Environmental History in Romania: The Travail of a Scientific Field

By Stefan Dorondel

This piece appeared first on the White Horse Press Blog. Part I: https://whitehorsepress.blog/2019/07/23/environmental-history-in-romania-the-travail-of-a-scientific-field-part-i/; Part II: https://whitehorsepress.blog/2019/08/05/environmental-history-in-romania-the-travail-of-a-scientific-field-part-2/

In an expanded version of his ‘Notepad’, originally published in Environment and History 25.2 (May 2019), Stefan Dorondel of the Francisc I. Rainer Institute of Anthropology in Bucharest expores the field of environmental history in Romania.

PART I

To write about environmental history as an independent epistemological field in Romania could be a task accomplished within minutes. This statement is rigorously true only if we consider environmental history as a field of scientific inquiry without taking into account works from related disciplines such as geography or anthropology. Even enlarging the range to encompass other disciplines that include works that attempt to study the intersections between the environment and society does not yield tremendously numerous results. In the following pages I explore some of these works in an effort to build a framework on which the study of environmental history in Romania could raise its scaffold. In order to accomplish this task, I posit the existence of three periods in the historiography of environmental historical studies: the pre-socialist period (roughly end of 1800 up to 1945), the socialist period (1945 to 1989) and the post-socialist period. Part 1 of this blog covers the first two periods, and the second part will cover the last period and offer some conclusions.

The pre-socialist period

There are several big figures who conducted research at the intersection between nature, society and history such as Grigore Antipa (1867–1944), Simion Mehedinti (1868–1962) and Vintilă M. Mihăilescu (1890-1978). Antipa was an ichthyologist who extensively studied the Danube Delta and the Lower Danube and was the promoter of the first modern fishing law (1896) in Romania. His studies included riparian populations, their fishing practices, their way of life and the political economy of the Lower Danube and Delta – in an approach that would be appreciated by an environmental historian or political ecologist.[1] He drew plans based on a historical approach for what we would now call sustainable fishing. For instance, he mentioned the richness of fishing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in one of the largest lakes in Romania (Lake Greaca, Southern Romania) that communicated constantly with the Danube, while linking the rising scarcity of Danube fish to the unsustainable fishing practices of riparian peoples. He interviewed old fishermen regarding fishing practices and fishing ecology and pointed out that the scarcity of sturgeons was likely due to the newly emerging, chaotic capitalist fishing practices in Romania.[2] Yet, the primary interest of Antipa was to find sustainable ways to exploit the countless wetlands along the Danube and the Delta and all his research was directed toward this end.[3] Nevertheless, in drawing economic plans for organiszing fisheries, Antipa engaged deeply with history of fishing practices, including a thorough description of fishing tools from the medieval age to his time (early 1900s). That makes him a key person in evaluation of any field which focuses on the intersections between history, society and nature.

Some of his associates such as Vasile Roşu published books (for example Drenagiu şi irigaţiune în Austria [Dredging and Irrigation Systems in Austria]) (1902) that analysed dredging and the irrigation systems in different countries perceived as much more advanced than Romania. These countries were perceived as models which Romania had to follow in its process of modernising economy and nature or, on the contrary, examples of bad practice in nature modernisation from whom Romania could draw lessons. The USA and the embankment of the Mississippi River was also discussed by Ion Vidrascu as a bad example of building embankments. He showed that the Americans had learned the hard way the usefulness of un-submersible levees which were not been able to protect them from catastrophic floods in 1927.[4]

Antipa and his followers were rather interested in developing the fishing economy and the ‘modernisation’ of the Danube and villages lying along it. Thus, history of different natural resources – of fish, rivers, lands, forests – was engaged in order to draw policies and plans of modernisation rather than for strictly epistemological reasons. History of the environment was thus wielded as a political tool of changing social and economic realities, especially in rural areas.

