Environmental History between Institutionalization and Revolution: A Short Commentary with Two Sites and One Experiment

Environmental history was born with the promise to shift the focus of his-tory from humans to nature. Indeed, it was a revolution for such a deeply 'human- centric' discipline as history. It is a matter of debate how much, or even whether, environmental historians have been able to place nature at the centre of their analysis. We have had several kinds of environmental history, each with different approaches, priorities, and narratives, thereby, with a different degree of 'anthropocentrism'. There is no doubt that, historically, environmental historians have pursued the ambitious project to overcome the great divide that separates hard sciences from humanities. Since the beginning, geologists, foresters, biologists, and ecologists were the primary interlocutors. Environmental historians were supposed to learn the 'foreign languages' of those disciplines-- to use Donald Worster's words-- if they wanted to understand the book of nature. The other side of the coin has been a rather frail relationship with history and, in general, with the humanities. In this chapter I aim to explore the contribution of environmental history in the shaping of the environmental humanities, in particular reflecting on the dialectic between adaptation to/ transformation of the broader academic and disciplinary context.