Environmental Disasters, Climate Change and ...

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makes some suggestions how the anthropology of and in Southeast Europe can contribute .... Environmental racism, as it was called (Kottack 1999), is a form of.
Ethnologia Balkanica 19 (2016)

Environmental Disasters, Climate Change and other Big Problems of Our Times. A View from Southeast Europe1 Ștefan Dorondel, Bucharest

Abstract The paper explores the contribution of social and cultural anthropology to the study of environmental disasters and climate change as it is reflected in the literature. It then makes some suggestions how the anthropology of and in Southeast Europe can contribute to these issues and the reasons why social anthropologists from and of Southeast Europe should engage more in environmental issues. It concludes that engaging in these issues will not only refresh the discipline theoretically and methodologically in the context of zonal anthropologies but can also offer the discipline of social anthropology a more conspicuous political voice.

Every year, the international media report catastrophic floods throughout the globe. From Southeast Asia to the Americas and from Australia to Europe, strong storms or heat and drought produce tremendous human loss and economic damage in just a few days. Farmers lose their crops, people lose their homes, populations are displaced, and many lives are lost during such catastrophes. It looks as the Humanity’s worst nightmare is coming true. Climatologists and other scientists have warned us that the situation due to the climate changes2 will only get worse in the coming years. Thus, the study of environmental disasters is closely linked to the study of climate change. However, as Anthony OliverSmith and Susanna Hoffman (2002: 3) put it, disasters do not just happen, they rarely appear from nowhere. The two authors show that we need to think of environmental disasters as a conjuncture of two factors: the presence of humans at a certain time and in a certain place and the potentially destructive agent of an ecological system. In fact, an environmental disaster is the meeting point between the power of Nature and the agency of humans. Moreover, as Piers Blaik This paper was first written as a keynote speech for the 7th International Association for Southeast European Anthropology Congress “Cultures of Crisis: Experiencing and Coping with Upheavals and Disasters in Southeast Europe”, Istanbul, September 18–21, 2014. 2 For a review and a critique of neo-catastrophism in geosciences literature see Marriner et al. (2010). See Hoang et al. (2015), among other studies, for the link between climate change and extreme hydrological phenomena. 1

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ie et al. (1994) have shown, natural disasters are not just natural. They are often the result of the social, political or economic milieu. Treating natural disasters only from their physical point of view is misleading and obscure rather than clarifying their causes and their effects. Thus, in order to understand environmental disasters we need to understand the link between the physicality of the natural world and human behaviour (Oliver-Smith, Hoffman 2002: 12). In this essay I will explore some of the possible ways in which socio-cultural anthropology can contribute to a deeper understanding of environmental disasters and the related issue of climate change – problems that haunt the contemporary society. I look at this matter through the lenses provided by my interest in post-socialist societies from Southeast Europe. What is at stake is not only an attempt to refresh theoretically and methodologically this discipline in Southeast Europe but the political relevance of the discipline and its public undertaking. The reader should not worry; I am not going to show charts, figures or anything similar – that is something I barely understand myself. Instead, I will engage with some theoretical issues concerning human-environment contusive relations in our time and urge the anthropologists of and from Southeast Europe to go deeper and to move further in this direction. If Western anthropology tackled these issues later than other sciences, especially the climate change issue (Batterbury 2009) as I will sketch out in a subsection of this paper, the anthropologists from Southeast Europe – and the anthropologists of Southeast Europe equally – have just started their enquiry. I will also point out that the socio-economic and political changes that have convulsed our region of study, Southeast Europe, make it even more vulnerable than other regions of the globe to environmental disasters and climate change. A few theoretical clarifications Before exploring the situation of the anthropology in Southeast Europe and how – or if – it addresses the environmental challenges of our times, several theoretical clarifications are necessary. There are at least three concepts circulated when one analyses environmental disasters. One is the concept of disaster itself, which has been defined as “a process combining a potentially destructive agent/ force from the natural, modified, or built environment and a population in socially and economically produced conditions of vulnerability, resulting in a perceived disruption of the customary relative satisfaction of individual and social needs for physical survival, social order, and meaning” (Oliver-Smith, Hoffman 2002: 4). Political ecologists have been particularly good in showing that what may look like natural phenomena such as droughts, land degradation or famines are not caused primarily by natural conditions but by the wider political econo-

