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

英国的国家公园为探讨自然和文化系统如何和谐共存提供了理想的场所。在英国退出欧盟后环境危机和环境管理政策发生巨大变化的时代，本研究项目的核心宗旨是环境史领域对解决21世纪英国国家公园面临的复杂挑战有很大贡献。在1945年的报告中，约翰·道尔使用了“美丽且相对野生”这个词，该报告为1949年的《国家公园和乡村准入法案》奠定了基础，该法案在英格兰和威尔士建立了国家公园。约翰·道尔承认，在决定国家哪些地区值得特别保护时，自然和文化在根本上是重叠的。作为一个研究人类与非人类自然关系的领域，环境史的理想定位是将人文社会科学的方法与自然科学的视角结合起来研究国家公园。因此，环境史对英国国家公园的有效管理做出开创性贡献的潜力在很大程度上仍未实现。在实践环境史应用方法的基础上，该奖学金项目采用跨学科和多尺度的方法，在三个不同但相互关联的尺度上研究国家公园的历史：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（参与埃克斯穆尔沿海森林的合作项目）。在每一个尺度上，通过PI的国际经验和国际国家公园学者对项目的参与，将提供更广泛的背景。国家、地区和地方的尺度构成了该项目的三个研究线索。在第一个研究线索中，研究英国所有15个国家公园历史的专家，以及4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学术编辑集，集中在英国国家公园的环境历史上，这将由PI和PDRA编辑。为了确保该研讨会具有强大的应用维度，来自Exmoor国家公园和Exmoor协会的项目合作伙伴以及来自DEFRA，国民信托和Parks UK等组织的合作者参加了研讨会。为了让更广泛的公众参与到这部分工作中来，研讨会期间将在市政厅、乡村教堂、山地农场和假日公园等地点举行一系列广泛的公众参与活动，重点关注比较国家公园的历史。第二条研究线索是PI撰写的关于埃克斯穆尔国家公园从二十世纪早期到中期到现在的历史的学术专著。通过关注国家公园本身的历史，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所面临的挑战，再次从历史经验中吸取教训，为当前的管理政策提供信息。在第三条研究线索中，PI和PDRA将与公园管理人员和研究伙伴合作，研究埃克斯穆尔海岸森林的环境历史。由于政府计划在全国范围内种植数千公顷的树木，作为其减缓气候变化努力的一部分，这是一个特别重要的当代地区。更好地了解该地区的环境历史将有助于显示过去植树造成的紧张局势，以便预测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.