “A Touch of Frost: Gender, Class, Technology, and the Urban Environment in an Industrializing Nordic City”, in Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, eds. Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 195 – 222.  Simo Laakkonen and Pekka Lehtonen, “Mikrobit palveluksessa. Jätevedenpuhdistuksen kehitys Helsingissä”, in Näkökulmia Helsingin ympäristöhistoriaan, Kaupunki ja sen ympäristö 1800ja 1900-luvulla [Approaches to the Environmental History of Helsinki. The City and its Environment in the 19th and 20th century], ed. Simo Laakkonen et al. (Helsinki: Edita/Helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus, 2001), 226 – 239.  Simo Laakkonen and Staffan Thelin, “Beauty on the Water? Two Turning Points in Stockholm’s Water Protection Policy”, in Living Cities. An Anthology of Urban Environmental History, eds. Sven Lillja and Mathias Legnér (Stockholm: Formas, 2010), 306 – 331.  Ibid.  Simo Laakkonen, “Warfare – An Ecological Alternative for Peacetime? The indirect impacts of the Second World War on the Finnish Environment,” in Natural Enemy, Natural Ally. Historical Studies in War and the Environment, eds. Edmund Russell, and Richard Tucker (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004), 175 – 194.  Wladimir I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, transl. David B. Langmuir (New York: Springer, 1997 [1926]), 149.  “Dålig beredskap mot oljeutsläpp!”, Sveriges Natur 5 (November 1965): 193 – 194; Gunnar Böös, “Sommarens oljeskandaler”, Sveriges Natur 5 (October 1967): 203; “Sen sist”, Sveriges Natur 5 (November 1970): 184.  S. Jensen, A. G. Johnels, M. Olsson, and G. Otterlind, “DDT and PCB in Marine Animals from Swedish Waters”, Nature 224 (1969): 248– 249; O. Hook and A. G. Johnels, “The Breeding and Distribution of the Grey Seal (Halichoerus Grypus Fab.) in the Baltic Sea, with Observations

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on Other Seals of the Area”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B. Biological Sciences 182 (1972): 45.  Stig H. Fonselius, On the Stagnant Conditions in the Baltic (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 1969).  Peter M. Haas, “Protection the Baltic and the North Seas”, in Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection, eds. Peter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohane, and Marc A. Levy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 147.  Andrey G. Kostianoy and Angela Carpenter, “History, Sources and Volumes of Oil Pollution in the Mediterranean Sea”, in Oil Pollution in the Mediterranean Sea: Part I: The International Context, eds. Angela Carpenter and Andrey G. Kostianoy (Cham: Springer, 2018), 11, 13.  Ritchie Calder, The Pollution of the Mediterranean Sea (Berne: Herbert Land, 1972), 53 and passim.  Tuomas Räsänen, Itämeren ympäristökriisi ja uuden merisuhteen synty Suomessa 1960-luvulta 1970-luvun puoliväliin, PhD thesis (Turku: University of Turku, 2015), 244.  Simo Laakkonen and Tuomas Räsänen, “Cold War Science Diplomacy in the Baltic Sea Region: Beginnings of East-West-Cooperation in Marine Protection”, in Northern Europe in the Cold War, 1965 – 1990: East-West Interactions of Trade, Culture and Security, eds. Poul Villaume, AnnMarie Ekengren and Rasmus Mariager (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, 2016), 29 – 33, 38 – 40.  Tuomas Räsänen and Simo Laakkonen, “Cold War and the Environment: The Role of Finland in International Environmental Politics in the Baltic Sea Region”, Ambio – A Journal of the Human Environment 36 (2007): 231– 232.  Mostafa K. Tolba, with Iwona Rummel-Bulska, Global Environmental Diplomacy for the World, 1973 – 1992 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 35 – 45; Stacy D. VanDeveer, “Protecting Europe’s Seas”, Environment 42, no. 6 (2000): 1.  ICES, Report of the ICES Working Group on Pollution of the Baltic Sea (Charlottenlund: ICES, 1970).  ICES, Report of the ICES Working Group on Pollution of the North Sea (Charlottenlund: ICES, 1968), https://www.ices.dk/sites/pub/Publication%20Reports/Expert%20Group%20Report/Fish eries%20Improvement%20Committee/1968/1968_E5.pdf (accessed 7 April 2020).  Robert G. Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy: Cooperation and Conflict in East-West Environmental Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001): 53 – 55; Peter M. Haas, Saving the Mediterranean: The Politics of International Environmental Cooperation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 237.  Final Act of the Diplomatic Conference on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area, Helsinki, 22 March 1974, Archives of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Helsinki, Finland, 71b; Räsänen and Laakkonen, “Cold War and the Environment”, 232– 234.  Haas, Saving the Mediterranean, 111.  Lev A. Fedorov, “Officially Banned – Unofficially Used: DDT Use in the Soviet Union”, Global Pesticide Campaigner 7 (1997): 11.  Ronald B. Mitchell, “Intentional Oil Pollution of the Oceans”, in Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection, eds. Peter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohane, and Marc A. Levy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 208 – 221.  See for example, Ragnar Elmgren, “Understanding Human Impact on the Baltic Ecosystem: Changing Views in Recent Decades”, Ambio – A Journal of the Human Environment 30 (2001): 227– 228; Michael Karydis and Dimitra Kitsiou, “Eutrophication and Environmental Policy in the Mediterranean Sea: A Review”, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 184 (2012): 4932, 4937– 4943.

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 Detlef Jahn and Kati Kuitto, “Environmental Pollution and Economic Performance in the Baltic Sea Region”, in Governing a Common Sea: Environmental Policies in the Baltic Sea Region, eds. Marko Joas, Detlef Jahn, and Kristine Kern (London: Earthscan, 2008), 30 – 31.  Elmgren, “Understanding Human Impact on the Baltic Ecosystem”, 227.  Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen, “Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic”, in Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945 – 1990, eds. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. McNeill (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2019), 36 – 54.  Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy, 60.  Ibid., 21– 23, 58 – 59, 63 – 69; Ronnie Hjorth, Building International Institutions for Environmental Protection: The Case of Baltic Sea Environmental Cooperation, PhD thesis (Linköping: Linköping University, 1992).  Ronald Barston, “The Helsinki Convention (1992): New Approaches”, Ocean & Coastal Management 22 (1994): 249 – 250; Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy, 58 – 59.  Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992).  Björn Hassler, “Protecting the Baltic Sea: The Helsinki Convention and National Interests”, in Yearbook of International Co-operation on Environment and Development 2003/2004, eds. Olav Schram and Øystein B. Thommessen (London: Earthscan, 2003), 38; Stacy D. VanDeveer, “Environmental Cooperation and Regional Peace: Baltic Politics, Programs, and Prospects”, in Environmental Peacemaking, eds. Ken Conca and Geoffrey D. Dabelko (Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002), 42– 48.  Eg. VanDeveer, “Environmental Cooperation and Regional Peace”, 28 – 29, 44– 48, 51– 54.  Veronica Frank, The European Community and Marine Environmental Protection in the International Law of the Sea: Implementing Global Obligations at the Regional Level, PhD thesis (Utrecht: Utrecht University, 2006); Helcom, EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive, https:// helcom.fi/about-us/partners/eu-marine-strategy-framework-directive/ (accessed 29 April 2020).

Selected Bibliography Darst, Robert G. Smokestack Diplomacy: Cooperation and Conflict in East-West Environmental Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Haas, Peter M. Saving the Mediterranean: The Politics of International Environmental Cooperation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Haas, Peter M., Robert O. Keohane, and Marc A. Levy, eds. Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. Hjorth, Ronnie. Building International Institutions for Environmental Protection: The Case of Baltic Sea Environmental Cooperation, PhD thesis. Linköping: Linköping University, 1992. Joas, Marko, Detlef Jahn, and Kristine Kern, eds. Governing a Common Sea: Environmental Policies in the Baltic Sea Region. London: Earthscan, 2008. Kowalik, Piotr, Simo Laakkonen, and Ziemowit Suligowski. “Early urban water management in Gdansk, Poland.” In Thomas Panagopoulos, Teresa Noronha, and Jose Beltrão, eds. Advances in Urban Rehabilitation and Sustainability. Conference Proceedings of the 3rd WEAS International Conference on Urban Rehabilitiation and Sustainability (URES’ 10), 12 – 22. Faro: University of Algarve, 2010.

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Laakkonen, Simo, and Sari Laurila, eds. The history of urban water management in the Baltic Sea Region. Special Issue of European Water Management 2, no. 4 (August 1999): 29 – 76. Laakkonen, Simo, and Sari Laurila, eds. Man and the Baltic Sea. Special Issue of AMBIO – A Journal of the Human Environment 30, no. 4 – 5 (August 2001): 263 – 326. Laakkonen, Simo et al., eds. Science and Governance of the Baltic Sea. Special Issue of AMBIO – A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 2 – 3 (April 2007): 123 – 286. Laakkonen, Simo, and Tuomas Räsänen. “Science Diplomacy in the Baltic Sea Region: Beginnings of East-West Cooperation in Marine Protection during the Cold War”. In Ann-Marie Ekengren, Rasmus Mariager, and Poul Villaume, eds. Northern Europe in the Cold War: East-West Interactions of Security, Culture, and Technology, 25 – 48. Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, 2016. Laakkonen, Simo, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo, eds. The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017. Mignon Kirchhof, Astrid, and John R. McNeill, eds. Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945 – 1990. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2019. Räsänen, Tuomas. Itämeren ympäristökriisi ja uuden merisuhteen synty Suomessa 1960-luvulta 1970-luvun puoliväliin, PhD thesis. Turku: University of Turku, 2015. Räsänen, Tuomas. “Alarmism and Denialism in Environmental Science: The Case of the Nutrient Pollution in the Baltic Sea in the 1960s and 1970s”. Scandinavian Journal of History 43, no. 5 (2018): 646 – 665. Räsänen, Tuomas, and Simo Laakkonen. “Cold War and the Environment: The Role of Finland in International Environmental Politics in the Baltic Sea Region”. AMBIO – A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 2 – 3 (April 2007): 223 – 230. VanDeveer, Stacy D. “Environmental Cooperation and Regional Peace: Baltic Politics, Programs, and Prospects”. In Environmental Peacemaking, edited by Ken Conca and Geoffrey D. Dabelko, 23 – 60. Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002. Westing, Arthur H. ed. Comprehensive Security for the Baltic: An Environmental Approach. London: Sage, 1989.

Heike Weber

11 Recycling Europe’s Domestic Wastes: The Hope of “Greening” Mass Consumption through Recycling

Abstract In the 1970s and 1980s, waste recycling was politically promoted as a strategy to lower the environmental impact of postconsumer waste. In diverse Western European cities, local recycling projects emerged as a result of civic and ecological activism. What began as an eco-movement turned into the main pillar of municipal waste management, as stakeholders from industry and politics, and environmental activists agreed that recycling was the best way to handle rising amounts of waste. Moreover, consumers began to carve out an unexpected form of a “consumer-recycler citizenship”: Sorting, storing, and transporting one’s waste for recycling (or not) became a means to express one’s individual environmental awareness as a consumer. A closer examination of glass recycling demonstrates that recycling was a mixed blessing. The 1970s bottle banks were driven by the idea of defying the throwaway culture as expressed by disposable glass bottle, but in the end, it represented a further shift away from reusing (the traditional returnable bottle) towards disposal and scrapping. Keywords municipal waste management; recycling; reuse; disposable bottle; consumer-recycler citizenship In most parts of Europe, the public sphere is dotted with containers to deposit recyclable materials, and many citizens can even dispose recyclable wastes in municipal backyard bins. As an inconspicuous fixture of the urban space, these containers are material testimonies of both the rise of mass consumption and citizens’ efforts to ‘green’ their lifestyles through waste recycling. Supported by civic activism, many European countries created extensive waste recovery infrastructures over the last half century and integrated waste recycling as pivotal pillar in their municipal waste management systems. While to some degree following developments that originated in the United States,¹ recycling in Europe followed its own distinct path. This chapter outlines how household waste recycling, as a supposedly ‘green’ or ecological waste treatment strategy, emerged in the context of changing European consumer cultures and values. The call for and subsequent widespread adoption of household waste recycling as daily practice in the 1970s and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-012

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1980s was led by Western European citizens – in particular, city dwellers in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and (West) Germany. By the late twentieth century, this recycling movement resulted in strong European Union (EU) waste policies that enforced recycling as distinct household waste management strategy all over the EU. There is no single history of European recycling and we have to distinguish the paths taken in East and West, but even the ‘green’ recycling projects of Western Europe developed differently in each country and region. However, it is possible to identify certain shared trends and motivations. The practice of recovering waste materials is not in itself a recent invention. Channelling used materials back into production has long been an industrial or private strategy to deal with limited resources or personal limited income. What makes the recycling movement which emerged in late-1970s affluent societies distinct is the fact that authorities and governments, environmental activists and mass consumers alike were now re-defining waste recovery as an ecological waste treatment which would address the waste crisis and limited natural resources. It is this dimension which is referred to in this chapter by speaking of ‘green’ recycling. Furthermore, the chapter carves out the unique role of civic activism and consumers’ willingness to define themselves as what I will call “consumer-recycler citizens”. In addition to political frameworks and an extensive infrastructure that handled the complex reverse logistics of recycling, this active participation of consumers in the recycling system – such as sorting, hording, and transporting waste – was fundamental for the transition of what began as an eco-movement for recycling into an enduring and encompassing waste handling strategy of municipalities all over Europe. Engaged citizens and activists figured as pivotal actors in addition to state legislation, national, international, and local authorities, waste experts, industry, and the distribution sector. After providing an overview of the major players and developments in European recycling, this chapter focuses on one type of recyclable material – glass – as a central element of household recycling practices. It traces the emergence of glass recycling with France and West Germany serving as case studies. In addition, using the example of East Germany, the chapter briefly looks at waste recovery practices in Eastern Europe prior to the collapse of socialism; East European citizens also engaged in environmentally motivated recycling, but the economic context and lack of mass consumerism meant that their experiences differed from those of Western Europe in important ways. Yet the story of recycling is not merely a success story of environmental protection. While recovering domestic waste for reuse became part of Europe’s diverse consumer culture and a way to mark one’s individual environmental awareness as consumer, it did not disrupt the trend of increasing waste amounts

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and ecological costs created by mass consumption. Furthermore, public discourse, civic activism, and environmental policies alike have foregrounded household waste (or so-called municipal or post-consumer waste), even though industrial waste far exceeds household waste – more waste is generated by the production of consumer goods than by discarding them; producers have clearly successfully shifted the responsibility for wasteful designs and packaging to consumers. Moreover, the traditional waste salvage trade has turned into a highly profitable and global waste recycling business, dominated by a few corporations and featuring many opaque trade chains, some of which result in toxic recycling and disposal far away from where the waste originated.

1 Situating Recycling in Twentieth-Century Consumer Culture: Consuming, Discarding, Reusing, and the Changing Understanding of Stewardship For most of human history, channelling used materials back into production was the norm and was driven by thrift and austerity.² Under rubrics such as waste utilization or salvage, scrap peddling, or the rag-and-bone trade, industry practiced what we would nowadays call recycling. In fact, the term “recycling” was originally coined in the 1920s with reference to the reprocessing of oil industry residues. Waste salvage around 1900 also included domestic waste, which at this time was by and large an urban phenomenon in Europe. By the late nineteenth century, waste had turned into a hygiene problem in urban settings and consequently more and more municipalities established municipal waste services. At the same time, rag-and-bone men remained common, collecting recyclable waste from private households and small businesses, and reselling it to the salvage trade. Metal scrap, followed by rags, then bones, and waste paper constituted the major fields of this past waste salvage business.³ In private households, the relatively greater expense and scarcity of goods were accompanied by a culture of thrift, diverse everyday reuse and repair practices, and a caring “stewardship” of objects. Housewives burned paper in domestic fireplaces for heating and cooking, repurposed worn cloth for other purposes, and in smaller municipalities, they often handed over kitchen scraps to those who came into the city from the countryside to deliver milk, or fed them to pigs, hens, or rabbits kept in the backyard.

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Seen from this longer perspective, the “Great Acceleration” from the 1950s onwards, including, in particular, increasing resource extraction and the growing amounts of waste produced by affluent mass consumer societies, represents a fundamental turning point in societies’ use of material, or what has been called the “metabolism” of society – a development which waste recycling has done little to reverse.⁴ Indeed, between the beginning of the century and its end, waste, its origins and flows, and actors’ approaches towards it, underwent a basic transformation. There is no direct line of continuity from the waste salvage activities of the early twentieth century to the ‘green’ recycling of the late twentieth century; each is situated in distinct historical contexts with different social values, economic and business structures, contemporary technologies, and production and consumer cultures. The examples of nylon stockings and furniture can help to illustrate the fundamental changes of consumer behaviour and societal values in respect to the use, care, and stewardship of things. In post-war Europe, nylon stockings and tights were still quite expensive and women would turn to repair shops – in West Germany, they were called Laufmaschendienste – to have runs fixed; this professional service had gone out of business by the early 1970s due to rising labour costs and falling purchase prices for new items.⁵ Some wearers might still have resorted to nail polish or similar workarounds to stop runs, but buying new pairs and throwing away the old became the rule. In a similar vein, when furniture – once a highly valuable item which was passed on to the next generation – turned into a mass-produced “consumer durable”,⁶ mass consumers acquired cabinets, beds, or kitchen furniture with shorter timespans of use in mind. Around 1960, bulky waste emerged as a new phenomenon and over the course of that decade most West German or French cities, for example, implemented bulky waste collection as a regular municipal service – in socialist states, such waste collection was never implemented. The bulky waste of the 1960s and 1970s – consisting of old furniture, other large personal items, textiles, and in increasing proportions also electrical equipment – indicates that cultures of repair, reuse, and object stewardship were dwindling, while cultures of disposal and passing use became the norm once households were affluent enough to acquire and possess more and more things.⁷ In the early 1980s, an OECD study observed that many Western European consumers tended to think of repair as too expensive or complicated and instead disposed an increasing share of their consumer durables.⁸ Looking at the US context, and American housewives in particular, Susan Strasser has shown how the early twentieth-century rise of mass consumer culture went hand in hand with new norms of getting rid of old stuff.⁹ In the course of this transformation, discarding came to be considered a hygienic, modern,

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and even economical everyday practice by the interwar period, when municipal waste services had become widely available and mass consumption was the norm. While a similar shift in attitude can be traced in Europe as well, it occurred several decades later: in the crisis-ridden interwar period, cultures of thrift continued to be prevalent; they were reinforced during World War II, when warring nations explored waste salvage not simply as a means to mobilize resources, but also to mobilize citizens for war-making, and daily reuse habits persisted while Europe’s economies recovered from the war. These extended periods of depression, war, and post-war recovery meant that mass consumption blossomed in most countries only from the 1960s onwards. When the environmental movement took hold on a global scale in the late 1960s, mass consumption had nevertheless profoundly transformed European societies. The post-war economic boom, described in Germany as the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”) or in France as Les Trente Glorieuses (“Glorious Thirty Years”), enabled consumers to shop in supermarkets and acquire novel consumer goods such as pre-packaged food, plasticware, and mass-produced furniture. Mass motorization had set in and mass consumption practices extended to rural households. Household were increasingly equipped with a fridge and convenient heating systems were beginning to replace traditional fireplaces. Western European paths into mass consumer societies not only differed from the American archetype, but also regionally.¹⁰ Portuguese consumers of the 1970s, for instance, consumed less and differently from their Swedish counterparts. Likewise, the waste that European households produced not only varied along the socialist/capitalist binary, but moreover along categories such as rural/urban or class and social groups and along cultural regions. Waste from Parisian households, for instance, carried more vegetable content than that of Frankfurt or Hamburg.¹¹ Recent research on post-war Western European consumption and discarding practices has underlined that the thrift and reuse cultures of the past were still recent enough to be readily reactivated by the ecological movement and recycling activism.¹² This specific constellation fostered ‘green’ recycling projects in Western Europe. According to Strasser, a “European consumer citizenship” not only emerged alongside, but developed “symbiotically” with “environmental concern and green citizenship”.¹³ But it did so with different timing and manifestations in different regions, depending on consumption levels and patterns, national policies, cultural traditions, societal values, and ecological expectations: National methods for coping with the waste of consumption – so-called municipal waste or post-consumer waste – diverged and there was no unique path to ‘green’ recycling.

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Waste recovery not only varied across time and place, but also in terms of the materials.¹⁴ Waste paper recovery, for instance, increased steadily throughout the twentieth century, at first primarily industrial paper waste, but later on, increasingly including domestic waste paper. Rag recycling – once the second-most important salvage sector after the metal scrap business – began to decline by the 1960s, and to this day there are still few ecological recovery strategies or suitable applications for synthetic fibres which gradually replaced organic ones. By contrast, broken glass – a secondary raw material of minor value – was reused by local glass industries, but rarely traded on a larger scale before the advent of ‘green’ recycling, and glass recycling took hold on a mass scale only as a consequence of late twentieth-century recycling frameworks. A French-German episode from the 1980s illustrates some of these regional differences in the methods and in particular meanings and values of waste recycling and ecological mass consumption. In France, reusing organic household waste in agriculture and vegetable farming as gadoues vertes or gadoues noirs (green wastes distinguished by whether they had gone through a short or long decomposition period) had been common practice until the 1950s. It found continuation in mushroom farming of the 1970s and 1980s that still operated under the traditional label of gadoues vertes utilization rather than recycling. At that time, the potential heavy metal contamination of compost made from biowaste was intensely debated in West Germany, where there had been little demand for composted waste since the interwar years. As a result of these divergent traditions and mentalities, ecologically concerned West German consumers rejected the French mushrooms offered in their supermarkets,¹⁵ while carrying empty glass containers or waste paper to public recycling banks. Consumers’ decisions about what to repair or reuse or recycle and what to waste take place in complex settings and vary depending on what technological infrastructures are available. Social, cultural, and material as well as political and economic factors are decisive for how people consume, and likewise, what they consider as waste and how they treat it: gender and class, generational differences, and rural or urban backgrounds all play a role, as do values and norms regarding material culture. Books, for instance, have a long tradition of second-hand use¹⁶ and even today are not generally disposed of in wastepaper recycling. In rural settings, feeding kitchen scraps to small livestock or dogs was a common habit of the older generation. For most of the twentieth century, handing down used clothes or giving them away to charitable organizations were the prevailing ways of getting rid of used clothing, even after mending one’s textiles had become rare in affluent societies. However, the recent trend of fast fashion and overconsumption has turned clothes into throwaway items – according

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to the European Clothing Action Plan, consumers inside the EU discard substantial amounts of clothing in residual waste, ranging from more than 7 kg per capita annually in Italy to 2.8 kg in Denmark (2014).¹⁷ Analysing recycling as a component of consumer culture helps to understand that, despite its indisputable environmental benefits, waste recycling favoured the growth of mass consumption and discarding. Except for poor households, domestic strategies for storing, repairing, or reusing have gone from being a necessity and a norm to an occasional practice and deliberate decision to preserve or hand down selected items. Along with the rise of ‘green’ recycling, the meanings and understandings of stewardship shifted substantially, as will be illustrated for the case of the disposable glass bottle in section four of this chapter. Along with the rise of waste recycling, stewardship was not about preserving a given object for its (re)use, but about recovering the material content of discarded items through complex recycling processes.

2 “Closing the Loop” in Socialist Economies: The East German Case In the post-war economic boom, Western European citizens began to identify themselves as what has been termed “consumer citizens”: along with their new material lifestyles, they considered consumption a basic right and a means to act and express citizenship.¹⁸ On the other side of the Iron Curtain, socialist governments also promised their citizens affordable consumer goods, and this “consumer socialism” stimulated higher expectations and desires than states could fulfil.¹⁹ But while rising volumes of household waste and an increase of throwaway practices triggered Western Europe’s recycling movement, socialist consumption and discarding patterns diverged significantly from their capitalist neighbours. As part of post-war recovery and a strategy for dealing with the scarcity of domestic resources and Cold War embargos on the capitalist global trade of raw materials, many socialist governments implemented a wide spectrum of waste recovery or salvage initiatives for industrial and domestic wastes alike. Socialist consumption was lower than in the West – and thus, the amount of municipal waste was also lower. Throwaway items such as disposable glass bottles or soft-drink cans were simply unavailable. In the everyday, socialist consumers practiced reuse, repurposing, or repair as personal strategies to overcome goods shortages in socialist economies. Many citizens kept old things to reuse them – or to use them for bartering to obtain things currently unavailable

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on the market. As a result, the stewardship of objects continued to be the norm rather than the exception.²⁰ In East Germany, households kept cars – a consumer item which was difficult to acquire – about three times longer than their officially projected lifespans, and the resulting repair and maintenance efforts (and costs) were greater than in West Germany.²¹ Consuming and discarding patterns diverged substantially between East and West Germany. In West Germany, the traditional rag-and-bone men became rare figures by the 1960s. Even if numerous landfills of West German cities were still leased out to waste pickers, this form of waste salvaging vanished when rags, paper, or scrap from dumps lost any market value.²² In the early 1960s, going house to house to collect bundles of old newspapers had become too laborious as to be economic for the paper salvage trade, and only a few charitable organizations continued to engage in this practice.²³ By contrast, the East German government continued or adapted many elements of the traditional waste salvage structures which the Nazi regime had intensified and instrumentalized for its autarkic and war purposes.²⁴ Around a third of the textile and paper and half of the bone waste which the East German salvage sector recovered in the 1950s originated from private households; the high rates of bones can be explained by continuation of the practice of domestic slaughtering.²⁵ Citizens were encouraged to return waste by a compensation system: 2.5 kg of old paper yielded five rolls of wallpaper or ten sanitary towels; 1 kg of bones yielded one bar of soap. Socialist youth organizations and other groups initiated salvage drives (see figure 1); moreover, throughout East Germany, households disposed of kitchen scraps separately in the so-called Specki-Tonne (“bacon bin”), which the local agricultural production cooperative or municipal waste service would collect for use as swine feed. In the course of the 1960s, states like Hungary and East Germany promoted the goal of “closing the loop” of their economies, e. g. by reprocessing and recovering waste material.²⁶ Where possible, production processes took advantage of secondary raw materials: toilet paper, for instance, was made of waste paper, as were most other paper products.²⁷ The term Sekundärrohstoffe was a guiding concept in the production system of East Germany.²⁸ Over the 1970s, the East German state restructured its waste salvage sector. During this time, in addition to growing resource demands, ecology became a further motivation for recycling.²⁹ By 1981, the waste collection system SERO (Sekundärrohstofferfassung) was established as separate channel to absorb recyclable domestic waste. In order of tonnage, SERO collected large volumes of waste paper (41 per cent) and used and broken glass containers (32 per cent), followed by scrap metal (14.9 per cent), bones (5.9 per cent), textiles (5.7 per cent), and small amounts (less than one per cent) of plastics and rubber.³⁰ By 1988, SERO had more than 17,000 deposit

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Figure 1: Collection centre for refillable glass containers, paper and further scrap, East Germany, 1977. Source: ddrbildarchiv.de/ Klaus Morgenstern.

locations, i. e., roughly one per 1,000 inhabitants, and most of these centres were operated by individuals or associations rather than by government staff. While SERO continued the traditional financial compensation system – 1 kg of plastics, for instance, was worth 1 mark, 1 kg of newspapers 0.30 mark³¹ –, later studies on SERO underline that citizens were motivated to participate in this recycling programme less because of this financial compensation, but out of a spirit of thriftiness and commitment to material conservation. They listed as motivations the reduction of environmental impact, saving resources, the dense network of collection points, and only in fourth place, financial aspects.³² In the late 1980s, SERO collected 17 kg of waste per capita annually, while the socialist market offered 80 kg of paper per capita annually. The average

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West German citizen, by contrast, delivered around 25 kg of waste paper annually to recycling, while the national paper consumption lay at 215 kg per capita annually.³³ For glass, West German annual per capita amounts recovered by recycling were 20 kg of broken glass, compared to 26 kg in East Germany, most of which represented non-broken containers destined for reuse. Relative to consumption volumes, East German citizens’ recycling efforts were much higher than those of their West German counterparts. But the subsequent reprocessing formed a bottleneck: SERO’s stock of used textiles was overflowing, and sorting and reconditioning were deficient in many sectors – such deficiencies, however, also marked the West German recycling system, which lacked, for example, ways to reutilize plastic and neglected textiles altogether. In the end, East Germany’s ambitious goal of gainfully re-using more than 80 per cent per cent of its overall (industrial and municipal) waste was never achieved.³⁴ SERO’s household waste recycling represented only a minor share of these total figures and reduced municipal waste volumes substantially. Most of the non-recyclable wastes, however, were disposed in landfills lacking secure sealing. Concern about the risks and environmental consequences of this unsanitary waste disposal coincided with the growth of environmental groups in East Germany by the 1980s. These group spoke out about ecological concerns in spite of severe state restrictions of the public sphere. Their primary objective was the considerable environmental degradation brought about by the coal and chemical industry. But the issue of waste disposal and various treaties with West Berlin and other West German municipalities to import their waste, including toxic waste also led to environmental civic protests.³⁵ Capitalist and socialist societies shared many motives and ambitions in respect to industrial pollution and nature conservation, and in some cases these shared concerns resulted in exchange of expertise collaboration.³⁶ On the matter of waste recovery, by contrast, instances of knowledge transfer between East and West were rare, and even direct interactions involving waste, such as waste export from West Germany to East Germany, hardly led to exchange of expertise on waste treatment issues. Moreover, to the consternation of many East Germans, SERO disappeared within just a couple of years after German reunification. When the reunited Germany investigated recycling policies in the early 1990s to promote its Kreislaufwirtschaft (circular economy), the SERO system was only briefly studied and ultimately abandoned altogether.

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3 How Western European Consumers Became Recyclers: Actors of the ‘Green’ Recycling Initiatives of the Late 1970s and 1980s In Western Europe, the first ‘green’ recycling projects were implemented in the late 1970s. The ensuing recycling movement was able to draw on past waste recovery strategies. Paper and glass were the first targets of recycling efforts – a fact which was in part driven by the content of domestic waste bins: Paper was the largest component of waste, as paper consumption had exponentially increased and wood- and coal-fired furnaces had vanished from homes. Glass containers made up the second-largest portion of the waste as a result of new drinking and eating habits. Bottle and paper banks thus promised to substantially reduce the waste in municipal waste bins.³⁷ By contrast, the third major waste type was hardly targeted by ‘green’ recycling projects of that time: organic waste and kitchen scraps. To understand this neglect of organic waste, we need to focus on the involved actors and their interests. While the glass and paper industries had a stake in recycling as a source of raw material, composting lacked a lobby in most regions at the time. Structural changes also played a role: Western European nations were proud of leaving behind their agrarian roots to become fully industrialized societies. As this section underlines, while environmental concerns were an important motivation of consumers who sorted and delivered their waste to recycling collection points, the post-1970 turn to ‘green’ recycling was not exclusively driven by ecological considerations. Moreover, the environmental benefits of ‘green’ recycling are debated to this day. In many Western European countries, the post-war transformation to a mass consumer society was accompanied by conservative criticism of consumerism. Moreover, older generations in particular, having lived through times of war and crisis, saw their core values affronted by the burgeoning wastefulness.³⁸ This traditional criticism of mass consumption and profligacy was now increasingly joined by environmental concerns. A West German press article from 1970, for instance, admonished the “waste avalanches of the throwaway culture” and listed the waste crisis, alongside “poison gas from everyone’s car” and other problems of the day, as “environmental sin”.³⁹ By the end of that decade, the increasing amounts of waste and the contentious issue of disposables had even become subjects of West German school education.⁴⁰ In West Germany and France, as in many other countries, the “throwaway society” (or, German Wegwerfgesellschaft and French la société de gaspillage) became a despised byword of the time. By the late 1960s, Vance Packard’s Waste Makers (1960), a criticism

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of the excesses and wastefulness of American consumer culture, had been widely read, and the promotion of disposability of convenience goods described in that study was almost univocally rejected in public debates. At the same time, these developments did not automatically lead to ‘green’ waste recycling. Recycling was shaped by and negotiated between diverse actors who in turn were driven by specific, even opposing interests, as the bottle bank example in the next section will show in more detail. These actors included municipalities and municipal waste services, waste experts, national environmental policies and legislation, diverse industrial players (or in the case of waste compost, agrarian representatives), transnational think tanks, and environmental activists as well as citizens. When, for instance, West German bottlers announced their plan to replace the traditional refill system with disposable packaging in 1967, municipal waste services warned authorities that they would not be able to handle the resulting waste amounts.⁴¹ Aware of the limited capacity of disposal sites and confronted with growing post-consumer waste, West German cities called for national legislation to limit waste by the late 1960s.⁴² Once environmental thinking had entered the political and public scene in the early 1970s, many national governments began discussing potential bans on disposable packaging to protect municipalities and taxpayers against skyrocketing waste disposal costs. Such considerations, along with environmental activism, eventually formed the basis for governments to commit to creating recycling infrastructures and pressure industries such as glass and paper manufacturers to use increasing amounts of secondary raw materials. Think tanks such as the Club of Rome advocated recycling as a resource conservation strategy. Its 1972 study Limits to Growth proposed substantial use of secondary resources for the very near future and its models for a more sustainable economy included waste composting and recycling in addition to enhancing resource efficiency and product durability.⁴³ In 1973, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI) in Rüschlikon, Switzerland, a research institution dedicated to issues of consumption, economy, and society, turned its attention to recycling, bringing together prominent experts from the fields of waste disposal, economy and ecology, among them Barry Commoner, Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, and Dennis Meadows.⁴⁴ On the level of national politics, governments implemented waste laws, published waste studies, and developed programmes for making waste treatment more environmentally friendly. The grand ambitions of many such projects, however, were never fully realized, as the cases of France and West Germany demonstrates: The French GEERS and GRUSON reports and the West German Abfallwirtschaftsprogramm of the mid-1970s spoke out against wastefulness, called on

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industry to design consumer products with longer lifespans and better repairability, proposed bans on disposable packaging, and appealed to consumers to take responsibility for waste and recycling.⁴⁵ But in the 1980s, recycling was not the primary concern of waste politics in either country; rather they were focused on the more pressing issues of hazardous waste and environmental modernization of landfilling and incineration. On a global scale, transnational environmental movements such as Friends of the Earth and widely received events such as Earth Day promoted waste recycling. But the regional and local levels were decisive for the implementation of recycling initiatives, and here there was considerable variation between countries.⁴⁶ From the mid-1970s onwards, many Western European cities began putting recycling schemes into operation, often starting with smaller pilot projects. These initial recycling schemes originated from ecological grassroots movements, charity organizations and citizens, or national or municipal environmental politics, and some also from the waste salvage trade or municipal waste services. In West Berlin, one such recycling initiative was spearheaded by the environmental group Gesellschaft für Umweltschutz e. V. with the support of the Protestant church. The activists convinced housing associations to join the system and found a private enterprise to take over the collection and resale of recyclable material. Between 1976 and 1978, nearly 22,500 households were provided with yard collection bins for scrap paper and glass. Due to the success of this pilot project – around 70 per cent of the waste paper and 86 per cent of the broken glass disposed of by these households landed in the separate recycling bins and reduced waste volumes by around 30 per cent –, the system was continued under the title Recycling Modell Berlin and by early 1981, served around 100,000 residential units.⁴⁷ One motivation of the West Berlin activists was to limit or prevent waste exports to East Germany: cut off geographically from the rest of West Germany, West Berlin lacked a hinterland where its growing amounts of waste could be disposed of, and city authorities had made a treaty with East Germany to manage this waste crisis. The West German city of Konstanz pioneered a statefunded study on collection of sorted waste.⁴⁸ With the purpose of reducing landfill pressure, other West German cities contracted commercial operators to pick up paper, which households would bundle and deposit on street corners for collection.⁴⁹ In 1979, around 100,000 tonnes of waste paper were redirected as a result of these initial activist efforts – an insignificant figure when compared to the five million tonnes of paper generated by West German households, but a meaningful step towards the establishment of a new waste disposal scheme.⁵⁰ In the Netherlands, initial recycling schemes emerged out of the protest of housewives’ associations and Protestant church groups. From oral history inter-

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views with main actors we know that older activists in particular were motivated by values of thrift and stewardship and even referred to their wartime experiences of living through scarcity and salvage – even if these experiences were largely the result of waste salvage obligations imposed by the Nazi occupation.⁵¹ In 1979, the Dutch Parliament declared waste prevention a priority in waste handling, followed by recycling, incineration and, as a last resort, landfilling; this last would be forbidden altogether within the course of the next decade.⁵² In the United Kingdom, where post-war rationing restrictions had continued until 1954, individual municipal waste services such as that of Glasgow continued to operate the salvage of paper and scrap until the mid-1960s, and in the early 1970s, nearly a surprising third of Britain’s paper consumption was reclaimed.⁵³ During the oil crises, boy scouts and other voluntary organization collected bundled paper off the streets, and by 1977, Britain’s first bottle bank was operating in Oxford as a cooperation of Oxfam and a local glass manufacturer. While the Labour government had published the green paper War on Waste: A Policy for Reclamation in 1974, more widespread implementation of recycling was impeded by the conservative Thatcher government and did not become widely available throughout England until the 1990s.⁵⁴ In France, the Paris-based environmental action group Progrès et Environnement combated the spread of gaspillage in the municipalities of Le Havre, Lyon, and La Rochelle with a test project in selected neighbourhoods for the separate collection of household paper and glass, and in some quarters, also plastic.⁵⁵ La Rochelle even included schools in this initiative: as part of an educational campaign to raise environmental awareness, pupils collected PVC bottles during an action week in 1974.⁵⁶ Official press material emphasized the dual environmental and economic aims of La Rochelle’s recycling project: curbing littering and cutting down trees as well as reducing wood and cellulose imports. Bordeaux’s Centre de Recyclage et de Récupération de Déchets introduced seven drop-off stations for recyclables in its periphery.⁵⁷ As its test site for paper recycling, ANRED (Agence national pour la récupération et l’élimination des déchets, founded in 1976) choose the Alsace region with its long tradition of paper manufacturing; collection was carried out by various associations – from student and sports groups to the Red Cross and the Scouts de France.⁵⁸ Bottle banks in particular spread in French cities starting in the late 1970s. By 1977, over 500 French municipalities, totalling 2.8 million citizens, participated in glass recycling.⁵⁹ Cities and citizens of the Northern Europe played a particularly important role as recycling pioneers. Once established on a municipal level, widespread public support for recycling and authorities’ environmental commitments were key for the permanent adoption and expansion of recycling on a national level. Guaranteed prices for scrap material and mandated recycling quotas turned industrial

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players into stakeholders of the recycling system and enabled the transition of the first wave of voluntary, non-profit, or citizen-driven recycling schemes into broadbased recycling infrastructures. In parts of Scandinavia, for instance, as in West Germany, the packaging and bottling industries adopted paper and glass recycling as voluntary commitments to escape more radical, threatening steps such as production bans. On a supranational level, the first steps towards unified recycling and waste management policies in Europe were initiated in the 1970s by the European Economic Community (EEC), which issued its first Directive on Waste in 1975 and formed a Waste Committee in 1976. In addition to the importance of environmental protection in waste treatment, the EEC waste directive (75/442/EEC) mentioned waste minimization and recovery to conserve natural resources – a beginning of the later so prominent “Three R’s” of waste management: the “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” motto. However, the directive had hardly any impact on national waste policies and municipal waste management. The 1985 EEC directive on how to pack liquids left it to national authorities whether to introduce bottle bills or negotiate agreements with industry. Other European institutions, responding to the rise of civic recycling movements in the late 1970s, also began to concern themselves with the topic. The Council of Europe’s Assembly organized two conferences on waste. They concluded that citizens’ mentalities were critical for converting the waste system: the “ordinary citizen” should play a part as “forewarned consumer” as well as “a helper in the collection process”.⁶⁰ A further transnational institution, the OECD, had recommended recycling as resource recovery strategy in 1976, but regularly assessed it as not being economically viable.⁶¹ Starting in the 1990s, frameworks and policies of the EU played an important role in promoting recycling, e. g. by advocating recycling quotas. In 1999, the Landfill Directive was a main impulse to stop or at least minimize the landfilling of household waste. Today, recycling is mandatory and an integral part of household waste management in EU countries. Inspite of EU-wide legislation, however, the average recycling rates – and also the total post-consumer waste amounts – continue to vary widely. Around 2005, Spain recycled nine per cent of its municipal waste (and composted 33 per cent), France 16 per cent (composting: 14 per cent), Germany recycled 33 per cent (composting: 17 per cent), and the UK 17 per cent (composting: nine per cent).⁶² At that time, the average citizen of these countries produced between 597 kg (Germany) and 541 kg of waste per year (France), while in other countries, e. g. Belgium, Greece, and Portugal, numbers were substantially lower. This also means that households in Germany, Denmark, or the Netherlands currently produce more waste than the average American household. And while recycling has become a mainstream activity among

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Northern European consumers, who have integrated the separation of their recyclable wastes for recycling in their daily consumption, shopping, and disposal routines, this is not true everywhere in Europe. The EU can be divided into three distinct waste regions:⁶³ the northern part takes the lead in waste volumes of which large shares are recycled while landfills have nearly disappeared; in the southern Mediterranean areas with less waste, recycling is modest and landfills absorb substantial shares of municipal waste. In Eastern Europe, waste volumes are lowest; recycling is hardly practiced, as capitalist ‘green’ recycling was unable to continue or build on previous socialist waste salvage practices, and most waste is still being landfilled.

4 Bottle Banks: Resistance to Throwaway Consumerism? In the years around 1970, the non-returnable bottle represented a highly contested symbol of mass consumerism and throwaway practices, much as, later, the plastic shopping bag. When Western European beverage markets were expanding in the 1960s, industry marketed this innovation as convenient alternative to the traditional deposit-and-return system – but immediately faced unforeseen resistance from environmental activists and citizens alike. The first campaign of the British branch of Friends of the Earth in May 1971 is but one prominent example (see figure 2):⁶⁴ After the beverage company Schweppes announced that it would be selling its drinks in disposable bottles, environmental activists collected and deposited more than 1,500 non-returnable bottles at the doorsteps of the Cadbury-Schweppes headquarters in London. This episode illustrates two important changes that were taking place in the beverage industry between the 1950s and 1970s. First, people increasingly began to purchase beverages such as bottled water, juice, lemonade, and beer for consumption at home – something that had not previously been common. For example, in 1956, the average West German consumed 17 bottles of Coke annually; by the mid-1960s, this figure had risen to 36 bottles.⁶⁵ In Europe, production and consumption habits differed nationally and in many places still had a highly regional character: West German consumers, for instance, favoured beer produced by regional breweries, all of which bottled their beer in the traditional returnable bottle, while the French preferred wine and consumed large amounts of bottled water. Initially, these beverages were largely sold in reusable bottles. As markets and distribution chains expanded, supermarkets and chain stores soon became the main points of sale for such beverages. In the wake of this shift, a second

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Figure 2: Friends of the Earth protesting Schweppes’ decision to bottle their drinks in non-returnable containers. At this time, non-returnable bottles were still a novelty in European markets, and the environmental activists had to engage in a concerted effort to gather the more than 1,500 non-returnable bottles. Source: Alamy.

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change began: industries increasingly turned to single-use and non-returnable containers. The French mineral water industry was the first European industry to turn to non-refillable glass containers in the early 1960s, followed by the disposable PVC plastic bottle adopted by Vittel in 1968.⁶⁶ In West German supermarkets of the mid-1970s, mineral water packed in plastic bottles was most likely a French import, and over 95 per cent of beer and mineral water consumption was sold in returnable bottles.⁶⁷ A similar transition took place for milk, which had long been delivered directly to consumers’ doorsteps by dairy companies in returnable bottles. In the Netherlands, the heavy glass bottle delivered to one’s door was replaced by the lightweight milk container bought in supermarkets starting in the 1960s; previously, the distribution of milk had been a monopoly of licensed milk and dairy retailers and milk was not available in grocery stores.⁶⁸ In West Germany, by 1969, only 20 per cent of the consumed milk was bottled in glass, cartons were used for around 50 per cent, and over 25 per cent was packed in polyethylene tubes.⁶⁹ By contrast, around 75 per cent of non-dairy beverages were still purchased in returnable bottles by West German consumers in 1980.⁷⁰ In the United Kingdom, doorstep milk deliveries prevailed well into the 1970s, and many dairy companies operated electric vehicle fleets to distribute milk in returnable glass containers (see figure 3). In 1980, nearly 90 per cent of the milk consumed in the UK was still sold in returnable glass bottles; by the 1990s, supermarkets offered milk in plastic containers or cartons. For producers and retailers, one-way packaging offered many advantages. Reusable bottles require extensive distribution logistics and a reverse logistics of collecting bottles and preparing them for refill. In the affluent 1960s, the traditional deposit-and-return system reached its logistical and economic limits: beverage markets expanded geographically, retail distances increased, and supermarkets rationalized labour and storage space.⁷¹ Manufacturers thus utilized the availability of more efficient and cheaper packaging. For consumers, too, one-way packages promised more convenience: they could simply throw packages away instead of saving and transporting used containers. However, in contrast to consumers in the US – where non-returnables had been in use starting in the 1930s and the share of refillable bottles in beverage sales had sunk to 40 per cent by 1970⁷² –, in Western Europe consumers proved reluctant to embrace the non-returnable bottle. In fact, Western European consumers of the 1960s identified the one-way bottle as icon of American mass consumerism and corporate America’s promotion of disposable products. The packaging industry and glass manufacturers tried to educate Western European consumers on the convenience and hygiene of the one-way glass bottle, but they clearly continued to prefer bottle reuse to discarding. The French packaging

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Figure 3: British door-to-door milk delivery with an electric vehicle. The delivery included the return of the empty bottles. Source: Martin Hammond, The British Milkman (Oxford: Shire 2020), 42.

industry journal, Emballages, noted in 1965 that consumers still considered glass “un matériau noble que l’on conserve” – housewives resisted throwing it away after use as if it were garbage.⁷³ In the years around 1970, many West German citizens identified the disposable beer, soft drink, or water bottle as symbol of the reviled “throwaway society”. Concerned citizens expressed their disapproval of the disposable bottle through protests or letters to authorities.⁷⁴ In a letter to the Ministry of the Interior, the Deutsche Wanderjugend – a youth hiking association and also a traditional actor in the field of nature conservation – demanded that plastic and the “antisocial throwaway bottle (here today, gone tomorrow) for the disposal of which the community pays”, be prohibited.⁷⁵ Municipalities received many such complaints from both environmental activist groups and individuals about the environmental hazard represented by throwaway products and plastic packaging or the litter problem they produced. When the parliament initiated a hearing on the issue of one-way packaging in 1972, West German consumer as-

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sociations univocally advocated state interventions to prevent use of the maligned one-way bottle.⁷⁶ While the transition from returnables to disposables also gave rise to political debates in the United States,⁷⁷ only a few US states introduced bottle bills which stipulated mandatory deposits for one-way beverage containers. Many municipalities initiated curbside recycling programmes which collected cans, glass, and plastic bottles as well as newspapers in a door-to-door pickup model. The bottling and beverage industry lobbied for municipal recycling programmes, not least as way to avoid costs and efforts for industrial reclamation schemes. In contrast to Europe, industry rejected active involvement in recycling and the state refrained from passing compulsory regulations. Today, the US still lacks national legislation on recycling as pillar of waste management, although individual regions such as San Francisco have reached high recycling quotas. Pressured by civic engagement, environmental protests, or consumer associations, a number of Western European nations allowed the “throwaway bottle” only in parallel with deposit-return systems or efficient recycling systems or both. But bottle deposits and glass recycling infrastructure were not exclusively motivated by environmental concerns. In Norway, a high tax on disposable containers sought to protect the local beverage industry against multinational corporations like Coca Cola.⁷⁸ The subsequent laws rewarded companies for high recycling rates. Sweden introduced deposits on all containers, including cans, while environmental legislation motivated bottlers to adhere to the returnable system, or, alternatively, to engage in recycling. By the late 1970s, Swedish bottlers and packaging firms founded the Returpack consortium to handle the reverse logistics of container recycling.⁷⁹ As beverages were traded across borders, the European Economic Community (EEC) also concerned itself with the matter, and in 1971 it established a working group on packaging within its environment and consumer protection branch.⁸⁰ This group also evaluated the traditional deposit-and-return system and concluded that it was superior to glass recycling.⁸¹ A study from 1974 found refilling to be cheaper than single-use bottling; moreover, according to the study, glass recycling offered only limited benefits. Nevertheless, the working group agreed that companies which already used one-way bottles would be reluctant to cease doing so. Likewise, although many actors in the environmental movement ideally favoured reusing over recycling, recycling proved to be the option on which most actors could agree. In the West German case, the main stakeholder in recycling was the glass industry. In 1972, confronted with heated public debates on the single-use bottle and the prospect of a radical ban of this packaging form, the West German glass industry declared its willingness to recycle waste glass, provided it was clean

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and obtainable at reasonable prices.⁸² In the context of the waste management programme (Abfallwirtschaftsprogramm), policy-makers set up a working group on glass recycling that brought together representatives of the government, the federal states, municipal authorities and waste services, and the glass industry. The outcome was a voluntary commitment by the glass industry to take a fixed quota of glass shards and to help develop the glass recycling logistics. The political aim was twofold: glass recycling was to be established to recover singleuse glass containers – beverage bottles, but also food containers such as pickle jars – in parallel with a continuation of the traditional deposit-and-return system for refillable containers. Glass recycling was initiated by different groups in different regions, but in most cases, included glass industry, municipal waste services, scrap dealers, and volunteer organizations⁸³ – sometimes charitable ones, sometimes sports clubs, youth or church groups, and scouts, as well as housewives’ associations and environmental activist groups. To encourage participation, the container glass industry distributed brochures to the Association of German Cities (Städtetag), the regional Chambers of Industry and Commerce, and housewives’ organizations. The first regional systems started operations by 1975, and by the end of the decade, recycling bins for white, green, and brown glass were available in about 80 per cent of the country, reaching 75 per cent of the population, while 25 reprocessing units prepared the glass for manufacturing into new products.⁸⁴ By the early 1980s, deposit containers for used glass could be found all over West Germany.⁸⁵ “Waste glass is not waste, but a raw material!” (“Altglas ist kein Müll, sondern Rohstoff!”)⁸⁶ proclaimed the glass recycling slogan of the 1980s; its circular logo, formed by an empty and a full bottle, each gripped by a hand, represented closed material cycle. The glass industry touted the success of the recycling programme as evidence that it was a “reliable partner for citizens and administration” in the field of environmental protection.⁸⁷ These ‘green’ recycling initiatives of the late 1970s relied on one key element: environmentally conscious citizens who were willing to participate in recycling’s reverse logistics by dropping their bottles off in collection containers instead of receiving the financial reward of the old deposit system. In daily practice, it was mostly women or children who carried out the duty of transport and deposit (see figure 4). A 1977 study by the West German Environmental Agency (Umweltbundesamt) identified the desire for “active environmental protection” as the driving motivation for citizens to collect used glass.⁸⁸ The success of glass recycling was not just the result of the participation of citizens who voluntarily brought their bottles to collection containers, but also on the material characteristics of glass which made recycling cost-effective for the industry. Reprocessing glass in the form of shards was a known technique

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Figure 4: A teenager depositing glass bottles in the corresponding containers, West Germany, early 1980s. Source: Brigitte Jaschke, Glasherstellung: Produkte, Technik, Organisation. Munich: Deutsches Museum, 1986, 105; Source: IZG-report 3 (1983): 31.

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that even offered savings in terms of energy and resources. The West German’s glass industry’s initial commitment to a 30 per cent reprocessing rate was not a significant technical challenge and the target rates for increasing this ratio were easily surpassed. The main challenge lay in efficiently returning the used glass to manufacturers – as the material value per tonnage was quite low, transport distances had to be kept short, and consumer participation was a pre-condition for the system’s feasibility. In the early 1980s, the necessary sorting of glass by colour became a bottleneck: while consumers performed basic pre-sorting, the final sorting before reprocessing still had to be carried out manually; electro-optical colour selection mechanisms would only be introduced some years later. In addition to engaged consumer-recyclers, the system thus depended on the professionalization of an efficient reverse logistics – and here, industry had stepped in. In 1990, Germany’s glass recycling rate (i. e. the ratio of recovered waste glass volumes to container glass sales) reached 54 per cent, behind the Netherlands and Switzerland (66 and 61 per cent respectively).⁸⁹ In the mid-1970s, glass recycling was the common denominator upon which the diverse stakeholders with diverging interests could agree. The glass industry found a way to avoid bans on production of single-use glass containers; environmentally-minded citizens could reduce their waste output, since glass made up an increasing proportion of household waste; the private sector could tap into new economic opportunities, etc. Recycling was a compromise that accepted rather than completely rejecting the throwaway practices of mass consumerism. “One-way is the wrong way” (“Einweg ist Irrweg”) was the motto of the West German consumer association in the 1980s, and user studies likewise indicated a consumer preference for the traditional deposit-and-return system.⁹⁰ Nonetheless, many consumers increasingly purchased disposable glass bottles, and the environmentally concerned ones among them were left with the path to the next bottle bank to appease their ecological conscience. By the mid-1980s, the share of returnable bottles had declined in all beverage sectors, in particular for non-carbonated soft drinks,⁹¹ so that the government decided to introduce a mandatory deposit on non-returnables as well in 1988. This did not halt the trend towards non-returnables, however. In 2020, over half of the beverages consumed in Germany are sold in single-use plastic bottles.⁹² At the same time, more than 80 per cent of single-use glass containers were recycled.⁹³ Given that the question of “disposable or returnable bottle” has been a continuing political issue in (West) Germany since the 1970s, this outcome suggests a failure of national environmental policy. But at the same time, it was the long-term result of consumers identifying themselves as consumer-recycler citizens. At a 1982 recycling congress, the president of the Umweltbundesamt stated that promoting the refillable bottle and limiting the further spread of the

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single-use bottle was “necessary from an environmental policy point of view”, since it made environmental protection tangible for the individual citizen.⁹⁴ In fact, in a study from 1989, the Umweltbundesamt calculated that the returnable bottle was still more cost efficient than one-way packaging (excluding the beverage carton), when counting all costs, including logistics, cleaning, and disposal.⁹⁵ Over time, however, growing transport distances to point of sale and new packaging and distribution systems – such as PET bottles or reverse vending machines at supermarkets⁹⁶ – have changed the conditions in which reuse and recycling are embedded. Life cycle analysis (LCA), a tool to “measure” the ecological imprint of consumer goods, has its historical origins in this very debate: In the late 1960s, Coca Cola commissioned a “Resource and Energy Profile Analysis” study of beverage containers; this study was never published but allegedly found that the plastic single-use bottle had a worse environmental impact, particularly since plastic recycling was not yet available.⁹⁷ The purpose of LCA studies is to assess material cycles under the existing parameters, not to critique market conditions – however, changing these conditions (such as reducing transport distances to a regional scale) might result in more sustainable consumption patterns. Today, after five decades of various bottle bills for non-refillable containers, there is little difference for consumers between reusable and refillable bottles. Ultimately, the success of glass recycling was a one-way street that led to the gradual demise of the traditional deposit-and-return system of reused bottles and short-distance, regional beverage markets.

5 Concluding Reflection: How ‘Green’ Is Post-Consumer Waste Recycling? “The world is now only 8.6 per cent circular”, calculates the Circle Economy Initiative, an impact organization promoting a “global circularity” of material cycles, for the year 2020.⁹⁸ As this statistic suggests, the rise of recycling has not brought about widespread reuse of waste; on the contrary, our headlong rush towards extractivism has continued.⁹⁹ As material flow analysis studies have amply demonstrated, any material recovery gained by local recycling has been outstripped by the steady growth of material inputs and outputs globally.¹⁰⁰ We thus need to reassess the understanding of the 1970s as a turning point towards environmentalism: For one thing, a global and long-term perspective is needed, for another, environmental awareness, activism, and policies must be contrasted with continuities and changes in everyday routines, daily consumer practices, and their material impacts.

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In Western Europe, despite its heterogeneous consumer cultures, a substantial recycling movement emerged in the 1970s that was driven by a shared will for environmental protection as well as the rejection of the throwaway bottle – at that time, a contested icon for the American-type “throwaway society”. As an environmental action to help “save the globe”, 1970s ‘green’ recycling started in local settings and resulted in the adoption of recycling in politics, waste management, and daily consumer practice. But seen in the longue durée, the success of bottle collection bins and glass recycling is simply a shift further away from object reuse towards disposal and scrapping or recycling – the two first parts of the “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” motto were never achieved and waste volumes grew substantially in the decades around 2000. Moreover, on the global scale, debates about recycling post-consumer waste have failed to address other waste-related challenges – from industrial waste volumes to the questionable use of certain recyclates to the many pitfalls of a global waste and recycling trade. When citizens recycle their waste, we consider such an activity an act of responsible ‘green’ citizenship as it limits the environmental impact of individual consumption. But can mass consumption be ‘greened’ through recycling? Or does recycling simply function as “atonement rather than effective environmental action”?¹⁰¹ As early as the late 1970s, some actors considered recycling postconsumer waste a second-best option in respect to conservation and environmental protection, but it became the one option on which diverse stakeholders – from industry to politics to consumers and environmental activists – could agree. Given Western European citizens’ willingness to identify with a novel and unexpected form of a consumer-recycler citizenship, more radical or anticonsumerist alternatives such as bans on wasteful product designs have been silenced ever since. In the end, recycling was framed as an environmentally sound way to enable continued capitalist mass consumption at the cost of practices of object stewardship, reuse, and repair. Seen from the viewpoint of past and current consumer-recyclers, the history of recycling showcases the ever-increasing gap between citizens’ environmental hopes and the cumulative, long-term environmental consequences of their everyday consumption practices. As act of everyday environmentalism, recycling was able to be easily integrated into daily consumption routines. It changed citizens’ social identity, but in the end, it resulted in more material “throughput” in daily consumption: the shortage-aware European consumers of the 1960s consumed far less than the environmentally-concerned consumer-recycler citizens of the late twentieth century.

