Notes from the Edges. Environmental History Writing in a Mediterranean “Periphery”

Abstract

Associated with the emergence since the 1970s of an environmental consciousness and activism among the middle classes of Western Europe and North America, environmental history has been constituted as an academic field of the “core” not only institutionally but also epistemologically. For it was mainly the historical experiences of the so-called developed world, with the industrialization as central process, that laid the theoretical ground and shaped the agenda of the field.

But what about environmental history writing in the “periphery”?

Based on the Greek example, this paper examines the impact of specific socio-economic, political and historical realities and of the epistemological traditions on the ways historians deal with the environment. While “nature” and its derivatives has served both as one of the main categories of perceiving Greece and the Greeks in Europe since the eighteenth century and as a means of self-promotion in the world tourism market, the environment has rarely been the focus of historiographic reflection and research in Greece. Recently, and especially after the outbreak of the financial crisis in Greece, this situation seems to be changing. The rapid privatization of natural resources has provoked protests that rendered the environment and the concepts of the “commons” and the “public” into central notions of a political vocabulary and turned some scholars’ attention to environmental history.

The paper presents some first samples of this new research activity and discusses the methodological and theoretical issues that a Greek environmental history is confronted with. Inscribed in the broader Mediterranean context, Greek environmental history is marked by the bipolar way in which the environmental history of the wider Mediterranean region has been conceived, namely either as a history of degradation and disaster, or as a history of continuity. Both disaster and continuity serve as keys for understanding environmental, economic, social, political and cultural phenomena in the region. In this prospect, environmental degradation or/and continuity, economic and technological backwardness, social and cultural primitivism are seen as interrelated versions of a Mediterranean essence. On the other hand, the strong impression of the modernization schema in the Greek and overall Mediterranean historiography reduces the environmental history to a search for differences and divergences from an “ideal type”, namely to a history of absences and negativities.

Finally, using as case of study the Greek forests during the Ottoman era (fifteenth – nineteenth century) the paper attempts to offer an alternative reading of the environmental history of the area that rejects the disaster narrative and, instead of the idea of continuity, it promotes the study of the various adaptions to the environmental challenges of the region. In this perspective, the environmental history of the “periphery” is not conceived as “what it’s not” in comparison to the environmental history of Western Europe and North America, but as a paradigm that could enrich or question some of the fundamental assumptions of the discipline.