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GREEN HISTORY? WHAT IS THE ROLE OF HISTORIANS’ WORK ON ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS OF THE PAST, AND WHAT SHOULD IT BE?! Róbert Balogh What does it mean that something is studied from a historical perspective? What is the form of historical knowledge? It is not far-fetched to presume that with the environmental turn, human relationships, our concept of history, and the expectations and assumptions concerning the work of historians will all be rethought within a few years (Simon 2021). Should this occur, the key to change will be the shift of the focus of historical thought onto the more or less apocalyptic conditions believed to be possible or probable in the future. The new synthesis of the natural scientific knowledge of the Anthropocene has been achieved by a new field of scholarship, Earth System Science, which explores the physical, chemical relations of the planet, such as how the properties of ocean water affect the planet or various anomalies in the climate. Its counterpart in the humanities and social sciences in the coming years may be a new approach called Environmental Humanities (hereafter EH). As illustrated by the present volume, this involves a dialogue between the results, among other fields, of anthropology, historical ethnography, environmental history, the arts, art history and the natural sciences. For the time being, it is easier to introduce the EH with examples than to describe it in abstract terms. While studying and reviving Sark6z’s art of textile manufacture, Bertalan Andrdsfalvy devised a model of the interrelations between traditional economy and the realm of various forms of folk art (Andräsfalvy 1967). Janos Géczi has described the intertwining of the arts, the culture of plant cultivation and the wealth of rose varieties in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Géczi 2020). In recent years, Barna Eltes’s works focussing on the interconnections of landscape, human activity and materials have shown that art is important for engendering thoughts about the nature and historical character of the environmental crisis and about the need to involve these questions in a dialogue with local identity (the Szeklarland in Eltes’ case). All of his works exhibited at the Hungarian University of Art in December 2022 with the title Cleft landscape (including the piece below) reveal how a tiny but accurately chosen modification of the natural material can turn it into the representative of the relationship between the environment and the human being, and into a work of art. 1 The paper was supported by the NKFIH FK 14245 grant for the project ,,Budapest — environmental history of an urban region”.
