EG35CH13-McNeill ARI 18 September 2010 7:45
The State of the Field of
Environmental History
J.R. McNeill
History Department and Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University,
Washington, District of Columbia 20057; email: mcneillj@georgetown.edu
Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 2010. 35:345–74
First published online as a Review in Advance on
August 16, 2010
The Annual Review of Environment and Resources
is online at environ.annualreviews.org
This article’s doi:
10.1146/annurev-environ-040609-105431
Copyright c 2010 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved
1543-5938/10/1121-0345$20.00
Key Words
historiography, forest history, wetlands history
Absract
This article reviews the state and evolution of the field of environmental
history since about 1970. It focuses chiefly on the work of professional
historians, but because environmental history 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 grown especially lively.
It considers the prominence of Americanists (that is, historians of the
United States, not the same thing as Americans) in the field 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 comments upon some signal findings of recent years.
345
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EG35CH13-McNeill ARI 18 September 2010 7:45
Contents
1. INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
2. WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL
HISTORY? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
2.1. Material Environmental
History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
2.2. Political Environmental
History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
2.3. Cultural Environmental
History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
2.4. Environmental History as
Interdisciplinary History . . . . . . . . 348
3. THE ORIGINS AND
INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY. . 348
3.1. Forebears of Environmental
History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348
3.2. Origins of United States
Environmental History. . . . . . . . . . 349
3.3. Institutionalization of
Environmental History. . . . . . . . . . 350
3.4. The Waning of American
Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
4. A QUICK AROUND-THEWORLD
TOUR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
4.1. Antipodes and Asia. . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
4.2. Europe and Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
4.3. Global Environmental
History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
4.4. South Asia and Latin America:
Active Frontiers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354
5. FOR AND AGAINST
ENVIRONMENTAL
HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
5.1. The Value of Environmental
History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
5.2. Critiques of Environmental
History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
6. WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? . . . 361
6.1. Forests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
6.2. Wetlands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
7. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
1. INTRODUCTION
This article 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. 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.
This article does not review the allied field
of disease history. Although several historians
at work in this field have for decades taken an
ecological approach to their subject (2, 3), lately
most of them have migrated in the direction of
cultural interpretations of disease (4). This is a
fascinating and fast-moving scholarly field, but
deserving of its own separate review. Nor does
this review take full account of the emerging
field of natural disaster history, which is tending
toward the view that few disasters are fully
natural. A recent introduction to this field is
available in Mauch & Pfister (5).
2. 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.
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EG35CH13-McNeill ARI 18 September 2010 7:45
Like every other subset of history, environmental
history is different things to different
people. My 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 firm
boundaries.
2.1. Material Environmental History
First is the study of material environmental
history, the stories of human involvement with
forests and frogs, with cholera and chlorofluorocarbons.
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 (6) and Spier (7), 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.
2.2. 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 history,
as perhaps do social struggles over land
and resource use. Political struggle over resources
is as old as human societies and close
to ubiquitous. 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. (Mind you, others see this
differently.) 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.
2.3. 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. 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
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EG35CH13-McNeill ARI 18 September 2010 7:45
K. Gandhi and Arne Naess.1
Remarkably,
the most comprehensive work in this vein
as regards the Western world was written
over 40 years ago, Glacken’s Traces on the
Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western
Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the
Eighteenth Century (8). 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.
2.4. Environmental History as
Interdisciplinary History
More than most varieties of history, environmental
history is an interdisciplinary project.
Many scholars in the field trained as geographers
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).
1
Arne Naess was a Norwegian academic philosopher, born in
1912, who was credited with establishing a school of thought
known as Deep Ecology, according to which humans are
merely one among many species and ethically obliged to pursue
egalitarianism within the biosphere.
3. 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).
3.1. Forebears of Environmental
History
Manyscholarsoflongago,notablyIbnKhaldun
(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
(10). Among professional historians, awareness
of geographical constraints and influences has
long been a hallmark, although not a universal.
Braudel (11, 12), 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, Soci´et´es, Civilisations, wrote
copious geographically aware histories, mainly
of medieval and early modern Europe.2
Their
work on harvests, famines, climate, epidemics,
2
Since 1994, this has been published as Annales: Histoire, sciences
sociales. The journal was founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch
and Lucien Febvre and underwent many name changes, becoming
Annales: E.S.C. in 1946 when Braudel joined Febvre
as editor.
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EG35CH13-McNeill ARI 18 September 2010 7:45
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. 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 (13). 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 (9, 14). 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.3
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.
3.2. Origins of United States
Environmental History
Environmental history as a self-conscious undertaking
dates only to about 1970 and, like
3
Annales: E.S.C. 29:537–647, 915–965. Two of the articles
were contemporary rather than historical.
so much in intellectual life, drew its energy
from trends within society at large. Around the
world, of course, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed
the coalescence of popular environmentalism
as a cultural and political force (15, 16). It was
stronger in some places than in others and took
different shapes in different contexts. In the
United States, it helped a few historians, initially
almost all scholars of U.S. history, to come
together both intellectually and institutionally.
Among them were Roderick Nash, John Opie,
Donald Worster, Susan Flader, and a historian
of the ancient Mediterranean, Donald Hughes.
By some accounts Nash, author of Wilderness
and the American Mind (17), an intellectual history
of an environmental subject, was the first
to employ the term environmental history.
Between the publication of Nash’s book and
1985, a small handful of books acquired status
as foundational texts in U.S. environmental
history. The first was Crosby’s Columbian
Exchange (18), one of the few books whose title
became part of nearly every historian’s vocabulary.
It is a global as well as an American history
and did not easily fall into any existing historiographical
categories. Revealingly, Crosby had
great difficulty finding a publisher for a book
that explored the extraordinary ecological consequences
of the regular crossing of the Atlantic
after 1492. His portrayal of the transmission
of pathogens, crops, weeds, and livestock back
and forth across the Atlantic has found its way
into standard histories and textbooks, more so
than any other single contribution from environmental
history. Worster’s Dust Bowl (19)
took an iconic subject in U.S. history and gave
it a new twist, bringing new detail to historians’
discussions of climate, soil, and grass, as well as
to the human tragedies that played out on the
southern plains in the 1930s. Cronon’s Changes
in the Land (20), which explored the transformations
of southern New England’s human
ecology between 1600 and 1800, enjoyed
great success and inspired unabashed imitation
(21). Worster and Cronon soon became the
most influential figures in U.S. environmental
history, joined by White, who like Cronon
featured Amerindians prominently in much
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EG35CH13-McNeill ARI 18 September 2010 7:45
of his work (22–24), and by Merchant, who
put women and gender relations front and
center (25, 26). Melosi (27, 28) and Tarr (29)
pioneered U.S. urban environmental history.
Environmental history in the United States
in its infancy displayed a strong connection
to rural history and the history of the American
West. It took some time, and some argument,
before urban subjects became fully
accepted as legitimate fields for environmental
history. Worster (30), for example, argued
that cities were expressions of culture rather
than nature and that environmental historians
should confine themselves to rural themes,
where nature showed itself more conspicuously.
But by the late 1980s, Melosi (29) and Rosen
& Tarr (31)—and a handful of allies—had
won that battle. Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis
(32) showed in convincing historical detail,
for Chicago circa 1850–1900, what every student
of urban economies already intuitively
knew—cities and their hinterlands were intimately
bound together—and hence, there can
be no firm divide between urban and rural environmental
history. Urban environmental history
since the 1980s has flourished to the point
where many large American cities, and not a
few smaller ones, have an environmental biography
(33, 34). By the end of the 1980s, environmental
history, both rural and urban, had won
a place on the crowded stage of U.S. history.
Of new subfields in U.S. history, only women’s
history (now often termed women’s and gender
history) has enjoyed fuller acceptance.
These Americanists, who continued to
produce influential work, attracted international
attention too. Historians around the
world, contemplating taking an environmental
turn, often read them, especially Worster and
Cronon, while formulating their own projects.
