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Judit Gil Farrero holds a degree in environmental sciences from the UAB and a PhD in history of science from the Centre for the History of Science (CEHIC), currently the Institute for the History of Science (iHC) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher in the Area of History and Economic Institutions of the Department of Applied Economics at the Universidad de Zaragoza. Her research topics focus on the study of environmental conflicts, the processes of protection of natural areas and the perception of nature and landscape.

1. What does environmental history offer us in the context of the current ecosocial crisis? Why is the historical perspective necessary for environmental justice?

Environmental history covers various fields, which are given more or less relevance according to personal interests and previous training, but in general terms, it seeks to broaden the historian's perspective by analyzing the history of human societies in continuous interaction with their natural environment. In my case, the environmental history topics I study (environmental conflicts) have an inherent part of politics of critique, protest, activism and vindication, which connects it directly to the current issue of environmental justice.

Current environmental struggles often have a long history, and history can provide an understanding of precedent, putting into context the inequalities and injustices that shape current realities. It is important to understand that many contemporary struggles have deep roots, and environmental history allows us to identify strategies for both the concealment and visibilization of conflicts, as well as helping to understand power differentials and political potential in these confrontations. For example, I may be studying what happened 50 years ago in a particular place, but it may be a history that is still alive.

A common mistake in environmental issues is to study them only from the present. Knowledge of the past is essential to understanding the present and fighting for informed and meaningful environmental justice in the future. It is necessary to know how these conflicts began, the actors involved and how they have evolved so as to act effectively and contextually over time, taking into account changing perspectives.

2. Why do you think an interdisciplinary perspective enriches historical research on environmental issues? What tools and methodologies do you use from different academic fields to conduct your research?

I believe that creating an interdisciplinary perspective in historical research on environmental issues is crucial. It can be seen metaphorically as a path in which, as we walk along it, we find different points and elements of interest that enrich the study, in this case tools and methodologies from different academic fields that allow us to deepen the analysis of complex situations or processes. This is a challenge, but also an opportunity, since these issues cannot be encapsulated in strict categories of “social” or “natural” or opaque dichotomies of “rural” or “urban”, because the interactions between human beings and their environment are intrinsically complex and dynamic.

Personally, in my research, I have not followed a consciously interdisciplinary strategy, but rather it has arisen from the need to understand the problems I was studying. I have been using elements from environmental history and the history of science, but also from economic history, political ecology, geography and environmental anthropology. For example, I began to study the history of the protection of the volcanic area of the Garrotxa region and I found that the perception of the landscape was very different between the person who goes to see it from the outside (urban) and the person who lives from the inside (rural). To better address what I was studying, I ended up using tools and methodologies from disciplines such as geography and anthropology. This approach has allowed me to address the issues in a more complete and effective way, as it helps me better understand the dynamics of environmental conflicts and their roots. Using tools and methodologies from other disciplines enriches the research and allows for a more careful treatment of the problems studied, overcoming the limitations of a single discipline.

3. How has environmental activism changed between current and previous generations, especially in the context of the climate crisis?

It depends on the generation and the particular historical era. Generations X and Z, who are facing the climate issue head-on, may be much more aware of environmental justice than other generations. But I don't think young people are more activist than other age groups (although they are more aware), certainly not in academia. There is a whole generation of environmental activists from the 1970s and 1980s, especially academics in biology and geology, who were fully engaged. They may not be as involved in today's climate activism, but they were involved in safeguard campaigns and environmental activism, such as anti-nuclear campaigns, to stop the unbridled development of the system during the political transition.