Simion Mehedinţi, a student of Frederich Ratzel, the founder of Anthropogeography, was interested in sociocultural anthropology and in geography. He was, in fact, the first professor of geography of the University of Bucharest.[5] Scientifically in debt to anthropogeography, history, ethnography and geography were interrelated sciences – so close to each other that it would be difficult to separate them. For instance, in his one of his masterpieces, Coordonate etnografice civilizaţia şi cultura[Ethnographic Coordinates: Civilization and Culture] (1930) Mehedinţi defined civilisation as ‘the sum of all crafts and tools used by humans to adapt to the physical environment’.[6] He emphasised the importance of tools for the human adaptation to environment – tools that are a prolongation of teeth, nails and jaws. Adaptation to the physical environment is the key point in his work. Clothes, tools, houses – all represent the adaptation to a certain climate. Most of his ethnographic examples come from the Romanian peasant culture. However, he uses anthropology textbooks of the time to illustrate his point.

Vintilă M. Mihăilescu was another geographer whose works included history, ethnography and geography. He made a history of human settlements (mostly villages but also Bucharest, the capital of Walachia and later of Romania) in the southern lowlands of actual Romania from antiquity to 1900s. Using archaeological and historical documents, including maps, and contemporary ethnographic observations Mihăilescu analyses the structure and density of villages, their distribution across the space linked to access to natural resources – rivers, land and agricultural fields. As documentation multiplied in the nineteenth century, he was able to document the movement of population and the environmental consequences of the liberalisation of the grain commerce after 1829: vast deforestation and the transformation of the savannah-like lowlands along the Lower Danube into agricultural fields.[7]

This period is characterised by the fact that Romanian scholars were mostly trained in western universities and were perfectly contemporary with western scholars and their works. Some of them, like Antipa or Mehedinţi, were favourite students of west European scholars who founded new scientific fields. They carried knowledge, methods and approaches back to Romania and taught them at the university or promoted policies to ‘modernise’ nature for the benefit of the society. Yet, they also contributed to the global knowledge of the period and their publications were equally prized by Romanian and foreign scholars. The best proof is that both aforementioned Romanian scholars had their work reviewed in the most important scholarly journals of the time and were celebrated by important figures in their respective fields.[8] A second feature of the scholarship in the interwar period, and in particular of these founding figures of their respective scientific fields, is that the research they carried out was widely interdisciplinary. Antipa was a biologist, Mehedinţi was an anhropogeographer, whereas Mihăilescu was a classic geographer. Yet, all three engaged history and ethnography in their analysis, all three positioned their studies at the intersections of history, society and nature.

Romanian contemporary historiography, mostly interested in politics, diplomacy and military events and facts –a very nineteenth century style of researching history – still omits including the research of these authors into the main historical narrative of Romania. Looking retrospectively, it is quite difficult to have a clear picture of the history of modernisation of Romania at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth without including the fierce technological and ideological debates concerning the fate of rivers, the transformation of ponds, lakes and backwaters along the Lower Danube into agricultural fields. It is difficult to understand the policies of modernisation in interwar period without referring to the obsession with constructing large infrastructure (bridges, canals, irrigation systems) – seen then as well as now – as the key point of a country’s economy modernisation.[9] We can only partially understand state formation and national identity without referring to the emergence of protected areas and national parks in Romania at the beginning of the twentieth century. These subjects were quite marginal so far in Romanian historiography. However, all these transformations of the newly emerged nation state (1878) were intended in the most direct way to alter nature, to transform it for the sake of people.

The socialist period

Technically, the socialist period was one that promoted several laws and policy measures to protect nature and the environment. In fact, many laws meant to protect nature remained unapplied or poorly implemented on the ground whereas the regime promoted an aggressive policy of industrialisation and intensive agriculture.[10] For this period one can count only a few books and several small articles which fit a wider definition of environmental history. One of these analyses the importance of forests in Romanian history starting with prehistory.[11] Constantin C. Giurescu explored forestry works and related tools, the importance of old trees as markers of different land properties from medieval times until the collectivisation of land (1946–1962), and various usages of different trees (from construction to firewood). He pointed out that late nineteenth-century industrialisation required a huge quantity of wood which led to drastic deforestation throughout Romania. The same author wrote a history of fishing in Romania in which he describes the economic importance of fish for communities living on the current territory of Romania – a country with one of the richest river networks in Europe.[12] He examines the fishing trade in Romanian history, the main species of fish living in Romanian waters as well as fishing tools and practices. This was conceived as the first volume, which ends with the modern period. A second volume, never published, was meant to cover the end of the nineteenth century until the socialist period.

