Marco Armiero is Senior Researcher at the Italian National Research Council and Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Aut(noma de Barcelona. He has published extensively on-Italian environmental history and edited Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World. --

This exploration of the environmental practices of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime invites readers to consider the ecological connections of all political projects. “We might think we see a mountain while it was a war; a forest can actually be an engine; a monument to workers might reflect the violence of a colonial empire.”—extracted from Mussolini’s Nature In this first environmental history of Italian fascism, Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveal that nature and fascist rhetoric are inextricable. Mussolini’s Nature explores fascist political ecologies, or rather the practices and narratives through which the regime constructed imaginary and material ecologies functional to its political project. The book does not pursue the ghost of a green Mussolini by counting how many national parks were created during the regime or how many trees planted. Instead, the reader is trained to recognize fascist political ecology in Mussolini’s speeches, reclaimed landscapes, policies of economic self-sufficiency, propaganda documentaries, reforested areas, and in the environmental transformation of its colonial holdings. The authors conclude with an examination of the role of fascist landscapes in the country’s postwar reconstruction: Mussolini’s nature is still visible today through plaques, monuments, toponomy, and the shapes of landscapes. This original, and surprisingly intimate, environmental history is not merely a chronicle of conservation in fascist Italy but also an invitation to consider the socioecological connections of all political projects.

Following the industrial revolution and post- war exponential increase in human population and consumption, conservation in myriad forms has been one particularly visible way in which the government and its agencies have tried to control, manage or produce nature for reasons other than raw exploitation. Using an interdisciplinary approach and including case studies from across the globe, this edited collection brings together geographers, sociologists, anthropologists and historians in order to examine the degree to which socio- political regimes facilitate and shape the emergence and development of nature states.

Winner of the 2019 Turku Book Award from the European Society for Environmental History The Albufera Natural Park, an area ten kilometers south of Valencia that is widely regarded as the birthplace of paella, has long been prized by residents and visitors alike. Since the twentieth century, the disparate visions of city dwellers, farmers, fishermen, scientists, politicians, and tourists have made this working landscape a site of ongoing conflict over environmental conservation in Europe, the future of Spain, and Valencian identity. In Cultivating Nature, Sarah Hamilton explores the Albufera’s contested lands and waters, which have supported and been transformed by human activity for a millennium, in order to understand regional, national, and global social histories. She argues that efforts to preserve biological and cultural diversity must incorporate the interests of those who live within heavily modified and long-exploited ecosystems such as the Albufera de Valencia. Shifting between local struggles and global debates, this fascinating environmental history reveals how Franco’s dictatorship, Spain’s integration with Europe, and the crisis in European agriculture have shaped the Albufera, its users, and its inhabitants.

This innovative environmental history of the long-lived European chestnut tree and its woods offers valuable perspectives on the human transition from the Roman to the medieval world in Italy. Integrating evidence from botanical and literary sources, individual charters and case studies of specific communities, the book traces fluctuations in the size and location of Italian chestnut woods to expose how early medieval societies changed their land use between the fourth and eleventh centuries, and in the process changed themselves. As the chestnut tree gained popularity in late antiquity and became a valuable commodity by the end of the first millennium, this study brings to life the economic and cultural transition from a Roman Italy of cities, agricultural surpluses and markets to a medieval Italy of villages and subsistence farming.

The essays in this volume provide a theorization of what we might call the “denatured” wild, in other words a notion of environmental “restoration” or "reinhabitation" that recognizes and reconfigures the human factor as an interdependent entity. Acknowledging the contributions of Marco Armerio, Serenella Iovino, Giovanna Ricoveri, Patrick Barron and Anna Re among others, Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild negotiates the ground within the historicizing, theoretical perspectives, and surveying spirit of these writers. Despite the central role that nature has played in Italian culture and literature, there has been an evident lack of critical approaches free of the bridles of the socio-political manipulations of nationalism. The authors in this collection, by recognizing the groundbreaking work of many non-Italian ecocritics, challenge the narrowly defined conventions of Italian Studies and illuminates complexities of an Italian ecocriticism that reveals a rich environmentally engaged literary and cultural tradition.

Undertaking a peripatetic pilgrimage that is equal parts a daily description of a 200-kilometre walk from the wounded mountain of La Verna to the tortured river in Assisi, and an examination of the debt owed to Italy in terms of ecocultural and environmental scholarship, this book provides an innovative addition to the nascent field of ecocritical narrative scholarship. Through a process that has been referred to as “deep-travel“ or “mind-walking,” the text fulsomely reviews how time spent in Italy influenced the writings of notable North American environmental historians, geographers, scientists, nature writers, landscape architects, and restoration theorists about the conception and manipulation of the natural world. This literary field study highlights how the phenomenological co-traversing of texts and trails can be a valued methodology for undertaking environmental criticism.

