In comparison with the significant historiographical work on the German case, specifically on Nazi environmental policies and ideology, studies on such issues for other Fascist regimes are still rather rare. This article attempts partially to fill this gap, at least as regards the Italian
case, offering a general overview of the Fascist regime and its environmental politics and narratives. Analysing how Fascists appropriated Italian landscapes through both discourses and concrete policies, this paper examines the construction of a Fascist nature as a rhetorical, symbolic and
geographical space. In particular, this essay explores the combined process of appropriation and expropriation through the analysis of two diverse but intertwined issues: firstly, Fascist rural ideology as a narrative on the mutual constituency of nature and people and secondly, the creation
of the first Italian national parks, their successes and failures as institutions of nature conservation and their role as symbols of the nature/society divide. While blending the ideas of race, landscape, history, modernity and ruralism, Fascists shaped both the national environment and general
ideas about nature in a narrative which affected the very object of the narration - that is, nature itself.
This article introduces the special issue on 'Estimated Truths' which investigates the role of estimation in knowledge-making about water and, through it, contributes to thinking place as environment in the historical geography and history of knowledge. It argues that while historical geographers and historians of science have paid much attention to precision and quantification, approximation and estimation have also played an important role in knowledge-making and deserve more attention. It discusses the roles played by uncertainty and estimation in the water sciences and makes the case for more sustained engagement with the influence of the environment e understood as a dynamic set of human and nonhuman actors and forces e on knowledge-making. Finally, the article presents the five papers and discusses their individual and collective contributions to the themes of the special issue and to further investigation into the making and operation of estimated truths.
Nature conservation is a complex venture, with a great impact, among other things, on local and national power relationships. Nature conservation also depends on a wide set of variables to determine any one planned initiative's long-term success or failure. This article explores what made the difference between success and failure in the history of nature conservation under Mussolini's regime. Many parks were planned in those years in Italy, but only a handful were effectively instituted. This essay will address the following questions: What were the reasons behind the planning and creation of these national parks? What was the role of Fascist ideology in determining the long-term success of a park proposal? Was there anything specifically Fascist in Italian nature conservation in the 1920s and 1930s? Which other variables impacted on the involved decision-making processes?
Littorals are interfaces between worlds, where land and water meet and mingle. Central to human interaction with the sea, these regions, veritable staging grounds for globalization, have been thoroughly analyzed, mostly as discrete singularities, important for their unique local features. The global ocean is, however, a medium of physical, biological, and cultural connection among littorals. Each shore is thus also part of the "global coastline." Building on this idea, this Focus section brings to the forefront and historicizes the interconnectedness of coasts and littoral knowledge on a planetary scale.N eat distinctions between land and sea are recent constructs. The two have, indeed, long been seen as inseparable, mingling incessantly along the world's shores. The coastline of modern Western cartography, as Paul Carter explains, "is an artefact of linear thinking, a binary abstraction that corresponds to nothing in nature." Littorals, independently of whether one defines them strictly, including just the intertidal zone, or adopts a broader cultural approach, extending them way beyond the reach of the tides, are much more blurry and unruly than they appear on maps. 1 They actually defy our efforts to assert material and legal control.
This exploration of the environmental practices of Benito Mussolini's fascist regime invites readers to consider the ecological connections of all political projects.
In this first environmental history of Italian fascism, Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveal that nature and fascist rhetoric are inextricable. Mussolini's Nature explores fascist political ecologies, or rather the practices and narratives through which the regime constructed imaginary and material ecologies functional to its political project. The book does not pursue the ghost of a green Mussolini by counting how many national parks were created during the regime or how many trees planted. Instead, the reader is trained to recognize fascist political ecology in Mussolini's speeches, reclaimed landscapes, policies of economic self-sufficiency, propaganda documentaries, reforested areas, and in the environmental transformation of its colonial holdings.
The authors conclude with an examination of the role of fascist landscapes in the country's postwar reconstruction: Mussolini's nature is still visible today through plaques, monuments, toponomy, and the shapes of landscapes. This original, and surprisingly intimate, environmental history is not merely a chronicle of conservation in fascist Italy but also an invitation to consider the socioecological connections of all political projects.
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