Introduction to Environm

Introduction
• This unit reviews the state of the field of environmental History.
• It focuses chiefly on the work of professional historians, but
because environmental history (not always by that name) is
pursued by many varieties of scholars, it occasionally discusses
the work of archeologists, geographers, and others.
• It offers a working definition of the field and an account of its
origins, development, and institutionalization from the 1970s until
2010.
• It briefly surveys the literature on several world regions,
concentrating most heavily on South Asia and Latin America,
where environmental history at present has become especially
lively.
 Introduction
• It considers the prominence of Americanists (that is, historians of
the United States, not the same thing as Americans) in the field
since the 1970s and how that prominence is now waning.
• It reviews the utility of environmental history for historians,
sketches some of the critiques of environmental history, and lastly
comments upon a few of the signal findings of recent years.
• It updates a general review of the field published in 2003 (1) and
tries to reframe the subject for scholars who are not professional
historians.
 What is Environmental History

•Over the past generation or so, a growing cohort of renegade

historians has created a new subfield called environmental
history.
•They write history as if nature existed. And they recognize that
the natural world is not merely the backdrop to human events
but evolves in its own right, both of its own accord and in
response to human actions.
•Like every other subset of history, environmental history is
different things to different people.
•The preferred definition is the history of the relationship
between human societies and the rest of nature on which they
depended. This includes three chief areas of inquiry, described
below, which of course overlap and have no fir boundaries.
 Material Environmental History
•First is the study of material environmental history, the stories of human
involvement with forests and frogs, with cholera and chlorofluoro-carbon.
•This entails study of the evolution of both human impact on the rest of
nature and nature’s influence upon human affairs; each is always in flux and
always affecting the other.
•This form of environmental history puts human history in a fuller context,
that of Earth and life on Earth, and recognizes that human events are part of
a larger story in which humans are not the only actors.
•A full extension of this principle is the so-called Big History of Christian
and Spier , which places humans into the unfolding history of the Universe
and finds recurrent patterns over the largest timescales.
•In practice, most of the environmental history work in the material vein
concerns the past 200 years, when industrialization, among other forces,
greatly enhanced the human power to alter environments.
 Political Environmental History
•Second is political and policy-related environmental history. This concerns
the history of self-conscious human efforts to regulate the relationship
between society and nature as well as between social groups in matters
concerning nature.
•Thus, efforts at soil conservation or pollution control qualify as
environmental his tory, as perhaps do social struggles over land and
resource use. Political struggle over resources is as old as human societies
and close to ubiquitous.
•Example I would not use the term environmental history to refer to contests
between one group of herders and another over pastures, but I would use it
to refer to struggles over whether a certain patch of land should be pasture
or farmland.
•The difference lies in the fact that the outcome of the struggle carries major
implications for the land itself, as well as for the people involved.
 Political Environmental History

•In practice, policy-related environmental history extends back

only to the late nineteenth century, with a few exceptions for
early examples of soil conservation, air pollution restrictions,
or monarchical efforts to protect charismatic species for their
own hunting pleasure.
•This is because only in the late nineteenth century did states
and societies mount systematic efforts to regulate their
interaction with the environment across the board.
•Before 1965, these efforts were normally spasmodic and often
modest in their effects, so most of this sort of environmental
history deals with the decades since 1965, when both states and
explicitly environmental organizations grew more determined
and effective in their interventions.
 Cultural Environmental History

•The third main form of environmental history is a subset of

cultural and intellectual history. It concerns what humans have
thought, believed, written–and more rarely, painted, sculpted,
sung, or danced–dealing with relationships between society and
nature.
•Evidence of a sort exists from tens of thousands of years ago
in Australian aboriginal rock shelter paintings and in the cave
art of southwestern Europe that dates back some 25,000 years
—although no one has anything more than a guess about what
this ancient evidence means
 Cultural Environmental History