An interdisciplinary environmental humanities volume that explores human-environment relationships on our permanently polluted planet. While toxicity and pollution are ever present in modern daily life, politicians, juridical systems, media outlets, scholars, and the public alike show great difficulty in detecting, defining, monitoring, or generally coming to terms with them. This volume’s contributors argue that the source of this difficulty lies in the struggle to make sense of the intersecting temporal and spatial scales working on the human and more-than-human body, while continuing to acknowledge race, class, and gender in terms of global environmental justice and social inequality. The term toxic timescapes refers to this intricate intersectionality of time, space, and bodies in relation to toxic exposure. As a tool of analysis, it unpacks linear understandings of time and explores how harmful substances permeate temporal and physical space as both event and process. It equips scholars with new ways of creating data and conceptualizing the past, present, and future presence and possible effects of harmful substances and provides a theoretical framework for new environmental narratives. To think in terms of toxic timescapes is to radically shift our understanding of toxicants in the complex web of life. Toxicity, pollution, and modes of exposure are never static; therefore, dose, timing, velocity, mixture, frequency, and chronology matter as much as the geographic location and societal position of those exposed. Together, these factors create a specific toxic timescape that lies at the heart of each contributor’s narrative. Contributors from the disciplines of history, human geography, science and technology studies, philosophy, and political ecology come together to demonstrate the complex reality of a toxic existence. Their case studies span the globe as they observe the intersection of multiple times and spaces at such diverse locations as former battlefields in Vietnam, aging nuclear-weapon storage facilities in Greenland, waste deposits in southern Italy, chemical facilities along the Gulf of Mexico, and coral-breeding laboratories across the world.

Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities centres on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Across its theoretical and empirical chapters, written by leading scholars from anthropology, geography, urban studies, and political science, the book explores new political possibilities that are opening up in an age marked by proliferating contestations, sharpening socio-ecological inequalities, and planetary processes of urbanization and environmental change. A deepened conversation between urban environmental studies and political theory is mobilized to chart a radically new direction for the field of urban political ecology and cognate disciplines: What could emancipatory politics be about in our time? What does a return of the political under the aegis of equality and freedom signal today in theory and in practice? How do political movements emerge that could re-invent equality and freedom as actually existing socio-ecological practices? The hope is to contribute discussions that can expand and rearrange critical environmental studies to remain relevant in a time of deepening depoliticization and the rise of post-truth politics. Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene will be of interest to postgraduates, established scholars, and upper level undergraduates from any discipline or field with an interest in the interface between the urban, the environment, and the political, including: geography, urban studies, environmental studies, and political science.

Environment and Society in the Long Late Antiquity brings together scientific, archaeological and historical evidence on the interplay of social change and environmental phenomena at the end of Antiquity and the dawn of the Middle Ages, covering the period ca. 300-800 AD. It gives a new impetus to the study of the environmental history of this crucial period of transition between two major epochs in premodern history. The volume contains both systematic overviews of the previous scholarship and available data, as well as a number of interdisciplinary case studies. It covers a wide range of topics, including the histories of landscape, climate, disease and earthquakes, all intertwined with social, cultural, economic and political developments. Contributors are Daniel Abel-Schaad , Francesca Alba-Sánchez, Flavio Anselmetti, José Antonio López-Sáez, Daniel Ariztegui, Brunhilda Brushulli, Yolanda Carrión Marco, Alexandra Chavarría, Petra Dark, Carmen Fernández Ochoa, Martin Finné, Asuunta Florenzano, Ralph Fyfe,Didier Galop, Benjamin Graham, John Haldon, Kyle Harper, Richard Hodges, Adam Izdebski, Katarina Kouli, Inga Labuhn, Tamara Lewit, Anna Maria Mercuri, Alessia Masi, Lucas McMahon, Lee Mordechai, Mario Morellón, Timothy Newfield, Almudena Orejas Saco del Valle, Leonor Peña-Chocarro, Sebastián Pérez-Díaz, Eleonora Regattieri, Stephen Rippon, Neil Roberts, Laura Sadori, Abigail Sargent, Gaia Sinopoli, Paolo Squatriti, Giovanni Stranieri, Raymond van Dam, Bernd Wagner, Mark Whittow, Penelope Wilson, Jessie Woodbridge. See inside the book.