Worster’s work on droughts and irrigation
in the American West, for example, seemed
thought provoking in many settings outside
the United States, and Worster invited crosscultural
comparisons by using Wittfogel’s ideas
about hydraulic despotism in China to frame
his own study (35). The themes of cultural
clash and colonization, developed in Cronon’s,
Crosby’s, and White’s work, found interested
readers among those writing about colonial encounters
in Asia and Africa. White’s concept of
a middle ground, for example, seemed helpful
to scholars both of medieval Central Europe
and of Tokugawa Japan 1603–1868 (36, 37).
3.3. Institutionalization of
Environmental History
Part of the influence of the U.S. authors must
be attributed to institutional rather than intellectual
factors. The first generation formed the
American Society for Environmental History
(ASEH) in 1976–77 and by the early 1980s
held regular conferences. Most importantly,
the ASEH began publishing a journal, now
called Environmental History, in 1976. Moreover,
as in all fields of history, the Americans
enjoyed advantages in the form of the general
vigor and (comparatively) generous funding of
U.S. academia and in the fact that so
many historians around the world could read
English (this, obviously, boosted the fortunes
of all Anglophone authors).
In contrast, the institutionalization of environmental
history came later elsewhere. For
example, the European Society for Environmental
History (ESEH) began regular meetings
in 2001. SOLCHA, the Society for Latin
American and Caribbean Environmental
History, began operations in 2003. A Canadian
network of environmental historians (NiCHE)
took shape in 2006–2007. The Association
of South Asian Environmental Historians
(ASAEH) arose in 2007–2008. Scholars from
China and Japan formed an Association for
East Asian Environmental History (AEAEH)
in 2009. An umbrella organization for environmental
history around the world coalesced in
2006–2008 and oversaw the first world congress
of environmental history in Copenhagen in
2009. The journal Environment and History,
which published chiefly British, European,
and imperial environmental history, started up
in 1995. A Dutch and Flemish journal, Tijdschrift
voor Ecologische Geschiedenis ( Journal for
Ecological History), became a regular annual in
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EG35CH13-McNeill ARI 18 September 2010 7:45
1999. In 2004, the Croatian journal Ekonomska
i ekohistorija was launched. An Italian-based
but internationally focused journal, Global
Environment: A Journal of History and Natural
and Social Sciences, began publication in 2008.
In every respect, the Americans enjoyed
a firmer institutional footing sooner than
environmental historians elsewhere. The opening
of the Rachel Carson Center at the LudwigMaximilians-University
in Munich in 2010 may
mark a shift in the center of gravity of environmental
history toward Europe. Still, numerically,
Americanists continue to loom large in
the early twenty-first century and, at a guess,
accounted for roughly half of the environmental
historians around the world as of 2010.
3.4. The Waning of American
Influence
But the intellectual prominence of the Americanists’
examples waned. Scholars elsewhere
quickly found their own voices and confronted
the limits of the relevance of American precedents,
concepts, formulas, and approaches. The
American environmental historians’ emphasis
on wilderness, for example, had minimal resonance
in most of the rest of the world. Beyond
that, although almost everyone in the field
could read their work, the Americanists could
not (or chose not) to read the work of scholars
elsewhere. Over time, the proportion of environmental
history written in Spanish, German,
Italian, among other tongues, grew, and most
Americanists could not read it. A few prominent
works, such as Radkau’s Natur und Macht: Eine
Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (Nature and Power:
A Global History of the Environment, 38), were
translated for Anglophone audiences, but no
more than a few (39, 40). Thus, as the enterprise
of environmental history globalized, the intellectual
exchange expanded but not evenly. By
and large, everyone around the world read the
prominent Americanists, but the Americanists,
for reasons of language and inclination, read
only one another. This is not quite as blinkered
as it sounds; by the 1990s, Americanists were
numerous enough that keeping up with their
production alone became a full-time job.4
4. A QUICK AROUND-THEWORLD
TOUR
Since the 1970s, environmental history has
appealed to thousands of scholars and students
around the world. However, the degree
to which environmental history has made inroads
in professional history varies tremendously
from place to place and era to era.
About eras, I will only say that in general the
further from the present the less interest environmental
historians have shown. This is partly
a matter of scarcity of available source material.
The chief exception to this is the ancient
Mediterranean, where comparatively abundant
sources and other attractions have invited historians
and classicists to take up environmental
approaches (42–48). But it is also a matter of
the intrinsic drama of their subject. Environmental
changes—with many exceptions—came
more slowly and proved less pervasive in the
deeper past than in recent decades. Environmental
policy in distant centuries was rare and
exerted comparatively little sway over the affairs
of societies and states. For scholars interested
in the policy aspects of environmental history,
or in environmentalism, the 1960s and 1970s
hold an attraction unlike any other moment. As
a group, environmental historians overwhelmingly
focus their attentions on the recent past.
This is also true, but less true, of historians in
general, of whom perhaps half are chiefly concerned
with the twentieth century.
Regionally, the appeal of environmental his-
toryhasbeenespeciallyuneven.Below,Idiscuss
quickly several world regions and dally only in
South Asia and Latin America.
4
This blanket generalization is only that, and it does not
capture the minority of Americanists who read languages
other than English and the larger minority who follow environmental
history work written in English from around
the world. A case in point is Karl Jacoby (41), whose Crimes
Against Nature owed something to Indian, Africanist, and
British studies that presented conservation as an elite imposition
upon unwilling peasantries.
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EG35CH13-McNeill ARI 18 September 2010 7:45
4.1. Antipodes and Asia
Historians of Australia and New Zealand
have taken to environmental history with gusto
since the early 1990s. The theme of ecological
change brought by settler colonialism, especially
the extinction of native species and the
spread of exotics, resonated in both countries.
The brevity of the settler period and the pace of
ecological change made this theme irresistible,
although subjects such as the (politically sensitive)
ecological impact of Aborigines and Maori
as well as the meanings of modern environmentalism
have also found their historians (49–55).
Southeast Asia may be well served by
writers working in Thai, Malay, or Tagalog;
I do not know for sure, although colleagues
tell me it is not so. Bankoff, Boomgaard, and
Kathirithamby-Wells led the way in bringing
Southeast Asian environmental history to
international audiences, highlighting colonial
themes in the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies,
and Malaya, respectively. Deforestation,
forest protection, land use, and responses to
hazards, such as drought and typhoon, feature
prominently in their work. The records of
the Dutch East India Company have proven
especially useful for this work for the era
before 1815 (56–62). East Asia presents a
contrasting picture. If my informants are
correct, aside from Liu in Taiwan, Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean historians were as
of 2000 little interested in environmental
history, but foreigners working on China
took to it readily. The provincial gazetteers
of imperial China, especially from the Qing
dynasty, included raw data for detailed work
on material environmental history, and the
abundance of surviving texts from the literati
rewarded inspection by invesigators interested
in the environmental attitudes and sensibilities
of Chinese elites. For imperial China, the
majority of work by foreigners came from
scholars closer to economic history, and so
themes such as agriculture, irrigation, and
state management predominated (63–66).
Soon after 2000, however, Bao, originally an
Africanist, led the development of environmental
history within China (67). Bao and his
colleagues pursued themes of environmental
management—efforts to combat desertification
for example—that span the gap between
imperial China and the era (post-1949 China)
of the People’s Republic. The tempestuous
environmental history of post-1949 came in
for less attention from foreign scholars, partly
no doubt owing to restrictions on access to
relevant documentation (but see Reference 68).
Japan too has attracted some attention from
environmental historians. Among foreigners,
Totman (69) led the way with studies of forests
and forestry in particular. Japanese scholars, often
not historians, had laid a foundation for
Totman, as they had for other foreigners working
on whaling, wolves, or other themes. And
by 2010, the Japanese had begun to produce
environmental history in earnest (37, 69–72).
