The article analyzes the emergence of environmental history as a self-conscious science in the historical and cultural context of the passage of the twentieth to the twenty-first century. He defines environmental history as an open and non-reductive investigation of the interactions between social systems and natural systems over time. Also discussed are the sociological factors and the fundamental epistemological issues present in the constitution of this new historiographical field.

Environmental history; Ecological history; Theory of history; Interdisciplinary dialogue; Conceptions of Nature