Out of the woods and into the lab: Exploring the strange marriage of American woodcraft and Soviet ecology in Czech environmentalism

Environment and History

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 187-210

  Jehlička, Petr ^a   Smith, Joe ^a  

^a OPEN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Czech environmentalism; Ecological modernisation; Soviet ecological science; Woodcraft

Indexed keywords

ECOLOGICAL IMPACT; ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING; ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS; ENVIRONMENTALISM; MODERNIZATION; POST-COMMUNISM; POST-WAR;

CENTRAL EUROPE; CZECH REPUBLIC; EURASIA; EUROPE;

EID: 34250021911     PISSN: 09673407     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3197/096734007780473546     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. Interview with co-author, 5 December 2003. Birmingham, UK.
2. Hein-Anton van der Heijden, 'Environmental Movements, Ecological Modernization and Political Opportunity Structure', Environmental Politics 8 (1999):199-221.
3. Barbara A. Cellarius and Caedmon Staddon, 'Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations, Civil Society, and Democratization in Bulgaria', East European Politics and Societies 16 (2002): 182-222.
4. For political science accounts of the Czech environmental movement see, for example, JoAnn Carmin and Barbara Hicks, 'International Triggering Events, Transnational Networks and the Development of the Czech and Polish Environmental Movements', Mobilization 7 (2002): 305-42;
5. Adam Fagan, Environment and Democracy in the Czech Republic: The Environmental Movement in the Transition Process (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2004);
6. Adam Fagan and Petr Jehlička, 'Contours of the Czech Environmental Movement: A Comparative Analysis of Hnutí Duha (Rainbow Movement) and Jiho české matky (South Bohemian Mothers)', Environmental Politics 12 (2003): 49-70.
7. The historian Miroslav Vaněk offers scholarly Czech-language accounts of the history of the Czech environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Miroslav Vaněk, Nedalo se tady dýchat [It was impossible to breathe here] (Praha: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 1996);
8. Miroslav Vaněk, 'Zelené mládí' [Green youth], ed. by Miroslav Vaněk, Ostrůvky svobody. Kulturní a občnské uktivity mladé generace v 80. letech v Československu [Islets of freedom: Cultural and civic activities of young generation in the 1980s' Czechoslovakia] (Praha: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR and Votobia, 2002), 237-72.
9. The following English-language historical accounts go beyond the 1989 political change: Andrew Tickle and Josef Vavroušek, 'Environmental politics in the former Czechoslovakia', ed. by Andrew Tickle and Ian Welsh, Environment and Society in Eastern Europe (Harlow: Longman, 1998), 114-45;
10. Petr Jehlička, 'The New Subversives - Czech Environmentalists after 1989', ed. by Helena Flam, Pink, Purple, Green: Women's, Religious, Environmental, and Gay/Lesbian Movements in Central Europe Today (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2001), 91-4.
11. Petr Jehlička and his colleagues found that most key figures of the movement in the late 1990s were veterans who joined the movement during the 1980s. Petr Jehlička, Philip Sarre and Juraj Podoba, 'The Czech Environmental Movement's Knowledge Interests in the 1990s: Compatibility of Western Influences with Pre-1989 Perspectives', Environmental Politics 14 (2005): 64-82.
12. Zsuzsa Gille, 'Legacy of Waste or Wasted Legacy? The End of Industrial Ecology in Post-Socialist Hungary', Environmental Politics 9 (2000): 203-31.
13. Raymond Dominick made a similar point concerning the efficiency of the metals recycling system in former East Germany. Raymond Dominick, 'Capitalism, Communism and Environmental Protection. Lessons from German Experience', Environmental History 3 (1998): 322.
14. Albert Weale, The New Politics of Pollution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992)
15. Van der Heijden, 'Environmental Movements'.
16. John Dryzek, The Politics of Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
17. Maarten A. Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
18. For exceptions see van der Heijden, 'Environmental Movements', 201-7;
19. Arthur, P.J. Mol, 'The Environmental Movement in an Era of Ecological Modernization', Geoforum 31 (2000) 45-56;
20. David A. Sonnenfeld, 'Social Movements and Ecological Modernization: The Transformation of Pulp and Paper Manufacturing', Development and Change 33 (2002): 331-7.
21. This transformation of the western environmental movement along the lines of ecological modernisation is described in Sonnenfeld, 'Social Movements', 331-7.
22. See, for example, Barbara Jancar-Webster, 'Environmental Movements and Social Change in the Transition Countries', Environmental Politics, 7 (1998): 69-90;
23. Jehlička, 'New Subversives', 91-4.
24. Jehliča, Sarre and Podoba, 'Czech Environmental Movement', 69-71.
25. See for example, Fagan, Environment and Democracy, 74-121.
26. Miroslav Vaněk refers to the 1973 quote of the ideologue of the scientific-technological revolution in Czechoslovakia and the director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Radovan Richta: 'Many negative ecological phenomena arise primarily from insufficiently substantiated human interferences in nature, which corresponds with the initial phases of the scientific-technological revolution. Problems often occur not due to excessively active human interference in nature, but due to the insufficient human activity...' Vaněk, Nedalo se, 22.
27. For description of how the emphasis after the 1948 communist coup shifted from the humanistic education of the interwar period to technically focused education see Sharon L. Wolchik, Czechoslovakia in Transition: Politics, Economics and Society (London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1991), 295.
28. For example, according to the list of all courses related to the environment taught at Charles University in the academic year 1993/94 compiled by the Charles University Center for the Environment, 191 out of the total of 211 were science based. Centrum Univerzity Karlovy pro otázky životního prostředí, Seznam přednášek týkajících se problematiky životního prostředí na fakultách Univerzity Karlovy 1993/1994 [The list of environment-related courses at Charles University 1993/1994] (Praha: Univerzita. Karlova, 1993).
29. Miroslav Kundrata, 'Czechoslovakia', in Civil Society and the Environment in Central and Eastern Europe ed. D. Fisher, C. Davis, A. Juras, V. Pavlovic (London: Ecological Studies Institute/Bonn: Institut fur Europäische Umweltpolitik/Belgrade: Eko-Center, 1992) 34.
30. Jiří Musil, 'Education and Research in the Czech Republic: Burden of the Past and Hope for the Future', East European Politics and Societies, 7 (1993): 59-73.
31. Dieter Rink, 'Environmental Policy and the Environmental Movement in East Germany', Capitalism Nature Socialism 13 (2002): 81-2.
32. Bahro's book Die Alternative: Zur Kritik des real existierenden Sozialismus was published in Frankfurt am Main in 1977;
33. Harich's book Kommunismus ohne Wachstum. Babeuf und der Club of Rome was published in Reinbek in 1975.
34. Jan Čeřovský, 'Czechoslovakia: Environmental Status Report 1988/ 1989', Environmental Status Reports 1988/1989: Volume One: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. Thatcham: IUCN (1990) 1-58.
35. Jonathan D. Oldfield and Denis J.B. Shaw, 'Revisiting Sustainable Development: Russian Cultural and Scientific Traditions and the Concept of Sustainable Development', Area, 34 (2002): 391-400.
36. David J.M. Hooson, 'The Development of Geography in Pre-Soviet Russia', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 58 (1968): 272.
37. Tatyana Saiko, Environmental Crises: Geographical Case Studies in Post-socialist Eurasia (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2001), 13.
38. Two chapters on the former communist countries - the Soviet Union and Hungary - in the Social Learning Group's Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2001) bring ample evidence of good environmental science coexisting with poor capacities for the development of environmental policies as a result of the framing of environmental problems as exclusively scientific matters. For more details see the chapter by Vassily Sokolov and Jill Jäger on the Soviet Union, 150-51, and that by Ferenc L. Tóth and Eva Hizsnyik on Hungary, 180-84. According to Tóth and Hizsnyik, their comparisons justify the extension of this analysis to other socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, 185.
39. Bedřich Moldan, Jan Jeník and Jaroslav Zýka, Životní prostředí očima přírodovědce: Člověk v biosféře [The environment through the eyes of the scientist: Man in biosphere] (Praha: Academia, 1989, 2nd edition [1st edition 1979]).
40. Bedřich Moldan, an analytical chemist by training, pursued a markedly interdisciplinary career. His work straddled chemistry, biology and geology. He was, between 1978 and 1992, a vice-chairman and secretary of Ekologická sekce (more discussion below). After 1989, he became the first Czech minister of the environment. He is now a Senator, a director of Charles University Environment Research Centre and a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Environmental Agency.