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my (Blaikie 1985, Watts 1983). In the same direction, the Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen (1981), sees starvation not as a result of the non-existence of food but the lack among the poor of access to it. Thus, starvation is not the result of tragic and unavoidable natural disasters but the consequence of deep social inequality. Instead of focussing on the local level management of natural resources, Sen’s book looks at wider national or global forces that influence local level human-nature relations. The definition of disaster introduces two other concepts: the first is “hazard”, the second is “vulnerability”. Hazard has been defined as “the forces, conditions, technologies that carry a potential for social, infrastructural or environmental damage. The issue of hazard further incorporates the way a society perceives the danger … either environmental and/or technological” (OliverSmith, Hoffman 2002: 4). Vulnerability on the other hand is defined by Blaikie et al. (1994: 9) as “the characteristics of a person or group in terms of their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard”. Obviously, vulnerability is linked to the socio-economic status of a person or of a social or ethnic group (ibidem). Let me take floods as an example. People in flooded areas are not equally affected. For instance, poor and uneducated people building houses on the banks of rivers will be more affected in case of floods than richer people living in the same village but on the hills. While the poor have no other choice but to build their houses in flood-prone areas, people having more power and access to resources would avoid such dangerous places, being able to afford building their houses in a safer place. There are several ethnographic and historical examples that can be cited to support this point. Most of them reflect the situation of poor and rural populations in developing countries (Blaikie et al. 1994; Brammer 2010; Hofer, Messerli 2007).3 India alone, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, has suffered an average loss of 1 612 lives due to floods between 1953 and 2010, while 3.4 million people are affected annually (Baghel 2014: 94). A historical example is provided by Archer (2015) who shows that, in nineteenth century Texas, the Brazos River flooding hit the poor and the Afro-Americans rather than the rich Whites. The Afro-Americans lived in the flood-prone areas and worked in agriculture, so they were more exposed to such perils. For instance, an 1868 newspaper published the following announcement: “a flood in the Brazos River, in Texas, washed away seventeen negroes and the grain crop” (Archer 2015: 56). Not only rural people and not only developing countries experience the hardship of floods. Ted Steinberg (2000) presents the case of an American city called Hannibal, the hometown of Mark Twain, and the failure of its officials to protect

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Blaikie et al. (1994) provide multiple examples of floods affecting poor communities.

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the poor of the city against the 1993 flood. Faced with the dilemma of whether budgetary investments to mitigate flood should be directed towards protecting Mark Twain’s historical house – an excellent source of revenues for the city – or towards the protection of areas where the poor lived, the city leaders have predictably chosen the first variant. Another good example going back to history is provided by Rohr (2015), who pointed out that the medieval city of Krems was severely hit by floods at the end of the sixteenth century. The archival documents show the severity of the flood that killed people and animals and destroyed houses. However, shortly after this event, the rich citizens of Krems lent a large amount of money to the Habsburg Emperor. This, concludes the historian, shows that, despite the awful painted images showing the disaster the city had experienced, it seems that the poor people were more affected whereas the rich were less, given that they could still afford to lend money to the Emperor. This seems to be true not only for local groups but for nations as well. While industrial countries are able to absorb the loss quicker from an earthquake, flood, or hurricane, developing countries suffer more in terms of lost lives and material damage. William Torry (1978) for instance shows that losses in Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Mangua are ten to twenty times greater than in the US. Again, not all people suffer equal loss in the case of a disaster. Often, belonging to a certain ethnic group means a higher vulnerability to environmental hazards. Environmental racism, as it was called (Kottack 1999), is a form of institutional discrimination in terms of programmes, policies, politics and institutional arrangements that harm members of a particular group. Several authors have pointed out that multinational companies often completely disregard the local people’s interests, putting their lives in danger for large gains. William Tsuma (2010), for instance, gives the example of gold mining in Ghana – one of the developing countries that suffer a lot from the multinationals’ exploitation of its natural resources. Tsuma shows the major impact on waters, agricultural fields and forests not only by the mining itself but also by the spilling of cyanided waters. A similar example comes from Romania. The following case that I shall briefly describe was detailed by Krista Harper (2007). She shows that not only large dams containing toxic waters can produce huge environmental catastrophes that cannot be foreseen, but also that local people living next to these dams suffer the most, whereas those who harvest the huge profits from mining with cyanide live thousands of miles away and are not affected at all. On 30 January 2000, a dam holding tailings breached, releasing around 100 000 cubic metres of infested waters into two rivers from northern Transylvania. The toxic waters containing high levels of cyanide and heavy metals were the outcome of an Australian-Romanian gold-mine operation. Within a few days the toxic waters reached the Tisza, a tributary of the Danube. Analysing the serious consequences of this disaster, the chairman of the Hungar-