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Notes  Samantha MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2012).  Chad Denton and Heike Weber, “Rethinking Waste within Business History: A Transnational Perspective on Waste Recycling in World War II (Introduction)”, Business History (2021), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1919092; Finn Arne Jørgensen, Recycling (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2019); Ruth Oldenziel and Heike Weber, “Introduction: Reconsidering Recycling”, Contemporary European History 22 (2013): 347– 370.  Sabine Barles, L’invention des déchets urbains: France: 1790 – 1970 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005); Heike Weber, “Nazi German Waste Recovery and the Vision of a Circular Economy: The Case of Waste Paper and Rags”, Business History (2021), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00076791.2021.1918105.  Willi Haas et al., “Spaceship earth’s odyssey to a circular economy – a century long perspective”, Resources, Conservation and Recycling 163 (2020), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/pii/S0921344920303931 (accessed 21 May 2021).  Heike Weber, “‘Made to Break?’ – Lebensdauer, Reparierbarkeit und Obsoleszenz in der Geschichte des Massenkonsums von Technik”, in Kulturen des Reparierens: Dinge – Wissen – Praktiken, eds. Stefan Krebs, Gabriele Schabacher, and Heike Weber (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018), 49 – 83.  On the origins of mass-produced furniture in Germany, see Maren-Sophie Fünderich, Wohnen im Kaiserreich: Einrichtungsstil und Möbeldesign im Kontext bürgerlicher Selbstrepräsentation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019).  Heike Weber, “Mending or Ending? Consumer Durables, Obsolescence and Practices of Reuse, Repair and Disposal in West Germany (1960s–1980s)”, in The Persistence of Technology: Repair, Reuse and Disposal, eds. Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber (forthcoming, Bielefeld: transcript, 2022), 236 – 263.  Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, ed., Product Durability and Product Life Extension: Their Contribution to Solid Waste Management (Paris: OECD, 1982).  Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan, 1999), 21– 68.  Hannes Siegrist, Hartmut Kaelble, and Jürgen Kocka, Europäische Konsumgeschichte: Zur Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des Konsums, 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1997); Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first (London: Allen Lane, 2016); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, ed., Die Konsumgesellschaft in Deutschland, 1890 – 1990: Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2009); Frank Trentmann, “The Long History of Contemporary Consumer Society Chronologies, Practices, and Politics in Modern Europe”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009): 107– 128.  Heike Weber, “Zur Materialität von Müll: Abfall aus stoffgeschichtlicher Perspektive”, Blätter für Technikgeschichte 77 (2015): 75 – 100.  Oldenziel and Weber, Introduction; Ruth Oldenziel and Mikael Hård, Consumers, Tinkerers, Rebels: The People who Shaped Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).  Susan Strasser, “Complications and Complexities: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Recycling”, Contemporary European History 22, no. 3 (2013): 517– 526, at 519.  Denton and Weber, Rethinking Waste; Heike Weber, “Ökonomie, Ökologie oder Ideologie? Motivationen für das Recycling von Altpapier im 20. Jahrhundert”, in Wirtschaft und Umwelt

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vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, eds. Günther Schulz and Reinhold Reith (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2015), 153 – 179; Barles, L’invention.  Catherine de Silguy, Histoire des hommes et de leurs ordures: du moyen âge à nos jours (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1996), 99, 103.  Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme, Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700 – 1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  ECAP (european clothing action plan): Mapping clothing impacts in Europe: the environmental costs. December 2017, p. 20, http://www.ecap.eu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Map ping-clothing-impacts-in-Europe.pdf (accessed 31 January 2021).  Kate Soper and Frank Trentmann, eds., Citizenship and Consumption (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).  Paul Betts, “The Politics of Plenty: Consumerism in Communist Societies”, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, ed. Stephan A. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 424– 439.  Ekaterina Gerasimova and Sofia Chuikina, “The Repair Society”, Russian Studies in History 48 (2009): 58 – 74.  Kurt Möser, “Thesen zum Pflegen und Reparieren in den Automobilkulturen am Beispiel der DDR”, Technikgeschichte 79, no. 3 (2012): 207– 226.  Heike Weber, “Müll und Recycling: Der Glaube an das technische Schließen von ‚Stoffkreisläufen’”, WerkstattGeschichte (forthcoming, 2022).  Weber, “Ökonomie”.  Christian Möller, Umwelt und Herrschaft in der DDR. Politik, Protest und die Grenzen der Partizipation in der Diktatur (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 137– 146. On Nazi waste recycling, see Weber, Nazi German Waste Recovery.  Dirk Maier, “‘Mehr Achtung für den Lumpenmann’: Altstofferfassung und Materialwirtschaft in der DDR der 1950er und 1960er Jahre”, in Müll: Facetten von der Steinzeit bis zum Gelben Sack, eds. Mamoun Fansa and Sabine Wolfram (Mainz: von Zabern, 2003), 131– 139, at 136.  Möller, Umwelt, 137– 146; Zsuzsa Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History. The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).  In 1980, East Germany produced around 800,000 tonnes of paper, while waste paper amounts added up to 600,000 tonnes, Jakob Calice, Sekundärrohstoffe eine Quelle, die nie versiegt. Konzeption und Argumentation des Abfallverwertungssystems in der DDR aus umwelthistorischer Perspektive. Diploma thesis, University of Vienna, 2005, 28.  Raymond G. Stokes, Constructing Socialism in East Germany (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 155 – 161.  “Jede Tonne Abfall, die nicht verworfen, sondern verarbeitet wird, trägt zur Erhaltung einer gesunden Umwelt bei”, explains this brochure on secondary resources: Hans-Heinz Emons and Heiner Kaden, Schätze im Abfall? Sekundärrohstoffe – Nutzbringendes aus Nutzlosem (Leipzig: VEB Fachbuchverlag, 1983), 20.  Figures from 1988, Susanne Hartard and Michael Huhn, Strukturanalyse des SERO-Systems der DDR im Hinblick auf Effizienz und Eignung unter marktwirtschaftlichen Bedingungen: Forschungsbericht 148 06 87 (Berlin: Umweltbundesamt, 1992), 143. Also: Susanne Hartard and Michael Huhn, “Das SERO-System”, in Umweltschutz in der DDR: Analysen und Zeitzeugenberichte: vol. 2: Mediale und sektorale Aspekte, eds. Hermann Behrens, Jens Hoffmann, and Institut für Umweltgeschichte und Regionalentwicklung e.V. (Munich: Oekom, 2007), 309 – 334.  Hartard and Huhn, SERO-System, 194.

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 Sandra Hollerbuhl, “SERO: Mobilisierung der Bevölkerung für Recycling”, in Die DDR war anders: Eine kritische Würdigung ihrer sozialkulturellen Einrichtungen, eds. Stefan Bollinger and Fritz Vilmar (Berlin: Edition Ost im Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 2002), 159 – 183. Also: Hartard and Huhn, SERO-System; podcast, interview with Doreen Brumme (“SBK092: Eingesammelt”), https://www.staatsbuergerkunde-podcast.de/tag/podcast-2/ (accessed 3 February 2021).  Umweltbundesamt, ed., Jahresbericht 1991 (Berlin: Umweltbundesamt, 1991), 255.  Stokes, Constructing Socialism, 158 – 159.  Sophie Lange, “A Deal over Dirt: From a German-German Bargain to the Creation of an Environmental Problem in the 1980s”, Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 3, no. 1 (2020), DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/wwwj.35; Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “‘For a Decent Quality of Life’: Environmental Groups in East and West Berlin”, Journal of Urban History 41, no. 4 (2015): 625 – 646.  Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. McNeill, eds., Nature and the Iron Curtain. Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945 – 1990 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).  In 1980, the figures for the average West German citizen were 46 kg of waste paper and 28 kg of used glass annually: Argus (Arbeitsgruppe Umweltstatistik, TU Berlin), ed., Umweltforschungsplan des Bundesministerium des Inneren. Abfallwirtschaft. Forschungsbericht 10303503. Bundesweite Hausmüllanalyse 1979/80. Im Auftrag des Umweltbundesamtes (Berlin: Umweltbundesamt, 1981), 126 – 127.  Ruth Oldenziel and Milena Veenis, “The Glass Recycling Container in the Netherlands: Symbol in Times of Scarcity and Abundance, 1939 – 1978”, Contemporary European History 22 (2013): 453 – 476.  Christian Schütze, “Die Menschheit auf der Müllhalde,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25/26 April 1970, 4.  Landesbildstelle Berlin, ed., “Lehrerinformation zur Schulfernsehreihe ‘Was ist Sache… mit dem Müll?’”, in Erprobungsmaterialien zur Schulfernsehreihe des SFB (Berlin: 1977). For letters from pupils writing to the government to require documents on recycling, see BArch (Bundesarchiv), B 106/58838.  Roman Köster, Hausmüll: Abfall und Gesellschaft in Westdeutschland 1945 – 1990 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016).  Anonym, “Zum Entwurf eines Abfallbeseitigungsgesetzes”, Städtetag 10 (1968): 552; U. Doose, “Abfallbeseitigungsgesetz”, Städtetag 4 (1971): 225.  Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Erich Zahn, and Peter Milling, Die Grenzen des Wachstums. Bericht des Club of Rome zur Lage der Menschheit (Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1973), 118 – 119, 149.  Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, ed., “Recycling: Lösung der Umweltkrise? Referate des Recycling-Symposiums 1973 in Zürich”, Brennpunkte 2 (1974).  Groupe d’Etudes sur l’Elimination des Résidus Urbains (GEERS), ed., Déchets solides: Propositions pour une politique. Rapport du groupe d’études sur l’élimination des résidus solides (Paris: la Documentation française, 1974); Claude Grusson, La lutte contre le gaspillage: Une nouvelle politique économique, une nouvelle politique de l’environnement (Paris: Ministère de la Qualité de la Vie; Groupe Interministériel d’Evaluation de l’Environnement, 1974); Umweltbundesamt, ed., Materialien zum Abfallwirtschaftsprogramm 1975 (Berlin: Umweltbundesamt, 1976).  See also Oldenziel and Weber, Introduction; Oldenziel and Hård, Consumers, 238 – 244.

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 BArch, B 295, 17669 (Brief des Aktionszentrums Umweltschutz Berlin an den Bundesminister des Inneren, 24.09.1982, Betr.: Vorhaben: Abschluß eines Müllverbringungsvertrages zwischen dem Essener Kommunalverband Ruhr und der DDR).  Rolf Schiller, Getrennte Hausmüllsammlung: Untersuchung über die Trennung und Verwertung von Papier, Glas aus Hausmüll, dargestellt am Beispiel der Stadt Konstanz (Friedrichshafen, by order of the Bundesminister des Innern and the Umweltbundesamt, Dornier System GmbH, 1977).  Raymond G. Stokes, Roman Köster, and Stephen C. Sambrook, The Business of Waste: Great Britain and Germany: 1945 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 222.  Anonym, “Müll ist mehr als Abfall”, Test 7 (1979): 51– 53.  Oldenziel and Veenis, “Glass Recycling”; Frida de Jong and Karel Mulder, “Citizen-Driven Collection of Waste Paper (1945 – 2010): A Government-Sustained Inverse Infrastructure”, in Inverse Infrastructures: Disrupting Networks from Below, eds. Tineke Egyedi and Donna Mehos (Cheltenham, Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2012), 92.  De Jong and Mulder, “Waste Paper,” 83 – 101.  Stokes, Köster, and Sambrook, Business of Waste, 119, 120, 125; Trentmann, Empire of Things, 639, 640.  Matthew Gandy, Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste (London: Routledge, 1994); Stokes, Köster, and Sambrook, Business of Waste, 292; Timothy Cooper, “War on Waste? The Politics of Waste and Recycling in Post-War Britain, 1950 – 1975”, Capitalism Nature Socialism 20, no. 4 (2009): 53 – 72.  J. Colardeau, “La collecte sélective”, Techniques et sciences municipales 10 (1977): 401– 405; C. Vastry and F. Reveillaud, “Collecte selective des papiers et des cartons dans les ordures ménagères: Essais effectués par la Ville du Havre”, Ingénieurs des villes de France (1974): 57– 60.  M. Erramoun, “Collecte selective des ordures ménagères: Expérience de La Rochelle”, Ingénieurs des villes de France (1975): 53 – 56 (Special Issue on “Residus Urbains”).  Centre Georges Pompidou, ed., Déchets: L’art d’accomoder les restes (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1984).  ANRED, La Récupération et le recyclage des papiers et cartons (Angers: ANRED, 1979).  Colardeau, “La collecte sélective”.  Report on the “International conference of local authorities on the collection, treatment and recycling of solid urban waste”, Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 16 March 1981, 3, https://rm.coe. int/16807a88a9 (accessed 3 February 2021).  Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ed., Waste Paper Recovery: Economic Aspects and Environmental Impacts (Paris: OECD, 1979); OECD, Household Waste: Separate Collection and Recycling (Paris: OECD, 1983).  Philippe Chalmin and Catherine Gaillochet, Du rare à l’infini: Panorama mondial des déchets 2009 (Paris: Economica, 2009), 53, the following: 47.  Trentmann, Empire of Things, 644– 646.  On this public relation coup, see also Stokes, Köster, and Sambrook, Business of Waste, 163 – 164.  Jeff R. Schutts, “Born Again in the Gospel of Refreshment? Cola-Colonization and the Remaking of Postwar German Identity”, in Consuming Germany in the Cold War, ed. David F. Crew (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 121– 150.  Nicholas Marty, L’invention de l’eau embouteillée: Qualités, normes et marchés de l’eau en bouteille en Europe, XIX–XX siècles (Brussels and New York: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2013).

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 Klaus Lösch, “Probleme des Abfallaufkommens und der Abfallbeseitigung dargestellt am Beispiel bundesdeutscher Städte”, PhD thesis, University of Bremen, 1984, 283.  Schot et al. underline that the transfer to the lighter carton was a negotiation between the Dutch Dairy Union, the Dutch Packaging Center and also associations of housewives. Johan Schot and Adri Albert de la Bruheze, “The Mediated Design of Products, Consumption, and Consumers in the Twentieth Century”, in How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies, eds. Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 229 – 245.  Karl J. Thomé-Kozmiensky, ed., Verpackung und Umwelt: Ressourcen und Recycling (Berlin: Freitag, 1982), 177.  Jürgen Orlich, “Begrenzung des Verpackungsabfalls: Das Problem von Einweg und Mehrweg”, in Recycling: Von der ‘Wegwerf-Gesellschaft’ zur ‘Verwertungs-Gesellschaft’: Probleme der Verwertung und Möglichkeiten der Verminderung und Vermeidung von Hausmüll, ed. Meinfried Striegnitz (Rehburg-Loccum: Evangelische Akademie, 1984) (Loccumer Protokolle 13/1983), 59 – 61.  Finn Arne Jørgensen, Making a Green Machine. The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011).  In 1965, returnable bottles represented 41 per cent of beer sales and 82 per cent of soft drinks; by 1970, a third of all beverages were packaged in cans and 27 per cent in one-way bottles, see Robert Friedel, “American Bottles: The Road to No Return”, Environmental History 19 (2014): 505 – 527, here 521, 522.  Anonym, “Le verre perdu”, Emballages, October 1965, 161– 163 (quote: 163).  Consumers used similar strategies to voice their concerns in the Netherlands also; see: Oldenziel and Veenis, Glass Recycling; de Jong and Mulder, “Waste Paper”, 83 – 101.  Andrea Westermann, “When Consumer Citizens Spoke Up: West Germany’s Early Dealings with Plastic Waste”, Contemporary European History 22, no. 3 (2013): 477– 498; letter in: BArch, B 106/25190, Deutsche Wanderjugend Arbeitsgemeinschaft NRW, Hagen, 2 February 1971, Pressemitteilung, 2 (as the German slogan goes: “ex und hopp”).  G. Hösel, “Hearing Abfallbeseitigung im Deutschen Bundestag”, Müll und Abfall 1 (1972): 28 – 30.  On recycling and bottle bills in the US, see: Bartow J. Elmore, “The American Beverage Industry and the Development of Curbside Recycling Programs, 1950 – 2000”, Business History Review 86, no. 3 (2012): 477– 501; Friedel, “American Bottles.”  Jørgensen, Recycling, 76.  Jørgensen, Green Machine, chapter 5.  BArch, B 106/69781: EG-Arbeitsgruppe Verpackungen, vol. 1: 1971– 74.  Kommission der Europäischen Gemeinschaften, ed., Das Einsammeln, die Beseitigung und das Recycling von biologisch nicht abbaubaren Verpackungen (Paris: SEMA, 1974), BArch, B 106/69781: EG-Arbeitsgruppe Verpackungen, vol. 2, 1971– 1974, VIII.  G. Lubisch, “Verwertung von Altglas aus der Sicht der Glasindustrie”, in Stoffliche Verwertung von Abfall- und Reststoffen, ed. Dieter O. Reimann (Berlin: Schmidt, 1989), 258.  Ulrich Jetter, Recycling in der Materialwirtschaft: Stoffkreisläufe, Rückgewinnung, Abfallnutzung (Hamburg: Spiegel, 1975).  Doedens, Getrennte Sammlung, 67.  Studiengruppe Altglas, “Glashütten und Aufbereitungsanlagen”, in Striegnitz, ed., Recycling, 99.  Jetter, Materialwirtschaft, 73.

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 Studiengruppe Altglas, ed., Einwerfen statt wegwerfen. Glas-Recycling: Ein Beitrag von Bürgern und der Industrie zur Rohstoffersparnis und Abfallverringerung (Düsseldorf: 1984), 17.  Heiko Doedens, Möglichkeiten der getrennten Sammlung von Wertstoffen des Hausmülls als Maßnahme der Abfallwirtschaft (Hannover: 1980), 179; see also H. Mausch and E. R. Wiehn, Verhaltensaspekte in einer getrennten Hausmüllsammlung: Eine soziologische Studie (Konstanz: Fachbereich Psychologie und Soziologie, 1977).  Jasna Hamidović, Industrielle Konzepte zum Altglasrecycling: Eine technisch-wirtschaftliche Analyse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Situation in Baden-Württemberg (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997), 20; Klaus Grefermann, Die Recycling-Industrie in Deutschland (Munich: Ifo-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, 1998), 99.  Gerhard Hermann, “Begrenzung des Verpackungsabfalls: Das Problem von Einweg und Mehrweg: Statement der Verbraucher-Zentrale Niedersachsen”, in Striegnitz, ed., Recycling, 75.  Mineral water: 89 per cent; beer: 87 per cent; carbonated soft drinks: 76 per cent; non-carbonated soft drinks: 29 per cent. Umweltbundesamt, ed., Verpackungen für Getränke, vol. 5: Fortschreibung 1970 – 1986. (Berlin: Umweltbundesamt, 1989), 15.  https://www.duh.de/mehrweg-klimaschutz0/einweg-plastikflaschen/ (accessed 2 February 2021).  Burkhard Landers, “Stoffliche Verwertung in Deutschland”, in Recycling und Rohstoffe, eds. Karl J. Thomé-Kozmiensky and Daniel Goldmann (Neuruppin: TK, 2009), 134.  Haimo Emminger, “Verwertung von Kunststoffen aus Hausmüll: Möglichkeiten und Probleme”, in Recycling International: Haushaltsabfall, Klärschlamm, Sonderabfall, Kunststoff, Ernährungs- und Getränkeindustrie, Verpackung, Bauwesen, ed. Karl J. Thomé-Kozmiensky (Berlin: EFVerlag für Energie- und Umwelttechnik, 1984), 559 – 560.  Umweltbundesamt, ed., Verpackungen, 38.  Jørgensen, Green Machine.  Robert G. Hunt and William E. Franklin, “LCA: How it Came About: Personal Reflections on the Origin and the Development of LCA in the USA”, International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 1, no. 1 (1996): 4– 7.  “Circularity Gap Reporting Initiative”, https://www.circularity-gap.world (accessed 5 May 2020); following quote: https://www.circularity-gap.world/about; Heike Weber, “Zeit- und verlustlos? Der Recycling-Kreislauf als ewiges Heilsversprechen”, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 2 (2020): 19 – 31, DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14821.  Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living. Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism, transl. Zachary King (London: Verso, 2021).  Willi Haas, Fridolin Krausmann, Dominik Wiedenhofer, and Markus Heinz, “How Circular is the Global Economy? An Assessment of Material Flows, Waste Production, and Recycling in the European Union and the World in 2005”, Journal of Industrial Ecology 19, no. 5 (2015): 1– 13.  Jørgensen, Recycling, 152.

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Selected Bibliography Barles, Sabine. L’invention des déchets urbains: France: 1790 – 1970. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005. Chalmin, Philippe, and Catherine Gaillochet. Du rare à l’infini: Panorama mondial des déchets 2009. Paris: Economica, 2009. Denton, Chad, and Heike Weber. Rethinking Waste within Business History: A Transnational Perspective on Waste Recycling in World War II. (Special Issue, Business History 2021). Elmore, Bartow J. “The American Beverage Industry and the Development of Curbside Recycling Programs, 1950 – 2000”. Business History Review 86, no. 3 (2012): 477 – 501. Friedel, Robert. “American Bottles: The Road to No Return”. Environmental History 19 (2014): 505 – 527. Gandy, Matthew. Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste. London: Routledge, 1994. Gerasimova, Ekaterina, and Sofia Chuikina. “The Repair Society”. Russian Studies in History 48 (2009): 58 – 74. Gille, Zsuzsa. From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Hartard Susanne, and Michael Huhn. Strukturanalyse des SERO-Systems der DDR im Hinblick auf Effizienz und Eignung unter marktwirtschaftlichen Bedingungen. Berlin: Umweltbundesamt, 1992. Jørgensen, Finn Arne. Making a Green Machine: The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Jørgensen, Finn Arne. Recycling. Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2019. Köster, Roman. Hausmüll: Abfall und Gesellschaft in Westdeutschland 1945 – 1990. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016. MacBride, Samantha. Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012. Oldenziel, Ruth, and Milena Veenis. “The Glass Recycling Container in the Netherlands: Symbol in Times of Scarcity and Abundance, 1939 – 1978”. Contemporary European History 22 (2013): 453 – 476. Oldenziel, Ruth, and Heike Weber. “Introduction: Reconsidering Recycling”. Contemporary European History 22 (2013): 347 – 370 (Special Issue: Social History of Recycling and Re-use in the Twentieth Century). Stobart, Jon, and Ilja Van Damme. Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700 – 1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Stokes, Raymond G., Roman Köster, and Stephen C. Sambrook. The Business of Waste: Great Britain and Germany: 1945 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Strasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan, 1999. Trentmann, Frank. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first. London: Allen Lane, 2016. Weber, Heike. “Ökonomie, Ökologie oder Ideologie? Motivationen für das Recycling von Altpapier im 20. Jahrhundert”. In Wirtschaft und Umwelt vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Günther Schulz and Reinhold Reith, 153 – 179. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2015.

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Weber, Heike. “‘Made to Break?’ – Lebensdauer, Reparierbarkeit und Obsoleszenz in der Geschichte des Massenkonsums von Technik”. In Kulturen des Reparierens: Dinge – Wissen – Praktiken, edited by Stefan Krebs, Gabriele Schabacher, and Heike Weber, 49 – 83. Bielefeld: transcript, 2018. Weber, Heike. “Mending or Ending? The Case of Consumer Durables in West Germany, 1960s–1980s”. In Histories of Technology’s Persistence: Repair, Reuse and Disposal, edited by Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber, 236 – 263. Bielefeld: transcript, 2021. Westermann, Andrea. “When Consumer Citizens Spoke Up: West Germany’s Early Dealings with Plastic Waste”. Contemporary European History 22, no. 3 (2013): 477 – 498.

III Sustaining Environments

Silke Vetter-Schultheiß

12 Visualizing the Invisible: Communicating Europe’s Environment Abstract This chapter explores the visual history of the Europeanization of conservation and environmentalism. It illustrates more general arguments by discussing stamps as historical visual sources, followed by a topical case study on several series of stamps issued by national institutions to celebrate the European Conservation Year 1970. Stamps become contact zones, and in this chapter they reveal the issues surrounding environmental and European concerns. I argue that producing, selling, and collecting stamps is what sociologist Andreas Reckwitz refers to as an “aesthetic practice”: a practice that focuses on stimulating aesthetic perception in order to shape society, in this case a European society. Keywords Council of Europe; European Conservation Year 1970; European visual politics; stamps; visual history In summer 1970, the editors of the journal Nature in Focus ¹ addressed one single event: the European Conservation Year (ECY). Nature in Focus was the “Bulletin of the European Information Centre for Nature Conservation”, and its message was quite clear what this year was about: awareness had to be raised and political measures to be taken to preserve the natural heritage and the well-being of the people of Europe. The summer 1970 edition includes 28 pages of analysis, appeals, findings, and commitments concerning the future of European environment, together with pictures displaying heaps of litter, mountains of junk automobiles, chimneys evaporating heavy smoke, and forests killed by air pollution. This visual narrative of gloom is contrasted by pictures from Eastern and Western Europe depicting brown bears and pelicans as well as some young people cleaning up a dirty pond in Britain. This visual storyline displaying the fundamental tension between ecological disaster and natural beauty refers to a long-standing tradition in public relation work for conservation. Apart from initiating environmental programmes, drawing public attention to the issue also was essential during the commemorative year: “Only when every citizen is aware of the realities of nature conservation can we afford to be optimistic.”²

Note: I would like to thank Dieter Schott and the editors, especially Anna-Katharina Wöbse, for their inspiration. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-013

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The questions, however, remained: What did European nature look like? Apart from cuddly brown bears and paper-white egrets, what did European natural heritage consist of? What was meant by “European nature” was as vague and diverse as Europe. The year 1970 was surely a decisive year for Europe as the accelerating process of integration and unification of (Western) Europe met with heated debate over the state of its environment. How was this vagueness turned into images representing the aforementioned “realities of nature conservation”? This chapter explores the visual history of the Europeanization of conservation and environmentalism. Broader arguments are illustrated by discussing stamps as historical visual sources. This will be followed by a topical case study on several series of stamps issued by national institutions to celebrate the ECY. There are many good reasons for taking a closer and analytical look at stamps when following a practice-centred approach towards European history. On the one hand, stamps condense a long process of identifying motifs and symbols that tell a complex story, which in turn have to be designed, approved, and printed. On the other hand, there are material phenomena attached to stamps that turn them into agents of activity. They are sold, bought, licked, and stuck on letters. They travel across borders. Philatelists collect and store them in sets and series in albums. They are available en masse, and people use them consciously or unconsciously during their everyday life. Stamps convey messages. Stamps become contact zones, and in this chapter, they display issues surrounding environmental and European concerns. I argue that producing, selling, and collecting stamps is what sociologist Andreas Reckwitz calls an “aesthetic practice”: a practice that focuses on stimulating an aesthetic perception for the sake of shaping society, in this case a European society. In this sense, stamps represent decisions and interests of specific human actors within an arrangement of people and objects.³ After a brief introduction on visual history and on the significance of images for environmental history, I will focus on the potential that stamps offer as visual sources for a European environmental historiography. This is followed by the presentation of the ECY as a historical moment in which cross-border conservation and environmentalism came to be visualized. By taking a closer look at the stamps issued for that event and focusing on the small differences and nuances in the production of images and thus in their meaning, the visual analysis might help to overcome the criticism that environmental movements have limited their visual scope to either idyllic images or horror scenarios.⁴

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1 Picturing Environmental History Visual history sees images not only as images but also as causes for historical change and thus as independent sources. Images are imbued with their own aesthetics, which co-determine the way we look at an issue.⁵ This chapter defines images as representations of an imagination. A visual medium and its motif turn thoughts into visible and thus tangible items. Not only these imaginations but also the corresponding types of visualization and the motifs used have been changing in the course of history.⁶ With regard to the visual history of conservation and environmentalism, the visualization of these two movements’ agendas and issues have followed certain patterns. The environmental historian AnnaKatharina Wöbse speaks of a three-step process. The initial depictions of natural beauty (1) at the beginning of organized nature conservation around 1900 were soon supplemented by images of damage (2), for example oil-covered waterfowls or destroyed spots of natural beauty. Later, activists involved with saving animals or sites (3) were incorporated into the visual narratives.⁷ According to environmental historian Finis Dunaway, this sequence of images of beauty, damage, and activity was extended through the creation of diagrams and detailed portraits of individual activists.⁸ The cultural geographer Dennis Cosgrove speaks of a shift in the framing of iconic images, from picturesque landscapes to living organisms.⁹ Social debates on conservation and environmentalism have always been fostered by image motifs and media. Such an aesthetic practice – connecting thinking and acting of people with material objects – has been part of society’s struggle over what is considered to actually “be” nature or the environment and what is worth being protected. Pictures show how their creators perceive nature and the environment and how they visually translate their ideas into images for everyone to see. Thus, historians can approach the subject both through the actions of individuals and through the visual sources handed down. Pictures provide a quick overview and are emotionally connectable. They achieve their persuasive power by combining emotional appeal with rational arguments.¹⁰ As “eco-images”, they can also be charged politically.¹¹ However, as they are always snapshots, it is often difficult to depict long sequences or complicated contexts. The period between 1950 and 1990 in particular saw fundamental changes in perception. This was initially true for the Western industrialized nations. Their visual traditions formed the basis, for example, of the national eco-labels that began to emerge around the world in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s and 1990s.¹² In contrast to traditional conservation – which focuses more on individual species, landscapes, or picturesque features – environmentalism devel-

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oped a specific imagery. People began to look through an “ecological lens”.¹³ New actors excessively used pictures and designs to emphasize their more radical approach towards environmental politics, as environmentally themed images played an ever-increasing role in drawing attention to worldwide calamities and the depletion of the earth’s resources. Stamps serve to refine this language because their small size forces designers to condense information to the extreme. The motifs of the stamps issued by the countries in the context of the ECY represent the entire spectrum of the development mentioned above. This chapter combines two historical approaches to analyze stamps. On the one hand, it examines their iconography and focuses on the motifs that visually expressed human ideas about European conservation. It is similar to the stamp collector’s view of defining a collection field and categorizing stamps according to various criteria. On the other hand, it draws on written archival sources to reconstruct the creation process of the West German stamp series, which can be considered an exemplary case. The history of the West German process shows how people fought to create “their” stamps and how they made arguments using international references. Most of these debates are hidden, though not necessarily recognizable when looking at the final motifs.

2 Europe, Stamps, and the Environment Stamps have evolved from a highly elaborated system of negotiation between stakeholders, politicians, and bureaucrats – at least in most democratic countries. Already in the 1930s, the first stamps displaying nature parks (or even earlier, animal, plant, and landscape motifs) appeared worldwide. Countries as diverse as the United States, Argentina, and Japan, as well as various colonies such as Southern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo, had used the iconic settings of their national parks for stamp collections. The aims of such stamp campaigns were to popularize nature parks and to create an awareness of the vulnerability of nature.¹⁴ Stamps have also served conservationists as visual material objects, marking “the other” in the sense that Raf de Bont argues (see chapter 3 by de Bont). In this way, conservationists have positioned themselves and their goals in this worldwide network of symbols. After 1945, European conservationists referred to each other on both sides of the Iron Curtain, making use of the transnational prestige attached to postal presentation.¹⁵ Stamps and their inscribed international system of reference thus functioned at this time as aesthetic arguments for conservation, as both an excluding and including element. The German case can serve as a telling example of the complex processes of the successful or failed attempts to turn ideas into stamps. Following 1949, the

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founding year of the Federal Republic of Germany, citizens were invited to propose subjects to be designed on special stamps. As the Federal Ministry of Postal Services issued only about 35 stamps per year, people had to provide good arguments for their proposals. In the beginning, the Federal Ministry of Postal Services was the institution responsible for the design. In 1954, the Art Advisory Board (Kunstbeirat) was established to improve the graphic quality of the stamps. The board consisted of graphic artists as well as members of the parliament and administrative officials from the German Federal Post Office (Deutsche Bundespost). In 1972, the ministry established an additional committee, the Programme Advisory Board (Programmbeirat), which classified the incoming proposals according to topics. Throughout the process, the ministry also approached graphic artists with the request to submit a stamp design on a specific topic, like the ECY. The returning drafts were discussed anonymously, and the winning design was then printed by the Federal Printing Office (Bundesdruckerei) or another printing company commissioned to carry out a test print. The Art Advisory Board, the Federal Minister of Postal Services, and the graphic artists discussed this proof with the printing company until it was finally approved and afterwards printed.¹⁶ The produced stamps had to be transported to the post offices, from where the customers would buy them. The consumers decided on a motif that they could use for franking or for putting in their scrapbook. Franked postcards, letters, and parcels travelled through the country where they were issued and even across borders. Postal workers and postmen, as well as recipients, came into contact with the stamps and could enjoy the motifs and reflect on the subject displayed. The entire collector’s market – with its specific infrastructures and rules, a cosmos of its own – was another important group of consumers engaged in receiving and discussing stamps. Considering the many contact zones that stamps crossed, there are many opportunities to examine this aesthetic practice involving people and material items. Following these little paper ambassadors allows us to track an evolving European nature conservation debate and its visual representation. Beside the motifs, the discussions held in the run-up to the official development process as well as the reactions to published stamps (which are documented in the federal archives) are of interest to historians. In West Germany, various stakeholders discussed what functions were inherent in these “little works of art”¹⁷ and what extra value could be attributed to them in addition to the postal one. Stakeholders included not only members of the Federal Ministry of Postal Services, the government, and the parliament but also private individuals and representatives from a wide variety of non-governmental organizations. Representatives from the field of conservation and environmentalism approached the Federal Ministry of Postal Services to use stamps to promote their ideas.

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In regard to the example discussed here, two issues in particular were intensely debated in the recorded correspondence and meetings: Could the abstract and complex topic of nature conservation be presented at all in such a small format? Which motifs were suitable for publicizing the protection of landscapes, animals, and plants? These two questions act as a background for the motif analysis in a European context. How could stamps visualize cross-border European conservation? Since 1956, the idea of a peaceful Europe has been visualized on stamps. In the 1950s, the then six member states of the European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1952, created the so-called EUROPA stamps. The annually issued stamps were and still are committed to the European idea, which is represented not only by the EUROPA logo but also through common themes. Since 1974, each participating European country has been designing its own motifs on an overarching theme. The annually changing theme refers to social and cultural similarities that symbolize peaceful coexistence, as well as a shared past and common goals and values. From 1960 to 1992, the EUROPA stamps were developed with the support of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (Conférence Européenne des Administrations des Postes et des Télécommunications, CEPT), an umbrella organization of regulatory authorities in the field of postal and telecommunication services. With the liberalization of postal transport, joint stamp issues since 1993 have been dealt with by PostEurop, a European trade association for postal services. Ever since the idea of EUROPA stamps took shape, these stamps have focused on six different themes related to nature and environmental protection: “Conservation and Environmentalism” (1986), “Nature Conservation Parks” (1999), “Water – A Natural Treasure” (2001), “Forests – International Year of Forests” (2011), “Ecology in Europe – Think Green” (2016), “National Birds” (2019), and “Endangered National Wildlife” (2021).¹⁸ Since it is relatively rare for an issue to appear within a short period of time on the stamps of a country or of a community of states, environmentalism seems to be becoming increasingly important for Europe. This is indicated by PostEurop’s comments on the themes for 2019 and 2021. These comments highlight how the world has faced environmental challenges such as climate change. Stamps, especially with bird motifs, have helped to raise awareness of a sustainable future: “Birds are not only amazing creatures that graze the sky, they also play an important role in monitoring our planet’s ecosystem”. EUROPA stamps also have helped “to promote the European Ornithology which reflects the magnificent biodiversity that we have throughout Europe”.¹⁹ Birds thus illustrate the joint responsibility of European states towards environmental commons (see chapter 2 by Anna-Katharina Wöbse).

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The first time European nations jointly commemorated conservation on stamps was in 1970, when the first ECY was proclaimed by the Council of Europe (CoE). The initiative was intended to popularize the idea of cross-border conservation and was regarded as the birth of a European environmental policy that had previously been limited to nation-states. In addition to various activities around the theme “Man in his environment”, stamps were considered a suitable means for visualizing this “first European-wide environmental campaign”²⁰ for a broader mass.

3 The ECY and its Visual Features In 1949, ten states founded the Council of Europe. The United States had inspired this initiative not least because of the circumstances and experiences concerning the Second World War. Since its founding, the aim of this first European organization of states has been to cooperate across national borders, to promote democracy and human rights, and to preserve the common heritage. Furthermore, the CoE has aimed to encourage cooperation between the participating states in economic, social, cultural, and scientific fields. The two main bodies are the Committee of Ministers, which takes political decisions, and the Parliamentary Assembly, which has a consultative function. Although the CoE cannot pass laws, it can draw up conventions and agreements, which are binding for its members.²¹ In the context of these transnational aims, the European Nature Conservation Committee, a commission of experts, began in the early 1960s to look into potential European conservation schemes. A European debate on nature conservation began to evolve in an era that in environmental history is still considered an epoch of planning and technology euphoria. In 1963, the European Nature Conservation Committee of the CoE took up the suggestion of the British conference series “The Countryside in 1970” (which was launched in the same year) to convene a ECY and started the first preparations. The commemorative year – 1970 – proclaimed by the CoE coincided with other international events concerning environmental protection, such as the environmental programme implemented by the US president Richard Nixon and the first Earth Day in the United States.²² Lastly, the aim of the ECY was no longer to frame national and European environmental problems separately but to discuss them in a wider European context. Educational programmes were to involve the population, thus creating awareness among members of the society of the destruction of the environment. The European Environmental Statement,²³ as a framework recommendation, was not legally binding, and no binding convention was signed. The statement contained proposals both in general and at inter-

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national, state, and regional level, including industry and individuals, on how to shape a common European nature. Nevertheless, this political expression of a coordinated will stimulated public debates and generated a moral impetus.²⁴ The decision to issue national stamps displaying the European idea also specifically served this goal of transferring environmental protection awareness to politics and society. The stamps issued for the ECY, acting as the sources and framework for this analysis, visualize the emerging European environmental awareness at a certain point in time (in 1970) and translate it in nationally distinct ways. The initiative started a process in which individual nations actively tried to not only identify European elements to be displayed but also use the opportunity to situate themselves as a European nation. Part of this process was to find out if and how other nations issued their own stamps to mark the occasion. In the commemorative year, delegates from all 17 member states of the Council of Europe attended the “European Conference on Nature Protection”, held by the CoE from 9 to 12 February 1970, which kicked off the ECY. Ten more countries from Europe, North America, and even the Eastern Bloc countries also took part.²⁵ Thirteen member states issued postage stamps to mark the event. Greece’s membership was suspended by the CoE between 1967 and 1974 due to its dictatorial regime. This nation did not attend the conference but nevertheless issued stamps. Denmark, Malta, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom attended the conference but did not issue stamps. The annual programmes of the ten nonmember states show how differently national postal departments commemorated the international events at that time. Finland, Yugoslavia, and Liechtenstein participated in issuing stamps. These countries were members of the CEPT and also attended the opening conference. The remaining members of the CEPT did not issue any stamps in 1970 on the occasion of the ECY and did not attend the opening conference, although Monaco issued conservation stamps in 1970. None of the stamps of the remaining participants made any direct references to the ECY. However, while Portugal, Spain, and Czechoslovakia did not issue any conservation stamps at all, other participating countries took up the environmental issue but without referring to the event as such. Israel chose national parks, Canada decided on the large-scale project called the International Biological Programme, and the United States chose natural history as well as nature conservation and environmental protection. Romania issued the most nature stamps, with 20 motifs on national flora and fauna.²⁶ All in all, 17 nations issued a total of 40 stamps with 37 different motifs. West Germany began issuing stamps as early as June 1969, some seven months before the ECY officially began. Turkey and Finland issued their stamps in early February 1970. This coincided with the European conference. The remaining countries followed suit over the year.²⁷ Most issued sets with two or more stamps, whereas others decided to issue just a sin-

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gle stamp. Like the number of stamps, the printing methods also varied from country to country. Most of the countries used halftone photogravure or offset. Those who opted for a more elaborate procedure like intaglio usually put fewer stamps into circulation. It seems that this technique gave greater weight to the individual stamp. The commemorative year induced member states to present their own attitude towards conservation in a European context and, in that way, triggered a “European moment”. By comparing the ways in which member states of the CoE made use of emblems, phrases, and images, the various approaches to European environmentalization and conservation can be analyzed. One of the central design elements that can be found on the stamps is the logo of the commemorative year. A logo in itself is the outcome of a complex process condensing meanings and images.²⁸ This is also true for the emblem the CoE chose. The logo merges the nature conservation policy of the CoE with the objectives concerning future cooperation. Originally, the logo was created in the mid-1960s for the so-called European Diploma (in full, the European Diploma for Protected Areas of the Council of Europe), an award developed for promoting public awareness of a shared natural heritage. The CoE established this diploma in 1965 to acknowledge the exceptional character of remarkable protected areas in Europe. The award places landscapes, nature reserves, and national parks of European importance under the auspices of the CoE.²⁹ By 1970, ten sites had received the diploma. Accordingly, the logo started to travel across Europe and seemed a suitable icon for labelling the ECY. The original logo uses both the circle of stars of the CoE flag, introduced in 1955, and an archetypal symbol of nature in general and conservation in particular, the tree. The 12 stars of the flag, arranged in a circle, symbolize Europe as an ideal community of equal partners in an eternal union, irrespective of the changing number of the CoE’s members. The flag stands for unity and peace in Europe, as well as for its identity and values. Thus, the symbol refers to a common (political) project intending to unite all Europeans, regardless of their (national) differences.³⁰ The tree consists of three roots, a strong trunk, and a symmetrical crown of branches with 18 leaves. Similar to the number 12, the number three not only symbolizes perfection and unity but also means the search for an alternative path.³¹ At the time the logo was developed, 18 countries were members of the CoE. The logo represents European nature as well as its conservation policy. Since its creation, it has helped to draw public attention to this topic and to construct and propagate the idea of common European nature.³² The tree represents a carefully chosen symbol that, however, has its own specific history in iconography. Trees embody protection; they root deep in the earth, and their crowns reach up into the sky at the same time. The roots symbolize a stable base from which everything grows. The leaves represent vitality.³³ Additionally,

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the tree itself can be interpreted as a meta sign. It not only stands for itself as a specific tree somewhere on the earth but also has gained a further, overarching cultural level of meaning. Similar to water or the colour green, it symbolizes the cycle of life.³⁴ Within the visual framework of the European Diploma logo, its meaning even reaches beyond that of the archetypical tree of life. The tree became an icon – according to Gisela Parak, one could speak of an “eco-image”. In this case, it stands for both the subject who intends to protect – the CoE – and the object to be protected – nature.³⁵ On the stamps for the commemorative year, the tree can be found in three variations. First, it is a part of the official emblem for the conservation year. Second, countries used a tree symbol for their own national logo or used it to tell a story of destruction and/or of the future. Third, some countries showed a tree species that was typical for the country’s nature. The tree, however, could be presented and depicted in very distinct ways, as the three samples of trees used on stamps issued by Switzerland, Ireland, and Italy reveal.

4 Designing Environmental Stamps Switzerland Switzerland (see figure 1) features the official logo of the ECY quite prominently on its stamp. The one and only Swiss stamp that was designed for the occasion is framed by the phrase “Year of Nature 1970”, printed in the three official languages of the country. In contrast to other countries that presented the symbol in just one colour, Switzerland kept it colourful. The blue background and the yellow stars emphasize the juxtaposition of the logo with the European flag, while the colours of brown and green emphasize a strong, vibrant tree. Using colours evokes moods and emotions. Further levels of meaning can arise from their main associations; they culturally depend on the experiences or basic knowledge of the people. Blue stands for the sky and/or water across cultures. Here, it symbolizes the sky, which spans not only all of Western Europe but also the whole earth. Yellow indicates the life-giving sun and warmth. Green in Western culture is regarded as a symbol for nature, vegetation, and growth. Brown stands for soil.³⁶ In 1914, Swiss stamps achieved a milestone in European stamp design as their motifs, for the first time, marketed the Alps as both a tourist attraction and a national identity. Switzerland, which is still famous for its nature stamps,³⁷ made a commitment to Europe and the CoE’s nature conservation activities by deciding to place the official emblem prominently and using a striking colour scheme.

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Ireland Like the Swiss stamp, the Irish ones (see figure 1) display a logo. The Department of Lands, part of the Irish government, commissioned the Kilkenny Design Workshops to design a national logo. The Kilkenny Design Workshops was a statesupported institution that existed from 1963 to 1988. It created visual awareness of Irish design among the population and across national borders. The Irish artist Damien Harrington, who established the graphic design department in the Kilkenny Design Workshops in 1968, created the logo.³⁸ This emblem was used by stakeholders to label activities connected to this event.³⁹ Two roots coming from different directions taper off into a trunk or stem consisting of two strands. It could symbolize the lower part of an arrow or different paths joining and finally pointing in one direction. These two strands in turn expand to form a circular structure of four quadrants. Each quadrant consists of two forms reminiscent of (water) drops. Two of the drops unite to form a heart. A stylized bird emerges from the heart-like formation in the left quadrant. This figure could be interpreted in two ways: either as a blossom or as a treetop on which a bird sits. Three of these heart-shaped quadrants might also refer to the Irish national symbol of the three-leaved clover, which the bird finally expands into a four-leaved one – a symbol of happiness. The Irish logo cites the meaning of the European symbol (the tree with its leaves) and combines it with its own national, Irish motif (cloverleaf) to represent nature in a wider context: flora (tree, flower, and cloverleaf) and fauna (bird), as well as the life-giving water (drops) forming an entity (tree of life and life cycle). This entity – the stamp seems to suggest – is well rooted and stable; it can flourish. Translated into a message, the stamp conveys the assumption that acting at the national and the European level, respecting the environment, and caring for fragile nature would eventually lead to a harmonious and happy way of life for all – humans, flora, and fauna.

Italy Italy (see figure 1), too, makes use of the visual centrepiece of the European Diploma logo: the tree. However, this is embedded in a completely different motivic context. The stamp shows a stylized landscape destroyed by man.⁴⁰ An industrial and urban complex threatens green meadows. Smoke rises from two chimneys and apparently causes the death of a leafless tree. The last letter of the phrase “Annata Europea per la salvaguardia della natura” (ECY) touches a hill that cannot be clearly defined (rock, waste dump, or supply of raw materials). The lettering – which, like the houses, chimneys, and smoke, appears in red or blue-grey –

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seems to absorb the poisoning of the surroundings and to bring nature back to life. The phrase also limits the growth of the buildings as well as an even greater spread of the smoke. It suggests that the activities of the commemorative year will bring nature back to life and will improve the living environment of people. Trees feature on the stamps of many national sets. Two of the three Turkish stamps (see figure 1), for instance, portray desertification and forest fires with withered shrubs in a desert landscape and a charred tree trunk in the middle of a sea of flames. Even if countries such as Belgium (see figure 1) or Greece (see figure 1) chose the simplest option of depicting a particular tree species of national importance to represent the issuing country and its natural environment, it still evokes the tree of life. Thus, a tree could indicate a utopian future in which solutions to problems could be found or in which a community could be built. Oppositely, a dead tree could warn against a dystopian future in which the lives of all living things would be threatened. However, all these different modes of representation have one thing in common: the tree provides identity across borders.

The European Diploma As mentioned before, another reoccurring motif on stamps is the European Diploma awarded to landscapes of European significance. Some countries that had already held it highlighted this award and visualized those sites. The strategy supporting the CoE’s diploma programme has been the creation of a future network of outstanding protected areas, providing a spatial equivalent to the common values and heritage of the continent. The commemorative year extended this idea. With the help of national and international activities and events coordinated by the CoE, not only would a “mental map” (Frithjof Benjamin Schenk) evolve but also the active process of being integrated into an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson) would be fostered. Wöbse calls the European Diploma logo the visual prelude to a history of consolidating European nature conservation relations, a theme that had the power to be considered universally valid and to construct a common identity among European citizens. The European Diploma is a weak device, as it is associated neither with any financial assistance or legal standing nor with any binding standards or legal texts. Its significance lies rather in its representational power and the ritual of awarding it. It is mainly about symbolic politics. This does not necessarily make it unattractive. On the contrary, the representatives of the nations and regions that have applied for the diploma want to place their sites within a European context and to emphasize the transnational dimension. They thus declare

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their commitment to Europe. The European Diploma has helped to create a European identity and – at the same time – drawn attention to cross-border nature conservation. The European Diploma lacks legal power, but it radiates normative authority. Moreover, it exudes the aura of European integration. The focus of the award is on nature reserves that have already been granted official and governmental protection. Some of reserves awarded the diploma are literally icons of the nature conservation movement of the early twentieth century, such as the French Camargue or the Krimml Waterfalls in Austria.⁴¹ Analyzing stamps issued on the occasion of the commemorative year allows us to take a closer look at these two reserves.

France France (see figure 1) acknowledged the significance of the Camargue National Nature Reserve (Réserve Naturelle Nationale de Camargue) and showed its national devotion to its local and European importance by designing a prestigious stamp. This single stamp is of high quality, being printed in multicoloured intaglio. The French officials responsible for coordinating the stamp design made sure that all possible visual symbols that the CoE provided to celebrate the commemorative year would be on it. Only France incorporated all representational items. The stamp uses the logo and the phrase “Année européenne de la nature 1970” (ECY 1970), as well as the picture and the name of an animal species that is iconic for nature conservation in France: pink flamingos (flamants roses). The graphic artist placed an individual bird at the centre of the stamp, displaying its lifelike colours of pink, grey, and white shades. In the background, one can see flying and wading flamingos in a lifelike representation referring to the habitat of a breeding colony. The image of the birds is framed by green, which contrasts the shades of pink of the bird. The logo and the lettering announcing the ECY are kept in green as well. Flamingos have always been a rare sight in Europe, breeding only in a few places along the Mediterranean coast. In France, the impressive wading birds live beside many other wetland species in the lagoons of the Rhone delta. Throughout the twentieth century, the bird population had been continuously under threat by reclamation schemes in the marshy landscape. Due to the rich bird species in the area, the Camargue turned into an Eldorado for ornithologists and wildlife photographers. In 1927, a private organization, the National Society for the Protection of Nature (Societé Nationale de Protection de la Nature), managed to establish the Camargue National Nature Reserve. This reserve, representing one of the most important hubs for migratory birds in the Western Palaearc-

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tic, is displayed in the background of the stamp, being just as iconic as the flamingos. The lagoons of the Camargue had been under constant pressure from neighbouring development schemes and had turned into one of the most controversial areas in France and Europe in terms of conservation. In 1966, the very first year the European Diploma was launched, the Camargue National Nature Reserve received the European Diploma and was placed “under the sponsorship of the Council of Europe”. It was this European award that helped to defend and save the reserve at the national level in the longer run. In 1970, when an expert sent by the CoE assessed the status of the reserve to grant a renewal of the diploma, he emphasized that “those, responsible for the Reserve and the Park still have many difficulties to face”. He assumed that any “action likely to sustain them in their efforts is welcome. The renewal of the European Diploma is one such step.”⁴² After just four years, the European Diploma had turned into an instrument used by local environmental actors to strengthen and legitimize their activities.

Austria Austria⁴³ (see figure 1) uses a similar approach to its stamp, though less obvious. It also issued only a single stamp showing an area awarded the European Diploma. However, the stamp does not represent the flora and fauna living there but depicts an outstanding landscape as such: the upper part of the natural monument Krimml Waterfalls.⁴⁴ The Austrian stamp focuses on the European mountains par excellence, the Alps (see chapter 9 by Aschwanden et. al.). The waterfalls have a long history of being a popular tourist destination. Travelers, especially from the United Kingdom and the United States, have been visiting the site ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century. With the emerging production of electricity through hydropower, conflicts between the touristic and the economic use of the falls arose at the end of the nineteenth century. Over the decades, these disputes had been repeatedly decided in favour of the natural spectacle. The resulting obligation concerning all Austrians “not only for the future but also for the past”⁴⁵ to protect the falls was invoked by the botanist and nature conservationist Gustav Wendelberger in the 1950s. This “heart” of the planned Hohe Tauern National Park could not be sold because a park “without its most beautiful jewel would be meaningless”.⁴⁶ In 1983, the picturesque falls were finally included as a “crystallization point”⁴⁷ in the Hohe Tauern National Park, the largest protected area in the Alps and at the time the largest national park in Central Europe. Wendelberger’s ambition to secure one of the

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most traditional “cardinal points of Austrian nature conservation”⁴⁸ for the future was thus fulfilled. These impressive waterfalls received the European Diploma in 1967. Although there are no legal requirements attached to the diploma, it comes with moral obligations. The drive of such “symbolic policy”⁴⁹ is evident in the ceremonial speeches on the occasion of the first awarding of the diploma, in 1967, which refer to the European Diploma and its obligations to protect the site.⁵⁰ The environmental political and aesthetic quality attributed to the waterfalls is also reflected in the chosen method of manufacturing the stamp. While most countries opted for a less expensive printing process and a series of stamps, the Austrians, like the French, opted for a single stamp and also chose a particularly high-quality intaglio printing process, which was keeping with the country’s tradition of stamp production and motifs. Among philatelists and designers, this printing technique is considered the most refined.⁵¹ In their own way, the two nations showed the importance attributed to the depicted subject matter: France, through the natural and iconic colours, and Austria, through the elaborate, detailed, and large-scale depiction. The Austrian graphic artist used neither the logo nor the geographical name, but only the phrase. “Europäisches Naturschutzjahr 1970” (ECY 1970) serves as a headline advertising the event as well as the site. In both countries, the subject shimmers in the colour of nature conservation or life as a whole: green. In contrast to France, which chose a striking shade of green, Austria opted for a uniform, more muted green. From an aesthetic point of view, Austrian’s graphic artists decided to present the motif in an engraving-like style. In the tradition of early nature conservation, it emphasizes the grandeur and sublimity of the natural monument. As the examples of France and Austria show, the same idea – the European Diploma or the printing process – could be expressed very differently.

Liechtenstein There were many ways to interpret and present European nature and the ECY. Each country followed its own approach to the commemorative stamp production in general and to the chosen motif in particular. Liechtenstein (see figure 1) issued a series of four displaying flowers. However, it was the only country that called for nature conservation merely by presenting (endangered) native plant species. This set can not be traced back to the commemorative year with the help of the stamp motifs. Nevertheless, it was the start of a three-year series on flowers in Liechtenstein.⁵² Before these stamps, however, it had already demonstrated environmental ambitions when it issued in 1966 a special series on

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conservation with positively connoted symbols for the topics “Healthy Earth”, “Clean Air”, “Clean Water”, and “Protection of Nature”. The West Germans, in contrast, had to wait until 1973 to see any stamps with such themes. The West German stamps were inspired by the 1970 environmental stamps of the United States, which display the famous blue marble in connection with the phrase “Save our…”, in conjunction with soil, cities, water, or air. The United States also issued a conservation stamp with a bison symbolizing the country in 1970 – the year marking the world’s first Earth Day as well as the commemoration year in Europe.⁵³

West Germany Like Liechtenstein, West Germany (see figure 1) issued a set of four stamps without using the logo or the phrase. The German commissions and individuals responsible for discussing the motifs to be chosen opted to display landscapes like some other countries did. Norway, Sweden, and Austria presented landscapes that were famous for their scenery (see figure 1). West Germany, in contrast, chose to present stylized and idealized sceneries that did not really exist but summed up “typical German landscapes”, like lakesides, low mountain ranges, high mountains, or river landscapes. The choice rested on the assumption that landscape motifs were very popular among representatives of nature conservation and the general public. As Germany was still divided, the West German Federal Ministry of Postal Services refrained from presenting real sceneries. The images on the stamps are subtitled with a brief and imperative phrase: “Schützt die Natur” (protect nature). The German stamps issued for the ECY thus combine a rather neutral image with a direct appeal to the citizen. The series combines intaglio and offset printing, giving the stamp a refined and prestigious note, which in a way contrasts the straightforward request. The messages on the stamps address the consumer and plead for his or her involvement with the greater cause of conservation.⁵⁴ Delving deeper into the history of these stamps, however, might reveal a less than clear-cut history of their genesis. In the case of West Germany, stamps were not produced especially for the commemorative year. Neither did the stamps appear in 1970 nor did any motif or phrase highlight this event. However, this is exactly what corresponding publications of the Federal Ministry of Postal Services referred to. The unusual context in which the stamps and their motifs were created can only be traced on the basis of the archive files. The national authorities of the commemorative year had no influence on the design and issue date of the stamps. Nevertheless, these small visual postage receipts were an integral part of the ECY. The CoE,

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in Strasbourg, took note of their release, and both the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Forestry and the German League for Nature and Environment (Deutscher Naturschutzring) used them to stamp their correspondence.⁵⁵ Apart from the history of the commemorative year, these stamps also tell their own story, which sheds light on the issuing policy of the Federal Ministry of Postal Services concerning conservation and telling motifs. The planning for the series had begun long before the commemorative year celebrating Europe’s nature, that is to say in 1955. It took some 14 years until the stamp series could eventually be put on envelopes and postcards.⁵⁶ There were various requests by nongovernmental organizations that asked for stamps displaying conservation and protection issues. The ministry was hesitant, even actively hindering such initiatives. In 1965, for instance, it refused a request by the Society for the GermanLuxembourg Nature Park Echternacherbrück to dedicate a stamp at the same time as Luxembourg to celebrate the first cross-border European nature park, founded in 1964. This would have been the first joint issue of two European countries celebrating a conservation topic. Even with the positive attitude of the Luxembourg postal administration, the support of the leading official of the region of Trier and the chief postal officer of the city could not change the ministry’s mind.⁵⁷ Apparently, a single event or occasion was not enough to convince the ministry of the importance for issuing a stamp. Rather, it needed a more general setting or political debate to actually start the process, in this case growing environmental concern in Europe. The example of the history of the German conservation series of 1969 highlights the process in which the different interests of the various stakeholders and institutions competed with each other. Sometimes, in their deliberately vague generality, stamps subsequently covered a subject as well as other topics related to conservation.

