Environmental humanities offer an alternative perspective on the relationship between human and non-human beings, revisiting the belief in the supremacy (both normative and descriptive) of the former over the latter. As a part of this interdisciplinary paradigm, environmental history brings to light the role of non-human factors in historical processes, which the traditional account routinely downplays. A prime example of a study that looks into the active contribution of non-human agents to the current condition of the phenomenon that is too often seen as purely human, namely a city, is the book Krakow: An Ecobiography, edited by Adam Izdebski and Rafal Szmytka. As the title suggests, the book tells us the 'personalised' environmental history of Krakow, the former capital of Poland, and the second largest city nationwide, with a population of nearly 800,000 inhabitants. Krakow is a popular city-break destination in Europe, with the impressive number of 14.05 million visitors in 2019. Unfortunately, Krakow is also famous for air pollution making it, in this respect, comparable to Beijing (at least from time to time). There is an intense public debate on fighting this problem, and the first steps have already been taken. However, without an in-depth analysis of the environmental problems which Krakow is facing, all actions will only be band-aid solutions. And this is the rationale behind the reviewed book. Its editors attempt to answer the question of whether Krakow's modern ecological problems (smog, and also floods, water pollution and noise pollution) really have a centuries-old lineage (p. 4). By looking back, the contributors to the volume facilitate an understanding of the current situation both for Krakow's inhabitants and for the local government assessing the scale of the problem (p. 5).
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