Taking Turns: Landscape and Environmental History at the Crossroads

Abstract

Dealing with the relationship between humankind and the more or less ‘natural’ environment, landscape and environmental history have interests and objects of study in common. This paper explores the similarities and differences of the two fields and the current challenges and opportunities they face. It suggests that the two fields have much to offer each other—especially when dealing with the ‘urban realm’—without running the risk of losing their individual identities. It argues that the reasons for the lack of contact between the fields have been the small size, relative obscurity and ‘youth’ of landscape history on the one hand and the declensionist and broad narratives in environmental history on the other hand. Distrust of the declensionist viewpoint and of the effects that the environmental movement had on landscape and garden design might have led landscape historians in the past to distance themselves from environmental history altogether.