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scientific and “indigenous” non-scientific forms of knowledge. It has been found
that in discoveries thought to be fully Western in origin, non-Western, “indigenous”
specialists and communities played an important role.
All things considered, it would be high time to synthesize historical thought
and environmental historical research, even if it were not so urgent to interpret
all this knowledge within the frames of a menacing and incalculable era, the
Anthropocene. If one tried to epitomize the essence of history in terms of the
Anthropocene era, one would research and describe the modes of energy use, food
production and supply, the ideas of the human body and its capabilities, and the
protection of the environment, as well as the history of the sense of crisis rich in
power relations and existing alternatives as the interaction with materials and living
beings, instead of dealing with the history of political power or human society and
culture. The main emphasis in EH would be on the alternatives, and the significance
of matters and living beings. This would form a new synthesis, rather than the
discarding of former knowledge. In the new framework, the anthropocentric
characteristic of the earlier attitude to history would be replaced by the hybrid
appearance of natural and cultural features, and it would be necessary to eradicate
from the research topics the explicit and implicit idea that human richness and
influence are to be hailed as a triumph. This shift would require new mental
associations created through narratives, rethinking and cognitive reshuffling of
the sources and the creation of new virtual archives. The basic elements of historical
thinking outlined above would then also be found in research conducted within
the framework of the EH.
Recommended readings
Horn, Eva — Berghtaller, Hannes 2019. The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities.
Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge.
A great overview of the concerns that researchers in the humanities should include in the
Anthropocene. It discusses the problems of coordinated action in international politics
and the various concepts which relate nature and culture as well as the issue of scale.
Of particular interest for EH is its call to include the local level in discussing changes
ona planetary scale.
Patel, Raj — Moore, Jason 2017..A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A Guide to
Capitalism, Nature and the Future of the Planet. Oakland, CA, University of California
Press.
An essential work, which makes a strong case for how various actors using either legitimate
or illegitimate violence achieved a very low price of goods, energy and money as well
as labor and its reproduction throughout the late medieval and modern period. It
clearly proves that this mechanism persists but is also incommensurate with the need
to overcome the ongoing ecological crisis.
Bonan, Giacomo 2019. The State in the Forest. Contested Commons in the Nineteenth
Century Venetian Alps. Winwick, Cambridgeshire, The White Horse Press.
This book is an important history of the commons and resource use in the 19th century
Alps. It tells how local inhabitants of a particular region rich in timber resources tried
to preserve the fundamental system of the commons through modernization and
adaptation to the changing political, legal and commercial contexts from Napoleonic
times until after the unification of Italy. It is a social and political history of forestry
in a region with unique characteristics.