Jessaveryja wrote:George S.K wrote:This is confusing. Haven't there been periods of stagnancy recorded throughout history?
There have been.
Not really. There were periods when most of the things didn't change, but their never was complete absence of change.
But more on the topic: no, history is not the same as change. Change is something that lies in the very nature of everything: nothing stays the same, there are always some things that are changing, be that growth or aging, ideas and ideologies, relations, nature or art, everything does.
Is change history? No, history is, at least as one way to look at it, a chronological record of changes. Can there be history without changes? No, because change is omnipresent.
To the text at the beginning of this thread: Apparently the writer doesn't equal history with change per se, he equals history with changing environment from its wild state. So the question must be: is history, and by that he probably means the history of human civilisation(s) the same as the process of changing the environment from its wild state? I think he probably means that people are only acknowledged historically if they have created some kind of civilisation, and, as he equals that to civilising the environment, the more civilised the environment is the greater the civilisation. But I'm really reading a lot into this quote, and without knowing the specific context, I could be quite wrong.