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Place and Nature: Introduction
This is the introduction to the book that offers new perspectives on the environmental history of the lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule by paying attention to ‘place’ and ‘nature’ in the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them. Through a series of carefully selected, linked case studies, the book highlights the importance of local environments and the specificities of individual places in understanding the human-environment nexus. This focus is accentuated by the fact that the authors have travelled extensively in the places they write about. They have first-hand experience of the specificities of local natural systems, and have gained a sense of how these places look, sound, taste, feel and smell. They have met, talked to, interviewed and in other ways engaged with members of the local populations, including the specialists in a variety of disciplines who study these places and ecosystems and the people who manage and administer them. In this way, our collective research also makes an important methodological intervention to the research and practice of environmental and perhaps also other elds of history: that to write robust history, historians need to embed themselves in the places and environments they study. In this way, our work underscores that ‘place’ and ‘nature’ are both topics of study and theoretical models and methodological approaches for scholarship.