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

by Arvid Nelson

Part of the Yale Agrarian Studies Series series

Hardback

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Description

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 countryâ€™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 leadershipâ€™s values and goals manifest in the landscape, they wouldnâ€™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 leadersâ€™ 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 environmentâ€™s system qualities rather than on political leadersâ€™ goals and beliefs.