Taylor Zajicek is Mellon Teaching Fellow at the Harriman Institute. His first book project is an environmental and transnational history of one of the planet’s most notorious chokepoints: the Black Sea region. The manuscript details how the Black Sea’s fractious geopolitics—from the Cold War to today’s Russo-Ukrainian conflict—have transformed the region’s ecosystems. 

Harriman: How did you become interested in the environmental history of the Black Sea region?

Zajicek: I’ve been interested in history since I was a kid. And I always wanted to travel to the places I’d read about to see them firsthand. As an undergraduate at Whitworth University, I had the opportunity to spend a semester in Estonia in 2010. I really liked Eastern Europe, and I learned some Russian. It was exhilarating to realize that I could travel to places as different from each other as Estonia and Turkmenistan and still be able to communicate. Around the same time, I also visited Turkey and found Turkish culture to be wonderful and its modern history fascinating.

I then had a kind of crisis of confidence — am I going to do Eastern European studies and continue to learn Russian, or am I going to learn Turkish and do Middle Eastern studies? Generally, in the academy, those regions are split into two different departments. At some point it occurred to me that I could do both, because that cultural and civilizational divide is totally artificial. And so I started thinking of ways to bridge those two. The environment was one way to do that. I got really interested in how the environment connected the various cultures living on the shores of the Black Sea.

Harriman: That’s such a perfect fit for the Harriman Institute and Valentina [Izmirlieva]’s Black Sea Networks project.

Zajicek: That’s why I’m here. For the intellectual reasons I mentioned, the study of the different parts of the sea have been separated by different academic traditions. So it’s been a lot of fun for me to connect them with institutional backing. 

If you’re thinking about these regions in terms of their languages, cultures, economic systems they are all very different. But from an environmental perspective, they have to cooperate because they share this body of water around which they have to make environmental regulations and decisions.

That was my starting point. I read one book about Black Sea regionalism and it went from the deep past up until about 1917, and then it jumped to 1991. There was literally a blank section in the book. My dissertation and now my book are looking to fill that gap. How did ecological continuities force cooperation or competition? How did capitalist Turkey versus its communist neighbors tackle the same problems in different ways based on their different systems?

Harriman: And what were some of the most surprising things you learned?

Zajicek: Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, but I was struck that so many connections persisted between these two rivalrous economic and political blocs.  There were scientists traveling around and trying to create different forms of solidarity and joint institutions. Many of them didn’t succeed, but the people who recognized this reality, the shared environmental fate of the region, and then tried to do something about it using the levers available to them, are fascinating to me. 

Harriman: And is there anything we can learn from that today, in the current geopolitical situation? 

Zajicek: Yes, both on the regional level, and also globally. Part of the reason it’s hard to cooperate around the Black Sea is because you have many religions, cultures, and historical backgrounds. But in that sense, it’s just a microcosm of the planet. 

We need to continue to find solutions for nuclear non-proliferation, conflict, and climate change. My hope is that the study of this small region can teach us about those larger issues.

There was a brief moment after the Cold War in which suddenly, you had all these newly-independent countries, and for the first time in modern Black Sea history they started signing accords and treaties and creating institutions to deal with things like pollution and fishing regulations. But, a lot of that work toward a sustainable future has broken down. Now, the situation, unfortunately, is quite ugly and depressing. 

Harriman: Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, or even before? 

Zajicek: The first hints of the breakdown came in the mid two thousands with the Russian invasion of Georgia, and then in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, and then with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

In the context of wartime, people may find it offensive to talk about ideas like environmental cooperation and sharing scientific knowledge. But I think the optimistic note from my research is that even in perilous, drastic times, committed people and committed institutions have found ways to bridge some of those divides. 

Harriman: Can you give an example?

Zajicek: Yeah. So, this isn’t an ecological success story, but there’s a dam on the border of Turkey and Armenia that was first conceived in the early 1940s and then built in the seventies and eighties.

This is a dam that literally straddled the iron curtain. Half of it was on NATO territory and half of it was in the Soviet Union itself. 

The dam had various negative environmental effects, but it also allowed both sides to create new settlements and plantations and gardens and to live in a region that’s very arid and generally a difficult place for economic development. And this persisted in spite of the Cold War and even after Armenia gained independence, in spite of its tortured history with Turkey. 

Specialists on each side would meet each month to manage this dam. And they continue to do this throughout all the conflict and all the ugliness, partially because the infrastructure was there and partly due to the shared conundrum of an arid region where it’s difficult to grow crops. To me, that’s an interesting, hopeful story of what happens when you have both a physical connection and you create the right institutional frameworks.

[Editor’s note: Read Taylor’s essay on the environmental impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion in the latest issue of Harriman Magazine]

Harriman: How has your time at the Harriman shaped the trajectory of your research and what are you working on while you’re here?

Zajicek: My main project at the Harriman has been to convert my dissertation into a book, which involves a fairly substantial revision and expansion. I learned Romanian while I was here, and then thanks to a PepsiCo grant I visited Romania and briefly Bulgaria last summer for archival work. The fact that there’s such a strong Black Sea interest here has helped me shape the book quite a lot. It’s been a very supportive community and I was able to teach a Black Sea course, which I found really useful in expanding my thinking about long term trajectories in the region. I’m fortunate to be starting a new job at Williams College this summer and I’ve been able to develop courses that I can use in this next stage of my career.

Pictured: Taylor Zajicek on the Cernavodă Bridge in Romania last summer.