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ian Parliament described it as the largest ecological havoc after Chernobyl. This description is by no means an exaggeration. The spill affected 2 000 kms of the Danube basin, killing thousands of fish, poisoning waterfowl and affecting thousands of people living on the riverbanks. In the spring of the same year, catastrophic floods sent more contaminated waters downstream to the Tisza and the Danube. The two examples show that people living in such areas, often poor or in desperate need of poorly paid jobs, suffer the consequences of a disaster whereas rich people – sometimes living in safe places thousands of kilometres from the exploitation spot – reap the entire benefit. How a society reacts in times of a crisis says a lot about that society, about its structure of power, politics, ethnic relations or social structure. Following Oliver-Smith and Hoffman (2002: 4), one could say that “there is much to learn about a society when all hell breaks loose”. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2014 [2005]) has pointed out, discussing the way the American government reacted in response to the 1 200 victims of the Katrina hurricane, the political response to a disaster could be as damaging as the disaster itself. She shows that the poor of New Orleans, most of them Afro-Americans, were the last to be saved and they were abandoned without food and water after the hurricane was over. Another example of the poor being overlooked by the authorities comes from Southeast Europe. In 2006, Romania confronted one of the worst floods of the modern period. Large cities along the Lower Danube (such as Giurgiu, Brăila and Galați) were under the threat of being flooded. Although the Iron Gates experts tried to control the water flow of the Danube, the river continued to rise. A commission of ministers and regional experts decided to make a break into the dykes along the Danube, so that the water flow would diminish before reaching the large riparian cities. Not only the large industrial cities would have been heavily affected but the pressure of water could have broken the dykes anywhere along the Lower Danube. After a debate with the large landowners and fisheries owners along the Danube, who would have suffered great losses in case of flooding, the levee was breached at a point where only a village with rather poor people was affected. In fact that village was almost swept away by the waters. Allegedly, high ranking officials tried in this way to protect the fishery of a rich politician with connections in the Romanian government, but neglected the fate of villagers.4 I leave aside many details, which make this case very interesting from the point of view of the environmental justice theory. I only emphasize that the political forces acted to the benefit of rather rich people in the area by negotiating the levee breach with them, while neglecting expert advice and the local ecological knowledge. From this point of view, the flood was not just a natural, cata-

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This case was presented extensively in Dorondel and Ivan (2015).

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strophic event but a political and economic negotiation. This case is important because it shows two things. One is that we do not have to look at disasters only as events in a certain time and space. Disasters are processes that involve politics and economics rather than onetime natural events disturbing the daily social life. That type of gaze would lead us to understand disasters too narrowly and to essentialize them. Secondly, we need to look at the social and economic history of the region that has been hit by an environmental disaster, which would give us a wider perspective, and to explain why the disaster unfolded the way it did and to show us who gained and who lost. To paraphrase Mauch et al. (2006), one person’s economic ruin from a disaster may be another person’s economic yield. The question that I am going to explore further is what is the place of sociocultural anthropology in these debates that shape and grip our time? Do we have the tool kit even to be involved in this discussion? For a new environmental anthropology The human-nature relations have been an important topic from the dawn of the anthropology. Over recent years, several environmental anthropologists have urged us to change the paradigm in this sub-discipline.5 The American Anthropologist journal published a special issue in 1999 dedicated to Ray Rappaport’s work in which several anthropologists drew up the new design of environmental anthropology. Kottack (1999), for instance, argues that the new environmental anthropology has to blend with political awareness and policy concerns. He also points out that we need to look closer at what he calls environmental morality. By this he means that there is much more concern in many places for the environment and the animals that populate it than for humans. There is an entire body of literature on conservation and national parks in extra-European settings analysing what Bram Büscher (2012) has coined as “inverted commons”. Büscher shows that countries from the North require countries from the South to protect the environment and biodiversity seen as a sort of common heritage of Humanity. However, those who pay the price are the developing nations. He gives the example of Serengeti, the world-known symbol of the wild nature of Africa. The attempts of the Tanzanian government to build a road through the northern part of the Serengeti Park triggered international protests, even from UNESCO, which threatened the government that it would remove the park from the World Heritage List. A group of well-known scientists published an article in

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There is a large amount of literature, which I am not going to explore here. For more see Crumley et al. (2001) or Ingold (2000).

