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.
Postwar Italy's political organisations' attitude towards environmental issues is closely correlated to how the country transformed from a merely agrarian society to one of the world's richest industrial actors as well as to how its governments managed development. In view of the role of the social-Communist opposition in shaping the country's cultural and social features we are persuaded that a better understanding of that process has to pass through an analysis of how the representatives of the workers' movement approached the environmental question and the Italian model of development: an approach that was deeply influenced by a political vision favouring industrialisation, employment, and production. 2 After World War II (WWII), and despite being entrenched in a framework deeply marked by the Cold War, the social-Communist left became an important political actor positing itself as a force of renewal and vouching for an alternative developmental model opposed to that outlined by laissez-faire capitalism. Of course, its behaviour changed over time according to the country's economic situation. For instance, since the postwar reconstruction-from the 'economic miracle' and youth contestation until the energy crisis of the 1970s and the free-trade policies of the following decade-the Italian left faced several complex environmental problems. This complexity, together with the length of the historical period considered, has not facilitated a simple historical narrative. Nevertheless, we wish to offer here a preliminary survey of the main issues at stake in the Italian left's environmentalism. It is therefore useful to clarify a few points. The first one concerns the definition of the term 'left' as it is used in this essay: even if there are some references to socialist politicians or to documents produced by the social-Communist union, Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), the essay is based mainly on sources referring to or produced by the Italian Communist Party (PCI). The latter is this article's main object of analysis as it is the predominant organization of the Italian workers' movement, which has enacted a sort of cultural and political hegemony over other sectors of the Italian left. Secondly, we wish to explain the expression 'environmental question', which some may consider void of significance because of the wide spectrum of issues it is used to define today, which include pollution, nature conservation, urban sustainability, or illegal whaling. The environmental issues we address in this essay are specifically those which we believe have the greatest connections to PCI's role as the major representative of Italy's workers' movement, to employment, and
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