Опубликовано в журнале Неприкосновенный запас, номер 2, 2006
Debates on politics and culture
This special thematic issue of NZ — «Politics of Nature: from the environment of survival to the living environment»— was originally supposed to be dedicated to the ecological movement as a specific form of civil activism. However, in the process of assembling this issue we were confronted with the necessity to write the ecological problematics into a perspective, reaching far out beyond the bounds of the ecological movement as such.
The issue opens with a theoretical section The production of nature, dedicated to the problematisation of the notion of «nature», that often continues to function as an obvious horizon of objectivity. At the same time the future of nature itself is determined not only by direct protection activities, but also by the process of fundamental redefinition of the currently dominant cultural values, that in turn is connected to the necessity to become cognisant of our idea of nature being inbuilt in existing knowledge-producing mechanisms. The workings of those mechanisms are discussed in the texts by the French and Russian sociologists Bruno Latour and Oleg Yanitsky.
The conversation on social perception of nature is continued by our columnist Aleksey Levinson (Sociological Notes), who discusses the specifics and tendencies in Russian society’s attitude towards ecological problems in the material provided by the opinion polls.
The next thematic group Back to the USSR: nature- society- stateoffers a diachronic section, presenting the history of the ecological movement and of state environmental management policies in the USSR and Russia of the 1990s. Thus, an article by an American historian Douglas Weiner describes how participation in the work of environment protection societies became one of the few available mechanisms of gaining a civil consciousness at least partly autonomous from the state ideology. The articles by Dmitry Vorobyev, Alla Bolotova and Lev Fedorov further discuss that set of problems in connection with various separate aspects and incidents of government and society clashing over the issues of environment (and heath) protection as well as those of environmental management.
In the new NZ section- Case studies— the Zurich University professor Peter Brang offers an overview of the development of Russian vegetarianism, particularly stressing its ethical motivation that distinguished it from the European movement.
We could not avoid the topic related to an attempt by Russian ecologists to copy a successful initiative of their European colleagues and create a political party that would have direct influence over making socially significant decisions not limited to the field of environment protection. The Russian specifics of party building are argued over by ecological activists and professional political scientists in a discussion comprising the bloc of materials Is there such a party?
Aleksandr Saburov’s column Humane Economics picks up that issue of ecological problems becoming a significant argument in the country’s political and economical life.
The coming topic —Ecology or the art of making a profit — directly places ecology into an economic context. Environment protection and rational natural resources management have become (although to a catastrophically insignificant degree as yet) important pragmatic factors of economic development that stimulate industrial modernisation and acquiring of an ecological image necessary for effective competition. The existing state of the economy and its prospects of shifting towards a more careful and at the same time more cost-effective treatment of nature is described by the journalist Irina Fedotova and the nature conservation policy director of Russian WWF Yevgeny Schwartz.
The rubricNZ Tribunegives the ecological
activists an opportunity to speak for themselves. The
The last thematic bloc of the issue Works and days: ecological policy in modern Russia is dedicated to monitoring the current state of interaction and inner conflict between society, ecological organisations and the state. On one hand we are confronted by the reorganisation of the state environment protection system, the weakening of the control over the status of the environment and the growing state and business pressure on ecological activists. On the other hand individual ecological policy issues are gaining in immediacy (the import of used nuclear fuel, the debates on the necessity of resource rent and ecological risk insurance, etc.)
The issue is concluded by our traditional columns New Institutions, Journals Review and New Books.
Though we do share the general attitude of the ecological movement, we have nevertheless tried to create a more complex, stereoscopic picture of the perception of nature, not only placing it in various disciplinary and pragmatic contexts, but also combining various perspectives and views — the internal position of ecological activists and the external metaposition of the experts that specialise in the problems of ecological movements and ecology as such.