Henri H. Stahl, a sociologist, focused on the commons (villages, lands and forests) in Romanian history. In his impressive work he illustrates the transformation of property rights over land and forests from the Middle Ages to the modern period. He shows not only the way the commons were organised and the techniques of exploitation of land and forests but also the physical consequences to natural resources (deforestation, land fragmentation, land exhaustion).[13]

Several other short journal articles describe fishing during the Middle Ages in different provinces and its economic importance. These articles are rather descriptive and, more importantly, they do not aim at studying the environment but economics. Environment is presented in these studies as a sort of stage on which the economic facts unfolds.[14] Fish, in these studies, are nothing else but an economic resource depleted from its natural state. These studies are important for bringing to light different documents, often found in obscure archives that are  difficult to access. A future environmental historian would use these historical documents to draw a larger picture of environmental transformations in the Middle Ages and the modern history of Romania.

The socialist period in Romania, due to the rigid political regime (that ranked with Albania as the toughest socialist regime in Europe) had poor links with Western academia especially after 1971. This is the reason that the main developments in the global evolution of environmental history had no echo in Romania. For instance, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring(1962), which contributed substantially to boosting environmental movements in the West, remained virtually unknown and un-echoed in Romania—and this remains the case today.

Acknowledgements 

I thank Gheorghiţă Geană, Vintilă Mihăilescu and Oana Popa for sending me pictures of Simion Mehedinţi, Vintilă M. Mihăilescu and Grigore Antipa respectively. I also thank my friend and colleague Stelu Şerban for reading and commenting aptly on an earlier draft.

[1] Grigore Antipa, ‘Câteva probleme ştiinţifice şi economice privitoare la Delta Dunărei’ [Several Scientific and Economic Problems Concerning the Danube Delta],Analele Academiei Române36(1914);Idem,Studii asupra pescariilor din Romania [Studies on Fisheries of Romania](Bucuresti: Imprimeria Statului, 1895).

[2] Grigore Antipa, Regiunea inundabila a Dunarii. Starea ei actuala si mijloacele de a o pune in valoare[The Danube Floodplain. Its Status and the Means to Exploited] (Bucuresti: Institutul de Arte Grafice Carol Göbl, 1910).

[3] See for details, Stefan Dorondel, Vera Mitroi, ‘Nature, State and Conservation in the Danube Delta: Turning Fishermen into Outlaws’, in W. Graf von Hardenberg, M. Kelly, C. Leal and Emily Wakild (eds.), The Nature State. Rethinking the History of Conservation(London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 194–212.

[4] Ion G. Vidraşcu, Inundaţiile catastrofale ale Mississippiului şi îndiguirile Dunărei[The Catastrophic Floods of the Mississippi and the Embankment of the Danube], (Bucureşti, 1928). For the adaptation of Western models of river transformations to Romania, see Stelu Serban and Stefan Dorondel, ‘The Economy of a Leashed River: State, Experts and Interbellum Politics along the Lower Danube, in S. Dorondel and Stelu Serban (eds), Planners, Experts and Bureaucrats. Transforming Economy and Nature in European Peripheries(manuscript).

[5] Gheorghiţă Geană, ‘Ideas of Culture: Romanian Para-Anthropologists in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences35(1): 23–40.

[6] Simion Mehedinţi, Coordonate geografice civilizaţia şi cultura, in S. Mehedinţi, Civilizaţie şi cultură. Concepte, definiţii, rezonanţe[Civilization and Culture. Concepts, Definitions, Resonances], edition by G. Geană, (Bucureşti: Editura Trei, 1999), p. 75 (originally published by Casa Şcoalelor, Bucureşti, 1930).