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the influential journal Nature announcing the collapse of the entire ecosystem. Although that road would have offered the local communities a chance at economic development, what counted more was the well-being of nature rather than that of the humans that populated it. In other cases, the international conservationists indirectly offer support to national states that exercise coercive methods to protect the biological world’s heritage.6 Let me offer another example, this time from the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve. The environmental policy promoted by the Romanian state attempts to protect the natural world as if it had not been inhabited for centuries, while it disregards the historical rights of the local fishermen – the inhabitants of that place. Fishermen often complain that the Romanian state, supported by national and international NGOs and international donors such as the World Bank implement environmental policies that protect fish, birds, and plants – but ignore people. These policies ask local people – fishermen – to pay the price of environmental protection of the Delta (Mitroi Tisseyre 2013).7 These two cases suggest that the environmental morality means that the anthropologist should take a stance whenever injustice is seen, to go public in supporting those who are subjected to unrighteous policies and to offer his or her knowledge as support for producing good public policies. The new environmental anthropology should also examine more closely the most pressing issue of our time, the ultimate disaster, a threat to the entire human species: global warming. Climatologists warn us that global warming caused by the use of fossil fuels is one of the main threats of our time. There are credible scientific data provided by climate historians showing that, in Britain alone, the quantity of carbon dioxide emissions produced from burning fossil fuels increased seventeen times during the nineteenth century: from 7.3 million tons to 114.6 million tons (Peet et al. 2011: 17). This aspect of global warming was fiercely debated among scientists, although fewer and fewer would disagree with it: this is a phenomenon driven by human activity (Urry 2011). Social scientists have even come up with a new term to designate the era we live in now, which is characterized by humans’ activity, altering the planet by marking deeply the natural environment: the Anthropocene.8 As for the be-

See, for instance, Peluso (1993). The environmental degradation of the Danube Delta and the marginalization of fishermen are not contemporary phenomena. Grigore Antipa (1914), a Romanian naturalist, pointed out similar socio-economic and political processes, which unfolded at the beginning of the twentieth century, with similar appalling environmental outcomes. 8 There is already expansive literature on the Anthropocene from various disciplines’ perspectives. However, most authors agree that we can no longer separate the human from the natural world and thus closer collaboration between social scientists and natural scientists 6 7

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ginning of this new geological era, there are still contested scientific debates whether it should be associated with early industrialization or with the post-industrialization period (Zalasiewicz 2015). We know from environmental historians and historical climatologists that climate change is not a purely modern phenomenon – the Mediaeval small Ice Age in Europe or short periods of extreme drought and floods provide proof of such climatic disturbances in periods when human activities could hardly have been responsible for them (Cernovodeanu, Binder 1993; Kiss, Laszlovszky 2013; Vadas 2011). However, the period of intense industrialization that started in the eighteenth century seems to have contributed massively to global warming. A major impact of industrialization is represented by a probable rise in temperature by anything from 1.10 to 6.40 Celsius by the end of this century. As The Economist in a special report on global warming (December 5, 2009) put it: “At the bottom end of the range, the difference would be barely noticeable. At the top end of the range – well, guesses about what the world would look like then read rather like science fiction.” Another major blame for climate change is what was called “the carbon civilization”, which uses fossil fuel as the main source of power. Thus, this period of intense climatic changes may well be called the Carbocene.9 The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) estimates that 74 percent of all CO2 emissions are from fossil fuels and industrial activity while the remainder is produced by land-use change such as massive deforestation (Moriarty, Honnery 2011). In order to stop the disaster the planet is on the brink of, Jeremy Rifkin (2011) and other policy advisors preach a Third Industrial Revolution that would have the energy obtained from renewable sources as its pivotal point. They think the future will have to be green or there will be no future at all. As a process, global warming is not perceived by people since it is a statistical aggregation of long-term measurements, a long and slow process. It is, as Rudiak-Gould (2013a) puts it, an invisible and imperceptible phenomenon. Thus, the average person is rarely concerned about climate generally but about weather (ibidem). Local weather and the perceived changes over a short time span is the only perception ordinary people have, since these have a direct impact upon their lives. In the last decade, new literature has been rapidly developed on anthropology and climate change.10 Different authors suggest possiis needed. For an anthropological perspective see Biermann et al. (2015), Crumley et al. (2015), Hamilton et al. (2015). 9 For the term Carbocene see LeCain (2015). 10 There is extensive literature already on this bourgeoning sub-field of socio-cultural anthropology, too large to be quoted entirely here. However, several authors stand out among others, such as Susan Crate (2008), Crate, Nuttal (2011), Michael Dove (2014), Barnes, Dove (2015) and Rudiak-Gould (2009, 2013b, 2013c).

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ble ways in which socio-cultural anthropology could be involved in the climate change debate. In a recently published reader, Michael Dove (2014), an anthropologist from Yale, explores the history of climate concerns from Antiquity up to nowadays. He points out that the interest in the nexus climate–society is as ancient as Hippocrates (first millennium BC). Dove identifies global capitalist relations and colonial and postcolonial relations as one of the causes of an accelerated change in global climate. He points out that while early industrialized countries – basically, the western ones – have benefited economically from intensive industrial activity until quite recently, the recent industrialized countries, which have not contributed much to global warming from industrial activities, meet the opposition of the first group. Anthropologists can and should be researching climate change simply because the manifestations of global warming are inherently local and thus are a subject of ethnography and participant observations. Although the effects of climate change are inherently global they are produced by social, economic and political forces at a local level (Barnes et al. 2013, Dove 2014, McIntosh et al. 2000). Moreover, the discipline pays attention to cultural values, to political and economic relations and their history and by virtue of this is in the best possible position to contribute to a better understanding of climate change (Barnes et al. 2013). The synchronic and diachronic analysis of socio-economic, political and cultural relations is a hallmark of socio-cultural anthropology. Let me give an example, one of many, of how anthropology can contribute to a better documentation of climate change. Local communities of herders, hunters or fishermen become aware of global warming because the animals and plants they rely on for their livelihoods began to suffer changes. Rajindra Puri (2015) shows that changes in the local climate produce changes in different food resources and in animals and insects, which in turn change the conditions in which local communities live and obtain their livelihoods. People observe these changes and try to adapt to them. He gives the example of herders from India whose territory has been invaded recently by a tropical American shrub, Lantana camara. Eighty percent of Malai Mahadeshwara territory has been infested with this shrub, including the rainforest and agricultural fields. Lantana competes with other local species, altering vegetation composition. Its high density and thorns impede mobility through the forest and affect food availability. Besides, the larger domestic animals cannot be grazed on traditional pastures and have to be taken further afield, which increases conflicts between humans and the large predators. Thus, how local communities adapt to the climate change, how they perceive, interpret, understand, reject or utilize the manifestations of global warming to their own advantage is a subject of socio-cultural anthropology (Rudiak-Gould 2011: 8; Barnes et al. 2013). Puri’s study shows that some populations are more vulnerable to environmental haz-

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ards than others. Especially those people whose livelihoods rely on agriculture, forest or rivers are more exposed than others. However, this study also shows that the local ecological knowledge of these populations is crucial for adaptation and resilience to changes in their environments – people just find ways to deal with such changes.11 What about the anthropology of Southeast Europe? How do anthropologists studying Southeast Europe position themselves inside and outside the academic community vis-à-vis the main narrative of our time, that is, global warming? How is Southeast Europe, as a region with distinct historical roots and recent economic developments, affected by climate change? How do people living in this area, with their recent socialist past – with all its cohorts of economic and social features from collectivization to intensive industrialization and undemocratic political rule – and their post-socialist present perceive these changes and act accordingly?12 Finally, how do scholars of and from Southeast Europe tackle these issues in relation to more distant or recent history and economic and political developments? Before exploring briefly some possible answers to these questions, I have a confession to make. When I was invited to give a keynote speech on environmental disasters I was equally excited and scared. I was excited because I saw that as a chance to talk to my peers over issues that had haunted me for several years. I was scared since I knew that I could not rely on many published papers on the subject. In this subsection I intend to plead that more attention be paid to environmental aspects when we study the changes the societies of Southeast Europe are undergoing. And why would that be so important for understanding the societies of Southeast Europe? To begin with, we should remember that the environment of Southeast Europe was strongly affected over the last sixty years by the socialist state political economy and by the post-socialist governments’ neoliberal policies. The forced industrialization in most socialist European countries from the 1960s onwards, the intensification of agriculture (and thus the use of pesticides and fertilizers), the practice of monoculture on large land tracts and a continued quest for increasing industrial productivity at any cost have all marked the socialist environment (Carter, Turnock 1993; Turnock 2002). The Chernobyl accident and its long-term consequences for both humans and the natural world is another example of a disaster produced in a former so-

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For this point see also Byg and Salick (2009). For more on post-socialist societies see Rogers and Verdery (2013).

