On Tilted Ground: Paradoxes of Nature Conservation in the Anthropocene

Wartha, a village in Saxony, Germany, about 15 kilometres north of Bautzen. Here in the centre of the Oberlausitzer Heide-und Teichlandschaft UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, we kick off our network meeting from May 20 to May 24, 2026, with a lecture by Astrid M. Eckert, Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta. Astrid’s public lecture The Two German States in the UNESCO Program “Man and the Biosphere”  (in German) presents the history of the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program since 1968 and its implementation in West and East Germany (Fig. 1). MAB’s goal was to create a global archive of characteristic landscape types on Earth. The plan to delineate areas for protection worldwide and subject them to strict regulations responded to perceived threats to the planetary environment but could also be turned into a political instrument. Under MAB’s umbrella, the superpowers employed environmental protection as a pretext to advance their geopolitical interests during the era of decolonization. MAB’s model of international cooperation borrowed from previous large-scale scientific projects in the Cold War, such as the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957/58, by promoting science as a neutral authority and a language of diplomacy.

The Biosphere Reserve as a Modern Environmental Project

Astrid Eckert’s presentation exemplifies the core interests of our network EuCoHN: The European Conservation Humanities Network . We are concerned with the political, social, and cultural aspects of nature conservation in a humanities perspective. The practices of scientific inventorying and categorizing nature and the environment can be studied as politics by other means. Biosphere reserves created modern social and natural orders by classifying and zoning landscapes, along with the people within them. The Upper Lusatian Heath and Pond Landscape was formally established as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1996, exactly thirty years ago (Fig. 2). The “Land of a Thousand Ponds” was protected as a cultural landscape. MAB focused not on uninhabited, pristine nature, but rather on nature managed and cultivated by humans. The unique characteristics of the Upper Lusatian cultural landscape were the globally unparalleled combination of sandy heathland, pond landscape, post-mining landscape from lignite open-cast mining, and their location within the cultural region of the Sorbs, a recognized national minority in Germany. The reserve exclusively represents man-made landscapes that were cultivated over the past centuries, and especially in the 20th century.

It is a fundamental paradox of nature conservation that constant ecological and technical interventions are required to maintain the chosen, historically specific state of the landscape. Modern systems ecology perceived these interventions not as a problem, but as a necessary task to address the progressive global environmental destruction, and as a challenge to empirically and experimentally map and optimize terrestrial nature. However, nature, beyond human interests and needs, is increasingly showing itself to be a powerful actor in the reserve, and an unruly actor at that. When the beautiful summer weather suddenly changes during the lecture and it begins to rain heavily, the audience anxiously reaches for their jackets. The reserve staff, on the other hand, welcome the rain like a miracle in the desert. The ground has become parched during the recent weeks of low rainfall.

New Instabilities: From Swamps to Tipping Landscapes

The biosphere reserve Upper Lusatian Heath and Pond Landscape displays the new contradictions in nature conservation. The increasing drought in the Upper Lusatia region impressively demonstrates that nature is shaped by humans, but not always as intended. Unforeseen massive anthropogenic changes to the natural environment threaten to tip the concept of the biosphere reserve. On our guided excursions through the reserve, we learn that nature in the heath and pond landscape depends not only on careful species protection, but above all on water management. Lusatia, Lužica in Sorbian, means wet land. In the long geological perspective, Lusatia was a wet depression. The former peat bogs and swamp forests were transformed by the people of the Middle Ages around 700 years ago (Fig. 3). Artificial ponds were created for fish farming and interconnected in intricate systems of irrigation and service roads (Fig. 4). To this day, the ponds are drained up to twice a year to fish the Upper Lusatian carp from the bottom before they are refilled.

We are standing on tilted ground, in many respects. As a consequence of lucrative fish farming, little remains of the former peat bog. Centuries of pond farming and the straightening of the Spree River’s course along with its damming at the Bautzen Reservoir to quickly channel water to agriculture and to the capital city of Berlin contributed to increasing aridity. The current renaturalization of the river is proving to be arduous work (Fig. 5). The flooding of the lignite mines has further depleted the heath and moorland of water. Where excavators tore away entire villages, where the pits once swallowed a third of the Sorbian-speaking area, large lakes are emerging. The Lusatia region, the former wetland, has been transformed in recent decades into the largest artificial lake district in Europe.

A new form of tourism is developing around the new water, which is sorely lacking in the soil. The area around the new lakes is literally "tipped ground"—unstable spoil from the open-cast mine. The wasteland of the Lohsa II open-cast mine is part of the biosphere reserve, but accessible only to reserve staff. Due to the risk of landslides, the entire area is closed to the public. The recent heat waves and droughts resulting from global climate change are proving to be an additional strain. They are further thinning even the sandy heathland. Constant new planting experiments are needed to wrest anything from the barren landscape (Fig. 6).

After Modernity: Anthropocenic Nature

A new paradox becomes visible. The unique cultural landscape, which the biosphere reserve seeks to preserve as a snapshot of human environing, presents ever new wicked problems. That the natural sciences shape, structure, catalog, and even experiment with nature for human benefit, making nature understandable, accessible, and malleable, is not new. Nor is it new that nature conservation always also shapes nature, a fact familiar to historians of science, technology and the environment. New is that anthropocenic nature – a nature human-made but with spatial and temporal repercussions beyond human reach – upends the modern concepts of nature conservation. Biosphere reserves, as Astrid Eckert explains in her lecture, are products of the 1970s and bound to the idea that nature can be shaped and controlled by humans. This concept of nature protection, and the often associated notion of nature’s utility, must now give way to the task of adapting to entirely new situations whose causes and consequences are barely foreseeable for humans. Can and should we even still speak of nature conservation on an Earth on which both humans and nature must constantly adapt to new and unforeseen conditions?

Sabine Höhler

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