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How The Cold War Boosted Conservation

A portion of the Green Belt border between Sorge and Hohegeiss in the Harz mountains in Germany.
Nickel van Duijvenboden
/
Wikimedia Commons -2017
A portion of the Green Belt border between Sorge and Hohegeiss in the Harz mountains in Germany.

Today the European Green Belt is a stretch of rich and flourishing land in Western Europe that extends north to south for thousands of miles. However, during the Cold War the strip was a no-man’s land that separated the Soviet Union from non-Soviet countries. 

Lisa Brady, professor of environmental history at Boise State University, talks about how the Cold War influenced conservation.Fences and even landmines scattered the border prohibiting any human development. The European Green Belt is one of many examples of places that accidentally became a nature preserve because of the Cold War. Host Frank Stasio talks with Lisa Brady, professor of environmental history at Boise State University, about how the Cold War influenced conservation.

Brady will give a lecture tomorrow at Duke University in Durham at 5 p.m. called “No-Man’s-Land as Nature Preserve: The Strange Case of Cold War Conservation.” 

Copyright 2017 North Carolina Public Radio

Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.
Charlie Shelton