Page 75 [75]
OCR
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 accelerating decline of habitats (Biré-Molnär—Ollerer-Demeter-Bülôni 2022; MolnärKiräly-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).
