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GREEN HISTORY? 75 half of the 19" century were often pastures or orchards in the second half of the 18" century. The settlement-limits provided in mediaeval diplomas shows a similar situation in the Ärpädian Age as well (Szakäcs 2012). In the proximity of settlements, woodless periods alternated with reforestations, which eradicated many of the signs of earlier land use by settlements (K. Németh—Maté 2020). On the other hand, ethnobotanical and forest historical investigations have identified several forest types created by forest management in Hungary, which means that the word forest has several connotations (Szabé 2023; 2005; Varga et al. 2017; Molnar—Erdélyi—Hartdegen-Birö-Pänya-Vadäsz 2022). The significance of forests — wooded gardens and groves — formed by conscious human activity has been increasingly stressed by researchers of other continents, too (e.g., Sri Lanka, Central America, the Amazon basin). The interaction between forests and human communities is a global story. It is worth selecting from it a turning point related to the global history of ideas. A re-reading of the emancipation of the serfs has an important role for Hungarian environmental history in the modern age. The early- and mid-19" century liberal interpretation of the term emancipation and the intention behind it were the liberation of society from the bonds of serfdom, which entailed that millions would acquire private property and with it citizenship. It was included among the 12 demands of the nation, as proclaimed on 15 March 1848. However, liberation from bondage — attempted under the revolutionary and constitutional conditions of 1848 and eventually slowly unfolding during the centralized relations of the 1850s — did not solely mean the right to freedom. Agrarian historical investigations in the 1960s already established that the liberation of the serfs also transformed the peasantry’s traditional way of life. The subdivision of land formerly used in common by the serfs and their landlord also entailed the abolition of the system of collectively used pasture and forests. This, along with arbitrary rules about land that serfs rented, meant that many serf families living in the village but having little to no land according to the socage ordinances of the second half of the 18" century were squeezed out of land use. On the other hand, the arable areas created by clearing the forests became the objects of decades of disputes. Likewise hotly disputed was the location of pastures to be allocated (Orosz 1998; Vérés 1976). Thus, the emancipation of the serfs is to be examined as an event in environmental history as well. Memory, narrative and the historian as expert We have now arrived at the other potentiality of historical knowledge: through historical analyses, we may point out the one-sidedness of its use in memory politics. Actually, historians often act as memory experts, specialists who know whether the episodes narrated and used as knowledge or as a basic platform which favored certain political interpretations indeed happened. Of what does this expert activity consist? On the one hand, historians must be aware that actors in the past also tried to design interpretive frames comprehensible in their age and conducive to their goals. Historical facts always go together with representation, and the analysis must interpret their interaction (Szécsi 2020: 92). Moreover, contemporary political actors also have a vested interest in picking certain modes of past narratives and keeping silent about others. They create their own representative frameworks
