Environmental history
The environmental history is a science that deals with the long-term development of the interactions of people with their natural or cultured environment.
Issues
An important approach to environmental history is to ( human and environmental ) to see from both perspectives, as opposed to a deterministic approach which only asks the extent to which environmental conditions have effects on social developments. Thus, the environmental history asks quite on one side caused not by man-made environmental changes (eg, ice ages ) and their impact on human history. The focus of their interest, however, are on the other side of the present in the various epochs social nature images, the development of human knowledge about nature, the social rules of natural intercourse (environmental policy, environmental law), the changes in economic and ways of life, the consequences for the environment and the effects on human societies.
An essential performance of environmental history is the sober consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of the natural handling of earlier cultures. In delineation of enthusiastic idealization of earlier eras to " golden ages ", in which people supposedly lived in harmony with nature
Institutionalization
The environmental history began in the 1960s as a sub-discipline of history, but has soon developed into an interdisciplinary area of research which makes reference to numerous human sciences and scientific disciplines, including philosophy, history, or the history of ideas, history of science (eg, medical history ) and history of folk knowledge gained through experience, legal history, political history ( eg history of environmental policy ), economic history, history of technology. Closely related disciplines are geography, environmental sociology, environmental psychology and environmental policy. Despite its interdisciplinary orientation, the environmental history remains an important area of historical research. Own chairs for the field of environmental history at historical institutes in Germany, however, rare; usually it is therefore operated under other names chair, as the history of technology, urban history or modern history. Part of Lehrstuhldenominationen is the field at the Ruhr- University Bochum and at the Technical University of Darmstadt. German -speaking representatives of environmental historical research include Joachim Radkau, Rolf Peter Sieferle, Bernd Herrmann, Frank Uekötter, Franz -Josef Bruges Meier, Dieter Schott, Verena Winiwarter, Christian Pfister, Christof Mauch, Wolfram Siemann, Martin Knoll and Cornel Zwierlein.