41. Paul Duvigneaud, Ekologická syntéza (Praha: Academia, 1988) [Czech translation of La synthèse écologique, Paris: Doin editeurs, 1980].
42. Jaroslav Stoklasa, Historie Ekologické sekce Čs. biologické společnosti ČSAV [The history of the Ecological Section of the Czechoslovak Biological Society of the Academy of Sciences] unpublished manuscript sent to the authors in June 2005.
43. Václav Mezřický, one of the founding members of Ekologická sekce, quoted in Vaněk, Nedalo sc, 40.
44. 'We regarded ecology as a political, and ecological activity, as a way in which the system could be destabilised, which would in turn enable us to open and reflect on this problematic.' Václav Mezřický, quoted in Vaněk, Nedalo se, 39.
45. Hardin's text was published as an appendix to the minutes of a meeting.
46. Kundrata, 'Czechoslovakia', 34.
47. Apart from Životní prostředí očima přírodovědce and Ekologická syntéza, only a limited number of other books on the environment, many of them of the popular scientific character, were published in Czech during the 1970s and 1980s, often as translations of Soviet authors: Alois Zlatník a kol., Základy ekologie [Fundaments of ecology] Praha: Státní zemědělské nakladatelství, 1973;
48. Z. Madar and A. Pfeffer, Životní prostředí [The environment] (Praha: Orbis, 1973);
49. J.J. Dozhkin and I.I. Fetisov, Rovnováha v přírodě [Equilibrium in nature; translation from Russian] Praha: Horizont, 1973);
50. Jean Dorst, Ohrožená příroda [Endangered nature; translation from French] (Praha: Orbis, 1974);
51. Ivan Laptev, Planeta rozumu [The planet of reason; translation from Russian] Praha: Práce, 1974);
52. Miroslav Martiš and Jan Šolc, Země, krajina, člověk [Land, landscape, man] (Praha: Horizont, 1977);
53. I.K. Abadashev, Život zítra - tragédie nebo harmonie [The life in the future: tragedy or harmony; translation from Russian] (Praha: Svoboda, 1978);
54. Bedřich Moldan, Koloběh hmoty v přírodě [The cycle of materials in nature] (Praha: Academia, 1983);
55. Bedřich Moldan and Tomáš Pačes, Konec věku plýtvání [The end of the wasteful era] (Praha: Mladá fronta, 1984);
56. Václav Mezřický a kol., Životní prostředí, věc veřejná i soukromá [The environment: a matter both public and private] (Praha: Práce, 1986);
57. Václav Císař, Člověk a životní prostředí [Man and environment] (Praha: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1987).
58. Most of these books were used as supplementary readings on environmental study programmes. However, students on these programmes were required to read skripta, teaching texts written by university teachers for their own courses. These often heavily relied on the Soviet sources. Pavel Tobiášek's Nauka o životním prostředí [Theory of the environment] (Praha: Vysoká škola zemědělská, 1983) is a case in point. The overwhelming majority of these publications approached the environment from scientific point of view and as the titles suggest, were concerned with issues such as natural equilibrium, homeostasis, functioning of ecosystems and cycles of materials.
59. Writing academic books on as sensitive a topic as the environment in 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia was a delicate balancing act. Authors who wished to refer to western sources had to carefully balance them with references to eastern sources, most often Soviet. This does not mean, however, that Czech authors would necessarily be in ontological and epistemological disagreement with their Soviet counterparts - both the Soviet and Czechoslovak literature on the environment was largely written by scientists.
60. Following Saiko, Environmental Crises, in this paper we use this transcription of the surname, unless we cite other sources.
61. Václav Mezřický, professor of environmental law, interview with co-author, 6 June 2005, Faculty of Law, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (tape recording and handwritten notes in possession of the authors).
62. Much of the environment-related academic activity in 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia was conducted within the framework of the UNESCO international programme Man and Biosphere (MAB), for which Verndaskiy's teachings about biosphere provided the ideological basis. George Kauffman, 'Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945), environmental pioneer: On the 70th anniversary of his biosphere concept', South African Journal of Science 92 (1996): 523.
