Foreword to New Publication Series

This volume is the first in a new series “Environment and Society,” brought out by the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental History, an international humanities research institute based at LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum. This series will publish between two and four volumes annually on topics concerned with the relationship between humans and their natural environment in all its diversity. These volumes will primarily be monographs, but may also include essay collections. The express aim of this new book series is to become the foremost German-language resource for contributions from the humanities to historical and current debates about environment and society.

The three editors of this series are historians, each of whom found their own unique path into environmental history. In this spirit they hope to encourage authors from a variety of disciplines to contribute their work. Like the Rachel Carson Center itself, the series is conceived as a forum for different subjects, providing a platform for debate on historical and current questions and problems. This approach is a call for fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue.  In addition, it is also a challenge to the various disciplines to produce sophisticated and transferable knowledge.  The quality of the research presented and the questions raised are more important to the editors than inter-professional disputes about where exactly boundaries should be drawn.

The environment is a field that calls for a broad sweep of approaches and a wide range of methods. The title of our series, “Environment and Society,” stands to reflect this thematic and methodological openness. It serves as an invitation to a dialogue between humanities, natural sciences and social sciences. There are good reasons for the dominance of natural science and technological research in our era of ecological crisis and global climate politics; but this one-sided focus on nature and technology risks losing sight of the human participation in the changes to the natural environment and of the cultural consequences of these changes. This is where the “Environment and Society” series aims to redress the balance. Central to our philosophy is the conviction that human ideologies, interests and visions have played a key role in our cultural interaction with nature – and this philosophy is crucial for an understanding of ecological changes which is not limited to isolated rescue packages by economists and politicians.

Broad definitions and methodological pluralism are the ideal characteristics of the first volume in the series, which quite consciously is not a classical work of environmental history, but a history of the science of German agriculture. This study not only concentrates on ecological aspects, but discusses these in the context of social, economic, technical and cultural factors. That it was conceived as a history of science makes it clear that environmental history has no programmatic or exclusive methodology to employ, but rather profits from its broad basis in historical studies as a whole.

This first volume in our series, with its topicality and provocation, is proof of the best that humanities research has to offer. The author is able, in a sense, to have the best of several worlds, in presenting the arguments of all the various fractions in the agricultural discourse. He also criticizes the myth of agricultural science without presenting “good” organic farming as the saviour of “evil” conventional agriculture: the consumer too is presented as a thoroughly ambivalent actor. The study concludes that in the current agricultural debate, there are a number of important questions which have not even been asked, and which only arise as a consequence of this historical analysis. How is it that environmental politics have been nowhere less successful than in the agricultural sector? Did agricultural developments in the 19th century, which among their successes can count the eradication of hunger, simultaneously lead to an erosion of knowledge with consequences that are with us today? This work lays bare the workings of agricultural knowledge transfer which underpin the ecological problems of the modern industrial-agricultural complex, giving fresh momentum not only to the way that science history is understood, but also to environmental debates today.