NZ: Debates on politics and culture

http://www.nz-online.ru/index.phtml?aid=80011680

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 - state offers 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 rubric NZ Tribune gives the ecological activists an opportunity to speak
for themselves.  The St. Petersburg ecologist and journalist Tatiana
Artemyeva tells us about the dramatic collisions of the "espionage cases"
and criminal actions started against Russian ecologists that concluded in
the authorities beating a temporary retreat and a partial overhaul of the
obsolete legislation.  A Kazan ecologist Sergei Mukhachev shares with us his
experience of participating in a popular ecological movement.

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.