Customer Reviews

Biodiversity Conservation in Transboundary Protected Areas

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This book, now quite dated, consists of the proceeds from a conference in those heady post-Communist days of the early 1990s. It consists of US and East European biologists discussing problems of transboundary protected areas in Eastern Europe. The obvious subtext to the conference was a bit of scientific and policy imperialism, to inform post-Communist public land managers of the state of the art in the West.

Judged by this book, that altruistic motive seems pretty well justified. The first part of the book consists of American experts discussing US experience, while the rest consists of East Europeans doing the same for their experience. It's painfully clear from a comparison of the two parts just how far many East European land managers fell behind international standards under Communism. The apparent exception is Polish scientists and land managers, who clearly remained part of the international community. Their chapters tend to be the strongest, comparable in quality to the US chapters. Several chapters provide good information about Bialowieza Primeval Forest on the Polish-Belorussian border, for example.

The rest of the book is painfully descriptive and boring. If you want facts and figures about protected areas in Eastern Europe, this is a good source - - but you can probably find the same information on the Internet now. There isn't much to learn about biology or environmental policy in this book because of the huge gap in quality. However, it might make interesting fodder for anyone studying the intellectual history of environmentalism in Eastern Europe, or the spread of western ideas to the East in the early 1990s.