Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs and vice versa.
Environmental history first emerged in the United States out of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and much of its impetus still stems from present-day global environmental concerns. The field was founded on conservation issues but has broadened in scope to include more general social and scientific history and may deal with cities, population or sustainable development. As all history occurs in the natural world, environmental history tends to focus on particular time-scales, geographic regions, or key themes. It is also a strongly multidisciplinary subject that draws widely on both the humanities and natural science.
The subject matter of environmental history can be divided into three main components. The first, nature itself and its change over time, includes the physical impact of humans on the Earth's land, water, atmosphere and biosphere. The second category, how humans use nature, includes the environmental consequences of increasing population, more effective technology and changing patterns of production and consumption. Other key themes are the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer communities to settled agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution, the effects of colonial expansion and settlements, and the environmental and human consequences of the Industrial and technological revolutions. Finally, environmental historians study how people think about nature – the way attitudes, beliefs and values influence interaction with nature, especially in the form of myths, religion and science.
Origin of name and early works
In 1967, Roderick Nash published Wilderness and the American Mind, a work that has become a classic text of early environmental history. In an address to the Organization of American Historians in 1969 (published in 1970) Nash used the expression "environmental history", although 1972 is generally taken as the date when the term was first coined. The 1959 book by Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920, while being a major contribution to American political history, is now also regarded as a founding document in the field of environmental history. Hays is professor emeritus of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Alfred W. Crosby's book The Columbian Exchange (1972) is another key early work of environmental history.
Historiography Brief overviews of the historiography of environmental history have been published by J. R. McNeill, Richard White, and J. Donald Hughes. In 2014 Oxford University Press published a volume of 25 essays in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History.
Definition There is no universally accepted definition of environmental history. In general terms it is a history that tries to explain why our environment is like it is and how humanity has influenced its current condition, as well as commenting on the problems and opportunities of tomorrow. Donald Worster's widely quoted 1988 definition states that environmental history is the "interaction between human cultures and the environment in the past".
In 2001, J. Donald Hughes defined the subject as the "study of human relationships through time with the natural communities of which they are a part in order to explain the processes of change that affect that relationship". and, in 2006, as "history that seeks understanding of human beings as they have lived, worked and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the changes brought by time". "As a method, environmental history is the use of ecological analysis as a means of understanding human history...an account of changes in human societies as they relate to changes in the natural environment". Environmental historians are also interested in "what people think about nature, and how they have expressed those ideas in folk religions, popular culture, literature and art". In 2003, J. R. McNeill defined it as "the history of the mutual relations between humankind and the rest of nature".
Subject matter Traditional historical analysis has over time extended its range of study from the activities and influence of a few significant people to a much broader social, political, economic, and cultural analysis. Environmental history further broadens the subject matter of conventional history. In 1988, Donald Worster stated that environmental history "attempts to make history more inclusive in its narratives" by examining the "role and place of nature in human life", and in 1993, that "Environmental history explores the ways in which the biophysical world has influenced the course of human history and the ways in which people have thought about and tried to transform their surroundings". The interdependency of human and environmental factors in the creation of landscapes is expressed through the notion of the cultural landscape. Worster also questioned the scope of the discipline, asking: "We study humans and nature; therefore can anything human or natural be outside our enquiry?"
Environmental history is generally treated as a subfield of history. But some environmental historians challenge this assumption, arguing that while traditional history is human history – the story of people and their institutions, "humans cannot place themselves outside the principles of nature". In this sense, they argue that environmental history is a version of human history within a larger context, one less dependent on anthropocentrism (even though anthropogenic change is at the center of its narrative).
Dimensions
J. Donald Hughes responded to the view that environmental history is "light on theory" or lacking theoretical structure by viewing the subject through the lens of three "dimensions": nature and culture, history and science, and scale. This advances beyond Worster's recognition of three broad clusters of issues to be addressed by environmental historians although both historians recognize that the emphasis of their categories might vary according to the particular study as, clearly, some studies will concentrate more on society and human affairs and others more on the environment.