The rest of Asia, aside from the Indian subcontinent,
remains almost terra incognita for
environmental history—in other words—a
beckoning opportunity. Although historical geographers
have done excellent work on southwest
Asia, Central Asia, and Russia, environmental
historians have scarcely set to work (but
see References 73–75).
4.2. Europe and Africa
Europeanists since 1990 have excelled in producing
provocative environmental history. In
the work of the Annales historians (considered
above) and in that of a few other prominent
scholars, such as Keith Thomas, some observers
see a deep tradition of environmental history
within Europe. Thomas considered himself a
historian of English culture and society, but
his Man and the Natural World (76) canvassed
English letters of the early modern centuries
for changing attitudes toward animals and nature
in general. Today, this book could easily
pass as a work of environmental history, even if
Thomas did not think of it (or himself) in such
terms. A landmark early work of self-conscious
environmental history, The Silent Countdown
(77) set a fine example, showing some of the
variety of possible subjects and how to make
use of a comparatively deep documentary base.
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Scholars working on Germany, Scandinavia,
Scotland, and the Netherlands led the way in
the 1980s, originally concentrating on forests
and water issues, but the strong traditions of
agrarian history in Italy and especially Spain
soon led to a fruitful exploration of environmental
themes in the rural history of southern
Europe (78–80). East Europeanists got off to a
late start, perhaps because environmental perspectives
did not fit easily with the state’s approved
historical agendas before 1989. Since
1989, Hungary and Czechia have developed
small but lively environmental history communities.
Perhaps because of the supply of suitable
records, Europeanists have done more than
others with climate history as it affected human
affairs (81–85). They also explored the
history of industrial pollution and the social
conflicts surrounding its regulation (86–88).
European environmental historians are sometimes
inclined to lament the state of their field
(89), partly on the grounds that mainstream historians
seem uninterested in what they do (an
interesting contrast to the fate of U.S. environmental
historians), but from an outsider’s
perspective, the Europeanists have done and
continue to do well in almost every sphere of
environmental history.
European scholars—but by and large not
textual historians—developed one of the few
concrete methodologies of environmental history
in the “social metabolism” approach.
Drawing on a few observations of Karl
Marx, Herbert Spencer, and others, groups
in Barcelona and Vienna doggedly compiled
quantitative studies of the raw material use of
chosen societies. This is both a hypermaterial
form of environmental history, tabulating units
of energy and materials, and an explicitly theoretical
one, using the analogy of metabolism
in biology to construct an input-output model
of economies. It has the virtue of showing in
bold relief how different the modern, fossilfuel-based
economies are from their organic
predecessors. But it has the limitation that to
be persuasive it requires very good data of the
sort not easily found outside modern European
and North American settings (90, 91).
Africanists showed an early inclination to
adopt environmental history perspectives. The
famous challenges of African environments
(aridity, disease) inclined Africanists to keep
ecological matters in view. More than any
other, the theme of colonial alteration to the
environment dominated, partly because of the
availability of suitable sources, which are scarce
for precolonial African history. Of necessity,
Africanists have gone further than anyone else
in making the techniques of oral history serve
the interests of environmental history. This allowed
research into the environmental thought
and practices of Africans, as opposed to the
better-documented subjects of the doings of
colonial states, science in the service of empire,
and the resource conflicts between Africans and
settlers. Lately, it seems that work on South
Africa pours out faster than that on the rest of
the continent put together (92–97). The persuasiveness
of Africanist environmental history
is reflected in the fact that Iliffe, one of the
leading scholars of African history since the
late 1960s, chose to put environmental themes
at the center of his conspectus, Africans: The
History of a Continent (98). Iliffe emphasized
those constraints of nature that operated in
African history, notably diseases, drought, and
soil infertility, in narrating sagas of African pioneer
settlement and transformation of a wide
variety of environments.
Although historians of one region or another
may have made an earlier start in adopting
the perspectives of environmental history, by
2010 environmental history had traveled almost
everywhere, from the polar regions to the equatorial
latitudes and from ancient Mesopotamia
to the day before yesterday. Almost every world
region by 2010 had an environmental history
survey (54, 60, 63, 96, 99).
4.3. Global Environmental History
Global-scale environmental history is built
upon the foundation of local work and regional
surveys. It has the obvious intellectual
merit that many ecological processes are
global in scope, and many of the cultural trends
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concerning the environment have been nearly
so. But it has the equally obvious practical problem
that mastering the relevant information is
out of the question, and bringing coherence
to the subject much more difficult than, say,
to the history of asbestos regulation in Kansas
City in the 1980s. For decades, the only global
syntheses came from authors who were not
professional historians, but geographers such
as Simmons (100) and in one case a former
mandarin of the British Foreign Office (101).
Sociologists too joined the fray, unencumbered
by the documentation fetish that historians acquire
during their apprenticeships (102). Eventually,
natural scientists had a go at global historical
treatments of subjects such as nitrogen
and soil (103–108). A multidisciplinary magnum
opus from 1990, Turner et al.’s The Earth
as Transformed by Human Action (109), helped
spur global historians to action.
Professional historians began by taking
slices of the whole, with books on global fire
history by Pyne (110) and environmentalism
by Guha (16). Pyne’s work, which grew out of
his earlier studies of fire in American history,
sought to discuss every aspect of the human
relationship with fire, from cooking and the
physiology of digestion to the cultural perceptions
of wildfires. Guha’s short treatise on modern
environmentalism showed the contrasts between
the social movements that go by that
name in, above all, India and the United States.
Radkau (38) was perhaps the first to bring the
sensibilities of the historian to general globalscale
environmental history in his Natur und
Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt, first published
in German in 2000. His was not a survey,
but a sprawling series of soundings and reflections
on everything from animal domestication
to contemporary tourism in the Himalayas. A
small flurry of world environmental histories
appeared almost simultaneously, some written
as surveys (111–113) and some as portraits of
an era (114, 115). Although the practical problems
of such efforts will always remain, environmental
history probably lends itself to globalscale
work more readily than does, for example,
labor history, women’s history, or intellectual
history.
4.4. South Asia and Latin America:
Active Frontiers
Two of the most active arenas for environmental
history lately have been South Asia and Latin
America. Both appear energized by scholars’ investment
in current environmental struggles.
4.4.1. South Asia. Within South Asia, indeed
within all of Asia, environmental history
writing began first and appears strongest in
India (116–120). Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and especially
Pakistan have come in for much less
scrutiny (but see Reference 121). If this impression
is not an illusion resulting from my
English-language bias, it is probably a result of
Indian scholars’ engagement with social and environmental
struggles since 1980. As in Latin
America, environmental history in India seems
to carry more political content, and a stronger
social commitment, than it now does in Europe
or North America, where that sort of engagement
has waned since the 1970s and 1980s.
The vigor of Indian environmental history
also results from the helpfulness of the available
historical records. The gazetteers of the
Raj, for example, proved most useful for understanding
land-use patterns. Its forestry service
left behind mountains of memoranda, allowing
very detailed work on Indian forest management
history. The lack of comparably meticulous
work for the period 1500 to 1750 suggests
that the record base left by the Mughals
is not nearly so helpful, but that may be disproven
in years to come. So far, environmental
perspectives have made no impact on the
syntheses of Mughal history (122), not even
the one written by a prominent environmental
historian, John Richards (123). The success
of Indian environmental historians may
also owe something to their having easy access,
through English, to work done elsewhere. The
Indians too have often read Worster and
Cronon and dozens of others writing on the
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Americas, Africa, and Australia. The context of
Indian history is so different from that of North
America that there could be no facile appropriation
of the themes that the U.S. (or any other)
environmental historians championed. But, to
take a single example, the struggles for control
of water in the American West had their parallels,
indeed their precursors, in Indian history.
Indian environmental historians have shown
great interest in social competitions over natural
resources, especially where peasant protests
were involved.
