Environmental Transitions

A comprehensive account of the environmental changes in Central and Eastern Europe, both under state socialism and during the period of transition to capitalism. The change in politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s allowed an opportunity for a rapid environmental clean up, in an area once considered one of the most environmentally devastated regions on earth. The book illustrates how transformations after 1989 have brought major environmental improvements, as well as new environmental problems. It shows how environmental policy, economic change and popular support for environmental movements, have specific and changing geographies associated with them. "Environmental Transitions" addresses a large number of topics, including the historical geographical analysis of the environmental change, health impacts of environmental degradation, the role of environmental issues during the anti-communist revolutions, legislative reform and the effects of transition on environmental quality after 1989. The book also contains case studies from the region which illustrate the complexity of environmental issues, and their intimate relationship with political and economic realities.

..."a gold mine of empirical and descritpive information. The connections that Pavlinek and Pickles draw between cultural values and economic and environmental issues is a major step in theorizing the mode of social regulation, which has been a black hole in regulationism for too long...quite possibly the best book on environment and governance in Eastern Europe. It provides a detailed picture of the condition of the environment, contributes an explicitly geographic perspective to the literature, and opens up new directions in the study of regimes of accumulation and modes of social regulation- Elizabeth Dunn, Dept. of Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO."