BorderNature: Stories of People and Nature along the German Wall

Sonja Pieck, associate professor of environmental studies at Bates College, researches the struggles over nature in South America and Germany, including the border region between East and West Germany. Shaped for decades by demographic and economic decline, it became an ecological refuge for more than a thousand endangered plant and animal species. When the wall fell in 1989, conservationists scrambled to protect the former border space and convert it into an ecological corridor and protected area called the Green Belt. That effort continues today, and many parts of the corridor remain incomplete. This talk introduces the Green Belt and, through an up-close look at two particular places, explores the ways in which diverse stakeholders struggle for, and experiment with, different visions of what the border’s nature was, is, and should be.