Environmental Transitions: Transformation and Ecological Defense in Central and Eastern Europe
Petr Pavlínek
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0415162696
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Environmental Transitions is a detailed and comprehensive account of the environmental changes in Central and Eastern Europe, both under state socialism and during the period of transition to capitalism. The change in politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s allowed an opportunity for a rapid environmental clean up, in an area once considered one of the most environmentally devastated regions on earth. The book illustrates how transformations after 1989 have brought major environmental improvements, as well as new environmental problems. It shows how environmental policy, economic change and popular support for environmental movements, have specific and changing geographies associated with them. Environmental Transitions addresses a large number of topics, including the historical geographical analysis of the environmental change, health impacts of environmental degradation, the role of environmental issues during the anti-communist revolutions, legislative reform and the effects of transition on environmental quality after 1989. Environmental Transitions contains detailed case studies from the region, which illustrate the complexity of environmental issues and their intimate relationship with political and economic realities. It gives theoretically informed ideas for understanding environmental change in the context of the political economy of state socialism and post-communist transformations, drawing on a wide body of literature from West, Central and Eastern Europe.
crisis of 1973 when developed countries considerably slowed their own pace of investment. In fact, CEE countries did not substantially change their investment behavior at this time and largely ignored or discountedthe negative impact the global economic crisis would have on their own economies (Marer 1989, Zloch-Christy 1987). The 1973 oil shock coincided with CEE investments in oil and energy intensive technologies and the construction of new petrochemical plants and refineries. Energy intensive
a site on which global processes operated, but as a complex nexus of relations operating at many scales in determining responses to global restructuring processes. Notable among these projects were the Changing Urban and Regional Systems (CURS) program, which employed a comparative historical perspective to study the impact of international and national economic restructuring on seven localities in England (Leitner 1989), and theories of the local state which became predominant in the late 1970s
also allow us to integrate two important theoretical moments into the analysis of transition and the environment at the regional and local scale: regulationistresponses to productivist explanations, and dialectical explanations of the production of space and Nature. The concept of structured coherence The concept of structured coherence is based on Harvey’s analysis of urban-regional labor markets. Urban-regional markets are defined as the geographic area in which “daily exchanges and
development model. The old spatial order of the Most basin was destroyed by open cast coal mining, resulting in large scale landscape devastation and the destruction of thirty-two villages as well as the old city of Most. A new thoroughly “state socialist” space was produced, and this was typified on the one hand by the urban structure and form of the new city of Most and other cities in the region, and on the other hand by the scale and form of the abandonment and recultivation of coal mines and
the environment have been documented in Bulgaria Source: OECD (1994a: Annex 1:2–4), Hertzman (1995:73–5) recorded ten-year average nitrate concentrations in drinking water in the range of 50 to 100 mg/l, with about 35–45 percent of their population being exposed to nitrate concentrations in drinking water above acceptable limits. (See Table 6.25.) Conclusion Above all other indicators, health is surely the most crucial one in assessing the state of any society. The failures of state socialism