Environmental history

Did You Know?

• The term "environmental history" was used by Roderick Nash in a 1969 address to the Organization of American Historians, though 1972 is generally taken as the date when the term was first coined.
• Alfred W. Crosby's book The Columbian Exchange (1972) is a key early work of environmental history.
• The American Society for Environmental History was founded in 1977, while the first European institute devoted to environmental history was established in 1991 at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Historiography

The historiography of environmental history has been summarized by scholars such as J. R. McNeill, Richard White, and J. Donald Hughes, with a 2014 volume of 25 essays published by Oxford University Press. No single definition of environmental history is universally accepted; generally, it seeks to explain the current state of the environment and humanity's role in shaping it, while also addressing future challenges. Donald Worster's 1988 definition describes it as the "interaction between human cultures and the environment in the past."

J. Donald Hughes in 2001 defined the subject as the study of human relationships through time with the natural communities of which they are a part, aiming to explain processes of change affecting that relationship. In 2006, Hughes characterized it as history that seeks understanding of humans as they have lived, worked, and thought in relation to the rest of nature across time. Environmental history uses ecological analysis as a method to understand human history and examines how people think about nature, expressed in folk religions, popular culture, literature, and art.

J. R. McNeill in 2003 defined it as the history of mutual relations between humankind and the rest of nature. Traditional historical analysis has broadened from studying a few significant people to include social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions; environmental history further expands this scope. Worster stated in 1988 that it attempts to make history more inclusive by examining the role and place of nature in human life, and in 1993 that it explores how the biophysical world has influenced human history and how people have thought about and transformed their surroundings.

The concept of the cultural landscape expresses the interdependency of human and environmental factors in creating landscapes. Worster also questioned the discipline's scope, asking whether anything human or natural could be outside its enquiry.

History

Questions central to environmental history date back to antiquity, with Hippocrates asserting in Airs, Waters, Places that different cultures and temperaments relate to their surroundings. Scholars such as Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu viewed climate as a key determinant of human behavior. During the Enlightenment, awareness of the environment grew, and scientists addressed sustainability through natural history and medicine. The subject's present form is generally traced to the 20th century.

In 1929, a group of French historians founded the journal Annales, a forerunner of modern environmental history that focused on reciprocal global influences between environment and human society. The Annales School emphasized long-term developments shaping human history, moving away from political and intellectual history toward agriculture, demography, and geography. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a pupil of the Annales School, embraced environmental history in a more contemporary form in the 1950s.

Lucien Febvre, another influential member, wrote the 1922 book A Geographical Introduction to History, now a classic. The most influential empirical and theoretical work has been done in the United States, where teaching programs first emerged and a generation of trained environmental historians is active. Environmental history as an independent field emerged in the 1960s and 1970s alongside environmentalism, conservation history, and awareness of global environmental issues.

This was partly a reaction to earlier history that portrayed human mastery over nature and celebrated technological progress. Environmental historians aimed to develop a post-colonial historiography that was more inclusive in its narratives.

Issues

The field contains several areas of lively debate, including what subject matter is most appropriate, whether environmental advocacy can detract from scholarly objectivity, and standards of professionalism in a subject where much outstanding work has been done by non-historians. Other debates concern the relative contribution of nature and humans in determining the passage of history, and the degree of connection with and acceptance by other disciplines, especially mainstream history.

Paul Warde argues that the scale, scope, and diffuseness of environmental history require an analytical toolkit with a range of common issues and questions, and a core problem. He identifies a lack of human agency in its texts and suggests it be written to act as information for environmental scientists, incorporate the notion of risk, analyze what is meant by "environment," and confront the way environmental history is at odds with the humanities by emphasizing the division between materialist and cultural or constructivist explanations for human behavior.

Many themes of environmental history examine circumstances that produced present-day environmental problems, including population, consumerism, climate change, waste disposal, deforestation, industrial agriculture, species extinction, depletion of natural resources, invasive organisms, and urban development. The message of sustainable use of renewable resources is frequently repeated. As early as 1864, George Perkins Marsh noted that changes made in the environment may later reduce its usefulness to humans, so changes should be made with care—what would now be called enlightened self-interest.

Richard Grove has pointed out that states will act to prevent environmental degradation only when their economic interests are threatened.

Germinal works by region

A 2004 theme issue of Environment and History 10(4) provided an overview of environmental history as practiced in Africa, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Europe, as well as works with global scope. J. Donald Hughes in 2006 also provided a global conspectus of major contributions. Key works include George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864, edited by David Lowenthal in 1965). For the Americas, works include Pyne's The Ice (1986), Dorsey's The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy (1998), and Loo's States of Nature (2006).