Environmental transitions: Transformation and ecological defence in central and eastern europe. (Book Reviews).

Environmental Transitions: Transformation and Ecological Defence in Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by P. PAVLINEK and J. PICKLES. London: Routledge 2000. Pp.xxii + 362, 22 plates, 39 figures, 19 maps, 56 tables, biblio, index. [pounds sterling]70.26 (cloth) ISBN 0-415-16268-8; [pounds sterling]22.99 (paper) ISBN 0-415-16269-6.

This book certainly fills a felt gap in the vast amount of literature dealing with transitions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The general subject matter revolves around the relationships between environmental and socio-political change. The declared aim of the authors is to understand, from a critical perspective, the ways in which environmental conditions arose in state socialism and how they have been changing during the transition processes across CEE. The environment is located within the broader political economy and the changing political geography of those countries, namely, of central planning and forced industrialisation initially, and of marketisation and what the authors call 'liberal-productivism' more recently.

The authors theorise about social and environmental change in Part I, resorting to regulation theory and other critical political economy approaches ranging from Marxist analytics, to regulation theory, Gramscian analysis, cultural studies, to Foucaultian genealogy. These approaches represent a conscious attempt to incorporate the environment into a social theory of environmental and societal change (Chapter 2). With remarkable richness of data and information, all illustrated with an array of figures, tables and even pictures, Part II describes the gloomy environmental legacy of central planning. Chapter 3 explains how environmental degradation was part of the logic of state socialism and how ...