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

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.