•The great majority of cultural environmental history is drawn

from published texts, as with intellectual history, and treats the
environmental thought contained either in major religious
traditions or, more commonly, in the works of influential (and
sometimes not-so-influential) authors from Aristotle and
Mencius millennia ago to twentieth-century thinkers such as
Mohandas K. Gandhi and Arne Naess.
•Glacken’s massive work explored the conceptions of nature
among several dozen prominent writers from ancient times
through the European Enlightenment.
•This sort of environmental history tends to focus on individual
thinkers, as Glacken did but it can also extend to the study of
popular environmentalism as a cultural movement
 History as
Environmental Interdisciplinary History
•More than most varieties of history, environmental history is an
interdisciplinary project. Many scholars in the field trained as geographer or
historical ecologists.
•In addition to the customary published and archival texts of the standard
historian, environmental historians routinely use the findings culled from
bioarchives (such as pollen deposits, which can tell us about former
vegetation patterns) and geoarchives (such as soil profiles that can tell us
about past land-use practices).
•The subject matter of environmental history is often much the same as that
in historical geography or historical ecology, although the choice of sources
emphasized normally differs.
•An illustration is the field of climate history, which is pursued by scholars
from at least a half-dozen disciplines, including text-based historians.
Textual historians have found useful records (proxy evidence normally) for
climate history going back many centuries, for example, a series of dates for
the beginning of grape harvests in European vineyards (9).
 THE ORIGINS AND
INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

•Like every twist and turn within intellectual life, environmental history has
countless and tangled roots. Some of the oldest extant texts, such as the
“Epic of Gilgamesh”—the earliest versions of this are 4,000 years old—deal
with environmental change generated by human action (in this case, cutting
cedar forests in the Levant).
Forebears of Environmental History
•Many scholars of long ago, notably Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) and
Montesquieu (1689–1755), found in the geographical variations in the
natural world, in climate especially, a key to human behavior.
•By today’s standards, they rank as naive environmental determinists.
Historical geographers since the 1870s charted landscape change, as did
George Perkins Marsh, lawyer, diplomat, and polymath, whose 1864 book
Man and Nature is a foundational text for many American environmental
historians
 Forebears of Environmental
History
•Among professional historians, awareness of geographical constraints and
influences has long been a hallmark, although not a universal.
•Braudel, in what was probably the twentieth century’s most influential
work among professional historians, devoted a large proportion of his
classic study of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century to geography and
environment.
•Braudel and a set of colleagues, loosely termed the Annales school because
they often published in the journal Annales: Economies, Societies,
Civilisations, wrote copious geographically aware histories, mainly of
medieval and early modern Europe.
•Their work on harvests, famines, climate, epidemics, and demography
proved enormously influential from the 1950s onward.
• Braudel and others tended to adopt the position of “possibilism,”
prominent in French academic geography in the early- and mid-twentieth
century; according to this position, geographical contexts set limits upon
human affairs while not strictly determining them.
 Forebears of Environmental
History
•Braudel did not leave much room for changing environments in his work,
although in later editions of his Mediterranean book he included sections on
deforestation in Venetian lands, on which the Venetian archives include
plentiful information.
•Braudel’s most prominent successor, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, explicitly
considered changing environments in a pioneering work of medieval and
modern European climate history in 1967, which he followed up decades
later with a more general study of climate history.
•But Le Roy Ladurie, like Braudel and almost all of the rest of the Annales
historians, betrayed little interest in human-induced changes to the natural
world.
•In 1974, Annales printed about 160 pages of articles in a special section,
edited by Le Roy Ladurie, entitled “Histoire et Environnement,” but the
articles deviated only slightly from the established emphasis on harvests
•and epidemics.
 Forebears of Environmental
History
•Braudel did not leave much room for changing environments in his work,
although in later editions of his Mediterranean book he included sections on
deforestation in Venetian lands, on which the Venetian archives include
plentiful information.
•Braudel’s most prominent successor, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, explicitly
considered changing environments in a pioneering work of medieval and
modern European climate history in 1967, which he followed up decades
later with a more general study of climate history.
•But Le Roy Ladurie, like Braudel and almost all of the rest of the Annales
historians, betrayed little interest in human-induced changes to the natural
world.
•In 1974, Annales printed about 160 pages of articles in a special section,
edited by Le Roy Ladurie, entitled “Histoire et Environnement,” but the
articles deviated only slightly from the established emphasis on harvests
•and epidemics.
 Forebears of Environmental
History
•In subsequent decades, Annales offered almost nothing that could be called
environmental history, and the proportion of its pages devoted to agrarian
themes declined as other interests evolved among its editors.

•In general, although Braudel and the Annales school offered one of the
most compelling perspectives available to professional historians in the
latter half of the twentieth century, they had only modest impacts on what
was becoming environmental history and did not conceive of their own
work in those terms
 Forebears of Environmental
History
•In subsequent decades, Annales offered almost nothing that could be called
environmental history, and the proportion of its pages devoted to agrarian
themes declined as other interests evolved among its editors.

•In general, although Braudel and the Annales school offered one of the
most compelling perspectives available to professional historians in the
latter half of the twentieth century, they had only modest impacts on what
was becoming environmental history and did not conceive of their own
work in those terms