Beautiful and Relatively Wild: Applied Environmental Histories of Britain's National Parks

英国的国家公园是探讨自然和文化系统如何和谐共存的理想场所。在环境危机和英国退出欧盟后环境管理政策发生巨大变化的时候，这项研究项目的一个核心原则是，环境历史领域对解决英国国家公园在21世纪面临的复杂挑战有很大贡献。约翰·道尔在1945年的一份报告中使用了“美丽和相对野生的”一词，该报告为1949年的《国家公园和进入乡村法案》奠定了基础，该法案在英格兰和威尔士创建了国家公园。约翰·道尔承认，在决定英国哪些地区应该受到特别保护时，自然和文化的根本重叠。作为一个研究人类与非人类本性之间关系的领域，环境史非常适合在研究国家公园时将人文和社会科学的方法与自然科学的观点结合起来。因此，环境历史在很大程度上仍有潜力为英国国家公园的有效管理做出开创性的贡献。在实施基于关键自然地理学(CPG)见解的环境历史应用方法时，该奖学金项目采用了跨学科和多标度的方法，在三个不同但相互关联的尺度上审查国家公园历史：国家(英国国家公园作为一个整体)、区域(英格兰西南部的埃克斯穆尔国家公园)和地方(参与关于埃克斯穆尔沿海森林的合作项目)。在这些规模中的每一个，都将通过PI的国际经验和国际国家公园学者对该项目的参与来提供更广泛的背景。国家、区域和地方尺度构成了该项目的三条研究主线。在第一个研究线索中，英国所有15个国家公园的历史专家，以及四位国际国家公园历史学家，将被邀请到埃克斯穆尔国家公园参加一个研讨会，该研讨会将产生第一个专注于英国国家公园整体环境历史的学术编辑集，这本集将由PI和PDRA编辑。为了确保此次研讨会具有强大的应用性，来自埃克斯穆尔国家公园和埃克斯穆尔协会的项目合作伙伴以及来自DEFRA、国家信托基金和英国公园等组织的合作者参加了研讨会。为了让更广泛的公众参与这一部分的工作，研讨会期间将在市政厅、乡村教堂、山区农场和度假公园等地点举行一系列广泛的公众参与活动，重点是比较国家公园的历史。第二条研究主线是由PI撰写一部关于埃克斯穆尔国家公园从20世纪初到中期的起源到现在的历史的学术专著。通过关注公园本身的历史，这本书将突出国家公园在平衡全球、国家和地方优先事项以及调解土地使用冲突方面面临的挑战，同样是为了从历史经验中学习，为当前的管理政策提供参考。在第三个研究线索中，PI和PDRA将与公园管理者和研究伙伴合作，审查埃克斯穆尔沿海森林的环境历史。这是一个特别具有当代重要性的地区，因为政府计划在全国各地种植数千公顷的树木，作为其缓解气候变化努力的一部分。更好地了解这一区域的环境历史将有助于显示过去植树在哪里造成了紧张，以便预见和避免目前不必要的问题。

Britain's national parks offer ideal locations for asking how natural and cultural systems can co-exist harmoniously. At a time of both environmental crisis and tremendous change in environmental management policy following the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union, a core tenet of this research project is that the field of environmental history has much to contribute to addressing the complex challenges facing Britain's national parks in the twenty first century. In using the phrase 'beautiful and relatively wild' in the 1945 report that laid the basis for the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, which created national parks in England and Wales, John Dower acknowledged the fundamental overlap of nature and culture in deciding which parts of the country would merit special protection. As a field that studies human relations with non-human nature over time, environmental history is ideally positioned to integrate humanities and social science approaches with perspectives from the natural sciences in studying national parks. As such, environmental history has the still largely unfulfilled potential to make a ground-breaking contribution to the effective management of Britain's national parks. In putting into practice an applied approach to environmental history based on applying insights from Critical Physical Geography (CPG), this fellowship project adopts an interdisciplinary and multi-scalar approach that examines national park history at three distinct but interconnected scales: national (UK national parks as a whole), regional (Exmoor National Park in South West England), and local (participation in a collaborative project on Exmoor's coastal forests). At each of these scales, broader context will be provided through the PI's international experiences and the involvement of international national park scholars in the project. The national, regional, and local scales constitute the three research threads of the project. In the first research thread, specialists on the histories of all fifteen of Britain's national parks, along with four international national park historians, will be invited to Exmoor National park for a workshop which will produce the first academic edited collection focused on the environmental history of Britain's national parks as a whole, which will be edited by the PI and PDRA. To make sure this workshop has a strong applied dimension, project partners from Exmoor National Park and the Exmoor Society participate in the workshop, along with collaborators from organizations such as DEFRA, the National Trust, and Parks UK. To involve the wider public in this part of the work, an extensive series of public engagement activities focused on comparative national park history will be held during the workshop in locations such as town halls, villages churches, hill farms, and holiday parks. The second research thread is the writing of an academic monograph by the PI on the history of Exmoor National Park from its origins in the early-to-mid twentieth century to the present. By focusing on the history of the park itself, this book will highlight the challenges faced by a national park in balancing global, national, and local priorities and mediating in land use conflicts, again with the goal of learning from historical experiences to inform current management policy. In the third research thread the PI and the PDRA will work with park managers and research partners to examine the environmental history of Exmoor's coastal forests. This is an area of particular contemporary importance as a result of the government's plans to plant thousands of hectares of trees across the country as part of its climate mitigation efforts. A better understanding of the environmental history of this region will help to show where tree planting has created tensions in the past in order to anticipate and avoid unnecessary problems in the present.