Paper short abstract:

There definitely is a dispute about how activist environmental historians should be. I believe, however, that beyond that, there is an inherent tendency in environmental history itself to take back history in the emphatic sense. A loss of opportunities to be active is itself actively brought about.

Paper long abstract:

Environmental history has itself changed in the course of its history. Set out to study the “interactions people have had with nature in past times” (Donald Worster), it sought in its early days first of all to explain how humanity has shaped the environments current form. Today, in view of the widening ecological crisis, environmental history seems to prefer to investigate how a changed environment in turn shapes people and human cultures. The form of interaction is being reweighted. But at the same time, the time horizon has also shifted: away from the influence that humans exerted on the environment in the past to the influence that a changed environment will exert on humans in the future.

In doing so, to me it becomes apparent that extrapolation of those historical interactions studied in the early days, leading to our crisis-ridden present, tends toward the retraction of history itself. The window of time, as well as the space for human action, threatens to become ever narrower. What looms is the end of humanity. The view of the future is increasingly a prehistoric one.

There definitely is a dispute about how activist environmental historians should be. I believe, however, that beyond that, there is an inherent tendency in environmental history itself to take back history in the emphatic sense. A loss of opportunities to be active is itself actively brought about.

I would like to bring this paradoxical role of environmental history into the debate of the Roundtable.