Oldal 83 [83]
OCR
Green History? 81 (K. Németh—Maté 2020). Their focussed regional history, spanning five hundred years, also lends a historical perspective to the process of forest clearing by peasant communities known to scholars from the classic studies of Lajos Takacs. Margit Készegi and her research team wish to study the concept of human and environmental value on the national parks of the karst region from a historical perspective (Készegi—Bottlik—Telbisz— Mari 2019). Honed in historical ethnography, Bertalan Andrasfalvy’s model of floodplain agriculture became the central theme, or part thereof, of several studies on the growing water shortage in the 1980s, and again in the early 2000s (Rézsa 2021; Molnar 2011; K. Takacs 2000-2001; Doka 1982; Ferenczi 2006). As already mentioned, medievalist Péter Szabé, working in a botanical research center, is attempting to draw up a comprehensive model and chronology of Central European fire-botes. On the border areas of historical ecology and ethnography, the research teams of Anna Varga, Zsolt Molnar, and Daniel Babai have opened up new vistas for social, economic, and landscape history by studying the relations of grazing, big livestock husbandry and landscape use. Having climate history as their central interest, researchers of paleobotany (Magyari et al. 2012) have estimated the chronology of the vegetation over a broad period of tens of thousands of years on the basis of pollen examinations. It is now perfectly clear that the chronology is a sequence of considerable turns instead of permanence even within the Holocene alone. The indicator role of plant species is a fundamental methodological element in the dating of the appearance of plants in an area. Gabor Demeter and his research team have published atlases on the changing use of the land, and they point to the environmental history of 19" century drainages and proprietary changes (Demeter et al. 2020). That being said, it is important to stress the difference between historical ecology focused on past landscapes and the interaction of species living there, on the one hand, and environmental history, which studies the mutual impacts of human communities and the landscape, on the other. Among the first Hungarian practitioners and organizers of environmental history, Agnes R. Varkonyi applied the term historical ecology to her hypothesis of the late 18"-century environmental crisis, but actually she spoke of a historical environmental problem, namely the decisions and culture underlying altered resource use (R. Varkonyi 1999a; 1999b). Interdisciplinary practices in history can go as far as stating the connection between, for example urban power relations, wars, nation building, the functioning of regimes or differences among lobbying interests, and the decisions related to the landscape. It is also important to stress that in the 1960s, when environmental history as a field of scholarship evolved in the United States, its approach was one of social criticism. The “founding mothers and fathers” of the literature of environmental history, William Cronon, Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby and Carolyn Merchant, focused on the inequalities in bearing the burdens of naturedestructive power use and exploitation, on the interconnection of the capitalist economic system and the landscape, and on the environmental impacts of the violent attitude of the USA as a state toward its indigenous population (Eszik 2021; Cronon 1993; Merchant 2003). This attitude was strengthened by linking environmental history to postcolonial criticism, which by the end of the 1990s had already produced a considerable body of academic literature in South Asia. The crucially important outcome of this criticism is the demonstration, on several examples and regions, of the importance of the interrelation between “Western”
