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GREEN HISTORY? 73
Figure 1. Barna Eltes’s work in his exhibition Cleft landscape, 20 December 2022
The piece depicts a house, or rather a church and the path leading to it, and higher
up some cultivated fields. One interpretation it suggests is that human culture
can be created or continued through careful observation. It requires only a few
human interventions in the landscape on the basis of its thorough knowledge.
Eltes’s exhibition also emphasizes that there are still communities and forms of
life that do not contribute to the environmental crises. One of the keys to the
approach of the new EH is certainly the formulation of its issues of research relying
on works of art.
But what kind of work, exactly, is to be done? The aim of this chapter is to
outline the meaning of historical thinking and to discuss whether environmental
history in its current state is ready to interweave historical research into the EH.
Historical corrections and well-known errors
Now, standing at a turning-point in historical thought, it can be stated that historians
are specialists of reflexive thinking about the conditions of past and present politics,
society, the economy and the environment. A historian is a researcher who enquires
into the special circumstances of seemingly “natural” relations or their memory.
Close examination of the explorable past of a commonly known phenomenon
often leads to the questioning of seemingly self-evident implications. It is also
possible that previously overlooked factors will come to light.
For example, it is well-known that in the period between 1920-2020, the area
of Hungary covered by forests nearly doubled compared to the entire area. The
research program working on the maps of the historical changes in the plant cover
for the National Atlas of Hungary concluded that although the vegetation of today’s
Hungary has changed considerably over the course of tens of thousands of years,
the past two hundred years has been characterized by an unambiguous and accel¬
erating decline of habitats (Biré-Molnär—Ollerer-Demeter-Bülôni 2022; Molnär¬
Kiräly-Fekete 2018). One might conclude from this that the wooded area in the
territory of present-day Hungary steadily decreased between the Settlement in
Pannonia and prior to 1920, until it reached an extremely low value. However, the
historical reality is far more complex (Bartha 2000; Konkoly-Gyurö-Baläzs 2016).