63. The importance of the UNESCO MAB programme in the pre-1989 Czechoslovakia is reflected, for example, in the support which the programme provided for the publication of Císař's Člověk a životní. Also the subtitle of the highly influential book by Moldan, Jeník and Zýka Životní prostředí was Člověk v biosféře (Man in biosphere).
64. Jaroslav Procházka, Jaromír Pospíšil and Rudolf Orct, 'Dodatek. Některé teoretickometodologické otázky dalšího rozvoje ekologického poznání' [Annex: Some theoretical-methodological questions of further development of ecological knowledge] in Paul Duvigneaud, Ekologická syntéza (Praha: Academia, 1988) 382-387.
65. Miloslav Lapka, senior researcher in the Institute of Landscape Ecology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, telephone interview with co-author, 1 July 2005, (handwritten notes in possession of the authors).
66. Miloslav Lapka, email correspondence with co-author, July 2005.
67. Jonathan D. Oldfield and Denis J.B. Shaw, 'V.I. Vernadsky and the Noosphere Concept: Russian Understandings of Society-Nature Interaction', Geoforum, accepted for publication, available online 2 August 2005 at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science.
68. Lapka, telephone interview with co-author, 1 July 2005.
69. Jiří Papoušek, Hovory o ekologii. Cesty k trvale udržitelnému Česku [Interviews about ecology: Towards the sustainable Czechia] (Praha: Portál, 2000), 29.
70. Papoušek, Hovory, 115.
71. Libor Pecha, Woodcraft: Lesní moudrost a lesní bratrstvo [Woodcraft: sylvan wisdom and sylvan brotherhood] (Olomoue: Votobia, 1999), 178. Pecha's list also contains a number of non-academics, including Ivan 'Hiawatha' Makásek, the editor of the intrepid cult environmental magazine of the 1970s and 1980s Nika. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Makásek was also a leading figure of Prague clandestine scout and woodcraft movement and in the 1990s edited a magazine for scouts and woodcrafters Wampum Neskenonu. In the 1980s, he was a member of the Ekologická sekce's steering committee.
72. Jehlička, Sarre and Podoba, 'Czech Environmental Movement', 68.
73. James Morton Turner traces the origin of woodcraft to the 1890S' US publications of manuals for woodsmen. James Morton Turner, 'From Woodcraft to 'Leave No Trace': Wilderness, Consumerism, and Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America', Environmental History, 7 (2002): 464.
74. Although Seton was initially part of the leadership of the Boy Scout movement in the US, he increasingly resented the military and authoritarian aspects of scouting. Seton's aims for the movement as set forth in the Birch Bark Roll (the promotion of interest in out-of-door life and woodcraft, the preservation of wildlife and landscape and the promotion of good fellowship among its members were further elaborated in his subsequent The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore (1912).
75. Brian Morris, 'Ernest Thompson Seton and the origins of the Woodcraft movement', Journal of Contemporary History, 5, (1970): 187.
76. Scholarly accounts of the history of the woodcraft movement in the USA and the UK can be found, for example, in H. Allen Anderson, 'Ernest Thompson Seton and Woodcraft Indians', Journal of American Culture 8 (1985) 43-50 (USA);
77. David Prynn, 'The Woodcraft Folk and the Labour Movement 1925-1970', Journal of Contemporary History 18 (1983): 79-95 (UK);
78. Rich Palser, '"Learn by Doing, Teach by Being": The Children of 1968 and the Woodcraft Folk', Socialist History 26 (2004): 1-24 (UK).
79. In contrast, a scholarly English-language history of the woodcraft movement in the Czech Republic, the only country where the movement is still active in its nearly original form, does not exist. The only two books available - Pecha's Lesní moudrost and Milan Klimánek and František Kožíšek's (eds.), Kniha o woodcraftu [The book on woodcraft] (Katowice: Biblioteczka Walden) - are written in Czech.
80. Seton visited Prague in December 1936 and held talks with various factions of the woodcraft and scout movements.
81. E.T. Seton, described by H. Allen Anderson already in the mid-1980s as 'America's forgotten artist-naturalist' and 'relatively unknown to many Americans today' (Anderson, 'Ernest Thompson Seton', 43) is still widely known as a writer and educationalist in the present-day Czech Republic. A Prague-based publishing house Leprez has recently set out to publish the complete works of E.T. Seton in Czech. From 1997 to 2004 eleven out of the planned 14 books were published.