A good deal of early work focused on land
use and forests. Issues of access to forests
loomed large (as they still do in parts of India),
especially under the Raj when ambitious state
forest conservation efforts put officialdom on a
collision course with peasants for whom forests
had routinely provided much of their wherewithal.
Another important theme was water
manipulation, including canal building (chiefly
in the colonial era) and dam building (mainly
since independence in 1947). Indeed, one might
fairly say that Indian environmental history
grew out of the study of forests and irrigation
and the conflicts raging around them. A third
subject, taken up more recently, was the fate
of wildlife, especially iconic mammals such as
tigers and elephants, and their meanings in different
Indian cultural settings (124). These are
all rural subjects, appropriate perhaps in India.
But the tremendous urbanization of the last
century has made Indian cities a most interesting
and rewarding topic for environmental
history, one that as yet has attracted almost no
historians.
Environmental historians of India also
tended to focus their work on the role of the
state, whether that refers to the Mughal Empire,
or more commonly the British Raj, or the
post-1947 national state. There is a threefold
logic to this. First, since at least the middle of
the nineteenth century, India has been home
to environmentally activist states. Rulers chose
to try to remake nature in India according to
(evolving) ideas about modernity, security, and
prosperity. Not content with the nature they
inherited from the past, they sought to change
and to manage it in service of either imperial or
nationalist agendas. This is far from unique, and
never reached the levels of ambition attained by
the Soviet leadership. But it supplies a rationale
for historians (most of whom rarely need encouragement)
to focus on the role of the state
(116, 119, 125).
Second, just as states indulge in gross simplifications
in order to understand the complexity
of the societies they rule (126), historians often
focus on the state to simplify their tasks. In the
Indian subcontinent, the situation is especially
challenging. Its ecological diversity, from the
Himalayas to deserts to rice paddies to jungle
(and much else besides), is daunting enough.
Add to that the rich linguistic, religio-cultural,
and ethnic diversities, and then bear in mind
that none of this stays still for long. Indian history
is a kaleidoscopic swirl that, as much as
anywhere in the world, drives historians to take
intellectual refuge in emphasizing the role of
the state (116, 119, 125).
Third, a focus on the role of the state makes
environmental history in India (perhaps more
than most other settings) more interesting and
relevant to historians in general and the public
at large. The significance of British colonial rule
has probably been the foremost preoccupation
of Indian historians in the past half century, and
certainly that issue has dominated Indian environmental
historiography. Although it may be
that the import of colonial rule is exaggerated, it
did bring major changes: new plantations, railways
(and forest protection to ensure supplies
of railway sleepers), and far more ambitious
irrigation, among other things. The colonial
preoccupation, I cautiously predict, will change
as the colonial experience recedes in time and
memory. Historians of Africa, where admittedly
colonial rule came later and lasted less
long, have progressively demoted colonialism
from its formerly dominant position among historiographical
priorities (98, 127). The same,
I suspect, is happening or will happen in
Indian historiography, both in general and with
respect to environmental history. Against this
prediction, it must be admitted, is the convenience
of record keeping and archives created
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and maintained by colonial authorities, which
will long make work in this sphere tempting for
historians.
Since the pioneering works of two decades
ago (116, 128), Indian environmental history
has grown with extraordinary exuberance.
Those working in the field freely admit that
they can scarcely keep up with the spate of publications
in the field.
4.4.2. Latin America. The same happy
situation now exists for Latin American environmental
history as well.5
Scholarship on this
region included a rich tradition of historical
geography dating back to Alexander von
Humboldt (1769–1859). But environmental
history as such arrived only in the 1970s with
a small handful of articles in Spanish and
with Crosby’s Columbian Exchange (18), which
included a good deal about Latin America and
the Caribbean. A growing sense of crisis in the
1980s underlay the work of two pioneers of
Latin American environmental history, Luis
Vitale and Warren Dean. Vitale (129) steered
the conventional Marxist critique of economic
development in Latin America in an environmental
direction, although his work remained
obscure even among Latin Americanists. Dean
(130), a Brazilianist and economic historian
based in New York, wrote about the Amazonian
rubber boom of 1880–1920 as his first work of
environmental history. In many respects, the
agendas of Vitale and Dean, with their emphasis
on colonial (and neocolonial) economic
impacts, remain in place decades later. Leaving
the question of pre-Columbian Amerindian
relations with nature to the preserve of anthropologists,
geographers, and archeologists, the
main issues of Latin American environmental
history have been connected to colonial
conquest (as in South Asia) and settlement
(unlike South Asia). More recently, work on
industrialization, urbanization, conservation,
5
The bibliography maintained by Sedrez and colleagues included
about 1,200 entries as of 2009. See http://www.
csulb.edu/projects/laeh/.
and environmentalism has emerged, making
Latin American environmental history both
richer and less distinctive.
In exploring the ecological impacts of colonialism
and capitalism, Latin American environmental
historians emphasized themes often
familiar in other contexts, such as the installation
of plantation economies and the spread
of deforestation. Dean took up both in his final
book (131), a masterpiece of research and a
model of politically committed scholarship. He
took the story of a sprawling forest from preColumbian
times to the 1990s, emphasizing the
accelerating retreat of the forest in the face
of short-sighted economic agendas. The book
is squarely in the declensionist tradition (see
below) of environmental history, and consistent
with the raubwirtschaft (plunder economy)
theme prominent in Latin American historical
geography. These themes also predominate in
the as yet thin environmental history of the
Caribbean (132–134), where the colonial era
was long and plantation economies dominant.
The grasslands of Argentina and Uruguay
had a different history, inviting historians to
take different approaches. Settlement of the
pampas by people and herbivores looms large
in the environmental history of Argentina, summarized
in a prizewinning book, Memoria verde:
Historia ecol´ogica de la Argentina (135), written
by an unusual team, an economist and a biologist
long active in Argentine environmental
politics. The story of the pampas, the displacement
or destruction of its indigenous peoples,
and its transformation into pasture and
wheat fields readily call to mind the North
American prairie experience (136, 137). Within
the environmental history of the Latin American
colonial economy in general, pastoralism,
irrigation, and mining attracted attention, although
much opportunity remains especially
as regards mining (but see References 138 and
139).
Lately environmental historians of Latin
America have struck out in new directions.
While not neglecting the study of colonial
transformations, they have begun to work on
environmental thought and science in both
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colonial and independence periods. In terms
of research, two standard setters were P´adua
(140) and McCook (141). State programs of nature
conservation also came in for some treatment
(142–144). Latin America has for centuries
been among the most urbanized parts
of the world (today nearly 80% of its people
live in metropolitan areas), so the early work
on rural and agrarian subjects acquired a complementary
literature, albeit still small, in urban
environmental history. The first in-depth work
was Ezcurra’s study of Mexico City and its surroundings
(145), eventually followed by works
on Brazilian cities, such as S˜ao Paulo (146, 147),
widely regarded as an environmental blight, and
Curitiba, a southern Brazilian city viewed by
some as a bright example of enlightened environmental
city planning (148, 149). Bogot´a is
another giant city, now the subject of an environmental
history (150). Latin Americanists
have gone further in the direction of urban environmental
history than have the South Asianists
(after all their region is twice as urbanized), but
plenty of interesting cities still await attention.
Latin Americanists produced several regional
and national overviews after Vitale’s
early effort, taking into account the fruits of
new research. Castro (151) offered a compact
survey, and Brailovsky longer ones (152, 153),
all firmly nostalgic for a more ecologically intact
past. Miller’s An Environmental History of Latin
America (99) succeeded admirably as an introduction
to and conspectus of the field. Despite
the complications, discussed above, of using the
nation-state as a unit of analysis in environmental
history, Latin Americanists have followed
this well-worn path too (154, 155).
