It is the summer of 1987.

Three figures weave along an expanse of open ground, fenced along one side with a new silver chain link fence, three meters high.   "Isn't it fantastic?" one opines enthusiastically, "A unique biotope! Where else in the world is there such vegetation right in the middle of a metropolis?...There are wild rabbits here,..hedgehogs, opposums, even blindworms! And as for insects, we've already counted six different varieties of parasitical hymenopter. We hope that bats and night birds will colonize the towers in time."

Where else indeed! Our characters are Hans Magnus Enzensberger and two guides from the Ministry of the Environment of the West German Senate and the GDR Ministry of the Environment, attending the Wannsee environmental conference.   Criss-crossing along the non-space between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, Enzensberger's guides are in search of the vestiges of nature left undamaged by the equally destructive legacy of eastern and western industry.   Enzensberger is in search of Europe. What is it? Where is it? What paradoxes lie at its heart?   The space between East and West Berlin mapped out a no man's land, not just because to enter it without permission was to risk physical annihilation, but because it represented, in fact it constituted, ideological meltdown too. There was no ideology strong enough to bridge that gap. No over-arching idea which could encompass both Western multi-national capitalism and Eastern state socialism.   No mans' land was literally the fault-line between two worlds. A space where nothing human was at home. Seen from the West it was the fathomless pit of the unconscious from which the repressed anxieties of the East bubbled to the surface. Seen from the East, it was the fathomless zone of aggression imposed by a vengeful Super-ego on an unruly, libertarian Id.   And curiously, between the political devastation and the booby-traps, it was a haven for butterflies, an oasis of knot grass, broom, lupins and nettles, tall as a man.   But not man.   The image begs the question: Is no-man's land the only place that biodiveristy can flourish, precisely because of man's absence?

The decision to pursue all-out industrialisation and intensive agriculture in the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe was made without concern for the natural environment. Air pollution controls, treatment of waste and heavy metals were all neglected in the drive for production and aggravated by a stubborn centralisation which ignored local conditions and favoured the construction of massive industrial complexes. Collectivist farming turned the Aral Sea basin into a vast cotton plantation whose irrigation resulted in widespread soil erosion and salinisation, and vast amounts of toxic waste from pulp factories and metallurgy combines in the Kola peninsula and Novaya Zemlya (where the Soviet Union carried out more than 100 nuclear tests between 1955-1990) have been deposited in the Barents Sea.   Enormous sulphur dioxide emissions in the Norilsk region (6 million tonnes per year), augmented by those drifting in from the West, have decimated vast acreages of confierous forest, already under threat from over-exploitation by the timber industries.   Vegetation has deteriorated to such an extent that tens of thousands of hectares around these industrial centres has been totally destroyed.

To the East, the region comprising Belarus, Moldova and the Ukraine is the most industrialized area within the former Soviet Union. High density of population, transportation networks and intensive agriculture combined with the legacy of Chernobyl make this region one of the most environmentally challenged in Eastern Europe.

The advent of glasnost in the 1980s saw non-governmental agencies in the East beginning to engage with the state on environmental issues.   But the beginnings of these discussions were disrupted by the collapse of the communist regimes and the economic crises of the 1990s.   Efforts to tackle the enormous environmental problems facing central Europe have not yet borne fruit: government agencies devoted to environmental matters are seriously under-funded and driven largely by pressure from the international community. Local support is limited, and local environmental management bodies largely ineffective.

Poland has one of the richest ancient woodland eco-structures in Europe. Cranes, wild deer, foxes and many species of marshland birds flourished in its relatively unspoilt medieval forest and marshland. Ironically, this was protected more by neglect than decision under communism, and the rich variety of flora, fauna, bird and insect life is now under serious threat from the rampant construction of roads, industrial and shopping complexes which a largely unregulated capitalism is unleashing. The growing individual consumption of energy, fuels and disposable and short-term usage goods, combined with unrestricted use of motorized vehicles are posing ever-increasing threats to the natural environment.

In the Czech Republic, habitat deterioration and destruction is the main cause of the threat to many wild plant species and communities.   Construction of roads, dams and reservoirs, combined with changes in land use, mono-cultivation and drainage, have had a devastating effect on biodiversity.   Air pollution and inappropriate silvicultural management has decisively undermined the Czech forests' resistance to extreme weather conditions, insect pests and fungal diseases.   As a result, the forests of the Czech republic are now amongst the most heavily damaged in Europe.

And yet there are hopeful signs - In the Ukraine, over 70,000 species of flora and fauna, which began developing 5000 years ago, make it one of the richest biodiverse regions in Eastern Europe.   One third of species still remain undescribed.   Forty-five thousand species of animal, 400 species of bird, and 35,000 species of insect inhabit the territory of the Ukraine, including the area around the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.   Where a sufficient 'mass' of diversity is permitted to survive, ecostructures can be maintained and species develop.   Hybridisation is one process whereby the diversity of species, by being introduced to one another to freely mingle, can evolve. "Hibrida" in Latin, was the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar - a fruitful merging of the town and the countryside, normally separated by walls and fences, to preserve and invigorate the species.

