Noi culturi, noi antropologii - Humanitas

and carry out small projects in Chişinău. Eventually I was
put into contact with the project organizer, Violeta, a young
Moldovan woman who was studying ecology in Germany.
She returned to Moldova in April 2010 to carry out the project,
called Ecoweek, which involved about 30 local high
school and university students. I volunteered to help with
the project, an experience that gave me several insights into
the divide between old and young within the environmental
community.
One of the main differences between these two communities
concerns their degree of willingness to use official
channels and engage in political debates. Although the older
men complain about the government’s lack of understanding
of environmental problems, and international organizations’
lack of understanding of the political context in Moldova,
they still attend meetings at the Ministry of Environment
and attempt to go through official channels to seek funding
and develop projects. The young environmentalists, on the
other hand, tend to work outside of official channels, seeking
funding from international organizations rather than the
government and largely ignoring initiatives from the Ministry
of Environment. In fact, during one Ecoweek educational
session, Violeta stressed to participants that while there are
different ways to effect change, going through political channels
is not a worthwhile approach. As a group of students,
she said, they had no way to change the political situation in
Moldova, and to try to do so would be a waste of time.
Another difference between the two factions again has
to do with project focus. On the one hand, the well-funded
NGOs focus mainly on large projects that fall in line with
international donors’ priorities, such as biodiversity conservation.
This tendency of environmental NGOs to adopt the
dominant narratives of biodiversity conservation and sustainable
development has been well documented 376 . On the
376. e.g. Michael Goldman, Imperial nature: The World Bank and
struggles for social justice in the age of globalization, Yale University
Press, New Haven, 2005; Katrina Z.S. Schwartz, Nature and national
identity after communism: Globalizing the ethnoscape, University of
Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2006.
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