Stamp Motifs Cross Read It is noteworthy, too, that the United Kingdom did not issue any postage stamps referring to the event at all, even though it had played a decisive role in declaring the commemorative year.⁵⁸ There is no evidence that international postal organizations such as the CEPT or the Universal Postal Union asked national postal service ministries to issue stamps for this event. In 1972, for example, the Universal Postal Union asked for stamps highlighting the first environmental conference in Stockholm.⁵⁹ During the ECY, however, the organizers of the commemorative year, being on their own, depended on the goodwill and structural framework of the individual postal service ministries.⁶⁰ In 1970, they could not

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make use of the already institutionalized EUROPA stamps because there was still a single transnational motif. As a result of the growing environmental discourse, the CEPT would become more proactive during the 1980s. In 1986, one year before the European Year of the Environment, the CEPT focused on conservation and environmentalism.⁶¹ For this reason, postal service ministries made use of the EUROPA stamps in 1986 to promote the topic. The structural framework for stamps depicting European nature and environmental protection thus became more established. Stamps offered a transnational platform to visualize European conservation and environmentalism. This also became evident in 1986 with the selected motifs. In addition to landscapes, plants, and animals, these motifs focused much more on environmentalism as part of a European understanding. The latter still consisted of typical national entities, as were mainly found on the stamps of 1970. However, it was now more important to continue this idea of a European heritage beyond national borders and to focus on European responsibility for common natural resources such as the sea, air, or water. This led to a visual Europeanization of conservation and environmentalism on stamps.⁶² In the end, the ECY provided numerous European countries with an important incentive to pay tribute to the common goal of protecting the European heritage by issuing stamps. A closer look at the motifs reveals the variety of conveying images of nature and the environment, which reveal the facets to the ECY and its significance for cross-border, European-wide nature conservation. The national institutions responsible for issuing the stamps usually condensed a lot of information into a very small format. This led to constant discussion about stamp design in general and information density in particular.⁶³ The variety of stamps illustrate various concepts of nature – not only iconic species and sceneries but also threats caused by pollution, reclamation, or building schemes. The variability and freedom to change the visual components and linguistic elements stress the purely normative and non-legally binding character of the CoE and the diversity of approaches towards any such thing as European conservation. Nevertheless, it was this diversity of presentations and their arrangement that gave rise to the idea of a future European conservation, envisaged and imagined by applicants and those responsible in the postal service ministries. When looking at the entire series in an album of a collector or a digital archive, the stamps form a diverse and yet connected European tableau. The ECY and its symbols resemble a compass that drew the attention of officials, stakeholders, and the general public to a European map displaying a wealth of species in the most diverse natural landscapes, which were in need of protection. The motifs present key issues of environmental concern that the CoE had addressed. Even the two biodiversity concepts elaborated by Lisbeth

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van de Grift and Wim van Meurs (see chapter 16) were already recognizable: the conservationist and the biodiversity concept. The most common presentations are true to nature with a symbolic impetus connecting to the conservationist concept of the 1960s. Some of them, however, already advanced a more ecological approach, which would prove decisive for the future European environmental policy. The symbol of the circle, standing for the ecological cycle, turned into a feature of stamp design. The use of landscape sceneries, which seem to accentuate the aesthetic value and qualities of a region, had a hidden agenda, like in the case of the Camargue, which at the time was seriously threatened by development schemes. The stamps with plant and animal motifs draw the consumer’s attention to species protection. Birds – and bird protection – were almost omnipresent, especially birds of prey, indicating the loss of central organisms of the web of life. Other animal species, like the Cretan wild goat, already pointed the way to the future of European conservation schemes like the Bern Convention (1979).⁶⁴ One of the most progressive and straightforward stamps, however, was issued in Italy, which was dedicated to the dangers arising from intensified land use and air and soil pollution. These examples highlight the changing biodiversity concepts, which focus on the survival of mankind rather than on individual species or scenery protection.

5 Conclusion This synopsis of stamp motifs highlights the meaning of stamps as strong visual impacts. Their message is intended to be grasped by viewers within seconds. In the examples presented, each country featured a specific approach towards visualizing the ECY. Using the logo and/or phrase endorsed common visual politics. The evolving corporate identity and design, however, did not hinder individual countries from finding their own ways to express their idea of European nature and European conservation. European visual politics, as it materialized on the stamps, echoes both the search for a common ground and the need to be distinguishable. Throughout the 1960s, conservation had turned into an issue that called for European collaboration. European nations strove to promote the cause by highlighting and presenting the importance of as well as constant threat to natural heritage. Images are one of the decisive tools for getting this message across. They also provide researchers with material to identify historic moments and processes that mark the visual Europeanization of nature protection. Stamp issues that were designed particularly for the ECY can be read as a symbol and as a visualization of the European idea. These small postage receipts made the

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vision of a common Europe tangible and visible to many people precisely because they were so common in everyday life. They travelled across countries and crossed national borders while advertising both their country of origin and a common goal. As stamps are small but strong indicators of what politics classifies as valuable and what a country should represent, they help us to understand the process of visualizing Europe and Europeanizing imagery. Here, we can see how cross-national conservation and environmentalism turned into legitimate principles, which some of the participating countries had been emphasizing for decades. This allows us to trace historical developments in the Europeanization of conservation and its visualization and to highlight both similarities and differences. The stamps created for the commemorative year carried a specific European momentum as they triggered intense debates among those who were involved in the process of production about how to present the issue, as seen in the German case study. The stamps as such turned into agents of spreading the visual message of how Europe’s nature actually looked like and should look like in the future. Writing a visual history of Europe means looking at sources that have been produced for the sake of their perception. The production process, the visual product, and its reception are relevant for a European environmental historiography. Images were not only created from a specific idea but also embedded in a socially negotiable framework. As part of an aesthetic practice, they were intended to stimulate reflection on what European nature conservation might look like and to act accordingly. While the environmental movements have repeatedly been accused of limiting their visual scope to either utopian or dystopian motifs, the range of visual narratives proved to be much broader. The messages and meanings displayed on the stamps are more complex than one might assume at first glance. The strong feelings that materialized in the images were an immanent part of the social and political discourse and helped to determine it beyond the motifs depicted. With the help of visual history, these debates can be studied. If the world view of a group can be expressed by using images, then this can be pursued in diverse ways. The first part of the study focused on the motifs depicted on the stamps. This approach revealed similarities and differences of a common Europe imagined by people from different countries. This was visualized both by nationally anchored ideas about a common Europe and transnational environmental protection as well as by tangible natural points of reference such as landscapes, plants, or animals. The second focus of the study was the actual process of creating a stamp series. The production of stamps for current events such as the ECY was subject to institutional and personal constraints. Such imponderables were also at the expense of visual clarity. However, this is only partially evi-

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Figure 1: ECY stamps sorted by nation and date of issue. West Germany MiNo. 591 – 594, 4 June 1969 (Bundesministerium der Finanzen, photos: © Sandor Rapolder). Turkey MiNo. 2158 – 2160, 9 February 1970 (Ptt, photos: © Schwaneberger Verlag GmbH, Germering). Finland MiNo. 667, 10 February 1970 (Posti Group Oyi, photo: © Schwaneberger Verlag GmbH, Germering). Ireland MiNo. 237 – 238, 23 February 1970 (An Post, photos: © Sandor Rapolder). Luxembourg MiNo. 804 – 805, 9 March 1970 (POST Luxembourg, photos: © OT/130.16). France MiNo. 1704, 23 March 1970 (La Poste, photo: © Schwaneberger Verlag GmbH, Germering). Norway MiNo. 602 – 605, 10 April 1970 (Posten Norge, photos: © Schwaneberger Verlag GmbH, Germering). Liechtenstein MiNo. 521 – 524, 30 April 1970 (Liechtensteinische Post AG, photos: © Liechtensteinisches Landesmuseum, Sven Beham). Sweden MiNo. 674 – 675, 11 May 1970 (PostNord, photos: © Sandor Rapolder). Austria MiNo. 1325, 19 May 1970 (Ö sterreichische Post AG, photo: © https://austria-forum.org/af/Wissenssammlungen/Brief marken/1970/Naturschutzjahr). Greece MiNo. 1049 – 1052, 16 June 1970 (ELTA Hellenic Post, photos: © Schwaneberger Verlag GmbH, Germering). Belgium MiNo. 1583 – 1584, 3 July 1970 (bpost, photos: © Schwaneberger Verlag). Cyprus MiNo. 335 – 337, 3 August 1970 (Cyprus Post, photos: © Schwaneberger Verlag GmbH, Germering). Iceland MiNo. 447 – 448, 25 August 1970 (Iceland Post, photos: © Schwaneberger Verlag GmbH, Germering). Switzerland MiNo. 932, 17 September 1970 (Post CH AG, photo: © Schwaneberger Verlag GmbH, Germering). Italy MiNo. 1325 – 1326, 28 November 1970 (Poste italiane, photos: © Sandor Rapolder). Yugoslavia MiNo. 1406 – 1407, 14 December 1970 (succession states, photos: © Sandor Rapolder).

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dent in the final product and can therefore only be explored by consulting written sources regarding the creation process. Such complementing approaches help to shed light on the complex negotiation processes at a national and European level, impaired or promoted by individuals. After all, 40 visual testimonies of a common European path developed agency, which spread the vision of a shared natural heritage across the continent and the world.

Notes  Nature in Focus. Bulletin of the European Information Centre for Nature Conservation. ECY Summer (1970), https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent? documentId=090000168069c88f (accessed 11 May 2020).  Jean-Pierre Ribaut, “ECY as a beginning”, Nature in Focus Summer (1970): 20.  Andreas Reckwitz, “Ästhetik und Gesellschaft: Ein analytischer Bezugsrahmen”, in Ästhetik und Gesellschaft: Grundlagentexte aus Soziologie und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Andreas Reckwitz et al. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 13 – 52; Pierre Smolarski et al., eds., Gezähnte Geschichte: Briefmarken als historische Quelle (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2019), especially the chapters of Christian Rohr and Silke Vetter-Schultheiß.  Harald Welzer, Die smarte Diktatur: Der Angriff auf unsere Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2016), 245.  See the book series by Jürgen Danyel et al., eds., Visual History: Bilder und Bildpraxen in der Geschichte (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016 onwards).  Eva Schürmann, “Darstellung einer Vorstellung: Das Bild der Welt auf der Pioneer-Plakette”, in Atlas der Weltbilder, ed. Christoph Markschies et al. (Berlin: Akademie, 2011), 366 – 375. On metaphors, see Tilman Grabbe, “Der kranke Planet”: Populäre Imagination von Natur in der Bundesrepublik der 1980er Jahre (Marburg: UB Marburg, 2017), https://doi.org/10.17192/z2018.0047 (accessed 19 February 2020).  Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Zur visuellen Geschichte der Naturschutz- und Umweltbewegung”, in Natur- und Umweltschutz nach 1945: Konzepte, Konflikte, Kompetenzen, ed. Franz-Josef Brüggemeier et al. (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2005), 222– 246.  Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015).  Dennis Cosgrove, “Images and Imagination in 20th-Century Environmentalism: From the Sierras to the Poles”, Environment and Planning A, 40 (2008): 1862– 1880, here 1863.  Ibid., 1878.  Gisela Parak, Eco-images: Historical Views and Political Strategies (Munich: RCC, 2013), 5 – 9.  Cornelie Becker-Lamers, “Die nationalen Umweltzeichen: Zur Entstehung einer globalen Tradition” (PhD thesis, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, 2007), https://doi.org/10.25643/bauhaus-uni versitaet.942, I.3.1 (accessed 31 August 2020).  Dunaway, Seeing Green, e. g., 11.  Walter Effenberger, “Briefmarken und – Naturschutz?”, Naturschutz 9, no 2 (1927/28): 45 – 47; Sn., “Naturschutz und Briefmarken”, Naturschutz 15, no. 5 (1933/34): 100 – 103; F. Moewes, “Nationalparke auf Briefmarken”, Naturschutz 16, no. 5 (1934/35): 112– 115 (Stiftung Naturschutzgeschichte Königswinter).

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 Paul Hochstraßer, “Postwertzeichen für Naturschutz”, Europäische Nachrichten “Natur- und Nationalparke” 5, no. 18 (1967): 48 – 51 (National Archives Koblenz, B 257/42208/147– 150).  Rolf Lederbogen, minifactum: Über das Entwerfen von Briefmarken (Karlsruhe: Röser, 1995).  Emil Preetorius, Die Kunst der kleinen Form: Zum künstlerischen Problem der Briefmarke (Munich: Bruckmann, 1956).  MICHEL stamp catalogue: CEPT 2019 (Unterschleißheim: Schwaneberger, 2018). The use of the corresponding stamp illustrations and MICHEL numbering (MICHEL Number, hereafter MiNo.) (country MiNo. 123) is courtesy of Schwaneberger Verlag GmbH, Germering.  The EUROPA 2019 theme is…, https://www.posteurop.org/showNews?selectedEventId= 32496; EUROPA stamps can raise awareness, https://www.posteurop.org/showNews?selectedE ventId=36275 (both accessed 31 August 2020).  Thorsten Schulz, Das “Europä ische Naturschutzjahr 1970”: Versuch einer europaweiten Umweltkampagne (Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fü r Sozialforschung gGmbH, 2006), 1, https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-196627 (accessed 11 May 2020).  Birte Wassenberg, Histoire du Conseil de l’Europe (1949 – 2009) (Brüssel et al.: Lang, 2012).  J. Brooks Flippen, Nixon and the Environment (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); Dunaway, Seeing Green, 35 – 46.  Europarat and Europäische Naturschutzkonferenz, “Erklä rung zur Gestaltung der natü rlichen Umwelt in Europa”, Mitteilungen des Europarats 2 (1970): 26 – 29, cited in Schulz, Das “Europä ische Naturschutzjahr 1970”, 25 – 30.  Schulz, Das “Europä ische Naturschutzjahr 1970”; Kai F. Hünemörder, Die Frühgeschichte der globalen Umweltkrise und die Formierung der deutschen Umweltpolitik (1950 – 1973) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004); Anna-Katharina Wö bse, “Die ausgezeichnete Natur Europas. Zur Geschichte eines Labels”, Themenportal Europä ische Geschichte (2016), www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/ id/fdae-1670 (accessed 11 May 2020). See also chapter 16 by Liesbeth van de Grift and Wim van Meurs in this volume, especially section 5.  Member states of the Council of Europe in 1970 were: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, France, West Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Non-member states participating in the conference in February 1970 were: Finland, Portugal, Spain, Lichtenstein, Israel, Canada, USA, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia (Nature in Focus, 2).  Monaco MiNo. 959, 966 – 971; Israel MiNo. 456 – 460; Canada MiNo. 450; USA MiNo. 999 – 1002, 1004, 1012– 1015; Romania MiNo. 2824– 2831, 2868 – 2873, 2888 – 2893.  On motifs and issue dates, see figure 1.  Becker-Lamers, “Die nationalen Umweltzeichen”, I.1, I.5, II.5.  Wö bse, “Die ausgezeichnete Natur Europas”.  Conseil de l’Europe, Pavoiser europe´en (Straßburg [without year]), https://www.cvce.eu/de/ obj/pavoiser_europeen-fr-0fab63df-d5c3 - 41a5-ac49-da913609423a.html (accessed 11 May 2020).  Bálint Balla, Die Zahl Drei und die Soziologie (Hamburg: Krämer, 2008), 9 – 16.  Wö bse, “Die ausgezeichnete Natur Europas”.  The Archive for Research in Archetypical Symbolism, Das Buch der Symbole: Betrachtungen zu archetypischen Bildern (Cologne: Taschen, 2011), 130 (tree) and 140 (roots).  Bä rbel Kü hne, Das Naturbild in der Werbung: Ü ber die Emotionalisierung eines kulturellen Musters (Frankfurt am Main: Anabas, 2002), 48 – 49.  Wö bse, “Die ausgezeichnete Natur Europas”.  Kü hne, Das Naturbild in der Werbung, 73, 74, 170 and 190.

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 David Scott, European Stamp Design: A Semiotic Approach to Designing Messages (London: Academy Editions, 1995), 61.  Crafts Council of Ireland, Designing Ireland: A Retrospective Exhibition of Kilkenny Design Workshops 1963 – 1988 (Kilkenny: Crafts Council of Ireland, 2005), https://issuu.com/crafts councilofireland/docs/kdwdesignirl2013 – 1– 1/51, 18, 51– 52 and 70 (accessed 30 September 2020).  Nature in Focus, 20.  Amministrazione delle poste e delle telecomunicazioni, Emissione di una serie di francobolli celebrativi dell’annata europea per la salvaguardia della natura e delle sue risorse, Rome, 28 November 1970.  Wö bse, “Die ausgezeichnete Natur Europas”.  European Diploma, On-the-Spot Appraisal of the Camargue Nature Reserve (France), Report by W. A. Plattner, 12 November 1970, Council of Europe CE/Nat (70) 71, https://rm.coe.int/ working-party-on-flora-fauna-and-landscapes-european-diploma-on-the-sp/168066ec01 (accessed 25 May 2020).  Christian Rohr, “The Austrian Environment en miniature: ‘Official’ Perceptions of the Austrian Landscape Reflected through Postal Stamps since 1945”, in Austrian Environmental History, ed. Marc Landry and Patrick Kupper (New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2018), 155 – 181.  Nationalparkverwaltung Hohe Tauern Salzburg et al., Geschichte des Nationalparks Hohe Tauern (Innsbruck et al.: Tyrolia, 2013), especially chapter 4.  Gustav Wendelberger, “Die Rettung der Krimmler Wasserfä lle: Ein Rü ckblick”, Natur und Land 8, no. 11– 12 (1953): 155 – 159, here 159.  Ibid., 155.  Peter Haßlacher, “Krimmler Wasserfä lle und Oesterreichischer Alpenverein”, in Krimmler Wasserfä lle: Festschrift 25 Jahre Europä isches Naturschutzdiplom 1967 – 1992, ed. Peter Haßlacher (Innsbruck: Österreichischer Alpenverein, 1993), 4– 5, here 4.  Gustav Wendelberger, “Krimmler Wasserfä lle, Gesä use, Gamsgrube: Die Kardinalpunkte des ö sterreichischen Naturschutzes”, Natur und Land 6, no. 12 (1951): 199 – 202.  Wö bse, “Die ausgezeichnete Natur Europas”.  Haßlacher, Krimmler Wasserfä lle.  Wolfgang Maassen, Echt oder falsch? Fälschungen und Fälscher in der Philatelie (Schwalmtal: Phil Creativ, 2003), 217– 226.  Liechtenstein MiNo. 521– 524 (1970), 539 – 542 (1971), and 560 – 563 (1972).  Liechtenstein MiNo. 460 – 463; West Germany MiNo. 774– 777; USA MiNo. 1012– 1015, 1004; Rene´ Smolarski and Silke Vetter-Schultheiß, “Die Briefmarke als historische Quelle”, philatelie 484/October (2017): 29 – 31, here 29 – 30.  National Archives Koblenz, B 257/42208.  National Archives Koblenz, B 257/45387 (Druckblatt 8/1969); B 257/42208/12– 15, 125 – 40, 58 – 60.  National Archives Koblenz, B 257/475 and 42208.  National Archives Koblenz, B 257/42208/139 – 146.  Schulz, Das Europä ische Naturschutzjahr 1970, 8.  National Archives Koblenz, B257/42223/443 – 448.  ECY 1970, 10 March 1969, Vol. 779, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1969 – 03 – 10/ debates/11806566-f71d-424d-9aa9 – 2c95f69940a3/EuropeanConservationYear1970?highlight=eu ropean%20conservation%20year%201970#contribution-271938a2 – 77 ff-4e3 f-

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9d98 – 8a18ac0436ed (accessed 31 August 2020); National Archives Koblenz, B 257/42208/25 – 40, 58 – 60.  National Archives Koblenz, B 257/45309.  EUROPA stamps of 1986.  These discussions accompanied almost all conservation and environmentalism stamps in West Germany but were very prominent in the 1969 series (National Archives Koblenz, B 257/ 42208).  Draft Resolutions on the Renewal of the European Diploma for Protected Areas, drafted by the Directorate of Democratic Participation, 2 September 2019, Council of Europe T-PVS/DE (2019), 17, https://rm.coe.int/draft-resolutions-on-the-renewal-of-the-european-diploma-for-pro tected/1680971998 (accessed 30 September 2020).

Bibliography Becker-Lamers, Cornelie. “Die nationalen Umweltzeichen: Zur Entstehung einer globalen Tradition”. PhD thesis, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, 2007. https://doi.org/10.25643/bau haus-universitaet.942 (accessed 31 August 2020). Cosgrove, Dennis. “Images and Imagination in 20th-Century Environmentalism: From the Sierras to the Poles” Environment and Planning A, 40 (2008): 1862 – 1880. Danyel, Jürgen, Gerhard Paul, and Annette Vowinckel, eds. Visual History: Bilder und Bildpraxen in der Geschichte. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016 onwards. Dunaway, Finis. Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015. Gissibl, Bernhard, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper, eds. Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective. New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2012. Grabbe, Tilman. “Der kranke Planet”: Populäre Imagination von Natur in der Bundesrepublik der 1980er Jahre. Marburg: UB Marburg, 2017. https://doi.org/10.17192/z2018.0047 (accessed 19 February 2020). Grevsmühl, Sebastian. “Planet Earth Seen From Space: A Very Brief Visual History”. Contemporânea 9, no 1 (2019): 37 – 53. Grevsmü hl, Sebastian. “Visualising Climate and Climate Change: A longue dure´e Perspective”. In Climate and Culture: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on a Warming World, edited by Giuseppe Feola, Hilary Geoghegan, and Alex Arnall, 46 – 67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Hack, Achim Thomas, and Klaus Ries, eds. Geschichte zum Aufkleben: Historische Ereignisse im Spiegel deutscher Briefmarken. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2020. Hünemörder, Kai F. Die Frühgeschichte der globalen Umweltkrise und die Formierung der deutschen Umweltpolitik (1950 – 1973). Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004. Lederbogen, Rolf. minifactum: Über das Entwerfen von Briefmarken. Karlsruhe: Röser, 1995. Naguschewski, Dirk, and Detlev Schöttker, eds. Philatelie als Kulturwissenschaft: Weltaneignung im Miniaturformat. Berlin: Kadmos, 2019. Parak, Gisela, ed. Eco-images: Historical Views and Political Strategies. Munich: RCC, 2013. Reckwitz, Andreas. “Ästhetik und Gesellschaft: Ein analytischer Bezugsrahmen”. In Ästhetik und Gesellschaft: Grundlagentexte aus Soziologie und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Andreas Reckwitz, Sophia Prinz, and Hilmar Schäfer, 13 – 52. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015.

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Reid, Donald M. “The Symbolism of Postage Stamps: A Source for the Historian”. Journal of Contemporary History 19 (1984): 223 – 249. Rohr, Christian. “The Austrian Environment en miniature: ‘Official’ Perceptions of the Austrian Landscape Reflected through Postal Stamps since 1945”. In Austrian Environmental History, edited by Marc Landry and Patrick Kupper. 155 – 181 New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2018. Schulz, Thorsten. Das “Europä ische Naturschutzjahr 1970”: Versuch einer europaweiten Umweltkampagne. Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fü r Sozialforschung, 2006. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-196627 (accessed 11 May 2020). Schürmann, Eva. “Darstellung einer Vorstellung: Das Bild der Welt auf der Pioneer-Plakette”. In Atlas der Weltbilder, edited by Christoph Markschies, Ingeborg Reichle, Jochen Brüning, and Peter Deuflhard, 366 – 375. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011. Scott, David. European Stamp Design: A Semiotic Approach to Designing Messages. London: Academy Editions, 1995. Smolarski, Pierre, René Smolarski, and Silke Vetter-Schultheiß, eds. Post – Wert – Zeichen. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2019 onwards. Wassenberg, Birte. Histoire du Conseil de l’Europe (1949 – 2009). Brüssel et al.: Lang, 2012. Welzer, Harald. Die smarte Diktatur: Der Angriff auf unsere Freiheit. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2016. Wö bse, Anna-Katharina. “Die ausgezeichnete Natur Europas: Zur Geschichte eines Labels”. Themenportal Europä ische Geschichte (2016). www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/fdae1670 (accessed 11 May 2020). Wöbse, Anna-Katharina. “Zur visuellen Geschichte der Naturschutz- und Umweltbewegung”. In Natur- und Umweltschutz nach 1945: Konzepte, Konflikte, Kompetenzen, edited by Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, and Jens-Ivo Engels, 222 – 246. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2005.

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13 Revealing Risks: European Moments in Nuclear Politics and the Anti-Nuclear Movement Abstract This chapter explores various European moments when Europeans have engaged with civil and military use of nuclear energy. While the development of nuclear power was initially closely and deliberately linked to (re‐)building Europe and European integration, since the 1970s, the growing critique of this technology has given rise to conflicts within societies and across borders, transnational movements, and European networks of cooperation. In the beginning, this was limited to Western Europe, but since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 it has increasingly included the East as well. This chapter draws on European moments that have played out on – and often cut across – different levels, from the supranational to the national and local, in different parts of Europe, shaped by a variety of different actors. It underscores, in particular, the important role played by women in this conflict. Keywords nuclear energy; nuclear weapons; protest; European cooperation; transnational movements When the German Young Socialists Josef “Jo” Leinen and Petra Kelly visited the occupied construction site of the planned Wyhl nuclear power plant on the West German side of the Upper Rhine in 1975, they immediately interpreted the protest event as what could be called a “European moment”.¹ Supported by activists from across the French and Swiss borders, the predominantly local protesters appeared to them to be the embodiment of a better Europe from below. Such border-crossing protest seemed to represent a counter-project to the Europe of big business that many leftists associated with the European Communities (EC) – Kelly’s employer.² Both Leinen and Kelly were part of the Young European Federalists, the leftleaning youth organization of the European movement, a movement aiming to create a “United States of Europe”. In an attempt to challenge and ultimately change EC nuclear policy, both of them subsequently worked hard to take the protest against nuclear power to Brussels. They managed to convince the European commissioner Guido Brunner to organize public hearings in Brussels in 1977/78, the “Open Debates on Nuclear Energy”.³ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-014

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Leinen and Kelly were fully aware of the EC’s institutional commitment to nuclear power. The European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) had been founded in 1957 explicitly to promote nuclear power as the energy source of the future. By the 1970s, Euratom had developed ambitious plans for closing the “fuel cycle”, including reprocessing, fast breeder reactors, and waste repositories,⁴ while societal perceptions began to change in many European countries.⁵ New anti-nuclear movements started to challenge the desirability of nuclear energy altogether,⁶ let alone its promotion via Euratom.⁷ This chapter explores the variegated European histories of ambitions for and conflicts over nuclear power. The term Europe was highly contested during the Cold War and was used to emphasize political boundaries. Western Europeans and the EC institutions claimed the term Europe for themselves, linked it to the vision of European unity, and juxtaposed it with the Soviet Empire of the Warsaw Pact. In turn, beginning in the 1970s, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian intellectuals highlighted that they had preserved European traditions much better than the supposedly Americanized West.⁸ Just as the meaning of Europe was constantly disputed, so were the promises and perils of nuclear power. In the 1950s and 1960s, Western European governments; European institutions in Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg; and industrial, business, scientific, and technological elites promoted nuclear power as a vision and a force for a prosperous, united, and secure Western Europe after the Second World War, a vision that proved persuasive within the media and society. Similar visions were promoted east of the Iron Curtain under Soviet leadership. Since the 1970s, nuclear technology started to become increasingly controversial and divisive, initially in the West and also – after Chernobyl – in the East. Within societies, conflicts intensified between promoters and opponents, and differences also increased between European countries – as some of them opted out of nuclear energy, while others remained staunchly committed to the technology.⁹ At the same time, engagement with nuclear power continued to link Europeans across borders, however, divided into two camps: on the one side, the critics of nuclear power and, on the other side, the promoters as well as operators. Both camps were connected across Europe through transnational exchange and networks of cooperation, sometimes even cutting across the Iron Curtain, and they frequently evoked European or transnational solidarity.¹⁰ The politics of nuclear Europe played out at different levels: at the supranational level, with the early institutionalization of Euratom; at the national levels, with political and technological elites initially pursuing very similar approaches to nuclear energy;¹¹ and at the subnational, regional, and local levels, with anti-nuclear protest frequently linked to centre-periphery conflicts, regional identities, and local concerns, for instance regarding land or water

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use, coal miners’ jobs, or local tax revenue.¹² The local, national, and international levels sometimes overlapped, as transnational and transboundary links and transfers were important for both technological development and protest.¹³ Many of these transfers were not limited to Europe’s geographical boundaries, but involved global connections. Men and women engaged in protest and as transnational mediators with women being often the driving force behind actions. Thus, various action groups and transnational networks were founded and sustained by women. Thus the anti-nuclear movement also became an emancipatory force for female equality and participation beyond nuclear issues.¹⁴ When looking back at the nuclear history of Europe, we can single out a number of European moments. We may define such moments as events of relevance for more than one European country, events demonstrating wider European developments, connections, and exchanges in a nutshell while reflecting multiple levels and perspectives. European moments hit home and played out very differently across Europe. Some European moments were actually discussed as “European” by the contemporaries, or involved an “appeal” to the European institutions or an imaginary European public sphere.¹⁵ This chapter will include those European moments relating to civilian and military uses of nuclear technology like nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. We thus seek to avoid reproducing attempts since the US president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative in 1953 to reframe the two kinds of applications as fundamentally different. The chapter will draw attention to such European moments chronologically: from the Treaties of Rome to Chernobyl and to the most recent debates on the so-called nuclear renaissance and the persistent issue of what nuclear power leaves behind.¹⁶

1 Rome, March 1957: Making Europe through Nuclear Energy In the history of nuclear power, Monday, 25 March 1957, was clearly an important European moment. On that day, the governments of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, France, and West Germany signed the Treaties of Rome. These treaties created the European Atomic Energy Community, alongside the European Economic Community, which established a European common market for goods, services, labour, and capital. These two new organizations complemented the earlier European Coal and Steel Community. Merging into the European Communities in 1967, they formed the institutional basis for today’s Euro-

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pean Union (EU). While the European Coal and Steel Community had been founded to provide equal access to vital fossil energy resources in the early 1950s, Euratom was to open the road to what was considered the energy source of the future: providing an apparently clean, and seemingly endless source of nuclear energy.¹⁷ Euratom complemented the promotional efforts of the “Atoms for Peace” campaign, which involved exhibitions and events all across Europe during the 1950s.¹⁸ Euratom’s primary goal was to foster European cooperation in research and development through a network of research centres in the original six member states. Most prominent among those was Ispra in northern Italy, where “[s]ome 500 nuclear scientists from throughout the six nations” could draw on a budget of “$40 million for new equipment and installations to speed Europe’s power reactor technology, instrument research, research in the field of raw and processed materials, and the training of nuclear scientists”, as the European Commission proudly announced in 1960.¹⁹ The euphoria did not last long. By the end of the 1960s, the failure to find a market for the European “Orgel” (organically cooled) reactor design, developed at Ispra, led Euratom into a cul-de-sac.²⁰ In the early 1970s, disaffected researchers left Ispra in droves.²¹ Also from the perspective of the US administration, who had supported Euratom’s founding to prevent proliferation and nuclear nationalism, the organization was a failure, as national reactor projects mushroomed and France attained its force de frappe.²² Despite the efforts of the “Atoms for Peace” campaign and Euratom, already in the 1950s, there was some contention around the use of nuclear fission. Across various Western European countries, such as Sweden, the UK, and West Germany, some leading scientists and parts of civil society were highly critical of military uses and weapons testing.²³ The US fallout debate resonated in Europe, too. The contamination of children’s milk by radioactive caesium from nuclear weapons tests evoked potent images, triggered health concerns, and mobilized mothers in particular.²⁴ Only rarely did such critique refer to civilian uses as well, but where they did, similar arguments were used.²⁵ The siting of two major nuclear research centres in West Germany between 1956 and 1958 led to effective local opposition. Eventually the research centres were relocated to a forest outside Karlsruhe and to war-ravaged Jülich instead of Cologne.²⁶ Critics emphasized health concerns and issues of land and water use.²⁷ Some of them were apparently aware of experiences elsewhere and referred not only to the transnational fallout issue, but also recent accidents with nuclear waste materials in the US or in other European countries, namely the British Windscale site, where a major accident occurred in 1957.²⁸ Women’s associations played an important role in both

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cases and highlighted health concerns “in the name of many unnamed women and mothers”.²⁹ Nevertheless, such protests remained rare and mostly local, because most Western European citizens accepted the promises of the new technology and its symbolic and institutional attachment to European unification. Looking eastwards of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union equally promoted nuclear energy as a force of modernization and a Soviet utopia.³⁰ Notwithstanding the promotion of a shared vision of progress by the advocates of nuclear power on each side of the Iron Curtain, by the 1970s nuclear energy became increasingly conflict-prone, and European countries began to diverge in their nuclear energy policies with the beginning of the anti-nuclear protest movements.

2 Stockholm, June 1972: Linking Environmentalism and the Critique of Nuclear Power At the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, Western and – with a certain delay – also Eastern European states and societies underwent changes in attitudes, values, political behaviour, and their economies, as the post-war boom came to an end. The rise of environmentalism and a new debate on the negative side effects of economic growth were not only concerns among the new social movements and the media. Such issues were also promoted and placed on the European agenda by international organizations.³¹ 1970 was the Council of Europe’s European Conservation Year (see chapter 12 by Vetter-Schultheiss); the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and also EC institutions started their respective projects to establish environmental policies (see chapter 16 by van de Grift/van Meurs).³² In the face of growing domestic concerns about long-range air pollution affecting Swedish lakes and forests in the late 1960s (see chapter 14 by Kaijser),³³ Sweden had taken the initiative for holding a conference on environmental issues in the framework of the United Nations (UN). Sweden committed to hosting the first UN Conference on the Human Environment which took place in Stockholm in June 1972. This event marked the establishment of environmental policies at various levels in Europe and internationally. Despite its global nature, the conference constituted an important European moment with regard to nuclear power and the rise of anti-nuclear movements espcially in Western Europe. Nuclear issues were discussed during official meetings as well as at the so-called counter-conferences – a series of alternative meetings that took place in parallel

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to the official gathering in Stockholm.³⁴ From the late 1960s, nuclear power started to become much more controversial not only in the United States but also in some European countries. In Sweden, it was a highly topical issue, as the king had just inaugurated the country’s first commercial nuclear power plant in May 1972.³⁵ Thus, at the alternative forums, Swedish nuclear critics like Hannes Alfvén and the new international non-governmental organization Friends of the Earth connected the Swedish issue to broader concerns about the technology and thus raised awareness among European environmentalists from those countries where nuclear power plants were still only on the drawing board.³⁶ Nuclear power was also negotiated at the UN General Assembly and various plenary meetings. Three main topics were discussed: radioactive pollution of the seas by nuclear vessels and as “weapon” in the Vietnam war, a ban on the production and use of nuclear weapons, and the issue of nuclear tests and fallout. In the end, however, only a draft resolution on nuclear weapons testing was passed, presumably directed against states such as France, which had been conducting nuclear tests in the South Pacific since the 1960s, an issue much criticized by various non-governmental organizations.³⁷ The growing concern for the environment contributed to a new awareness of the problems related to nuclear technology. This is the context in which the great protests of the 1970s emerged, notably on the Upper Rhine, where Swiss, West German, and French energy planners competed for the river’s ample cooling water, becoming the hotbed of transnational anti-nuclear protest in Western Europe.

3 Wyhl, February 1975: The Rise of Cross-Border Anti-Nuclear Protests on the Upper Rhine In the early 1970s, protests against nuclear power began on the French side of the Upper Rhine. The conflicts were initially regional, within the transboundary region, but they quickly turned into transnational, and in many ways also European ones, as the protesters created networks across borders. The events on the Upper Rhine became a point of reference for anti-nuclear activists all over Europe. Many of them perceived the protest as a larger European affair – just as Kelly and Leinen. Well before Stockholm, the construction of the nuclear power plant in the Alsatian village of Fessenheim aroused some local opposition. Its location at the border, originally intended as a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation in the spirit of European technological cooperation, meant that those living on the other side of the river were also potentially affected.³⁸ This

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led German and Swiss citizens to join the protest. Right after the plans had been announced in the summer of 1970, a small group of protesters sent an open letter to the responsible French minister. A first demonstration was held in April 1971. Protesters hailed from the peace movement with its strong Lutheran base, and from, environmentalist as well as eugenicist circles. The Austrian-based but transnationally connected World Union for Protection of Life, with roots reaching back to Nazi times, warned against genetic damage due to low level radiation.³⁹ Other networks were the Christian peace group International Fellowship of Reconciliation, which also supported the critique of nuclear power in Stockholm in 1972 as well as the 1973 meeting that led to the founding of the Organization for Information about Atomic Energy (OOA), the Danish anti-nuclear organization.⁴⁰ When the village of Wyhl on the West German side of the Rhine, not very far from Fessenheim, was selected for a nuclear power plant in 1974, opposition started immediately and culminated in occupation of the site, modelled on French practices from across the border.⁴¹ The occupation lasted from 23 February until 7 November 1975 and has been widely viewed as the starting point for the anti-nuclear movement in Germany.⁴² Protesters from Wyhl also went on to occupy the site of the nearby Swiss nuclear power plant in Kaiseraugst, a project under development since 1967.⁴³ Occupation as a strategy was studied by activists and protest researchers⁴⁴ and immediately became a model for protests elsewhere.⁴⁵ The protests at Wyhl had emerged from within the local population, including conservative farmers, vintners, and landowners in the vicinity of the plant, all worried about their produce, way of life, and health. By not taking local concerns seriously, the Baden-Württemberg state government in Stuttgart unintentionally aroused regionalist resentment against what came across as heavyhanded policy. Many locals objected to what looked to them like the forced industrialization of their home region. Cross-border identities, strengthened by the shared Allemannic dialect, provided a more convincing regional identity than the seemingly artificial new state of Baden-Württemberg. Poets and singer-songwriters making use of the shared dialect successfully mobilized cross-border regional ties. In Alsace, protesters similarly inflamed regionalist sentiments against French centralism.⁴⁶ The regional anti-nuclear movement connected nationally and transnationally via mediators like Kelly and Leinen. In the late 1970s, both became leading figures in the umbrella organization of the German environmental citizen action groups. While Kelly helped found the German Green Party, Leinen strengthened the growing anti-nuclear wing of Social Democrats, devoting his career to environmental and European issues. They established links to other European antinuclear activists and helped in taking the protest to Brussels. Kelly travelled to

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countries as far as Australia, sustaining transnational connections to movements abroad for years.⁴⁷ Within the region, the rural groups at Wyhl reached out to urban initiatives, such as in the university town of Freiburg, with the Baden Women’s Initiative, for instance. Like the female protesters in the 1950s, many of the women emphasized their motherhood and responsibility for life, health, and food. Women of different generations played an important role in the occupation and the protest at Wyhl and their prominent presence also contributed to the legitimacy – and authenticity – of the opposition.⁴⁸ In the end, it was not only the transnational protests but also the courts, lower-than-expected electricity demand, and politics that put the nail in the coffin of the Wyhl nuclear power plant project. In March 1977, the administrative court withdrew the construction license but later the case was referred to a higher-level court. In 1982, the prime minister of Baden-Württemberg declared the construction of the nuclear power plant in Wyhl unnecessary. In the end, the plant was never built.⁴⁹ Likewise, Kaiseraugst was halted in the wake of the 1975 occupation and eventually abandoned in 1988.⁵⁰ In France, however, where nuclear power development was accelerated beacause of the 1973 oil crisis, Fessenheim’s two reactors were connected to the grid in 1977 and ran until 2020. Across all three countries, much fought-over plants were completed and some went on line even after the nuclear catastrophy of Chernobyl.

4 Barsebäck, August 1976: Transboundary Nordic Protests Protests against nuclear power in Scandinavia were transnational and transboundary, too. However, they were not viewed as European, but rather as Nordic concerns. On 7 August 1976, the participants of a Nordic environmentalist summer camp in southern Sweden singled out the Swedish nuclear power plant Barsebäck, where a first reactor had been operating since 1975 and a second one was to go online in 1977, for a first joint Nordic anti-nuclear demonstration with protesters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.⁵¹ Even though activists were well aware of the events in France and Germany, they engaged in neither occupations nor violence. Instead, the creative and peaceful protest march – involving a diein (see figure 1) – linked Barsebäck and the critique of nuclear power to various other environmentalist concerns in the rapidly modernizing Nordic societies. Slogans also criticized the depopulation of the Scandinavian countryside, Copenhagen’s Ørestad city expansion into precious wetlands, and included a

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plea for a “society that used its resources sustainably” (see figure 2).⁵² After this initial protest event, anti-nuclear activists continued to collaborate transnationally in (almost) annual marches against the Barsebäck nuclear power plant. Its close vicinity to Copenhagen and major Swedish cities helped in making the argument that it was “the world’s worst located nuclear power plant” very strong and facilitated the trustful cross-border collaboration of Danish and Swedish anti-nuclear activists.⁵³

Figure 1: “Die-In.” Imaginative Nordic protest against the Swedish Barsebäck Nuclear Power Plant, 7 August 1976 (© Lasse Herneklint, permission kindly granted).

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Figure 2: “Nordic Atomic March, 7 August 1976. We meet at Barsebäck”. Poster of first Joint Nordic March against Barsebäck (© OOA Fonden, Copenhagen, smilingsun.org, permission kindly granted).

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Barsebäck becoming the target of cross-border anti-nuclear activism caught the Swedish operators somewhat by surprise because relations across the border had been close and cordial up until that time. When the Swedish electricity company Sydkraft planned to build a nuclear power plant in relatively densely populated southern Sweden in the late 1960s, they were following energy planners’ common conventions. The building site at Barsebäck was on a spit of land surrounded by the sea, with no population in the vicinity of five kilometres. The location about 20 kilometres away from Copenhagen was economically advantageous for the planned export of electricity to Denmark. The Swedes consulted their neighbour’s authorities, but the Danes did not object to the location. When the nuclear experts from the Danish research centre criticized the emergency cooling system,⁵⁴ the Swedes incorporated this technical advice and changed the plans accordingly, and construction works started in 1971.⁵⁵ In early 1974, in response to the oil crisis, Danish utility companies concentrated on securing a licence to build their own nuclear power plant. The nascent anti-nuclear movement organization OOA immediately challenged these plans and soon found allies in Denmark’s newly fragmented party system. Between 1974 and 1976, energy issues were controversially discussed in parliament and society. By 10 August 1976, three days after the Nordic demonstration against Barsebäck, the Danish government decided to postpone any decision to licence nuclear power plants until a solution for safe waste disposal had been found, which proved impossible to demonstrate.⁵⁶ Nuclear development was put on hold until the Danish parliament decided in 1985 to exclude nuclear power from the country’s energy planning. From 1976 onwards, Barsebäck became one of the main targets of OOA mobilization, calling attention to the risk of a nuclear accident impacting on Danish territory. In December 1976, OOA activists protested in front of Copenhagen town hall and the Swedish embassy against the start-up of Barsebäck’s second reactor. Transnational links and international work were very important for the OOA. The organization had emerged from Christian youth circles, activists from War Resisters’ International, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, as well as from the new environmentalist movement organization NOAH. OOA closely observed and communicated with Swedish, German, and other Western and later also Central and Eastern European groups and provided the international anti-nuclear movement with a symbol: the sun sticker created by activist Anna Lund was distributed worldwide (see figure 3). Proceeds from the copyright helped to fund the international renewable energy group World Information Service on Energy (WISE).⁵⁷ Cross-border cooperation between Danish and Swedish anti-nuclear activists continued well into the 1990s. When a referendum on nuclear power was held in

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Figure 3: How symbols travel. “Nuclear power – No thanks”, by Anne Lund, Organization for Nuclear Information (OOA), Denmark (© OOA Fonden, Copenhagen, smilingsun.org, permission kindly granted).

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Sweden in March 1980, Danish anti-nuclear groups supported the Swedish People’s Movement against Nuclear Power.⁵⁸ Even when the Swedish movement effectively disintegrated after the lost referendum, groups cooperated locally across the border in their efforts against Barsebäck. The nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and at Chernobyl in 1986 induced OOA to start massive petition campaigns. In 1979, they only demanded the closure of Barsebäck, but in 1986 this was extended to all nuclear power plants within 150 kilometres of the Danish borders, with OOA delegations entering into talks with the Swedish as well as the West and the East German governments. In the early 1990s, Danish activists protested at the congress of Sweden’s Social Democratic Party.⁵⁹ Embarrassed by the continuous pressures from the Danes,⁶⁰ the Swedish government eventually decided to prioritize Barsebäck’s phase-out. The first reactor was closed in 1999 and the second one in 2005.

5 Malville, July 1977: Fast Breeder Reactors, Violence, and Transnational Protests While protests remained peaceful in Scandinavia and anti-nuclear message found its way into the political system by sympathetic parties, anti-nuclear activists in most of Western Europe – notably in France and West Germany – faced a pro-nuclear elite consensus that nuclear power was indispensable for energy provision. Accordingly, government authorities had little sympathy when protesters turned out for large-scale demonstrations, involving increasingly violent confrontations with the police. The year 1977 started with clashes at the northern German Brokdorf and Grohnde nuclear power plant sites in February and March, which were closely studied by the French police. Violence peaked on 31 July 1977 at a transnational anti-nuclear demonstration in France directed against the European fast breeder reactor that its opponents called Malville. This European moment was characterized by brutal battles between police and protesters that left a protester dead.⁶¹ In the eyes of its planners and supporters, the Superphénix at Creys-Malville – as it was emphatically called officially– was to explicitly symbolize the benefits of European research cooperation.⁶² France, West Germany, and Italy collaborated on an industrial prototype of a breeder reactor. To its advocates, fast breeder reactors were the future of nuclear technology. They promised endless energy by “closing the fuel cycle” using reprocessed spent nuclear fuel in fast reactors in order to “breed” even more fissionable material which would help save precious uranium fuel as they argued.⁶³ However, from the perspective of the critics

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of nuclear power, breeding plutonium and making what they considered “bomb fuel” the basis for energy production was the embodiment of everything they feared and loathed about the nuclear sector: its connection to the military, the dangers of proliferation,⁶⁴ and the handling of the highly poisonous, radioactive element with a long half-life, involving great risks for people and the environment.⁶⁵ For all of these reasons, Malville became the symbol and centre of a transnational protest event, culminating in a violent mass demonstration with participants from West Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and France. Transnational cultural and political misunderstandings aggravated the situation – gear like motorcycle helmets routinely used by West German protesters seemed offensive to French policemen, while Germans were not familiar with French police tactics and their arsenal of gas grenades, which caused severe injuries. Facing criticism in the media, French politicians mobilized nationalist stereotypes and blamed the violence on the activists from other countries, in particular the “Germans”.⁶⁶ For the French anti-nuclear movement, Malville was a turning point, leading to its decline and turn towards a more localized approach. As a European moment, Malville had a wider impact, reflecting the limits of mass demonstrations and the issue of violence. Already on 24 September, when they gathered at the construction site of another controversial European fast breeder reactor at Kalkar on the German part of the Lower Rhine near the Dutch border, Dutch, French, and German protesters as well as the police had reconsidered their strategies to prevent another loss of life. While activists learned from each other how to organize protests more effectively, government officials and police developed special strategies not only to protect reactor sites but also to prevent escalation.⁶⁷ Malville also paved the way for the founding of the European Green parties to take the case against nuclear power to parliamentary institutions.⁶⁸ The transboundary conflict over Malville, however, did not end in 1977. Swiss cantons engaged in litigation to slow down the process of construction before the plant opened in 1986, shortly before Chernobyl, and tried to stop its operation thereafter. In the end, technical problems eventually led to its closure in the 1990s.⁶⁹

6 Greenham Common, September 1981: Women Against Nuclear Arms While energy issues and the conflict over nuclear power dominated the 1970s, the rise of the Cold War tensions in the early 1980s shifted public attention in

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Europe – and North America – back to the military uses of nuclear technology. The peace movement gained strength again, raised the spectre of nuclear war and criticized the double-track decision of the NATO to station new cruise missiles to balance the Soviet SS-20 missiles. A substantial number of those activists who had protested against power plants now mobilized against nuclear rearmament. This overlap and continuity of actors and ideas reinforced both movements, not least in terms of technical, political, and organizational knowledge.⁷⁰ Women played a prominent role in these protests in Western Europe at conferences, demonstrations, Easter marches, and so-called women’s resistance camps. The first and most famous women’s peace camp in Western Europe was established in 1981 in Berkshire in England against the British government’s decision to have cruise missiles stationed there. A whole series of protests followed, taking place close to the Greenham Common Royal Air Force Base. From 250 women in May 1982, participation grew to 30,000 women half a year later. Protests were very creative and rife with symbols. At the first major protest event, the “Embrace the Base” that took place in September 1981, the participants held hands to form a human chain around the 6-mile (about 10 kilometre) perimeter of the base. During the “Reflect the Base” demonstration in December 1983, 50,000 women encircled the base again to criticize the recent arrival of the cruise missiles. Women held up mirrors to make the military symbolically look back at itself and reflect upon its actions.⁷¹ Early on it was decided that the protests should involve women only. This choice was part of a deliberate strategy, in line with an ecofeminist critique that supposed and emphasized the connection between the suppression of women in a patriarchal society and the subjugation – and destruction – of nature through wars, nuclear power and weapons, and the arms race. Seemingly inherent differences between men and women were highlighted to create a positive reference to shared womanhood, which became an important source of emotional strength and legitimacy for political activities in the women’s peace movement. Essentializing gender differences, ecofeminists used motherhood as a political strategy. In ways similar to earlier female anti-nuclear protesters the women at Greenham Common legitimated their opposition in the name of the safety of their children and future generations. Many women in subsequent protests after Chernobyl advanced such arguments, too. As Greenham Common was a permanent installation from 1981 until the year 2000, female activists often stayed overnight at the camp, thus challenging traditional notions that a woman’s place was in the home. Indeed, journalists provocatively asked the women why they were not at home with their children if they were so important.⁷²

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Greenham Common, in England, and the camps in Comiso, in Italy, served as models for other camps in Western Europe, such as the feminist camp in the heavily militarized West German Hunsrück region. It was set up to protest against the stationing of 96 US cruise missiles in 1983. European female protests also resonated on the other side of the Atlantic, and in the same year, activists in the United States established a protest camp adjacent to the Seneca Army Depot in New York state.⁷³ Two female transnational networkers, Petra Kelly and Helen Caldicott especially, were deeply involved in mediating protest ideas and were perceived as leading voices in peace protests. Transnationally shared ecofeminist ideas provided an important bond not only between the two of them but also to the women at Greenham Common and female activists elsewhere.⁷⁴ Petra Kelly, a German, had grown up and studied in the United States before returning to Europe in the early 1970s. Linking European and global peace and anti-nuclear movements, Kelly established close ties with US and international peace protesters, including, notably, the Australian doctor Helen Caldicott, co-founder of the Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament in the United States and the organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, whose protest had been triggered by French nuclear testing in the Pacific.⁷⁵ With the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and nuclear power returning to the European agenda with a vengeance, Kelly’s perseverance in transnational networking paid off, as her older contacts among international critics of nuclear energy, primarily from the US, revived the connection.⁷⁶

7 Chernobyl, April 1986: The Maximum Credible Accident Hits Home Differently in Europe The catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine on 26 April 1986 released vast quantities of radioactive substances into the atmosphere. It impacted on Europe in two ways. Firstly, nuclear isotopes were blown with the wind and hit Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe more heavily than regions further west. Chernobyl fallout was thus not limited to Soviet Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, but exposed Europeans elsewhere, too. Radionuclides taken up by plants and animals could subsequently be found in milk, meat, forest food products, freshwater fish, and wood – even until today.⁷⁷ Secondly, public perceptions of Chernobyl and the ensuing political consequences, however, often varied tremendously between countries, reflecting the state of na-

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tional debates on nuclear power much more so than the actual physical fallout. A cross-section of national cases will demonstrate this pattern. Sweden was thus not only instrumental in uncovering the accident – as surprisingly high levels of radiation measured at the Forsmark nuclear power plant led to diplomatic exchanges that forced the Soviet Union to admit that a nuclear power plant had been “damaged”⁷⁸. It was also the country outside the Soviet Union most affected by radioactive fallout. Chernobyl’s short-term political consequences were immense, but eroded in the long term. Chernobyl was intensively covered in the Swedish media and seemed to demonstrate that the anti-nuclear activists’ fears of accidents were not exaggerated. This rekindled the country’s nuclear controversy, which had been dormant after the referendum of 1980. Its result had allowed nuclear power expansion to go ahead with a planned phase-out by 2010. Influenced by Chernobyl and the protests that followed, the Social Democratic government put into law in 1988 a phase-out period beginning in 1995/96. However, in 1991, the pro-nuclear wing of the party had this decision reversed. Important arguments for this U-turn were jobs and costs, along with nuclear power’s supposed contribution to combatting climate change.⁷⁹ Italy, by contrast, was much less affected by actual fallout, but Chernobyl had decisive and long-term political ramifications because it accelerated an ongoing conflict about nuclear technology in the first half of the 1980s. Activists protested against expansion of nuclear power and the stationing of US cruise missiles. Just one month before Chernobyl, the Italian government had approved building several large nuclear power plants and taking a greater share in the Superphénix at Malville. Chernobyl triggered large demonstrations and a campaign for a national referendum. Eventually, the referendum held between 8 and 9 November 1987 put an end to the expansion of nuclear power in Italy.⁸⁰ In France and the UK, both the physical and the political consequences of Chernobyl were low. Primarily Scotland and some parts of eastern France had been affected by fallout, but authorities played down the impact and argued that their own nuclear power plants were safe. In the UK, with a certain delay, authorities had to admit that some grazing sheep had been contaminated and farmers were duly compensated. This affair remains the main British memory of Chernobyl today. Chernobyl did not resonate much in the UK, as the British anti-nuclear movement primarily focused on nuclear arms. In France, the cover-up of measurement results seemed to confirm the critics’ beliefs regarding the high-handed power and recklessness of the pro-nuclear elite. Chernobyl had a more permanent effect on the French anti-nuclear movement, though, as activists started to establish their own independent infrastructure of measurement stations and counter-expertise.⁸¹

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Figure 4: May 1980: Protest against the nuclear waste storage in Gorleben. Building a hut village – “Republic Free Wendland” – on a clearing in the area of the planned deep drilling site 1004 that was cleared by police and federal border guard on 4 June 1980 (© Günter Zint, permission kindly granted).

