This book is the product of the 2nd World Conference on
Environmental History, held in Guimarães, Portugal, in 2014. It gathers
works by authors from the five continents, addressing concerns raised by
past events so as to provide information to help manage the present and
the future. It reveals how our cultural background and examples of past
territorial intervention can help to combat political and cultural
limitations through the common language of environmental benefits
without disguising harmful past human interventions.
Considering that political ideologies such as socialism and capitalism,
as well as religion, fail to offer global paradigms for common ground,
an environmentally positive discourse instead of an ecological
determinism might serve as an umbrella common language to overcome
blocking factors, real or invented, and avoid repeating ecological loss.
Therefore, agency, environmental speech and historical research are
urgently needed in order to sustain environmental paradigms and overcome
political, cultural an economic interests in the public arena.
This book intertwines reflections on our bonds with landscapes,
processes of natural and scientific transfer across the globe, the
changing of ecosystems, the way in which scientific knowledge has
historically both accelerated destruction and allowed a better
distribution of vital resources or as it, in today's world, can offer
alternatives that avoid harming those same vital natural resources:
water, soil and air. In addition, it shows the relevance of cultural
factors both in the taming of nature in favor of human comfort and in
the role of the environment matters in the forging of cultural
identities, which cannot be detached from technical intervention in the
world.
In short, the book firstly studies the past, approaching it as a data
set of how the environment has shaped culture, secondly seeks to
understand the present, and thirdly assesses future perspectives: what
to keep, what to change, and what to dream anew, considering that
conventional solutions have not sufficed to protect life on our planet.
