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Anniversary Forum
Euro-English and the Art of Environmental History
Petra J. E. M. Van Dam
| ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY transcends national boundaries. Maybe in Europe this is even truer than in the United States.1 Europeans share large ecosystems that are not confined by national boundaries. Among them are seas (Baltic, North, Mediterranean), mountains (Pyrenees, Alps, Carpathians) and rivers: The river Rhine cuts through four different countries where people speak at least three different languages (German, French, Dutch). Furthermore, Europeans profit from studying large issues of environmental history in a comparative perspective, yet in the context of national histories: Urban hygiene from the late Middle Ages onward, industrial pollution from early modern times onward, and landscape destruction due to the collapse of agriculture in our time are phenomena that appeared all over Europe, but in all sorts of variants. |
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Why do such environmental topics gain from cross-national research? Of course the general background of our history is European culture. Describe it whatever way you want, but Europeans had and have a shared system of norms and beliefs, traditions, and even art styles, originating in our common ancient and medieval Romano-Germanic-Christian roots. Also, our legacy of wars means that the borders within Europe have changed many times, and migration has been a normal thing for millennia. Since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, this mixture has been enriched with increasingly important norms about political, economic and personal freedom—norms that are reflected in the basic features of our societies' institutions, be they laws, education structures, or environmental-protection bodies. In daily lives and scholarly practice, however, we are not so intrigued by basic similarities; mainly we are busy overcoming all sorts of practical cultural differences. One of the most urgent for me is language. |
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The need for a universal language is not new in Europe, but we have arrived at a new phase of development. Until the end of the Middle Ages, all scholars communicated in Latin, the language of the long-deceased Roman Empire, and for many of them this continued well into the eighteenth century. Newton still published his treatises in Latin, but Darwin did so in English. Publishing is important for international communication, but today this is not sufficient anymore, because the oral means of communication are increasing in scope and frequency. This development had started already with the rise of modern transportation, but with the increase in the number of conferences and the advent of e-mail, the trend entered a new phase. For, to be sure, e-mailing is closer to conversation than to writing. One does not take time to consult a dictionary, let alone a translator. So we have a new phase of international communication that is more oriented toward oral use of language than ever before. |
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In Europe, so far, one of the important ways we have solved the problems with the dozens of languages is what I call the regional system. The languages of the largest countries have come to serve as secondary languages in the surrounding countries. Consequently, most European scholars read at least one, and often two other languages besides their native language, and many also speak one or more languages, particularly if they come from small countries. Research groups operate in several languages and at conferences do so even simultaneously! How does it work? Recently I attended the well-organized "Third Round Table for Urban Environmental History" in Siena, Italy. The contributors came from at least five different cultures, predominantly from the west and south, and the conference languages were English and French. As a result, we had papers presented in the one conference language, while speakers projected a translation in the other language on a screen behind them. For presentations this works fairly well, but for discussions and informal conversations one has to choose. (I have experienced a conference with translators and headphones too, but that is cumbersome; most translators are simply not specialized enough, apart from the fact that this is an extremely costly way of overcoming language differences). |
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