Environmental research is altogether a relatively young field of science which emerged as a significant force only as a result of the ecological crisis of the 1960s. Nonetheless, environmental history has to this day remained largely a ‘fringe area’ of historical research. It is far better established in the United States than in Europe, particularly thanks to the work of Donald Worster (Nature's Economy. A History of Ecological Ideas, 1977), William Cronon (Changes in the Land. Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England, 1983) and Alfred W. Crosby (Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1900, 1986) and to the journal Environmental History. The continental, particularly the German-speaking, discourse was long dominated by a more technological-historical approach, but is now broadly diversified and integrated through the European Society for Environmental History, founded in 1999. Rolf Peter Sieferle (Rückblick auf die Natur [‘A look back at nature’], 1997) provides a comprehensive system-theoretical approach. Christian Pfister has distinguished himself in the field of historical climate research (Wetternachhersage [‘Weather post-diction’], 1999). J. Donald Hughes (What is Environmental History?, 2006) and more recently Verena Winiwarter and Martin Knoll (Umweltgeschichte [‘Environmental history’], 2007) have provided introductory overviews.
Environmental history examines the past interaction between people and the rest of nature, that is, the environmental conditions which prevailed in the past, and their perception and interpretation by contemporaries:11
The object of environmental history is the social and economic dimension of human communities with respect to interactions in a habitat … The ‘environment’ in environmental history is thus all phenomena which influence the life situation of a human community. It takes into account all human actions which have any effect – even indirect – on the resource base and the natural spatial surroundings.12
In J. D. Hughes's view, there are three main areas of environmental historical interest which apply to all epochs of world history:
(1) the influence of environmental factors on human history; (2) the environmental changes caused by human actions, and the many ways in which human-caused changes in the environment rebound and affect the course of change in human societies; and (3) the history of human thought about the environment and the ways in which patterns of human attitudes have motivated actions that affect the environment.13
Furthermore, R. P. Sieferle points out:
‘Environmental history’ therefore deals in principle with a difficult, tortuous process: it reconstructs a complex interaction between human cultures and their natural environment, and must integrate both perspectives in the process. It must not only ask – as the older environmental determinism has done – whether and to what extent natural conditions affect societal processes … What should become clear are the basic conditions established by natural circumstances, which scope of action existed for cultural-societal self-organisation, and how the limits which nature placed on society were constituted.14
Integral environmental history strives for a comprehensive reconstruction of the human-environmental relationship. Also useful in this respect is the ‘environmental hygiene’ approach, which examines the effects of culture on ‘harmonious’ nature, and thus arrives in the proximity of social history.
According to V. Winiwarter, the environment can be subdivided into various subsystems, the specific place and time relationship of which provides information about the prevailing environmental conditions:15
1. The material environment: the material conditions of the habitat, such as the availability and quality of water; the climate; the types and conditions of the soil; the infrastructure; and the availability of natural resources such as wood, building materials, mineral resources etc.
2. The structural environment: the possibilities and conditions for the utilisation of the material environment; the relations of ownership; the availability of technology for the exploitation of natural resources; the basic legal, political and economic conditions.
3. The intellectual environment: the possibilities and conditions for human access to phenomena, such as a concept of nature; the religion; the technical and philosophical level of knowledge.
Since, according to Immanuel Kant, the human being is the object of study of the science of history, the concept of the environment in environmental history is anthropocentric: history – that which has occurred – is of relevance only for those who write about it or study it. The bio-eco-systemic approach can, according to Winiwarter, be incorporated as an important aspect; however, it is not constitutive: ‘The object of historical environmental research is the extrapolation of scientific data sets into the past’, which involves such methods as climatic history, pollen analysis and dendrochronology (the calculation of the felling date of trees using their growth rings).16 According to Sieferle, the ‘human ecological perspectives’ of historical environmental research include energy flows, material cycles, population, pathogens and the effects of industrialisation.17 Historical ecology pursues the goal of using knowledge of the current situation for the study of the environment in the past. As ecology ‘includes social and cultural patterns’, ecological history is ‘somewhat broader than environmental history, but the two terms often are used interchangeably’.18
Basically, Sieferle argues, three factors of the investigation of environment history can be ascertained:19 ‘Nature’, or natural ecosystems; ‘human population’ in the physical sense; and ‘culture’ as an organisational pattern. Four areas of work emerge from this: the reconstruction of particular systems of culture and nature in the past; the stability and duration of the respective system of culture and nature; the periodisation of environmental history, with explanations of the transitions; and finally the history of pollution. The problem overall is the consequences of human behaviour from a long-term perspective, which must be investigated using an interdisciplinary approach.
In environmental history a rough periodisation has gained acceptance in which the periods correspond both to energy systems and to landscape types:20 first are the Palaeolithic hunter and gatherer societies up to 12,000 years ago, which lived in a natural landscape without the cultivation of natural products. With the end of the last ice age, the Neolithic revolution began over 10,000 years ago, bringing with it a radical upheaval which began in the Fertile Crescent approximately 8,000 years ago and was characterised by agriculture, sedentary life and the domestication of animals. The changes led to the emergence of agrarian societies, with the use of solar energy and natural energy flows in cultivated landscape. Here a distinction is made between the peasant societies prior to the emergence of advanced civilisations, roughly 5,000 years ago, and the stage of these agrarian-based civilisations. Finally, after a long interval, came the period of industrialisation, which began more than 200 years ago. It led to the consumption of fossil sources of energy with high energy flows in an initially segmented, later ‘total’ industry landscape. At first, coal was the central energy source; thereafter, the use of oil and natural gas became virtually universal. The city walls had long been torn down; now the cities lost their ties to their surrounding countryside, and mobility grew constantly. The resulting consumer society was accompanied by a massive drop in the price of fossil energy sources during the 1950s.21
Ancient societies were thus fundamentally tied to agriculture, and dependent on natural energy. Water power was used largely for mills; wind power only for sailing ships. Petroleum and bituminous and brown coal were known but were not widely used, and played no role for energy supply. The primary fuels used were wood, charcoal and olive oil for lamps, so that renewable energy sources predominated. Nevertheless, cases of resource depletion were recorded, in terms of timber construction, mining and land use. These instances were, however, hardly perceived as alarm signals – unlike the situation today – and could often be compensated for by opening up new lands.