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Contribution short abstract

The paper investigates the paradox of nature conservationists who care for more-than-human species and about local landscapes, but are opposed to renewable energies and neglect the planetary climate crisis. It intends to make sense of the nature conservationists’ imaginaries of nature and belonging.

Contribution long abstract

Nature conservationists in Germany who adhere to the ‘classical’ or ‘traditionalist’ idea of nature and landscape conservation, which developed in the course of the 19th century and which was considerably shaped by ideas of Romanticism, seem to be a paradox: on the one hand, these actors and groups care intensively for more-than-human species and about local landscapes, thus genuinely ‘loving nature’ in Milton’s (2002) words, but on the other hand, many of them are sceptical of or even resist renewable energies and wind power in particular and therefore seem to ignore or to neglect the planetary climate crisis. This paper intends to make sense of the nature conservationists’ imaginaries of nature and belonging, thus navigating the activist-sceptic divide. By de-essentializing the opposition to wind power and investigating the diverse ideas and motivations of its actors, the paper moreover seeks to explore the transformative potential of such research. More specifically, the paper scrutinizes the nature conservationists’ imaginaries of nature and belonging and asks what distinguishes these perspectives from publicly and academically more acknowledged views on human-environment relations and on the various planetary crises as interpreted by environmental and climate protection activists. I argue that the main differences relate, first, to a divergent assessment of what constitutes ‘the human’ in relation to the more-than-human environment; and second, to the question of which cognitive and political scales matter most in human-environment relations in the Anthropocene.