[7] Vintilă Mihăilescu, ‘Vlăsia şi Mostiştea. Evoluţia geografică a două regiuni din Câmpia Română [Vlăsia şi Mostiştea. The Geographic Evolution of Two Regions from the Southern Lowlands],’ Buletinul Societăţii Regale Române de GeografieXLIII, (1924): 1–200.

[8] See for instance the list of international contributors to pay homage to Grigore Antipa at his 50thanniversary: Grigore Antipa Hommage àson œuvre, Bucureşti M.O., Imprimeria Naţională, 1938. For Mehedinţi, see G. Geană, op. cit.

[9] For more details, see Stefan Dorondel and Stelu Serban, ‘Ecologia politică a îndiguirii: stat, comunităţi locale şi transformarea socialistă a Dunării de Jos [The Political Ecology of Embankment: State, Local Communities and the Socialist Transformation of the Lower Danube]’, in A. Timotin (ed.), Dinamici sociale şi transferuri culturale în sud-estul European(Bucureşti: Editura Academiei Române, 2019), pp. 350-364.

[10] Stefan Dorondel, Vera Mitroi, op. cit.

[11] Constantin C. Giurescu, Istoria pădurii româneşti din cele mai vechi timpuri pînă astăzi [The History of Romanian Forest from the Most Ancient Times Until Today](Bucureşti: Ceres, 1975).

[12] Constantin C. Giurescu, Pescuitul şi piscicultura în România [Fishing and Fisheries in Romania], vol. 1 (Bucureşti: Ed. Academiei Române, 1964).

[13] Henri H. Stahl, Contribuții la studiul satelor devălmașe românești [Contributions for the Study of the Romanian Commons], 3 vol. (București: Cartea Românească, 1998 [1958]).

[14] See for instance Alexandrescu M.M., Dersca Bulgaru, ‘Aspecte ale vieţii economice din porturileşi schelele Dobrogei în secolele XV-XVI’ [Some Aspects Regarding the Economic Life in the Ports of Dobrogea in the 15th and the 16th Centuries]. PeuceVI (1977): 259–270;idem, in PeuceII (1971): 267–282; Contantin Rusu, ‘Evoluţia pescuitului şi pisciculturii în judeţul Botoşani’ [The Evolution of Fishing and Aquaculture in Botosani County]. HierasusVII–VIII (1989): 431–435.

PART II

Post-socialist period

Marked by economic harshness, the post-socialist period meant first and foremost an opening to the world and the freedom to publish and to travel. As difficult economically as this period was, and still is, it has marked a reconnection of Romanian and Western academia. This connectedness is reflected in several attempts to ‘catch up’ with authors, theories, methods and topics that were, for a long time (during socialism) forbidden territory for Romanian scholars.

The closest book to environmental history was writtenby Paul Cernovodeanu and Paul Binder. The two authors are clearly influenced by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and by the French School of Annales.[1] They explore catastrophic events such as locust invasions, floods, droughts or earthquakes in the Romanian Middle Ages, including Transylvania which was then part of the Hungarian Kingdom. Despite the dearth of documents, especially for the medieval period – a challenge all scholars of social and economic history of Romania face – the authors succeed in extracting enough information from the documents to offer conclusions about droughts or intensive rain in certain years. For instance, they track the production of grapes – a Mediterranean fruit loving sun and drought – to show that Transylvanian medieval chroniclers mentioned excellent wine quantity and quality in years following a drought whereas much poorer wine qualities following rainy periods.[2] This book might have served as a foundation for future Romanian research in environmental history, being the most thoroughly researched and richly insightful book of environment history published in post-socialist  Romania. Yet, appearing in the first years of post-socialist transformations, surrounded by political unrest, economic changes and institutional restructuration, the book did not reset Romanian historiography as one would have expected.

Lucian Boia, one of the most prominent contemporary Romanian historians, explores more in Omulşi clima[Man and the Climate] (2015[2005]) the way Europeans were imagining the climate than the way people experience the climate in practice.[3] The book focuses on Europe, starting with the ancient Greeks, and the author does not spend any words on the Romanian case. When he refers to great plans to changing nature drawn up by the socialist governments he refers to Stalin and the Soviet Union.

