Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Cold War Ecology: Forests, Farms, and People in the East German Landscape, 1945-1989

Cold War Ecology: Forests, Farms, and People in the East German Landscape, 1945-1989

Nelson, Arvid
Auld, Graeme
Newsom, Deanna

Hardcover

Series: Yale Agrarian Studies

General World HistoryGerman History

ISBN10: 0300106602
ISBN13: 9780300106602
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Dec 1 2005
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.50
Height: 0.99 Width: 6.48 Depth: 9.52
Language: English

A new way of measuring the health of a political system: by examining the health of its landscapes and ecosystems

East Germany, its economy, and its society were in decline long before the country's political collapse in the late 1980s. The clues were there in the natural landscape, Arvid Nelson argues in this groundbreaking book, but policy analysts were blind to them. Had they noted the record of the leadership's values and goals manifest in the landscape, they wouldn't have hailed East Germany as a Marxist-Leninist success story. Nelson sets East German history within the context of the landscape history of two centuries to underscore how forest and ecosystem change offered a reliable barometer to the health and stability of the political system that governed them.

Cold War Ecology records how East German leaders' indifference to human rights and their disregard for the landscape affected the rural economy, forests, and population. This lesson from history suggests new ways of thinking about the health of ecosystems and landscapes, Nelson shows, and he proposes assessing the stability of modern political systems based on the environment's system qualities rather than on political leaders' goals and beliefs.

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