As disciplinary limits become blurred and knowledge fields so distant as history and ecology come closer (paradoxically together with a strong specialization within each of them), the tensions generated when we try to harmonize each field's approach on its object of study are more and more clear. We might summarize those approaches around the subject of scales, techno-cultural approximations used by each discipline in order to reduce its object to a workable dimension. We might find those differences under two non-excluding dimensions: time and space. The scales used to analyze each of them are variable and so far have been object of controversy within the humanities. However, introducing the variable which we may call generically "environmental", the tension becomes very difficult to solve, since we will have to harmonize, on the one hand, the disciplines, such as geology, whose work unit is that of 1 million years, or geomorphology, which works with tens of thousands of years, with history, working with 12.000 years of land cultivation. Not to mention current disciplines, as geography, sociology, whose time span rarely goes beyond one generation. Two basic questions arise from all that controversy: is there a special scale which harmonizes the disciplines that coincide on the environment? What are the meanings of macro, micro and middle for that discipline? Is it possible to relate the time cycles which determine each discipline? How is a conceptual interdisciplinary field built, such as environmental history or historical geography?
scale; interdiscipline; environment; territory