Germany received substantial doses of Chernobyl fallout. The political ramifications in West Germany were strong because – as in Italy – they resonated with ongoing conflicts about the soon-to-go critical nuclear power plant Brokdorf, the planned Gorleben nuclear waste repository (see figure 4), and the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant. These projects had kept the nuclear power issue alive in the 1980s, together with the prevailing peace protests.⁸² After Chernobyl, some of the peace groups reconnected to their anti-nuclear power plant roots.⁸³ New groups also formed, among them the Mothers against Nuclear Power, who – along the lines of ecofeminism – emphasized their role in care and defence of their children and engaged in innovative protest.⁸⁴ In the short run, the large-scale demonstrations – with a total number of 1.2 million participants in 1986⁸⁵ – did not impress the government(s), and plants went online as planned. However, in the long run, also due to the growing parliamentary presence of the anti-nuclear Green Party and changing public opinion, governments and utility companies became more hesitant to push for nuclear power. The private operators of the Wackersdorf plant (see figure 5) eventually pulled

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Figure 5: August 1988: “Demonstration in Neunburg before Wackersdorf hearing of Mother’s Against Atomic Power”, writing on cotton diaper (© Cornelia Blomeyer, permission kindly granted).

the plug on the project in 1988 and opted for European cooperation in reprocessing existing plants in France and the UK instead.⁸⁶ Across Western Europe, in Italy, the UK, France, and West Germany, Chernobyl solidarity groups formed. They sought to help Soviet children, whose health had suffered from the Chernobyl fallout, reaching out across the crumbling Iron Curtain in a humanitarian mission rather than an overtly political one.⁸⁷ In East Germany, information about Chernobyl arrived via Western media and undermined even further any remaining trust in the state socialist government, which had declared all environmental information a state secret in 1982. Nuclear power had hardly been controversial in the socialist state that had beat West Germany in the race for the first operating reactor and heavily relied on dirty brown coal. Only in the wake of Chernobyl, under the umbrella of the Lutheran church, anti-nuclear groups formed, and a first state-wide anti-nuclear workshop took place in East Berlin in April 1987. Activists tried to acquire counter-expertise, obtained from West Germans, as well as, for instance, the Danish OOA.⁸⁸

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Like in East Germany, in the socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union, many citizens viewed nuclear power positively. Official propaganda linked nuclear energy to progress and pride in socialist scientific achievements. Information about safety problems was kept secret and the public sphere was tightly controlled. Environmentalism was usually incorporated into official structures. Critical views began being voiced only after Chernobyl. In relatively liberal Poland, anti-nuclear messages were included in environmental protest, for instance, on Children’s Day on 1 June 1986 in Kraków, and a petition was signed by 3,000 citizens to halt the construction of a nuclear power plant.⁸⁹ In the Soviet Union, Chernobyl put Gorbachev’s new policy of glasnost to a test. The slow and secretive response, as well as the lack of protection and compensation for the hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens mobilized to help, undermined the trust in the new Soviet leader. The critique of nuclear power became part of the opposition’s critical perspective of the Soviet system and was increasingly linked to nationalist movements. In Soviet Lithuania, for instance, opposition emerged against adding a new reactor to the Ignalina plant. Ironically, after the establishment of independent states in the former Soviet Union, the meaning of nuclear power changed again. In Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, nuclear power plants were framed as sources of national economic strength, and critics were increasingly marginalized.⁹⁰ Chernobyl was clearly a European moment, even if its physical and political ramifications varied greatly across countries. Chernobyl’s impact on anti-nuclear mobilization and the nuclear sector also varied regarding the short- and longterm consequences: short-term consequences were strong in Italy and Sweden, but did not last in the Scandinavian country, while in West Germany, the consequence was initially weak in the short term, but important in the long term. On the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, Chernobyl had the strongest and most lasting environmental and health effects, thereby contributing to the demise of the Soviet system, but the opposition to nuclear power did not always last.

8 Europe, 1990s and beyond Chernobyl probably constituted the last important European moment in the history of nuclear politics and the anti-nuclear movement. Three common themes, however, have been characteristic of nuclear politics in Europe since then. Firstly, after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the run-up to European Union membership, a number of nuclear power plants in Central and Eastern Europe were closed down. East German nuclear power plants were closed down already

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in 1990, not least because Western politicians had attributed the Chernobyl accident to risky Soviet technology. Similar concerns played a role in closing down the Lithuanian Ignalina nuclear power plant.⁹¹ However, in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, reactors were modernized and “Westernized” in terms of their security under the auspices of international and European organizations, including Euratom. Operators and regulators were integrated into wider European networks.⁹² Secondly, for European states the search for a nuclear waste repository has become increasingly urgent. For a long time, waste sites have been a focus of anti-nuclear protest across Europe, such as in Spain, where transboundary a protest emerged against a repository to be built on the Portuguese border since the late 1980s.⁹³ After German reunification, Morsleben, the final repository inherited from East Germany, seemed to offer a convenient solution for West German low- and medium-level radioactive waste in the 1990s. Protests, legal action by environmental non-governmental organizations, and a change of government finally led to its closure in 1998.⁹⁴ Since the 1990s, new repository projects have been underway in Sweden and Finland. After initial protests against test drilling, the Swedish authorities changed to a competition format among Sweden’s existing “nuclear communities” to prevent opposition right from the start.⁹⁵ As a lesson from this experience, since 2013 the German government has restarted its search for a final repository with a more transparent and more credible science-based procedure in hopes to find a geologically and socioeconomically suitable place by 2031. By excluding Gorleben from the options in 2020, the authorities tried to put an end to the long-drawn-out conflict over this site, which had lasted for more than four decades.⁹⁶ Thirdly, the debate about the so-called nuclear renaissance has varied widely throughout Europe. Some European countries, among them Finland, France, the UK, and Russia, have invested in building new nuclear power plants, while some, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, are considering this option. Those promoting new nuclear plants are framing nuclear energy as a climate-friendly, “low-carbon” source, a view that is seconded by Euratom.⁹⁷ In other countries, notably Germany, this argument has been less persuasive, notably with a view to the “wicked” nuclear waste problem – a lasting heritage of the use of nuclear energy and a persistent source of risk for a million years to come.⁹⁸ All in all, however, in Europe “pro-nuclear environmentalism” seems more limited than in the United States.⁹⁹ Like with Chernobyl, European responses to the Fukushima accident in 2011 varied dramatically: while Fukushima triggered little reaction in the UK, France, or in Eastern Europe, Germany saw major anti-nuclear demonstrations. The gov-

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ernment of chancellor Angela Merkel immediately backtracked from its 2010 decision to slow down the phase-out. Merkel quickly decided to close the last nuclear power plants by 2022. Similarly, another referendum in Italy in the wake of Fukushima blocked the building of new nuclear power plants that the Berlusconi government had advocated.¹⁰⁰ In Finland, Fukushima’s ramifications only temporarily limited the country’s path of nuclear renaissance.¹⁰¹

Conclusions This chapter argued that the nuclear history of Europe can best be captured through a series of European moments. These differ when considering how the actors involved thought about and engaged with nuclear technology. Even during the pro-nuclear euphoria of the 1950s – when European collaboration on nuclear power was associated with a promise of progress, peace, prosperity, as well as European unity or solidarity between socialist countries – some critics made their voice heard against military and civilian uses. While this critique was mostly local, it was transnationally informed and often involved women. The 1972 UN conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm epitomized the arrival of global environmentalism, which made nuclear power look increasingly problematic. Various conflicts around reactor sites and nuclear weapons constituted European moments, as they connected sites and movements transnationally. However, activists – many of them women – did not always profess a “European” identity when they collaborated transnationally and locally across borders to oppose nuclear power plants. In Wyhl, identities were deeply regional and transboundary, while in Barsebäck they were Nordic. In Malville, transnationally organized groups challenged the kinds of European identities professed by Euratom’s nuclear Europeanism. Transnational misunderstandings aggravated violent conflicts, and the French authorities did not acknowledge protesters as fellow Europeans and in turn resorted to nationalist othering. Protests against nuclear rearmament during the 1980s had a strong transatlantic dimension – again with many women at the forefront. The “peace” protesters against NATO’s new missiles organized demonstrations both in the heavily militarized peripheral regions of the continent and in national capitals. In the wake of the Second World War, Western European nation-states, their elites, and large parts of their societies optimistically tried to employ nuclear power not only to provide clean energy but also to reunite a war-torn continent through technology. This unifying force did not last: already in the 1960s, national governments pursued their own nuclear policies alongside some European

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projects, notably those fast breeder reactors, which met fierce transnational resistance. Transnational and transboundary cooperation was characteristic of Western European anti-nuclear movements. From the late 1970s, they often pursued specific national and subnational paths, as they responded to the political frameworks in which they operated. However, after Chernobyl, Western European movements increasingly reached out to cooperate with the nascent movements in Central and Eastern Europe. Across Western Europe, the success of anti-nuclear protest in halting the expansion of nuclear power in Europe differed greatly by country and sometimes even by site. In many European countries, protests reduced the attractiveness of nuclear power for policy-makers and utility companies as such opposition made planning politically riskier and more expensive. Some countries never went nuclear, and protests played an important role in this. Austria, where the already completed Zwentendorf power plant was never connected to the grid after the 1978 referendum, or Denmark, where commercial nuclear projects were never even started,¹⁰² are cases in point. In many countries, the scale of nuclear programmes was reduced. As electricity demand grew much more slowly than expected in the 1970s and 1980s, ironically, some utility companies were secretly satisfied not having realized their investment plans in full.¹⁰³ When the Chernobyl disaster struck in 1986, it unexpectedly constituted a European moment that drastically demonstrated the biophysical interconnection of the continent. Nuclear politics and anti-nuclear movements’ concerns cut across the Iron Curtain. The end of the Cold War reduced worries over nuclear arms. While apparently reuniting the continent, it led to the further fragmentation of nuclear politics and policies. Nevertheless, the most lasting impact on Europe from the conflicts about nuclear technology lies in its transformative power within and across societies. The nuclear conflict mobilized civil society and social movements in an unprecedented manner, within and across national borders. Engaging with nuclear power citizens started questioning authority, technocracy, and traditional values, demanded and realized emancipation and democracy, but also experienced and self-critically reflected upon violence.

Notes  Josef M. Leinen, “Wyhl und was dann…?”, Forum Europa 6, no. 3/4 (1976): 2; Petra Kelly, “to John W. Gofman, Brussels, 2 January 1975”, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis (hereafter AGG), Petra Kelly Archiv (hereafter PKA), no. 2119 (1975).  Saskia Richter, Die Aktivistin. Das Leben der Petra Kelly (Munich: DVA, 2010), 72– 78.

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 Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Challenging the Atomic Community. The European Environmental Bureau and the Europeanization of Anti-Nuclear Protest”, in Societal Actors in European Integration. Polity-Building and Policy-Making 1958 – 1992, ed. Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 197– 200, 209 – 214; Jan-Henrik Meyer, “‘Where do we go from Wyhl?’ Transnational Anti-Nuclear Protest targeting European and International Organisations in the 1970s”, Historical Social Research 39, no. 1 (2014): 227– 229.  Paul R. Josephson and Markku Lehtonen, “International Organizations and the Atom: How Comecon, Euratom, and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency Developed Societal Engagement”, in Engaging the Atom. The History of Nuclear Energy and Society in Europe from the 1950s to the Present, ed. Arne Kaijser et al. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, forthcoming 2021).  Josep Espluga et al., “Risky or Beneficial? Exploring Perceptions of Nuclear Energy over Time in a Cross-Country Perspective”, ibid.  Albert Presas I Puig and Jan-Henrik Meyer, “One Movement or Many? The Diversity of Antinuclear Movements in Europe”, ibid.  E. g. Ökologiegruppe Frankfurt, Kleines Handbuch für Atomkraftwerksgegner. Ein Leitfaden für den Widerstand (Munich: C. Trikont Verlag, 1977), 89.  See, e. g., Hans-Åke Persson and Bo Stråth (eds.), Reflections on Europe. Defining a Political Order in Time and Space (Brussels: P. I. E-Peter Lang, 2007).  See Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, “Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies”, Science as Culture 22, no. 2 (2013): 189 – 196.  Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “Spanning the Globe: West-German Support for the Australian Antinuclear Movement”, Historical Social Research 39, no. 1 (2014): 254– 273; Meyer, ‘Where do we go from Wyhl?’.  Paul R. Josephson, Jan-Henrik Meyer, and Arne Kaijser, “Nuclear-Society Relations from the Dawn of the Nuclear Age”, in Engaging the Atom, ed. Kaijser et al.; Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, ed. Pathways into and out of Nuclear Power in Western Europe: Austria, Denmark, Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, and Sweden (Munich: Deutsches Museum Verlag, 2019).  Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Nature: From Protecting Regional Landscapes to Regionalist Self-Assertion in the Age of the Global Environment”, in Regionalism and Modern Europe: Regional Identity Construction and Regional Movements from 1890 until the Present, eds. Xosé M. Núñez Seixas and Eric Storm (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 74– 76.  Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Global Protest Against Nuclear Power. Transfer and Transnational Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s. Focus Issue”, Historical Social Research 39, no. 1 (2014): 163 – 273; Arne Kaijser and Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Siting Nuclear Installations at the Border. Special issue”, Journal for the History of Environment and Society 3 (2018): 1– 178; “Nuclear Installations at European Borders: Transboundary Collaboration and Conflict”, in Engaging the Atom, ed. Kaijser et al.  Kirchhof, “Spanning”; Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and Chris McConville, “Transcontinental and Transnational Links in Social Movements and Environmental Policies in the Twentieth Century”, Australian Journal of Politics & History 61, no. 3 (2015): 331– 338; Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “Frauen in der Antiatomkraftbewegung. Das Beispiel der Mütter gegen Atomkraft”, Ariadne 64, no. November (2013): 48 – 57.  Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Responding to the European Public? Public Debates, Societal Actors and the Emergence of a European Environmental Policy”, in The Environment and European Public Sphere: Perception, Actors, Policies, ed. Éric Bussière, et al. (Winwick: White Horse Press, 2020).

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 Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).  Ilina Cenevska, The European Atomic Energy Community in the European Union Context : the “Outsider” within, Nijhoff Studies in EU Law (Leiden: Nijhoff, 2016).  Stuart W. Leslie and Joris Mercelis, “Expo 1958. Nucleus for a New Europe”, in World’s Fairs in the Cold War: Science, Technology, and the Culture of Progress, eds. Arthur Molella and Scott Gabriel Knowles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019); Jan-Henrik Meyer, “‘Atomkraft – Nej tak’. How Denmark did not Introduce Commercial Nuclear Power Plants”, in Pathways, ed. Kirchhof, 89 – 91.  European Community Information Service, “Euratom gets large-scale nuclear research center. 20 July 1960”, http://aei.pitt.edu/53590/ (accessed 10 May 2021).  Paul Bähr, “Was wird aus Euratom? Die Europäische Atomgemeinschaft in der Krisenzone”, Europa-Archiv 25, no. 3 (1970): 81– 90.  Interview with Herbert Allgeier, former Director General in the European Commission, conducted by Jan-Henrik Meyer, 11 October 2016, Amberg, European Commission 1986 – 2000, INT952, https://archives.eui.eu/en/oral_history/INT952 (accessed 14 July 2021).  John Krige, “The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s”, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, no. 1 (2008): 44.  Arne Kaijser, “The Referendum that Preserved Nuclear Power and Five Other Critical Events in the History of Nuclear Power in Sweden”, in Pathways, ed. Kirchhof, 266 – 269; Holger Nehring, Politics of Security. The British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, 1945 – 1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 95.  Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green. The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 9 – 23.  Nehring, Politics, 95; Ute Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft und Protest 1945 – 1970 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 200 – 234.  Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and Helmuth Trischler, “The History behind West Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out”, in Pathways, ed. Kirchhof, 129; Bernd A. Rusinek, Das Forschungszentrum. Eine Geschichte der KFA Jülich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1996), 223 – 227.  Natalie Pohl, Atomprotest am Oberrhein: Die Auseinandersetzung um den Bau von Atomkraftwerken in Baden und im Elsass (1970 – 1985) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2019), 48 – 52.  Rusinek, Forschungszentrum, 256 – 260.  Ibid., 243.  Sonja D. Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization? Soviet Technopolitics in the Second World”, in Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, ed. Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 125 – 154.  Matthias Schmelzer, “The Crisis before the Crisis: the ‘Problems of Modern Society’ and the OECD, 1968 – 74”, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’histoire 19, no. 6 (2012): 999 – 1020.  Jan-Henrik Meyer, “From Nature to Environment: International Organizations and Environmental Protection before Stockholm”, in International Organizations and Environmental Protection, eds. Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 50 – 53; Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Making the Polluter Pay: How the European Communities Established Environmental Protection”, ibid.; Iris Borowy, “Before UNEP: who was in charge of the global environment? The struggle for institutional responsibility 1968 – 72”, Journal of Global History 14, no. 1 (2019): 87– 106.

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 David Larsson Heidenblad, “Mapping a New History of the Ecological Turn: The Circulation of Environmental Knowledge in Sweden 1967”, Environment and History 24, no. 2 (2018): 265 – 284.  Wake Rowland, The Plot to Save the World. The Life and Times of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1973).  Kaijser, “Referendum”, 246.  Ecologist/FoE, “Swedish Cover-Up on Nuclear Safety”” Stockholm Conference Eco, 7 June 1972, 1.  Report of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm 5 – 16 July 1972, United Nations, New York 1973, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/523249 (accessed 10 May 2021); Ecologist/FoE, “NZ slams then clams”, Stockholm Conference Eco, 10 June 1972, 2.  Florence Frölig, “Fessenheim: A Nuclear Power Plant for Peace”, Culture Unbound 12, no. 3 (2020): 569 – 589, 576.  Christian Forstner, “The Failure of Nuclear Energy in Austria: Austria’s Nuclear Energy Programmes in Historical Perspective”, in Pathways, ed. Kirchhof, 56.  Stephen Milder, Greening Democracy. The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968 – 1983 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 31– 37.  Robert Gildea and Andrew Tompkins, “The Transnational in the Local: The Larzac Plateau as a Site of Transnational Activism since 1970”, Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 3 (2015): 581– 605.  Dolores L. Augustine, Taking on Technocracy. Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 93 – 125; Kirchhof and Trischler, “The History behind West Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out”, 146 – 148.  Patrick Kupper, Atomenergie und gespaltene Gesellschaft. Die Geschichte des gescheiterten Projektes Kernkraftwerk Kaiseraugst (Zürich: Chronos, 2003); David Häni, Kaiseraugst besetzt! Die Bewegung gegen das Atomkraftwerk (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2018).  Wolfgang Sternstein, Überall ist Wyhl: Bürgerinitiativen gegen Atomanlagen. Aus der Arbeit eines Aktionsforschers (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1978).  Milder, Greening Democracy, 135 – 141.  Andrew Tompkins, Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-nuclear Protests in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 29 – 47; Pohl, Atomprotest, 337– 406.  Kirchhof, “Spanning”, 254– 273.  Jens Ivo Engels, “Gender Roles and German anti-nuclear Protest. The Women of Wyhl”, in The Modern Demon. Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies, eds. Christoph Bernhardt and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2002); Augustine, Taking, 103; Pohl, Atomprotest, 234– 241.  Jens Ivo Engels, Naturpolitik in der Bundesrepublik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 350 – 352.  Kupper, Atomenergie; Häni, Kaiseraugst.  Arne Kaijser and Jan-Henrik Meyer, “‘The World’s Worst Located Nuclear Power Plant’: Danish and Swedish perspectives on the Swedish nuclear power plant Barsebäck”, Journal for the History of Environment and Society 3 (2018): 71– 105.  Arne Kaijser and Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Nuclear Installations at the Border. Transnational connections and international implications. An Introduction”, Journal for the History of Environment and Society 3 (2018): 1– 32.

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 Jan-Henrik Meyer, “To trust or not to trust? Structures, practices and discourses of transboundary trust around the Swedish nuclear power plant Barsebäck near Copenhagen”, Journal of Risk Research 24 (2021): 1– 15, at 10.  Jens Andersen et al., “Preliminary Accident Analysis for the Barsebäck Reactor, February 23, 1972, confidential, Danish Atomic Energy Commission Research Establishment Risö, Reactor Physics Department”, Rigsarkivet Copenhagen 1916, no. 119 (1972).  Tore Nilsson, “Statens Kärnkraftinspektion, Tore Nilsson, til styrelsen, SKI. Villkor för laddning af bränsle”, Rigsarkivet Copenhagen, 1916, no. 119 (1974).  Henry Nielsen et al., Til samfundets tarv – Forskningscenter Risøs historie (Risø: Forskningscenter Risø, 1998), 284, 289 – 293.  Meyer, “Atomkraft”, 82– 83.  E. g., Susan Mortensen, Ole Christiansen, and Helle Carlsson, “Letter to the editor of Helsingborgs Dagblad, Ishoj, 13 March 1980”, Rigsarkivet Copenhagen 10451, no. 25 (1980).  Kaijser and Meyer, “‘The World’s Worst Located Nuclear Power Plant’”, 91.  Birthe Weiss, “till Näringsminister Per Westerberg, Stockholm”, Rigsarkivet Copenhagen 10451, no. 116 (1994).  Tompkins, Better Active, 161– 167.  Claire Le Renard, “The Superphénix Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactor – Cross-border Cooperation and Controversies”, Journal for the History of Environment and Society 3 (2018): 107– 144.  Heinz Vossebrecker, Kurt Ebbinghaus, and Alexander Stancelescu, “Schnelle Brutreaktoren”, in Handbuch Kernenergie, eds. Hans Michaelis and Carsten Salander (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Elektrizitätswerke, 1995), 91, 113.  Nuno Luís Madureira, “Reckless Proliferation and Guardianship Proliferation: The Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactor and the Plutonium Economy”, Technology and Culture 60, no. 3 (2019): 833 – 865.  Frank von Hippel, Masafami Takubo, and Jungmin Kang, Plutonium. How Nuclear Power’s Dream Fuel Became a Nightmare (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2019).  Tompkins, Better Active, 166 – 167.  Andreas Kühn, “Kalkar 1977. Anti-Atom-Bewegung und Polizei im Wandel”, Geschichte im Westen 22 (2007): 278.  Silke Mende, “Nicht links, nichts rechts, sondern vorn.” Eine Geschichte der Gründungsgrünen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), 337.  Tompkins, Better Active, 166 – 172, 194– 198.  Christoph Becker-Schaum et al., eds., The Nuclear Crisis. The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s (New York: Berghahn, 2016); Stephen Milder, “From Antinuke to Ökopax. 1970s Anti-Reactor Activism and the Emergence of West Germany’s Mass Movement for Peace”, in Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945 – 1990, eds. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. Mc Neill (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).  Sasha Roseneil, Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995).  Laura J. Shepherd, Gender Matters in Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 2010), 29 – 31.  Kyle Harvey, American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975 – 1990: The Challenge of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 68 – 92; Christina Perincioli, “Nike vor der Küchentür. Raketen im Hunsrück”, Courage. Berliner Frauenzeitung 8, no. 7 (1983): 8 – 10; Ilse Lenz, ed. Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland. Abschied vom kleinen Unterschied: Eine Quellensammlung (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2010), 847– 865.

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 Rob Okun, “Dr. Helen Caldicott, Waking America Up To The Nuclear Nightmare. A New Roots Interview, New Roots, no. 377 (1979)”, AGG, PKA, no. 139 (1979); “Women should push against Uexport”, Tasmanien, 28 May 1984, AGG, PKA, 480.  Monica Green, “Women in the Anti-Nuclear Movement”, in Peace Action. Past, Present and Future, eds. Glenn Harold Stassen and Lawrence Wittner (Boulder: Westview Press, 2007), 90; Claudia Kemper, “International, national, regional. Die Organisation ‘Internationale Ärzte zur Verhütung des Atomkrieges’ und der Wandel im anti-atomaren Protest in der ersten Hälfte der 1980er Jahre”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 52 (2012): 563.  John Gofman, “Comittee for Nuclear Responsibility, to Petra Kelly, San Francisco, 6 July 1986”, AGG, PKA no. 2119 (1986).  Brown, Manual.  Kaijser, “Referendum”, 282.  Ibid., 281– 284.  Matteo Gerlini, “The Rise and Fall of Nuclear Italy”, in Pathways, ed. Kirchhof, 226.  Susanne Bauer, Karena Kalmbach, and Tatiana Kasperski, “From Pripyat to Paris, from Grassroots Memories to Globalized Knowledge Production. The Politics of Chernobyl Fallout”, in Nuclear Portraits: Communities, the Environment, and Public Policy, ed. Laurel Sefton MacDowell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 149 – 189, 159 – 166.  Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Kleine Geschichte der Atomkraftkontroverse in Deutschland.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 71, no. 21– 23 (2021): 10 – 16, at 15.  Luise Schramm, Evangelische Kirche und Anti-AKW-Bewegung. 1976 – 1981 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 354– 356.  Augustine, Taking, 165; Kirchhof, “Frauen”.  Engels, Naturpolitik, 346.  Janine Gaumer, Wackersdorf. Atomkraft und Demokratie in der Bundesrepublik 1980 – 1989 (Munich: Oekom, 2018).  Melanie Arndt, Tschernobylkinder. Die transnationale Geschichte einer nuklearen Katastrophe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020).  Augustine, Taking, 185 – 211; Wolfgang Rüddenklau, ed. Störenfriede. DDR-Opposition 1986 – 1989 (Berlin: Basis-Druck, 1992), 170; Siegfried Christiansen, “Notes for visit to Berlin, 12 September 1986”, Rigsarkivet Copenhagen 10451, no. 134 (1986).  Julia E. Ault, “Protesting Pollution. Environmental Activism in East Germany and Poland 1980 – 1990”, in Nature and the Iron Curtain, eds. Kirchhof and Mc Neill, 162– 163.  Bauer, Kalmbach, and Kasperski, “From Pripyat”, 151– 159; Tetiana Perga, “The Fallout of Chernobyl. The Emergence of an Environmental Movement in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic”, in Nature and the Iron Curtain, eds. Kirchhof and Mc Neill, 55 – 72; Tatiana Kasperski, “Une transition vers plus de nucléaire? Analyse comparée des politiques énergétiques russe et ukrainienne”, Revue internationale de politique comparée 24, no. 1– 2 (2017): 101– 125.  Storm, Post-Industrial Landscape Scars (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 75 – 99.  Arne Kaijser et al., The Past and the Present of Nuclear Safety Regulation in Europe. Transcript of the Discussions of the Witness Seminar in Barcelona, 16 October 2018 (Barcelona: University Pompeu Fabra, 2019).  Mar Rubio-Varas, António Carvalho, and Joseba de la Torre, “Siting (and mining) at the border: Spain-Portugal nuclear transboundary issues”, Journal for the History of Environment and Society 3 (2018): 47– 52.  Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “East-West German Transborder Entanglements through the Nuclear Waste Sites in Gorleben and Morsleben”, ibid., 163 – 165.

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 Markku Lehtonen, Matthew Cotton, and Tatiana Kasperski, “Trust and Mistrust in Radioactive Waste Management: Historical Experience from High- and Low-Trust Contexts”, in Engaging the Atom, ed. Kaijser et al.  Astrid M. Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain. Environment, Economy & Culture in the Borderlands. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019), 201– 243; Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “Embodying Fear and Toxicity: Environmental Protests against West Germany’s Final Repository for Nuclear Waste in Gorleben, 1977– 1980”, in: Hazardous Time-Scapes. How to Study Toxicity and Pollution from Multiple Timed, Spaced, and Embodied Perspectives, eds. Simone M. Müller and May-Brith Ohman Nielsen (Athens: Ohio University Press, forthcoming 2021).  Directorate-General for Research, European Commission, Benefits and limitations of nuclear fission for a low-carbon economy. Defining priorities for Euratom fission research & training (Horizon 2020): compilation of the experts’ reports, background to the synthesis report (Brussels: Publications Office of the European Union, 2014).  Lukas Hermwille, “The Role of Narratives in Socio-Technical Transitions – Fukushima and the Energy Regimes of Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom”, Energy Research & Social Science 11 (2016): 237– 246; Maria Rosaria Di Nucci, and Achim Brunnengräber, “In whose Backyard? The Wicked Problem of Siting Nuclear Waste Repositories.” European Policy Analysis 3, no. 2 (2017): 295 – 327.  Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest, “Pro-Nuclear Environmentalism: Should We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Energy?”, Technology and Culture 56, no. 4 (2015): 789 – 811.  Arne Kaijser et al., “Conclusions: Future Challenges for Nuclear Energy and Society in a Historical Perspective”, in Engaging the Atom, ed. Arne Kaijser et al.  Marja Ylönen et al., “The (de)politicisation of nuclear power: The Finnish discussion after Fukushima”, Public Understanding of Science 26, no. 3 (2017): 260 – 274.  Meyer, “Atomkraft”; Forstner, “Failure”.  Hendrik Ehrhardt, “Energiebedarfsprognosen. Kontinuität und Wandel energiewirtschaftlicher Problemlagen in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren”, in Energie in der modernen Gesellschaft. Zeithistorische Perspektiven, eds. Hendrik Ehrhardt and Thomas Kroll (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 193 – 222.

Bibliography Arndt, Melanie. Tschernobylkinder. Die transnationale Geschichte einer nuklearen Katastrophe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020. Augustine, Dolores L. Taking on Technocracy. Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present. New York: Berghahn, 2018. Ault, Julia E. “Protesting Pollution. Environmental Activism in East Germany and Poland 1980 – 1990”. In Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945 – 1990, edited by Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. Mc Neill, 151 – 168. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. Brown, Kate. Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.

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Engaging the Atom. The History of Nuclear Energy and Society in Europe from the 1950s to the Present. Edited by Arne Kaijser, Markku Lehtonen, Jan-Henrik Meyer, and Mar Rubio-Varas. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, forthcoming 2021. Gaumer, Janine. Wackersdorf. Atomkraft und Demokratie in der Bundesrepublik 1980 – 1989. Munich: Oekom, 2018. Häni, David. Kaiseraugst besetzt! Die Bewegung gegen das Atomkraftwerk. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2018. Kaijser, Arne, and Jan-Henrik Meyer. “Siting Nuclear Installations at the Border. Special issue”. Journal for the History of Environment and Society 3 (2018): 1 – 178. Kalmbach, Karena. The Meanings of a Disaster: Chernobyl and its Afterlives in Britain and France. New York: Berghahn, 2020. Kasperski, Tatiana. “Children, Nation and Reactors: Imagining and Promoting Nuclear Power in Contemporary Ukraine”. Centaurus 61, no. 1 – 2 (2019): 51 – 69. Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon, ed. Pathways into and out of Nuclear Power in Western Europe: Austria, Denmark, Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, and Sweden, Munich: Deutsches Museum Verlag, 2019. Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon. “East-West German Transborder Entanglements through the Nuclear Waste Sites in Gorleben and Morsleben”. Journal for the History of Environment and Society 3 (2018): 145 – 173. Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon, and Chris McConville. “Transcontinental and Transnational Links in Social Movements and Environmental Policies in the Twentieth Century. Special Issue”. Australian Journal of Politics & History 61, no. 3 (2015): 331 – 338. Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon, and Jan-Henrik Meyer. “Global Protest Against Nuclear Power. Transfer and Transnational Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s. Focus Issue”. Historical Social Research 39, no. 1 (2014): 163 – 273. Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon. “Spanning the Globe: Australian Protest against Uranium Mining and their West-German Supporters”. Historical Social Research 39, no. 1 (2014): 254 – 273. Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon. “Frauen in der Antiatomkraftbewegung. Am Beispiel der Mütter gegen Atomkraft”. Ariadne. Forum für Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte 64 (2013): 48 – 57. Kupper, Patrick. Atomenergie und gespaltene Gesellschaft. Die Geschichte des gescheiterten Projektes Kernkraftwerk Kaiseraugst. Zürich: Chronos, 2003. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. “Challenging the Atomic Community. The European Environmental Bureau and the Europeanization of Anti-Nuclear Protest”. In Societal Actors in European Integration. Polity-Building and Policy-Making 1958 – 1992, edited by Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer, 197 – 220. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. “Responding to the European Public? Public Debates, Societal Actors and the Emergence of a European Environmental Policy”. In The Environment and European Public Sphere: Perception, Actors, Policies, edited by Éric Bussière, Anahita Grisoni, Hélène Miard, and Christian Wenkel, 221 – 240. Winwick: White Horse Press, 2020. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. “‘Where do we go from Wyhl?’ Transnational Anti-Nuclear Protest targeting European and International Organisations in the 1970s”. Historical Social Research 39, no. 1 (2014): 212 – 235.

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Milder, Stephen. Greening Democracy. The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968 – 1983. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Perga, Tetiana. “The Fallout of Chernobyl. The Emergence of an Environmental Movement in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic”. In Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945 – 1990, edited by Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. Mc Neill, 55 – 72. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. Rubio-Varas, Mar, António Carvalho, and Joseba de la Torre. “Siting (and mining) at the border: Spain-Portugal nuclear transboundary issues”. Journal for the History of Environment and Society 3 (2018): 33 – 69. Schmid, Sonja D. “Nuclear Colonization? Soviet Technopolitics in the Second World”. In Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, edited by Gabrielle Hecht, 125 – 154. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Tompkins, Andrew. Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-nuclear Protests in 1970s France and West Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Arne Kaijser

14 Combatting “Acid Rain”: Protecting the Common European Sky Abstract In the late 1960s, Scandinavian scientists asserted that the long-range air pollution was causing serious acidification and that emissions all over Europe would have to be diminished. The prevailing view at the time was that air pollution was a local phenomenon best handled by building high smokestacks, and the major polluting countries were opposed to spending money on protecting areas far away in other countries. This chapter analyses how the discovery of “acid rain” triggered the first international research projects to confirm long-range air pollution and how, in a second phase, international negotiations involving scientists, policymakers, and diplomats resulted in the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution in 1979. Later on, special protocols were adopted, and the signing nations promised to decrease their emissions in accordance with specific goals. Cold War politics played an interesting role in the negotiations and led to an unexpected alliance between Nordic countries and the Soviet Union. Keywords acidification; LRTAP Convention; Waldsterben; best available technology; critical loads

1 Introduction On 24 October 1967, the influential Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter published an article with a boring title, “The Acidification of Precipitation”.¹ The message, however, was new and radical: air pollution was not only a local but also an international phenomenon. The author, the Swedish scientist Svante Odén, claimed that “there is a more or less permanent cupola of polluted air over Europe”.² Sulphur dioxide, he wrote, being emitted in large quantities by power plants and industries burning sulphurous coal or oil all over Europe, was being transported through the air over vast distances and transformed into sulphuric acid through chemical processes in the atmosphere. Odén further

Note: I want to thank Astrid Kirchhof, Jan-Henrik Meyer, Patrick Kupper, Corinna Unger and Anna-K. Wöbse for valuable comments on the manuscript. The research for the chapter was funded by the Bank of Sweden′s Tercenary Foundation. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-015

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argued that when rain or snow brought the airborne sulphuric acid down, usually in places far away from where the emissions had taken place, it lowered the pH values in streams and lakes (see figure 1). In Sweden and Norway, this in turn contributed to the drastic decrease of fish populations in many lakes that had recently been observed by fishery experts. Moreover, he predicted that increasing acidity would reduce the future biological productivity of forests and of cultivated land, particularly so in the Nordic countries, where soils were especially sensitive to acidification.³

Figure 1: This map accompanied Odén’s article in the Dagens Nyheter and had the following caption: “A map of the pH of precipitation over Europe in 1962. Note the acidic finger that extends up over the Baltic”.

By publishing his findings in a leading daily paper, rather than a scientific journal, Odén was able to immediately attract attention to his alarming message far beyond the academic community. Officials at the newly established Swedish

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Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) became very concerned, whereas industry representatives questioned his findings, fearing that the government might respond by taxing sulphur emissions. SEPA, recognizing the international dimension of acidification, or acid rain as it was called, searched for a suitable arena in which the issue of acid rain could be launched. At the time, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was one of the few environmentally active intergovernmental bodies, and in in February 1969, SEPA introduced the acidification issue at a meeting of the OECD’s Air Quality Committee. There, Odén’s scientific findings encountered considerable scepticism because they challenged a politically convenient scientific consensus. One by one, the air quality experts present “stood up and explained that, outside an inner zone of only a few kilometres, sulphur emissions were no problem”, as the SEPA representative, Göran A. Persson, later recalled.⁴ The predominant view among scientists and experts at the time was that air pollution was a local phenomenon. The atmosphere was seen as a giant diluting machine, offered by nature for free. Most experts viewed the building of tall smokestacks as the most effective measure to deal with air pollution. They argued that sufficiently tall stacks led to an effective dispersion of sulphur and other pollutants, rendering their concentrations harmless before they hit the ground.⁵ Odén seriously questioned this prevailing consensus, arguing that the atmosphere must rather be seen as an efficient transport infrastructure capable of redistributing pollutants from industrial regions to faraway places elsewhere in Europe. His view reflected an emerging ecological conception of the earth as a cohesive biosphere – as Barry Commoner was to phrase it in 1971 – where “everything is connected to everything else” and “everything has to go somewhere”.⁶ Put differently, Odén claimed that Europe had a common sky. The political implication was clear: the problem of air pollution would have to be addressed on an international level. This chapter analyses how the “discovery” of acid rain gradually led to an understanding of the transnational character of air pollution. This in turn triggered international negotiation involving scientists, policy-makers, and diplomats, resulting in the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (hereinafter LRTAP Convention), signed in Geneva in 1979.⁷ This convention did not impose any legal obligations on the signing nations, but it established an international regime for further negotiations, leading to the formulation and adoption of a number of so-called protocols. The countries signing these later protocols promised to fulfil concrete goals on decreasing emissions, and these protocols thus contributed to a joint international protection of the common European sky from pollution. Hardly surprising, a number of countries in

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North-Western Europe were the main drivers of the process, though at times in an unexpected cooperation with the Soviet Union. Before delving into these international processes from the late 1960s and onwards, I will first give a brief background of how air pollution had been understood until then.

2 The Era of the Chimney In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the combustion of coal in the industrial towns and regions of Europe grew rapidly, and, as a result, the air became increasingly polluted. By the late nineteenth century, many industrial regions in Europe were suffering from chronic air pollution, to which, astonishly, the inhabitants became more or less inured. In fact, the pollution only became evident on those few rare occasions when it was greatly minimized for one reason or another. One such hiatus occurred in January 1923, when the Ruhr district was occupied by French troops because Germany had failed to pay its war reparations according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (1919). The German workers went on strike, and industrial production in the entire Ruhr ground to a sudden halt. As a result, the sky over the Ruhr cleared up for the first time in many decades. The harvests that summer were much more bountiful than normal, trees grew faster than ever before, and housewives did not have to scrub their homes twice a day. However, the strikes led to an economic crisis, with hyperinflation and mass poverty – especially among the families of the strikers. Therefore, it was a relief for the population in the Ruhr district when the strikes were called off in September. When production resumed, the “normal” smoke came back, and it was in fact seen as a blessing.⁸ The unexpected clearing of the sky during the long strike had very clearly demonstrated the gravity of the air pollution, and in 1924 an official committee was set up to investigate its effects. One of its main conclusions was that it was not the visible smoke and ash but rather the invisible sulphuric acids that were the most damaging pollutants. However, the committee could not identify any feasible measures for reducing these emissions and concluded “that the battle against air pollution by large industries seems to have little chance of success”. Instead, it proposed adaptive measures like the planting of species of deciduous trees that are more resistant to sulphuric acids.⁹ The rather laconic attitude of this committee was typical of the way air pollution was treated in many heavily polluted industrial areas of Europe and elsewhere until the mid-twentieth century. Air pollution was seen as an almost

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inevitable side effect of the industrial production that provided employment and prosperity to the very people that were most affected. This is not to say that there was no resistance at all. For example, in Manchester, in England’s industrial heartland, an elite group of urban reformers were pursuing investigations of air pollution as early as the second half of the nineteenth century. However, it was not able to muster enough political support to get laws enacted that would curb emissions.¹⁰ One of the reformers was a chemist, Robert Angus Smith, who systematically investigated the content of rainwater in and around the city of Manchester in the 1850s and 1860s. He emphasized the detrimental effects of sulphur emissions, and in an extraordinary book entitled Air and Rain: The Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology (1872), he actually first used the term “acid rain”. The only feasible strategy for coming to grips with the most dangerous health effects of air pollution seemed to be the building of ever-higher smokestacks.¹¹ When gases and particles were emitted into the atmosphere at high altitudes, winds dispersed them across the surrounding landscape, thereby reducing the concentrations of hazardous substances – or so it was believed – to levels that were no longer harmful.

3 The “Killer Smog” However, even if industries built tall smokestacks, innumerable household furnaces still emitted pollutants. Occasionally this produced dangerous smog. In December 1952, London faced a combination of cold weather, intensive use of furnaces, and an absence of wind, generating very high concentrations of smoke particles in the city. Four thousand people lost their lives. This tragedy contributed to a change in British perceptions of air pollution. In response to the “killer smog”,¹² the parliament passed the Clean Air Act (1963), introducing severe restrictions for smoke emissions in heavily polluted areas. In “smoke control areas”, households and industries could only use “smokeless furnaces”, being forced to switch from coal to electricity, gas, or low-sulphur oil.¹³ The Clean Air Act was a first step towards a new paradigm for reducing air pollution developed by newly professionalized environmental experts. In this paradigm, dedicated energy systems such as electricity, gas, and district heating played a key role. These systems converted “dirty” fuels into user-friendly and fairly clean energy carriers and then distributed them via a specially designed physical network. Large plants, in which the combustion process could be carefully controlled and the amount of pollutants reduced, accomplished this conversion. The remaining smoke was emitted through high chimneys. Many European

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countries began applying this new approach to reduce pollution starting in the 1950s. Furthermore, new environmental protection agencies were established to enforce these laws. By the 1960s, similar kinds of national measures had been taken in most of the industrialized countries of the West. The focus was primarily on mitigating the deleterious public health effects of air pollution.¹⁴ Until the late 1960s, air pollution was thus seen as a local issue that could be handled by national authorities. However, it was appreciated that large industrial plants located near national borders could easily be a source of serious transborder pollution. In the 1930s and 1940s, there had been a spectacular conflict of this kind in the western part of North America. A huge lead and zinc smelting plant located in the little town of Trail, Canada, a few kilometres from the US border, was identified as the source of the heavy pollution experienced across the border by farmers in the state of Washington. The American farmers protested vigorously and succeeded in mobilizing the high-level support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who wrote a letter of protest to his colleague, the prime minister of Canada. The two governments set up a special arbitration tribunal. In its final decision, in March 1941, this tribunal proclaimed a general principle: No state has the right to use or permit the use of its territory in such a manner as to cause injury by fumes in or to the territory of another or the properties of the persons therein, when the case is of serious consequences and the injury is established by clear and convincing evidence.¹⁵

In accordance with the principle, the Canadian government took on the responsibility of ensuring that the Smelting Company in Trail reduced its effluent burden and financially compensated the US farmers that had been affected by the pollution.¹⁶ This general principle, known as the Trail Smelter Convention, became famous in international law and was brought to the fore in Europe 30 years later, as will be described below.¹⁷

4 Putting Acid Rain on the International Agenda Today, when the perception of air pollution as an international problem has become almost self-evident, it may be hard to understand how controversial the claim of large-scale transborder air pollution was in the late 1960s, as the reactions of the experts in the OECD’s Air Quality Committee to Odén’s findings demonstrate. At that time, the building of high smoke stacks was seen as an easy and effective measure to solve the problem of air pollution. It was based on a percep-

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tion of the atmosphere as a more or less limitless sink.¹⁸ Were this conception to be abandoned, new abatement technologies would clearly be needed, and this might lead to high costs for many power companies and industrial firms. However, in spite of its scepticism, the OECD committee did in fact appoint an expert group to take a closer look at the Swedish data.¹⁹ Swedish government representatives also presented the findings on acid rain at the meetings with Nordic neighbour countries, which, according to Odén’s research, were also strongly affected by imported acid rain. Not surprisingly, the message got a much warmer reception than at the OECD, and the Nordic Research Council decided to initiate a joint research programme to investigate the acidification issue further. This Nordic research team contacted the expert group appointed by the OECD, and together they made plans for undertaking a more ambitious survey. In April 1972, the OECD adopted this plan and decided to initiate the so-called Co-operative Technical Programme to measure the longrange transport of air pollutants. Eleven Western European countries – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and West Germany – agreed to participate.²⁰ Meanwhile, the Swedish government continued to look for international arenas to promulgate the issue of acidification, arenas that also included the Eastern European countries. A very attractive option had appeared in December 1968, when the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) voted to convene the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, later held in June 1972. Sweden offered to host the conference and was thus able to influence the agenda. The Swedish government prioritized the issue of acid rain and appointed an expert group to prepare a study on the subject. The group was chaired by Professor Bert Bolin, Sweden’s leading meteorologist, and also included Odén as member. In 1971, it presented its report: Air Pollution Across National Boundaries: The Impact on the Environment of Sulphur in Air and Precipitation, based on research conducted in the previous year. In this report, the concept of “transboundary air pollution” was launched, and it was demonstrated that the large-scale dispersion of sulphur over Europe had a certain tendency towards the east and north-east due to the prevailing winds. The authors emphasized that the transboundary character of air pollution had political implications and that “adjacent countries intervene in each other’s economies through the effects of atmospheric pollutants”.²¹ However, the report’s reception at the conference was somewhat of a disappointment to the authors and the Swedish government. Although the report and its findings were strongly supported by Norway and the other Nordic countries, which had in the meantime also discovered acidification in their environments, the large majority of the participating European countries saw the acidification

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problem as mainly a Nordic problem, linked to the lime-deficient soils in this region, which were incapable of buffering the acids. They did not want to impose expensive restrictions on their own power plants and industries to protect fish and forests in the Nordic countries.²² Another disappointment for the conference organizers was occasioned by the long shadow of the Cold War. The Eastern European countries (apart from Romania) boycotted the conference in solidarity with the German Democratic Republic, whose delegates had been refused visas by the Swedish government.²³ That said, the conference was quite successful in other respects. It led to the establishment of the United Nations Environment Programme and to the adoption of a declaration of principles, the UN Stockholm Conference Declaration (1972). Particularly important was Principle 21 in this declaration: States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies, and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction.²⁴

In the fall of 1972, this principle, with its roots firmly planted in the Trail Smelter arbitration, was also adopted by the Eastern European countries in a session at the UN in New York.²⁵

5 Joint Research Projects A number of international research projects to monitor long-range air pollution were carried out in the 1970s. In 1973, the above-mentioned OECD survey was launched with eleven countries participating, under the leadership of Sweden and Norway. Data about emission, dispersion, and deposition of pollutants (primarily sulphur and sulphur acids) were collected from the whole of Western Europe. By 1977, the OECD was able to publish a final report that indeed confirmed the scope and severity of transboundary air pollution.²⁶ Parallel to this study, other organizations, in particular the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), also initiated projects to monitor and map air pollution that now also included scientists from Central and Eastern European countries. Gradually these various efforts coalesced, and the UNECE took the lead in establishing the ambitious Co-operative Programme for Monitoring and Evaluation of the Long-Range Transmission of Air Pollutants in Europe (also known as the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme, EMEP).²⁷

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These research projects brought together researchers from many countries and from numerous fields like meteorology, chemistry, limnology, forestry, geology, computer science, mathematical modelling. The set of scientific specialties here reflects the complex and comprehensive nature of the pollution processes involved, yet gradually a common view of transboundary air pollution and its environmental effects developed. The researchers also built up mutual trust; they became an “epistemic community” in the field of air pollution, to use a concept coined by the American political scientist Peter Haas.²⁸ A particularly important aspect of these scientific efforts was the development of sophisticated mathematical models of the geographical flows of pollutants and the chemical transformations to which they were subject. In the 1950s and 1960s, access to more and more powerful computers had enabled meteorologists to develop mathematical models of atmospheric systems for weather forecasts, and these models could also be applied to pollution studies in order to make the air pollution threats “visible” to the public.²⁹ The meteorological institutes in Stockholm and Oslo had been leading centres in this research, and it is not surprising that these institutes came to play key roles in the EMEP and OECD programmes.³⁰ Research from the 1970s confirmed the long-suspected asymmetrical character of the acidification problem. Long-range air pollution did not spread evenly in all directions but according to the prevailing wind patterns, thus primarily in eastern and north-eastern directions (due to the rotation of the earth). This finding implied an asymmetry: while some countries, notably the Nordic countries, were net importers, others were net exporters of pollutants. This asymmetry was aggravated by the fact that some of the net importing countries had soils with low lime content, which made them more vulnerable to acidification. Even if scientists from different European countries were gradually able to reach a consensus about the extent and the nature of the acidification, its asymmetrical character made it an extremely difficult political problem.³¹ The net importing countries called for the introduction of efficient measures to diminish the emissions, while the net exporting countries had few incentives to impose extra costs on their polluting industries. What complicated the matter even more was that the net exporters were big and powerful nations like Germany, Great Britain, and France, whereas some of the main net importers, like the Nordic countries, were fairly small, at least in terms of inhabitants and political power. Other major net exporters like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, situated on the other side of the Iron Curtain, were, from a Nordic perspective, even less susceptible to influence. A political deadlock seemed almost inevitable. However, political developments on a high level, far removed from environmental politics, would ultimately break this deadlock.

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6 Pollution and Cold War Politics In the mid-1960s, after the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, the two superpowers embarked on the road to a lasting détente. The major symbol of this détente process was the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which was in session from 1973 to 1975 with the participation of the USA, Canada, and 33 European countries, including the Soviet Union. The end result was the Helsinki Final Act (1975), entailing an agreement to cooperate in three areas, or “baskets”: armaments control, human rights, and economic affairs. The third basket includes a sub-basket about cooperation on environmental issues. However, it subsequently turned out to be very challenging to make any progress in the three main areas. Both superpowers were reserved about arms control, the East was not inclined to promote human rights, and economic cooperation also proved difficult to achieve. But both sides were still eager to have something come out of the Helsinki agreement, and when the Soviet Union proposed cooperation in the environmental arena, the Western countries responded positively (see also chapter 10 by Laakkonen and Rä sä nen). Both sides expected negotiations in this area to lead to rather undemanding obligations, and the UNECE was chosen as a convenient arena.³² Soviet policy-makers and experts looked for suitable environmental issues and identified the problem of acid rain as an interesting issue. They knew that this was of great concern to the Scandinavian countries. Moreover, Soviet scientists had undertaken a preliminary study that revealed that the Soviet Union was also a major net importer of air pollution. The study indicated that acid rain caused annual losses of more than USD 150 million to Soviet agriculture.³³ At the beginning of 1978, the Norwegian minister of environmental protection, Gro Harlem Brundtland, was invited to Moscow. Upon arrival, she argued for an international convention on the reduction of sulphur emissions, and to her surprise, she met with sympathy from her hosts. This led to an alliance between Norway and the Soviet Union aimed at organizing such a convention within the framework of the UNECE. Subsequent negotiations in Geneva were thus characterized by what, from a Cold War perspective, could only be seen as an unholy alliance between Norway and the Soviet Union. However, from an environmental perspective, taking into account the asymmetrical character of acidification, it was an alliance between two net importers of pollution. The Soviet Union promised to “take care of the position of other socialist countries during the negotiations” – as Valentin Sokolovsky, the chief Soviet negotiator, put it – while Norway agreed to agitate for a convention in the West.³⁴ Norway, in close cooperation with its Nordic neigh-

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bours, was able to exert a kind of moral pressure on the Western European countries. Norway’s case was supported by the final OECD report from 1977, which confirmed what the Scandinavians had been arguing for a decade: large-scale transborder air pollution was indeed taking place in Europe and was causing severe environmental damage in many parts. The Nordic countries aimed at a convention with binding commitments for reducing sulphur. This, however, encountered tough opposition from many Western European countries, which believed that they did not have any domestic acidification problem and were not prepared to take on the costs of reducing their emissions. Opposition collapsed when the Nordic countries dropped the demand for reduction commitments. Great Britain and France agreed to a non-committing convention, and the most stubborn holdout, West Germany, finally succumbed to pressure from all the other countries. The Soviet Union kept their promise about convincing their allies, and in November 1979, the LRTAP Convention was agreed upon and signed by representatives from 33 countries. Most European countries signed the treaty, as did the USA and Canada.³⁵ Even if the convention did not impose any binding obligations on the signatory countries, its adoption could still be seen as an important first step for handling long-range transboundary air pollution. The preamble of the convention – referring to Principle 21 of the UN Stockholm Conference Declaration and the guiding principle of the convention, formulated in Article 2 – states that The Contracting Parties, taking due account of the facts and problems involved, are determined to protect man and his environment against air pollution and shall endeavour to limit and, as far as possible, gradually reduce and prevent air pollution including longrange transboundary air pollution.³⁶

Most importantly, the convention established an international regime for further negotiations: it formulated a set of rules and created an organizational structure with the Executive Body, comprising government officials from the signatory countries, that would meet once a year, and a permanent secretariat. In addition, a number of ad hoc work groups, research programmes, and task forces were set up, which provided the growing epistemic community of researchers and experts on air pollution with a stable transnational platform. Finally, the convention secured the continuation of the monitoring and evaluation programme for air pollution, the EMEP. However, the participation in this regime by countries in Eastern and Southern Europe was not very enthusiastic in its early years. In particular, in Eastern European countries, environmental problems were not among the official priorities, and they felt forced into the convention by the Soviet Union. After a period of initial obstruction, these countries gradually took part

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in the regime by submitting air pollution data, sharing knowledge, and participating in various task forces.³⁷

7 Waldsterben and Tote Board Diplomacy In the spring of 1982, ten years after the UN conference on the environment, Sweden hosted a conference on the topic “Acidification of the Environment”. At this conference, the German biochemist Bernhard Ulrich presented a study arguing that 1,000,000 hectares of forests in Central Europe were at risk of acid deposition, with 100,000 hectares already dying. The phenomenon of Waldsterben (dying forests, see chapter 7 by Hölzl/Oosthoek) was particularly pronounced in Germany’s Black Forest, according to Ulrich.³⁸ These findings had an enormous impact in West Germany, where the Green movement was gaining political momentum and where, since the days of romanticism, the forest was enjoying an important place in national mythology and self-images.³⁹ In October 1982, a new federal government was installed with conservative leader Helmut Kohl from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) as the new chancellor. Under pressure from the media and the growing Green movement –its parliamentary wing, the Green party, secured seats in the West German parliament for the first time in 1983 – the new government took a new stance towards long-range air pollution and began to support the Nordic countries in their struggle for concrete actions to reduce emissions. The CDU – far less in thrall to the coal industry and its trade unions than the former Social Democratic government had been – was (and still is) closely linked to powerful rural, agricultural, and forest interest groups, like the German Forest Conservation Society (Schutzgemeinschaft Deutscher Wald).⁴⁰ It was not only the concern for the health of German forests but also the possibility of a technological fix that led the new government to change its tune. New technology for flue gas desulphurization (FGD) at large power plants was becoming available and affordable. In the 1970s, the Japanese industrial sector had made great advances in this technology in order to satisfy the Japanese government’s strict environmental policies. In the early 1980s, a few German companies were successful in advancing FGD technology further to the point that reducing sulphur dioxide emissions up to 95 per cent could be achieved at power plants fired by coal or fuel oil. In a familiar pattern, the cost of the new technology decreased as production volumes increased. By 1983, the German government was able to get the parliament’s approval for a law – though highly unpopular in the utility sector – that made FGD compulsory for large power plants.⁴¹

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With West Germany as a new ally and with affordable and efficient technological options at hand for decreasing emissions, there seemed to be few obstacles to a decisive advance in the war against transboundary air pollution. At a meeting of the Executive Body of the LRTAP Convention in 1983, representatives from four Nordic countries proposed an amendment to the convention in the form of a protocol aiming at a 30 per cent reduction of sulphur dioxide emissions by 1993, using emission levels in 1980 as a basis. They received support for their proposal from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria – which all had domestic Green movements concerned about Waldsterben – and from Canada and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union argued for a 30 per cent reduction of transboundary fluxes rather than of total emissions, as this would imply that it would not have to reduce emissions in parts of its country that did not affect other European countries. These nine countries, soon known as the 30 % Club, were a minority of the convention members. In particular, the USA and the UK argued that there was no scientific justification for the 30 per cent target. The Executive Body was thus unable to agree on a joint protocol.⁴² However, the 30 % Club continued to exert pressure on the other countries, in particular by organizing two high-level conferences in 1984, first in Munich and then in Ottawa, presenting new data on environmental degradation caused by acidification. As a result, more and more countries joined the club, and when the Executive Body met in 1984, 20 of the 33 convention members were in favour of a binding protocol on reduction of sulphur emissions. According to Article 12 in the LRTAP Convention, amendments have to be adopted by consensus, and 13 countries were still refusing to reduce their emissions. A deadlock seemed inevitable. However, eventually an elegant diplomatic solution was found and agreed upon. Those countries that were willing to reduce their emissions should be allowed to sign a protocol that would be binding only for its signatories, while the other members of the convention were not restricted by it. Accordingly, 21 countries signed the Protocol on the Reduction of Sulphur Emissions at the following Executive Body meeting in 1985, which was held in Helsinki to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act. The signing of this protocol was a significant step forward for the 30 % Club, even though it meant that free riding by some countries was officially accepted: a number of big net exporters of sulphur like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Greece, Poland, Spain, and the UK – none of which had signed the protocol – could continue to emit sulphur as usual.⁴³ However, the members of the 30 % Club insisted in what can be called “naming and shaming” diplomacy.⁴⁴ The political scientist Marc A. Levy used the metaphor of a tote board to describe this. A tote board is a device often used in the USA for charity fundraising, and it shows how much different parties have do-

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nated for a certain cause. By making the size of these contributions visible to all on the tote board, incentives are created for increasing donations. The sulphur protocol worked like such a tote board. It clearly demonstrated which countries were willing to “donate”, or cut emissions in this case, and which were not. Governments that did not sign were free to allow their citizens and industries to discharge effluents without limit, but in doing so, they ran afoul of their own domestic Green movements and suffered a kind of ostracism from the community of the “compliant” countries. The tote board mechanism also put pressure on countries that had signed the protocol but failed to comply, inasmuch as the monitoring of emissions made their failure public. Thus, even though the sulphur protocol had no material sanctions for noncompliance, it could still exert considerable moral pressure on members and on non-members alike.⁴⁵ An important tool for this tote board diplomacy was the impartial monitoring of emissions and subsequent public reporting under the aegis of the EMEP. In 1984, the signatories to the LRTAP Convention approved an annual budget to secure the long-term financing of EMEP monitoring activities, which suggests that the EMEP was seen as “the backbone” of the convention.⁴⁶ Through the monitoring activities of the EMEP, scientists were able to demonstrate that a number of other substances besides sulphur dioxide caused severe transboundary air pollution. Nitrogen oxides contributed to acidification, too, and so-called volatile organic compounds produced “summer smog”, not least in Germany. In the following years, additional protocols for other pollutants were prepared and ratified: nitrogen oxides (NO and NO2) in 1988, volatile organic compounds in 1991, a second one for sulphur in 1994, heavy metals in 1998, and a “multi-effect” protocol in 1999. As with the sulphur protocol, signing these additional protocols was not mandatory for members of the LRTAP Convention. Nevertheless, partly because of the tote board mechanism, over time more and more countries signed the various protocols. With all these protocols and a growing number of countries signing them, the LRTAP Convention became considerably stronger.⁴⁷

8 Best Available Technology versus Critical Loads The first sulphur protocol is a short and simple document of only four pages and bereft of appendices. The central sentence in the document states, “The Parties shall reduce their national annual sulphur emissions or their transboundary

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fluxes by at least 30 per cent as soon as possible and at the latest by 1993, using 1980 levels as the basis for calculation of reductions.”⁴⁸ There are no specifications of how these reductions should be achieved. This was left to the signatory governments. The later protocols gradually became more complex and included appendices aimed, on the one hand, at stipulating technical means for reducing emissions and, on the other hand, at reducing the ecological impacts of emissions. Since 1994, the protocols have also called for an implementation committee to oversee implementation of the measures and compliance by the signatories. In the 1990s, a controversy emerged within the epistemic community between advocates of a technology-oriented approach based on the concept of best available technology and an effect-oriented approach based on the concept of critical loads.⁴⁹ The technology-oriented approach was developed first. It was rooted in a long-standing UNECE tradition, dating back to the mid-1960s, of working parties in which technical experts exchanged views and information on technologies for abating air pollution. In the 1960s, the agenda was still limited to local air pollution. In the mid-1980s, this tradition was revived within the LRTAP Convention in the form of the Task Force on Abatement Technologies, which was established in preparation for the nitrogen oxides protocol in 1988. In 1991, the task force was upgraded to become the permanent Working Group on Abatement Techniques, and in addition, a number of expert groups were set up to review abatement techniques of many different kinds – with a particular emphasis upon operational experiences and costs. The work of all these groups was essential for most of the protocols that were developed in the late 1980s and onwards. The technology-oriented approach had a strong impact on the nitrogen oxides protocol signed in 1988, which was considerably more complex than the protocol signed three years earlier. The protocol itself is eight pages long and has a 16-page technical annex, which forms an integral part of the protocol. The signatories took on a twofold obligation: to ensure that their total emissions in 1994 would not exceed their emissions in 1987 and to apply emission standards based on the “best available technologies which are economically feasible”.⁵⁰ The technical annex specifies what the best available technologies are, and this annex was to be regularly updated to keep pace with technological developments. While most of the sulphur effluents were discharged by large power plants and factories where FGD could be applied, the nitrogen oxides emissions tended to come from cars. This brought catalytic converters to the forefront of negotiations about the nitrogen oxides protocol. Catalytic converter technology had been developed in the USA for reducing nitrogen oxides emissions from cars

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in response to the increasingly stringent standards for automobile emissions, notably in California. Some technical experts saw converters as the crucial best available technology for reducing nitrogen oxides emissions from cars, whereas others thought they were too expensive and thus not economically feasible. The British, French, and Italian car manufactures lobbied their governments to avoid emission standards based on converters, while the German and Swedish car manufacturers did the opposite. The latter had an important stake in the US market and were thus familiar with the technology they had to apply in cars for exports to the USA. However, this did not carry the day, and the upshot was that the new nitrogen oxides protocol did not require the introduction of converters and could therefore aim only at a freeze on emissions. But, in parallel to the signing of the actual protocol, 12 countries (only from Western Europe) publicly pledged a 30 per cent reduction in nitrogen oxides by 1998, a feat that could only be accomplished by introducing catalytic converters on a large scale.⁵¹ The controversies around catalytic converters and other abatement technologies led some countries to question a purely technology-oriented approach. They argued that this approach conferred undue benefits on producers of clean technologies and ignored not only different capacities for implementation but also the differential ecological effects of emission reductions. Therefore, they advocated an effect-oriented approach based on the concept of critical loads as a complement or alternative to the technology approach.⁵² The concept of critical loads was developed by Nordic scientists in the 1970s and 1980s. The concept refers to the vulnerability of a specific ecosystem to pollutants. The critical load is the maximum quantity of pollutants that an ecosystem can tolerate without being irrevocably damaged. Proponents of the critical loads approach argued that the most cost-effective way of reducing air pollution in Europe was to replace the ongoing pursuit of uniform reductions in all countries by differentiated reductions based on the dispersion patterns of different kinds of emissions and the differential sensitivity of ecosystems in various parts of Europe.⁵³ This approach thus addressed the asymmetrical character of long-range air pollution. To become relevant for policy purposes, the concept of critical loads had to be buttressed with complex computer models – models that could produce an integrated assessment of the deposition of pollutants over various parts of Europe based on different scenarios for future emissions. Such a model, called Regional Acidification Information and Simulation (RAINS), was developed in the late 1980s at a scientific institution that is interesting in itself: the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).⁵⁴ The establishment of the IIASA was the outcome of a bridge-building initiative intended to reduce East-West tensions by creating a common research institution in the expanding field of systems analysis. It was established in 1973 by scientific institutions in 12 countries

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(it was thus non-governmental) from both sides of the Iron Curtain and was located in Laxenburg, in neutral Austria. IIASA’s research focused primarily on making global models in different domains like energy, agriculture, and forestry. In the early 1980s, IIASA initiated a project on transboundary air pollution, which culminated in the RAINS model, designed for simulating air pollution in Europe. More specifically, the model’s aim was to estimate the long-term environmental impacts of different emission control policies for all of Europe at a resolution of 150 km x 150 km. The model has six modules for each pollutant to be studied: emissions and costs of reducing them, atmospheric transport and deposition, soil acidification, lake acidification, groundwater sensitivity to acidification, and forest sensitivity to acidification. With this comprehensive model, colour maps could be produced illustrating how different emissions scenarios would affect ecological systems in different parts of Europe. The IIASA scientists later also developed a user-friendly version of the RAINS model, which allowed policy-makers to test the environmental effects of different emission reduction strategies.⁵⁵ The RAINS model thus provided a sophisticated science-based tool for developing efficient reduction policies, and in the late 1980s, an effect-oriented approach became institutionalized within the LRTAP Convention regime.⁵⁶ The Task Force on Integrated Assessment Modelling was set up, and the negotiations for the second sulphur protocol, adopted in 1994, were primarily based on an effect-oriented approach together with a technical approach. Now the basic obligation for the signatories was to ensure “that the depositions of oxidized sulphur compounds in the long term do not exceed critical loads”. In addition, the signatories promised to “make use of the most effective measures for the reduction of sulphur emissions”.⁵⁷ This protocol has five appendices, the first two addressing environmental effects and the latter three addressing abatement technologies. When negotiating this protocol, the negotiators discovered a pragmatic advantage to the effect-oriented approach, namely that politically it allowed for more room for manoeuvre. Countries that had been reluctant to sign earlier protocols requiring uniform reductions for fear that they would be too costly could now be offered more lenient terms with lower reduction targets or longer time limits.⁵⁸ This seems to be one reason why the protocols were signed by ever more countries in the 1990s. The focus on the environmental effect approach was even more prominent in the negotiations in the second half of the 1990s, leading to the so-called Gothenburg Protocol, which was signed in 1999. This protocol was of a new kind, based on a “multi-pollutant/multi-effect” strategy. The aim of the protocol is to “reduce emissions of sulphur, nitrogen oxides, ammonia and volatile organic compounds that are caused by anthropogenic activities and are likely to cause

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adverse effects on human health, natural ecosystems, materials and crops – due to acidification, eutrophication or ground-level ozone”.⁵⁹ The protocol is thus a complex and multifaceted agreement based on simulations made with the RAINS model. However, for some countries, the emission reduction requirements were rather modest, and it seems as if a certain political manoeuvring was in place in order to get as many countries as possible to sign the protocol.

