Hungary, Orbán, environmental history, communism

This paper aimed to reevaluate some of the environmental ideologies, toolkits and methods of the Orbán regime. These are often perceived as new, self-proclaimed and “illiberal”. However, in this paper I aimed to connect some of them to their roots via the science of previous political periods both in Hungary and globally. This, I hope, will enable the reader to place Orbán’s environmental actions in a wider perspective and gain a deeper understanding of what has been done to the environment in Hungary – and why it has been done – since 2010. This paper argued that the controversial attitudes of communists to the non-anthropogenic world fltered into contemporary Hungary and, to make contemporary government attitudes toward the environment more complex, several aspects of the pre-existing ecological discourses of the Habsburg and interwar periods have been recycled, often with the associated nationalist, xenophobic and racial connotations of the non-human world