Communities in Transition: Protected Nature and Local People in Eastern and Central Europe (Petrova)

Despite the European origins of the wilderness idea, European natures have occupied a relatively marginal place in critical social science scholarship on protected areas.At the same time, the Chornobyl disaster made contamination the dominant image in popular perceptions about the natural environments of the formerly socialist world.However, a recent wave of scholarship that includes Saska Petrova's Communities in Transition: Protected Areas and Local People in Eastern and Central Europe demonstrates that postsocialist ecologies are about more than just degradation, and that nature protection in Central and Eastern Europe refracts the global history of conservation practice in novel ways.Saska Petrova's book is a geographical study of the relationship between local communities and administrators in the Pelister National Park in Macedonia, and in the umava National Park in the Czech Republic.Using evidence from surveys, interviews, regulation, and policy documents, Petrova analyzes the ways in which place attachment and the economic opportunities parks provide affect whether residents have positive or negative attitudes about the parks' existence.Petrova argues that contrary to the dominant image of local communities as obstacles, victims or opportunists found in nature conservation literature, people residing near the two parks were pragmatic in their engagement with administrators, and were able to exercise themselves as political subjects.Despite residents' disagreements with managers, and their hazy understanding of managers' responsibilities, they displayed a strong sense of the park as "home" and never questioned the value of the parks' ongoing existence.The first five chapters of Communities in Transition set the stage for the two case studies.These chapters review literatures on the history of nature conservation, the relationships between parks and local communities, and environmental policies during socialism and after its demise.Chapter 2 brings together scholarship on the importance of treating communities as complex and differentiated, the significance of place attachment in grasping people's relationship to protected areas, and the social construction of "wilderness."Chapter 3 situates national parks in a global history of conservation that emerged in the context of colonialism and Europeans' obsession with natural history and hunting.Petrova underscores that although "the national park" is a global category, its enactment in particular places takes unique and specific forms as a result of local and regional histories.Chapter 4 forms the conceptual core of the book and develops the argument that local residents in the two national parks were neither obstacles, victims, nor opportunists.Instead, they engaged pragmatically with administrators in order to improve stewardship over parks' natural landscapes and to create opportunities for making a living.In Chapter 5, the book's final contextualizing chapter, Petrova helpfully reminds the reader of socialism's paradoxical environmental impacts.On the one hand, centrally planned economies were resource intensive and often highly polluting.On the other hand, they facilitated the conservation of forestsoften through the creation of security zones along the Iron Curtain.

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