Politicizing Nature. Environmental Political Thought in Romanian Modernity around 1900

The article starts from the general observation of a need in Romanian and central-east European literature of addressing from an environmental history lens the question of climate change and the narratives pushing the subject on the table of public policies, in a historical perspective. Drawing from the literature in the field and linking the environmental to the modernization narratives, the article investigates the different ways of politicizing and conceptualizing Nature during the Grand Transformation in the Romanian Modern State. Analyzing several case studies by using the conceptual history methods, the article argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, shaping modernization passes also through reconceptualizing the possession of nature which means reflecting, conceiving norms and practices and professionalizing all the narratives and the activities dealing with humanizing, territorializing, transforming, commodifying especially forests and mountains. The article also founds that the narratives on deforestation or lacking law enforcement in the matters of environment protection are to be understood also in an intergenerational transmission of concept and/or stereotypes, linked often to nationalistic discourses: the contemporary patriotic narrative comes directly, as it is showed in the article, from a certain nationalistic cult of Nature. At the turn of Nineteenth century, Romanian central and east European popular patriotism emerges also from that ideological entanglement.