There will soon be need for further
overviews, as more research pours forth and
as new subjects find their historians. Climate
history, for example, including the impacts of
El Ni˜no, have only just begun to figure in
Latin American environmental history, and the
same may be said of energy history, although
Enfield (156) and Santiago (157) have shown
some of the potential these two areas hold.
The entire Caribbean region, so prominent in
one of the shining achievements of modern
historiography—revealing the dark world of
plantation slavery—remains woefully underde-
velopedwhenitcomestoenvironmentalhistory
(but see References 132 and 134).
From the 1970s to the early 1990s, environmental
historians within Latin America
were few and isolated from one another.
Castro, working in Mexico in the early 1990s
on his dissertation, was unaware of the works of
Vitale (129) or Brailovsky & Foguelman (135).
He found the books of Worster and other U.S.
environmental historians much easier to lo-
cate.6
But since the 1990s, an organized community
of Latin Americanist environmental
historians has grown up, linking scholars mainly
in the Americas and in Spain—an effort in
which Castro himself played a prominent part.
This new scholarly community has great opportunities
still before it in the turbulent environmental
history of Latin America.
5. FOR AND AGAINST
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
Like any new initiative in the world of scholarship,
environmental history has attracted admirers
and detractors. Here, I offer a few words
on the utility of environmental history, especially
to historians who are not predisposed to
think in environmental terms, and then explore
some of the leading critiques of the genre.
5.1. The Value of Environmental
History
Sometimes environmental history seems too
tangential to the main concerns of other historians.
What can it tell them about the big
issues that have preoccupied historians for generations?
What can it say about empire, war,
revolution? What can it say about issues that
have preoccupied the last generation, such as
gender, identity, or slavery? These are fair questions,
to which a fair answer would be more and
more every day, but not yet enough.
6
Castro relates this in “Environmental History (Made)
in Latin America,” (http://www.h-net.org/∼environ/
historiography/latinam.htm).
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Environmental historians since Crosby have
had a great deal to say about the success of
European overseas empires in the early modern
period, particularly the extent to which disease,
crops, and animals abetted them. Environmental
historians, especially those working
on Africa, Southeast Asia, and India, have contributed
a great deal to the appreciation of what
European empires did, how they sought to maximize
their revenues, control populations, and
“modernize” nature (158–161). Environmental
historians have done much less with nonEuropean
modern empires, whether Russian,
Chinese, or Japanese, let alone the deep roster
of ancient ones. Since about 2000, environmental
historians have turned their attention to
warfare, especially the subject of its environmental
consequences, following (usually unknowingly)
in the footsteps of French forest historians
(162). Two edited collections give a fine
sense of the field (163, 164), and Bennett’s detailed
study of the Pacific War (165) stands as
the most in-depth work to date, aside from one
available only in Finnish (166). For the most
part, historians have not followed the invitation
of the environmental security specialists in
political science, who have sought to find environmental
components in the causes of war
(167). As for revolutions, environmental historians
have begun to show how just about every
peasant revolution has a component of environmental
grievance and bad weather behind
it. Perhaps the boldest attempt in this direction
was Grove’s linking the French Revolution to
the disruptions of the giant El Ni˜no of 1789–
93 (168). The outcomes of some revolutionary
wars in the Americas, including the American
Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the independence
wars in Venezuela and Cuba, probably
also had significant environmental causes
behind them: Plantation systems made landscapes
more hospitable to the mosquito vectors
of yellow fever and malaria, both of which ravaged
armies sent to prevent these revolutions
(134).
Merchant pioneered the systematic use of
gender perspective in environmental history.
Her first book (25) offered a feminist critique
of the intellectual underpinnings of Europe’s
Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, arguing
for a linkage between the quest for mastery
over nature and male oppression of women.
She then took her arguments to colonial New
England (26) and expanded the inquiry beyond
intellectual matters to actual changes to the biosphere,
where she found, as in her earlier work,
a thorough transformation in social and cultural
appreciation and appropriation of nature, one
that increasingly reflected male preferences and
power. Since the 1980s, Merchant and other
eco-feminist voices have inspired several environmental
historians working in diverse fields
(95, 157).
The history of identity (an amorphous category
that includes studies of race, nationality,
and ethnicity) intersects easily with environmental
history. This is perhaps most
evident in the work on German heimat in which
local affiliations to particular landscapes translate
into identity and consciousness that in
turn support landscape preservation and conservation
movements (169). But it also appears
in the environmental justice subset of
environmental history, which considers how
powerful entities—governments and businesses
mainly—select the sites of such things as toxic
waste incinerators and nuclear waste repositories.
The environmental justice literature, especially
well developed in the United States,
finds that Native Americans and African Americans
often found their communities chosen
for these unwelcome installations. Politically
and economically weak minorities around the
world probably had similar experiences, as further
work is beginning to show (95, 170–176).
The study of slavery, in Africa and in the
Americas, is one of the jewels in the crown of
historiography in the last generation, for which
environmental historians can take no credit.
Historians of slavery have shown extraordinary
ingenuity in exploring various aspects of their
subject, but as yet, they have found little to
say to connect the exploitation of nature with
the exploitation of slaves. Geographers such as
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Watts (133) and Earle (177) have inquired more
deeply into such matters than environmental
historians until recently, but that is beginning
to change (178–181). A shining opportunity still
beckons.
5.2. Critiques of Environmental
History
The enterprise of environmental history has
its problems. It does not fit very well with the
typical training of historians. It can easily slip
into facile morality tales of past edens despoiled
by someone’s greed. And to many social scientists,
it can appear credulously environmentally
determinist.
5.2.1. Environmental history and the
nation-state focus of historians. Questions
of language, training, and inclination inform
one of the three main weaknesses of environmental
history. First is its awkward compatibility
with the nation-state as a unit of analysis.
For more than a century, most historians
have defined themselves in national terms, as
historians of Japan, Russia, Canada, Mexico, or
some other nation-state. The publishing industry
and the academic job markets strongly reinforced
this socialization. The investment in
linguistic skills made it seem unrewarding for
someone who had learned Chinese to study the
history of Chile. Moreover, many archives are
kept by national governments and record the
behavior of a single state. Very few historians
see themselves as specialists in a given time period,
e.g., 1600–1650, around the world, and
indeed, most would find this ambition absurd,
as they would the idea of specializing in, say,
the history of plantations or monasticism or
smallpox throughout the ages and around the
globe. The main reason these things seem absurd
to most historians is the importance of
reading texts in original languages, and there
is a great deal to be said in favor of this preference.
However, this preference fits poorly with
mostformsofenvironmentalhistory.Thenatural
phenomena that form part of environmental
history’s subject matter pay no heed to political
borders. Pumas and sulfur dioxide plumes migrate
across boundaries with impunity. The cultural
and intellectual trends concerning human
views of nature migrate internationally with al-
mostequalease,asthenear-simultaneousriseof
modern environmentalism as a popular movement
around the world in the 1960s and 1970s
attests. Only in the realm of political environmental
history does the historian’s preference
for national units of analysis make much sense.
And even there its logic diminishes yearly as
in recent history international NGOs, transnational
institutions, and diplomacy have played
ever larger roles. The long-standing, although
weakening, fetish for national-scale history is
problematic for many genres of history, but especially
so for environmental history. If in the
future transnational, international, and global
history continues to grow in appeal and importance,
then perhaps environmental history can
claim some credit for nudging this evolution
along (182).
5.2.2. Declensionism. The second problem
for environmental history is that it consists (allegedly)
of a single dreary and repetitive tale
of woe, irritating to other historians (183) and
depressing for the young. Environmental historians
grandiosely call the tendency to write
in this vein declensionism. In the 1970s and
1980s, many scholars found in environmental
history an opportunity to critique the environmental
record of societies, their own or others’,
by writing degradation narratives. With varying
degrees of plausibility, they located in the
past societies that behaved with ecological prudence
and restraint, or at least in a better time
when ecosystems were intact. Since those halcyon
days, it seems, all has gone relentlessly
downhill.