It is complicated to compare the current context with the 1980s or even the early 2000s, because they are very different contexts, and it is easy to fall into anachronisms. Strategies that worked at one time may not work now, because the context and situation have changed significantly. One of the current difficulties with the climate issue is to get out of these pessimistic catastrophic narratives, which are obviously justified by the circumstances. This is an abysmal difference with the generation of that time, where there was a collective enthusiasm and a feeling that “everything was to be done and everything was possible”. The consolidation of individualism in recent decades is closely related to an individual anguish in the face of climate issues. This generally makes the issue of participating in an association not as common, unlike in the 70s and 80s, when associationism and collectivism were very powerful, especially after having been banned during Franco's dictatorship. The context of each era is very important to understand the forms of activism. I am not saying that the context is the only cause, but it is very relevant, because if it is not considered, an important part of the circumstances that allowed certain events to occur is lost.

4. In your research, you talk about the change in the perception of the mountain landscape during the 20th century. Could you give some examples of how the perception of these natural landscapes has changed?

In general, in the West there has been a notable change in the way society perceives nature, and the mountains in particular, which began in the 17th-18th centuries and which, among other aspects, was reflected in the creation of the figure of the national park in the USA in the last decades of the 19th century. The national park was born from the idea that there were pieces of “untouched” or “unanthropized” nature, an idea that was strongly related to mountain landscapes. These landscapes were perceived as more natural than urban or even rural landscapes, which led to the declaration of many protected mountain areas for decades.

However, from a rural perspective, the mountain was traditionally seen as a place with productive land, where terraces could be created to cultivate and use the land for the primary sector, where livestock could be raised, and the resources offered by the forests could be exploited. When natural spaces began to be protected, mountain landscapes were considered to be the most suitable. The implementation of conservationist policies in these areas, which limit or may limit the use of natural resources by rural communities, generated rejection among the rural population. However, in recent decades these limitations are not considered so important because the primary sector has lost much weight globally, and these areas had experienced significant depopulation in previous decades.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, there have been significant changes in the perception and protection of natural landscapes. As I already mentioned, at first, mainly mountain areas and majestic and abrupt landscapes were protected. But since a few decades ago, the type of nature or landscape worthy of protection has expanded considerably, and now areas that are perceived as more humanized and that do not have spectacular landscapes, such as wetlands, are also protected, because other values beyond the landscape are taken into account. Examples of this change of perception in Catalonia are the protection of the Ebre delta, the Llobregat delta and the Empordà wetlands. Previously, these areas were viewed negatively: wetlands were associated with malaria, which is practically endemic to these environments, and they were often drained for this reason and to convert them into farmland. Another example of change in the perception of what deserves to be protected is the volcanic area of the Garrotxa region, where in the early 1970's the local population did not know that it was a volcanic territory, and in general the geology was not considered a value to be protected. During the transition and first years of democracy, with the environmental education that the safeguarding campaigns carried out in the Garrotxa and the Empordà and the political changes, a change of perception was achieved, and these areas became protected and emblematic natural areas.

5. How does the conversion of a natural landscape into a national park affect local/rural activities?

When in 1916 the national park concept, imported from the USA, was applied in Spain, the idea was that the declared area would be totally protected, so there were limits on who was allowed to be in that area and what could be done there. Agricultural and livestock activities were restricted (depending on the legislation and the specific context, obviously) and logging was prohibited. As an alternative, local communities, whose use of the natural resources of the then protected area was limited, were offered tourism as an economic source. It was a tertiarization of the space: from a productive use linked to the primary sector to a perception of the landscape as a place for leisure and tourism, of the tertiary sector. In other words, it changed who was allowed to be in that area: the farmer, stockbreeder or lumberjack cannot, the tourist can.

Today, natural mountain areas are no longer productive spaces, but leisure spaces. Most of the money moves in that area is related to tourism: mountain races, skiing, etc., and not to the primary sector. This is a general trend throughout Europe, but we have a clear example in the Pyrenees. Mountains are no longer productive spaces in general: agriculture is economically unviable, forestry is a minority and only extensive livestock farming is maintained, with aids such as the common agricultural policy (CAP), among others. The sector that generates the greatest income is tourism, and also has significant public investment (just think of the ski slopes acquired or managed by the Government of Catalonia).