9 The Effectiveness of the LRTAP Convention Under the auspices of the LRTAP Convention, delegates from the signatory countries were able to negotiate and agree upon a whole series of agreements, or protocols, in which the signatories agreed to reduce their emissions and to introduce different kinds of measures and policies. Furthermore, the number of countries that have signed these protocols have increased over time. It is also clear that the emissions of many pollutants have decreased rather substantially since 1979, when the convention was established. For example, from 1980 to 1989, the total emission of sulphur dioxide from all the Eastern and Western European countries that had signed the LRTAP Convention decreased by 23 per cent. However, there was a marked difference between the signatories and non-signatories of the sulphur protocol. The former cut back their emissions by an average of 29 per cent, whereas the latter achieved no more than an eight per cent decrease.⁶⁰ The period between 1980 and 2000 witnessed an overall reduction of sulphur emissions in Europe by nearly 70 per cent. In the decade between 1990 and 2000, emissions of nitrogen oxides and of volatile organic compounds were reduced by 25 – 30 per cent, lead by 60 – 70 per cent, and mercury by 50 per cent.⁶¹ According to assessments made with the RAINS model, since 1980 these reductions have also markedly increased the area of ecosystems that receive less than the critical load of different pollutants.⁶² Does this mean that the LRTAP Convention has been effective in coping with transboundary air pollution in Europe? This is a difficult question to answer.⁶³ On the one hand, this convention has often been considered as a very successful example of international environmental cooperation. It clearly has raised public awareness of air pollution in most European countries and thereby has fostered a readiness to enact and implement legal emission standards. It also has facilitated the emergence of an epistemic community of scientists and technical experts that has acquired a thorough scientific understanding of pollution processes. Many countries have also introduced specific legislation to enforce emission cutbacks, for example by taxing emissions or making the use of abatement technologies like FGD or catalytic converters compulsory. Furthermore, by the mid-

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1990s, the dynamism of the LRTAP Convention had influenced the European Union, which in 1997 adopted its own Acidification Strategy, based on the RAINS model. The European Union had more effective tools at its disposal to enforce compliance with its strategy than the LRTAP Convention had.⁶⁴ Taken as a whole, therefore, it can be argued that the convention has been an effective form of organization in the struggle to decrease emissions. On the other hand, it can be argued that many of the emission cuts were outcomes of processes that had little to do with environmental policies, and they would have taken place without the convention in any case. The energy sector was the largest emitter of sulphur, and while it succeeded in lowering its emissions substantially, its cutbacks were not motivated primarily by environmental concerns but by the adoption of more efficient and profitable process technologies. One such change was the shift to North Sea oil, which became the energy source of choice for Western Europe in the 1980s, not least for security reasons. This oil had much lower sulphur content than that from the main Arab suppliers, and its use thus decreased sulphur emissions. Another change was a switch from coal and oil to other energy sources. The 1970s and 1980s saw a rapid increase in the consumption of natural gas in most European countries, both in the East and in the West, and as natural gas contains almost no sulphur, this also led to substantial reductions of sulphur emissions. Norway and the Soviet Union became the two largest suppliers of natural gas. In the late 1970s, both countries promoted aims to expand their sales of natural gas to the European continent, and it is not unlikely that this shared interest motivated their unholy alliance against acid rain. Furthermore, many European countries, both in the East and West, built nuclear power plants in the 1970s and 1980s. Oftentimes the decisions to build these plants had been taken long before the LRTAP Convention came into force. But when the nuclear plants were commissioned, they partly replaced fossil fuel plants and thus reduced emissions. Additionally, the sharp hike in oil prices starting in the mid-1970s provided strong incentives for introducing more energy-efficient technologies in Western European countries. In combination with lower economic growth, this led to lower increases in energy consumption than expected and thus lower emissions. Finally, in Eastern Europe, the dramatic decline in industrial production after the political transitions in 1989 resulted in major reductions in emissions. Again, this development was not driven by environmental policies. In a number of cases, it can thus be argued that the reduction of emissions had little to do with efforts made by the LRTAP Convention. But this is too simplistic, I believe. The convention contributed to a new mindset among many European policy-makers and politicians regarding environmental issues. Though

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few politicians were prepared to accept high costs for reducing emissions, they were willing to exploit windows of opportunity for legislating emission cutbacks made possible by developments in other fields. A very important window of opportunity emerged when eight Central and Eastern European countries wanted in the mid-1990s to become members of the European Union. They were compelled to agree to the union’s much stricter environmental policies as a condition for membership.

10 Concluding Reflection It is not so surprising that large-scale, transborder air pollution was first discovered in Europe, given the high degree of industrialization combined with the small size of most of its countries. Given the resistance from influential emitting industries, the opposing interests of countries that were net exporters and net importers of sulphur emissions, and the deep political divisions of the Cold War, much more extraordinary is the way that this discovery was handled by scientists, politicians, diplomats, and policy-makers. To an informed observer in the early 1970s, it must have seemed very unlikely that international agreements in the form of conventions and protocols on transborder pollution would be reached within a decade and that these agreements would contribute to substantial decreases in emissions in the following decades. For sure, the lowering of emissions was slower in Eastern Europe. Heavy industry occupied an almost sacred place in the official culture of communist societies, and this led to the delayed installation of regulations to control air pollution. It was only after 1989 that more substantial reductions of emissions occurred in these countries. How can we understand this achievement? There were three main factors involved. One of them was the increasing knowledge of the environmental consequences of long-range transboundary air pollution, thanks to the continued monitoring and modelling activities within EMEP. On the basis of these findings, many net exporters discovered that their own environments were also affected and that emission cutbacks would benefit them too. A second factor was the development of relatively inexpensive technological fixes for end-of-pipe emission control and simultaneously a large-scale introduction of substitute technologies that could eliminate sulphur emissions from power plants, in particular nuclear power and natural gas.⁶⁵ The third factor, finally, was politics. In the late 1970s, striving towards a détente of the Cold War led the Soviet Union and Norway to form an unholy alliance in pursuit of the LRTAP Convention. In the following decades, European integration politics also played a role. When the countries in Western Europe developed ever-deeper economic and political relations, they be-

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came increasingly interdependent. Even countries lacking any intrinsic environmental motive to cut back on their toxic emissions could be swayed to do the “right thing” by other countries that were evidently frustrated and saw themselves as victims of these emissions. In addition, domestic politics played a role in many countries. An emerging Green movement asserted growing political influence in many Western European countries in the 1980s and, to a lesser degree, in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The story in this chapter may be a source of optimism to those who are frustrated by the ongoing international negotiations on climate change as it demonstrates that is was possible in the past to reach international agreements leading to substantial reductions of emissions. Moreover, much of the working mode developed under the LRTAP Convention was transferred to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1994), and international collaboration among scientists has increased the knowledge about climate change very rapidly. However, climate change is a particularly hard nut to crack because, unlike for acid rain, potential solutions via technological fixes are neither readily available nor cheap, even if the fast growth of wind power and photovoltaics is promising. At present (fall of 2020), the political conditions are extremely unfavourable for international environmental collaboration, but this can hopefully change for the better, like the fall of the Berlin Wall did in in the 1990s. Moreover, a growing Green movement and an increasing realization in broad sectors of society of the effects of climate change in terms of devastating storms and fires will most probably increase the political pressure from below. Finally, the combatting of acid rain shows that to achieve coordinated action among many heterogeneous countries and actors it is necessary to have endurance and purposefulness as well as understanding of and respect for differences in conditions among countries.

Notes  This chapter is based on my chapter “Under a Common Acid Sky. Negotiating Transboundary Air Pollution in Europe”, in Nil Disco and Eda Kranakis, eds., Cosmopolitan Commons. Sharing Resources and Risks across Borders (MIT Press, 2013), 213 – 242.  Svante Oden, “The Acidification of Precipitation”, Dagens Nyheter (24 Octobre 1967).  Lars Lundgren, Acid Rain on the Agenda. A Picture of the Chain of Events in Sweden, 1966 – 1968 (Lund University Press, 1998).  Göran Persson, “… och än faller regnet”, in Miljö för miljoner ‘85 (Solna: SNV, 1986), 9 – 10 (own translation).

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 Göran Persson, “The Acid Rain Story”, in International Environmental Negotiations: Process, Issues and Contexts, eds. G. Sjöstedt, U. Svedin, and B. Hägerhäll Aniansson (Stockholm: Utrikespolitiska Institutet and Forskningsrådsnämnden, 1993).  Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle. Nature, Man and Technology (New York: Knopf 1971), Introduction.  Philippe Sands, Jacqueline Peel, Adriana Fabra, Ruth MacKenzie, Principles of International Environmental Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 261.  Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommelspacher, Blauer Himmel über der Ruhr. Geschichte der Umwelt im Ruhrgebiet 1840 – 1990 (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1992), 50 – 52.  Ibid., 52 (own translation).  Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke. A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times (London: Methuen, 1987), 138 – 141.  Frank Uekötter, Von der Rauchplage zur ökologischen Revolution : Eine Geschichte der Luftverschmutzung in Deutschland und den USA 1880 – 1970 (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2003), 218 – 224.  Richard Stone, “Counting the Cost of London’s Killer Smog”, Science 298, no. 5601 (2002): 2106 – 2107.  Brimblecombe, Big Smoke, 161– 78.  Uekötter, Von der Rauchplage zur ökologischen Revolution, 349 ff.  Keith A. Murray, “The Trail Smelter Case: International Air Pollution in the Columbia Valley”, British Columbia Studies 15 (1972): 84.  Ibid., 68 – 85; see also Rebecca Bratspies and Russel Miller (eds.), Transboundary Harm in International Law: Lessons from the Trail Smelter Arbitration (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).  Philippe Sands, Principles of International Environmental Law I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 243 – 244.  Water was also considered according to a similar perception, with rivers, large lakes, or seas being seen as sinks that could make emissions harmless, see Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink. Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio, 1996), chapter 1.  Persson, “The Acid Rain Story”, 107.  Ibid., 107– 108.  Bert Bolin et al. Air Pollution across National Boundaries. The Impact on the Environment of Sulphur in Air and Precipitation (Stockholm: Royal Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 1971), 12. Martin Letell emphasizes the significance of the concept “transboundary air pollution” that was introduced in this report, see Martin Letell, Governable Air: Studies on the Science and Politics of Air Pollution in Europe (STS Research Reports 12) (Gothenburg: Science and Technology Studies, Göteborg University, 2006), 121– 149.  Lundgren, Acid Rain on the Agenda, 288.  Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “East Germany’s Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State. Environmental Diplomacy as Strategy in Cold War Politics”, in Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945 – 1990, ed. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. Mc Neill (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 219 – 232.  See http://www.un-documents.net/unchedec.htm (accessed 6 May 2021).  Sands, Principles of International Environmental Law, 37.  Persson, “The Acid Rain Story”, 108.

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 Toni Schneider and Jürgen Schneider, “EMEP – Backbone of the Convention”, in Clearing the Air. 25 years of the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution, ed. Johan Sliggers and Willem Kakebeeke (New York and Geneva: United Nations, 2004), 31– 44.  Peter Haas, “Introduction. Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination”, International Organization 46, no. 1 (1992): 1– 35.  Stephen Mosley, “Environmental History of Air Pollution and Protection”, in The Basic Environmental History, ed. Mauro Agnoletti and Simone Neri Serneri (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014), 143 – 169.  Rachel Rothschild, “Détente from the Air. Monitoring Air Pollution during the Cold War”, Technology and Culture 57, no. 4 (2016): 831– 865; Schneider and Schneider, “EMEP – Backbone of the Convention”.  Gunnar Sjöstedt, “Special and Typical Attributes of International and Environmental Negotiations”, in International Environmental Negotiations, 32.  Thomas Gehring, Dynamic International Regimes. Institutions for International Environmental Governance (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1994), chapter 2.  Valentin Sokolovsky, “Fruits of Cold War”, in Sliggers and Kakebeeke, Clearing the Air, 7– 17.  Ibid., 10.  The USA and Canada have been members of the UNECE since its establishment in 1947. That air pollution could cross the boundary of these two countries was demonstrated already in the 1930s through the conflict that led to the Trail Smelter arbitration, see above. The LRTAP Convention was thus an instrument for handling their air pollution controversies as well.  See the UNECE website.  Jean-Paul Hettelingh et al., “Air pollution effects drive abatement strategies”, in Sliggers and Kakebeeke, Clearing the Air, 68.  Marc Levy, “European Acid Rain. The Power of Tote-Board Diplomacy”, in Institutions for the Earth. Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection, ed. Peter Haas, Robert Keohane, Marc Levy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 92– 93.  Johannes Zechner, Der Deutsche Wald: eine Ideengeschichte zwischen Poesie und Ideologie: 1800 – 1945. Darmstadt: Philipp von Zabern, 2016, 195 – 208.  Birgit Metzger, “Erst stirbt der Wald, dann du!” Das Waldsterben als westdeutsches Politikum (1978 – 1986) (Frankfurt/New York: Campus), 2015; Frank Uekötter and Kenneth Anders, “The Sum of all German Fears”, in: Frank Uekotter, ed., Exploring Apocalyptica. Coming to Terms with Environmental Alarmism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 75 – 106; Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “‘Tu dem Wald kein Leid, er ist der Heimat schönstes Kleid’. Gründung und Entwicklung der Schutzgemeinschaft Deutscher Wald”, in Ursula Breymayer and Bernd Ulrich. eds., Unter Bäumen. Die Deutschen und der Wald (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2011), 250 – 255; Dieter Jost, “Waldsterben a Breakthrough”, in Sliggers and Kakebeeke, Clearing the Air, 15 – 17.  Lars Lindau, Andrzej Jagusiewicz, and Endre Kovacs, “Software and Hardware, No Protocols without Technologies”, in Sliggers and Kakebeeke, Clearing the Air, 50; Hendrik Erhardt, “Keeping the Air Clean? Environmental Policy, Utility Companies, and Social Movements in West Germany since the 1970s”, in Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945 – 1990, eds. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. Mc Neill (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 73 – 86, at 84.  Levy, “European Acid Rain”, 93 – 94; Gehring, Dynamic International Regimes, 145 – 148.  Ibid., 155 – 157.  Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, “Sticks and Stones: Naming and Shaming the Human Rights Enforcement Problem”, International Organization 62, no. 4 (2008): 689 – 716.

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 Levy, “European Acid Rain”, 77, 93 – 94.  Describing EMEP as “the backbone” is a common expression in the literature on LRTAP.  All protocols and their signatories can be found on the UNECE homepage.  http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/env/documents/2012/EB/1985.Sulphur.e.pdf (accessed 6 May 2021).  Karin Bäckstrand, What Can Nature Withstand? Science, Politics and Discourse in Transboundary Air Pollution Diplomacy (Lund Political Studies 116) (Lund: Lund University, 2001), 176 – 179.  http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/env/lrtap/full%20text/1988.NOX.e.pdf (accessed 6 May 2021).  Levy, “European Acid Rain”, 95 – 99.  Ibid., 129.  Jorgen Wettestad, “The ECE Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution: from Common Cuts to Critical Loads”, in Science and Politics in International Environmental Regimes. Between Integrity and Involvement, ed. Steinar Andresen et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 70 – 94.  Harvey Brooks and Alan MacDonald, “The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the TAP Project, and the RAINS Model”, in Systems Expert, and Computers. The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After, ed. Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 413 – 432.  Ibid.  The model became an “obligatory point of passage” for the whole regime, according to Rolf Lidskog and Göran Sundqvist, “The Role of Science in Environmental Regimes: The Case of LRTAP”, European Journal of International Relations 8, no. 1 (2002): 77– 101, at 92.  http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/env/lrtap/full%20text/1988.NOX.e.pdf (accessed 6 May 2021).  Bäckstrand, What Can Nature Withstand, 212– 220.  https://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/env/lrtap/full%20text/1999 %20Multi.E.Amended. 2005.pdfUNECE protocol. Article 2 (accessed 6 May 2021).  Levy, “European Acid Rain”, 114.  Lars Lindau, Andrzej Jagusiewicz, and Endre Kovacs, “Software and Hardware, No Protocols without Technologies”, in Sliggers and Kakebeeke, Clearing the Air, 46.  Jean-Paul Hettelingh et al., “Air pollution effects drive abatement strategies”, in Sliggers and Kakebeeke, Clearing the Air, 77– 78.  The discussion below partly builds on Jorgen Wettestad, “Acid Lessons? LRTAP Implementation and Effectiveness”, Global Environmental Change 7, no. 3 (1997): 235 – 249; Levy, “European Acid Rain”, 115 – 127.  Jörgen Wettestad, Clearing the Air. European Advances in Tackling Acid Rain and Atmospheric Pollution, (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002), chapter 5.  Max Oelschlaeger, “The Myth of the Technological Fix”, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 1 (1979): 43 – 53; Sean F. Johnston, “Alvin Weinberg and the Promotion of the Technological Fix”, Technology and Culture 59, no. 3 (2018): 620 – 651.

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Selected Bibliography Bäckstrand, Karin. What can Nature Withstand? Science, Politics and Discourse in Transboundary Air Pollution Diplomacy. Lund: Lund University, 2001. Bolin, Bert et al. Air Pollution across National Boundaries. The Impact on the Environment of Sulphur in Air and Precipitation. Stockholm: Royal Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 1971. Brimblecombe, Peter. The Big Smoke. A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times. London: Methuen, 1987. Brüggemeier, Franz-Josef, and Thomas Rommelspacher. Blauer Himmel über der Ruhr. Geschichte der Umwelt im Ruhrgebiet 1840 – 1990. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1992. Gehring, Thomas. Dynamic International Regimes. Institutions for International Environmental Governance. Berlin: Peter Lang, 1994. Haas, Peter. “Introduction. Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination”, International Organization 46 (1992): 1 – 35. Kaijser, Arne. “Under a Common Acid Sky. Negotiating Transboundary Air Pollution in Europe”. In Cosmopolitan Commons. Sharing Resources and Risks across Borders, edited by Nil Disco and Eda Kranakis, 213 – 242. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Levy, Marc. “European Acid Rain. The Power of Tote-Board Diplomacy”. In Institutions for the Earth. Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection, edited by Peter Haas, Robert Keohane, and Marc Levy, 75 – 132. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Lundgren, Lars. Acid Rain on the Agenda. A Picture of the Chain of Events in Sweden, 1966 – 1968. Lund: Lund University Press, 1998. Lidskog, Rolf, and Göran Sundqvist. “The Role of Science in Environmental Regimes: The Case of LRTAP”. European Journal of International Relations 8 (2002): 77 – 101. Rothschild, Rachel. “Détente from the Air. Monitoring Air Pollution during the Cold War”. Technology and Culture 57 (2016): 831 – 865. Sliggers, Johan, and Willem Kakebeeke, eds. Clearing the Air. 25 years of the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution. New York and Geneva: United Nations, 2004. Wettestad, Jörgen. “Acid Lessons? LRTAP Implementation and Effectiveness”. Global Environmental Change 7 (1997): 235 – 249. Wettestad, Jörgen. “The ECE Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution: from Common Cuts to Critical Loads”. In Science and Politics in International Environmental Regimes. Between Integrity and Involvement, edited by Steinar Andresen et al., 70 – 94. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Wettestad, Jörgen. Clearing the Air. European Advances in Tackling Acid Rain and Atmospheric Pollution. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002.

Elke Seefried

15 Developing Europe: The Formation of Sustainability Concepts and Activities Abstract This chapter analyses the formation of sustainability concepts and political activities in Europe. Sustainable development and sustainability are not understood as normative ideas providing timeless solutions to environmental or developmental problems, but as political concepts and a field of action that are subject to historical change. The chapter shows that during the 1990s, sustainable development concepts were Europeanised. The Agenda 21 programme set both governmental Sustainable Development Strategies and local civil society actions in Europe in motion. Also, the concept began to shape the EU’s environmental policy in the 1990s as it accorded well with the Union’s self-image as a community pursuing consensual and balanced solutions to future problems. Keywords sustainability; sustainable development; Agenda 21; ecological modernization; European Union In May 1994, the European Conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns passed the Aalborg Charter, which was eventually signed by 2,500 local and regional administrations of 39 countries. By joining in the “Sustainable Cities and Towns Campaign”, European cities and communities committed themselves to a sustainable development strategy, to “base our standard of living on the carrying capacity of nature”,¹ a strategy incorporating all relevant social groups through the practices of grassroots democracy. The Aalborg Charter referred to Agenda 21, which had been passed by the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992. This so-called Earth Summit had identified “sustainable development” as a guiding principle to be followed in international politics. It had adopted not only the Rio Declaration but also the Agenda 21 action programme, which called for a participatory process in implementing sustainable development by engaging actors at the global, national, and local levels. This aspect of the agreement was the result

Note: I am very grateful to Eva Oberloskamp for her support. The chapter also draws partly on my article “Rethinking Progress. On the Origin of the Modern Sustainability Discourse”, Journal of Modern European History 13 (2015): 377 – 400. I would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) for offering a perfect atmosphere for writing parts of the chapter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-016

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of lobbying by environmental groups and NGOs. Since then, “sustainable development” and “sustainability” have become central concepts of the international and European environment and development discourse.² This article aims to trace the development of sustainability concepts and activities in Europe. Sustainability is not understood as a normative idea providing timeless solutions to environmental or developmental problems,³ but as a political concept and field of action that is subject to historical change. This chapter asks how European notions of sustainable development and sustainability were created and produced, also shedding light on political actors promoting what came to be understood as sustainability.⁴ During the 1990s, sustainable development concepts were Europeanised. The Agenda 21 programme set both governmental Sustainable Development Strategies and local civil society actions in Europe in motion. Also, the concept began to shape the EU’s environmental policy as it accorded well with the Union’s self-image as a community pursuing consensual and balanced solutions to future problems.

1 Early Conceptualizations of Sustainable Use of Resources Sustainability ideas are often traced back to the eighteenth century. In 1713, while working as an inspector of mines in Saxony, Hans Carl von Carlowitz published a treatise on forestry in which he advocated “nachhaltende Nutzung” (sustained use) of wood in times of scarcity. In the following decades, “sustainable yield” became a key concept in both forestry and fishery.⁵ However, tracking sustainability back to eighteenth-century scientific forestry in Germany can be regarded more as a useful founding myth for constructing an affirmative tradition of sustainability. As research has shown, by the early nineteenth century, modern state government were using concepts of sustainable forestry to control their resources by management planning and to bar the access of the rural population to forests (see chapter 7 by Hölzl and Oosthoek). When local social protests followed, sustainability concepts became subject to “power struggles”. From the 1850s on, scientific forestry was not only ecologically filtered by ideas of a “household of nature” but had to be rethought by politics and experts, due to the growing consumption of wood as Central Europe feverishly industrialized.⁶ In addition, nature conservation groups were now becoming concerned with the preservation of threatened species and endangered habitats in Europe (see chapter 2 by Wöbse and chapter 3 by de Bont). Notions of what stood at the centre of conservation changed nationally and over time, and these groups could

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partially include the understanding of “wise use” of natural resources that had originated in America, along with a championing of management of resources and landscapes. In the late 1940s, the International Union for the Protection (then Conservation) of Nature (IUCN) was set up by nature conservation experts and by scientists, like the British biologist Julian Huxley, who built on “colonial networks of naturalists around the globe” and saw themselves as responsible for maintaining all life and resources in the global environment.⁷

2 Environmentalism and the Search for a Sustainable System Around 1970, for a variety of reasons, industrial societies in the West, and to a degree in Central and Eastern Europe as well, took on a new environmental awareness. Emerging environmentalism – understood as a political, social and cultural movement triggered by concerns about environmental pollution, scarcity of resources and nuclear risks (see chapter 13 by Kirchhof and Meyer) – was especially driven by American actors, whose knowledge and activities spread to Europe. The “ecological revolution”⁸ was triggered by “objective” problems, such as the air pollution troubling the industrialized nations (see chapter 14 by Kaijser). However, it was also much influenced by changing perceptions of nature and industrial modernity, signalled by a semantic shift from taking “nature” as a “given” that needed to be conserved and protected to a perception of a human “environment” that was being threatened by human civilization in a systemic perspective. Ecology, a science studying the relationships between living organisms and their local environment that had originated in the nineteenth century, became the central environmental science in the Western industrialized countries around 1970. Its exponents saw the planet as a cohesive ecosystem, and worked on the perception that ecological and social systems were interconnected. A new focus on the global ecosystem was also driven by the entrancing images – Earthrise and Blue Marble – captured by the Apollo space missions in 1968 and 1972. These visualized the Earth as a fragile blue planet and shaped public perceptions of the global environment this planet sustained.⁹ In the late 1960s, environmental policy was conceptualized as a new policy field by reformers in the West like Lyndon B. Johnson in the USA, and then Willy Brandt in West Germany, as well as by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A major role was played by the US administration. The makers of environmental policy adopted a long-term perspective and drew on the systems approach that had dominated Western political planning

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and futures studies in the 1960s. Further, protection of the environment and of public health became part of the Western security strategy, as was made clear when US President Richard Nixon set up a NATO “Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society” in 1969.¹⁰ Environmental policy and environmentalism also developed in Central and Eastern Europe. Industrial pollution intensified there after 1945, too. The socialist governments and their Academies of Sciences maintained an ideology-based Marxist-Leninist view of industrial modernity. In their understanding, nature should be subordinated to industrial production, though only rational usage and planning of natural resources could lead to productive labour.¹¹ The Soviet Union and other socialist states became members of IUCN, despite the fact that the organization was dominated by the West.¹² In the era of détente, environmental knowledge definitely transcended Cold War borders and barriers to exchange. Knowledge was shared not only so that East and West could get hold of the opposite camp’s information, but to find common solutions in the face of growing environmental pollution. Under the banner of “peaceful coexistence”, the Soviet Union propagated the necessity of trans-bloc environmental cooperation in the Budapest Appeal by the Warsaw Pact member states to all European countries in March 1969.¹³ Further, the Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB) launched by UNESCO in 1970 and the International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis, set up in Laxenburg near Vienna in 1972, served as platforms where scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain were able to cooperate in fields that touched on environmental issues. Early on, members of the Polish Academy of Sciences were involved in organizing the MAB programme in which the rational use of ecosystem resources was debated.¹⁴ The communist state parties also reacted to environmental concerns and submitted petitions from the people to their governments from below. The Czech government allowed substantial public discussion of industrial pollution and its health problems during the Prague Spring. Even after the subsequent Soviet invasion, the Czech authorities reacted to public concerns about pollution triggered by the country’s dependence on coal mining.¹⁵ In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the authorities of the Honecker administration initiated environmental reforms not only in response to petitions but also as a tactic of environmental diplomacy to gain international recognition as a sovereign state.¹⁶ Environmentalism took shape in both of the Cold War blocs during the late 1960s. However, in the West European democratic states it was driven much more by grassroots initiatives. There, a special impetus came from the counterculture and student movements, which spread from the US to Western Europe. These groups did not solely protest against nuclear weapons and the dangers of radiation exposure. Many had espoused anti-capitalist ideas or post-material-

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ist values, and they questioned the economic growth paradigm, the main criterion by which the Western industrialized countries judged their economic success. Environmental groups and associations linking the counterculture/alternative milieu and concerned citizens emerged in Western Europe around 1970. These included the West German Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz, the Swiss Umweltclub, and the British Friends of the Earth. In 1971, Greenpeace was established as a “campaign-led organization” protesting against nuclear testing in the USA. In the late 1970s, it set up a number of offices in Western Europe.¹⁷ Environmentalism and a questioning of economic growth was also fuelled by “ecologized” futures studies, and particularly by the highly influential publication The Limits to Growth, which came out in 1972. This study was commissioned by the Club of Rome, a circle of Western-centred scientists and business leaders, such as the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei. The authors (who came from the US, West Germany, and Norway) devised a systems-based computerized world model in which the standard-run scenario predicted that exponential economic and population growth would result in the collapse of the world “system” within the next hundred years. The study therefore called for a “controlled end to growth”. Drawing on ecological and systems analysis concepts, the authors proposed working towards a “desirable, sustainable state of global equilibrium”.¹⁸ Following this, an international discourse on growth took shape, particularly affecting West European politics. Within the European Commission, Vice President (later President) Sicco Mansholt, a Dutch Social Democrat and expert on agriculture, was deeply impressed by The Limits to Growth. A European economic plan he presented in 1972 put the ecological balance to the fore, raising it above insistence on economic growth: it recommended cutting the standard of living and rationing goods within European Community societies (see chapter 16 by van de Grift and van Meurs). Mansholt thus gave an anti-capitalist slant to the agenda. Some West German Social Democrats like Chancellor Willy Brandt and Erhard Eppler were impressed by the Limits to Growth scenario as well. Given the perception of growing global interdependence, Brandt supported a strengthening of the EC’s environmental policy. However, the Mansholt plan was rejected not only within the European Commission but by many of the West European Social Democratic parties as being at odds with their core social concerns. Economists and defenders of the market economy, too, criticized the study harshly, claiming that economic growth could promote new technologies that would solve problems such as environmental pollution and scarcity of resources.¹⁹ The socialist states held official reservations towards the study, as the Club of Rome was regarded as “bourgeois” and imperialist. However, the study did attract the attention of elites interested in the world model and in addressing

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the global problems shared by industrial societies – such as environmental pollution. The Club of Rome founders stood in close contact to Jermen Gvishiani, Vice President of the Soviet Committee for Science and Technology and member of the UN Advisory Council of Applied Science and Technology.²⁰ A powerful bottom-up environmental movement, however, could not take form inside the 1970s state socialist dictatorships. What is more, criticism of the Limits to Growth study was expressed by experts from the Global South who argued that, by calling for zero growth, the Club of Rome denied the developing countries their chance to move forward. Western European intellectuals close to the New Left (such as the Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung) dismissed the study for being elitist and Western-centred, too. Thus, the discourse on The Limits to Growth interlinked environmental and developmental concerns.²¹ While the East-West divide of the Cold War had lost some of its significance due to détente, the states of the South called for concerted international action to improve trade policies conducive to development for a just New International Economic Order (NIEO).²² The first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in the summer of 1972 also took up the perception that environmental destruction, poverty, and overpopulation seemed to be interrelated, popularizing the metaphor of “Only One Earth”.²³ However, the concept of a sustainable system did not prevail in the Western European consumer societies or the European Economic Community (EEC) during the 1970s. The reason was that, at that time, the concept was linked to the principle of sufficiency, implying zero material growth politics and harsh population control. This principle was crystallized in the propagation of a “sustainable steady state” by the Limits to Growth author Dennis Meadows²⁴ and of a “sustainable society” by the British journal The Ecologist in an issue entitled “Blueprint for Survival”. The doomsday scenario evoked referred directly to the Club of Rome and was pushed by a “Movement for Survival” headed by the Ecologist’s editor-in-chief, Edward Goldsmith, who was supported by conservationists like Julian Huxley.²⁵ In Britain, out of the “Blueprint” group emerged the People party in 1973. Sceptical towards industrialism and modern consumer society, the party sought to promote a conservative and authoritarian programme of zero growth and population control, but this did not attract support from either the working or the middle classes, nor did it please the environmental movement. The party, which became the Ecology party in 1975, shifted further to the left.²⁶ The steady-state sustainable system compared unfavourably with a more open and consensual concept of qualitative growth. The First Environmental Action Plan that the EEC issued in 1973 proposed that national environmental pro-

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grammes and the common policy should “have as their aim the improvement of the quality of life. Therefore, economic growth should not be viewed from purely quantitative aspects.”²⁷ As the member states were beginning to set environmental regulations, the functioning of the Common Market as the heart of the European project seemed to be in danger. This was a key reason why the EEC raised environmental policy to be one of its fields of activity. Henceforth, the Community saw itself committed to the open and economic growth-friendly aims of ensuring quality of life by widening the definition of growth.²⁸ The Western European environmental movements did not play a central role in developing the European Environmental Action Plan.²⁹ On the whole, they favoured the qualitative growth approach as a concept for controlling economic growth and consumerism in the North and, at the same time, fostering economic growth in the South. From the 1970s onwards, Greenpeace was taking a radical stance, as the organization opposed not only capitalism and Western environmental policy but also the EEC, which it saw as a technocratic and capitalist organization. Hence, the group sought to pursue fundamental political and social change – not least by binding agreements on the limited use of natural resources.³⁰ Similarly, the first Western European Green parties – such as the French Ecologist groups set up prior to the presidential election in 1974 which later co-founded the French Greens (Les Verts) in 1984, and the West German Grüne, founded in 1979/80 – conveyed crisis narratives in order to urge fundamental political and social change. Although national differences existed, these parties had a leftist ecological anchorage and questioned the economic growth paradigm.³¹ The West German Grüne, who successfully joined the federal parliament (Bundestag) in 1983 due to the extraordinary public presence of the environmental and anti-nuclear movement in their country, were moulded by conflicts between alternative and post-materialist, Marxist, and conservative wings. Their first programme criticized a perceived “craze for growth” (Wachstumswahn) but opted for “qualitative growth” and “social growth”, both of which could be achieved with the same or less energy input and use of raw materials. This was to secure the “ecological equilibrium”.³²

3 West European Leadership? From the World Conservation Strategy to the Brundtland Commission The concept of sustainable development as a guiding principle to reconcile the tensions between environment and development originated mainly from a het-

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erogenous international group of experts gathered around the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). This experts’ circle first met in 1971 to discuss alternative development models and to prepare for the Stockholm Conference in 1972.³³ Key roles were played by the Canadian Maurice Strong, who became the first UNEP Director, and Barbara Ward, a British economist who co-founded the British Conservation Society and had co-authored the unofficial report on the Stockholm Conference entitled “Only One Earth”.³⁴ The Strong group also got in touch with experts from the IUCN and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) (see chapter 3 by de Bont). These NGOs, initially devoted to a more traditional nature conservation or preservation approach, opened themselves to developmental problems and post-colonial worldviews. It was particularly British elites who addressed the tensions between environmental and developmental concerns and the need to find common solutions for the pressing problems they encountered, such as tropical deforestation, growing desertification and threats to genetic diversity. The key role of British conservationists can be explained not only by their experience of Empire, which inspired them to think globally, but by a long tradition of pragmatic British conservation groups working “inside” the political system rather than by resorting to direct action with a fundamentally critical attitude.³⁵ IUCN’s founding father, Julian Huxley, Robert Allen, co-author of Blueprint for Survival, and others agreed to support a global strategy for pursuing both ecosystem conservation and economic development. In the late 1970s, this group of experts, along with activists based round UNEP, IUCN, and WWF, conceptualized sustainable development and worked out a “World Conservation Strategy”. The strategy accepted economic growth so long as development initiatives guaranteed the protection of genetic diversity and did not exceed the regenerative capacities of ecosystems, while also satisfying the basic needs of all people.³⁶ Subsequently, UNEP initiated the setting up of a World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) to “propose long-term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development to the year 2000 and beyond”.³⁷ Chaired by the former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, it brought together politicians and scientists from the West, the socialist states and the so-called Third World. Its work revolved around the diverging interests of the South and the North. The representatives of the states of the South argued that poverty was the root cause of environmental problems – as in the case of tropical deforestation – and insisted that sustainable development should generate growth in the developing countries by improving terms of trade, technology transfer, and debt relief.³⁸ While the US representative was markedly reserved, members from Western Europe identified interdependences between the ongoing Cold War arms race, growing environmental degradation, and development chal-

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lenges also arising from looming environmental conflicts.³⁹ The Commission’s report, Our Common Future, published in 1987, addressed the needs of both the South and the North, reconciling developmental, environmental, and disarmament issues. However, the Commission’s definition of sustainable development clearly leaned toward present-day material needs: “Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable – to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” A new emphasis was placed on present human needs and social justice between North and South, rather than on the environment as such. This was to be achieved – idealistically – by means of technology transfer and an international fund to increase aid for the South, and not by abandoning growth as proposed in The Limits to Growth. ⁴⁰ Although the concept of sustainable development originated mainly from a transatlantic network of experts, the Brundtland Commission underlined the guiding role that Western European Social Democrats – particularly exponents from Scandinavia and West Germany – played in putting sustainable development into political programmes and action. Next to Brundtland within the Commission, it was the West German Social Democrat Volker Hauff who strongly advocated the securing of peace, security and global justice by following the principle of sustainable development. As, throughout the Cold War, West Germany and the Scandinavian countries were close to the Eastern bloc borders, the securing of peace was a vital issue within these societies and political cultures during the 1970s and 1980s. What is more, the key role these Social Democrats played was rooted in their traditional claim to epitomize the future in terms of industrial modernity. This self-conception had come under pressure during the economic crises and phases of mass unemployment in the 1970s and early 1980s. Brundtland, along with Willy Brandt (acting as chair of the North-South Commission and president of the revitalized Socialist International) raised traditional elements of the Social Democratic programme – the furtherance of equality, solidarity, and peace – to a global level. The vague universal concept of sustainable development helped to boost the Social Democrats’ political legitimation, even when they were not in power, because it brought together political communications of threat and feasibility and promised to provide both current and long-term European solutions to global problems.⁴¹ In the Commission’s meetings, representatives from the socialist states (from the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Yugoslavia) called for environmental “security”, thus pointing to the central role peace and disarmament should play in the avoidance of environmental dangers. Thus, they linked environmental concerns with the disarmament issue in order to stop the arms race and relieve pressure on their own economies.⁴² In 1988, the Political Consultative Committee of the

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Warsaw Treaty states also agreed in interpreting the Commission’s report with a specific focus on disarmament problems. Thus, leading members of the GDR Socialist Unity Party (SED) referred to the report in order to propagate “common security”.⁴³ However, GDR data on environmental pollution and damage to woodlands was no longer being released, and the official claims sounded hollow in the ears of the emerging East German environmental movement, who had trans-bloc contacts with the West German one.⁴⁴ Further, the notion of sustainable growth became increasingly attractive to some West European Christian Democrats and representatives of the conservative parties. Initially, the West German Christian-Liberal coalition kept its distance from the Brundtland Commission. As the coalition preferred a supplyside economic policy, the ministries of finance and the interior, led by the Christian Democrats and the Bavarian Christian Social Union, feared that the Commission would demand substantial transfers to the South.⁴⁵ After the report had been published, the Christian Democratic Minister for the Environment, Klaus Töpfer, expressed appreciation for the report generally. Yet, the government rejected the report’s assessment that the industrialized nations were responsible for the problems of the developing countries, which had to exploit their resources so as to meet their debt obligations.⁴⁶ In the following years, Töpfer pursued the topic intensively. In 1994, he was appointed chairman of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, whose mandate was to monitor the implementation of Agenda 21 and to activate a dialogue within and between the UN institutions and NGOs. In the same year, the Christian Democrats adopted “sustainable development” into their party manifesto, placing their emphasis on balancing economic and environmental goals rather than on global justice, and backing this up with an appeal to the Christian duty to protect nature as created by God.⁴⁷ Similarly, the Thatcher government opened itself to the principle of sustainable development, referring to sustainable growth. Although the Conservative government strictly opposed any calls for an equitable NIEO, it devised an official response to the World Conservation Strategy in 1986.⁴⁸ Margret Thatcher not only referred to the conservative issue of saving wildlife and nature. She also drew on her experience as a chemist when she emphasized the dangers of climate change and population growth in her famous science speech to the Royal Society in 1988. As “stable prosperity” could only be achieved throughout the world if the environment was safeguarded, the government espoused “sustainable economic development”.⁴⁹ Further, the government commissioned the environmental economist David Pearce to prepare a document “Sustaining our common future” which laid the basis for a White Paper entitled “This Common Inheritance”. The Paper declared that there was a moral duty to look after the planet in order to hand it on “in good order to future generations”,⁵⁰ thus acquir-

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ing a conservationist tone, “which fitted comfortably into traditional Tory paternalistic values”, but also set out the central principle that the public should get greater access to environmental information. The Paper was “coolly received” by the environmental movement as it was mainly a compilation of already existing policies. Powerful interest groups such as car manufacturers were able to represent their interests, and the government continued to focus on furthering economic growth and liberalizing the energy sector.⁵¹ However, the Paper paved the way to conceptualizing one of the first sustainable development strategies in Europe, which was passed in 1994.

4 The Earth Summit and European Civil Society Dynamics The Brundtland Commission recommended a universal UN Declaration and a convention on sustainable development to extend legal principles. These arrangements were endorsed at UNCED, which took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The “Earth Summit” gathered some 15,000 representatives from 175 nations and more than a hundred heads of government. Moreover, it was the focus of strong media attention.⁵² Although, with the end of the Cold War, the political landscape had changed fundamentally, the Summit’s Rio Declaration more or less reaffirmed the positions taken by the Brundtland Commission.⁵³ The countries of the South demanded a commitment by the industrialized nations, to be attained by the year 2000, that the North would give seven per cent of their GDP in foreign aid; inter alia, the South rejected any binding commitment to protect forests. General objections made by the US Bush administration hampered any firm commitments.⁵⁴ The European Community had adopted the Brundtland Commission’s consensual concept of sustainable growth as part of the Rhodes European Council statement made in 1988.⁵⁵ However, in the preparatory talks for the Summit, the environment and development aid ministers of the EC member states disagreed on the seven-per-cent-of-GDP target, and they were at odds over the proposal to launch a common CO2 tax.⁵⁶ In the end, the Declaration could only propose, rather vaguely, that the participants would “reduce and eliminate unsustainable patterns of consumption and production” to achieve sustainable development.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, the Europeans did help to pass the Biodiversity and Climate Change Conventions and to launch Agenda 21, a comprehensive plan of action to promote participatory processes and to implement sustainable development activities, particularly at local levels. Indeed, the Agenda initiated a

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European “environmental moment” as it set a significant bottom-up process in motion. Although environmental NGOs like IUCN had played a central role in conceptualizing sustainable development, the concept had, up to this point, been mainly a top-down programme developed by Western environmental experts and political elites. Environmentalist groups and grassroots organizations groups like Greenpeace that had sprung from the alternative milieu did not latch on to the concept until the early 1990s. The same is true for most of the Western European Green parties.⁵⁸ As they were taking a critical stance, they questioned the economic growth paradigm and the consensual sustainable growth notions to be found in the Brundtland Report. For them, its balancing mode seemed merely to conceal the fundamental existing problems of environmental degradation and poverty, thus blocking any fundamental change such as an extreme cutback in coal mining or putting an end to nuclear fission.⁵⁹ At the Rio Summit itself, representatives of some hundred NGOs and grassroots organizations like Greenpeace were present. The end of the Cold War had raised their hopes not only that binding international accords could be passed, but also that the environmental movement might be given entirely new scope for action from below.⁶⁰ There are some indications that during the preparations for the summit, attitudes towards the sustainable development concept changed, and that a civil society bottom-up process was set in motion among Europeans (though, at this point, mainly Western Europeans were involved). This process was guided by the Greens and organizations connecting environmental and developmental concerns, led by visions of global community and the furtherance of women’s rights. In 1991, national civil society groups, such as the German Projektstelle (Project Office) for UNCED run by the Deutscher Naturschutzring and the Bund Umwelt und Naturschutz, were set up in order to influence the Earth Summit and to develop alternative programmes to the Rio Declaration. The Projektstelle was very close to the German Green party, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen. This party had moved away from earlier radical positions towards Western environmental policy after its “fundamentalists” had left it and representatives from the old GDR resistance movement had joined.⁶¹ Further, the Green parliamentary group in the European Parliament appropriated the sustainable development concept, preparing its own UNCED paper. The European Greens attacked the existing “maldevelopment” politics of the North that had brought “unprecedented environmental disaster and social polarization between rich and poor”. They demanded that the debts of the poorest countries should be entirely cancelled. Each country should set up its own independent Commission on Socially and Ecologically Sustainable Development with full participation by NGOs to establish more democratic

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decision-making procedures in environmental and developmental policy. Fundamental to the change from “maldevelopment to sustainable development” would be the shift to environment-friendly and renewable energy resources as well as energy saving and changes in wasteful patterns of consumption in the North. Hence, the Greens claimed that the EC should take the lead in introducing a system of taxation on carbon emissions. One-sixth of an EC CO2 tax was to be used to feed a new Global Climate Fund to help transitional economies in the East and developing countries achieve their CO2-reduction aims. Nuclear power was to be totally phased out. Further, the Greens focused on the interests of the indigenous people in the South and highlighted the key role women played in “ecologically sustainable development”, both as people especially concerned with preserving a healthy planet and as the main victims of “maldevelopment” in the South. Members of the Green group organized workshops during the Rio Conference that put a special focus on the role of women who were particularly affected by environmental and social degradation. Women, they insisted, were to set sustainable development in motion.⁶² Hence, it was the bottom-up discussion of environmental, developmental and gender issues, along with the chance to bring problems of global “maldevelopment” before an international public, that induced the Greens’ parliamentary group to make use of the sustainable development concept. What is more, the Green parliamentary group broadened the understanding of sustainable development to include their own programme – particularly the furtherance of the rights of women and indigenous people, along with the involvement of NGOs. The bottom-up engagement with sustainable development that had spun off from the Earth Summit helped to disseminate the concept; and platforms coordinating the NGOs’ activities in the Rio follow-up process were set up. These included the Forum Umwelt und Entwicklung led by BUND/Friends of the Earth Germany and the Deutscher Naturschutzring which continued the work of the Projektstelle. The Forum and grassroots-based ecological research institutes such as the Öko-Institut now made use of the sustainable development concept.⁶³ Greenpeace continued to urge a fundamental break with the economic system. In doing so, it referred to the principles of sustainable resource management that the American ecological economist Herman Daly had developed in 1989. Greenpeace maintained that it should be the “carrying capacity” of the earth that determined the extent to which natural resources were used. Consumption should never exceed the rate at which resources can regenerate. The same applied to the pace at which waste and pollution accumulated. Further, with the use of non-renewable resources, Greenpeace required that the rate of use be no greater than the pace at which renewable substitutes could be put into place. Hence, the industrialized nations must limit their use of resources

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and follow a path of renunciation. With such arguments, Greenpeace rejected the notion of sustainable growth, contending that “sustainability and constant growth were incompatible”.⁶⁴ Yet, it was now referring to sustainability as a guiding principle, after all. Following the Earth Summit, at a European Council in Lisbon in June 1992, the EC member states committed themselves to prepare national action plans for the implementation of the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21. As sustainable growth was to balance different interests, this consensual concept infiltrated European integration policy and became part of the Maastricht Treaty on the European Union of 1992.⁶⁵ During the 1990s, a few countries – among them the UK, Finland, Ireland, and Germany – developed national sustainable development strategies, whereas some member states renewed existing National Environmental Policy Plans (NEPPs). The Dutch NEPP was followed by a renewed Plan in 1993/94, intended to “maintain the environmental carrying capacity on behalf of sustainable development”. Further, it implemented national, regional, and local targets, entailing the reduction of emission levels and volumes of waste by around 70 to 90 per cent.⁶⁶ As Agenda 21 emphasized the role of public participation, the consultation processes for elaborating national sustainable development strategies involved inviting environmental organizations, trade unions, and other interest groups to be part of the consultation process. The British Conservative government started as early as 1993 with a consultation document published by the Department of the Environment which invited responses from a wide range of environmental organizations. However, the reactions of those in civil society had only “minimal influence on the final report” and, as Neil Carter and Philip Lowe put it, the “machinery of government reform did little to transform the policy process.” Whereas the Dutch NEPP included targets and monitoring procedures, the British sustainable development strategy did not set targets but mainly repeated existing environmental policy commitments, adopting a 20-year time horizon to fulfil them. The British set up a UK “Round Table on Sustainable Development” – boycotted by Greenpeace – and the consultation process sparked public debates. The English Tourist Board, for example, triggered a debate on sustainable tourism. What is more, a perception that traffic growth epitomized prosperity (as had been proclaimed in a White Paper in 1989) was challenged by a report provided by the Royal Commission on the Environment in 1994. Influenced by the debate on the sustainable development strategy, the report suggested that public transport should be encouraged and that the road construction programme be halved. As a result, public spending on roads was cut and parts of the programme for new roads put on hold.⁶⁷

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Further, after Agenda 21 was launched, European initiatives like the Aalborg Charter stimulated European towns and communities to implement bottom-up sustainable development strategies. National strategies and practices differed. In Norway, the “Environmental Protection at the Local Level” programme which had been passed in 1987 provided a “good basis” for the Local Agenda process, as it stimulated environmental awareness and involved local groups and NGOs at the local level. The ministry of the environment initiated further programmes after 1992 aimed at linking global problems and local action, while environmental groups like Friends of the Earth played an active role in assisting local authorities and cooperating with the Norwegian Union of Municipal Employees. In Germany, where municipalities have a relatively large scope of action in the fields of energy, transport, water and waste management, it fell on the local authorities and grassroots initiatives to develop the Agenda process. Transnational networks such as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) and the Aalborg Charter were decisive for coordinating initiatives and disseminating knowledge from below. For many local initiatives, climate change and protest against a nuclear power plant were important issues to start with, and stimuli for further action came from Third World groups. The municipal authorities were, by and large, not very enthusiastic. By contrast, in the UK, a unitary state, the local authorities generally had no scope to act, and, during the 1990s, the central government failed to let them develop their role in the Local Agenda Process. Further, lack of resources and failure to appoint a lead figure to develop the Agenda constrained its implementation in British communities.⁶⁸ In general, the Earth Summit and the launch of Agenda 21 helped to create a significant European “moment” in the early 1990s. The concept of sustainable development – which mainly stemmed from the US and from Western experts’ groups as well as the UN arena – became Europeanized, as it strengthened intra-European civil society connections.⁶⁹

