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82 RÓBERT BALOGH 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.
