Between 4-6 May 2017, the II meeting of REPORT(H)A - Portuguese Network of Environmental History brought together specialists from several countries in Europe.
Under the theme Environmental Changes in Historical Perspective, this II meeting was organized and hosted in Lisbon, by the University of Lisbon and the New University of Lisbon. This joint venture organization was mainly aimed at broadening the dissemination of such issues among scholars and students, in a disciplinary field still so difficult to implement in thesaurus and academic CVS within the different scientific areas.
Overcoming financial uneasiness, REPORTHA has managed to join efforts among universities and scholars to bring experts in varied fields and surpass institutional challenges when evaluation of scientific units are at stake.
About 70 participants offered presentations in a variety of subjects, providing approaches from arts to natural and social sciences. Some major results might be stressed:
1.The novelty of subjects presented at global scale on empires and environmental history, such as the way urban and sailing planning were organized in order to master “waste”; how empires and commerce or resources management resulted from uniting pieces of empires showing how “national” products resulted from global intertwined relationships.
2. The importance of disseminating information produced in native languages, in open access, to demystify worldwide historiography depending on secondary and biased narratives from the past. Native languages and local sources do reveal disparate information from the approach of the narratives of the ones mastering politically and culturally other cultures
3. The awareness of the need to evolve from multidisciplinary views and results to put interdisciplinary methodologies in practice.
As a discussion forum to present and discuss ideas and projects, the REPORTHA network already has about 130 members and although it does not have institutional affiliation and has few resources, it promises to continue its activity, either by publishing some of the results presented in Lisbon, and continuing their regular meetings, with two universities offering to organize the next meetings, in 2019 and 2021.
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