Themes Several themes are used to express these historical dimensions. A more traditional historical approach is to analyse the transformation of the globe's ecology through themes like the separation of man from nature during the Neolithic Revolution, imperialism and colonial expansion, exploration, agricultural change, the effects of the Industrial and technological revolution, and urban expansion. More environmental topics include human impact through influences on forestry, fire, climate change, sustainability and so on. According to Paul Warde, "the increasingly sophisticated history of colonization and migration can take on an environmental aspect, tracing the pathways of ideas and species around the globe and indeed is bringing about an increased use of such analogies and 'colonial' understandings of processes within European history." The importance of the colonial enterprise in Africa, the Caribbean and Indian Ocean has been detailed by Richard Grove. Much of the literature consists of case-studies targeted at the global, national and local levels.
Scale Although environmental history can cover billions of years of history over the whole Earth, it can equally concern itself with local scales and brief time periods. Many environmental historians are occupied with local, regional and national histories. Some historians link their subject exclusively to the span of human history – "every time period in human history" while others include the period before human presence on Earth as a legitimate part of the discipline. Ian Simmons's Environmental History of Great Britain covers a period of about 10,000 years. There is a tendency to difference in time scales between natural and social phenomena: the causes of environmental change that stretch back in time may be dealt with socially over a comparatively brief period.
Although at all times environmental influences have extended beyond particular geographic regions and cultures, during the 20th and early 21st centuries anthropogenic environmental change has assumed global proportions, most prominently with climate change but also as a result of settlement, the spread of disease and the globalization of world trade.
History
The questions of environmental history date back to antiquity, including Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who asserted that different cultures and human temperaments could be related to the surroundings in which peoples lived in Airs, Waters, Places. Scholars as varied as Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu found climate to be a key determinant of human behavior. During the Enlightenment, there was a rising awareness of the environment and scientists addressed themes of sustainability via natural history and medicine. However, the origins of the subject in its present form are generally traced to the 20th century.
In 1929 a group of French historians founded the journal Annales, in many ways a forerunner of modern environmental history since it took as its subject matter the reciprocal global influences of the environment and human society. The idea of the impact of the physical environment on civilizations was espoused by this Annales School to describe the long-term developments that shape human history by focusing away from political and intellectual history, toward agriculture, demography, and geography. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a pupil of the Annales School, was the first to really embrace, in the 1950s, environmental history in a more contemporary form. One of the most influential members of the Annales School was Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), whose 1922 book A Geographical Introduction to History is now a classic in the field.
The most influential empirical and theoretical work in the subject has been done in the United States where teaching programs first emerged and a generation of trained environmental historians is now active. In the United States environmental history as an independent field of study emerged in the general cultural reassessment and reform of the 1960s and 1970s along with environmentalism, "conservation history", and a gathering awareness of the global scale of some environmental issues. This was in large part a reaction to the way nature was represented in history at the time, which "portrayed the advance of culture and technology as releasing humans from dependence on the natural world and providing them with the means to manage it [and] celebrated human mastery over other forms of life and the natural environment, and expected technological improvement and economic growth to accelerate". Environmental historians intended to develop a post-colonial historiography that was "more inclusive in its narratives".
Moral and political inspiration Moral and political inspiration to environmental historians has come from American writers and activists such as Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson. Environmental history "frequently promoted a moral and political agenda although it steadily became a more scholarly enterprise". Early attempts to define the field were made in the United States by Roderick Nash in "The State of Environmental History" and in other works by frontier historians Frederick Jackson Turner, James Malin, and Walter Prescott Webb, who analyzed the process of settlement. Their work was expanded by a second generation of more specialized environmental historians such as Alfred Crosby, Samuel P. Hays, Donald Worster, William Cronon, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, J. R. McNeill, Donald Hughes, and Chad Montrie in the United States and Paul Warde, Sverker Sorlin, Robert A. Lambert, T.C. Smout, and Peter Coates in Europe.
British Empire