Presentation of Environmental History Dossier

Abstract

In 1989 Augusto Angel Maya, one of the pioneers of environmental studies in Colombia, warned about the delay of the historical method in allowing itself to be questioned by environmental issues. In advocating the "need for an environmental history" he criticized that the old rationality detached social events from their natural surroundings and that landscape is the explanatory root of social and symbolic activity. Since then, his reflections have become fertile ground for a discipline that, without much fuss, has been carving out a new scenario of studies and reflections on the critical past-present-future relations in the context of increasingly pressing socio-environmental conditions for humanity and especially for the most vulnerable sectors of society.

This dossier is a response to the demands and claims of Angel Maya insofar as it presents readers with the results of research in the field of environmental history from the thematic and methodological point of view, as proof that its reception is not a fad or a whim driven by the threats of Climate Change or Covid 19. On the contrary, it is the proof that today environmental history has an increasingly active place among the new historiographies that are bursting into the academic and citizen sphere, as a spur to the misfortunes of progress, conflicts and the teachings of past generations. It is not only the "narrative that emerges from the defeated nature", as one of the authors affirms, but also the possibility of bringing to the present the arrangements that different societies agreed to survive.