5 Sustainability and the European Union In the 1990s, the “sustainability” concept began to shape the EU’s environmental policy. It became the guiding principle – and part of the title – of the EU’s Fifth Environmental Action Programme of 1993, which addressed issues of climate policy, energy policy and biodiversity.⁷⁰ Differing considerably from previous action programmes, the 1993 Action Programme strengthened the subsidiary approach, as it demanded forms of cooperation between the EU, member states, local authorities, companies, and civil society movements in solving environ-

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mental problems. The Earth Summit and the threatening effects of global warming that had been laid bare in the Summit’s debates on the Climate Change Convention helped to support the guiding principle of sustainable development. Further, the EU referred to the Agenda 21 programme in order to encourage actors at the local level to engage in implementing sustainable development. What is more, sustainable development or sustainability, now often used as a noun, was mainly understood as a criterion for long-term and future-oriented politics, reconciling economy and ecology and edging society towards a “green economy”. Indeed, referring to sustainability could help to underline the image of the EU as a far-sighted union pursuing balanced and consensual solutions to future problems. As such, the Union and the member states made use of “ecological modernization” conceptions and a more “economized” understanding of sustainability. As Barnes and Hoerber put it very critically, at the core of the EU’s sustainable development narrative was the understanding, that “environmental protection is a pre-condition for economic growth, with other characteristics including partnership and shared responsibility across multi-levels of governance and the adoption of the model of ecological modernization”.⁷¹ Ecological modernization conceptions promised to harmonize the economy and ecology by using raw materials and resources more efficiently and by making use of technological innovation. An influential conception had been provided by the German political scientist Martin Jänicke, who moved from the Social Democrats to the “Alternative Liste” (part of the Green party family). During the 1980s and 1990s, his ideas of ecological modernization spread in both environmental movements and party politics. For him, ecological modernization could have a double usefulness, addressing ecological and economic aspects while also supporting the job market.⁷² A similar conception, with a focus on technological innovation, was advanced by Dutch sociologists grouped around Gert Spaargaren.⁷³ Thus, the concept was used by actors of all political parties, arguing that ecological modernization could uncouple the use of resources from economic growth.⁷⁴ It needs to be emphasized that ecological modernization did not automatically mean that economic considerations were to have priority: the focus was on efficiency and how to balance ecological, economic, and technological considerations. However, from the mid-1990s on, in EU’s understanding of sustainable development, the economic “pillar” gained new ground. The collapse of state socialism in Eastern and East Central Europe encouraged victory narratives for liberal capitalism, thus boosting already-circulating market-centred ideas.⁷⁵ New instruments in environmental policy, such as emissions trading, promised to strengthen sustainability by setting incentives in line with market requirements. The 1993 Environmental Action Programme also highlighted marked-based pol-

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icy instruments other than legislation. The 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam promoted environmental integration as the main means of pursuing sustainable development, thus stressing that other policies had to take environmental constraints into account. This involved deeper cooperation with other European Commission directorates-general, who were obliged to integrate environmental concerns into their policies.⁷⁶ Also, national sustainable development strategies emphasized market instruments to encourage production and consumers to change behaviour. The UK Sustainable Development Strategy launched by the Conservative government in 1994 proclaimed that, in environmental policy, the commitment was to make the markets work for the environment and to make use of economic instruments rather than regulation.⁷⁷ The peak of the economized understanding of sustainability in the EU can be located in the year 2000, when the Lisbon Strategy was launched by the EU heads of state and government. It aspired to make Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion”.⁷⁸ Many Western European political elites propagated green capitalism with an increasing conviction that it was a means to create sustainable growth and jobs, as well as to foster technological innovation. They were backed by European corporations such as Otto and Marks & Spencer who developed their own sustainability guidelines from the mid-1990s onwards. Understanding the concept as accounting to environmental and social responsibility as well as promoting efficiency, the companies were reacting, inter alia, to stakeholder expectations such as anticipated changes in the consumption behaviour of a new group of critical consumers. Although sustainability was used as a marketing tool enabling companies to claim that they were ecologically and socially responsible, these businesses were not simply “greenwashing”. In part they integrated existing policies into the new concept.⁷⁹ It is to assess how an economization of sustainability also led to a “greening of the economy”.⁸⁰ In Central and Eastern Europe, environmental organizations and Green parties emerged shortly after 1990, but their position was weak. Economic issues dominated the political scene, and post-materialist attitudes were more or less absent in post-socialist political cultures.⁸¹ The primary object of the states that acceded to the EU after 2004 was to catch up with Western Europe.⁸² An understanding of sustainability infiltrated by market-based, “neoliberal” thinking became particularly influential in Poland. The country’s economists had been in trans-bloc exchange communication with Western European and American experts ever since the late 1970s.⁸³ In 1997, Poland was the first Eastern European country to include sustainable development in its constitution. Two years later, during negotiations to gain access to the European Union, the Sejm passed a res-

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olution entitled (in translation) “Poland 2025 – Long-Term Strategy for Sustainable Development”. As its central goals, the strategy aimed “to ensure improvement in the welfare of Polish families”, to narrow the prosperity gap with the EU, and to secure for Poles a reasonable quality of life, a clean natural environment and the preservation of their country’s cultural heritage. Inspired by the Lisbon strategy, the Polish sustainable development strategy chiefly aimed at transforming Poland into a knowledge society fully integrated into the European and global economies. Hence, it focused mainly on fostering economic growth and technological efficiency and not on environmental or North-South issues.⁸⁴ In post-communist Romania, a notion of sustainable development as re-industrialization and pollution abatement competed with new and broader concepts of “dezvoltare sustinabila” and “dezvoltare durabila”, focusing on the “capacity of sustaining society development over time” without infringing the rights of future generations. In 1996, a UN development programme helped set up a National Centre for Sustainable Development under the patronage of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, but the experts there were caught up in governmental power struggles. The political process of establishing a sustainable development strategy was mainly driven by top-down approaches that left little room for citizen participation, and there was an emphasis on purely economic development in a time of liberalization and privatization. Governance structures were thus a “barrier” to the implementation of a sustainability discourse.⁸⁵ In general, the new Central and Eastern European EU member states have more or less managed to establish legal frameworks for ensuring sustainability guidelines according to European standards. In Russia, however, the Yeltsin government took part in the 1992 Earth Summit only half-heartedly and sent a minimal delegation. Although transnational and Western NGOs have helped various environmental groups and civil society activities, the environment has been “far from being a priority” in Russian politics.⁸⁶ Within the EU, the UN’s decision to convene a 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg led to renewed efforts to work out a more precise strategy. During its presidency of the European Council in 2001, Sweden too pushed for a better defined plan of action. The strategy that emerged, however, only added a third, environmental dimension to the Lisbon Strategy and did not get much additional political backing. In 2005, voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the Constitutional Treaty, and the ensuing crisis helped push the topic back onto the European agenda. A renewed sustainable development strategy stressing implementation and monitoring was launched in 2006. Referring to sustainable development as a future-oriented policy concept became a central instrument propping up the legitimacy of the EU.⁸⁷

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Meanwhile some environmental and One World movements rejected an economized and “weak” understanding of sustainable development and sometimes refrained from using the concept at all. As a result, new forms of collaboration between civil movements, expertise, and politics came into play. Academic critics of economization put the ecological pillar back at the centre, proposing that a combination of efficiency and sufficiency should be the guiding principles of sustainable development. The Greifswald approach of “starke Nachhaltigkeit” (“strong sustainability”), developed mainly by the philosopher Konrad Ott, maintains that natural capital – resources such as, for instance, wood – cannot be substituted satisfyingly by artificial capital. Drawing on theories of justice, this approach underlines the far-reaching responsibilities the present generation has to future generations more strongly than did the recommendations of the Brundtland Commission and the Rio Summit, which focused on anthropocentric needs more than on the ecosystem as a whole.⁸⁸ The ideas of “strong sustainability” have been put into action in a civil society context. The Agenda 21 process and proposals of decentralization put forward by environmental movements and the Greens have nurtured forms of regionalism and localism understood as specific opportunities for participative democracy. Examples of such participation at work are a series of “one-issue” initiatives such as the anti-pesticide campaign of the South Tyrolean commune Mals, which started in 2016. The campaign followed a local referendum and established the “Mals way” as a “social movement for democracy and sustainable regional development”.⁸⁹ Critics of globalization like the ATTAC network have also taken up the ideas of strong sustainability. A degrowth movement which first emerged in Germany, France, and other European societies at the turn of the millennium has rejected the growth paradigm altogether. The movement calls for political and economic reforms, but more explicitly encourages bottom-up collective actions that could lead to a reduction in the throughput of materials and to a drastic lowering in the use of non-sustainable resources. Some radical wings of the European Green parties, such as representatives of Europe Écologie/Les Verts in France, entertain ideas that are close to this.⁹⁰ Interestingly enough, the degrowth movement has taken up arguments The Limits to Growth study put forward in the early 1970s. In the course of the last decade, the concept of “transformation” has permeated European debates on sustainability. Calls to set a fundamental and necessary socio-ecologic transformation going, on local, national and global scales, have particularly infiltrated German political culture, where there are calls for Energiewende (“energy transition”) and Verkehrswende (“transport transition”).⁹¹ What is more, in 2015, when presenting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the need to “trans-

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form our world”. Social and developmental goals such as ending poverty, promoting well-being for all, ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and achieving gender equality were at the centre of the Agenda. The European Commission declared that it was committed to implement these sustainable development goals in all of its policies and would encourage EU countries to do the same.⁹² In this way, (re‐)formulations of the sustainable development concept in Europe oscillate between putting the ecological dimension back to the centre and a vague and somehow idealistic, multi-dimensional notion respecting the needs of all people of both the present and future generations in a global perspective.

Conclusions Though there was an older tradition of sustainable forestry concepts, European sustainability concepts and activities have strong roots in the 1970s and 1980s. Environmental policy and environmentalism took shape in Western Europe, and to a degree in Central and Eastern Europe, in the years around 1970. Global debates about the value of economic growth and the interdependence between environmental and developmental issues, stimulated by The Limits to Growth study and the Stockholm Conference, brought to the fore a conviction that growth and development had to be re-defined. In 1980, a concept of sustainable development as a guiding principle to reconcile the tensions between protection of genetic diversity, regeneration of resources, and the needs of the people was worked out by a group of experts gathered around UNEP and IUCN. In the mid-1980s, against a background of increasing American reluctance to engage in global environmental and developmental politics, it fell to Western European Social Democrats in particular to conceptualize a form of sustainable development that sought to attain environmental security, economic growth, and global justice. Further, the notion of sustainable growth became increasingly attractive to some Western European Christian Democrats and representatives of the conservative parties who referred to the issue of preserving wildlife and nature. In the wake of the Earth Summit of 1992, the Western European Greens and the environmental movement opened themselves up to the sustainable development concept, thus broadening it to include the decentralization of power, and the furtherance of women’s rights. During the 1990s, the Agenda 21 programme set both governmental National Sustainable Development Strategies as well as local civil society actions in motion. Further, the sustainable development concept infiltrated European integration policy and began to shape the EU’s environmental policy.

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As these activities strengthened intra-European connections, the sustainable development concept became Europeanized during the 1990s. Western and Eastern European attitudes and activities differed, however. Criticism of growth and post-materialist attitudes played only a minor role in post-socialist political cultures, whereas the ensuing spate of bottom-up projects in Western Europe was mainly led by environmental and developmental concerns. Nevertheless, the sustainability concept has always been used to claim that differences and conflicting interests can be balanced.⁹³ Also, it symbolizes future-oriented and farsighted political action. This is why it was extensively used by the EU: it accorded very well with its self-image as a partnership union pursuing balanced and consensual solutions to future problems.

Notes  “Aalborg Charter”, European Sustainable Cities Platform, https://sustainablecities.eu/fil eadmin/repository/Aalborg_Charter/Aalborg_Charter_English.pdf (accessed 20 April 2021).  See the project History of Sustainabilities funded by the Leibniz Association, which includes subprojects guided by the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, RWTH Aachen University, University of Augsburg, and Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/forschung/transformationen-in-der-neuesten-zeitgeschichte/pro jektuebersicht/geschichte-der-nachhaltigkeiten-diskurse-und-praktiken-seit-den-1970er-jahren/ (accessed 20 April 2021); for the American and global perspective, see Stephen Macekura, Of Limits and Growth. The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).  For a normative approach, see Routledge Handbook of the History of Sustainability, ed. Jeremy L. Caradonna (London: Routledge, 2018).  Pamela M. Barnes and Thomas C. Hoerber, eds., Sustainable Development and Governance in Europe. The Evolution of the Discourse on Sustainability (London: Routledge, 2013); Johannes Dingler, Postmoderne und Nachhaltigkeit. Eine diskurstheoretische Analyse der sozialen Konstruktionen von nachhaltiger Entwicklung (München: Oekom, 2003).  Hans Carl von Carlowitz, Sylvicultura Oeconomica oder: haußwirthliche Nachricht und Naturmäßige Anweisung zur Wilden Baum-Zucht (1713), quoted in Ulrich Grober, Die Entdeckung der Nachhaltigkeit. Kulturgeschichte eines Begriffs (München: Kunstmann, 2010), 117; Dieter Füsslein, ed., Die Erfindung der Nachhaltigkeit: Leben, Werk und Wirkung des Hans Carl von Carlowitz (München: Oekom, 2013).  Richard Hölzl, “Historicizing Sustainability. German Scientific Forestry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, Science as Culture 19, no. 4 (2010): 431– 460, quotations at 431, 450; Paul Warde, The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, c. 1500 – 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).  Simone Schleper, Planning for the Planet. Environmental Expertise and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 1960 – 1980 (New York: Berghahn, 2019), quotation at 5; Anna-Katharina Wöbse, Weltnaturschutz. Umweltdiplomatie in Völkerbund und Vereinten Nationen 1920 – 1950 (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2012).

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 Joachim Radkau, Die Ära der Ökologie. Eine Weltgeschichte (München: Beck, 2011), 134; on the beginning of the “Environmental Age”, see Sabine Höhler, Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960 – 1990 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015).  See Schleper, Planning; Patrick Kupper, “Die ‘1970er Diagnose’. Grundsätzliche Überlegungen zu einem Wendepunkt der Umweltgeschichte”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 43 (2003): 325 – 348.  See Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Who Should Pay for Pollution? The OECD, the European Communities and the Emergence of Environmental Policy in the Early 1970s”, European Review of History/ Revue européenne d’histoire 24, no. 3 (2017): 377– 398; Thorsten Schulz-Walden, Anfänge globaler Umweltpolitik. Umweltsicherheit in der internationalen Politik (1969 – 1975) (München: Oldenbourg 2013).  See Sandra Chaney and Rita Gudermann, “The East’s Contribution to International Conservation, Part 1”, Environmental Policy and Law 40, no. 2/3 (2010): 116 – 123; Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. McNeill, “Introduction”, in Nature and the Iron Curtain. Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries 1945 – 1990, ed. Astrid M. Kirchhof and John R. McNeill (University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 2019), 7– 8.  Richard S. Deese, “The New Ecology of Power. Julian and Aldous Huxley in the Cold War Era”, in Environmental Histories of the Cold War, ed. Corinna Unger and John R. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 283.  Kai Hünemörder, “Environmental Crisis and Soft Politics: Détente and the Global Environment”, in Environmental Histories of the Cold War, 257– 276; Elke Seefried, “Cooperation and Competition: Trans-Bloc Exchange of Knowledge during the Cold War” (keynote paper presented at the Workshop “Cold War and Environmental Sciences: Circulations, Exchanges and Cooperation between the East and the West, 1950s to 1990s”, London, Royal Geographical Society, 18 December 2018).  See Gilbert Glaser, “Acting together. Promoting integrated approaches, and the paradigm shift from environmental policy to sustainable development from Stockholm 1972 to Johannesburg 2002”, in Sixty years of Science at UNESCO 1945 – 2005, 2006, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ ark:/48223/pf0000189767 (accessed 20 December 2020). I also refer to Sabina Kubekė (Marburg) as a member of the History of Sustainabilities research group, who is working on sustainability in Poland.  Mignon Kirchhof and McNeill, “Introduction”, 6 – 7; Eagle Glassheim, “Building a Socialist Environment. Czechoslovak Environmental Policy from the 1960s to the 1980s”, in Nature and the Iron Curtain, 137– 150.  Christian Möller, Umwelt und Herrschaft in der DDR. Politik, Protest und die Grenzen der Partizipation in der Diktatur (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020); Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “East Germany’s Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State”, in Nature and the Iron Curtain, 219 – 232.  Liesbeth van de Grift, Hans Rodenburg, and Guus Wieman, “Entering the European Political Arena, Adapting to Europe: Greenpeace International, 1987– 1993”, in The Environment and the European Public Sphere. Perceptions, Actors, Policies, ed. by Christian Wenkel et al. (Winwick: The White Horse Press, 2020), at 152; see Kupper, “Diagnose”; Jens Ivo Engels, Naturpolitik in der Bundesrepublik. Ideenwelt und politische Verhaltensstile in Naturschutz und Umweltbewegung 1950 – 1980 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006); Stephen Milder, Greening Democracy. The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968 – 1983 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).  Dennis Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972), 170, 180, on the sustainable system,

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see 158; Elke Seefried, Zukünfte. Aufstieg und Krise der Zukunftsforschung 1945 – 1980 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), 255 – 292.  Elke Seefried, “Globale Sicherheit. Die Wurzeln des politischen Nachhaltigkeitsdiskurses und die Wahrnehmung globaler Interdependenz der 1970er und 1980er Jahre”, in “Security turns its eye exclusively to the future.” Zum Verhältnis von Sicherheit und Zukunft in der Geschichte, ed. Christoph Kampmann, Angela Marciniak, and Wencke Meteling (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2017), 353 – 388; Johan van Merriënboer, “Sicco Mansholt and ‘Limits to Growth’”, in Europe in a Globalizing World. Global Challenges and European Responses in the ‘long’ 1970s, ed. Claudia Hiepel (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), 319 – 342.  Patrick Kupper and Elke Seefried, “‘A computer’s vision of doomsday’. On the history of the 1972 study The Limits to Growth”, in Exploring Apocalyptica. Coming to Terms with Environmental Alarmism, ed. Frank Uekötter (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2018), 49 – 74.  Elke Seefried, “Globalized Science: The 1970s Futures Field”, Centaurus 59 (2017): 40 – 57.  Glenda Sluga, “The Transformation of International Institutions: Global Shock as Cultural Shock”, in Shock of the Global. The 1970s in Perspective, ed. Niall Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 223 – 236.  Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Only One Earth. The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet. An Unofficial Report Commissioned by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972); Lars-Göran Engfeldt, From Stockholm to Johannesburg and Beyond: The Evolution of the International System for Sustainable Development Governance and its Implications (Stockholm: Utrikesdepartementet, 2009), 44– 46, 56 – 61.  Dennis L. Meadows, “Introduction”, in Alternatives to Growth I: A Search for Sustainable Futures, ed. Dennis L. Meadows (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1977), xxiii.  “Blueprint for Survival”, The Ecologist 2 (1972): 8; Edward Goldsmith et al., Blueprint for Survival (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972); see Elke Seefried, “Towards ‘The Limits to Growth’? The Book and its Reception in West Germany and Britain 1972– 73”, German Historical Institute London Bulletin 33 (2011): 3 – 37.  Wolfgang Rüdig and Philip D. Lowe, “The withered ‘Greening’ of British Politics: A Study of the Ecology Party”, Political Studies 34 (1986): 262– 284; Lynn Bennie, “Greens in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Weak but persistent”, in Green Parties in Europe, ed. Emilie van Haute (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 196 – 216.  “Declaration of the Council of the European Communities and of the representatives of the Governments of the Member States meeting in the Council of 22 November 1973 on the programme of action of the European Communities on the environment”, https://eur-lex.europa. eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3 A41973X1220 (accessed 20 December 2020).  Christoph Knill and Duncan Liefferink, “The Establishment of EU Environmental Policy”, in Environmental Policy in the EU: Actors, Institutions, and Processes, ed. Andrew Jordan and Camilla Adelle (London: Routledge, 2012), 13 – 31, at 14; Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Making the Polluter Pay. How the European Communities Established Environmental Protection”, in International Organizations and Environmental Protection. Conservation and Globalization the Twentieth Century, ed. Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 182– 210.  Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Greening Europe? Environmental Interest Groups and the Europeanisation of a new Policy Field”, Comparativ 20, no. 3 (2010): 83 – 104.  See van de Grift, Rodenburg, and Wieman, “Entering the European Political Arena”, 147– 161.  Emilie van Haute, “The Development of Green Parties in Europe: Obstacles and Opportunities 1970 – 2015”, in The Environment and the European Public Sphere, 172– 174; Gareth Price-Tho-

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mas, “Green Party Ideology: Divergences and Continuities in Germany, France and Britain”, in Green Parties in Europe, 280 – 297.  “Bundesprogramm der Grünen”, 1980, 10, 7, https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/assets/ boell.de/images/download_de/publikationen/1980_001_Grundsatzprogramm_Die_Gruenen. pdf?dimension1=division_agg (accessed 20 April 2021); see Silke Mende, “Nicht rechts, nicht links, sondern vorn.” Eine Geschichte der Gründungsgrünen (München: Oldenbourg, 2011); Seefried, “Towards ‘The Limits to Growth’”.  See also in the following: Stephen J. Macekura, “Towards ‘Sustainable’ Development. The United Nations, NGOs and the Crafting of the World Conservation Strategy”, in International Organizations and Environmental Protection, 241– 267.  Ward and Dubos, Only One Earth; see the report of Ward’s assistant David Satterthwaite, Barbara Ward and the origins of Sustainable Development (London: IIED, 2006), 6 – 18.  See Rüdig and Lowe, “Withered ‘Greening’”; Karl-Werner Brand, “Vergleichendes Resümee”, in Neue soziale Bewegungen in Westeuropa und den USA. Ein internationaler Vergleich, ed. KarlWerner Brand (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 1985), 325.  International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), eds., World Conservation Strategy: Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development. (Gland: IUCN/ UNEP/WWF, 1980); Schleper, Planning; Macekura, Limits, 219 – 223.  UN Resolution 38/161, adopted 19 December 1983, www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp? symbol=A/RES/38/161&Lang=E&Area=RESOLUTION; UN Archives, S-1051 0014 05, Draft Resolution Recommended to the General Assembly for Consideration and Adoption by the Governing Council of UNEP at its eleventh session, adopted 23 May 1983: Process of Preparation of the Environmental Perspective to the Year 2000 and Beyond, and Notes on the Secretary General’s Meeting with Mostafa Tolba, Executive Director UNEP, 9 November 1983.  See for the meetings, Iris Borowy, Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future: A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013).  See Borowy, Defining, 75 – 161; Macekura, “Towards”, 255 – 256.  World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8.  See Seefried, “Global Security”.  Quoted in Borowy, Defining, 95.  Werner Krolikowski, in Globale Umweltpolitik als gemeinsame Überlebensfrage – neue Kooperationsformen zwischen Ost und West. 87. Bergedorfer Gesprächskreis 1989, https://www. koerber-stiftung.de/bergedorfer-gespraechskreis/protokolle, at 10; Bundesarchiv Berlin, DK 5/ 1531, “Vorlage für das Politbüro des ZK der SED, Bericht der Weltkommission für Umwelt und Entwicklung und Vorschläge für nationale Folgeaktivitäten”, confirmed by the Politbüro, 18 October 1988.  Tobias Huff, Natur und Industrie im Sozialismus. Eine Umweltgeschichte der DDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 195 – 200, 219 – 252.  Political Archives of the Auswärtiges Amt (PA), 132176, Auswärtiges Amt to Staatssekretär, 26 November 1984; PA, 132283, Bundesministerium des Innern to Auswärtiges Amt and Telex Bundesministerium der Finanzen to Auswärtiges Amt, 17 January 1985 and 6 December 1984.  PA, 194474, Lemp/Reinicke to Staatssekretär, 26 June 1987.

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 “Freiheit in Verantwortung. Grundsatzprogramm der CDU Deutschlands”, 1994, http://www. kas.de/upload/ACDP/CDU/Programme_Beschluesse/1994_Grundsatzprogramm_Hamburg_pdf (accessed 20 December 2020); Deutscher Bundestag, Minutes, 10 October 1991, 4300, 4306.  Conservation and Development. The British Approach. The United Kingdom Government’s Response to the World Conservation Strategy (London: Department of the Environment, 1986); see Jon Agar, Science Policy under Thatcher (London: UCL, 2019), 247– 249.  Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to the Royal Society”, 27 September 1988, https://www.mar garetthatcher.org/document/107346 (accessed 21 April 2021).  This Common Inheritance (London: Department of the Environment, 1990).  Neil Carter and Philip Lowe, “The conservative government and sustainable development in the UK: 1988 – 97”, in The Emergence of Ecological Modernisation, ed. Stephen C. Young (London: Routledge, 2000), 171– 188, quotation at 180.  Macekura, Limits, 261– 303.  Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 1992, Principle 3, https://www.un.org/ en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_CONF. 151_26_Vol.I_Declaration.pdf (accessed 20 April 2020).  Macekura, Limits, 270.  Marc Pallemearts, “Developing more sustainably?” in Environmental Policy in the EU: Actors, Institutions, and Processes, 349 – 350; Pamela M. Barnes and Thomas C. Hoerber, “Linking the Discourse on Sustainability and Governance”, in Sustainable Development and Governance in Europe, 120 – 127.  PA, 195077, Telex Krapp, Brussels, to the German Auswärtiges Amt, 5 May 1992.  Rio Declaration, Principles 3 and 8.  Eva Oberloskamp, “Sustainable Energy Futures. West German Civil Society Perspectives during the 1990s” (paper presented at the Leibniz Conference on the Sustainable Development Goals, 14 September 2018); Emilie van Haute, “The Development of Green Parties in Europe: Obstacles and Opportunities 1970 – 2015”, in The Environment and the European Public Sphere, 172– 174.  See the comments that the former co-founder of the German Green Party, Rudolf Bahro, made on articles of the Brundtland Report: AGG (Archives of the German Greens), A Bahro, 106.  Radkau, Ära, 498 – 506.  AGG, B II 2, BT 599, papers of the Projektstelle; see Silke Mende, “Von der ‘Anti-Parteien-Partei’ zur ‘ökologischen Reformpartei’. Die Grünen und der Wandel des Politischen”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 52 (2012): 273 – 316.  AGG, B II 2, BT 600, papers of Eva Quistorp and Green Group UNCED Paper Draft, 1 March 1992.  See Oberloskamp, “Sustainable Energy Futures”.  Thomas Worm, “Umtausch leider ausgeschlossen”, Greenpeace Magazin 3 (1993): 10 – 15, quotations 11, 12.  European Council in Lisbon 26/27 June 1992, Conclusions of the presidency, https://www. consilium.europa.eu/media/20510/1992_june_-_lisbon__eng_.pdf, 16 (accessed 10 April 2021); Marc Pallemearts, “Developing more sustainably?” in Environmental Policy in the EU: Actors, Institutions, and Processes, 349 – 350; Pamela M. Barnes and Thomas C. Hoerber, “Linking the Discourse on Sustainability and Governance”, in Sustainable Development and Governance in Europe, 120 – 127.

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 Barry Dalal-Clayton et al., “National sustainable development strategies. Experience and dilemmas”, in Environmental Planning Issues (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 1994), 21.  Carter and Lowe, “The conservative government”, quotations 173, 185.  Heather Voisey et al., “The Political Significance of Local Agenda 21: The Early Stages of Some European Experience”, in Local Environment 1, no. 1 (1996): 33 – 50, at 38; Lafferty and Eckerberg, From the Earth Summit.  On Europeanization understood as “a variety of political, social, economic and cultural processes that promote (or modify) a sustainable strengthening of intra-European connections and similarities through acts of emulation, exchange, and entanglement and that have been experienced and labelled as ‘European’ in the course of history”, see Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Kiran Klaus Patel, “Introduction”, in Europeanization in the Twentieth Century. Historical Approaches, ed. Kiran Klaus Patel and Martin Conway (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2010), 2.  “Towards Sustainability. A European Community Programme of Policy and Action in relation to the Environment and Sustainable Development”, 17 May 1993, https://ec.europa.eu/environ ment/archives/action-programme/env-act5/pdf/5eap.pdf (accessed 20 December 2020).  Pamela M. Barnes and Thomas C. Hoerber, “Conclusion – not one Discourse, but many?”, in Sustainable Development and Governance in Europe, ed. Barnes and Hoerber, 223.  Martin Jänicke, Umweltpolitische Prävention als ökologische Modernisierung und Strukturpolitik (Berlin: WZB, 1984); critically John Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 137– 154.  Arthur P. J. Mol and Gert Spaargaren, “Ecological Modernization Theory in Debate. A Review”, Environmental Politics 9, no. 1 (2000): 17– 49.  See Ökologische Modernisierung. Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart eines Konzepts in Umweltpolitik und Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Martin Bemmann, Birgit Metzger, and Roderich van Detten (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2014); for the British case, Carter and Low, “The conservative government”, 181.  Andreas Wirsching, Der Preis der Freiheit. Geschichte Europas in unserer Zeit (München: Beck, 2012).  See Jan Henrik Meyer, “Environmental Policy”, in The European Commission 1986 – 2000. History and Memories of an Institution, ed. Vincent Dujardin et al. (Luxemburg: Amt für Veröffentlichungen der EU, 2019), 386; Pallemaerts, “Developing”.  Carter and Low, “The conservative government”, 183; Making Markets Work for the Environment (London: Department of the Environment, 1993).  Presidency Conclusions, Lisbon European Council, 23/24 March 2000, https://www.europarl. europa.eu/summits/lis1_en.htm (accessed 20 December 2020); Wirsching, Preis, 247– 266.  Here I am indebted to Karen Froitzheim, member of the History of Sustainabilities research group, who is writing a PhD thesis on this topic. See Inga Nuhn, Entwicklungslinien betrieblicher Nachhaltigkeit nach 1945. Ein deutsch-niederländischer Unternehmensvergleich (Münster: Waxmann, 2013).  Rüdiger Graf, “Die Ökonomisierung der Umwelt und die Ökologisierung der Wirtschaft seit den 1970er Jahren”, in Ökonomisierung. Debatten und Praktiken in der Zeitgeschichte, ed. Rüdiger Graf (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019), 188 – 211, quotation at 206.  Emilie van Haute, “The Development of Green Parties in Europe: Obstacles and Opportunities 1970 – 2015”, in The Environment and the European Public Sphere, 170 – 171.

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 Simona Davidescu, “The sustainable development discourse in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. The case of Romania”, in Sustainable Development and Governance in Europe, 163 – 176, at 163.  I am indebted to Florian Peters, who is working on a study on the circulation of economic knowledge during system transformation in Poland between 1975 and 1995.  Ryszard Piasecki and Karina Kostrzewa, “Approaches to Sustainable Development in Poland”, in Sustainable Development in Europe. A Comparative Discourse Analysis, ed. Hartmut Marhold (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2009), 125 – 138.  Davidescu, “Evolving”, quotations at 168, 164.  See Paul Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2013), 300 – 307, quotation at 318.  Pallemaerts, “Developing”.  See Tanja von Egan-Krieger et al., eds. Die Greifswalder Theorie starker Nachhaltigkeit: Ausbau, Anwendung und Kritik (Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, 2009).  https://www.der-malser-weg.com/ (accessed 18 April 2021).  See https://attacberlin.de/ags/degrowth (accessed 18 April 2021); Assem Slim, “The impact of de-growth (la décroissance) on the discourse of sustainability”, in Sustainable Development and Governance in Europe; Eva Oberloskamp, “Energy and the Environment in Parliamentary Debates in the Federal Republic of Germany, United Kingdom and France from the 1970s to the 1990s”, in The Environment and the European Public Sphere.  https://www.wbgu.de/de/publikationen/publikation/welt-im-wandel-gesellschaftsvertragfuer-eine-grosse-transformation (accessed 20 December 2020); Die sozial-ökologische Transformation der Welt. Ein Handbuch, ed. Karl-Werner Brand (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2018).  https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda; https://ec.europa.eu/international-partnerships/sustain able-development-goals_en (accessed 20 December 2020).  Barnes and Hoerber, “Conclusion”, 228.

Selected Bibliography Barnes, Pamela M., and Thomas C. Hoerber, eds. Sustainable Development and Governance in Europe. The Evolution of the Discourse on Sustainability. London: Routledge, 2013. Borowy, Iris. Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future: A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission). Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013. Carter, Neil, and Philip Lowe. “The conservative government and sustainable development in the UK: 1988 – 97”. In The Emergence of Ecological Modernisation, edited by Stephen C. Young. 171 – 188. London: Routledge, 2000. Dingler, Johannes. Postmoderne und Nachhaltigkeit: Eine diskurstheoretische Analyse der sozialen Konstruktionen von Nachhaltiger Entwicklung. München: Oekom-Verlag, 2003. Dryzek, John S. The Politics of the Earth. Environmental Discourses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Egan-Krieger, Tanja von, Julia Schultz, Philipp P. Thapa, and Lieske Voget, eds. Die Greifswalder Theorie starker Nachhaltigkeit: Ausbau, Anwendung und Kritik. Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, 2009.

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Engfeldt, Lars-Göran. From Stockholm to Johannesburg and Beyond: The Evolution of the International System for Sustainable Development Governance and its Implications. Stockholm: Utrikesdepartementet, 2009. Grober, Ulrich. Die Entdeckung der Nachhaltigkeit: Kulturgeschichte eines Begriffs, München: Kunstmann, 2010. Hölzl, Richard. “Historicizing Sustainability. German Scientific Forestry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”. Science as Culture 19 (2010): 431 – 460. International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), eds. World Conservation Strategy: Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development. Gland: IUCN/UNEP/WWF, 1980. Kupper, Patrick. “Die ‘1970er Diagnose’. Grundsätzliche Überlegungen zu einem Wendepunkt der Umweltgeschichte”. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 43 (2003): 325 – 348. Kupper, Patrick, and Elke Seefried. “‘A Computer’s Vision of doomsday’. On the History of the 1972 Study The Limits to Growth”. In Exploring Apocalyptica. Coming to Terms with Environmental Alarmism, edited by Frank Uekötter, 49 – 74. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2018. Lafferty, William M., and Katarina Eckerberg. From the Earth Summit to Local Agenda 21: Working Towards Sustainable Development. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013. Macekura, Stephen J. Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Macekura, Stephen J. “Towards ‘Sustainable’ Development. The United Nations, NGOs and the Crafting of the World Conservation Strategy”. In International Organizations and Environmental Protection. Conservation and Globalization the Twentieth Century, edited by Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer, 241 – 267. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2017. Marhold, Hartmut, ed. Sustainable Development in Europe. A Comparative Discourse Analysis. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2009. Meadows, Dennis L. Donella Meadows, Erich Zahn and Peter Milling. The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books, 1972. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. “Environmental Policy”. In The European Commission 1986 – 2000. History and Memories of an Institution, edited by Vincent Dujardin, Eric Bussière, Piers Ludlow, Federico Romero, Dieter Schlenker, and Antonio Varsori, 371 – 387. Luxemburg: Amt für Veröffentlichungen der Europäischen Union, 2019. Oberloskamp, Eva. “Energy and the Environment in Parliamentary Debates in the Federal Republic of Germany, United Kingdom and France from the 1970s to the 1990s”. In The Environment and the European Public Sphere. Perceptions, Actors, Policies, edited by Christian Wenkel, Eric Bussière, Anahita Grisoni, and Hélène Miard-Delacroix, 205 – 219. Winwick: The White Horse Press, 2020. O’Riordan, Tim, and Voisey, Heather ed. The Transition to Sustainability. The Politics of Agenda 21 in Europe, London: Earthscan, 1998. Pallemaerts, Marc. “Developing more sustainably?” In Environmental Policy in the EU: Actors, Institutions, and Processes, edited by Andrew Jordan and Camilla Adelle, 346 – 366. London: Routledge, 2012.

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Seefried, Elke. “Rethinking Progress. On the Origin of the Modern Sustainability Discourse, 1970 – 2000”. Journal of Modern European History 13, no. 3 (2015): 377 – 400. Seefried, Elke. “Globale Sicherheit. Die Wurzeln des politischen Nachhaltigkeitsdiskurses und die Wahrnehmung globaler Interdependenz der 1970er und 1980er Jahre”. In “Security turns its eye exclusively to the future”. Zum Verhältnis von Sicherheit und Zukunft in der Geschichte, edited by Christoph Kampmann, Angela Marciniak, and Wencke Meteling, 353 – 388. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2017. Voisey, Heather, Christiane Beuermann, Liv Astrid Sverdrup, and Tim O’Riordan. “The Political Significance of Local Agenda 21: The Early Stages of Some European Experience”. Local Environment 1, no. 1 (1996): 33 – 50. World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future. Oxford and New York 1987.

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16 Europeanizing Biodiversity: International Organizations as Environmental Actors Abstract The twentieth century has witnessed a rise to prominence of the concept of biodiversity and underlying concerns with nature conservation, extinction of species, environmentalism, and the structural decline of biodiversity. With national governments and civil-society organizations taking the lead, biodiversity has eventually become part of the policy agenda of several international organizations. The present contribution focuses on four predominantly European organizations and their understanding and prioritisation of biodiversity issues: the League of Nations, Comecon, the Council of Europe, and the European Community/Union. The chapter demonstrates a transition from the protection of individual rare species threatened by extinction to the more structural approach of the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats and Natura 2000. It shows that in addition to concerns about environmental degradation, international organizations’ embracing of a biodiversity agenda was always informed by considerations of power and strategic interests as well. Keywords biodiversity; extinction; international organizations; Natura 2000; European Union

1 Introduction During its first weeks in office, the von der Leyen Commission (installed in 2019) announced the European Green Deal for the European Union (EU). Frans Timmermans, one of the three executive vice presidents, is in charge of the programme with a budget of EUR 1 trillion, which aims at developing the first European Climate Law. Despite the hefty price tag, the information provided by the European Commission, in the format of a an official communication, to EU citizens focused on benefits (“What’s in it for me? Advantages for individuals, businesses and society”¹) instead of costs and consumer renunciation. It was only 35 years ago that the Delors Commission (1985 – 1989) made the environment, for the first time, part of one of the then 12 directorates-general (DG) in the form of the DG Environment, Consumer Protection and Transport. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-017

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In strictly legal terms, the European Communities (EC) would only obtain competence in the field of environmental policy when the Single European Act was adopted in 1986.² However, beginning in the 1970s, nature conservation and environmental protection had already been gradually added to the European agenda, being considered inherent to the level playing field of the common market. A central feature of the endeavours to protect Europe’s nature since then has been the combination of environmental and instrumental motives. European institutions have identified “Europe’s nature”, the environment, and climate change as vehicles to demonstrate their own raison d’être and to find new momentum and supporters of the European project – after periods of political standstill (then) and the Brexit conundrum (now). Conserving Europe’s biological diversity – its flora, fauna, and habitats – involves a wide array of actors, including state and subnational authorities, European institutions, scientific experts, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) representing environmental interests, hunters, farmers, and fishermen. Through their actions, these actors have contributed to a veritable Europeanization of biodiversity protection, leading in 1992 to the adoption of the Habitats Directive and the creation of Natura 2000, a network of nature protection areas in the territory of the EU. Europeanization, as understood in this context, refers to multiple things. First of all, in the course of the twentieth century, biodiversity policies became more uniform; they became entangled and covered an ever-larger territory. Spatially, green belts and ecological corridors have served to enhance the connectivity of protected areas in Europe. While Natura 2000 applies to the territory of the EU, countries such as Georgia, Belarus, Norway, and Moldova are connected through the Council of Europe’s (CoE) Emerald Network of conservation areas. Second, in legal terms, biodiversity policies became increasingly integrated. Starting with the CoE’s Bern Convention (1979), which countries can voluntarily sign, nature conservation policies became part of the European Union’s acquis, the body of common rights and obligations that are binding for all EC/EU countries. Third, a shared love of European wildlife and landscapes was, and still is, regarded by some of the actors involved as a potential source of a European identity “by giving people a collective sense of the expanse and beauty of our continent”.³ This chapter focuses on international organizations and their contribution to nature conservation and restoration policies in twentieth-century Europe. The four international organizations that this chapter analyses – the League of Nations (1920 – 1946), the CoE (since 1949), the EC/EU (since 1957), and Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon, 1949 – 1991) – have been selected not just because they were the only or most important organizations when it comes to pushing for biodiversity protection policies, but also because they were the

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main (non-military) organizations for regional cooperation in Europe in the twentieth century. In all four cases, environmental and biodiversity policies were, in reality, only introduced at a later stage. This holds true for the League, being initially a security organization with a largely European membership. The European Economic Community (EEC) and Comecon, as Cold War organizations of economic integration, took decades to make the environment part of their agenda. For centralistic Comecon, resource efficiency was the incentive; for the more federalist EEC, distortion of competition in the common market turned out to be an important impetus. The CoE, with its membership including European and North American states as well as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (and its successor states), followed the broadening of the concept of human rights to include second- and third-generation rights, such as human environment. This chapter features two types of actors. Firstly, there are those international organizations adopting conceptual frameworks for environmental issues and subsequently enacting regulations. The difficult negotiations within each international organization and discussions with stakeholders consequently act as a background. Given their very nature, international organizations were rarely the first to champion far-reaching concepts of environmentalism. And in several cases, when they eventually adopted such concepts, their motives were at least partly self-serving or unrelated. Secondly, it may be argued that these concepts themselves are agents of change. Arguably, biodiversity and cognate concepts played an independent role in shaping national and international policies. In a policy field as contested as the environment, the question of how an issue is framed strongly influences the terms on which such policies are made. In line with this, actors involved in environmental policy-making have gone to great lengths to ensure that their preferred concepts would become accepted as the dominant frame to talk about and to regulate the issues at stake. Examples of such key concepts include biodiversity, sustainability (see chapter 15 by Seefried), and, more recently, carbon neutrality. This is especially the case in the EU, where “doing” environmental protection entails lengthy negotiating processes among European institutions, member states, and multiple stakeholders. Rather than issuing top-down commands, the European Commission can only propose legislation and work towards the adoption of directives and regulations. Within such processes, the successful framing of the problem at hand structures the playing field and puts certain actors in a more advantageous position than others. Clearly, such concepts did not fall out of thin air, nor were they the only ones in use within the wider community of scientists, activists, and policy-makers throughout the twentieth century. Rather, they had often already circulated with-

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in national or international settings, such as the United Nations and the CoE, and found their way into the EC through historical actors such as nature conservationists moving between those different political arenas. For this reason, the EU’s thinking and acting (i. e. strategic concepts and corresponding policy measures) will be put in a broader range of international organizations. The League of Nations preceded the EU in this policy field, introducing nature conservation into international politics. While being a global organization in name, the League of Nations was strongly European-centred in terms of the countries involved and the geographical areas on which it focused. In that sense, we regard the League of Nations as the first intergovernmental organization active in the field of nature conservation in Europe. The CoE added nature conservation to its agenda in the 1960s, with a focus on species and their habitats. In the 1980s, however, the CoE came to champion a more structural concern for species and their habitats. By mainstreaming the very concept of biodiversity, which was gaining traction in the 1980s, its directives would come to shape EU environmental policies. Last but not least, Comecon was both the EEC’s communist rival during the Cold War and, from the perspective of the new member states joining in 2004 and 2007, its predecessor. Although the agenda included the prevention of wasting and depleting natural resources from an economic perspective, biodiversity did not figure on its agenda at all. Arguably, in post-communist societies, biodiversity was a concept transferred from the EU as well as from national environmental policies and protests. In the current climate crisis, biodiversity has been redefined as a quantification of natural heterogeneity – itself a bulwark against global catastrophes. Brussels and Strasbourg have just begun to translate this new concept into conventions and policies. This is illustrated in the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, which specifically presents the protection of wildlife as one of the ways in which societies can become more resilient in the face of climate change.⁴

2 International Organizations and Nature Conservation Biodiversity as a concept was only introduced into scientific parlance by Thomas E. Lovejoy in 1985.⁵ However, concern about diminishing natural diversity, threats to the richness of flora and fauna as well as man-made extinction had arisen much earlier among naturalists. Dominant strands of thought and modes of preventing extinction – the compilation of endangered species lists,

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for instance – originate in the nineteenth century, when naturalists began to create taxonomies of living organisms, to make lists of endangered species, and to draw attention to the threat of extinction. Their advocacy efforts focused on regulations to preserve specific species and to create nature reserves, such as national parks.⁶ In the course of the twentieth century, their focus shifted from individual species, usually those that were economically valuable such as mammals, birds, and fish, to associations of organisms. This shift is illustrated by the development of scientific ecology, which started in the 1920s. The post-war period saw a turn to global ecosystem ecology. This came to serve as a scientific base both for the protection of threatened species in particular regions as well as for broader types of natural resource management, which was included on the agenda of organizations such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature in the 1950s.⁷ The rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s strongly impacted the nature conservation movement. On the one hand, the broader political, social, and cultural changes of the decade, such as the emergence of an environmental consciousness among citizens, proved fertile ground for nature conservationists’ attempts to put the extinction of species back on the political agenda. In particular, wildlife extinction drew the public’s interest. On the other hand, the environmental movement was mostly worried about the destruction and degeneration of its own habitat and “Planet Earth” by the human race, for example nuclear waste and resource depletion. Policy measures regarding industrial pollution, related health risks, and waste were more prevalent but concerned humans rather than biodiversity.⁸ Biodiversity came second on environmentalists’ agenda. The policy measures adopted at that time related to the preservation and restauration of habitats for a wider range of (migratory) birds and mammals. Arguably, measures of this kind remained tied to conservationism rather than to environmentalism, as they did not entail a fundamental criticism of the role of humans in the degeneration of the environment and failed to question the right to exploit nature and natural resources beyond the threshold of sustainability. In the 1980s, conservation biologists, such as Lovejoy, Michael Soulé, and Edward O. Wilson, sought to tackle the crisis in conservation by introducing the new and mediagenic concept of biodiversity, a contraction of biological and diversity. ⁹ However, it was soon eclipsed by new, even more appealing concepts, such as sustainable development and climate change.¹⁰ In current climate debates, biodiversity is a holistic concept and refers to all forms of flora and fauna as well as ecosystems. As such, it is directly linked to the term Anthropocene, introduced in the mid-1980s as well, to underscore present-day, man-made

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mass extinction.¹¹ The focus of biodiversity is no longer on individual species but on the diversity of landscapes and biomass in a quantitative way. The diversity of habitats is portrayed as the key guarantor of biodiversity. The motivation has acquired a new urgency and focuses on the dire global consequences for humankind itself. The urgently needed policy measures are far more drastic and comprehensive for economic activities and life styles. What sets conservationists apart from both environmentalists and climate activists is their inclination to be content with establishing the causes of the decline in biological diversity and with protecting species without aiming to fundamentally change the political and socioeconomic order responsible for this dire state. Environmentalists and climate activists are more inclined to demand fundamental changes in humankind’s exploitation and management of the planet and its natural resources. Throughout their history, advocates for the conservation of flora, fauna, and habitats have undertaken activities for a variety of reasons. These include aesthetic arguments, utilitarian motives (plants and animals are economically valuable resources), the pursuit of science (extinction limits the study of living organisms), and the intrinsic value of non-human beings, to name but a few.¹² However, as the focus of this chapter is on international organizations that have shaped the development of nature conservation and restoration regimes in Europe, only those arguments that were put forward by and within these organizations, with a tangible impact on their policies, will be discussed. Shifting our view to these organizations – the League of Nations, the CoE, and the EC/EU – and their handling of natural diversity issues, a pattern emerges (Comecon constituted an exception, having no interest in biodiversity whatsoever). For decades, up until about 1970, the common denominator was a genetic or species view of biodiversity. Organizations like the League of Nations or the CoE were not concerned with rare species going extinct. Whaling and some other hunting practices thus required regulation for economic and ecological reasons. Arguably, in the 1970s, international action concerning biodiversity remained associated with conservationism, since natural diversity was not a prominent part of the new environmentalist agenda. Pollution and depletion of resources as a direct threat to humankind and wildlife refuges were two different issues and concepts. The more recent conventions by the CoE and the implementation by the EU demonstrate the same.

3 The League of Nations: Endangered Species Extinction, as an antonym of biodiversity, is a relatively recent concept referring to human interference with natural habitats while acknowledging the responsi-

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bility towards preventing species from becoming extinct. The classic example is the dodo, a flightless bird species from the island of Mauritius, first described at the end of the sixteenth century and extinct less than a century later. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did biologists come to accept that extinction was a unmistakable possibility in nature. The dodo is a case in point; the aurochs (extinct in 1627) and the Tasmanian tiger (1936) are others. Scientific taxonomies and population counts made the ongoing destruction of natural habitats and the conservation of landscapes a public issue by revealing the irreversible extinction of species and the conservation of endangered animals, predominantly mammals (see figure 1) and birds (see chapters 3 by De Bont and 4 by Wöbse/Ziemek). Unlike the above cases of rare exotic animals, two mammals aroused concerns beyond a small community of conservationists, becoming known to a worldwide public: the buffalo and the whale. For a long time, both were thought to exist in such plentiful numbers that even intense hunting and modern hunting techniques could not endanger their sustainability as a species. More importantly, in the two cases, the threat of extinction had disastrous consequences for entire industries involved in hunting and processing these large mammals of the American plains and the oceans, respectively. Thus, extinction became primarily an economic rather than an ecological category and concern.¹³ The same longterm economically motivated concept of sustainability is apparent in forestry (see chapter 7 by Hölzl/Oosthoek).¹⁴ In the West, nature conservation made some headway around the turn of the century, with the creation of the world’s first national parks: the Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the Swiss National Park in 1914, or the Białowieża National Park in Poland in 1932.¹⁵ After the First World War, nature conservationists were quick to realize that the first endeavour at establishing a world government, the League of Nations, offered new opportunities for their agenda. In addition to its core responsibility, world peace and conflict management, the League embraced a wide array of other issues, ranging from economic development, migration, and refugees to trafficking, intellectual property rights, and, indeed, nature conservation. Setbacks in the 1930s to the League carrying out its primary aims made the League’s Secretariat all the more eager to claim success in such supplementary issues. Thus, nature conservation not only resonated with the organization’s ambitious objectives of world government, peace, and prosperity but also served to prop up the reputation of the League in its waning years.¹⁶ Conservationist NGOs and famous protagonists, such as Paul Sarasin and Pieter van Tienhoven, were in close contact with the League’s Secretariat, situated in Geneva. The League, conversely, was the first international organization to involve such (idealistic) stakeholders in its endeavours. Their awareness of the need for concerted action to safeguard a variety of habitats and species was

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Figure 1: European bison. William Berryman Scott, 1913, Wikipedia Commons.

spearheaded by the concept of national parks. The efforts to install a League commission for nature protection, however, came to naught. Actually, it would only bear fruit after the Second World War and the demise of the League. The traction of these ideas among the member states of the world organization at large seems to have been insufficient in a time of economic crisis. In retrospect, the nature conservation issues on the League’s agenda mainly regarded fisheries and whaling (see figure 2). Its main feat was the Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (1931), arguably a prefiguration of the United Nations worldwide moratorium on whaling in 1981. The convention was greatly facilitated by the concerns of whaling nations (the United Kingdom, Norway, and Germany) over the economic extinction of the most sought-after species (i. e. sperm whales, humpback whales, and right whales). Due to much-improved whaling techniques, whale populations decreased markedly over the 1930s as well as the yield of the whaling expeditions. Given the small profit margins, the trade-off between maximum profit and the sustainability of the whale populations required worldwide regulation. The League consistently referred to whales as “riches of the seas” and never doubted humankind’s right to exploit these riches to the greatest degree. The convention failed to mention at all the

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Figure 2: Whaling harpoon cannon from the 1870s in the Slottsfjellmuseet, Wolfmann 2020, Wikipedia Commons.

threat of ecological extinction of rarer wale species that were of no interest to the hunters.¹⁷ In sum, as far as biodiversity and the extinction of species were concerned, the League’s Secretariat, experts, and associated conservationists were far more ambitious than the member states. Its main tangible achievement, and an exemplary one for the post-war era, was driven by the economic interests of a number of member states. Fishing and hunting were regulated with an eye on the sustainability of species – and the related industries. The League’s legacy, as far as biodiversity was concerned, mainly evolved around notions of sustainability, habitats, and natural richness as such, rather than conservationist strategies and their implementation. Not only were its policy measures largely ineffective but they were also motivated by economic rather than by ecological interests. The League’s understanding of environmental protection was linked to a handful of mammals, magnificent landscapes, and national parks. In the long run, however, the legacy of the League – both in the internationalization of nature conservation and environmental policies and in the powerful concepts of sustainability and biodiversity – became building blocks for the CoE, the United Nations, and the EU in this policy field.

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4 Comecon and Resource Management Comecon was founded in 1949 in reaction to the Marshall Plan and, later on, to the EC. Much like its capitalist counterpart, the Eastern bloc organization was not a forum for issues of conservation or the environment. In the 1970s, a logic of economic sustainability placed natural resources on the agenda of the Comecon meetings. A quarter of a century later, the accession process to the EU thus confronted ten candidate member states with EU regulations for environmental issues in general and biodiversity in particular, which had no equivalent in previous multilateral cooperation in the East. Yet, communist states had subscribed to most of the worldwide nature conservation agreements. Nature parks and the conservation of natural landscapes and habitats coexisted with policies of forced industrialization.¹⁸ In the interwar period, not only the Soviet Union but also the new nationstates of East-Central Europe had been part of the general trend towards nature conservation. Nature parks were created in most Eastern European countries more or less simultaneously with those in Western Europe. The Voronezh Nature Reserve was created in 1927, the Retezat National Park in the Romanian Carpathian region in 1935, and the then Yugoslav Plitvice Lakes National Park in 1949. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the League for the Protection of Nature was one of the largest mass organizations, with up to 50 million members. In July 1975, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union passed the Act on Protection of Nature and Exploitation of Natural Resources. Most people’s republics introduced a national environmental council at the governmental level and first policies in the late 1960s or early 1970s.¹⁹ The protection of landscapes and species-type biodiversity became a tolerated form of activity by groups of citizens and academics in Eastern Europe because it did not question the legitimacy of the communist regime.²⁰ This tradition persisted after communism, with civil society organizations either demanding access to information (on industrial pollution and the related health risks) or advocating classic forms of nature conservation rather than environmentalism.²¹ Even before the Club of Rome’s report from 1972, both state authorities and citizens in the Soviet Union began to reconsider the limits to the seemingly inexhaustible natural resources of the Russian territories. Following Moscow’s lead, Comecon began to prioritize the management of natural resources and the prevention of wastefulness in its annual international meetings. Already in 1971, Comecon installed the Committee for Scientific and Technical Cooperation and the permanent Council on Matters related to the Conservation and Improvement of the Environment to coordinate environmental policies.²² In 1974, Come-

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con introduced its first environmental programme for the next six years. The programme focused on pollution and waste as well as on the rational use of natural resources and relied on science, planning, and management to reconcile environmental protection and economic development. The conservation of ecosystems constituted one of many issues on the agenda.²³ More importantly, in terms of international cooperation within the socialist bloc, Comecon lacked the formal authority and supranational power of the EEC to enforce common standards and interfere with national economic plans. Science and technology were used as an alternative vehicle for policy-making. Improved planning capabilities and enhancements in the efficient use of natural resources were assumed to solve the fundamental contradiction between higher production and environmental protection. In negotiations on cooperation between Comecon and the EC beginning in the mid-1970s as well as following the Helsinki Process, the environment featured quite prominently on the agenda. The plausible reason for this is the fact that the environment was considered one of the least politicized issues, a matter of common good despite all ideological conflicts.²⁴ Again, most of the cooperation related to science and technology rather than trade and economics²⁵ (see chapter 10 by Laakkonen/Rä sä nen). During the second half of the 1980s, under perestroika and glasnost, environmentalism constituted one of the main pillars of anti-regime protests and mobilization. The pollution caused by Soviet mining and heavy industry as well as communist-type plans for the management and transformation of nature merged with national and democratic opposition movements. Green became one of the transmission belts for anti-regime mobilization in the Baltic states as well as in Poland and Bulgaria. Increasing awareness of the health risks for the population resulting from this industrialization added to the concerns about the decreasing living standards in the Eastern Bloc.²⁶ Knowing that these health risks eroded the already fragile legitimacy of the regimes, the communist authorities belatedly introduced some measures (e. g. closing down some polluting factories) to ensure public health.²⁷ Generally speaking, in the 1980s most protesters held an anthropocentric understanding of the environment, comparable to localized protests against industrial pollution in the West in the 1950s. The destruction of the environment and the limitless exploitation of natural resources produced real and shortterm consequences for the health and well-being of citizens. Nature was, at best, considered part of national dignity and power, not an inherent value as such (although not mentioning marginal ecological groups and those unconcerned with political agenda setting). Biological diversity was not a significant concept in this political confrontation, neither on the basis of endangered spe-

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cies nor of habitats. In many heavily polluted regions of the former Eastern bloc, post-communist transition implied deindustrialization, but legacies of pollution remained (see figure 3). The new democratic regimes’ point of departure in environmental issues was on the agenda of the Green protests against the old regime.

