Environmental History Writing in Northern Europe

Abstract

In Chidher, a poem by Friedrich Rtickert (1788-1866), a perpetually youthful vagabond wanders aimlessly about the world, returning every half millennium to the same location. Each time he returns he encounters a completely transformed landscape. A town gives way to a pasture and then to a body of water. The body of water gives way to a forest and then to a metropolis. Yet whenever Chidher asks one of the local inhabitants-a townsman, a shepherd, a fisherman, a logger, in turnwhat has become of the past environment, he always receives the same basic reply: Whst here has always been here and will always remain., As Riuckert's poem suggests, the normal human lifespan is far too short to grasp firsthand all the anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic forces at work on the landscape, and as a result humans tend to accept their surroundings as natural and unchanging. But Ruckert was also sending a more subtle message to his fellow Europeans, who were themselves deep in the throes of industrialization and therefore silent witnesses to one of the greatest transformations in human history. What was for them startling and new was sure to become second nature to those who followed: the slag heap would become a hill, the empty mine a lake, the denuded forest a meadow. Thanks largely to the work of scholars in three interrelated fields-historical geography, landscape history, and environmental history-not all of the transformations that have occurred in Europe over the past two centuries will be lost to subsequent generations. Historical geography is the oldest of the three fields, as even a cursory glance at the texts and bibliographies of George Perkins Marsh, Clarence Glacken, N. J. G. Pounds, and Robin Butlin instantly reveals.2 The characteristic theme (as suggested by the famous collection edited by William Thomas) is man's role in changing the face of the earth.3 Landscape history is in many ways a subfield of historical geography. It began as a specialty of the British, and though it subsequently spread to the European mainland, its most avid practitioners still tend to come from the British Isles, most recently the London-born Simon Schama.4 Environmental history, the newest of the three fields, spread from the United States