Table Of Contenti
‘This book offers a bold new concept, the “nature state”, intended to take its place
beside useful terms such as the welfare state or patrimonial state. Building on fresh case
studies from every inhabited continent, the volume explores the tangled links between
states and the natural world in illuminating ways.’
J.R. McNeill, Georgetown University, USA
‘Environmental history takes an important and imaginative stride forward with the
concept of a “nature state” introduced here through a rich collection of unusual and
varied examples. This innovative approach to theorizing state control over the nat-
ural environment in the twentieth century will serve as a productive model for future
scholarship on this exciting theme.’
Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa
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iii
The Nature State
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 dedi-
cated to managing and protecting nature.
Following the Industrial Revolution and post-w ar exponential increase in human pop-
ulation 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 geogra-
phers, 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.
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, where he is helping to
establish the environmental humanities as a broad area of research and teaching within
the university. He was 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 Professor at the Department of History at Universidad
de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She was 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 environ-
mental history and a monograph on the social and ecological regions of Amazonia and
Patagonia.
iv
Routledge Environmental Humanities
Series editors: Iain McCalman and Libby Robin
Editorial Board
Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK
Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK
Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK
Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia
Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK
Jodi Frawley, University of Sydney, Australia
Andrea Gaynor, The University of Western Australia, Australia
Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
Jennifer Newell, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA
Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK
Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, USA
Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK
Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia
The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture rec-
ognizing that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource
depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food
insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture.
The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future
environmental challenges has shifted the epicentre of environmental studies away from an
exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-
focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences.
We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an
inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international reader-
ship and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and students
from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human
dimensions of environmental change.
v
The Nature State
Rethinking the History of Conservation
Edited by Wilko Graf von Hardenberg,
Matthew Kelly, Claudia Leal and
Emily Wakild
vi
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Selection and editorial matter, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, Matthew Kelly,
Claudia Leal and Emily Wakild; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978- 1- 138- 71904- 0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 1- 315- 19563- 6 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Out of House Publishing
vii
Contents
Notes on contributors ix
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction 1
MATTHEW KELLY, CLAUDIA LEAL, EMILY WAKILD AND
WILKO GRAF VON HARDENBERG
1 The export of the American national park idea in an age of
empire: the Philippines, 1898– 1940 16
IAN TYRRELL
2 Protecting Patagonia: science, conservation and the
pre- history of the nature state on a South American
frontier, 1903– 1934 37
EMILY WAKILD
3 Another way to preserve: hunting bans, biosecurity and the
brown bear in Italy, 1930– 60 55
WILKO GRAF VON HARDENBERG
4 Conservation politics in the Madras presidency: maintaining
the Lord Wenlock Downs of the Nilgiris, South India,
as a national park,1930– 50 76
SIDDHARTHA KRISHNAN
5 Negotiating the nature state beyond the parks: conservation
in twentieth- century north- central Namibia 93
EMMANUEL KREIKE
6 Conventional thinking and the fragile birth of the
nature state in post- war Britain 114
MATTHEW KELLY
viii
viii Contents
7 Behind the scenes and out in the open: making Colombian
national parks in the 1960s and 1970s 135
CLAUDIA LEAL
8 Ordering the borderland: settlement and removal in the
Iguaçu National Park, Brazil, 1940s– 1970s 158
FREDERICO FREITAS
9 Discovering China’s tropical rainforests: shifting approaches to
people and nature in the late twentieth century 176
MICHAEL HATHAWAY
10 Nature, state and conservation in the Danube Delta: turning
fishermen into outlaws 194
STEFAN DORONDEL AND VERONICA MITROI
Selected bibliography 213
Index 221
ix
Contributors
Stefan Dorondel has a PhD in history and ethnology from the University
Lucian Blaga Sibiu, Romania, and a PhD in rural economy and sociology
from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. He is Senior Researcher at
the Francisc I. Rainer Institute of Anthropology, Bucharest, and affiliated
with the Institute for Southeast European Studies in Bucharest. He has pub-
lished papers on land reform, property issues, landscape changes and land
use change in postsocialist countries. Recently he started to work on rivers
and state formation in Eastern Europe and on natural disasters and climate
change issues. He is the author of Disrupted Landscapes: State, Peasants and
the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania (New York & Oxford, 2016) and
co- author (with Thomas Sikor, Johannes Stahl and Phuc Xuan To) of When
Things Become Property: Land Reform, Authority and Value in Postsocialist Europe
and Asia (New York & Oxford, 2017).
Frederico Freitas holds a PhD in Latin American history from Stanford
University, USA (2016). He is Assistant Professor of Latin American and
Digital History at North Carolina State University and an investiga-
tor at the Visual Narratives Initiative. He is currently working on a book
manuscript tentatively titled ‘Boundaries of Nature: National Parks and
Environmental Change at the Argentine– Brazilian Border, 1890– 1990’. He
has published in South and North America. His work has been featured in
HIb: Revista de Historia Iberoamericana and ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin
America.
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg is Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, where he coordi-
nates the working group ‘Art of Judgement’. He holds a degree in history
from the University of Turin in Italy (2002) and a PhD in geography from
the University of Cambridge, UK (2007). Immediately before moving to
Berlin he was DAAD Visiting Professor of Environmental History at the
University of Wisconsin-M adison, USA. Previously he also worked at the
Rachel Carson Center and the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany,
the University of Trento, Italy, and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa,
Italy. He has researched and published extensively on issues related to the