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cialist country. Thus, the socialist regimes manifested the same propensity as the capitalist ones in subordinating nature to production goals and in propagating the same ideology that nature must be mastered by human beings in their own interest (Oliver-Smith 2002). Post-socialist economic and political transformations led to deforestation, land degradation and wasted the rivers. Land privatization, the use of inappropriate or excessive quantities of fertilizers, disorganization of agriculture, destruction of irrigation systems and overgrazing have led to changes in land-use with undesirable environmental consequences such as soil erosion, landslides and acid rain (Muica, Zavoianu 1996). Kenneth Howitt (1983a, 1983b) includes among hazards and disasters the damage suffered by agricultural crops due to the extreme weather, be it drought or excessive rain. He emphasizes that these hazards should not be understood as isolated events or disasters produced by purely climacteric moods. Instead, we need to focus our attention on the socio-economic conditions and political circumstances under which these disasters occur. This point is an extremely important one for countries of Southeast Europe due to the radical changes in agriculture produced by decollectivisation and land privatization. The agriculture in most post-socialist countries relies for a good crop more on good weather rather than on modern systems of irrigation and well-organized production. The post-socialist agricultural hazards are thus not only the consequence of wretched weather conditions but of economic and political organization. In a recent book, I have explored some of the above environmental problems post-socialist Romania experiences. Thousands of hectares of forest have been cleared by a joint effort of the local political and economic elite and the state bureaucrats in charge of protecting forests. Waste suffocating the rivers as well as the fierce exploitation by riparian population has transformed most rivers into dead water channels (Dorondel 2016). Pollution with heavy metals, which began during socialism with the state construction of large chemical and industrial factories, has continued to poison the Danube in post-socialist times (Bostan et al. 2000). Although the acreage of protected areas has been continually growing, the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources in these areas has brought many of them to the brink of ecological disaster. The Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve is just one example. Mercilessly exploited by the socialist regime, dammed and drained on thousands of hectares, the Danube Delta has suffered tremendous ecological damage. The post-socialist governments supported by international donors have attempted to advocate the well-being of the natural world, sometimes at the expense of local people (Iordachi, van Assche 2015; Richardson 2015a). At the same time, the post-socialist governments have neglected, ignored or turned a blind eye on the industrial exploitation of the Delta’s

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natural resources by large companies and investors, all linked through powerful political networks. All this environmental damage is to be found to various extents throughout the former socialist countries of Southeast Europe. Mapping environmental problems in this part of the world, linked to the tremendous political and economic changes, should be, in my reading, one of the main topics to be explored in Southeast Europe. Yet, they are largely ignored. Despite the fact that there is general agreement among scientists that global warming and its cortege of environmental problems have anthropogenic causes and exert deep consequences on humans, there is no growing concern for environmental issues among researchers of and from Southeast Europe. The literature on the anthropology of disasters or, more extensively, environmental anthropology based on ethnographies of Southeast Europe is also quite scarce. Elya Tzaneva et al.’s (2012) volume on disasters is one of the few publications that analyses this topic; its chapters ethnographically explore various ways people from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Ukraine and Moldova (along with other cases from China and Tibet) try to cope with, to adapt to, or to mitigate various biological, ecological, or technological disasters. The political ecology and human geography literature is focussed on postsocialist deforestation, land-use change and nature conservation issues (Dorondel 2007, 2016; Richardson 2015a, 2015b; Staddon 2009a, 2009b; Staddon, Grykień 2009; Stahl 2010a, 2010b; Vasile 2008; Vasile, Măntescu 2009). Other authors have studied the ambiguous post-industrial urban spaces represented by the ruins of socialist factories, which are difficult to categorize as either abandoned to “nature” or having a clear economic utility (Chelcea 2015). The sociality of urban trash, the materiality of garbage, its production, circulation and representation – what Zsuzsa Gille (2007, 2010) calls the “waste regimes” – were other issues tackled by anthropologists working in Southeast Europe (see also Alexander 2009, Pessel 2012). These studies point out the political and economic changes post-socialist countries have suffered and their influence on local environments. But how can we methodologically and theoretically contribute to the study of environment and environmental challenges in Southeast Europe? In my opinion there are several ways – and these are, by no means, exclusive or should be taken as normative – to approach the environment from a socio-cultural perspective. I suggest, following the literature on this matter (Barnes et al. 2013; Barnes, Dove 2015; Dove 2014), that the anthropologist needs to identify changes in the local environment, to look at how people perceive these changes, how they adapt their practices in order to identify the social groups that are more vulnerable to such changes. In identifying the status of local environments, the anthropologist needs to work with environmental historians but also with geog-