6. You say that narratives are created about natural spaces, about what is “natural” and what is “artificial”, but in reality, many natural spaces are no longer natural because they have been modified by humans. How does the conversion to a National Park affect a natural landscape?

The discussion about what is natural and what is artificial varies depending on the context and the person. For example, someone may say that “cows in a mountain landscape” is natural, but it is still a domesticated animal. In the western world, human beings are not considered “natural”, on the weekend people from Barcelona go to the nature, so nature is something that is outside of us. The rhetoric of what is natural or not is complex. Everyone uses these dichotomies, and we need them to communicate. Clearly there are environments that are much less anthropically altered and therefore considered more natural, but changing the conceptions of natural and artificial could help to see nature for what it is, dynamic, and not some kind of static image, as landscapes considered “natural” are often perceived.

By observing a landscape and the species present, one can know the changes of uses it has had throughout history. But here the main discussion is to what extent, the moment we take an area that has been exploited for centuries and leave it without human intervention, it becomes “natural”. Nature is wise, but if we have impacted a forest for years and suddenly abandon it, the dynamics of the vegetation have changed with respect to those of a forest where there has never been human intervention, and its behavior as well, and this can provoke or favor unforeseen events such as fires, as we have seen in recent years with the unmanaged reforestation of some areas of Catalonia. It can be compared, for example, to a caged bird that, if released, does not know how to feed itself because it has always been caged.

7. You comment that access to resources depends on the power structures of society, gender, class, etc. Do you have any examples?

When they began to build reservoirs in the 1910s in the Vall Fosca (Pallars Jussà), the hydroelectric company granted some concessions to the municipality of Torre de Cabdella related to the supply of water and electricity, such as a pipeline, money to make a public fountain, installation of public lighting lamps and the private lighting network, and free supply for public lighting and for two lamps per house. The inhabitants of the municipalities of Torre de Cabdella and Mont-ros also acquired perpetual advantages in the installation of the distribution networks and in the price of electricity. But this was only in some villages, which were affected by the works of the hydroelectric company. However, nearby villages did not have electricity until the 1970s. The light was produced much closer to them than anywhere in the city, but it  was not made available there. Therefore, electricity was not to bring light to the villages, it was to bring it to the industries and to the city. This is internal colonialism: you manage the territory from an office in Barcelona, from the city, according to your interests.

Another example: much is invested in fixing the roads that go up and down from Barcelona, but the different valleys that are between the mountains are poorly communicated with each other. It should be added that many roads in the Pallars and Ribagorça regions were built by the hydroelectric companies for their interests, but not for the local community, so there were villages that were never reached by road.

8. You argue that local/rural people are marginalized from political power and decisions(despite being in the front line of natural spaces), and that science does not consider this (local) knowledge to be legitimate. Why?

Different social structures, power relations and political potentials also produce an unequal distribution of environmental costs among different human groups according to ethnicity, gender, social class or age. Decisions taken at the administrative or corporate level to open a mine, build a dam, locate a landfill or build a ski slope have generally not taken into account the opinion of the people they affect.

In the case of the creation of a protected natural area, for decades the rural population has perceived it as an imposition from the administration in which, in addition, the knowledge that the local population has of the environment and its management is not considered. This local knowledge, different from scientific knowledge, is delegitimized by science, which has managed these areas. This is a subject that has been extensively studied by anthropologists. For example, in the Los Alcornocales Natural Park, in Cadiz, they are suffering from root rot, a disease that affects cork oaks and is killing them. The officials are trying to find solutions without taking into account the local population, who have worked all their lives pulling cork and know the environment, and who see how their local knowledge, a knowledge of the land inherited from generations, is being ignored, while decisions are being made by people who do not know the territory. Politicians and science (i.e. conservation management) pretend that the territory is theirs and manage it, but they cannot ignore the people who live there, who know the land, who are affected by this management and who demand to be part of the decision making and management of the protected natural area.