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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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How does the regional system work when it comes to publications? The Urban Round Table group publishes its proceedings in volumes that contain both contributions in English and French and also has a title in the two languages, for instance, Le Démon Moderne—La pollution dans les sociétés urbaines et industrielles d'Europe/The Modern Demon—Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies. This solution to the language problem may work very well now and for the region this conference drew its participants from, but one wonders what future it has, in particular for more formally organized research at a pan-European scale. Also, only a few publishers accept multilingual books. |
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Organizing research programs that transcend national boundaries is feasible, for "European" funding exists, coming from the European Union (cost.cordis.lu) and from the European Science Foundation (www.esf.org), which is a kind of independent small EU for scholars only. In reality, however, research groups often tend to keep things simple and set up programs with only one or two groups in neighboring countries. A curious result is the recent publication of a report of such a modest project dealing with medieval water mills in the area between the Rhine and Schelde rivers. The thin book consists of three highly specialized contributions in German, French, and Dutch, but the introduction and summary are translated in all three languages. Of course this book has a title in all three languages: Abijmolens tussen Rijn en Schelde/Moulins abbatieux entre Rhin et Escaut/Abteimühlen zwischen Rhein und Schelde. |
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None of what I indicate here on the diversity of languages in Europe and the confusions and costs it creates for cross-national research is new. But in environmental history something is new. In 1999 a European Society for Environmental History was founded and we chose to use one language only: English. The radical choice for (Euro-) English has some disadvantages. For people with a strong background in the humanities who cherish languages as cultural treasures, like me, it feels miserable to use a foreign language and realize that one is constantly damaging it because one is simply not well-trained enough. Also, one feels constantly hampered by a lack of skills to express exactly the nuances one uses in the native language. Environmental history, perhaps more so for those coming from the humanities than from the sciences, is a lot about historical changes of morals and values that are necessarily culturally bounded. Here language is very sensitive too. Furthermore, a sad practical disadvantage of the choice of one language is that some European governments give grants only for congresses if scholars use their national language for the paper. So at the ESEH meetings, some regions of Europe are remarkably underrepresented. |
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However, in the long term, what is the alternative? Probably we do not have to answer this question. The future for European scholars is being influenced already by semi-independent social-economic and social-political developments. When I was a student, now twenty years ago, in my country all students in the humanities had two to three foreign languages in their intellectual baggage upon arriving at the university. Now this has been reduced to English only. High pressures on the school system have eroded the language component to the advantage of new subjects such as computer sciences and social skills. So, many of the publications of my fellow colleagues in Europe, the very people I meet at conferences and with whom I e-mail regularly, cannot be used in my seminars anymore. A strong need for English-language literature written by specialists about European environmental history has risen. |
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Filling in the gap of cross-national literature is certainly one of the next big tasks for environmental history in Europe. |
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Petra J. E. M. van Dam specializes in the pre-industrial environmental history of northwestern Europe. Currently she is a research fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of the Netherlands, affiliated with the Free University, Amsterdam. In the ESEH she serves as representative of the Benelux.
Notes
1. For a recent state of the art, see Verena Winiwarter, et al., eds., "Environmental History in Europe from 1994 to 2004: Enthusiasm and Consolidation," Environment and History 4 (2004): 501-30.
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