Internationally, environmental history is a discipline in growth. An increasing number of historians worldwide are turning their attention to the complex historical relationship between human societies and the natural world surrounding us. Originally rooted in studies of forestry and agriculture, the discipline has expanded its scope to encompass much broader areas of inquiry, including science, technology, politics, gender, and consumption. The insights that environmental history can offer are in increasing demand as the world attempts to cope with global climate change, new energy regimes, and questions about sustainable lifestyles.
Through environmental history, we can historicize not only environmental problems, but also environmental solutions – even nature itself. The research in the field has demonstrated how environmental science, politics, and values are rooted in time and space, mediated by a series of actors. As William Cronon [1] has argued, environmental history should not think in terms of environmental problems, but rather create complex environmental stories. To him – and us – environmental history is at least as important for the way it asks and answers questions – by analogy, metaphor, and parable and the search to discover their meanings – than for any specific problems it may actually solve.
Thus we come to the question of how environmental history can and should find its place in the Nordic university sector. The network and the workshop series will address a shared need among Nordic environmental historians. In the Nordic countries environmental history as a discipline has reached varying degrees of institutional support. Since the early 1990s, a series of researchers have initiated environmental history research projects, but few have been successful in developing long-term research groups. As in most European countries, environmental history is rarely formally represented in universities, research institutions or curricula. Research and teaching in the field of environmental history is done by individual scholars at various institutions and under different denotations.
Environmental history has a growing following in the Nordic countries. Some Nordic researchers, including Poul Holm formerly of Roskilde University Center, have been active in developing the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), which was founded in 2001. The first World Congress of Environmental History is being hosted in August 2009 at Roskilde University (Denmark) and Malmö University (Sweden). In addition, the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University are hosting the 6th ESEH conference in 2011. Yet there has been little Nordic-wide research coordination or network building activities.
The lack of institutionalization of environmental history can be seen in all of the Nordic countries. A study of Scandinavian environmental humanities and social science research completed in 2002 found, for example, that there were only five doctoral dissertations completed in history departments in Sweden from 1990 to 2001, but environmental history was the fourth largest category of externally funded environmental social science projects in Sweden [2]. In Finland, environmental history has been included in the curricula of various universities since the late 1980s. The years since then have witnessed a number of master’s, licentiate’s and doctor’s theses in the field, but the discipline does not have any teaching posts or study programmes of its own. While Danish universities have had some large interdisciplinary research projects, particularly on historic fisheries and landscapes, their efforts have not been integrated into a coherent environmental history offering in Denmark. Although the Research Council of Norway has instituted a large environmental project funding scheme called Miljø2015, few of the funded projects are historically focused. In addition, environmental historians tend to work on funded projects (rather than in tenured positions) in non-history departments, making coordination challenging. Iceland does not have an established environmental history group, although Reykjavík Academy is sponsoring a university week-long summer school called ”Local Environments – Global Impacts: Environmental and agricultural history of Iceland in global context” in June 2009. So while there is clearly research opportunity in the field, there has been little explicit focus on research training and cross-border collaboration.
We believe that environmental history is at a critical moment in time because of its relevance for current environmental issues, such as climate change, sustainable consumption, environmental knowledge, public acceptance of environmental science, etc. Current environmental problems should be set within their historic development in order to analyze not only the sources of the problems but also their potential solutions.
Funding regimes that have previously been hard to access for humanities are currently opening up (for instance, Norway is investing hundreds of millions of kroner in climate research and technology). Environmental historians now have the opportunity to tap into this funding and thus provide vital knowledge, but to do so requires critical reflection on what our contributions can be and how they can be framed to meet the needs of modern policymakers.
Nordic scholars generally come into environmental history from different sub-disiplines in history, from anthropology, from geography, from the natural sciences. European environmental history is thus more diverse than American environmental history which has tended to find its roots in history departments. While this gives Nordic environmental history a wealth of perspectives and sources to draw on, finding a common identity is challenging. The lack of a shared researcher training contributes to this challenge.
This network aims to support knowledge exchange and learning across borders and institutions. Since Nordic environmental historians are often located in an institution with few other environmental historians, there is a need to build stronger external networks and a sense of academic community. This also means that PhD students tend to get guidance on environmental history from a very limited number of scholars (often just their advisor), limiting their intellectual growth. Through a series of workshops in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark we will make strategies to continue this exchange and cooperation beyond original funding, especially through future collaborative research projects and a Nordic PhD course in environmental history. Through these activities we wish to increase Nordic scholars’ self-reflection on their own scholarly practice, as well as on the knowledge generated by the Nordic environmental history community.
References:
[1] William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 1-22.
[2] Lars J. Lundgren, Christer Nordlund, and Sofia Storbjörk, eds., Miljöns mänskliga dimension: En studie av humanistisk och samhällvetenskaplig miljöforskning, Stockholm: Vetenskapsrådet, 2002.