82. Marek Waic and Jiří Kössl, Český tramping 1918-1945 [Czech tramping 1918-1945], (Praha: Práh, Liberec: Ruch, 1992), 11, 13.
83. Jiří Vágner and Petr Procházka, 'Vývoj českého trampingu a budování trampských osad' [The history of Czech tramping and of building tramp settlements], ed. by Jiří Vágner and Dana Fialová, Regionální diferenciace druhého bydlení v Çesku [Regional differentiation of second housing in Czechia] (Praha: KSGRR, 2004), 59.
84. Otakar Leiský, 'TIS - Nezávislé sdružení přátel přírody' [TIS - the independent association of friends of nature], Veronica, XVIII, 16th Special Issue (2004): 27.
85. Vaněk, Nedalo se, 32.
86. It is likely that Tis was the only legal organisation in the communist Czechoslovakia without the declaration of the Communist Party's leading role in society in its statutes. Dana Zajoncová, 'TIS: Svaz pro ochranu přírody, krajiny a lidí' [TIS: The association for protection of nature, landscape and people], (BA dissertation, Brno: Filozofická fakulta. Masarykovy univerzity, 2003), ch. VII.
87. For example, Tramp (Ostrava, Czechoslovakia) 9, November 1968, 21;
88. Tramp 7, September 1968, 3;
89. Tramp 2, February 1969, 19.
90. The magazine was published only during the Prague Spring period in the late 1960s and was banned in 1970. A further interesting evidence of the close affinity between Tis members, tramps and scouts is a chart in a facsimile of the Czechoslovak communist secret police's document from 1976 that under the heading Tis reads: 'tramps, scouts, rightwing and criminal elements'. Libuše Cuhrová, 'Dvacet let ve stínu' [Twenty years in shade], ed. by Miroslav Vaněk, Ostrůvky svobody. Kulturní a občanské aktivity mladé generace v 80. letech v Československu [Islets of freedom: Cultural and civic activities of young generation in the 1980s' Czechoslovakia] (Praha: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR and Votobia, 2002), 152.
91. Former Tis activist and tramp, interview with co-author, 7 June 2004, Valašské Klobouky, Czech Republic (tape recoding and transcript in possession of authors).
92. Three out of six founding members of the original Section of the National Museum Society, which later became Tis, were professional zoologists. Zajoncová, 'TIS: Svaz pro', ch. III.
93. Zajoncová, 'TIS: Svaz pro,' ch. V.
94. Národní fronta was an umbrella organisation for all mass organisations during the communist period.
95. Jan Čeřovský refers to customary participation of and coordination among a range of stakeholders (groups of citizens, public institutions and economic subjects) in activities related to environmental protection during the communist period, an approach compatible with tenets of ecological modernisation. Jan Çeřovský, 'Vývoj hnutí dobrovolných konzervátorů, zpravodajů a strážců přírody na území České republiky' [The history of the movement of voluntary conservators, rapporteurs and rangers in the territory of the Czech Republic], Veronica, XVIII, 16th Special Issue, 24-5.
96. Leiský, 'TIS - Nezávislé sdružení', 30.
97. For example, the Tis's leading activists-scientists Eliška Nováková and Václav Petříček were also involved in Brontosaurus's campaigns. Vaněk, Nedalo se, 37; Zajoncová, 'TIS: Svaz pro', ch. IV and IX.
98. Vaněk, Nedalo se, 36-7.
99. Leiský, 'TIS - Nezávislé sdružení', 33.
100. Vaněk, Nedalo se, 41.
101. Out of 19 leading figures of the Czech environmental movement, interviewed in 1998/99 by Jehlička and his colleagues who held a university degree or were currently studying for it, seven had a background in scientific disciplines, including four who studied biology or ecology. Seven were graduates of polytechnics or agricultural universities, two respondents were lawyers, two studied linguistics, and one did sociology. Jehlička, Sarre and Podoba, 'Czech Environmental Movement', 68.
102. Vaněk, 'Zelené mládí,' 250.