Theoretical aspects of historical science and the environment

Abstract

The action framework of historical science is increasingly changing. Historians have begun to analyze the historical sources from a different approach that includes topics related to social environment problems. Hence, history is the latest science approaching ecological issues within a  social-historical context. This was not so until recently because it was too enclosed within a social and political methodological context, where   historians continued depicting nature as something external and  mechanical. Environmental history studies the relation between society and its natural background in time and space, through the implementation of development models or the big social-economical stages and its corresponding lifestyles, forms, and production-consumption relations. The social-economical historians will look for an equilibrium between the analysis of natural processes, the eco-central vision and the description of the relevant social processes, or the anthropological central-market vision.  Historians may contribute a lot in the discussion about the never-ending            environment problems.