Constantin Ardeleanu, a young and very active international historian has published extensively on the Danube European Commission as well as on Danube navigation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. He shows the importance of steamboat voyages from Vienna to Constantinople and the corresponding transformation of the Danube river to make it more easily and safely navigable.[4] He also focuses on the contribution of infrastructure, such as bridges and railways, to the modernisation of Romania at the end of the nineteenth century.[5] His work includes a strong environmental component, since the lower Danube is an important actor in modern Romania, but his emphasis is always on economic aspects. Ardeleanu’s work could be considered economic or environmental history. Yet his international affiliations, as a member of the International Maritime Economic History Association, Economic History Association, Economic History Society (London) – and not of the ESEH – speak ofr his preference to identify his work on the Danube as economic history.

Tudose Tatu, a non-professional yet very active historian, is also interested in the history of the Danube. His book, Tradiţia, promotoare a pescuitului gălăţean[Tradition – Promoter of the Fishing Activity in Galati City] is important rather for the historical documents published in the local archives than for the analysis per seof fishing activities in Galaţi, one of the largest Romanian cities laying on the banks of the river. The author extensively uses Grigore Antipa’s books but also original documents to remind the readership of tools, practices and species of fish found in the Danube but also in the backwaters and lakes along the river and their economic importance. The period covered by the book is fifteenth century up to the interwar period.[6]

In the last ten years, a new direction has developed in Romania to emphasise political ecology and environmental anthropology. Liviu Măntescu and Monica Vasile have carried out anthropological fieldwork in several provinces of Romania, focused on communal forest restitution. They engage ethnography and political economy to show the winners and losers of post-socialist forest restitution.[7] Măntescu explores the intersections between post-socialist agrarian questions and ecological crises. He traces the eighteenth century penetration of capitalist relations in the Vrancea region (Eastern Romania) and their ecological impact.[8] Vasile has published widely on political corruption as a driver of deforestation in the post-socialist period, as well as the rules of property revival and local practices concerning common forests.[9] More recently she has engaged in new research regarding animal-human relations and their impact on Romanian forests and wildlife, rewilding and villagers’ attitudes toward reintroducing bison.[10]

Liviu Chelcea, Călin Cotoi, Stefan Dorondel and Stelu Şerban have also focused on current sociopolitical developments, post-socialist transformations and their impacts on urban and rural ecologies, growing interests to establish national parks in Romania, and reactions of villagers who resent newly protected areas as top-down impositions.[11]

Finally, in the last couple of years, instead of being surrounded solely by geography, social anthropology and political ecology, an independent environmental history has made steps toward being more visible in Romania. One of the seeds for developing Romanian environmental history has been its involvement with the Rachel Carson Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Stefan Dorondel and Monica Vasile were both fellows at the RCC and both benefited from its assistance at various times in promoting the discipline in Romania. Dorondel, Ursula Münster and Daniuel Münsterco-edited a special issue of RCC’s Perspectives that explores the interstices of forest and agriculture, as well as of conservation, state and agriculture.[12] In a monograph of the RCC’s book series, I explore the transformations of a socialist landscape into a post-socialist one. This work shows that land reform had consequences not only for humans but also for the natural world. De-collectivisation and forest restitution affected land tenure, local economy and local social relations as well as types of crops, quality of pastures, forests and wildlife.[13] The book was considered ‘one of the first monographs … that looks at the intermeshing of social, political, economic and ecological relations’, and a ‘stepping stone in the development of a multidisciplinary field exploring ecological themes in this part of the world’.[14]

Benefiting from knowledge accumulated while at the RCC, I won a research grant (€200,500) from the Romanian National Research Agency to study floods along the Lower Danube and riparian populations’ reactions in modern and contemporary period. Monica Vasile won a grant from the same agency (€100,000) in which she and her team attempted to map the commons (forest) and their history in Romania.

