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.
In the interwar years the Gran Paradiso ibex population followed two subsequent, contrasting trends: a steady rise once the national park was established in 1922, followed by a precipitous fall after the Fascist regime took direct control of conservation in 1934, which almost led to the colony's extinction. This paper addresses the issue of how models taken from population ecology may inform historical narratives. The data for the interwar years were analyzed using a statistical model based on climate and population density, which has proved reliable for most of the post-World War II period. The article highlights the pivotal role of anthropic variables in determining the inter-war trends and how these are best analyzed using historical scholarship.
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