Nature State

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. 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 in 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 environmental history and a monograph on the social and ecological regions of Amazonia and Patagonia.

"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 "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 natural environment in the 20thcentury will serve as a productive model for future scholarship on this exciting theme."Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa"[T]he contents of The Nature State are wide-ranging in topic and diverse in space. A quick list will illustrate the case studies from every inhabited continent: national parks in the Philippines, Namibia, southern India, Colombia and Brazil, science and conservation in Patagonia, China’s tropical rainforests and in the Danube Delta. A rich haul indeed, all well written, balanced and interesting...The book will be useful as a teaching tool and, no doubt, the type of discussion at the ESEH panel will be replicated in the classroom and beyond." Jane Carruthers, International Consortium of Enviromental History Organizations, July 2017

• Introduction 1.The Export of the American National Park Idea in an Age of Empire: The Philippines, 1898 1940 Ian Tyrrell2.Protecting Patagonia: Science, Conservation and the Pre-History of the Nature State on a South American Frontier, 1903-1934Emily Wakild3.Another way to preserve: hunting bans, biosecurity, and the brown bear in Italy, 1930-1960Wilko Graf von Hardenberg4. Conservation Politics in the Madras Presidency: Maintaining the Lord Wenlock Downs of the Nilgiris Grasslands, South India, as a National Park,1930-1950Siddhartha Krishnan5.Negotiating the Nature State Beyond the Parks: Conservation in 20th Century North-Central NamibiaEmmanuel Kreike6. Conventional thinking and the fragile birth of the Nature State in post-war Britain.Matthew Kelly7. Behind the Scenes and Out in the Open: Making Colombian National Parks in the 1960s and 70sClaudia Leal8. Ordering the Borderland:Settlement and Removal in the Iguaçu National Park, Brazil, 1940s-1970s Frederico Freitas9. Discovering China’s Tropical Rainforests: Shifting Approaches to People and Nature in the late Twentieth CenturyMichael Hathaway10. Nature, State, and Conservation in the Danube Delta: Turning Fishermen into OutlawsStefan Dorondel and Veronica Mitroi