Figure 3: Abandoned ferris wheel in amusement park in Pripyat in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Sean Williams, 2017, Asset-a-grid.

In many cases, however, the necessities of economic recovery and the transition to a market economy soon sidelined ecological concerns, so much to the extent that even prime examples of Soviet industrial pollution became national possessions of the newly independent states overnight, for example the Chernobyl-type nuclear power plant in Ignalina (Lithuania) or the shale-oil extraction plant in Kohtla-Järve (Estonia).²⁸ Much like in the Comecon years, lip service was paid to environmental issues and economic rationales prevailed. The environment was included in many regional agreements involving post-communist states in the early 1990s: The Central European Initiative, the Visegrád Group, and the Black Sea Economic Cooperation.²⁹ With EU pre-accession negotiations, candidate member states bargained over the costs and conditions of the environmental acquis of the enlargement process without involving parliaments and civil society to a great extent.³⁰

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5 The Council of Europe: Habitats and Biodiversity At its founding in 1949, the Council of Europe had high and wide-ranging ambitions, much like the pre-war League of Nations, when it came to peace and international cooperation. Nature and environment issues would only be added to its agenda one or two decades later, informed by its networks of activists from within organizations such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. After around 1970, the CoE took up two different concepts of biodiversity and their policy implications. One is a conservationist concept that began as early as the 1960s in the Strasbourg conventions – e. g. the European Convention for the Protection of Animals during International Transport (1968) or the European Convention for the Protection of Animals kept for Farming Purposes (1976) and focuses on individual endangered species, biotopes, landscapes, and public campaigns (see figure 4). Another, started in the 1980s, understands biodiversity as a vital and urgent concern for humankind’s long-term survival, requiring the management of habitats in Europe on a much more ambitious scale. The conventions signed by the member states of the CoE initially followed the perspective of single endangered species and conservationism. Nature or environment were not touched upon whatsoever in the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950), nor in the European Cultural Convention (1954).³¹ Actually, the first animal-related conventions deal with the international transport of farm animals and the slaughter of animals (from 1968 and 1979, respectively), both following strictly a logic of trade and commerce.³² Conventions on pollution of air, soil, and water relating to public health followed. Conversely, cruelty to animals was the main concern behind conventions on animal testing and on pet animals.³³ Nevertheless, the CoE’s earliest initiatives clearly predated the environmental crisis of the 1970s. Already in 1962, for instance, the European Committee for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources was created as a permanent advisory body to the Committee of Ministers. Since 1967, the Centre Naturopa (in full, the Documentation and Information Centre for the Environment and Nature) has been part of the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Directorate of Environmental and Local Authorities. At that early stage, the focus was on informing and educating citizens as well as on protecting threatened mammals, the diversity of flora and fauna in general, and a variety of landscapes.³⁴ The Committee for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources laid the groundwork for later actions by initiating the compiling of inventories

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Figure 4: Session of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg in 1967. Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F023908-0002 / Engelbert Reineke / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

of species and habitats and by collecting data. Concerned persons were starting to become aware that the modernization of post-war Europe and its restored prosperity were detrimental to nature and biodiversity.³⁵ The overall message was that “the impact of urbanization, of industry, of agriculture and forestry, and of leisure pursuits upon the physical environment” required better management.³⁶ The newsletters of the Centre Naturopa – Nature in Focus and later on Naturopa (since 1968) – demonstrate the use of such a concept of environmental protection as well as the concerns over endangered species. Public awareness should remedy “exhaustion and misuse of natural resources”, according to the first issue of Naturopa. ³⁷ Oil pollution of the seas, waste, and soil erosion are highlighted as threats to man’s living environment and health. The CoE declared the year 1970 to be the European Conservation Year at the initiative of its Committee for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, with a clear focus on raising awareness and establishing nature parks (see chapter 12 by Vetter-Schultheiss). Issues regarding biodiversity and endangered species in the Centre Naturopa’s communication to its member organizations and the general public re-

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mained, however, limited to excessive tourist development or commercial interests endangering the survival of the Mediterranean monk seal or the alpine ibex, for example.³⁸ A reference to “fast-changing environments” and “trends in the status of the world’s biological ‘capital’” in 1971 was a first hint at a broader understanding of biodiversity relating to habitats and nature as a treasure trove of genetic diversity and future medications – but still mostly regarding rare species. By the early 1980s, the scope of the newsletter was changing incrementally towards habitats.³⁹ The CoE’s understanding of biodiversity remained focused on landscapes, nature conservation, and identifiable threatened species. Economic motives, however, did not seem to play a role in the initiatives, with their restrictive scope, from Strasbourg. The initiatives focused, on the one hand, on investment in reconstruction after natural disasters or related environmental problems and, on the other hand, on conventions related to environmental protection. In 1999, the Resettlement Fund for National Refugees was turned into a full-fledged social development bank, the Council of Europe Development Bank. One of its priorities – the protection and management of the environment – refers to reconstruction in the aftermath of ecological and natural disasters, the protection of the natural environment as such, and the protection of natural and cultural heritage. Landscapes, however, are found in the framework of cultural heritage: they contribute to the well-being of humankind and, even, to the consolidation of European identity.⁴⁰ This conservationist concept have continued to be used in the new century. Two conventions stand out as they focus on the protection of the environment as natural and cultural heritage: the European Landscape Convention (2000) and, signed together with other international financial institutions, a declaration of the European Principles for the Environment (2006). In October 2000, the CoE adopted the European Landscape Convention,⁴¹ which encouraged states to engage in landscape policies, ranging from conservation to creation.⁴² The reference point for the convention clearly is the human perspective: harmonizing the social, economic, and ecological functions of nature for the sake of the well-being of humankind and European identity. The “quality and diversity” of European landscapes refers to the diversity of communities and identities, not to any type of biodiversity. (Yet, they may be cross-references from the biodiversity to the societal trope of diversity.⁴³) Later, seemingly as an afterthought, biological diversity was added as an argument, but the core mission of the convention and of the Steering Committee for Culture, Heritage and Landscape remains a cultural one. Diversity of landscapes, ecosystems, or flora and fauna, quite remarkably, are not mentioned once in the convention, and the convention explicitly address-

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es all territory, not just unique or outstanding landscapes. In these respects, the CoE’s convention differs from the World Heritage Convention (1972) by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization by focusing exclusively on outstanding landscapes and their inherent universal value as cultural and natural heritage. In sum, the convention is about the nexus between landscape and human quality of life but lacks the typical urgency of the evil tidings, so to say, regarding climate change. The term biodiversity did not appear once in the biannual reports of the meetings of the bureau of the Steering Committee for Culture, Heritage and Landscape (2012– 2019). Even the special report on climate change at the most recent meeting (November 2019) focuses on the threats that climate change poses to cultural sites and landscapes.⁴⁴ The pivotal contribution to biodiversity by the CoE is the Bern Convention. The stipulations and objectives of the convention exemplify the broader understanding of biodiversity, combining the older conservationists’ strategy of protecting prominent species and the new urgency of environmentalism. Connecting nature reserves and habitats all across Europe should create a critical mass of natural landscapes necessary for the conservation of various species. While the focus is no longer on a handful of well-publicized endangered species, mammals and birds remain the visible linchpins of the strategy. Typically, large mammals like wolves, lynx, or others need mobility and space to maintain a sustainable population.⁴⁵ As in many other policy fields, the Bern Convention became the basis of the EU’s policies for nature conservation in the Natura 2000 strategy. Both organizations began to prioritize the protection of sites and consolidation of networks of habitats as a conditio sine qua non for the conservation of a wider range of endangered species.⁴⁶ Thus, since the 1980s, the CoE’s conventions and programmes have been moving towards an understanding of biodiversity that concerns the entire environment, including urban locations, agricultural land instead of biotopes, and habitats as refuges for specific animals or all of nature. The Bern Convention aims to conserve Europe’s wild flora and fauna and their natural habitats. It is an innovative biodiversity convention because of its approach of protecting both species and habitats. Furthermore, it not only recognizes the intrinsic value of wild flora and fauna but also includes forward-looking issues such as biodiversity adaptation to climate change.

6 The Greening of the European Communities The European Union is generally considered to have some of the most progressive environmental policies in the world. Over the past 40 years, its body of en-

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vironmental legislation has expanded to such an extent that it is considered unique among international organizations.⁴⁷ European citizens recognize the EU as the primary actor in the field of environmental policy; here, its legitimacy seems all but undisputed.⁴⁸ This is a remarkable achievement given that no legal basis for environmental policies existed in the Treaty of Rome, establishing the EEC and Euratom in 1957. As late as 1968, the European Commission – the executive charged with initiating and drafting legislation – was reluctant to consider the EEC competent in the field of nature conservation.⁴⁹ The volte-face of the European Commission and the gradual emergence of the Community as a Green actor need to be understood against the backdrop of growing concerns over the depletion of natural resources; the pollution of air, water, and soil; and the decline of natural diversity in the 1970s. Member state governments began to adopt national environmental regulations, which threatened to distort competition within the EEC. Harmonization of environmental legislation would turn out to be a solution to this. This coincided with European officials’ quest for a new source of legitimacy in a time when European integration seemed to be stagnating. In addition, the active part played by NGOs in putting rare species protection on the European agenda and the ineffectiveness of other non-binding international agreements all contributed to what amounted to a veritable Europeanization of biodiversity protection, which culminated in the establishment of the Natura 2000 network. The term Eurosclerosis is used to describe the 1970s as a period of stagnation in European integration. The oil crisis exposed the inability of member states to act in a coordinated manner vis-à-vis oil-producing states in the Middle East. Moreover, attempts at increasing monetary coordination grounded to a halt in the context of the global economic recession. This image, however, only partly holds true. In fact, the 1970s were also the decade in which important new policy areas were added to the European Commission’s portfolio, such as that of the environment. At a meeting in Paris in 1972, heads of government renewed their interest in European integration and called upon the European Commission to develop an environmental policy. Aware of the need for the Community to boost its legitimacy, they considered the enhanced protection of the environment and consumer rights an important means to bridge the gap with European citizens and to make the EEC more responsive to their concerns. The CoE declared: Economic expansion is not an end in itself. It should result in an improvement in the quality of life as well as in standards of living. As befits the genius of Europe, particular attention will be given to intangible values and to protecting the environment, so that progress may really be put at the service of mankind.⁵⁰

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Called upon by the heads of state and government, the European Commission proceeded to work out an Environmental Action Programme, which was adopted by the Council of the EEC in 1973.⁵¹ The proactive stance by member states can only be understood in the global context of a growing awareness of the detrimental effects of industrialization and economic growth on the environment. On an international level, governments had been engaged in the preparations for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which took place in Stockholm in June 1972. In domestic contexts, concerns about the state of the environment led to the national governments’ adoption of an increasing number of environmental regulations. These now threatened to distort the functioning of the common market, which acted as the core of the European project. This instrumental reason proved decisive for the European Commission to put the environment on the European agenda.⁵² Yet, the rise to prominence of the EEC as a central policy-maker can only be understood by looking beyond the role of national governments. A variety of actors had considerable influence, including members of the European Parliament, proactive European Commission officials, nature conservation and environmental organizations, scientific experts, and the European Court of Justice. By adopting a wide range of political strategies, they helped to transform what was initially merely a vague proposition into an extensive body of binding environmental legislation. Members of the European Parliament laid the groundwork for the adoption of the first Environmental Action Programme. They prepared reports about water and air pollution at the beginning of the 1970s. In 1969, news had reached European citizens about the pollution of the river Main caused by the pesticide Thiodan. The pollution resulted in the death of huge amounts of fish and aroused concerns about the quality of drinking water in the Netherlands, located downriver. In response to this event, the European Parliament’s Committee on Public Health and Social Affairs drafted a report on the protection of inland waterways. In this report, the committee called for the harmonization of national anti-pollution standards, which threatened to distort international competition. Two dimensions of this report stand out. First, in addition to addressing the risks to public health, the committee stresses the economic risks of river pollution by referring to companies that rely on clean water as a resource. Second, it discusses the role played by other international organizations, such as the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine against Pollution (founded in 1963), and highlights their ineffectiveness. As opposed to the supranational EEC, these organizations were built on an intergovernmental basis and could only do research and propose non-binding recommendations. The members of

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the European Parliament framed their appeal for Community action in the field of environmental policy in such a way that it aligned with the EC’s legal basis and existing competence.⁵³ In addition to the members of the European Parliament, activist commissioners, such as Sicco Mansholt and Altiero Spinelli, were crucial in pushing forward the environmental agenda. Mansholt – who, as the commissioner for agriculture from 1958 to 1972, had been in favour of its mechanization and intensification – had changed his ways by the 1970s. Appointed as the president of the European Commission in 1973 and under the influence of the Club of Rome, Mansholt became an ardent advocate of a more sustainable use of natural resources (see chapter 15 by Seefried). Spinelli, the European commissioner for industry, set up the working group to prepare the action plan.⁵⁴ A decade later, Stanley Clinton-Davis and Carlo Ripa di Meana, two of the commissioners for the environment (1985 – 1988 and 1989 – 1992, respectively), played a crucial part in the preparation of the Habitats Directive.⁵⁵ Over the years, the European Commission officials, for instance within the Environment and Consumer Protection Service, would be an important factor. This was especially the case when they were able to combine a deep knowledge of the workings of the Community with (amateur) expertise in nature conservation and to strengthen ties with the nature conservation movement.⁵⁶ Nature conservation and environmental organizations were important agenda setters. They were able to exert considerable influence through a range of strategies, such as lobbying European institutions, raising public attention through media campaigns, organizing public protests, building strong coalitions (e. g. the Working Group of European Bird Protection Societies – later, BirdLife Europe), and providing indispensable expertise.⁵⁷ Moreover, they recognized the multilevel character of the Community, which meant that different venues to exert influence were available to them on national and international levels. Other interest groups such as hunting associations followed suit; however, their late arrival to Brussels was a disadvantage, as compared to environmental organizations that had recognized the importance of setting up shop, so to say, in Brussels at an earlier stage. NGOs did not have a direct part in the first stages of developing an environmental agenda for the EEC other than, of course, contributing to a general atmosphere in which political authorities ascribed increasing importance to the environment. As Jan-Henrik Meyer shows, however, they caught up quickly. The year 1974 saw the establishment of the European Environmental Bureau, a grassroots network of NGOs funded by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Information and Communication. Initially a small organization, it had grown into a network numbering 35 members by 1980.⁵⁸ As the funding

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mechanism already suggests, there were mutual benefits to be gained from concerted action by NGOs and the European Commission. The involvement of environmental and nature conservation organizations enhanced the legitimacy of the European Commission’s endeavours in the field of the environment. Vice versa, NGOs sought access to European policy-makers in an attempt to circumvent reluctant national governments. Moreover, they realized the unique advantage that the EEC offered, as compared to other international organizations: the binding character of its legislation.⁵⁹ When it comes to EEC policies designed with the aim of protecting European wildlife species and their habitats, most notably the Birds Directive (1979) and the Habitats Directive (1992), nature conservation and environmental organizations would have considerable influence in their development. These nature conservation laws are “amongst the most powerful and far-reaching the EU has ever passed in the environmental sphere”.⁶⁰ The Birds Directive would become the foundation on which later biodiversity policies were built. The direct cause was the hunting of migratory bird species in Southern Europe, which caused public outcry in Northern Europe. The goal of the directive was to maintain the populations of “all species of naturally occurring birds in the wild state in the European territory of the Member States” at levels compatible with certain other requirements.⁶¹ It did so by severely limiting hunting and trading in birds and prohibiting specific hunting methods such as lime or nets. Moreover, bird habitats were subject to conservation measures.⁶² The 1980s were marked by an institutionalization of the environment as a policy field within the EEC. In 1984, a separate Directorate-General for the Environment, Consumer Protection and Nuclear Safety was established within the European Commission. The Single European Act gave environmental policy its legal basis.⁶³ Moreover, as the Birds Directive was implemented, it became evident that the directive had teeth. Reluctant member states, surprised by the impact of the directive, chose to comply when the European Commission threatened to start proceedings or were forced to do so through the rulings of the European Court of Justice.⁶⁴ This was also the decade when the call for a more comprehensive biodiversity policy became louder. In 1983, the European Commission called for [a Community] framework [that] would ensure that a network of properly protected biotopes, sufficient in both extent and number, and interlinked in a rational fashion, was set up and maintained. The network should be designed in such a way as to guarantee – as far as the habitat is concerned – the survival of all species native to the Community.⁶⁵

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This quote illustrates a more general shift in the discourse about nature conservation within the EEC. Discussions pertaining to the Birds Directive had primarily focused on maintaining (migratory) bird populations by limiting certain hunting practices. Seen from this perspective, the case of declining populations of migratory birds constituted a collective action problem to be solved by supranational governance. NGOs managed to broaden the scope somewhat by underlining the importance of habitat protection, referring to the Ramsar Convention (1971), which aimed at the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands (see chapter 2 by Wöbse). Discussions about the Habitats Directive saw the emergence of a broader notion of the protection of plant and animal species by protecting, maintaining, and restoring their natural habitats. This is reflected in the Habitats Directive, which protects European plant and animal species that are considered to be endangered, vulnerable, rare, and/or endemic. This is done through species protection and site protection measures. Species protection measures oblige member states to protect certain species when they are found in the wild on their territories. In addition, member states are asked to identify and designate certain conservation areas – called Special Areas of Conservation – that are of particular importance for the protection of certain species or habitat types.⁶⁶ The totality of designated areas of nature conservation in the EU is called the Natura 2000 network. Ecological motives – ensuring biological diversity in Europe – became much more important than what had been the case for earlier nature conservation policies enacted by international organizations. At the same time, the value of wild flora and fauna for the citizens of Europe – hence, its instrumental value – continued to be important. In addition, intrainstitutional rivalry continued to shape the outcome of environmental policies. Member states and the European Commission attempted at developing competence, while the EEC frequently referred to the “ineffective” CoE to substantiate its claim of having expertise in the field of species protection. Vice versa, the creation of the Emerald Network of “areas of special conservation interest” can in part be understood as an attempt by the CoE to halt the Habitats Directive. Countries critical of the extension of supranational powers to the field of nature conservation and land use, such as the United Kingdom and Denmark, pushed for an improved implementation of the Bern Convention, which resulted in the Emerald Network, emerging in parallel with the Natura 2000 network.⁶⁷ During the preparation and implementation stages of the Habitats Directive, the European Commission continued to rely heavily on the input offered by NGOs. Even before sending its proposal to the governments of the member states, the European Commission had it circulated among 200 NGOs for consultation. This was a novel practice, which stirred national governments.⁶⁸ More-

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over, environmental organizations came to play a crucial role in drawing up the lists of sites to be protected. As such, Natura 2000 can be considered an example of the completion of the participatory turn, began by the European Commission in the 1970s. Paradoxically, however, Natura 2000 came to be associated with technocratic governance during its difficult implementation phase. While the interests of environmental organizations were well represented in the policy process, the European Commission has been criticized for not taking into account local interests and socioeconomic considerations (rather than scientific) in selecting sites of protection.⁶⁹

7 International Organizations and Concepts as Agents In the course of the twentieth century, several international organizations contributed to a Europeanization of biodiversity policies in a geographical, political, and legal sense, as this chapter has shown. This being the case, biodiversity policies have always maintained their contested character. As we have seen, the hierarchy of concepts has shifted over time, from a narrow focus on the protection of species threatened with extinction, to the protection of wildlife and their habitats, to an understanding of biodiversity as a crucial feature of healthy and resilient ecosystems able to absorb shocks. These various meanings are still present today alongside other powerful concepts, such as sustainability and carbon neutrality. At the surface, their present-day prevalence seems to suggest the existence of some sort of Green consensus. However, the opposite is true: they attest in part to overlapping and conflicting value systems. The institutions discussed in this chapter have each adopted core concepts that served as a suitable frame to pursue their own ecological, economic, and political goals. Arguably, the (European) international organizations – the League of Nations, Comecon, the Council of Europe, and the European Community/European Union – in hindsight embraced ground-breaking concepts of natural richness and biodiversity rather belatedly. In more than one case, the international organization began promoting biodiversity for reasons largely unrelated to the environment. In the cases of the League of Nations and Comecon, economic motives were important. For both the League of Nations and the EC, an institutional logic was paramount in “discovering” nature and the environment as a policy field. Both organizations used some policy success to shore up their legitimacy at the time. Environmental problems, being inherently transnational, seem to have played a minor role in setting in motion international organizations

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for this cause, with the possible exception of the conventions of the CoE. Comecon primarily addressed the efficient use of natural resources as a national strategy, whereas environmental protection entered the EC’s policy-making as a corollary of the common market and non-tariff barriers. The communities of activists and scientists that were in close communication with these intergovernmental organizations as well as some of their member states championed more progressive concepts and strategies. At the same time, achieving a consensus among national member states and defining workable policies were a tall order. Thus, the concepts informing the policies and conventions of the international community were bound to disappoint the more progressive environmentalists. On a positive note, however, each one of the international organizations did provide environmentalists with a forum for exchanging and communicating their ideas and facilitated the collection of data to substantiate the urgency of their claims. In restrospect, over the past century, environmentalists, international organizations, and, last but not least, the concepts of biodiversity they held all had agency in the grand narrative of the Europeanization of biodiversity.

Notes  European Commission, “A European Green Deal. Striving to be the first climate-neutral continent”, https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en (accessed 30 April 2020).  This chapter uses the terms European Economic Community and Community alternately. They also refer to the European Communities, the term used after the three communities (European Community for Coal and Steel, European Economic Community, and European Atomic Energy Community) officially merged in 1967. In 1993, the three communities were subsumed under the European Union as the so-called first pillar). Nature conservation and environmental policies were developed in the framework of the European Economic Community, later the first pillar of the EU.  See, for instance, the framing of the nature conservation projects by Rewilding Europe: https://rewildingeurope.com/blog/making-space/ (accessed 4 May 2020).  EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, https://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/biodiversity/ strategy/index_en.htm (accessed 18 October 2020).  Timothy J. Farnham, Saving Nature’s Legacy. Origins of the Idea of Biological Diversity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1– 3; Frank Uekötter, “Von großen Zahlen, stillem Sterben und der Sprachlosigkeit der Menschheit. Eine kleine Geschichte des Artenschutzes”, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 11 (2020): 3 – 12.  Patrick Kupper, Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park (New York: Berghahn, 2014).  Simone Schleper, Planning for the Planet: Environmental Expertise and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 1960 – 1980 (New York: Berghahn, 2019).

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 Joachim Radkau, The Age of Ecology: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).  Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, The Environment: A History of the Idea (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).  Libby Robin, “The Rise of the Idea of Biodiversity: Crises, Responses and Expertise”, Quaderni. Communication, Technologies, Pouvoir 76, no. 3 (2011): 25 – 26; Warde, Robin, and Sörlin, The Environment, 247– 248; Schleper, Planning for the Planet.  Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Anthropocene Time”, History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018): 5 – 32.  Mark V. Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).  Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750 – 1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Raf de Bont, “Extinct in the Wild: Finding a Place for the European Bison, 1919 – 1932”, in Spatializing the History of Ecology: Sites, Journeys, Mappings, eds. Raf de Bont and Jens Lachmund (New York: Routledge, 2017), 165 – 184.  Richard Hölzl, “Historicizing Sustainability: German Scientific Forestry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, Science as Culture 19, no. 4 (2010), 431– 460.  Kupper, Creating Wilderness; Thomas M. Bohn, Aliaksandr Dalhouski, and Markus Krzoska, Wisent-Wildnis und Welterbe. Geschichte des polnisch-weißrussischen Nationalparks von Białowieża (Cologne: Böhlau, 2017).  Jan-Henrik Meyer, “From Nature to Environment: International Organizations and Environmental Protection before Stockholm”, in International Organizations and Environmental Protection. Conservation and Globalization in the Twentieth Century, eds. Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 31– 70, 40 – 45; Anna Katharina Wöbse, “Oil on Troubled Waters? Environmental Diplomacy in the League of Nations”, Diplomatic History 32 (2008): 519 – 523, doi:10.1111/j.1467– 7709.2008.00711.x (accessed 17 October 2020).  Anna Katharina Wöbse, Weltnaturschutz. Umweltdiplomatie in Völkerbund und Vereinten Nationen 1920 – 1950 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2012), 171– 246; Helen Rozwadowski, “Science, the Sea, and Marine Resource Management: Researching the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea”, The Public Historian 26, no. 1 (2004): 41– 64, doi:10.1525/ tph.2004.26.1.41 (accessed 17 October 2020).  Nicholas Breyfogle, ed., Eurasian Environments. Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018); Josef Füllenbach, European Environmental Policy: East and West (London: Butterworths, 1981); Zsuzsa Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Tobias Huff, Natur und Industrie im Sozialismus. Eine Umweltgeschichte der DDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).  Antonín Sum, “Environmental Protection in Member Countries of the CMEA: A Survey”, Environmental Policy and Law 2, no. 1 (1976): 11– 15.  Douglas R. Weiner, “Environmental Activism in the Soviet Context. A Social Analysis”, in Shades of Green: Environmental Activism Around the Globe, eds. Christof Mauch, Nathan Stoltzfus, and Douglas R. Weiner (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 101– 134.  Liliana B. Andonova, Transnational Politics of the Environment: The European Union and Environmental Policy in Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 24– 26; Liliana B. Andonova, “The Europeanization of Environmental Policy in Central Eastern Europe”, in The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 135– 155, 143.  Giuseppe Schiavone, The Institutions of Comecon (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), 116 – 118; Füllenbach, European Environmental Policy, 45 – 56.

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 “CMEA Works for Environmental Protection”, Environmental Policy and Law 1, no. 2 (1975): 72.  Schiavone, The Institutions, 100 – 104.  Füllenbach, European Environmental Policy, 119 – 210.  William V. Wallace and Roger A. Clarke, Comecon, Trade and the West (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 21– 22; Laura A. Henry, Red to Green. Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).  Wallace and Clarke, Trade, 20 – 23; Adam Zwass, The Economies of Eastern Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 132– 134, doi:10.1007/978-1-349-07314-6 (accessed 17 October 2020); A. V. Leont’eva, “New Aspects in the Structure and Jurisdiction of the COMECON Regarding the Protection of the Environment”, Pace Environmental Law Review 7, no. 1 (1989): 179 – 183.  Wim P. van Meurs, “Die Transformation in den baltischen Staaten: Baltische Wirtschaft und russische Diaspora”, Bericht des BIOst 6 (1999): 18 – 21.  Gabor Bakos, “After COMECON: A Free Trade Area in Central Europe?”, Europe-Asia Studies 45, no. 6 (2007): 1025 – 1044, doi:10.1080/09668139308412139 (accessed 17 October 2020).  Andonova, “The Europeanization”, 135 – 155.  European Treaty Series (ETS) No. 005; ETS No. 018.  ETS No. 065; ETS No. 102.  ETS No. 123; ETS No. 125; ETS No. 145; ETS No. 172.  Cor J. Smit and Anne van Wijngaarden, Threatened mammals in Europe, ed. by European Committee for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources – Council of Europe (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1981).  Council of Europe, Committe of Experts for the Conservation of Nature and Landscape, “Appendices to the Report of the Third Meeting” (Strasbourg, 19 October 1964); Council of Europe, “The Management of the Environment in Tomorrow’s Europe” (Strasbourg, 1970), 155 – 161.  Henry A. Raup, “European Conservation Year”, The Professional Geographer 21, no. 5 (1969): 353, doi:10.1111/j.0033 – 0124.1969.00353.x (accessed 18 October 2020).  Nature in Focus 1 (1968): 1.  Naturopa 8 (1971): 27.  Naturopa 39 (1981): 28.  The Council of Europe: Its Law and Policies, eds. Stefanie Schmahl and Marten Breuer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), paras 10.53; 33.40; 33.60; Patrick J. O’Keefe and Lyndel V. Prott, Cultural Heritage Conventions and Other Instruments: A Compendium with Commentaries (Builth Wells: Institute of Art and Law, 2011), 123 ff.  ETS No. 176; ETS No. 219.  Together, the Cultural Heritage Committee and the Committee for the activities of the Council of Europe in the field of Biological and Landscape Diversity Strategy were in charge of the convention. Maguelonne Déjeant-Pons, “Landscape Convention and Ecological Corridors”, Environmental Policy and Law 39, no. 3 (2009): 170 – 173.  Farnham, Saving Nature’s Legacy, 6.  For the reports, see: https://www.coe.int/en/web/cdcpp-committee/; https://www.coe.int/ en/web/cdcpp-committee/special-file-climate-change (accessed 17 October 2020); Maguelonne Déjeant-Pons, “The European Landscape Convention”, Landscape Research 31, no. 4 (2006): 363 – 384, doi:10.1080/01426390601004343 (accessed 17 October 2020).  In explanatory contributions, the head of the Cultural Heritage, Landscape and Spatial Planning Division, Maguelonne Déjeant-Pons, links the Landscape Convention to the ecological corridors of the Bern Convention, and thus the network is “to ensure the conservation of a full

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range of ecosystems, habitats, species and landscapes of European importance”. Déjeant-Pons, “Landscape Convention”, 170.  Compare the Council of Europe’s Emerald Network, including non-EU states.  Andrew Jordan, “Introduction: European Union Environmental Policy – Actors, Institutions, Policy Processes”, in Environmental Policy in the European Union: Actors, Institutions, Processes, ed. Andrew Jordan, 2nd edn (London: Earthscan, 2005), 1– 18.  Andrea Lenschow and Carina Sprungk, “The Myth of a Green Europe”, Journal of Common Market Studies 48, no. 1 (2010): 133 – 135.  Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Getting Started: Agenda-Setting in European Environmental Policy in the 1970s”, in The Institutions and Dynamics of the European Community, 1973 – 1983, ed. Johnny Laursen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), 211.  Statement from the Paris Summit (19 – 21 October 1972), Bulletin of the European Communities. 10 October 1972, https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/b1dd3d57-5f314796-85c3-cfd2210d6901/publishable_en.pdf (accessed 29 April 2020). See also Liesbeth van de Grift, “Representing European Society: The Rise of New Representative Claims in 1970s European Politics”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 58 (2018): 263 – 278  Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Greening Europe? Environmental Interest Groups and the Europeanisation of a New Policy Field”, Comparativ 20, no. 3 (2010): 86 – 87.  Philip Hildebrand, “The European Community’s Environmental Policy, 1957 to ‘1992’: From Incidental Measures to an International Regime?”, in Environmental Policy, ed. Jordan; Tom Delreux, and Sander Happaerts, Environmental Policy and Politics in the European Union (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 15.  Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Making the Polluter Pay: How the European Communities Established Environmental Protection”, in International Organizations and Environmental Protection: Conservation and Globalization in the Twentieth Century, eds. Jan-Henrik Meyer and Wolfram Kaiser (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 191– 192; Meyer, “Getting Started”, 235 – 236; Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Green Activism: The European Parliament’s Environmental Committee Promoting a European Environmental Policy in the 1970s”, Journal of European Integration History 17, no. 1 (2011): 73 – 85; Charlotte Burns, “The European Parliament: The European Union’s Environmental Champion?”, in Environmental Policy, ed. Jordan, 87– 105  Meyer, “Greening Europe”, 85; Andrew L. R. Jackson, Conserving Europe’s Wildlife: Law and Policy of the Natura 2000 Network of Protected Areas (London: Routledge/Earthscan, 2018).  Ibid., 105.  Ibid., 105, 108 – 109.  Meyer, “Greening Europe”, 93 – 94.  Ibid., 89 – 90.  Ibid., 90 – 91.  Jackson, Conserving Europe’s Wildlife, 2.  Ibid., 52.  Meyer, “Greening Europe”, 93.  Hildebrand, “The European Community’s Environmental Policy”.  The United Kingdom was one of them. There is some irony to this given the large number of Britons involved in the development of this directive. Jackson, Conserving Europe’s Wildlife, 83.  Third Environmental Action Programme as cited in Jackson, Conserving Europe’s Wildife, 82.  Ibid., 3.  Ibid., 141.  Ibid., 117– 118.

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 Jozef Keulartz and Gilbert Leistra, eds., Legitimacy in European Nature Conservation Policy: Case Studies in Multilevel Governance (New York: Springer, 2008); Jozef Keulartz, “European Nature Conservation and Restoration Policy: Problems and Perspectives”, Restoration Ecology 17, no. 4 (2009): 446 – 450; Claire Baffert, “Participatory Approaches in the Management of Natura 2000: When EU Biodiversity Policy Gets Closer to its Citizens”, Bruges Political Research Papers 26 (May 2012): 1– 37; Francesa Ferranti et al., “Shifting Nature Conservation Approaches in Natura 2000 and the Implications for the Roles of Stakeholders”, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 57, no. 11 (2014): 1652– 1657.

Selected Bibliography Andonova, Liliana B. “The Europeanization of Environmental Policy in Central Eastern Europe”. In The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier, 135 – 155. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Andonova, Liliana B. Transnational Politics of the Environment: The European Union and Environmental Policy in Central and Eastern Europe. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Barrow, Mark V. Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Bont, Raf de. “Extinct in the Wild: Finding a Place for the European Bison, 1919 – 1932”. In Spatializing the History of Ecology: Sites, Journeys, Mappings, edited by Raf de Bont and Jens Lachmund, 165 – 184. New York: Routledge, 2017. Breyfogle, Nicholas, ed. Eurasian Environments. Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Delreux, Tom, and Sander Happaerts. Environmental Policy and Politics in the European Union. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Environmental Policy in the European Union: Actors, Institutions, Processes, edited by Andrew Jordan. 2nd edn. London: Earthscan, 2005. Füllenbach, Josef. European Environmental Policy: East and West. London: Butterworths, 1981. Henry, Laura A. Red to Green. Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Huff, Tobias. Natur und Industrie im Sozialismus. Eine Umweltgeschichte der DDR. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750 – 1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Jackson, Andrew L. R. Conserving Europe’s Wildlife: Law and Policy of the Natura 2000 Network of Protected Areas. London: Routledge/Earthscan, 2018. Keulartz, Jozef, and Gilbert Leistra, eds. Legitimacy in European Nature Conservation Policy: Case Studies in Multilevel Governance. New York: Springer, 2008. Kupper, Patrick. Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park. New York: Berghahn, 2014. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. “Greening Europe? Environmental Interest Groups and the Europeanisation of a New Policy Field”. Comparativ 20, no. 3 (2010): 83 – 104.

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Meyer, Jan-Henrik. “Green Activism: The European Parliament’s Environmental Committee Promoting a European Environmental Policy in the 1970s”. Journal of European Integration History 17, no. 1 (2011): 73 – 85. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. “Making the Polluter Pay: How the European Communities Established Environmental Protection”. In International Organizations and Environmental Protection. Conservation and Globalization in the Twentieth Century, edited by Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer, 182 – 210. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Radkau, Joachim. The Age of Ecology: A Global History. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. Robin, Libby. “The Rise of the Idea of Biodiversity: Crises, Responses and Expertise”. Quaderni. Communication, Technologies, Pouvoir 76, no. 3 (2011): 25 – 37. Schleper, Simone. Planning for the Planet: Environmental Expertise and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 1960 – 1980. New York: Berghahn, 2019. Smit, Cor J., and Anne van Wijngaarden. Threatened Mammals in Europe, edited by European Committee for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources – Council of Europe. Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1981. Wöbse, Anna Katharina. Weltnaturschutz. Umweltdiplomatie in Völkerbund und Vereinten Nationen 1920 – 1950, 171 – 246. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2012.

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17 Epilogue: The Nature of Europe If we were to create an illustration representing the manifold and multifaceted relations people built in order to protect, conserve, and sustain their natural environments, the historical map of Europe that might materialize would differ fundamentally in some places from the familiar geopolitical boundaries. It would display quite different patterns, marked by the variety and diverse types of entanglements and contact zones, including mountain ranges, seas and streams, migrating wildlife, air currents, travelling waste, and floating pollution. Another map of entanglements would depict the meandering and crisscrossing routes of ideas, knowledge, norms, values, images, organizations, and jurisdiction as they move back and forth across the subcontinent. If we were even able to create a multidimensional model including a temporal element, it would reveal numerous single, temporary, or delayed events of action and even some dead ends. Such a European atlas might document not only threatened species but also expanding sites of environmental destruction as well as European patterns of exploitation and overuse which were exported beyond Europe, exterritorialized, and reimported. At the same time, the viewer would discover intensifying practices and collaboration of activists who increasingly labelled their endeavours and visions as European. The map would illuminate the ways in which the meaning of Europe changed over time and in different contexts and narratives. Ultimately, we would find ourselves looking at a multicoloured atlas displaying both material and intellectual exchanges all across Europe, with vectors of heterogeneous relations that reveal the multitude of inputs and outputs of activists, actors, and agents. Such an atlas would show the reverberations created by regional, national, international, and colonial experiences. This complex and multi-layered perspective including heterogeneous actors and spheres makes environmental history such a productive approach to disentangle and understand multi-relational processes in twentieth-century Europe. It challenges the notorious Eurocentric view by constantly incorporating the transregional character of environments, species, and resources. It, furthermore, contests established historiographies that focus on top-down narratives of European integration, institutionalization, and regulation. The environmental perspective is also essential for any historical research that is interested in understanding the deep ambiguities of European attitudes towards nature and in discussing current crisis and grand scale changes in human-environment relations. This book has shed light on some focal points in the emergence and evolution of European environmentalism. Taking the series perspective as a point of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-018

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departure, it opted for putting human activity at the centre of attention, offering a new perspective for analysing contemporary European environmental history that reaches across conventional narratives and regional and temporal divides. The authors of this volume focused on human activities in human-nature relations by looking at ‘European moments’ in the modern history of conservation and environmentalism – situations and constellations in which people sensed opportunities, needs, or potential for co-operation that would surpass national limits and framed their ideas, actions, or campaigns as being of European concern or dimension. To this end, the authors looked for case studies and stories that in one way or the other epitomize genuinely European collaboration and relations. They focused on activities that transcended or challenged national narratives and instead claimed European aspiration. Activity, nature, and Europe mark three key elements which elude clear-cut definitions, but which, when examined in conjunction, offer tangible insights. Following the people who became involved in protecting landscapes, nature and environments, flora, fauna, and human well-being reveals the significance of care for nature, species, and the biosphere in the process of “making” contemporary Europe. But this influence also flowed in the opposite direction: as the contributions show, Europe, both as an idea and lived reality, stimulated and spurred pan-European conservation initiatives and the rise of environmentalism. The contributions in this book point to the long and deep history of concern for nature as something that crosses national borders. The objects and issues that activists have staged as being of European concern are highly diverse – and so, too, are the actors themselves. By embracing a broad set of actors and agents, the chapters of this book offer insights into the diversity of individuals, constituencies, and alliances that demonstrated European ambition in their endeavours to develop awareness for human-environmental relations. Almost ‘naturally’, the human activities seem to go hand-in-hand with activities of nonhuman agents. Here, we find the material side of the activism. While most historians would agree that “Europe” is a vague and volatile concept, environmental activism tends to express it in highly concrete terms. By identifying when and where Europe turns into a point of reference for actors and activities, the concept as such takes shape. While Europe did not necessarily mean much to people acting within the context of national claims, from a preservationist’s point of view, colonial experiences and international and global perspectives helped to consolidate diffuse ideas of Europe to a more compact entity. Moreover, as naturalists began to map and frame biospheres and habitats as entities that were not coterminous with national territories, the concept of Europe was a useful way to widen one’s own sphere of influence. This perspective offered orientation not only for epistemic communities but also for activist organizations and cam-

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paigns. Even while Europe was closely embedded in linkages that stretched across the entire world, connections within Europe continued to form a dense, coherent network of environmental communication and activities. Thus, environmental issues, which were often organized along traditional channels of scientific exchange, had a particular potential not only to reach beyond national borders but also to bridge the East-West divide that so decisively shaped the character of Cold War Europe. Moreover, while environmentalists sometimes found themselves isolated in one region, they might share interests with activists across the national border who were tackling the same problems. Another overlap that made activists think European was the shared experience of loss and demise. Migrating species went extinct, acid rain travelled, and environmental catastrophes spoiled shared resources. They increasingly felt united in bearing witness to the results of European economic development and fossil-fuel-driven acceleration. Another important finding of this book is how “nature” and “environment” turned into issues that became part of an evolving set of shared values. While landscapes and sceneries had long played a central role in establishing national narratives of space and homeland and proved essential for constructing distinct national identities, activists of the post-war era were eager to highlight a shared European natural heritage. One of the astonishing results of a closer reading of the initiatives of the Council of Europe – a topic that has heretofore been rather neglected in environmental history – is how the members and bodies of this institution boldly initiated resolutions, committees, and programmes to make conservation an established matter of concern to Europe. The importance of such actions is not to be underestimated, even if sometimes their effects were more symbolic than practical. National politicians could boost their show of commitment to Europe by supporting the a-priori soft goal of protecting a somewhat vague European natural heritage. The activists, though often minority voices on the national level, could strengthen their position by building alliances with others in neighbouring countries and playing the European card. Applying a European rhetoric to their individual causes could enhance their claims of political legitimacy far beyond the sometimes rather limited national sphere of attention. In sum, we find an intriguing interplay between environmental activities and contemporary Europe’s process of becoming. Europe represented a political sphere which was increasingly recognized and meaningful and which activists could use to further their objectives. Conversely, the issues of the activists tended to strengthen the cause of European cooperation. At the end of this book, let us briefly return to the scene displayed on the cover: a group of people gathering under the unofficial flag of the European Movement in 1957. They had sailed out to the periphery to protest against military

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action in the Wadden Sea which disturbed the traditional shelduck moulting areas. Not least because of the fact that the birds flew in from many different countries, the issue had developed European momentum. While the sandbank was saved and shelducks were able to continue their pan-European flights – as they do up to the present –, the human collaboration on this cause turned out to be short-lived. The activists would soon scatter to the four winds, satisfied with the designation of the area as a regional reserve. On the one hand, this episode demonstrates once more that there was no such thing as a linear process of “Europeanization”. Nature conservation and environmental protection did not become more and more European “naturally” or as a matter of course, but as a result of the concrete activities of tangible actors, activists, and agents. This development was marked by transitory achievements and failures, successful initiatives and ones that petered out into nothing. Taken together, the manifold activities contributed to a shared understanding of European challenges in nature conservation and environmental protection and the growth of expert and activist networks and of institutions and regulations with a European reach. Thus, on the other hand, our cover picture also captures the impetus that the activity of individuals – as turned into collective action – would have in the long run. The flag signalled a vision, a symbol they had agreed to assemble under. Europe denoted both their will to collaborate beyond national borders and the need to acknowledge the paradoxical fact that non-humans and even environments could be true Europeans in need of European protection, even though Europe was no distinct entity.

List of Contributors Romed Aschwanden is managing director of the Institute “Cultures of the Alps” at the University of Lucerne. His research focuses on transnational social and environmental history of modern Europe and the history of infrastructure. [email protected] Maria Buck is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History and European Ethnology at the University of Innsbruck and works in the FWF-DACH project “Issues with Europe”. Her research interests lie in the field of alpine and environmental history and cultural studies. [email protected] Peter A. Coates is Professor of American and Environmental History at the University of Bristol, UK. His books include Salmon (London: Reaktion, 2006), American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), A Story of Six Rivers: History, Culture and Ecology (Reaktion, 2013) and the co-edited (with David Moon and Paul Warde) Local Places, Global Processes: Histories of Environmental Change in Britain and Beyond (Oxford: Windgather Press, 2016). He also contributed a report on cultural ecosystem services to the UK’s National Ecosystem Assessment Follow-On exercise (2014). [email protected] Raf de Bont is Professor in the History of Science and the Environment at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. His recent books include Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870 – 1930 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Nature’s Diplomats: Science, Internationalism and Preservation, 1920 – 1960 (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). [email protected] Astrid M. Eckert is Professor of History at Emory University. She teaches modern German and European history. Her research engages European history after 1945 as well as German environmental history. She is the author of West Germany and the Iron Curtain. Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands (Oxford University Press, 2019). [email protected] Liesbeth van de Grift is Professor of International History and the Environment at Utrecht University. She specializes in the history of political representation through the lens of rural, environmental, and consumer governance in the twentieth century. She is leading the research project Consumers on the March: Civic Activism and Political Representation in Europe, 1960s to 1990s (2018 – 2023). Together with Amalia Ribi Forclaz, she edited the volume Governing the Rural in Interwar Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). [email protected] Robert Groß accomplished a PhD in Environmental History at the Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt/Austria in 2017. His book Die Beschleunigung der Berge. Eine Umweltgeschichte des Wintertourismus in Vorarlberg/Österreich, 1920 – 2010 was published by Böhlau (Vienna) in 2019. Currently he is working on the second book project on the environmental history of the Marshall Plan. [email protected]

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Ute Hasenöhrl is a social and environmental historian at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. An Assistant Professor at the Department of History and European Ethnology, she has published on the history of social movements and civil society, cultural landscapes and energy issues, as well as on the development and perception of socio-technical systems, institutions, and public goods. She is author of Zivilgesellschaft und Protest. Eine Geschichte der Naturschutz- und Umweltbewegung in Bayern 1945 – 1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011) and co-editor of the volume Urban Lighting, Light Pollution and Society (New York/London: Routledge, 2015). [email protected] Richard Hölzl is Lecturer at the Seminar for Medieval and Modern History, University of Göttingen. His research fields include the environmental history of modern Europe and the history of German and European colonialism. Publications include Umkämpfte Wälder. Die Geschichte einer ökologischen Reform in Deutschland, 1760 – 1860 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus 2010) and Gläubige Imperialisten. Katholische Mission in Deutschland und Ostafrika, 1830 – 1960 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus 2021), and the collected work Managing Northern Europe’s Forests. Histories from the Age of Improvement to Age of Ecology, edited with K. Jan Oosthoek (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2018). [email protected] Arne Kaijser is professor emeritus of History of Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He was president of the Society for the History of Technology (2009 – 2010). His main research interests concern the historical development of infrastructural systems from a transnational perspective. His latest book (with Per Högselius and Erik van der Vleuten) is Europe’s Infrastructure Transition. Economy, War, Nature (Palgrave, 2016). [email protected]. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof is a research associate in the project Transdisciplinary Research on the Disposal on High-Level Radioactive Waste in Germany at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Her research includes German-German history, conservation and environmental history, the history of technology, the history of conflict and social movements, urban history, and the history of philanthropy and gender. Publication: with John R. McNeill (ed.), Nature and the Iron Curtain. Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries 1945 – 1990, Pittsburgh 2019. [email protected]. Patrick Kupper is Full Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His expertise is in transnational economic, social and environmental history of modern Europe. He is the author of Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park (New York: Berghahn, 2014) and of an introduction to environmental history of modern Europe, Umweltgeschichte (Göttingen: UTB, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021). [email protected] Simo Laakkonen is a senior lecturer of landscape studies at the University of Turku, Finland. He specialises in urban environmental history, environmental history of the Baltic Sea and environmental history of the Second World War and the Cold War. [email protected] Wim van Meurs is full professor of European Political History at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, Radboud Institute for Culture & History. His expertise is in East European studies, European integration history, environmental history and the Second World War. His

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current research focuses on nature conservation and environmental policies in the Netherlands and he is project leader for Local governance between occupying power and citizens (2021 – 2024). [email protected] Jan-Henrik Meyer is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main, writing a history of European environmental law, and at the Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment, Berlin, examining the history of public engagement with nuclear energy in West Germany. Areas of expertise: transnational history of European integration, social movements, environmental and energy history. Publications: Engaging the Atom. The History of Nuclear Energy and Society in Europe from the 1950s to the Present (2021, co-editor); “Kleine Geschichte der Atomkraftkontroverse in Deutschland.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 71, no. 21/23 (2021): 10 – 16. [email protected] K. Jan Oosthoek is an environmental historian based in Brisbane. For many years he has lectured and researched at the Universities of Newcastle (UK) and Edinburgh. He has published on a wide range of topics including forest history, the history of industrial water pollution and history of the ozone problem. He is the author of Conquering the Highlands. A History of the afforestation of the Scottish Uplands (Canberra: ANU Press, 2013) and together with Richard Hölzl he edited Managing Northern Europe’s Forests. Histories from the Age of Improvement to Age of Ecology (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2018). [email protected] Tuomas Räsänen is an associate professor of environmental history at the University of Eastern Finland, Finland. He specialises in marine environmental history, history of environmentalism and history of human relation to wild animals. [email protected] Kira J. Schmidt is a doctoral candidate at the LMU’s Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. She is part of the DFG-DACH research project “Issues with Europe”. Her thesis on Alpine transit traffic includes European integration history, transnational history, environmental history, history of technology, and digital history. [email protected] Elke Seefried is Full Professor of Modern History (19th to 21st Century) at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Her expertise is in transnational knowledge and environmental history as well as political history of modern Germany and Europe. She is the author of Zukünfte. Aufstieg und Krise der Zukunftsforschung 1945 – 1980 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015) and editor of Politische Zukünfte im 20. Jahrhundert. Parteien – Bewegungen – Umbrüche (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, forthcoming). [email protected]. Pavla Šimková is postdoctoral researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich. Her research interests include Central European and American environmental history and urban history. Her current project focuses on transboundary environmental history of the Bavarian Forest and Šumava. [email protected] Silke Vetter-Schultheiß is a historian with a research focus on environmental history, visual history, and philosophy of history. She has been fellow of the graduate school “Topology of Technology” at the Technical University Darmstadt. She is coeditor of Technik – Macht –

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List of Contributors

Raum: Das “Topologische Manifest” im Kontext interdisziplinä rer Studien (Heidelberg: Springer, 2018) and of Gezähnte Geschichte: Die Briefmarke als historische Quelle (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2019). [email protected] Heike Weber is Professor of History of Technology at Technische Universität Berlin. She currently studies the history of waste, recycling and repair, thereby pushing history of technology beyond its traditional focus on production, consumption and use – towards issues of obsolescence, decay and disposal. Recent publications include Krebs, Stefan/Weber, Heike (eds.): Histories of Technology’s Persistence: Repair, Reuse and Disposal (Bielefeld: transcript, 2021) and the co-edited Special Issue (with Chad Denton) on Rethinking Waste within Business History: A Transnational Perspective on Waste Recycling in World War II (Business History, 2021). [email protected] Anna-Katharina Wöbse is an environmental historian, curator, and researcher at the University of Gießen. She has extensively published on media and the environment, human-animal relations, and the history of transnational environmental movements and diplomacy (Weltnaturschutz: Umweltdiplomatie in Vereinten Nationen und Völkerbund 1920 – 1950, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2012). Her current research project focusses on the history of wetlands and amphibians. [email protected] Hans-Peter Ziemek is Professor of Biological Didactics at the University of Gießen. He has conducted extensive research on science and nature education, public relations in conservation, and the history of science. Together with Hans-Werner Frohn and Hansjörg Küster he edited the volume Ausweisungen von Nationalparks in Deutschland. Akzeptanz und Widerstand (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: BfN, 2016). [email protected]

Index Aalborg Charter (1994), 389, 403 Abruzzi, 62, 204, 224. See also national parks acid rain, 11, 170, 171, 363, 365, 367 – 369, 372, 381, 383, 449. See also air pollution acidification, 171, 363 – 365, 369, 371 – 376, 379 – 381 activists: anti-nuclear, 336, 339, 341, 343, 347; climate, 424 actors: animal, 84; historical, 7, 422; human, 4, 7, 19, 73, 75, 79, 84, 245, 306; nonhuman, 7, 17, 84, 245 Adriatic Sea, 105, 130, 253 afforestation, 160, 166 Africa Special Project (1960 – 1963), 55 Africa, 29, 32, 36, 54, 64, 66; Eastern, 55; North, 22, 102, 121; Southern, 55; subSaharan, 20, 51, 52 African savannah, 62 agency, 61, 103, 326, 441; of animals, 73, 75, 84, 86, 95, 103; of birds, 17, 18; of nature, 3, 9; of wildlife, 73; shared agency, 10 agricultural production, expansion in, 29, 31, 32 agriculture, 23, 31, 32, 67, 89, 108, 134, 136, 160, 161, 166, 205, 221, 274, 372, 379, 393, 432, 437. See also forestry air pollution, 37, 177, 230, 231, 335, 363, 365 – 367, 372 – 374, 377, 391, 436; and forestry, 170 – 172, 305; health effects of, 368; long-range, 370, 371, 378; transboundary, 369 – 371, 373, 375, 379, 380, 382. See also pollution Albania, 34, 130 Alfvén, Hannes, 336 algae, 205, 260 Allen, Robert, 396 Alpine clubs, 202, 222; nature, 10, 201, 219, 221, 225, 226, 231; region, 77, 160, 201, 219, 226, 229, 231, 232, 234, 235

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669213-020

Alpine Convention (1995), 176, 203, 233, 234; Transport Protocol of the (2000), 234 Alpine Protection Transit Declaration, 232 Alps as European common, 218, 235; as model region, 232; as tourist destination, 217 – 219, 225, 314, 318; politicizing of, 233 – 235; symbolic value of, 221; transit traffic through, 203, 217, 219, 230, 232 – 235 Alsace, 276, 329 Amazon, 66, 67 American Fisheries Society, 112 Amsterdam, 53, 64, 106, 119 animal-human relations, 11 animals, 6, 25, 40, 53, 62, 77, 84, 89, 90, 137, 164, 166, 225, 307, 308, 310, 317, 346, 424, 425, 431, 434, 439; charged with significance, 8, 73, 79, 82; endangered, 82, 425; exchange of, 75, 86, 87, 95; protection of, 38, 186, 225 431; wild, 74 – 76, 79, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 92, 96 Anthropocene, 67, 94, 423 anti-nuclear movements, 331, 333, 338, 341, 353; British, 347; French, 344, 347; in Europe, 332, 333, 335, 337, 350, 352; in Germany, 337, 346, 348, 349, 351, 395; in Scandinavia, 338, 339, 341, 343 anti-oil pollution campaigns, 29, 30 Apulia, 105 aquaculture, 110, 114, 118 Arctic, 49, 51. 52, 63, 66, 62, 64, 108; Arctic Circle, 9, 129; Arctic Ocean, 244 Argentina, 308 Asia, 36, 54, 55, 116; East, 116; Southeast, 51, 77 Association of Alpine States (Arge Alp), 202, 233 Association of National Parks of France and its Colonies, 223

456

Index

Atlantic, 52, 92, 101, 102, 104 – 106, 114, 244, 259, 346; North Atlantic Oscillation, 108 Atlantic salmon, 101, 102, 104, 121 “Atoms for Peace”, 333, 334 ATTAC, 407 Audubon Society, US, 26, 28 aurochs, 62, 80, 425 Austria, 134, 156, 160, 167, 188, 198, 222, 225, 227, 233, 234; beavers, 87; Brenner pass and motorway, 230, 231, 234, 227; national parks, 80, 141 – 144, 204, 224 – 226, 228; Naturfreunde, 187, 191; stamps, 317 – 320, 319; tourism, 188, 189, 191, 192, 194, 196, 201. See also Alps; transit traffic Austrian Empire, 26 Aymonin, Gérard-Guy, 59 Azores, 102 Baden-Württemberg, 337, 338 Balkan countries, 40; peninsula, 9, 88, 129 Balkans, 87, 92, 130, 131 Baltic, 23, 87, 102, 117, 131, 147, 186, 195, 201; states, 85, 130, 256 – 258, 261, 429 Baltic Sea, 12, 25, 131, 137, 190, 199, 205, 243 – 249, 251, 253 – 263. See also Helsinki Convention Barcelona, 96 Barcelona Convention. See Convention for the Protection of the Mediterranean Sea Against Pollution Barclay-Smith, Phyllis, 30 bark beetle infestations, 143 Barschel, Uwe, 137 Barsebäck. See nuclear power plants Basque country, 105, 119 bathing houses, 250, 251 Baum, Peter, 64 Bavaria, 85, 87, 134, 143, 164, 222, 224, 227 Bavarian Forest, 129, 132, 134, 140 – 142, 191. See also national parks Bavarian Forest Law (1852), 167 bearded vulture, 92, 221 bears, 89, 117, 172, 221, 224, 305 beauty, natural, 188, 192, 199, 206, 227, 305, 307

beavers, 7, 9, 64, 75, 77, 84 – 87, 92, 95, 121. See also endangered species Belarus, 159, 160, 172, 346, 350, 420 Belgium, 26, 87, 106, 110, 159, 191, 198, 224, 283, 316, 333, 369 Berchtesgaden, 224, 226 Berge`s, Aristide, 226 Berlin Oyster Recommendation on the Future of Native Oyster Restoration in Europe (2017), 93 Berlin Wall, 261, 383 Berlin zoo, 52, 62, 79 Berlin, 27, 96, 169, 247, 248; East, 36, 349; West, 278, 281 Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (1979), 39, 83, 86, 89, 139, 225, 323, 419, 420, 434, 439 Bernard, Charles Jean, 226 Berndt, Rudolf, 136, 137 beverage markets, 284, 286, 292; industry, 284, 288 Białowieża forest, 63, 79, 144, 172, 425. See also national parks; Poland biocoenosis, 93 biodiversity, 34, 56, 76, 135, 136, 139, 159, 161 – 163, 173 – 178, 310, 409, 413, 420 – 424, 427, 428, 432 – 435, 438, 441; concept of, 12, 322, 323, 419, 422, 423, 431, 433, 434, 440; loss of, 40, 172 biodiversity policies, 420, 421, 438, 440 bioeconomy, 157, 177 biogeography, 21, 63, 132 biomass, 113, 173 – 175, 243, 254, 261, 424 Biosphere Reserve Middle Elbe, 138 bird: activists, 26, 36, 39; lovers, 1, 28, 31; politics, 8, 17, 19, 41; populations, 23, 26, 31, 32, 34, 439; preservation societies, 25 – 28, 31; protection, 19, 20, 24 – 29, 38, 39, 323, 437; ringing, 18, 24, 25, 29; species, 20, 21, 29, 31, 34, 40, 317, 425, 438; watching, 1, 18, 19 BirdLife International, 28, 437 bison, 80, 168, 172, 320; American, 79; European, 62, 79, 83, 121, 426 Black Sea Economic Cooperation, 430