The weight of this critique has diminished
over time. Since the 1980s, environmental historians
have lost some of their political commitment
and moral certitude, especially in
Europe and North America, and are ever more
apt to write about environmental change rather
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than loss and degradation. Their stories have
grown more complex, in recognition of the likelihood
that environmental change is good for
some people and species and bad for others.
The beguiling formula of Leopold’s (184) “land
ethic”—“A thing is right when it tends to preserve
the integrity, stability, and beauty of the
biotic community. It is wrong when it tends
otherwise”—seemed progressively less suitable
as a guiding principle as layer after layer of complexity
emerged from ever more research (185).
Moreover, historians found encouraging stories
of environmental change that could scarcely be
seen as degradation, such as the reduction in
urban air pollution in many cities since 1965
and the diplomatic protocols that led to bans
of chlorofluorocarbon use (thereby sparing the
stratospheric ozone shield a fast death and giving
the international community more time in
which to prevent a slow one.) The most resolutely
cheerful environmental history I have
seen is Brown’s account of twentieth-century
Georgia (186).
Related to the impatience with declensionism
is a critique of degradation narratives as
either intentional or unwitting accusations of
improper ecological conduct on the part of others,
especially Africans. Environmental history
that found degradation as a result of African
land use was suspect, complicit with colonialism,
because it implied that Africans ought not
be allowed sovereignty over African ecosystems
(187). Normally this view carried weight
only when applied to European and American
authors writing about formerly colonial,
or Amerindian, societies. Many historians have
grown wary of offering critical accounts of
African or Amerindian ecological practices, lest
they expose themselves to charges of racism.
5.2.3. Environmental determinism. Third
among the chief faults found with environmental
history is environmental determinism.
Scholars in the social sciences and history have
been highly sensitive to environmental determinism
for more than half a century, as a result
of early twentieth-century overenthusiasms
[e.g., the climatic determinism of geographer
Huntington (188)] and the efforts to justify
Nazi racism by recourse to belief in biological
superiority. Hence, any effort to explain
matters with emphasis on environmental or
biological factors attracts objections. Crosby’s
Ecological Imperialism (189) is a case in point. It
argues that the success of European imperialism
in the temperate Americas, Australia, and
New Zealand owed a lot to the unconscious
teamwork of pathogens, plants, and animals
that paved the way for the imposition of imperialism,
the removal and near-extinction of
indigenous peoples, and the creation of settler
societies. To some readers, this seemed to go
much too far, serving to exculpate Europeans
for crimes against humanity (which a proper
reading of Crosby rules out). To others,
it seemed to locate agency and causation
not in human choice and social structures
but in viruses, sheep, and bluegrass (which
to a considerable degree Crosby did, and
unabashedly).
Diamond’s enormously popular and much
admired Guns, Germs, and Steel (190), which I
do not consider a work of environmental history
but which Diamond (and others) does,
aroused sharp criticisms for its efforts to explain
the long-term distribution of wealth and power
around the world in environmental terms (191).
Diamond’s analysis began with the distribution
of potentially domesticable species, which
were found much more frequently in Eurasia
than on other continents. From there, he argued
that domestication took place earlier and
spread more readily in Eurasia than elsewhere,
giving Eurasians advantages in the development
of high population densities, cities, states, writing,
and much else. Although Diamond anticipated
criticisms of environmental determinism
and tried to rebut them, the thrust of his book is
that the geographical distribution of potentially
domesticable plants and animals is the best explanation
of why some people are rich and some
are poor today—an argument that, whatever its
merits, is hard not to classify as environmentally
determinist.
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Nonetheless, the great majority of environmental
history easily escapes the charge of environmental
determinism. More often than not,
environmental historians write about how societies
and cultures have altered environments,
rather than how environments shaped them.
Work in material environmental history that
covers long time periods normally recognizes
that environment and society shape one another
through time. Anyway, much of the genre concerns
cultural interpretation of nature, or societies’
efforts to regulate nature, which is as
far from environmental determinism as scholarship
can get.
Diamond eschewed all environmental
determinism in another popular book, entitled
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
(192). It has a stronger claim to be a work of
environmental history than did Guns, Germs,
and Steel because it explicitly tackled questions
of anthropogenic environmental change and its
consequences for the sustainability of societies.
In Collapse, Diamond constructs an argument
based on a series of comparisons to the effect
that it is within human power, indeed within
the capacity of a given society’s political elites,
to select a sustainable or an unsustainable
course for that society. As a work of scholarship,
it has many drawbacks, not least that
many of those societies he judges as ecological
failures (e.g., the Greenland Norse) lasted
longer than some he rates as successes (the
modern Dominican Republic). It has attracted
vigorous critiques (191), indeed harsher ones
than followed Guns, Germs, and Steel. Each
of Diamond’s books has had a much greater
intellectual footprint, as far the general public
is concerned, than any work of professional
environmental history ever written.
6. WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
After more than a quarter century of work by
more than a thousand scholars active in environmental
history, we have learned literally
millions of things, large and small. Contrary
to some of their rhetoric, and early scholarship
that took rhetoric too seriously (193), the Nazis
were not greens at all but enthusiastic despoilers
of the environment in their quest for military
power (194). The concept of the “tragedy
of the commons,” popularized by Hardin (195)
with its classic example of a pasture open to all
comers, rarely applied to pastures and is much
more useful for thinking about the Earth’s atmosphere
or oceans (196). Biological invasions,
an anxious concern for environmentalists today,
were enthusiastically encouraged in much
of the world for centuries (197). Many shibboleths
of the early environmental movement
in the United States, perhaps unsurprisingly,
do not stand up to scholarly scrutiny. American
Indians were not ecological angels but altered
their environments to suit their preferences
within the limits of their technologies and
populations (198). There is probably no true
wilderness in the United States, despite the resonance
of that term in the history and culture of
American environmentalism (199). Devotees
of eastern religions and philosophies, including
Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and
Daoism, eagerly degraded their environments
for centuries in routine quests for survival, prosperity,
and power. Despite early suggestions to
the contrary (200), it seems most unlikely that
the Judeo-Christian tradition lies at the heart of
ecological degradation. The reverence for nature
expressed in some sacred texts scarcely restrained
any but the most ascetic believers (63,
70, 72).
Lately the community of scholars interested
in environmental change has grown increasingly
concerned about the possibility of ecological
catastrophe or collapse. What insight can
environmental history offer on this issue? The
first point to make is that clear cases of ecological
collapse or even irretrievable decline in
the historical record are few and far between.
Archeology has its candidates, such as the Classic
Maya, around 900 AD, or the Khmer kingdom
in Cambodia, around 1420 (201). All such
cases are ambiguous, and most are disputed
by archeologists and anthropologists (191).
Textual historians have been unable to shed
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any light on the matter because the few surviving
texts say next to nothing, or more often
nothing at all, that can be used for environmental
analysis. Even where texts do abound,
and environmental historians have made the
case for collapse on ecological grounds, they
have at most been able to say that environmental
decline was a contributory cause to a more
general collapse, for example, in the case of the
western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD
(43).
This is only prudent. Environmental history
casts suspicion on straightforward linear
explanations of environmental change in
general. Rarely, if ever, has climate change,
population growth, or capitalism acted alone.
Regrettably, the society-environment relationship
has proven complex, and particularities
of time and place have irritating significance.
Historians sometimes revel in such particularities
(202) and convincingly argue for the
merits of microlevel analysis. But that makes
drawing generalizations and the development
of theory fraught undertakings. Whereas a generation
ago environmental historians, even the
best ones, might offer capitalism as the decisive
variable in tales of environmental decline (19,
20, 101), work on noncapitalist societies such as
the Soviet Union (73, 74) shows unequivocally
that capitalism has no special power to provoke
environmental changes.
