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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 nature¬
destructive 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”