Nature Conservation

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. What Is Nature for Us?

   • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

   Pages 1-7

3. Why Nature Conservation?

   • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

   Pages 9-27

4. Why Nature Conservation Has the Worse Cards Compared to Environmental Protection and Animal Welfare

   • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

   Pages 29-37

5. Nature Conservation: On Which Areas?

   • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

   Pages 39-45

6. Extreme Locations: Shunned by Industry, Preferred by Nature Conservation?

   • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

   Pages 47-50

7. Confusing Diversity: Area Categories of Nature and Landscape Protection—Nature Reserves, National Parks, Natural Monuments, Landscape Conservation Areas, Nature Parks

   • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

   Pages 51-59

8. Which Nature Do We Want to Protect and How?

   • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

   Pages 61-73

9. The Construction of Natural Equilibria: Ideal Starting Point of the Demand for Nature Conservation

   • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

   Pages 75-77

10. Help for Endangered Species? Red Lists and Endangerment Categories

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 79-86

11. Of Birds and of Butterflies: How Nature Conservation Distributes Its Sympathies

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 87-91

12. What Endangers Nature?

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 93-102

13. “Outlaws” and “Helpers”: The Players in Nature Conservation

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 103-115

14. Nature that Does not Deserve Protection: Spontaneous Vegetation, Ruderal Communities, Neophytes and Neozoa

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 117-129

15. Process Protection as an Alternative and a Silver Bullet?

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 131-138

16. Nature Where no One Expects it: In the City

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 139-150

17. Military Terrain: A Natural Idyll?

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 151-154

18. Second-Hand Nature: Renaturation of Quarries and Opencast Mines

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 155-159

19. Is Nature Only Intact if all Species Increase Equally?

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 161-164

20. Nature Conservation is Quite Successful: The Example of Large Animal Species

    • Klaus-Dieter Hupke

    Pages 165-178

Many things happen in nature reserves that are contradictory at first glance. For example, flower meadows are mown down during maintenance work, even though all the plants growing there are protected. Elsewhere, protected reed beds are burnt down in a fen or the top layer of soil is removed with bulldozers in a dune conservation area. Still other areas are to remain completely untouched by human intervention. The author Klaus-Dieter Hupke shows the different strategies of nature conservation. He also shows that nature conservation is mostly not exactly what the term says in essence: "protection of nature". On the contrary, in Central Europe nature conservation areas are predominantly the relics of old agricultural and thus cultural landscapes. Often, aesthetic aspects of a landscape section are also in the foreground when designating it as a natural monument or nature reserve. Moreover, nature conservation runs the risk of becoming a substitute action and an alibi for a stillgrowing destruction of traditional and near-natural landscape systems in Central Europe as well as globally.


The updated second edition now explicitly includes the consequences of climate change for nature conservation and has also incorporated a stronger reference to Austria as well as to the central Alpine region in some places for the relevant readers.

• IUCN
• Landscape planning
• Landscape protection
• National Parks
• Ecology

• University of Education Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

  Klaus-Dieter Hupke

Prof. Dr Klaus-Dieter Hupke is a lecturer in geography at Heidelberg University of Education.

Policies and ethics