Two generalizations that seem safe are that
people have always affected their environments
and that environments have always affected
people. Geoarcheologists and others rather
than historians have provided the data (because
there are no texts old enough), but it is clear
that, at least since the harnessing of fire,
communities have both intentionally and accidentally
altered their surroundings, especially
through the burning of forests and grasslands
(110, 203). Over time, they gradually acquired
more power to do so through technological
changes and population growth. Over the long
run if not in every particular epoch, this power
encouraged them to do so on ever larger scales.
Nonetheless, modern history seems a case
apart. The scale, scope, pace, and intensity
of anthropogenic environmental change since
the emergence of fossil fuels around 1800, and
especially since 1945, eclipse that which went
before. The enormous expansion of energy
use and the burgeoning of population are
likely the most important proximate causes
(114, 204).
For as long as there have been humans, environments
have also affected people, providing
their sustenance but also constraining their
options. Over the long haul, this has remained
true. In one sense, it is more true than ever
and, in another, perhaps less true than before.
For most of human history, i.e., the Paleolithic,
if people found aspects of their environments
unsatisfactory—too little food, too cold—they
had one simple solution. They could walk elsewhere,
and there were so few people on Earth
that their chances of bumping into another
group were small enough. Even settled cultivators
(in more recent millennia) could often
do this and find empty or sparsely populated
new terrain. But in the modern world, such
easy migration is no longer feasible, globalization
notwithstanding, and so the great majority
of people cannot exchange one environment
for another but instead must live within the
confines of the one they have. In that sense,
people are more affected than ever by their
environments.
In a more conventional sense, they are
less affected now than ever because billions
of people (not everyone) have technologies
and knowledge that insulate them from some
environmental effects and constraints. Those
people with access to yellow fever vaccine, for
example, are almost certain to avoid that affliction
even if living in or visiting environments
rife with yellow fever. Whether this is a temporary
state of affairs remains to be seen: The
yellow fever virus might evolve so as to sidestep
immune systems primed with vaccine. More
generally, environmental change in the future
might proceed so rapidly and sweepingly that
our ability to insulate ourselves from its less
agreeable impacts might diminish.
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More systematically, what have environmental
historians learned about specific biomes
or environments? Below, I offer some of the
findings from work on forests and wetlands and
pass over a dozen or more other possibilities.
6.1. Forests
Forest history has a tradition all its own, dating
back a century or more. Early work in
this vein mainly considered management of
forests, generally in Europe where adequate
documentation existed. North American forest
history came to emphasize the economic,
labor, and technological sides of the long
saga of exploitation of American and Canadian
forests. Environmental historians, at first writing
squarely in the declensionist mode, sought
to help establish the extent of deforestation
in ancient and modern times. Despite the fact
that forests are among the easiest biomes for
humans to alter, thanks to fire, and therefore
were among the earliest that humans transformed
(and destroyed), the great majority of
global deforestation took place in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries (131, 205, 206).
Faster population growth, intensified demand
for more farmland, more vigorous timber markets,
and more efficient technologies for cutting
and transporting timber, all led to a gathering
tempo of deforestation, climaxing in the
post-1960 assaults on the tropical forests of the
Americas, West and Central Africa, and Southeast
Asia. Trees do grow back where sufficient
nutrients remain and where humans and their
livestockpermit.Butinmostenvironmentsoutside
of eastern North America and Europe,
trees have not yet had much chance to make
a comeback (207).
Environmental historians have sought to
find the best institutional management regime
for forest preservation, but with no luck. In
some settings, peasants succeeded for centuries
in managing local forests sustainably, but in
others, they obliterated them within a generation.
Similarly, professional foresters have in
cases poured whole forests into sawmills with
no misgivings but elsewhere have carefully nurtured
forests over generations. Kings and emperors
were often the best stewards of forests,
preserving them for their own hunting pleasures
and imposing draconian punishments on
all who dared to poach a deer or gazelle (207). In
the age of wooden navies, kings and their ministers
worked hard to manage oak and conifer
forests for a sustainable yield to ensure steady
supplies of ship timber (13, 208–210). For Japan
and for Western and Central Europe, we have
detailed accounts of sophisticated forest management
practices going back several centuries,
which does not mean that forest cover in those
lands remained steady (69, 211, 212)—far from
it. Anxieties about declining forests were among
the spurs promoting the development of forest
management.
6.2. Wetlands
Like forests, wetlands often seemed a waste
of land that might serve humankind better
if farmed or grazed. Unlike forests, wetlands
could not be removed by fire but instead required
hydraulic skills and endless backbreaking
labor by man and beast (until the era of
fossil-fuel powered earth-moving equipment).
So the draining of wetlands, although an ancient
practice, gathered pace chiefly where and
when plentiful labor could be focused by the
coercive power of lords and states, and where
land hunger pushed young men to desperation.
The ancient river valley civilizations in
Egypt, Mesopotamia, and north China drained
some of their wetlands to expand cultivation,
probably though forced labor. Expanding states
in several Asian river deltas—the Irrawaddy,
Mekong, and many smaller ones—converted
wetlands into rice paddies. Successful drainage,
as well as flood management, was a hallmark
of durable states and prestigious rulers in the
Asian monsoon zone.
At higher latitudes in Eurasia, the retreat
of the ice at the end of the last glaciation left
a landscape pockmarked with depressions that
became bogs, wet moors, fens, and marshes.
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Many of these were useful to people as sources
of edible fish, birds, and seasonal grazing or
browsing for livestock. Many were also dangerous
to people as sources of the various anopheles
mosquitoes that carried malaria, which until
the nineteenth century was an annual summer
scourge in northern Europe and Russia. This
broad expanse of wetlands became a target for
drainage on a small scale through the efforts
of medieval monasteries to create fresh farmland.
In the Netherlands and Norfolk, England,
the wetland drainage skills reached high levels
in the seventeenth century, and both societies
converted many thousands of hectares of
swamp to farmland. Dutch engineers also found
drainage work along the Baltic, in what is now
Poland, and elsewhere. Still, the great majority
of European wetlands remained unaffected.
After 1750, however, two factors converged
to bring on a swamp drainage fever in Europe.
The first was accelerated population growth,
meaning more desperate young men eager for
land. The second was the rise of both scientific
expertise and an improving mentality, which
confirmed the view that wetland drainage was
desirable and feasible. Rulers with ambitions
to be modern and progressive found in swamp
drainage a suitable outlet for their talents, much
as twentieth-century statesmen were drawn to
dam building. Peasants hungry for land found
they had no better choice than wading into the
muddy marshes of east Prussia, with spade in
hand. Frederick the Great set the pace with his
determined effort to conquer the wild wetlands
of his domains and settle them with fertile peasant
families, who, he hoped, would fill the ranks
of his army with sturdy sons. As usual, environmental
modification had its political purposes
(213).
Europeans in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries carried their swamp drainage fever—
and their engineering expertise—overseas. The
settlement of North America, especially the region
from Ohio through southern Manitoba
circa 1830–1910, involved draining millions of
hectares of wetlands left behind by the retreat
of the glaciers and the creation of one of the
world’s great breadbaskets. Elsewhere, imperial
rulers sought legitimacy through drainage,
as for example, when the British held a League
of Nations mandate over Palestine in the 1920s
and 1930s (214). Draining wetlands in Palestine
helped reduce malaria (knowledge of anopheles’
role as malarial vector was by then well
established) as well as created new farmland.
French colonial authorities tried hard to drain
parts of the interior Niger delta (in today’s Mali)
as part of their improvement schemes. In the
course of the twentieth century, wetland areas
the size of Canada were drained (114).
Ironically, after 1980, some of the drained
wetlands were flooded again, in Israel for example.