Index

Black Sea, 102, 104, 130, 259 Bohemian Forest, 80, 142 Bonn, 36, 174 Bordeaux, 282 border security regime, 133 border(s), 10, 19, 25, 35, 37, 40, 77, 84, 90, 114, 116, 129, 131 – 144, 186, 206, 316, 332, 336, 337, 341, 343, 344, 351, 352, 392, 397; continental, 32, 76; EastWest, 9, 389; inter-German, 129, 131, 134, 136, 137, 140, 142; national, 8, 18, 132, 133, 221, 232, 233, 311, 315, 322, 324; political, 11, 129, 132, 134, 257; crossing borders, 8, 10, 140, 288, 306, 309, 316, 331, 332, 336, 352 boreal forest, 134, 135, 162. See also taiga botanists, 59, 61, 226, 318 bottles: disposable, 269, 275, 279, 280, 281, 284, 286 – 288, 291; glass, 275, 286, 291; non-returnable, 284; one-way, 286, 288; plastic, 286, 288, 291; returnable, 286, 291 bottle banks, 269, 280, 282, 284.291, 278 boundaries, 18, 39, 75, 79, 133, 333, 447; national, 95, 109, 139, 206, 369; political, 18, 21, 34, 159, 162, 332 Brandt, Willy, 257, 391, 393, 397 breeding (birds), 20, 21, 31, 62, 95, 137, 317; (eels) 101, 102, 108; grounds, 38, 41; programmes, 79, 85 Bremen, 248 Bremerhaven, 106 Brenner Pass, 230, 231 brent geese, 31, 40 Breslau, 247, 248 Brexit, 114, 118, 420 Britain, 1, 24, 32, 103, 104, 118, 156, 164, 167, 220, 276, 297, 363, 365, 386 British Conservation Society, 396 Brno, 36 Brundtland Commission, 395, 397 – 399, 400, 407 Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 372, 396, 397 Brunner, Guido, 331 Brussels, 52, 53, 116, 331, 332, 337, 422, 437 Bucharest, 36

457

Budapest, 36, 96, 392 Budowski, Gerardo, 203 Bulgaria, 88, 130, 134, 144, 371, 429 Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND), 138, 401 Bund für Vogelschutz, 28 Bund Heimatschutz (1904), 57 Bund Naturschutz (BN), 137, 138 Burhenne, Wolfgang E., 226 Buxton, Sydney Charles, Earl, 28 cable cars, 194, 199 – 201, 222. See also Alps; tourism caesium, 334 Caldicott, Helen, 346 Camargue, 32, 33, 37, 317, 318, 323; flamingos, 33, 317 camping grounds, 196, 197 Canada, 52, 64, 112, 133, 171, 312, 368, 372, 373, 375 Canaries, 102 carbon, 92, 167, 173; emissions, 174, 175, 178, 401; emissions trade, 174, 185, 383; neutrality, 421, 440 Carlowitz, Hanns Carl von, 157, 390 capitalism, green, 405 Carpathian Convention (2003), 176 Carpathians, 63, 87, 172, 428 Carson, Rachel, 31 Centre Naturopa, 431, 432 chemical contamination, 113, 139 chemicals, toxic, 32, 254, 259, 260 Chernobyl, nuclear accident, 331 – 333, 338, 343 – 353, 430. See also anti-nuclear movement cholera epidemics, 247, 249 Churchill, Winston, 253 CITES. See Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora civilization, 47, 51, 52, 59, 85, 222; European, 20, 59, 67, 75, 83, 220; human, 61, 216, 391; Western, 77 climate change, 92, 94, 139, 158, 159, 161, 167, 170, 173 – 175, 177, 178, 310, 347, 383, 398, 399, 403, 404, 420, 422, 423, 434; crisis, 41, 422

458

Index

climatic models, 171 Clinton-Davis, Stanley, 437 Club of Rome, 280, 393, 394, 428, 437; The Limits to Growth (1972), 280, 393, 394, 397, 407, 408 coastal towns, 10, 245, 252; zones, 90, 243 coasts, 102, 243, 247, 254, 256 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 167, 163 Cold War, 35, 106, 133, 136, 193, 207, 226, 246, 253, 257, 259, 261, 275, 332, 344, 345, 355, 363, 370, 372, 384, 396, 397, 421, 422, 449; divide, 10, 31, 121, 130, 144, 382, 392, 394; end of, 9, 129 – 131, 186, 246, 353, 391, 399, 400 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 168 Cologne, 334 Colonies des Vacances, 187 colonies, 26, 29, 51, 79, 160, 165, 167, 177, 223, 224, 308 Comacchio, 105, 106, 108, 119 Comecon. See Council for Mutual Economic Assistance commodification of nature, 201, 204 Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), 109, 113 comparison, cross-geographical, 47 – 49, 66, 67 Conférence Européenne des Administrations des Postes et des Télécommunications (CEPT), 310, 312, 321, 322 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Helsinki (1975), 259, 260 Congo, Belgian, 52 – 54, 308 Congrès International des Organismes Officielles de Tourisme, 188 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 169 coniferous plantation forest, 161, 165, 177, 178 conservationism, 423, 424, 431; colonial, 24; imperial, 50 Consultative Commission for the International Protection of Nature (1913), 51 consumer culture, 269 – 272, 275, 280, 293; goods, 265, 267, 269, 286; society, 194, 272, 273, 279, 394 consumerism, 10, 26, 270, 279, 284, 286, 291, 395

Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping from Ships and Aircraft (Oslo Convention, 1972), 258 Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution from land-based sources (Paris Convention, 1974), 252 Convention for the Protection of the Mediterranean Sea Against Pollution (Barcelona Convention, 1976), 258, 259 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), 109, 114, 173 Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP Convention), 171, 363, 365, 373, 375 – 377, 379 – 383 Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats. See Bern Convention Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (London Convention, 1972), 258 Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area (Helsinki Convention, 1974), 255, 258, 259, 261 Conwentz, Hugo, 57, 76, 77, 222, 223 Cook, Richard, 119 Cook, Thomas, 199 Coolidge, Harold, 49, 51 cooperation, 10, 12, 79, 85, 86, 175, 176, 231, 245, 246, 257, 311, 366, 421; economic, 80, 193, 372, 430; environmental, 166, 256, 257, 259 – 262, 380, 392; European, 9, 79, 86, 92, 95, 206, 243, 265, 311, 313, 331, 332, 334, 336, 343, 348, 372, 403, 405, 428 – 431, 449; transalpine, 232, 228; transnational, 8, 344; international, 170, 173, 246, 248, 261, 341, 392; transboundary, 9, 129, 131, 132, 140 – 144, 233, 352, 344 Copenhagen, 102, 338 – 341 coppices, 162 coronavirus pandemic, 132 Costa Brava, 201 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), 419 – 422, 424, 428 – 430, 440, 441

Index

Council of Europe (CoE), 37, 47, 58, 72, 80, 81, 87, 88, 110, 139, 198, 225, 226, 283, 305, 311 – 313, 318, 335, 419, 420, 431, 433, 440, 449; Assembly, 81, 283, 311, 432 Crowley, Joe, 117 Czechoslovakia, 88, 134, 139, 141, 144, 191, 312, 371, 375 Czech Republic, 87, 130, 141, 143, 159, 171, 350, 351 dams (beaver), 84, 86 dams, 108 – 111, 141, 199, 220, 224, 225, 227, 228, 235; golden age of dam construction, 228 Danube, 85, 86 Danzig (Gdańsk), 117, 247 – 250, 252, 263 Darwin, Charles, 49, 220 DDT. See chemicals, toxic decline, 31, 229, 245; of biodiversity, 161, 419, 435; of eels, 102, 109; of forest, 159, 163; of insects, 41 Delacour, Jean, 28 Denmark, 1, 106, 110, 115, 139, 160, 164, 244, 255, 261, 312, 330, 369, 439; nuclear power, 338, 341, 342, 353; waste and recycling, 275, 283 depopulation, 63, 66, 141, 142, 160 163, 185, 338 Derscheid, Jean-Marie, 52 desertification, 167, 173, 175, 316, 396 destruction: ecological, 50, 67, 39; of forests, 159, 169 – 172, 177; of nature, 192, 200, 311, 345, 423, 425, 429 Deutscher Naturschutzring, 321, 400, 401 development: regional, 10, 129, 185 – 187, 193, 197, 198, 203, 204, 206; sustainable, 11, 129, 174, 175, 203, 204, 233, 389, 390, 395 – 409, 423 disasters: ecological, 305; of oil tankers, 256, 259 diversity: biological, 157, 420, 424, 429, 433, 439; genetic, 102, 396, 408, 433; of landscapes, 59, 61, 424, 433; of natures, 6, 7, 48, 154, 158, 178, 422, 424, 435; species, 135, 161. See also biodiversity

459

Documentation and Information Centre for the Environment and Nature. See Centre Naturopa dodo, 425 Dresser, Henry E., 21 Drömling, 136, 138. See also wetland Drost, Rudolf, 29 dying forests, 171, 172, 374 eagle, 221 Earth Day, 281, 311, 320 Earth Summit. See Rio Earth Summit Easter marches, 345 Eastern bloc, 171, 187, 312, 397, 428 – 430 Echternacherbrück Nature Park, 321 ecofeminism, 345, 346, 348 eco-images, 307, 3142 ecological corridor, 9, 130, 410 ecology, 58, 66, 89, 133, 141, 144, 162, 168, 171, 235, 276, 280, 391, 404; Age of Ecology, 157, 159, 170; ecosystem 63, 423; historical, 161; plant, 56; political, 37; scientific, 177, 423 ecosystem creation, 87; science, 82 ecosystem(s): forest, 79, 157 – 163, 176, 177; global, 55, 177, 391, 423; marine, 245, 264; mnemonic, 144; natural, 65, 83, 88, 380; resilient, 12, 440; semi-natural, 58, 59 ecotones, 20, 161 ecozones, 56 Eden, 50, 52, 55, 56, 65 EEC. See European Economic Community eel as luxury food, 102 eel consciousness, 117; farms, 106, 114 – 117; fisheries, 105, 109 – 113, 116, 118 Eel Management Plans (EMPs), 113, 117 eel: American, 112, 115; European, 9, 101 – 104, 106, 108, 109, 115 – 121; Japanese, 112 eel: glass, 102, 104 – 106, 108 – 110, 115 – 120; silver, 104 – 106, 108, 113, 115, 119 eelscape, 9, 121 Egypt, 28 Eifel, 191, 198 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 333 Emerald Network (1989), 139, 420, 439

460

Index

endangered species, 109, 114, 118, 142, 173, 431, 432, 434; conservation of, 80, 228; lists of, 422, 423. See also CITES energy resources, 160, 334, 401; transition, 160, 163, 407 energy: clean, 235, 352, 367; nuclear, 224, 331 – 335, 346, 349, 351, renewable, 341, 401 Engadin, 62, 77, 221, 228 England, 1, 28, 63, 106, 119, 120, 157, 168, 169, 282, 345 Enhancement of the European eel fishery and conservation of the species (1995), 111 Enlightenment, 6, 177, 235 entanglements, 3, 4, 18, 39, 132, 178, 447 environment, marine, 243, 245, 254, 256 – 259, 261 – 264 environmental activists, 2, 3, 10, 269, 270, 280, 284, 287, 289, 293, 448, 449; actors, 318, 419; awareness, 5, 58, 200, 204, 206, 264, 269, 270, 282, 292, 312, 391, 403; consciousness, 10, 50, 207, 230, 423; crisis, 110, 262, 431; destruction, 24, 32, 38, 51, 192, 193, 200, 311, 314, 345, 394, 447; diplomacy, 243, 256, 259; disasters, 400, 423; legislation, 36, 130, 288, 435, 436; movements, 5, 10, 11, 110, 173, 217, 219, 228, 273, 281, 288, 306, 324, 394, 395, 398 – 400, 404, 407, 408, 423; organizations, 172, 402, 405, 436 – 438, 440 environmental history, 8, 10, 17, 19, 30, 75, 76, 82, 83, 101, 121, 160, 167, 172, 306, 307, 311, 447; European, 3 – 7, 39, 263, 264, 324, 448, 449; marine, 243 – 245 environmental policy, 35, 110, 170, 172, 206. 245, 247, 253, 262, 263, 271, 292, 370, 374, 381 – 382, 391, 392, 400 – 405, 408, 420, 421, 427, 428, 434, 435; European, 11, 39, 175, 311, 323, 335, 389, 390, 393, 395, 422, 437 – 439; global, 158; national, 280, 281, 291, 402, 422 environmentalism, 5, 11, 172, 186, 200, 205, 231, 292, 293, 305 – 307, 309, 322, 324, 349, 351, 391 – 393, 408, 419, 421, 423,

428, 429, 434, 447; and tourism, 182, 195, 201; global, 352; rise of, 335, 448 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 185 Eppler, Erhard, 393 Estonia, 106, 115, 130, 159, 244, 257, 431 Ethiopia, 35 European Union (EU), 10, 12, 37, 59, 130, 139, 144, 158, 219, 244, 246, 262, 2264, 270, 350, 381, 382, 389, 403, 405, 419, 420, 434, 440; Maastricht Treaty (1992), 113, 175, 402 EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, 422 EU Biomass Action Plan, 175 EU Birds Directive (1979), 38, 139, 175, 438, 439 EU Common Agricultural Policy (1962), 32, 41, 158 EU Fifth Environmental Action Programme (1993), 403, 404 EU Forestry Strategy, 158 EU Habitats Directive (1992), 39, 59, 61, 86, 93, 175, 420, 437 – 439 EU Regulation for the Recovery of the Eel/Eel Regulation, 104, 113, 114, 117 Euratom, 332, 334, 350 – 352, 435 Eurofisch, 101 – 104 EUROPA stamps, 310, 322 EUROPARC, 140, 143, 198 Europe: East-Central, 159, 188, 404, 428; Eastern, 6, 10, 35, 37, 66, 85, 89, 95, 161, 171, 195, 199, 258, 271, 284, 346, 349 – 352, 373, 381 – 383, 391, 392, 405, 408, 428, 397, 400, 418; Central, 24, 57, 59, 87, 89, 131, 140 – 142, 160, 222, 246, 318, 341, 346, 349, 350, 352, 370, 374, 382, 390 – 392, 405, 406, 408, 430; Northern, 6, 20, 26, 111, 160, 161, 169, 247, 248, 251, 257, 262, 282, 284, 346, 438; Southern, 6, 29, 33, 38, 66, 102, 373, 438; Western, 11, 26, 34, 35, 49, 53, 58, 81, 85, 88 – 90, 95, 185 – 187, 193, 199, 206, 249, 270, 274, 279, 286, 293, 305, 306, 314, 331, 332, 335, 336, 343, 345, 348, 353, 366, 370, 378, 381, 382, 392, 393, 396, 405, 408, 409, 428 European “Green Deal” (2019), 419

Index

European Atomic Energy Community. See Euratom European Environment Centre for Nature Conservation (1967), 59, 139, 297, 305 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 81, 310, 333, 334 European Commission (EC), 38, 116, 175, 232, 334, 393, 405, 408, 419, 421, 435 – 440 European Committee for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (1962), 37, 110, 431, 432 European Conservation Year (ECY, 1970), 11, 37, 58, 59, 110, 225, 305, 314, 335, 432 European Diploma for Protected Areas (since 1965), 313 – 319. See also Council of Europe European Economic Community (EEC), 283, 288, 394, 395, 421, 429, 435 – 439; Directive on Waste (1975), 283; Environmental Action Programme (1973), 394, 436; Waste Committee (1976), 283 European Environmental Bureau (1974), 437 European Forest Institute, 157, 159 European Inland Fisheries Advisory Commission (EIFAC), 102, 107, 110 European Landscape Convention (2000), 433 European moments, 8, 95, 111, 113, 194, 206, 206, 313, 331, 333, 335, 343, 344, 350, 352, 353, 448 European Network of Biogenetic Reserves (1976), 59 European Principles for the Environment (2006), 433 European Recovery Program (ERP). See Marshall Plan European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), 4 European Union. See EU European Water Framework Directive (WFD, 2000), 113, 114 Europeanization, 3, 9, 17, 19, 24, 37, 39, 40, 84, 450; of biodiversity protection, 420, 435, 440, 441; of nature conservation, 58, 86, 305, 306, 322 – 324 Europeanness, 59, 101, 102, 104, 117, 120, 121

461

eutrophication, 108, 254, 260, 380 Evelyn, John, 157 exceptionalism, environmental, 47, 67 extinction, 52, 77, 79, 82, 92, 109, 114, 120, 221, 254, 419, 422 – 427, 440 Extinction Rebellion, 120 fallout, 336; Chernobyl, 346 – 348 fallout debate, 334 fast breeder reactors, 332, 343, 344, 352. See also Superphénix fauna, 8, 31, 37, 40, 51, 61, 83, 109, 114, 121, 134, 138, 173, 225, 312, 315, 318, 420, 422 – 424, 431, 433, 434, 439, 448; avifauna, 20, 24, 26, 32, 38; megafauna, 62, 75, 79, 81, 172 feather fashion, 26, 27; hats, 26; traffic, 28 Federal Ministry of Postal Services, Germany, 309, 320, 321 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), 255, 257, 309. See also Germany, West fertilizers, synthetic, 31, 261 Finland, 34, 84, 136, 137, 159, 160, 164, 168, 244, 249 – 251, 253 – 256, 257, 261, 262, 312, 351, 369, 402; border with Russia, 133 – 135, 144, 247 fishing, 86, 112, 132, 141, 221, 427; commercial, 110, 113, 114, 118, 119 flora, 8, 31, 37, 40, 59, 83, 109, 114, 134, 137, 138, 173, 225, 312, 315, 318, 420, 422 – 424, 431, 433, 434, 439, 448 Fondo Lire, 193, 194 Forest Academies, 168 forest area, 87, 142, 159, 162, 170; destruction, 169, 177; exploitation, 164, 177, 178; governance, 170, 175, 176; health monitoring, 171, 175; policies, 157, 174, 177; protection, 10, 157 – 159, 161, 166, 170, 171, 173 – 178 Forest Europe (2009), 159, 176 Forest Stewardship Council (FSC, 1993), 174 forestry: ecological, 166; modern, 157, 164, 166, 177; natural, 162, 171; scientific, 165 – 167, 171, 176, 390 forests, boreal, 134, 135, 162; industrial, 135, 160 – 163

462

Index

fossil fuel, 93, 157, 158, 160, 163, 171, 381,449 France, 88, 133, 157, 191, 217, 228, 230, 232, 244, 259, 369, 371, 373, 406, 407; beavers, 84, 85; birds, 1, 26, 28, 28; eels, 105 – 107, 116; forestry, 160, 164, 168, 169; national parks, 198, 223, 226; nuclear technology, 333, 334, 336, 338, 343, 344, 347, 348, 351; Société pour la Protection des Paysages de France (1901), 57; stamps, 317 – 319; tourism, 188, 194, 198, 201, 222, 229; waste and recycling, 270, 273, 274, 279, 280, 282, 283 Freedman, Stuart, 12 Friends of the Earth, 138, 281, 284, 336, 393, 401, 403 Friendship Park, Finnish-Russian (1990), 135 Fukushima accident (2011), 351 Galápagos Islands, 55 Gätke, Heinrich, 24 Gayer, Karl, 167 GDR (German Democratic Republic), 36, 137, 138, 199, 392, 398, 400 geography, emotional, 144 Georgescu-Roegen, Nicolas, 281 Georgia, 102, 420 Germany: East, 90, 199, 257, 270, 276, 278, 281, 349, 351, 375; National Park Programme, 138 West, 134, 171, 172, 257, 261, 270, 272, 274, 276, 278 – 281, 283, 286, 289, 291, 369, 373 – 375, 391, 393, 397; anti-nuclear movement, 333, 334, 343, 344, 347 – 350; nature parks in, 196 – 198; stamps in, 309, 312, 320, 325. See also GDR; FRG German Empire, 57, 168, 247 glass industry, 274, 288, 289, 291; recycling, 269, 270, 274, 282, 283, 288, 289, 291 – 293 Global South, 55, 56, 174, 394 global warming, 108, 171, 404 Goldsmith, Edward, 394 Good Ecological Status (GES), 113, 114 Gorbachev, Mikhael, 350

Göring, Hermann, 79 Gorleben nuclear waste repository, 347, 348, 351 Gotthard Pass, 230, 231, 234 Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI), 280 Gran Paradiso, 77, 224 Grande Dixence dam, Switzerland (1961), 228 Grand-Maison dam, France (1985), 228 Grass, Günter, 117 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Great Depression, 188, 189, 246 Greece, 110, 130, 134, 144, 200, 283, 316, 375 Green Belt, 9, 410; European, 129 – 132, 140 – 144; Fennoscandian, 136; German, 129; of Karelia, 136 green economy, 404; movements, 374 – 376, 383 Green parties, 172, 344, 395, 400, 406 – 408 Green Party, Germany, 337, 348, 374, 395, 400, 401, 404, 407 Greenham Common protest, 344 – 346 Greenpeace, 393, 395, 400 – 402 Grey, Charles Robert, Earl, 28 growth: economic, 31, 175, 185, 186, 188, 194, 200, 205, 335, 381, 393, 395, 396, 399, 400, 404 – 406, 408, 436; sustainable, 398 – 400, 402, 405, 408 Grzimek, Bernhard, 85 Gulf of Finland, 249, 250; Agreement on the Scientific Cooperation of the Gulf of Finland (1968), 256 Gulf Stream, 108 Gurgiser, Fritz, 232 Gustav I, King, 250 Gvishiani, Jermen, 394 habitat, 85, 101, 102, 109, 117, 140, 161, 223, 317, 423, 438; non-terrestrial, 104; types, 35, 36, 61, 113, 439 habitats, 8, 9, 12, 17, 33, 38, 40, 59, 82, 83, 88, 92, 137, 139, 158, 166, 175, 390, 419, 420, 422 – 425, 427, 428, 430 – 434; Alpine, 223, 230; diversity of, 400, 424; forest, 176; fragmented, 108, 114, 132; loss of, 28, 32, 87, 108; natural,

Index

39, 83, 225, 424, 425, 434, 439. See also Bern Convention; EU Habitats Directive; Natura 2000 Habitats Directive (1992). See EU Hak, Pieter, 120 Hallstein Doctrine, 257 Hamburg, 106, 169, 252, 273 Harrington, Damien, 315 Harroy, Jean-Paul, 37, 54 Harz Mountains, 134, 138 Hauff, Volker, 397 health, 169, 191, 243, 249, 250, 252, 256, 264, 334, 335, 337, 338, 349, 350, 367, 368, 380, 392, 423, 428, 429, 431, 432, 436 heaths, 33 Heck, Heinz, 62 Heck, Lutz, 52, 62, 79 hedgerows, 31 Heim, Roger, 54 Heligoland, 24, 28, 29 Helsinki, 247, 250 – 252, 257, 263, 378, 429 Helsinki Commission (Helcom, Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission), 261 Helsinki Convention. See Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area Helsinki Final Act (1975), 372, 378 herbivores, 58, 64, 84, 88 heritage: cultural, 55, 67, 157, 178, 197, 406, 433; European natural, 11, 20, 306, 449; national, 166, 169; natural, 55, 168, 222, 305, 315, 323, 434; shared natural, 60, 313, 326, 449 high forest, 162, 165 Hilberseimer, Ludwig, 1659 Hoffmann, Luc, 32, 33, 35 Hohe Venn, 37 household waste, 270, 271, 274, 275, 283, 291; recycling of, 269, 278 human-animal relations, 8, 17, 19, 25, 90 human-bird relations, 19, 31, 39, 41 human-environment relations, 4, 39, 447 human-nature-relations, 4, 5, 7, 37, 41, 73, 76, 77, 81, 84, 94, 158, 172, 176, 448 Humboldt, Alexander von, 49, 50, 76

463

Hungary, 84, 87, 130, 159, 191, 199, 276, 350, 397 Hunsrück protest (1983), 345 hunting, 83, 165, 221, 220, 414, 415, 425, 437; bird, 18, 26, 27, 36, 38, 40, 438, 439; beaver, 84 – 87; wolf, 87, 88 hunting practices, 424, 425, 434 Huxley, Aldous, 47, 48, 67 Huxley, Julian, 31, 391, 394, 396 hydroelectric plants, 10, 108, 222, 226, 227, 235 hydrology, 33, 38, 136, 137, 166, 247 ibex, 62, 77, 79, 221, 224, 225, 433 iconography, 308, 313 ideals: aesthetic, 61; wilderness, 56, 64, 74, 75 identity, 76, 81, 90, 119, 220; cultural, 223; European, 37, 102, 207, 245, 313, 316, 317, 352, 420, 433; national, 189, 314; regional, 337; social, 293 identity building, 47, 67, 158 imageries of nature, 52, 54, 56, 62 images, 33, 62, 73, 82, 187, 308, 313, 320, 322 – 324, 334, 374, 391, 447; iconic, 307; nostalgic, 57; of “unspoiled nature”, 79, 81; of wilderness, 9; significance of, 306 imaginaries, 47, 49, 51 – 53, 55, 158 imperialism, 26, 50, 161, 177, 244; “green”, 178 India, 35, 170 industrialization, 22, 160, 176, 221, 337, 382, 406, 428, 429, 436 infrastructures, tourist, 185, 186, 193, 197, 199, 204, 206 Initiative Transport Europe (ITE), 232 insects, 31, 41, 143, 162, 164, 166 Institute of the National Parks of Belgian Congo, 52 intaglio printing, 313, 317, 319, 320 integration, European, 8, 9, 40, 58, 90, 121, 129 – 131, 194, 230, 232 – 235, 317, 331, 382, 402, 408, 435, 447 Intergovernmental Conference on Oil Pollution of the Sea (1954), 31

464

Index

International Bureau for Waterfowl Research, 36 International Commission for the Protection of the Alps (CIPRA), 202, 226, 233 International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine against Pollution (1963), 436 International Committee for Bird Protection (ICBP), 28. See also BirdLife International International Conference of Zoology, Graz (1910), 27 International Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution from Ships (1973), 259 International Convention for the Protection of Birds (1902), 23, 29; (1950), 31 International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), 403 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), 103, 107, 110, 113, 258 International Office for the Protection of Nature, 51, 52, 57 International Office of Documentation and Correlation for the Protection of Nature, 51 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), 346 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 37, 54, 56, 58, 61, 63, 80, 82, 89, 95, 109, 140, 203, 225, 229, 391, 392, 396, 400, 408 International Union for the Protection of Nature (1948, IUPN), 32, 54, 58, 63, 225 International Union of Forest Research Institutions (IUFRO, 1890), 159, 167 International Union of Official Travel Organizations (IUOTO), 200 International Wildfowl Research Bureau (IWRB), 32 Iran, 35 Ireland, 11, 104, 109, 110, 114, 118, 159, 189, 314, 315 Iron Curtain, 9, 10, 85, 89, 90, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136, 139, 140, 143, 144, 170, 198, 207, 246, 253, 254, 257, 258, 275, 308, 332, 335, 348, 350, 353, 371, 379, 392

Isar River, 84 Ispra, 334 Israel, 312 Italy, 29, 77, 88, 105, 106, 110, 115, 160, 169, 187, 217, 218, 222, 224 – 228, 230 – 233, 275, 314, 315, 323, 333, 334, 343 – 345, 347, 348, 350, 351; bird hunting, 26, 28, 40; forests, 168; national parks, 62, 92, 198, 204; tourism, 188, 190, 191, 193, 200, 201 IUCN. See International Union for the Conservation of Nature Jänicke, Martin, 404 Japan, 28, 112, 115, 116, 167, 170, 186, 308, 374 Johnson, Lyndon B., 391 Jordan, 35 Jouanin, Christian, 32 jungles, 47 Kaliningrad, 262 Kalkar, fast breeder, 344 Kamtschatka, 24 Karelia, Soviet Republic of, 135, 137, 162, 163 Karlsruhe, 334 Kelly, Petra, 331, 332, 337, 346, 338 Kerr, Andrew, 103, 107, 116 Kilkenny Design Workshops, 315 Knechtsand, 1, 2 Kola Peninsula, 102 Königsberg, 247, 248 Konstanz, 281 Kostomuksha Nature Reserve, 135 Kraft durch Freude (KdF), 187, 190, 191 Kroglund, Torolf, 120 Kyoto Protocol, 174 La Rochelle, 282 lagoons, 33, 36, 102, 105, 106, 108, 317, 318 Lake District, 47, 48, 61, 67, 168; Friends of the, 168 lakes, 34, 85, 168, 199, 227, 244, 335, 364 landfills, 276, 278, 284 landscape(s): agrarian, 59; Arcadian, 57, 59, 61, 63, 67; civilized, 52; cultural, 31, 57, 58, 61, 168, 169, 192, 197, 220, 229,

Index

231; “Edenic”, 55; iconic, 66, 226, 227; natural, 57, 59, 66, 67, 73, 166, 207, 222, 322, 428, 434; pristine, 52, 56, 73, 185, 263; rural, 22, 47, 57, 199; steppe, 167, 173; sublime, 10, 62, 76, 217; tourism, 200, 201 Lapland, 63 Latvia, 106, 130, 159, 244 Laxenburg, 370, 384 Le Havre, 282 League for Nature Protection (Bund für Naturschutz), 224 League of Nations, 29, 419, 420, 422, 424, 425, 431, 440; Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (1931), 426 Leibundgut, Hans, 171 Leinen, Josef (“Jo”), 331, 332, 336, 337 Leningrad, 35, 261 Leprince-Ringuet, Louis, 110 Liechtenstein, 218, 312, 319, 320 Link, Harald, 227 Lisbon, 402 Lisbon Strategy, 405, 406 Lithuania, 106, 116, 130, 159, 244, 350, 430 Ljubljana, 36, 226 lobby organizations, 186, 188, 205 lobbying, 198, 390, 437 Lobis, Markus, 231 London, 26, 28, 96, 106, 120, 252, 284; killer smog (1952), 367 London Convention. See Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter, 1972) Los Alcornocales Natural Park, Spain, 162 Lough Neagh, 118, 120 Lund, Ann, 341, 342 Lüneburger Heide, 198 Luxembourg, 321, 332, 333 lynxes, 73, 74, 83, 89, 109, 142, 172, 434 Lyon, 107, 276 Main River, 436 Mallorca, 201 Malta, 40, 312 Malville. See Superphénix

465

mammals, 39, 51, 52, 57, 62, 66, 87, 89, 104, 109, 117, 136, 423, 425, 427, 431, 434 Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme. See UNESCO Mansholt, Sicco, 393, 437 MAR initiative (1962), 33 – 35, 37 marine area, 39, 109; biology, 93; chemistry, 254; environments, 243, 245, 254, 257 – 259, 261, 262, 264; habitats, 132; scientists, 256 – 258 Marshall Plan, 193, 194, 206, 227, 428 marshes, 29, 31 – 33, 36 mass consumption, 10, 269, 271, 273 – 275, 279, 293; consumerism, 10, 270, 284, 286, 291; demonstrations, 344; market, 194; motorization, 194, 273 Mauritius, 425 McKenna, Pamela, 28 McKenna, Reginald, 28 meadow orchards, 31 meadows, 17, 22, 57, 86, 226, 315 Meadows, Dennis, 280, 394 Mediterranean coast, 28, 33, 66, 162, 169, 189, 198, 200, 201, 309 Mediterranean Sea, 102, 205, 244, 256, 258 – 260 melioration, 22 Merkel, Angela, 351 migration: bird, 1, 16, 17, 19, 36, 309, 413, 428, 429; fish, 106, 107, 116; wolf, 85, 88; wildlife, 131, 133 Möbius, Karl August, 93 modernization: ecological, 82, 389, 404; environmental, 281 Moldova, 420 Monaco, 218, 312 Monbiot, George, 67 monk seal, 109, 433 Monnet Plan, 193, 194 monocultures, 67, 160, 161, 165, 166 monuments, natural, 57, 63, 76, 192, 222, 226, 231, 318, 319 Morocco, 92, 105 Morozov, Georgij, 165 Morsleben nuclear waste repository, 351 moors, 29, 31, 58, 141

466

Index

Moscow, 36, 167, 372 Mortensen, Hans Christian Cornelius, 17, 18, 24, 40 Munich, 62, 84, 87, 167, 229, 375 Murmansk, 134 museums, 21, 52, 119; natural history museums, 51, 53, 54, 120, 226 Naples, 105 National Ecological Network, Dutch, 64 national economies, 30, 188, 189, 233, 350, 429 National Environmental Policy Plan (NEPP), 402 National Nature Heritage, 138. See also Green Belt national parks: Abruzzo National Park, Italy, 62, 204; Albert National Park, Congo, 52, 53; Bavarian Forest/Šumava, Germany/Czech Republic, 129, 132, 140 – 142; Berchtesgaden, Germany, 224, 226; Circeo, Italy, 225; Harz, Germany, 134, 138; Hohe Tauern, Austria, 204, 222 – 224, 226, 228, 318; Lower Engadine, Switzerland, 62, 222; Parc national de la Bérarde, France, 223, 224; Plitvice Lakes, Croatia, 428; Retezat, Romania, 428; Stelvio, Italy, 225; Thayatal/Podyjí, Austria/Czech Republic, 129, 132, 140, 141, 152; Triglav, Slovenia, 224, 226; Yellowstone, US, 56, 61, 62, 66, 76, 425; Yosemite, US, 65, 66 National Socialism, 52, 62, 187, 197, 224, 225; Nazi Germany, 78, 79, 185; Nature Conservation Act (Reichsnaturschutzgesetz, 1935), 221 National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or National Beauty, UK (1894), 57 nationalism, 168, 188, 206, 334 Natura 2000 network, 7, 39, 40, 59, 113, 139, 140, 143, 144, 158, 175, 176, 419, 420, 434, 435, 439, 440 nature conservation: debates, 95, 309; European, 90, 186, 191, 192, 309, 316, 324; groups, 227, 390; international, 58, 85, 86, 427, 428; legislation, 39, 86, 221,

438; movement, 217, 219, 220, 222, 233, 235, 317, 423, 437; organizations, 48, 49, 191, 224, 232, 427, 438; policies, 81, 199, 225, 313, 420, 439; projects, 130, 138, 223; transboundary, 131, 134, 142, 146 nature conservationists, 10, 75, 77, 85, 86, 90, 185, 206, 219 – 222, 224, 318, 422, 423, 425; European, 55, 308 “Nature in Focus”. See Naturopa nature park movement, 186, 193 nature parks, 78, 80, 81, 92, 138, 142, 197, 198, 226, 308, 321, 428, 432 nature protection, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 73, 80, 83, 129, 142, 157, 168, 185 – 187, 193, 197, 198, 223, 224, 420, 426; Alpine, 219, 231; debates, 75; European, 4, 37, 130, 323; idea of, 12, 77, 225, 220, 221; institutionalization of, 76, 77; measures, 82, 206, 221; movement, 52, 61; organizations for, 49, 54, 55, 219, 220; policy, 89, 90; tourism and, 203, 207 nature reserve, 1, 2, 82, 85, 86, 88, 95, 135, 136, 139, 141, 144, 186, 197, 222, 225, 228, 313, 317, 318, 423, 428, 434 nature: tropical, 47, 50, 54; unspoiled, 52, 55, 56, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 95, 219, 263; wild, 9, 74, 75, 77, 84, 90, 220, 222 Naturopa, 59, 63, 432 Netherlands, 1, 28, 63, 66, 106, 109, 110, 115, 118, 139, 160, 191, 270, 281, 283, 286, 291, 312, 333, 369, 406, 436 networks, ecological, 9, 129, 131, 132, 139, 175; European, 8, 30, 34, 331, 350; international, 11, 80, 186, 253; preservation, 27, 32; transnational, 2, 232, 333, 493; transregional, 2, 121 Neva River, 24, 249 New International Economic Order (NIEO), 394, 398 NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), 38, 117, 135, 137, 187, 206, 390, 396, 398, 400, 401, 403, 406, 420, 425, 435, 437 – 439 Nicholson, Max, 37, 58 Nixon, Richard, 311, 392

Index

Noirfalise, Albert, 59 North Atlantic Oscillation, 108 Northern Ireland, 108, 112, 116 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 255, 335, 344, 392 North Sea, 92, 93, 118, 205, 256, 258, 381; reef structures in the, 90 – 92 Northern Ireland (UK), 110, 114, 118 Norway, 34, 84, 92, 115, 136, 159, 160, 164, 171, 190, 288, 338, 364, 369, 370, 372, 373, 393, 403, 420, 426; alliance with Soviet Union, 372; 381, 382; stamps, 320, 325 Nowak, Eugeniusz, 36 nuclear politics, 331, 350, 353, 345, 352; power, 11, 331 – 333, 335 – 337, 338, 341, 343 – 350, 352, 353, 382, 403; technology, 11, 228, 332, 333, 336, 343, 344, 347, 352, 353; waste, 334, 347, 348, 351, 423; weapons, 331, 333, 334, 336, 352, 392 nuclear power plants: Barsebäck, 338 – 341, 343, 352; Brokdorf, 343, 347; Fessenheim, 336 – 338; Forsmark, 346; Grohnde, 343; Ignalina, 350, 430; Kaiseraugst, 337, 338; Wyhl, 331, 336 – 338, 352. See also Chernobyl; fallout; Fukushima; Superphénix Oberes Waldviertel, Austria, 134 oceanographers, 254 oceans, 256, 259, 425 oil tanker accidents, 248, 250, 253, 254, 256 One World movements, 204, 407 “Only One Earth”, 394, 396 OOA. See Organization for Information about Atomic Energy Oostvaardersplassen, Netherlands, 64 – 66 Opera Nationale Dopolavoro (OND), 187 “Operation Stork”, 64 Ordonnance des eaux et forêts (1699), 163 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 193, 200, 204, 205, 272, 283, 335, 345, 365, 368, 391 Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), 193, 194, 200, 206

467

Organization for Information about Atomic Energy (OOA), 337, 341, 343, 349 ornithologists, 1, 17, 18, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 317 ornithology, 25, 310; history of, 19, 21 Osborn, Fairfield, 51, 53 Oslo Convention. See Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping from Ships and Aircraft other(ness), environmental, 47 – 50, 52, 54, 56, 62, 66 Ott, Konrad, 407 Ottawa, 375 otters, 73, 117 Oxford, 282 oxygen, 167, 245, 261 oyster, 9, 75, 92 – 95 Packard, Vance, 279 Pakistan, 35 “panda sandwich”, 118 Pan-European Ecological Network (PEEN, 1996), 139 paradigm: economic growth, 393, 395, 400, 407; shift in nature conservation, 9, 64, 128, 131, 139, 140 Paris Convention. See Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution from land-based sources Paris, 23, 26, 31, 53, 54, 77, 164, 226, 229, 258, 282, 435 PCB. See chemicals, toxic peace movement, 337, 344, 345 Pearce, David, 398 Pearson, Thomas Gilbert, 28 Peccei, Aurelio, 393 perestroika, 261, 429 periphery, 10, 32, 40, 51, 63, 133, 134, 167, 185, 189, 191, 217, 234, 235, 282, 332, 352, 449; European, 12, 62, 87, 167, 200, 204 pesticides, 31, 38, 40, 436 Peter I, Tsar, 166, 249 Philippines, 198 pigeons, 22, 96 Pimlott, Douglas H., 88, 89 Piskernik, Angela, 226

468

Index

planning: city, 169; landscape, 58, 59, 82; regional, 80, 186, 193, 197; spatial, 81, 197, 205; tourism, 193, 188, 197 plantation forestry, 158, 159, 163, 166, 172 – 175 plastic, 114, 272, 276, 278, 280 – 282, 284, 286 Pleistocene landscape, 65 Poland, 106, 130, 159, 160, 171, 191, 244, 247, 349, 351, 371, 375, 405, 406, 429; beavers, 85, 86; Białowieża forest, 63, 79, 144, 172, 425; wolves, 88, 90 pollution, 4, 34, 40, 258, 322, 368, 372, 380, 401, 406, 424,429, 447; environmental, 11, 230, 391, 392 – 394, 398; industrial, 38, 278, 392, 423, 428 – 430; marine, 243, 246, 256, 258, 259; nutrient, 261; oil, 28 – 31, 37, 254, 257, 259, 260, 432; radioactive, 336; river, 257, 436; water, 10, 108, 205, 250 – 252, 263, 431, 435, 436. See also air pollution Portugal, 88, 104, 105, 116, 159, 283, 312 postal and telecommunications services, 310 postal departments, national, 312 power plants, 11, 199, 228, 363, 370, 374, 377, 382; hydroelectric, 226, 227; nuclear, 7, 331, 336 – 339, 341, 343, 346 – 348, 350 – 352, 381, 403, 430 practice, aesthetic, 305 – 307, 309, 324 Prague, 35, 36, 77, 164, 392 Prora, 190, 191 protected areas, 38, 39, 63, 130 – 132, 135, 137, 139, 141, 142, 144, 175, 176, 192, 193, 197, 200, 217, 219, 221, 224, 226 – 228, 313, 316, 318, 420 Protected Geographical Indication, 118 protection from humans and for humans, 81, 193, 199, 219 protest(s): anti-nuclear, 332, 335, 336, 345, 351, 353; border-crossing, 331, 338, 343; female, 345, 338; green, 429, 430; violent, 343, 344, 352 Prussia, 57, 93, 169, 170, 220, 222, 247, 248 Pyrenees, 133 quails, 7, 28, 31

rainforests, 48, 57, 67 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat (1971), 17, 36, 38, 143, 173, 439 recreation, 34, 141, 166, 169, 176, 178, 187, 188, 192, 193, 197 – 199, 223. See also tourism recycling, green, 270, 272 – 275, 279, 280, 284, 289 recycling movement, 270, 275, 279, 283, 293; projects, 269, 270, 273, 279, 282 Red List of Threatened Species, 82, 109 reforestation, 110, 135, 160, 162, 165 regeneration, 163, 164, 408; artificial, 160; natural, 160, 162 Regional Acidification Information and Simulation (RAINS), 378 – 381 regions: biogeographical, 132; border, 133, 134, 143; global, 159; peripheral, 185, 191, 204, 352 resilience, 34, 92, 157 resource autarchy, 160; conservation, 80, 166, 177, 178, 280; depletion, 4, 38, 161, 165, 167, 308, 423, 424, 435 resources: natural, 5, 29, 38, 51, 163, 177, 228, 270, 283, 322, 391, 392, 395, 401, 422 – 424, 428, 429, 432; wildlife, 55 restoration, 87, 95, 145, 160, 165, 221, 420, 424; of wilderness, 73, 75, 77 revolution, ecological, 235, 391 Rewilding Europe (2010), 66, 67 rewilding, 9, 47, 67, 73, 79, 83, 86, 87, 92, 94, 95 Rhine River, 133, 220, 331, 336, 337, 344, 436 Rhön Biosphere Reserve, 138 Rhône River, 84, 85, 109; delta, 33, 109, 317 Rio Earth Summit (1992), 173, 174, 203, 233, 389, 399 – 402, 407; declaration, 389, 399, 400, 402 Ripa di Meana, Carlo, 437 river(s), 7, 21, 32, 86, 102, 106 – 111, 113, 114, 120, 133, 228, 244, 248, 250, 251, 259, 336; beds, 64, 247; history, 104; landscapes, 84, 320; regulation, 84, 85, 141

Index

Rocky Mountains, 49 Rodríguez de la Fuente, Félix Samuel, 89 Romania, 87, 160, 172, 198, 312, 370, 406 Rome, 105, 118, 225, 333. Rossitten, 29 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 220 routes: of migrating birds, 9, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 29, 41; transit, 7, 230, 231; water, 28, 87 Russia, 85, 116, 131, 135, 136, 160, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171, 244, 346, 352, 351, 406; Imperial, 165, 249 Russian Federation, 261 sandbank, 1, 450 sanitary experts, 247, 256; reforms, 247 – 248 Sarasin, Paul, 51, 52, 77, 222, 223, 425 Sargasso Sea, 102, 104, 108, 114 Scandinavia, 64, 87, 88, 101, 114, 270, 283, 338, 343, 397 Schleswig-Holstein, 137 Schmidt, Johannes, 106 Schraffl, Kuno, 232 Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR), 258 Scott, Peter, 32 Scott, Robert, 32 seabirds, 27, 28 seaside resorts, 188, 191, 194, 201 secondary raw materials, 274, 276, 280 second-hand use, 274 SEG. See Sustainable Eel Group (SEG) Senegal, 35 Serbia, 159 Serengeti, 65, 66, 81 Severn River, eels, 105 – 108, 112, 115 – 120 sewerage systems, 247 – 248, 251, 252 Sielmann, Heinz, 137 silviculture, 157, 161, 166, 171, 162, 167 Single European Act (1986), 420, 438 ski lifts, 199 – 201 skiing resorts, 190, 194, 197, 201, 229 Slimbridge, 32, 36 Slovakia, 130, 159, 350 Slovenia, 87, 90, 130, 204, 221, 224, 226, 228

469

Socialist Unity Party (SED), 134, 398. See also Germany, East Sofia, 36 soil erosion, 37, 110, 165, 167, 174, 230, 432 Sopot, 248 Soulé, Michael, 423 South Moravia, 141 Southey, Robert, 168 Soviet Union. See USSR Spain, 25, 88, 244, 259, 283, 312, 351, 375; eels, 104 – 106, 116; forestry, 159, 162, 166, 169; tourism, 191, 202 species: bio-indicator, 113; bird, 20, 21, 29, 31, 34, 40, 317, 425, 438; extinct, 62, 64, 77, 82, 84, 87, 93, 424, 425, 449; invasive, 83; keystone, 73, 93; native, 83; nomenclature for, 23; pan-European, 8, 19, 109, 121; prominent, 424; threatened, 37, 109, 390, 423, 433, 447 Spinelli, Altiero, 437 Spitsbergen, 52, 63 St Petersburg, 93, 164, 247, 249, 261 – 263 stakeholders, 9, 12, 94, 117, 130, 140, 144, 187, 193, 196, 197, 201, 204, 206, 246, 269, 283, 288, 291, 293, 308, 309, 315, 321, 322, 405, 421, 425 Stalin, Joseph, 167 stamp campaigns, 308; design, 309, 314, 317, 322, 323; motifs, 319, 321, 323; series, 308, 321, 324 stamps: commemorative, 319; conservation, 312, 320; environmental, 314, 320; national, 312 starlings, 17, 20, 22, 24, 40 state socialism, 130, 134, 143, 349, 404; communist states, 257, 261, 262, 420, 428, 430; socialist bloc, 187, 312, 397, 428 – 430; socialist states, 37, 130, 171, 199, 272, 349, 352, 372, 392, 393, 396, 397 Steering Committee for Culture, Heritage and Landscape, 433, 434 Stephen, Leslie, 201 Stockholm, 77, 247, 251, 252, 263, 335 – 337, 371, 408

470

Index

Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (UN, 1972), 172, 203, 258, 321, 335, 352, 370, 373, 394, 396, 408, 436 Strasbourg, 37, 321, 332, 422, 431 – 433 Strong, Maurice, 396 Strzygowski, Walter, 80, 198 Stuffmann, Claus, 38 Stuttgart, 337 Suez Canal, 102 sulphur dioxide, 11, 132, 231, 363, 374 – 376, 380. See also acid rain sulphuric acids, 171, 366, 370 Superphénix, Malville, 343, 344, 347, 352 sustainability, 6, 11, 157, 161, 164, 167, 178, 389, 390, 402 – 409, 421, 423, 425 – 428, 440; concepts, 389, 390, 403 – 405, 408, 409 Sustainable Cities and Towns Campaign, 389 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), 174, 408 Sustainable Eel Group (SEG), 116, 120 sustainable yield, 157, 163, 165, 166, 169, 176, 390 swallows, 21, 25, 40 Sweden, 25, 34, 244, 250 – 252, 257, 261, 262, 288, 320, 351, 364, 369, 370, 374, 407; beaver reintroduction, 84 – 86; fishery, 104, 106, 110, 115, 119; forestry, 159, 165, 171; national parks, 62, 77; nuclear power, 334 – 336, 338, 341, 346, 350 Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), 365 Switzerland, 24, 37, 85, 159, 167, 221 – 224, 226 – 228, 230 – 234, 280, 291, 314, 344, 369, 375; Europarc Federation, 140, 143, 198; national park, 62, 77, 222 – 224, 228, 425; Swiss Alps, 77, 218, 221, 232; tourism, 188, 191, 193, 201 synanthropes, 96 taiga forests, primeval, 134, 135 Taiga Rescue Network (TRN), 135 Tasmanian tiger, 425 Taut, Bruno, 169 taxonomy, 121, 423, 425

Temple-Land, John, 38 Thatcher, Margret, 282, 398 Thaya/Dyje River valley, 141 Thomas, Vaughan, 37 Three Mile Island, nuclear accident, 343 throwaway culture, 269, 279; practices, 275, 284, 291; “society”, 279, 287, 293 timber, 136, 157, 160, 163 – 165, 169, 173 timber frontier, 160, 162, 165 Timmermans, Frans, 419 Tirana, 36 Toepfer, Alfred, 197, 198 Tončić-Sorinj, Lujo, 110 Töpfer, Klaus, 398 Torrey Canyon accident, 254 tourism: Alpine, 217, 219; “collective”, 191, 198; cultural, 200; domestic, 189, 190, 199; eco, 162; environmental impacts of, 200, 201,203; “hard”, 203; health, 191; landscape, 185, 187; mass, 10, 32, 185 – 187, 189, 192, 198, 200, 203 – 206, 217, 219, 221, 222, 225, 228, 229, 235; nature-friendly, 222; social, 185, 187, 191, 204; “soft”, 203; sustainable, 185, 186, 200, 203, 204, 229, 402 tourism: industry, 185, 189, 194, 204 – 206; policy, 199, 204, 205; history, 186, 194 transit traffic, 203; 217, 219; opposition to, 230, 232 – 235. See also Alps Transitforum Austria-Tirol, 231, 232 Transitinitiative Südtirol, 231 travellers, 54, 77, 201, 217, 218 travelling, 53, 55, 189, 205; birds, 21, 32; beavers, 86; wolves, 90 Treaty of Rome (1957), 333, 435 Treaty on the Scientific and Technical Cooperation (1955), 256. See also Finland; Soviet Union tree(s), 17, 25, 57, 84, 86, 87, 133, 162, 164, 168, 173, 174, 222, 256, 282, 366; symbolic function of, 313 – 316 Trieste, 130, 253 tropics, 47, 48, 50, 52, 54, 161 tundra, 49 Tunisia, 35 Turkey, 34, 37, 110, 134, 159, 312

Index

turn, ecological, 187; environmental, 4; natural, 171 Uexküll, Jacob von, 6 Ukraine, 160, 170, 346, 350 UNESCO Biosphere Reserves, 138, 204, 230 UNESCO Research Programme Man and the Biosphere (MAB), 82, 229, 230, 392 UNESCO World Heritage Convention (1972), 2, 173, 434; World Heritage List, 55, 61; World Heritage Site, 61, 144, 172 Union Internationale des Organismes Officiels de Propagande Touristique (UIOOPT), 188 United Kingdom (UK), 25, 57, 102, 110, 114, 116, 118, 119, 159, 160, 189, 198, 282, 283, 286, 312, 318, 321, 334, 347, 348, 351, 369, 375, 402, 403426, 439 United Nations. See UN UN Agenda 21 (Baltic 21 Programme), 233, 262, 389, 390, 398, 399, 402 – 404, 407, 408 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, 1992), 172, 173, 233, 389, 399, 400. See also Rio Earth Summit UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE, 1972), 171, 172, 203, 335, 369, 394, 436 UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), 80 UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), 194, 370, 372, 377 UN Forum for Forests (UNFF), 173 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 173, 174, 383 UN Moratorium on whaling (1981), 426 UN Strategic Plan for Forests, 173 United States of America. See USA United States of Europe, 331 Upper Palatinate Forest, 142 uranium, 343 USA, 4, 26, 28, 81 – 83, 93, 165, 171, 186, 194, 269, 288, 308, 311, 213, 318, 320, 372, 373, 375, 377, 378, 391, 393; border to Canada, 133; national park

471

model, 56, 62, 76, 81; nuclear power, 336, 346, 351 USSR, 32, 88, 167, 246, 261, 262, 373, 375, 381, 392, 397, 428; alliance with Norway, 363, 366, 372, 374, 382; FinnishSoviet relations, 133 – 137, 144, 253; nuclear power, 335, 346, 347, 349, 350; reintroduction of beavers, 85, 86 vacationers, 187 – 191, 197 van Straelen, Victor, 52 van Tienhoven, Pieter-Gerbrand, 28, 51, 57, 425 vegetation, 56, 58, 84, 130, 135, 213, 306 Vera, Frans, 65 Verein Naturschutzpark (1909), 197, 223 Verkerk, Mark, 66 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 254 Victor Emmanuel III, King, 224 Vistula River, 247, 248 visual history, 11, 73, 187, 305 – 307, 324 Volga River, 102 Voronezh Nature Reserve, 85, 86, 428 Vyborg, 17 Wackersdorf reprocessing plant, 347 – 349 Wadden Sea, 1, 2, 93, 440 Waldsterben. See dying forest Wallnöfer, Eduard, 233 Ward, Barbara, 396 Warsaw Pact, 259, 332 Warsaw Pact states, 35, 255, 392, 389 waste: bio, 274; bulky, 272; industrial, 271, 274, 293; paper, 271, 274, 276 – 279, 281, 292 waste: crisis, 270, 279, 281; management, 269, 270, 283, 288, 289, 293, 403; recycling, 269, 271, 272, 274, 275, 278, 280, 281, 284, 292 wastelands, 22, 33 wastewater purification, 250, 256, 261; treatment 205, 243, 247, 248, 250 – 252, 261, 262 water protection, 246 – 248, 251, 253, 263; policy, 247 – 249, 252 waterfowl, 1, 34 – 36, 307. See also Ramsar Convention

472

Index

waterpower, 221, 227, 228 Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, 133 waterways, 84, 114, 249, 436 Weigold, Hugo, 30 Weissen, Andreas, 233 Western Palearctic, 21 – 23, 34, 35 Westhoff, Victor, 58 wetlands, 17, 31 – 38, 108, 136 – 138, 173, 201, 222, 317, 338, 439. See also Ramsar Convention whales, 109, 117, 425, 426 white stork, 21, 31, 40 Wyhl. See nuclear power plants wilderness, 9, 47, 48, 53, 55, 62, 65, 75, 78, 79, 83, 84, 86, 88, 92, 168, 220; concepts of, 73, 75, 76, 95; European, 63, 67, 75, 79, 92; ideals, 56, 64, 74, 75; narratives, 82, 83, 89, 96; non-European, 24, 62; tropical, 54; “untouched”, 51, 52, 57, 58 wildlife, 9, 32, 39, 55, 59, 73, 75, 79, 82, 90, 116, 135, 137, 420, 422 – 424, 447; biologists, 88, 89, 92; documentaries, 86, 137; protection of, 81, 104, 133, 398, 408, 438, 440

Winter, Leopold von, 247 Wolf Specialist Group, 88, 89. See also IUCN wolf, 75, 87 – 90, 92, 95, 121, 172, 221 Wolfsburg, 136 Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament, 346 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 341 wood and timber, 160, 161, 164; conservation, 157, 158; scarcity, 163 woodlands, 157, 161, 162, 166, 168, 175, 176, 398 Wordsworth, William, 47, 48, 61, 67, 168 Working Group on Eel (WGEEL), 102, 103, 107, 110, 111 World Heritage Site. See UNESCO World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF, since 1986), 32 World Wildlife Fund (WWF, 1961), 82, 89, 118, 137, 396 Yugoslavia, 37, 130, 198, 218, 224, 226, 312, 397 Zagreb, 36 zoos, 52, 53, 62, 79, 85, 86