This research investigates the development of the nature study movement in the secondary schools of Transylvania and the Romanian Kingdom between 1870 and 1914. Building on the scholarship dealing with the rise of the “biological perspective” in Germany, the paper deals with the roots of the Romanian nature preservation movement and its relationship with the political and economic projects of nation-building that developed in the dualist Austrian-Hungarian Empire. It analyses how methodological changes in the teaching of natural history
and the introduction of teaching aids such as nature excursions, botanical school gardens, and celebrations of birds and trees, influenced the development of a nationalist, utilitarian, anthropocentric and racial approach toward the natural environment.