There, early in the twentieth century,
Zionist pioneers and (after 1919 when
Palestine became a British-mandated territory)
British authorities had drained swamps
to combat malaria, create new arable land, and
demonstrate their superiority to the local Arab
population through vigorous environmental
manipulations (214). But in time, the rise of
ecological consciousness converted bad swamps
into good wetlands, and where land values were
low enough, it seemed sensible to undo the
reclamation of decades ago in order to restore
wetlands in hopes that wildlife might return
(which it often did, especially in the case of migratory
birds). This is perhaps the best example
of how cultural preferences with respect to a
given biome can change over time, and the reviled
can become the revered.
7. CONCLUSION
Over its 30–35-year existence, environmental
history has emerged from the shadows to
become one of the fastest-growing—quite possible
the fastest of all—subfields within professional
history writing. It has cropped up almost
everywhere that historians are at work.
In some respects, Americanists still predominate,
although less so every day. The political
commitments of the early days have waned
somewhat, especially in North America and
Europe, but remain a strong motive for some
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environmental historians everywhere and perhaps
for the majority of those working in India
and Latin America.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century,
environmental history appeared in robust
good health. Nearly 700 scholars proposed
papers for the first world congress, held in
Denmark in 2009. Books and articles pour forth
at a rate that makes it a daunting challenge for
anyone to keep up (see the sidebar entitled How
to Get Up to Speed in Environmental History).
Young scholars in dozens of countries
continued to flock to environmental history.
Much of this good health, regrettably, was owing
to unhappy larger circumstances, notably
the continuing anxieties over environmental
problems around the world. As long as global
climate change, Beijing’s air quality, Brazil’s
Amazonian forests, and a dozen other concerns
remain with us, environmental history will
probably maintain its grip on historians’ imaginations.
Because these issues are likely to grow
in salience (although one never knows), the future
for environmental history looks distressingly
good.
Sustaining innovation and intellectual excitement
are always issues for a young subfield.
In environmental history, two easy routes remain
that it can follow in the years to come:
more interdisciplinarity and more imitation.
Although many historians trained to work as
individual scholars find it uncomfortable, interdisciplinary
collaboration of the sort routine
among environmental archeologists is one
way forward. Combining the data and perspectives
of environmental historians with those of
archeology, ecology, botany, climatology, and
so forth, while not without practical problems,
will help push along the frontiers of knowledge
(215).7
Collaboration of a different sort,
among historians trained in different languages,
might also propel environmental history forward.
It is a rare scholar who can cope with all
7
A few examples exist (e.g., 215). At G¨ottingen University,
the world’s largest environmental history graduate program
is premised on interdisciplinary approaches.
HOW TO GET UP TO SPEED IN
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
For those keen to keep abreast of (mainly English-language)
work in environmental history, the easiest way to do it is to follow
the journals Environmental History, Environment and History,
and Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and
Social Sciences. One can also subscribe to the discussion network
H-environment (http://www.h-net.org/∼environ/), which includes
notices of conferences, book reviews, and discussions of
various issues. In addition, several university presses publish series
in environmental history.
the languages of the Black Sea basin, for example,
which makes it exceedingly difficult for
any individual to write an authoritative environmental
history of that body of water. But a
team might do so, and it is well worth the risks,
real as they are, of collaborative scholarship.8
Paradoxically, more imitation will also propel
environmental history forward. Americanists
(other than Tarr) have as of yet taken virtually
no notice of the social metabolism approach
used to good effect by many scholars in Europe
(90, 91). The Americanists have written environmental
histories of at least 10 U.S. cities,
but no one has yet published one of an Asian
or African city. In this respect at least, environmental
history in and of the United States still
deserves the attention of and, within the limits
implied by local variations, imitation by scholars
elsewhere. In short, to maintain its intellectual
vibrancy, environmental history as a field
needs more integration, both with other disciplines
and within itself, among scholars at work
on different regions and different problems. As
always, communication among scholars across
disciplinary divides and linguistic barriers is the
key.
8
The Black Sea is a comparatively young body of water, perhaps
only 8,000 years old in its present incarnation, and thus
especially susceptible to ecological disturbance. It has had its
share of ecological problems because of developments along
the big rivers that flow into it, such as the Danube, Bug,
Dneiper, and Don.
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SUMMARY POINTS
1. Environmental history as a self-conscious enterprise dates back to the 1970s and got its
start primarily in the United States. It can usefully be divided into three main varieties:
material, political, and cultural environmental history.
2. In the 1970s and 1980s, the example of scholars working on and in the United States set
most of the research agendas. But in the last 20 years, this has changed, and the American
influence upon the field has declined.
3. Environmental history is pursued in many countries around the world, and lately, South
Asia and Latin America have produced quantites of excellent work. To date, historians
of the Middle East remain the least attracted by environmental history.
4. Among the problems with environmental history is that it requires an outlook and training
that are untraditional for historians. Moreover, it strikes some scholars as too focused on
degradation or too close to environmental determinism.
5. Environmental history can provide some context on current concerns about deforestation
or wetlands loss. It can also speak to issues of importance to scholars in environmental
studies, such as the implications of common property resources or of various religious
doctrines.
FUTURE ISSUES
1. The modern Middle East and Russia are the two geographic areas that, at present, are
least well represented in the literature on environmental history. Each offers dramatic
opportunities for scholars with the requisite language skills.
2. To date, there is a strong terrestrial bias in the work of environmental historians. More
work would be welcome on the seas and oceans.
3. The environmental history of the slave plantation world in the Americas has scarcely been
explored. Historians of slavery have taken every imaginable approach to their subject
except this one.
4. The environmental history of the industrialization of East Asia since 1960 is one of the
great ecological transformations of modern times, but has yet to attract much environmental
history treatment.
5. While authors have ventured many blanket statements about the roles of capitalism and
communism in shaping environmental histories, there is a natural experiment available.
The Koreas, North and South, since their separation in the Korean War (1950–1953) and
East and West Germany during the Cold War would allow controlled comparisons that
might shed some light on the significance of communism and capitalism in environmental
history.
6. The environmental history of migration and migrants remains but little explored. How
do people change their ideas and practices with respect to nature when they move from
one place to a very different one?
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DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to acknowledge the persistent efforts of Bill Clark to make this article better.
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Annual Review of
Environment
and Resources
Volume 35, 2010
Contents
Preface p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p pv
Who Should Read This Series? p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p pvii
I. Earth’s Life Support Systems
Human Involvement in Food Webs
Donald R. Strong and Kenneth T. Frank p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1
Invasive Species, Environmental Change and Management, and Health
Petr Pyˇsek and David M. Richardson p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p25
Pharmaceuticals in the Environment
Klaus K¨ummerer p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p57
II. Human Use of Environment and Resources
Competing Dimensions of Energy Security: An International
Perspective
Benjamin K. Sovacool and Marilyn A. Brown p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p77
Global Water Pollution and Human Health
Ren´e P. Schwarzenbach, Thomas Egli, Thomas B. Hofstetter, Urs von Gunten,
and Bernhard Wehrli p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 109
Biological Diversity in Agriculture and Global Change
Karl S. Zimmerer p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 137
The New Geography of Contemporary Urbanization and the
Environment
Karen C. Seto, Roberto S´anchez-Rodr´ıguez, and Michail Fragkias p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 167
Green Consumption: Behavior and Norms
Ken Peattie p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 195
viii
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EG35-FM ARI 18 September 2010 7:49
III. Management, Guidance, and Governance of Resources and Environment
Cities and the Governing of Climate Change
Harriet Bulkeley p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 229
The Rescaling of Global Environmental Politics
Liliana B. Andonova and Ronald B. Mitchell p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 255
Climate Risk
Nathan E. Hultman, David M. Hassenzahl, and Steve Rayner p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 283
Evaluating Energy Efficiency Policies with Energy-Economy Models
Luis Mundaca, Lena Neij, Ernst Worrell, and Michael McNeil p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 305
The State of the Field of Environmental History
J.R. McNeill p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 345
Indexes
Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 26–35 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 375
Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 26–35 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 379
Errata
An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Environment and Resources articles may
be found at http://environ.annualreviews.org
Contents ix
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