A second characteristic is that the Romanian historians seem to be rather reluctant in studying environmental history. Recent publications in Romanian environmental history come rather from anthropologists-cum-historians than from officially enrolled historians. Engaging a post-humanist perspective, Stefan Dorondel, Stelu Serban and Daniel Cain explore the history of two islands of the Danube and their transformation in order to show their power over human diplomacy, military actions and border establishment in modern times. The authors show how these highly volatile environments – the Danubian islands – have contributed in certain historical circumstances to human history.[15] Şerban surveys the rush for technological development and the establishment of a technocratic elite in Bulgaria and Romania as a way to understand the management of the Danube river and its political meanings at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.[16] In a different paper, Şerban focuses on the context of building levees along the Lower Danube in Romania and Bulgaria in the socialist period. Engaging the theory of techno-nationalism, he is able to show how the nation-state uses hydraulic technology to strengthen its legitimacy.[17]

Linked to the observation that historians are rather uninterested in environmental history is the fact that at only a few historians attended the round table organised by Constantin Ardelean and myself at the New Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies Bucharest (NEC) with the title ‘Is an Environmental History Possible in Romania?’ The most active were anthropologist, sociologists and political scientists whereas professional historians were rather shy in expressing their perspective. The round table explored the possibility of an environmental history approach in Romanian history and how this would allow us to have a new perspective on various historical events. At an invited talk at the Faculty of History of the University of Bucharest I pleaded for looking at the non-human as a neglected actor in the Romanian history. The invitation to pay more attention to the environment was heard by rather a thin audience, mostly of professors and graduate students from the department of ancient history but none from medieval, modern or contemporary history – signalling the low interest in including environment in their studies. On the contrary, the same talk was extremely well attended and received by both students and professors at the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Bucharest.

Conclusions

By exploring some of the most important works that have engaged in the study of environment and history I strive to show that there is a good ground upon which to build Romanian environmental history. Without being presumptuous, I consider this paper as a sort of birth certificate of contemporary Romanian environmental history. I do not want to suggest that this is the moment when the environmental history in Romania emerges. Instead, I gingerly suggest that the excursion into the historiography of works that border environment history represents awareness of the existence of local models, theories and approaches that could be used for an advancement of this field.

Acknowledgements

I thank my friend and colleague Stelu Şerban for reading and commenting aptly on an earlier draft.

[1] Paul Cernovodeanu, Paul Binder, Cavalerii Apocalipsului. Calamităţile naturale din trecutul României (până la 1800)[The Knights of Apocalypse. Natural Disasters in Romanian History (until 1800)] (Bucureşti: Silex, 1993).

[2] Ibidem, op. cit., p. 21.

[3] Lucian Boia, Omul şi clima(Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2015) (originally published in English by Reaktion Books, London, 2005).

[4] Constantin Ardeleanu, ‘From Vienna to Constantinople on Board the Vessels of the Austrian Danube Steam-Navigation Company.’ Historical YearbookVI(2009): 187–202; idem, ‘Accidente de navigaţie la Dunărea de Jos (1856-1914)[Navigation Accidents on the Lower Danube (1856-1914)]’, in Andreea Atanasiu-Croitoru & Florin Stan (eds),Dunărea şi Marea Neagră în spaţiul euro-asiatic. Istorie, relaţii politice şi diplomaţie [Danube and the Black Sea within Euro-Asian Space. History, Political Relations and Diplomacy] (Lucrările celei de-a XVII-a ediţii a Sesiunii Naţionale de Comunicări Ştiinţifice a Muzeului Marinei Române, 2014), pp. 83-90.

[5] Constantin Ardeleanu, ‘Efectele construirii căii ferate Cernavodă-Constanţa asupra navigaţiei dunărene (1859-1860)’ [The Effects of Building the Railway Cernavodă-Constanţa on the Danube Navigation (1859-1860)], Analele Universităţii Ovidius – Seria Istorie3(2006): 41–54; idem, ‘Comisia Europeana a Dunării şi modernizarea infrastructurii de transport a României: Calea navigabilă a Dunării (1856-1914)’ [The European Commission of the Danube and the Transport Infrastructure of Romania: Danube as Roadway], in Daniela Buşă and Ileana Căzan (eds),Curente ideologice şi instituţiile statului român modern – secolele XVIII – XX. Modelul european şi spaţiul românesc[Ideological Theories and the Modern Romanian Institutions] (Bucureşti: Oscar Print, 2007), pp. 169–188.

