"...mein Acker ist die Zeit", Aufsätze zur Umweltgeschichte - Oapen

Comments
By 1300, outmost extension of arable land in Central European was already passed
when the forerunners of the Little Ice Age stopped the climatic optimum. The
firstly modest, then accelerated population increase between 1000 and 1300 also
accelerated the decline of life expectancy by necessarily increased physical exhaustion
of these people, which was put on top of the biological hazards of increased
population density. In my opinion this effect has not been considered so far.
The absurd situation is that the Black Death stopped this development by reducing
the actual life expectancy to zero for one third or one half of the European population.
Thursday April 30 th
Comment to concluding round table (pp 594-596)
The title of the conference was “Economic and Biological Interactions in Preindustrial
Europe from the 13th to the 18th Centuries”. – As a biologist, I found
this conference fascinating because bringing together different traditions of epistemological
approaches always benefits both sides. This is why I appreciated very
much what Bruce Campbell undertook in his introductory statement, to demonstrate
that asking questions which can be answered only through efforts of different
disciplines, is the most stimulating and promoting tool that can be applied on
complex scientific questions. Further, as demonstrated by various contributors,
how from their point of view these approaches might work. Some of them had
done dedicated work on small scales in terms of epistemological approaches, and
some had chosen a broader scale, with necessarily very general conclusions. This
mixture was very stimulating.
“Health and wealth” was the part I had to comment on. It was amazing to me
what these two different approaches have in common in terms of materialistic
overlaps. It was soon visible that both biology and economics share a common
currency. And this is rather surprising, since economists are usually talking about
currencies in terms of pounds or florins or guilders. But economic currencies are
nothing but an energy equivalent. Any energy equivalent can be changed into the
currencies of biology, into health and/or offspring. I think this point was underestimated
both in the presentations and in the discussions.
I was very happy also to listen to Richard Hoffman’s and Bruce Campbell’s
contributions and I pick these two not only because I am most familiar with their
subjects, but because they opened up the view of the audience towards the necessity
of epistemological exchange and improvement. As the scientific community
we do not have yet a strong tradition in communicating in a common language and
in working pari passu on complex questions like that of this conference. This is
why the conference was both necessary and important. There are huge epistemo-
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