Historians are from Venus, Ecologists are from Mars

Previous calls for cooperation between historians and conservation scientists published in ecological and conservation journals have been made by nonhistorians. This Comment on Szabó and Hédl’s (2011), paper “Advancing the Integration of History and Ecology for Conservation,” provides the other half of the sought-for antiphonal duet from the perspective of an environmental historian. Most calls for interdisciplinary research frame their discussions in terms of problems to be overcome. They elaborate reasons for the failure of this union to be consummated, and this shapes discussions of what is to be done. In their welcome article, Szabó and Hédl follow this route, noting contrasting tendencies toward generality versus particularity for ecologists and historians, respectively, and mismatches in scale and precision of data collection. They frame the lack of ecological research before 1800 as a “major obstacle to successful cooperation between history and ecology” but then show that this lack of ecological data is really an opportunity for ecologists to gain from history (Szabó & Hédl 2011, p. 685). Helpfully, they advise us to pay attention to “difficulties in communication rather than to fundamental differences between the 2 disciplines” (Szabó & Hédl 2011, p. 681). Yet, they also suggest there exists a fundamental divide between the social and natural sciences (not to mention humanities). In the practice of interdisciplinary research, this fundamental divide is more often a divide between those who do primarily quantitative research and those who do primarily qualitative research. Szabó and Hédl’s suggestion that there is a communication breakdown between the “two cultures” of the social and natural sciences, exacerbated by the poor editorial practices of interdisciplinary journals, is arguably now less true than the authors suggest (their references span 1959–1999). More recent analyses of the publication of interdisciplinary research in ecological journals find matters somewhat improved (e.g., Reyers et al. 2010). Of