ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how a rereading of the history of the European countryside can help us to construct a new narrative regarding the relationship between mankind and nature. For too long, practitioners of geography and history backed a model based on the exploitation of natural resources, the limits of which have become evident since the mid-1970s oil crisis and in the light of the current climate emergency. Studying European peasantries can teach us a lot about how to use natural resources without exhausting them. Indeed, as is shown here, recent historical studies have incorporated a socio-environmental approach.
Of course, an idealisation of peasant communities would be just as out of place – an error mirroring the uncritical acceptance of “modernisation” that became widespread during the post-1945 green revolution. As such, more recent rural historiography strives to understand the rationality of the organic peasantry and its unique capacity for innovation, often taking advantage of oral sources and family memories recovered by writers and local researchers. Having explored these issues, a consideration is made as to how the education system can play a role in students’ rediscovering the fascinating complexity of that relationship between land and people that stretches back through the centuries, improving production and feeding methods.
