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Response to Kristina’s post
Thank you Kristina for your thoughtful post. I agree with you that it is nothing new for us as students of environmental history that we should be extremely careful about the information we get when we live in a world of endless overflow of information. Indeed, in our first semester we had the chance to take a course extremely useful with Benjamin Martin “Theory and methods in thesis work” where the importance of being critical towards every historical source has been highlighted. Rackham himself stated that we should multiply the sources of evidence before drawing conclusions. In historical ecology, we should keep in mind that what may be true for a place does not necessarily apply somewhere else. For example it is often accepted that trees protect the soil from erosion but this is not completely true in the case of Greece.
As students of environmental history, if we lack understanding of ecological systems, we should be extremely careful when reading about past scientific data. We might be tempted to oversimplify the facts in order to make sense of them, just as you pointed out.
I tend to regret that I do not have much knowledge in the natural sciences field and thus am subject to overgeneralize historical ecology and not being accurate enough in my interpretations of the past. Hence, I wish to learn more in the natural sciences field so that I can avoid to get stuck in the “pseudo-ecology” Rackham writes about.
To conclude, I agree with you that it would have been interesting to get Rackham’s opinion on present day Greece’s ecology but it seemed that he is more interested in studying the past without necessarily making a connection with the present or even the future. This is quite different from other historical ecologists such as Carole Crumley who work for finding solutions towards a sustainable future.
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