A New Ecological Order focuses on the dramatic transformation of nature in eastern Europe, or better said, on territories of the various empires in the region: the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian empires, as well as the former Soviet bloc. Given that the regions and landscapes studied fell on different sides of a variety of national borders over time—the impacts of which are also analyzed by some of the authors—identifying the countries represented might misrepresent the geographical scope of the anthology. With that proviso in mind, the territories covered fall today into the territories of Serbia, North Macedonia, Ukraine, Romania, Czechia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Greece, Poland, Russia, and Bulgaria. The collection is truly interdisciplinary: not only because the authors include historians, sociologists, anthropologists, as well as various natural scientists and areas studies experts, but also because the research methodologies and the theoretical concepts applied represent a wide range of humanities and social science fields.
The eleven substantive chapters embrace a long period from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present, and in light of this, the word “new” in the title of the volume is a bit misleading. However, perhaps new in the context of the broad range of projects analyzed by the contributing authors is meant to refer less to chronologically recent changes, and more to a novel modality of the nature-society relationship. The editors, the co-author of the epilogue Helmuth Trischler, and most of the authors take pains to demonstrate that the nature transformation projects they analyze are different from those in the west, and thus not simply contributing yet more empirical examples of modernization. There is repeated reference to James Scott's concept of high modernism, and his influential theoretical proposition, made famous by the main title of his 1998 book Seeing Like a State, infuses much of the conceptual interpretations of the chapter authors. Scott himself saw a similarity of various nature transformation projects in radically different parts of the world, including the Soviet Union, so applying his research does not mean transporting a western framework to eastern contexts. The authors explicitly reject not just a western epistemology but also the common diffusionist assumption that employing western expertise ipso facto constitutes westernization. The key argument, superbly supported by the empirical chapters, is that while western science and know-how was applied, they were done so at the initiative of the state (imperial or nation state) and produced unique effects and served distinctive social engineering objectives. These range from marginalizing or disciplining certain ethnic groups (George H. Vlachos; Vladislava Vladimirova), through civilizing city-dwellers (Dragana Ćorović), forging the Homo Sovieticus (Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Flora Roberts), and forcing peasants to modernize (Stefan Dorondel and Anna Olenenko; Agata Ábrán; Vlachos), to promoting nationalism and resistance to the European Union (Eunice Blavascunas).
The volume is divided into three sections: “Planning Territory”; “Nature, Economy and Experts”; and “Imaging Nature.” The key actors in all the sections, however, are experts and state planners, whether the nature transformations involve draining wetlands (Vlachos; Dorondel and Olenenko), building dams (Jiri Janáč; Féaux de la Croix and Roberts), regulating rivers (Şerban and Dorondel) or managing wildlife and cultivating animals (Hande Özkan; Vladimirova; Yulian Konstantinov). This shared cast of characters will not surprise students of eastern Europe where, as Immanuel Wallerstein argued long ago, the bourgeoisie was “missing,” forcing the state to undertake the large infrastructural investments needed for modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. At the same time, I wonder whether the absence of other social actors on these pages, such as (domestic or foreign) banks or private firms—at least in the pre- and postsocialist period—is the function of this older historiogaphy that sees the east as a deficient copy of the west, or the greater difficulty of accessing non-state archives. Similarly weak is the presence of resistance, whether of peasants, dissident experts, or civic groups and social movements. Blavascunas's chapter on Polish forestry is an exception, in that her whole focus is on the contestation of preservation methods due to their real or imagined geopolitical and ideological implications. In most of the cases where these make a small appearance (Vlachos; Dorondel and Olenenko; Janáč; Féaux de la Croix and Roberts; Konstantinov) they are introduced with locutions such as “paradoxically” (Janáč, 143) or “in an ironic twist” (Özkan, 186), further confirming the sense that even though their actions are detectable in the empirical records, the authors found it difficult to incorporate them into their stories. It might be unfair to fault the editors and authors for this omission in a book that explicitly focuses on the state and experts; however, I think it is fair to ask the question to what extent the collection's theoretical foundations laid down not just by Scott but also by Michel Foucault prevent one from reading sufficiently against the (state) archival grain, despite at least one author's (Özkan's) caution to that effect. Perhaps where the excellent research in the book points to as a next step is taking a cue from more recent scholarship, that does not take the state for granted but is asking how these nature-correcting projects—as the editors and some authors call them—are generative of the modern state, and not merely its effects. This can mean an application of Actor Network Theory (which is how Ábrán's outstanding chapter proceeds) or making a different use of Timothy Mitchell's work than the editors do, and incorporating the scholarship of Chandra Mukerji and Samer Alatout.
Nevertheless, the anthology advances eastern European environmental scholarship significantly due to the richness of the empirical material, the broad scope of cases and regions, and its theoretical ambition. The writing is clear and concise; students and scholars will find it a wonderful resource in environmental historiography.
