Gezocht: katholiek met hart voor natuurschoon: De natuurbeschermingsbeweging in Nederland en het katholieke volksdeel

The nature conservation movement and Catholicism were conspicuously detached in the Netherlands in the first half of the twentieth century. Nature conservation was apparently not an area of interest for the emerging Catholic ‘pillar’. Most conservationist groups and associations and their leaders were affiliated to the ‘neutral’ or ‘liberal’ pillar. The first half of this article provides an overview of the individual Catholic activists, conservationists, and hobby naturalists affiliated to the nature conservation movement in this early period. After 1945, however, Catholic under-representation became an issue for the Dutch nature conservation movement. Associations such as Natuurmonumenten were influenced by new perspectives on pillarisation and democratic participation, and met local opposition to their work in predominantly Catholic regions in the Netherlands. Once the conservationists ‘discovered’ that they did not have enough Catholic members and had no influential contacts in the Catholic pillar, they tried to amend this by approaching their friends in the Catholic elite. The Catholic political party usually opposed the goals of nature conservation in the 1950s, while left-wing politicians affiliated to the nature conservation movement defended them. The perception of an antagonistic relationship between nature conservation and Catholicism has persisted in the Netherlands since. It seems that this impression is actually based on that specific historical constellation in the Netherlands, and much less so on any fundamental incompatibility of nature conservation and Catholicism

One movement, three clusters: The national parks movement in England and Wales, 1929-1949

The history of the national parks movement in England and Wales culminated in the passing of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949. Many constituent bodies were, however, dissatisfied with the administrative arrangements in the new National Parks. To explain this inconsistency, this article seeks to understand the national parks movement as a heterogenous network of loosely affiliated civil society organisations. The movement consisted of three separate clusters, each with its own approach to, definitions and expectations of national parks. These clusters emphasised the aspects of planning and rural preservation, scientific interests and nature preservation, and open-air recreation, respectively. They first joined forces in 1929, when the government appointed the first National Park Committee. Different core organisations led the movement at different stages, forming different coalitions and committees, re-defining the character of the national parks movement and its public and political profile in the process. The scientific and nature preservation cluster was the most successful after abandoning the other two clusters after 1945. This article offers a new interpretation of the history of the national parks movement in England and Wales as a highly contentious and internally divergent social movement

Forests in the Netherlands and Their Many Functions since the 1900s

In European forestry, ‘sustainability’ as a key concept is centuries old. State-managed production forests and wooded landscapes for nature conservation have co-existed for a similar timespan. Incrementally, the functions of forests in the densely-populated Netherlands have shifted from timber production and economic rationales to natural beauty, biodiversity and recreation. ‘Monofunctional forests’ were gradually replaced in the 1960s by ‘multiple use’ of forests, according to which many functions may co-exist and be brought into balance in one forest area. The emergence of this idea was a significant step towards the formulation of a holistic concept of ‘sustainability’