The Nature State Rethinking the History of Conservation

This volume brings together case studies from around the globe (including China, Latin America, the Philippines, Namibia, India and Europe) to explore the history of nature conservation in the twentieth century. It seeks to highlight the state, a central actor in these efforts, which is often taken for granted, and establishes a novel concept – the nature state – as a means for exploring the historical formation of that portion of the state dedicated to managing and protecting nature. Following the Industrial Revolution and post-war exponential increase in human population and consumption, conservation in myriad forms has been one particularly visible way in which the government and its agencies have tried to control, manage or produce nature for reasons other than raw exploitation. Using an interdisciplinary approach and including case studies from across the globe, this edited collection brings together geographers, sociologists, anthropologists and historians in order to examine the degree to which sociopolitical regimes facilitate and shape the emergence and development of nature states. This innovative work marks an early intervention in the tentative turn towards the state in environmental history and will be of great interest to students and practitioners of environmental history, social anthropology and conservation studies.

Introduction 1.The Export of the American National Park Idea in an Age of Empire: The Philippines, 1898 1940 Ian Tyrrell 2.Protecting Patagonia: Science, Conservation and the Pre-History of the Nature State on a South American Frontier, 1903-1934Emily Wakild 3.Another way to preserve: hunting bans, biosecurity, and the brown bear in Italy, 1930-1960Wilko Graf von Hardenberg 4. Conservation Politics in the Madras Presidency: Maintaining the Lord Wenlock Downs of the Nilgiris Grasslands, South India, as a National Park,1930-1950Siddhartha Krishnan 5.Negotiating the Nature State Beyond the Parks: Conservation in 20th Century North-Central NamibiaEmmanuel Kreike 6. Conventional thinking and the fragile birth of the Nature State in post-war Britain.Matthew Kelly 7. Behind the Scenes and Out in the Open: Making Colombian National Parks in the 1960s and 70sClaudia Leal 8. Ordering the Borderland:Settlement and Removal in the Iguaçu National Park, Brazil, 1940s-1970s Frederico Freitas 9. Discovering China’s Tropical Rainforests: Shifting Approaches to People and Nature in the late Twentieth CenturyMichael Hathaway 10. Nature, State, and Conservation in the Danube Delta: Turning Fishermen into OutlawsStefan Dorondel and Veronica Mitroi

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, where he coordinates the working group ‘Art of Judgement’. He holds a PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge, UK, and has worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany, and the University of Trento, Italy. Matthew Kelly teaches history at Northumbria University, UK,where he is helping to establish the environmental humanities as a broad area of research and teaching within the university. Hewas an Associate Professor at the University of Southampton, UK,and a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany. Claudia Leal holds a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley, USA,and is Associate Professorin the Department of History at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Shewas a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany,and Co-president of the Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History. Emily Wakild teaches Latin American and Environmental History at Boise State University in Idaho, USA. Her current projects include a primer on teaching environmental history and a monograph on the social and ecological regions of Amazonia and Patagonia.