During the cold war, Central Europe could be envisaged as a sort of 'buffer zone' between the two superpowers; a zone rich and culturally biodiverse, whose fragile equilibrium managed to hold out against the withering blasts of US foreign policy or old-style communist dogma. Now that the wall, or more precisely, the walls, either side of no-man's land have been demolished, the paradox of development, which drove western capitalism in the 18 th -century has finally impacted on this little strip of land and its flora and fauna, and he who lives there is forced to face, "with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."   For its cultural, no less than for its environmental biodiversity to survive, there are tasks to be done.

"It was here in Central Europe, that modern culture found its greatest impulses: psychoanalysis, structuralism, dodecaphony, Bartók's music, Kafka's and Musil's new aesthetics of the novel. The postwar annexation of Central Europe (or at least its major part) by Russian civilization caused Western culture to lose its vital centre of gravity. It is the most significant even in the history of the West in our century, and we cannot dismiss the possibility that the end of Central Europe marked the beginning of the end for Europe as a whole."

If Kundera is correct in his appraisal of the significance of the loss of focus in Europe resultant from Soviet annexation, the decline of this superpower's stranglehold over Eastern Europe presents us with a renewed possibility to reassert, precisely, the centrality of Europe, and with it the centrality of its culture and environment.   If we take cooking to be an epitome of culture, can one imagine a cuisine which was not rooted in local produce, seasonal availability, regional accents and traditional combinations?   Or have we simply moved from Soviet annexation to the shadow of the "Golden M"?

In Venice, for example, what teems and swells this aquatic wonderland, is not the fish, lobsters, shrimp, crab, squid and mussels of the 'Pescaria' (fish market). What threatens to engulf the city's fragile eco-structure is not the rising Adriatic, though this too is a major concern, but the tourists who, in their diluvian encroachement, outstrip the lagoon's natural ability to cope: the vast quantities of fish required for restaurant tables, for example, are flown in from Spain; the modern conveniences such as the Marco Polo airport or the industrial complex at Mestre pour out pollutants over the Serenissima and damage the fragile water table upon which the city depends.

In Goethe's "Faust", the protagonist is driven by his Messianic desire to achieve great things for humanity, ambitious beyond the scope of his lifetime. The sale of his soul to Mephistopheles, predicated on the requirement that he must never rest even in contentment, spurs him on to achieve vast construction and land-reclamation projects. The more ambitious these are, and the more 'successfully' they are realised, the more empty they become, because, like their creator, they are dead within. This is the modern 'demon of progress' and it fills our multi-storey car parks and our shopping malls, where once forests and marshland endured.

In Rousseau's "Nouvelle Elöise" (1794), the hero, Saint Preux, makes the archetypal move from the countryside to the town, leaving behind what Marx would later call 'the idiocy of rural life" for the stimulus and temptations of the metropolis. It is the archetypal move of Modernism and fraught with the same paradoxes: As his thirst for new experience is constantly renewed, it is never satisfied, and, distracted, he forgets who he is and whom he loves.   Now, in south central London, urban foxes whose natural habitat has been ruined or destroyed by urbanisation and traffic, can be seen at night roaming through back gardens or loping along station platforms.   They travel into town along the same railway lines as bring the commuters in from the countryside to work, repeating the drift to the city, first observed in Rousseau's novel.

If modernisation is to be anything more than the chaotic and fragmentary eruption of irrational development and the proliferation of destructive and wasteful obsolescence, we, in the newly reclaimed no-man's land of Central Europe, need to reclaim this centrality - the centrality of European culture, civilisation and cuisine; its diversity of peoples, languages, landscape, environments, species and artforms.   And we need to reclaim it without destroying that which is culturally significant about it, and to rebuild on it with sensitivity and understanding.   Otherwise we have the scenario envisaged by Guattari, in "Molecular Revolution", of a type of development which can be characterised as psychotic, and which has all too often been the 'norm' of industrial growth and political expediencey:

"I think it is sensible to set out a kind of grid of correspondence between the meandering of meanings and ideas among psychotics, especially schizophrenics, and the mechanisms of growing discordance being set up at all levels of industrial society in its neo-capitalist and bureaucratic socialist phase, whereby the individual tends to have to identify with an ideal of consuming-machines-consuming-producing-machines.   The silence of the catatonic is perhaps a pioneering interpretation of that ideal."

Cultural hybridisation, of the sort encompassed and supported by this exhibition series, serves, precisely, to pre-empt this kind of catatonia, and to ensure that in the former no-man's land, both the nettles and Man can grow.

Kenneth G. Hay

Leeds, 2005

Notes