[6] Tudose Tatu, Tradiţia, promotoare a pescuitului gălăţean(Galaţi, 2015).

[7] Monica Vasile and Liviu Măntescu, ‘Property Reforms in Rural Romania and Community-based Forests’, Sociologie Românească2(2009): 95–113.

[8] Liviu Măntescu, ‘The Ecology of an Agrarian Question. Ecological Crises and the Coming of Age of Capitalism in Vrancea’, in S. Dorondel, S. Serban (eds), At the Margins of History. The Agrarian Question in Southeast Europe. A special issue of Martor19(2004): 97-113.

[9] Monica Vasile, ‘Règles de propriétéet pratiques locales dans les forêts communes villageoises de Vrancea : l’Obşteau d’aujourd’hui (Roumanie),’ Options MéditerranéennnesA 82(2009): 94–105 ; idem, ‘Corruption in Romanian Forestry – Morality and Local Practice in the Context of Privatization’, Revista Română de SociologieXX(1-2), (2009) : 105–120.

[10] Nicole Bauer, Monica Vasile and Maria Mondini, ‘Attitudes Towards Nature, Wilderness and Protected Areas: A Way to Sustainable Stewardship in the South-Western Carpathians’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management61 (5–6), (2018): 857–877; Monica Vasile, ‘The Vulnerable Bison: Practices and Meanings of Rewilding in the Romanian Carpathians’, Conservation and Society16 (3) (2018): 217–231.

[11] Liviu Chelcea, ‘Postindustrial Ecologies: Industrial Rubble, Nature and the Limits of Representation’, Parcours anthropologiques10(2015): 186–201; Stefan Dorondel, ‘Environmental Disasters, Climate Change and Other Big Problems of Our Times. A View from Southeast Europe’, Ethnologia Balkanica19(2016): 11–32. Stefan Dorondel and Stelu Serban, ‘Dissuading the State: Food Security, Peasant Resistance and Environmental Concerns in Rural Bulgaria’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies(2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2018.1498326. Calin Cotoi, ‘The Making of a National Park: Ruins of Nature and History in Northern Dobrudja’, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures31(3) (2017): 596–614; Stefan Dorondel, ‘Tenure Rights, Environmental Interests and the Politics of Local Government in Romania’, in T. Sikor and J. Stahl (eds),Forests and People. Property, Governance and Human Rights(London & New York: Earthscan, 2011), pp. 175–186.

[12] Ursula Münster, Daniuel Münster and Stefan Dorondel (eds), Fields and Forests: Ethnographic Perspectives on Environmental Globalization. RCC Perspectives 5(2012).

[13] Stefan Dorondel, Disrupted Landscapes: State, Peasants and the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania(Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2016).

[14] Stefan Voicu, ‘Review of Disrupted Landscapes: State Peasants and the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania’, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe(2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/25739638.2018.1511118

[15] Stefan Dorondel, Stelu Şerban and Daniel Cain, ‘The Play of Islands: Emerging Borders and Danube Dynamics in Modern Southeast Europe (1830-1900),’ Environment and History(2018). Fast Track, DOI https://doi.org/10.3197/096734018X15254461646413

[16] Stelu Şerban, ‘State, Technology and Environment on the Lower Danube: Bulgaria and Romania before the Balkan Wars,’ Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies21, 2 (2018): 204-221.

[17] Stelu Şerban, ‘Techno-nationalising the Levees on the Danube: Romania and Bulgaria after World War II,’ Nationalities Papers, 2019 (in print).

Stefan Dorondel is a Member of the ICEHO Board of Directors. This is the first in a planned series of reviews by ICEHO Board Members and others.

It also appears here as part of ICEHO's partnership with the White Horse Press. The White Horse Press publishes academic journals and books specializing in environmental issues.

Photo in home page gallery: Castelul Cantacuzino, Busteni, Romania by Alexandra Mirgheș on Unsplash