From Nature as Proxy to Nature as Actor

Abstract

What if Sheila Fitzpatrick's string-pulling, free-loadingHomo sovieticuswas compelled to enroll creatively not only his compatriots but also materials and nature in the struggles for survival? What if the fuzziness of private property in postsocialist Romania in Katherine Verdery's classic article “The Elasticity of Land,” had just as much to do with meandering streams, winds, and trees dying or growing, as with the absence of proper legal or cartographic documentation due to “purely social” history? What if figurative spaces such as Alexei Yurchak's “internal exile,” “zagranitsa,” “parallel universe,” or “vnye” were real places and were in and of nature—as Douglas Weiner started to consider when he called his nature preserves and circles of conservationists “little corners of freedom”?