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raphers, biologists and other scientists from the natural sciences, who are better prepared to identity these changes. Let me give you an ethnographic example that would better illuminate my point. In villages along the Lower Danube on both banks of the river (Bulgaria and Romania) corn is one of the main crops. Traditionally, the corn seeds were planted when the acacia tree was blooming, roughly in the second half of May. On both banks people used a non-academic but nevertheless graphic expression to designate this period: “when one sits with his or her bottom on the land and feels the heat”. Seeding before this period would compromise the crop and would have disastrous consequences for villagers. In recent years, though, this moment has been coming earlier, at the end of March. Thus, people have started to cultivate corn earlier than before, which has triggered many disputes within the family, especially with the elders whose agricultural knowledge is being challenged.13 This example proves that people perceive changes in annual local weather and adapt their practices accordingly. Moreover, it seems that older people have lost their capacity to influence the family decisions regarding agriculture, which had been based on local ecological knowledge on weather, agricultural land and different species of corn. In this way, the elderly, already marginalised due to small revenues, have become even more marginalised than other categories of the rural population, as they have lost the validity of one of their main advantages: ecological knowledge. What they knew from their own experience and from their forefathers’ experience is no longer valued and implemented by the younger generation. The perception of the local effects of global warming is also reflected in the myriads of stories we collected in our fieldwork in rural Bulgaria and Romania regarding the freezing Danube.14 Many old people living in riparian villages had found their spouse on the other side of the river. They met at traditional fairs or attended wedding parties or just met some friends on the other side of the river. These meetings were facilitated by the yearly created ice bridge on the Danube. Local memories of rural people we interviewed show that the Danube was no longer freezing over after the 1970s. Thus, the economic links created for at least one hundred years between families on the other side of the river weakened. Usually, locals explain the lack of ice on the Danube by weather warming. If this is true or not is not the point here. There may be alternative explanations such as damming the Danube (which makes the river waters flow more quickly Ethnographic research carried out with Stelu Şerban within the research project Taming Post-socialist Nature: Floods, National Policies and Local Strategies along the Lower Danube funded by the Ministry of National Education, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PNII-ID-PCE-2012-4-0587 from 30. 8. 2013. 14 Idem. 13

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than before damming, thus making freezing more difficult) or to the building of the hydro-power plant from Portile de Fier (Iron Gates), which contributes to a continuous variability of water volume. The point I want to make here is that people perceive weather changes and that these changes have a certain impact on their family relations, but also on economic relations. Let me give a final example in which science, technology and environment come together. Southeast Europe has lately become the new Eldorado for the wind-based energy production.15 The largest European onshore wind farm has been built in Dobroudja (Cogealac-Fântânele commune) by a large multinational company. The wind farm lies on 600 hectares, it counts 240 wind turbines, each having a capacity of 2,5 MW, and has a production capacity of 600 MW.16 The investment amounted to € 1.1 Billion. The press release announcing this large investment came one month after an announcement of another power company, namely the French company Filasa International. On August 31, 2012 Filasa International informed the public about the beginning of the works for a new giant wind farm in Eastern Romania with a production capacity of 2000 MW – thus, three times the power of the wind farm from Fântânele-Cogealac. This wind farm requires investments of € 3.0 Billion and will be fully operational in 2017.17 Other investors, also large international companies, have built wind farms in Southeast Romania. This country is a powerful newcomer with one of the highest rates in implementing and supporting “green energy” (energy from renewable resources) in Europe. Large inland wind-farms have been built in Bulgaria and Hungary as well. Although the first attempts to use wind farms to obtain different types of energy were made in the 1940s, the technology of modern wind turbines has boomed since the 1980s (Heymann 1998). In the last decade, world wind-based energy production increased by 30 percent, especially in countries such as the USA, Germany, Denmark, Spain, China and India (Sales, Raizer 2010). The literature on renewable resources based mainly on biological and technological research considers that wind farms do not affect in any way the crops and people living next to them. However, the Romanian villages where the wind-farms were erected are now socially and politically fractured between those villagers who want the wind farms on their land (for economic reasons), and those who do not. All local politics and economics revolve around the pros and cons of windfarms. Those who have turbines on their fields receive € 3 000 annually from the These observations are based on a short field trip in Cogealac-Fântânele commune in August 2012. Thus, the observations I give here are not based on long term field work. See for more details Dorondel 2012. 16 Source: AGERPRESS, October 12, 2012. 17 Source: AGERPRESS, August 31, 2012. 15

