The Contributions of Environmental History in Times of Social-Ecological Crisis: Insights from the Forest

In the face of current social-ecological crises, environmental history has important insights to contribute. However, large gaps remain between environmental history and contemporary sustainability sciences. I review the environmental history of forests and find that (1) the material environmental history of forests most explicitly addresses present-day challenges, e.g. in connection with nature conservation and climate-change mitigation; (2) cultural-intellectual environmental history touches upon present-day challenges more implicitly, but offers crucial insights on the historicity of scientific knowledge systems and their encounters with local knowledges; and (3) political environmental history refers to present-day challenges to varying degrees when dealing with forest-related conflicts and environmental justice, or exploring the intersections of forests and warfare. I propose that environmental history in general informs sustainability sciences by generating knowledge on (1) the emergence of present-day social-ecological crises, (2) temporalities in long-term social-ecological change, and (3) historical analogues for dealing with social-ecological challenges.

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .