Transboundary Natures

This chapter investigates the consequences of the border regime for landscape and wildlife. The ecological impact of the inter-German border has become widely known through the work of a postunification conservation project, the Green Belt. The chapter not only looks at the final ecological footprint of the Iron Curtain as evident in 1989–1990 but considers the effects of the East German border regime on landscape over time. It argues that these effects were neither purely detrimental to nor exclusively beneficial for nature and wildlife; hence neither a narrative of declension nor a narrative of creation adequately captures the dynamic influence of the border regime. This chapter introduces the term “transboundary natures” to refer to the landscapes shaped by the border, a concept that highlights the role of the border in landscape change, regardless of whether such change was embraced by contemporaries as advantageous for or rejected as deleterious to nature.