Oldal 82 [82]
80 RÓBERT BALOGH
tasks, for instance in deciding the starting date of the Anthropocene (R. Balogh
2021). The current consensus is that 1945 is the point in time from which, thanks
to the era of power plants, an unprecedented leap in carbon emissions occurred.
Further, the overuse and pollution of freshwater started increasing to an alarming
degree and the number of domestic animals began to grow unsustainably, to
mention but a few of the indicators that warn of the crossing of limits (Horváth
2021). This choice of the starting date, however, tends to suggest that the demand
for energy, plantation farming or industrial-scale husbandry came out of the blue,
and did not have alternatives. Historical research would have a fundamental role
in creating links between regional experience and dramatic planetary changes, in
other words, in a change of scale.
History as environmental humanities?
Environmental history from the viewpoint
of historians and non-historians
The interaction between the environment and human society is banal, or self¬
evident. Accordingly, it was already present in classic historical works at the onset
of the 20" century. For example, the section on the 17" century in A History of
Hungary by Balint Höman and Gyula Szekfti begins with a lengthy tableau of the
effects of Ottoman rule on landscape and environmental history: “This follows
directly from the fact that south of the Györ-Buda-Debrecen line, the Hungarian
population had perished and in the absence of human hands to till the fields year
by year around the villages and to maintain the road network, Nature took control
and produced its new vegetation and even climatological changes, independently
of humans, not forced into paths for human goals,” (Höman-Szekfü 1935-1936).
The scheme implied by the description strongly suggests familiarity with Kdroly
Kaän’s thesis on the relations between the Great Hungarian Plain and the forests
(Kaan 1939; Birö-Molnär 2009; Vadas—Szabé 2021). The so-called total history
approach associated with the French periodical Annales — that is, efforts of historians
to include all mental, temporal and geographical dimensions of history in a single
narrative— was not alien to Szekft’s approach. The preeminent example of this
attitude is Fernand Braudel’s grand and poetic undertaking about the Mediterranean
region (Braudel 1996).
In Hungary, research on the temporal changes in the relations between humans,
landscape use and environmental circumstances are not only, and not primarily
conducted by historians. Eva Konkoly-Gyuré and her colleagues have, as part of
their work on the concept of region, used digital methods to examine 18-20"
century changes in the forest cover and their causes separately for each landscape
type in the Carpathian Basin (plains, hills, mountains of medium height, high
mountains) (Konkoly-Gyuré—Baldzs 2016). In the field of geography, Gabor Maté‘s
and Andras K. Németh’s historical landscape research on the scale of areas around
settlements and their observations, call attention to the frequency of changes in
afforestation and to the extent of human presence and its fast disappearing traces
2 T express my gratitude to Pal Hatos for pointing out this locus to me.