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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 selfevident. 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.