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company, which is a small fortune for an inhabitant of rural areas. In Cogealac village, the former mayor has allegedly succeeded in having thirty turbines on his newly acquired land (which brings him € 90 000 p. a.). The rumours are that he put immense pressure on different villagers to sell their land exactly at those places he knew the turbines were going to be erected. The local politicians (all heads of local agricultural associations) seem to have decided to put pressure on the utility company to deliver money not to the owners of the land but to the agricultural associations that work the cropland. The case presented here, oversimplified to a brief sketch for lack of space, shows how a new “green” technology produces social differentiation at local level and destroys the social fabric of the villages. I have included this case in my discussion just to make the following point: technology and science are an important part in the analysis of climate change mitigation and in the anthropology of disasters. Yet, the new trend in anthropology called STS (Science and Technology Studies) is not at all reflected, to my knowledge, in the anthropology of Southeast Europe.18 Anthropologists of Southeast Europe need to engage with these theories not only to broaden the spectrum of approaches but also to understand the evolution of the contemporary societies they study. Studying human-nature relations requires both knowledge and collaboration with specialists such as ecologists, biologists and geographers and new methodologies. Using satellite images and participatory mapping, for instance, can show the changes in land-use and the history of agricultural land, or may document the ecological and economic changes in certain areas (Dorondel 2016). Using the historical hydrology approach in the case of studying floods, which combines the use of historical archives, hydrology, and the ethnographic analysis of local memories helps us to understand the risk of floods (Brazdil et al. 2006). Historical hydrology also provides a powerful tool of analysis. The STS approach, which implies keeping an eye on the output of scientific knowledge but also on circulation of scientific ideas and how the scientific knowledge is applied to different societal challenges, may lead to new methods, bring new ideas, and suggest groundbreaking results.19 Conclusions New methods and new directions of research can also change the face of the discipline as it is practised in Southeast Europe – for a long time quite mod-

For a general view on anthropology and STS see Cadena and Lien (2015). See also Lave 2012 on this point. However, she refers to STS and political ecology.

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est within the concert of area-based studies. But the stake is even higher than re-launching a discipline as it is practised in a particular geographical area. As other authors have pointed out, analysing human-nature relations and the new global threats such as climate change can bring anthropology into the forefront of social sciences. Not only are we well equipped for understanding how society works – in the past and in present –, but we have the advantage of a long-term study of human cultural adaptation to different environments. Studying environmental disasters and the other major issues of our time also gives us a political voice and thus a higher relevance in the world. If the American Association of Anthropologists has often been involved in political issues throughout its long history, having a powerful public voice, other international anthropological associations have been more reluctant to speak out in public. Nevertheless, the research agencies, such as the National Science Foundation or the European Science Foundation (to cite only the largest ones), often link funding opportunities to the policy relevance of research projects. Social sciences, including anthropology, must be “socially robust” besides being “scientifically robust”, as Helga Nowotny (2006) put it. As anthropologists, we are now expected to bring our knowledge to policy makers whose decisions would be based on our research. As Ban Ki-Moon, the General Secretary of the United Nations, declared in a speech that is considered to be historical, the changes the climate suffers are not a matter of the future but an urgent problem of today. Anthropology can bring in its knowledge in order to contribute to a better understanding of the human impact on the environment and on the human adaptation to and mitigation of climate changes. Acknowledgements This paper has been elaborated within the research project Politics and Environmental Practices in Southeast Europe (2013–2015) at the Institute for Southeast European Studies, Bucharest. I thank Alexandra Ion, Liviu Popescu and Stelu Șerban for their careful reading of the paper and for their comments, which helped me to strengthen my argument. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for any flaws or misunderstandings that may have occurred in this paper. Literature Alexander, Catherine 2009: Waste Under Socialism and After: A Case Study from Almaty. In: H. G. West, P. Raman (eds.), Enduring Socialism. Ex-

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