This wide-ranging edited volume offers an overview of many of the questions and topics of environmental history relevant to the city of Kraków since the Middle Ages. Presenting itself as the first book-length study in Polish dedicated entirely to environmental history (p. 4),1 its contributions by historians, climatologists, and archaeologists range thematically from climate, pollution, and plants to economics and industry. Elegantly translated and revised from the 2018 original, the individual chapters collectively suggest that Kraków's topography and the city's heavy reliance on its near surroundings hindered its medieval and early modern growth until nineteenth-century technologies enabled a shifting relationship between the urban core and the surrounding countryside while also imposing new ecological challenges. While some restrictions were due to geographical limitations, others were self-inflicted, as the chapter on pollution suggests.Izdebski and Szmytka's introduction begins with a familiar story of the twentieth-century emergence of environmental history alternatively through the Annales School and historical geography in Europe or in response to environmental degradation and activism in North America (the role of the frontier thesis and the methodological challenges of writing the history of the American West are not discussed). It then attempts to sketch an alternative Polish genealogy through the figure of Franciszek Bujak. An historian working in interwar Lviv, Bujak identified the environmental sciences as critical analytic partners to the history of geography, agriculture, and forestry, and boldly argued in the 1930s that environmental issues may have contributed to Poland-Lithuania's decline in the eighteenth century. Inspired by Bujak's legacy and by what they identify as a North American tradition of urban “ecobiographies,” the authors aim to apply these methods to a European metropolis to identify “the unique natural phenomena a given city has produced or lived with over the past century or two” (p. 11). Drawing from their interpretation of environmental history as a scholarly response to “burning social needs” (p. 3), the editors address their book to Kraków's “inhabitants and . . . authorities” (p. 4) in the hopes that it can offer them a longue durée framework to understand the city's contemporary environmental problems.The first chapter on the city's climate (by Konrad Wnęk, Adam Izdebski, and Leszek Kowanetz) surveys available climate data in support of the foundational premise of environmental history, that “the environmental conditions of life in Kraków over the past millennium were changeable, they did not stay the same over time and required constant adaptation” (p. 42). Their data show that Kraków's average annual air temperature increased by 1.9 degrees Celsius since the beginning of instrumental records in the late eighteenth century (p. 24). The reader aware of the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold in contemporary conversations around global climate change will understand the significance of this finding. Andrzej Chwalba's chapter studies Cracovians’ reliance on rivers as a source of prosperity (for drinking, brewing, food, commerce, etc.) and as a constant threat due to flooding and as a potential carrier of disease. While he convincingly demonstrates how Cracovians became less dependent on the Vistula in the modern era, his argument that this independence presents “a problem for the river to this day” (p. 52) would benefit from a longer discussion than the tantalizing sentence about vanishing and rerouted branches. This half of his equation of the “interdependence of man and nature” (p. 43) is but briefly sketched.Using the methods and practices of archeaobotany, Aldona Mueller-Bieniek's chapter on medieval plants unearths botanical traces to shed light on how different parts of the medieval city were used and offers evidence that carrots were known, cultivated, and traded already in medieval Poland. Mueller-Bieniek's non-textual evidence offers a clearer timeframe for carrots’ spread in Poland than the written record where the words parsnips and carrots were “used interchangeably” (p. 86). Piotr Miodunka's chapter, “Early Modern Cracow and Natural Resources,” studies the city's dependence on its surroundings, particularly for food, wood, and charcoal. While on average Cracovians historically ate more fruit (fresh and dried) than the Viennese or the inhabitants of Lviv (but comparable to urban Hungarians), the availability of fuel restricted the city's growth until a local coal industry in the nineteenth century renewed urban expansion. In a parallel to Chwalba's argument, Miodunka shows how new technologies enabled the city's growing “independence from its immediate surroundings,” as, for example, through the transport of food from further distances via train (p. 106). Rafał Szmytka's chapter demonstrates the overwhelming presence of pollution in early modern Kraków's water and air due to inadequate drainage, sewage, and plague. He paints a visceral image of a city “suffocating within its medieval walls and outlying settlements” (p. 131). Collectively, these studies lay a foundation for future scholars to further dissect and contextualize narratives of environmental change in Kraków's past.Jumping to the twentieth century, Ewelina Szpak examines attempts to reengineer the city from the top down, first through failed efforts to transform Kraków into a garden city, and subsequently through Stalinist industrialization and the construction of Nowa Huta. This industrialization led to the rapid growth of ecological challenges which in turn birthed local environmental activism. In chapter 7, Izdebski and Wnęk present the shifting forms of Kraków's air pollution from medieval and early modern breweries to more modern forms of pollution from coal. This chapter references many of the earlier contributions, thereby serving as a conclusion, where smog becomes the unifying “lens” for “the essence of the city's environmental history” (p. 159). The final chapter by Małgorzata Praczyk demonstrates the emergence of a “myth” of a “green” city that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries despite the reality of heavy pollution. This myth—typically marshaled in reference to the Planty and Błonia parks—has persisted despite the ecological catastrophes of the Stalinist period. Here Praczyk suggests that “Nature . . . began to play a particular role in the history of the city in the first half of the nineteenth century” (p. 162). This statement (as well as others throughout the book, such as the description of “a unique collision between the worlds of nature and of culture” p. 133) employ overly easy dichotomies between “nature” and “city” that environmental historians have heavily criticized in debates about the nature of nature. It also contradicts earlier arguments in the volume (Miodunka's chapter) about environmental limits to Kraków's medieval and early modern growth.The diversity of the chapters suggests the immense promise that environmental history offers for historians of Kraków, but inevitably leads to uneven treatment. Climate and smog are present throughout the book, while plant life and other subjects are studied only for select periods. The majority of the book's material covers the early modern period, with the nineteenth century serving typically as a coda to those chapters, despite the frequency with which that period is presented as one of environmental discontinuity. Considering that many of the problems that plague the contemporary city have roots in nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization, greater attention to this period would grant the reader a deeper sense of “the scale of the problem” (p. 5)—one of the volume's chief aims.Central to the book is the claim that Kraków had a “unique” “relationship with the world of nature” (p. 11). This point comes through most clearly in the study of the limitation of the city's early modern growth. Considering, however, that one of the volume's key audiences is the lay reader, greater comparative contextualization would have made the city's distinctive features more legible and meaningful. The study on climate, for instance, clearly demonstrates the high variability of temperatures and rainfall around Kraków, yet it is difficult to interpret the significance of these findings without greater comparison. Furthermore, despite the focus on historiographical methods in the introduction, the editors miss a chance here to integrate environmental perspectives and insights into their chronological overview of Kraków's history, falling back instead on a traditional political history of the city. For example, in their discussion of Kraków's early modern “decline” and the relocation of the capital to Warsaw after “a series of major wars” and “general economic and demographic decline” (p. 15), the reader is left wondering whether environmental factors played a role in these transformations.Finally, while the translation is fluid and readable, occasional choices baffle, such as the rendering of ochrona as “renovation” (p. 139). Nonetheless, as an introductory volume, the authors open new avenues of study in a field that will certainly bear fruit in further research. The frequent references to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's destruction during the seventeenth-century Swedish Deluge and Khmelnytsky Uprising, for instance, certainly deserve sustained environmental and historical analysis. Overall, Krakόw: An Ecobiography offers much food for thought for scholars interested in Polish environmental history.
Jared N. Warren (Thu,) studied this question.