Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe addresses persistent divisions between east and west in the more than thirty years since the collapse of socialism. The political ecology approach is particularly noteworthy for a region where legacies of the socialist era still pervade all spheres of life. The literature on the political ecology of the former “second world” remains somewhat underdeveloped, making this volume a welcome and important contribution. In graduate seminars in environmental politics or environmental sociology, this book will offer a lens into an often-neglected part of the world; it is equally well-suited for seminars in Russian and East European Studies that may not usually zoom in on environmental movements.
Part I considers the challenges of formal environmental movements in the region; Part II addresses the politics of lived experiences of landscapes and environments in the face of increasing nationalism; and Part III delves into the effects of environmental policies. The majority of chapters address Hungary, Poland, and Romania, with one chapter each on Czechia and Serbia and a brief mention of the Baltics. More focus on former Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union could have helped demarcate how distinct historical-political configurations within the socialist world have led to current socio-environmental relations.
What insights can we glimpse about the politics and the environment in the east, thirty years after its presumed unification with the west? In the introduction, Eszter Kovács emphasizes that eastern Europe has often been seen as a “laboratory” for social and political experiments. The chapters thus show the effects of being experimental subjects.
The chapters in Part I show us contradictory trends in politics in the region. Kovács and Györgi Pataki trace the strategic dismantling of the environmental sector and political activism in Hungary. Sustained attacks on academia, public figures, the media, and activists left the country at the dual mercy of an increasingly authoritarian regime and its corporate allies in the EU. Arnošt Novák and Mikulás Černik, however, reveal a more encouraging trend of re-politicization of environmental, and specifically climate change-oriented movements in Czechia and Poland, respectively. Following a fall into liberal market environmentalism and de-politicization in the 1990s, they joined more extreme groups such as Extinction Rebellion to engage in direct action and climate camps, demanding structural and systemic changes. Jana Hrckova zooms in on urban environmental activists in Warsaw who took advantage of uncertain property relations in urban zones of abandonment to preserve a non-commodified area in the midst of “wild development.” While there is new dynamism in environmental movements in the region, authors caution that these particular cases do not necessarily indicate overall trends, which must make us contemplate how to further enhance such opportunities.
Part II covers an increasingly important, and yet uncomfortable research area. These young scholars are to be commended for facing the intersection of nationalism, environmentalism, and capitalism head-on. Balsa Lubarda reminds us that environmental discourses have more in common with right wing discourses than most people care to admit. Alexandra Cotofanā addresses how esotericism and mysticism underpin claims of indigeneity in Romania, reinforcing divides between Romanians and their “others.” Emola Püsők turns to interpretations of time and socio-ecological interactions in the mining-town narratives of Rosia Montana, Romania, where landscapes reflect a loss of the mining futures that older residents once inhabited, belying a generational shift and social rupture felt in the town. These chapters should make us consider, however, that right-wing environmentalism, populism, and political nostalgia are not isolated trends of “backwards” eastern Europe, but increasingly true in “the West” as well.
Part III covers a broad range of unintended consequences of environmental policies. George Iordăchescu shows how the resilient ecology of rural Romania has paradoxically rendered it exploitable as a conservation policy reservoir “unrecognizable to those who live there” (203). June Brawner discusses how discourses of “terroir” make an awkward fit in the local context of Hungary, requiring a re-education of tastes, a re-spacing of grape vines to fit modern equipment, and a re-examination of how the “mineral” quality of particular soils may actually be related to the chemically intensive agricultural practices of the socialist years. Renata Blumberg calls for a regional political ecology of east European food systems, drawing on examples from the Baltics and elsewhere to show how models such as Community Supported Agriculture cannot be seamlessly transferred without paying more attention to the “invisible alternatives” (251) still practiced by rural residents. Jovana Dikovic argues that official state-led rural development policies in Serbia must be moderated to give space to local values that influence “endogenous” rural development. Particularly noteworthy is Chapter 12, co-written by Éva Mihalovics and Zsüli Fehér, the researcher and a co-founder of a failed cooperative in Hungary. The authors showcase an integrative writing style that remains true to the distinct interpretations of events by each. The two perspectives strengthen the researcher's claim that development projects must take into account the complicated village-level ethnic, gender, and class issues that may affect the longevity and sustainability of well-conceived efforts at cooperation. Taken together, we see that little has changed from the early days when ready-made models of “development” from the west were unsuccessfully imposed on the region, but that local reflections on these failures may lead to more informed local policies in the future.
The conclusion, co-written by all the contributors together, is a fresh approach that does not seek to “tie everything up,” rather it sheds light on the struggles the authors feel as young scholars, largely native ethnographers, straddling the activist-engaged researcher divide in their work. This motivates their choice of an open source publisher that would bring their work back to the audiences that matter to them. They note that recent scholarly work focused on “emancipatory politics” tends to “reinscribe somewhat linear expectations and ideas about progressivism, using a language and framework not grounded in most of our interlocutors’ prisms and worldviews, let alone our own personal experiences (312).” This is perhaps one of the more important contributions of the book and could have been highlighted even in the introduction to frame the volume. These insights tell us a fair bit about the continuing significance of the politics surrounding not only the environment, but also scholarship, that needs to find new language to reflect the realities on the ground.
