Reply To: September 22: Sverker Sörlin's History is a Nightmare

Rely to Anna from Yaqi Fu

Good reflection and good organization of our seminar! Thank you!

Our seminar is wonderful, letting our reason, understanding, invention, passion and what more make a chorus. The chorus is of environmental history. In this chorus, I see in your reflection, your comment on each work and your show of own vibe. I hope I could get it, or part of it, your vibe that “a broader practice of environmental history” is necessary. The broadness of broadness is actual our environmental history, but to achieve such broadness it’s hard, and even harder to get something beyond broadness. Besides the broadness, there are other dimensionalities which I hope our environmental history can also have the possibilities to reach, for example, simplicity, deepness and delicacy.

As you mentioned, “This introductory chapter was too concerned with Euro-centric examples”, but besides Europe what he can talk about, and talk with responsibilities? Maybe no, maybe it’s hard to know. The Euro-centric view, is grand, vivid, consistent, and of no harm as it be, because it’s the span of knowledge for most European scholars, and maybe North Americans as well. The wisdom of an expert is, knowing what one know, and saying nothing about unknown.