What is Environmental History? E-Book

J. Donald Hughes

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: What is History series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 310

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

What is environmental history? It is a kind of history that seeks understanding of human beings as they have lived, worked, and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the changes brought by time.

In this new edition of his seminal student textbook, J. Donald Hughes provides a masterful overview of the thinkers, topics, and perspectives that have come to constitute the exciting discipline that is environmental history. He does so on a global scale, drawing together disparate trends from a rich variety of countries into a unified whole, illuminating trends and key themes in the process. Those already familiar with the discipline will find themselves invited to think about the subject in a new way. This new edition has been updated to reflect recent developments, trends, and new work in environmental history, as well as a brand new note on its possible future.

Students and scholars new to environmental history will find the book both an indispensable guide and a rich source of inspiration for future work.

Leseprobe

Series page

What is History? series

John H. Arnold,

What is Medieval History?

Peter Burke,

What is Cultural History?

2nd edition

Peter Burke,

What is the History of Knowledge?

John C. Burnham,

What is Medical History?

Pamela Kyle Crossley,

What is Global History?

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie,

What is African American History?

Shane Ewen,

What is Urban History?

Christine Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, with Donna Gabaccia,

What is Migration History?

J. Donald Hughes,

What is Environmental History?

2nd edition

Andrew Leach,

What is Architectural History?

Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic,

What is Military History?

2nd edition

Sonya O. Rose,

What is Gender History?

Brenda E. Stevenson,

What is Slavery?

Richard Whatmore,

What is Intellectual History?

Copyright page

Copyright © J. Donald Hughes 2016

The right of J. Donald Hughes to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8842-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8843-5(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hughes, J. Donald (Johnson Donald), 1932–

    What is environmental history? / J. Donald Hughes.

        pages cm – (What is history?)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-7456-8842-8 (hardcover : alkaline paper) – ISBN 0-7456-8842- (hardcover : alkaline paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-8843-5 (paperback : alkaline paper) – ISBN 0-7456-8843-8 (paperback : alkaline paper)    1.  Human ecology–History.    2.  Nature–Effect of human beings on–History.    3.  Environmental degradation–History.    4.  Global environmental change–History.    I.  Title.

    GF13.H84 2015

    304.209–dc23

                    2015008642

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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1Defining Environmental History

Introduction

Environmental history studies the mutual relationships of humans and nature through time. Historians and others are active in this field in many parts of the world, the literature is vast and growing, and the subject is taught in schools and universities. Its audiences include students, other scholars, government and business policymakers, and a general public, all interested in environmental issues of great import in the modern world.

But what is environmental history? It is a kind of history that seeks understanding of human beings as they have lived, worked, and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the changes brought by time. The human species is part of nature, but compared to most other species we have caused far-reaching alterations of the conditions of land, sea, air, and the other forms of life that share our tenure of the Earth. The changes humans have made in the environment have in turn affected our societies and our histories. Environmental historians tend to think that the unavoidable fact that human societies and individuals are interrelated with the environment in mutual change deserves constant recognition in the writing of history.

River in Himalayas, India, choked with erosional material resulting from deforestation in the headwaters. Photograph by author, 1994.

Speaking of the contribution that environmental history can make to other kinds of history, Donald Worster, a leading American environmental historian, said that it is “part of a revisionist effort to make the discipline far more inclusive in its narratives than it has traditionally been.”1 Historians should see human events within the context where they happen, and that is the entire natural environment. The narrative of history must, as the American historian William Cronon said, “make ecological sense.”2 The theme of the interaction of human events and ecological processes has been operative during every chronological period from the origin of humankind to the present.

The environmental problems that received world attention during the last 40 years of the twentieth century, and whose importance has only increased in the present century, show the need for environmental histories that will help in understanding ways that humans have in part caused them, reacted to them, and attempted to deal with them. A contribution of environmental history has been to turn the attention of historians to topical environmental issues that produce global changes, such as global warming, altering weather patterns, atmospheric pollution and damage to the ozone layer, the depletion of natural resources including forests and fossil fuels, the dangers of radiation spread by nuclear weapons testing and accidents at nuclear power facilities, worldwide deforestation, extinction of species and other threats to biodiversity, the introduction of opportunistic exotic species to ecosystems far from their regions of origin, waste disposal and other problems of the urban environment, pollution of rivers and oceans, the disappearance of wilderness and the loss of amenities such as natural beauty and access to recreation, and the environmental effects of warfare including weapons and agents intended to impact the resources and environments of antagonists. Although long enough to suggest the variety and seriousness of the changes that make up the contemporary environmental crisis, the foregoing list is, unfortunately, incomplete. It might seem that many of these problems have appeared only recently, but there is no doubt about their tremendous effect during the twentieth century, and most of them had antecedents in all the previous historical periods. Environmental historians have given attention to these contemporary problems, but they also realize that a relationship between humans and the environment has had a formative role in every period of history, from ancient times onward.

Environmental historians recognize that human societies have experienced change in their relationships to natural systems. Changes have been slow during some periods and fast at other times; even isolated and traditional societies have faced tensions caused by factors such as depleted resources, growth and decline of population, the invention of new tools, and the appearance of unfamiliar organisms including diseases. When change is rapid and reordering, the term “ecological revolutions” used by the historian of science Carolyn Merchant is certainly apt.3 José Augusto Pádua indicates another class of “crucial epistemological changes in our understanding of the natural world and its place in human life”, including

1) the idea that human action can have substantial impact on the natural world, even to the point of degrading it; 2) the revolution in the chronological milestones of our understanding of the world; and 3) the view of nature as history, that is, as a process of construction and reconstruction over time.4

The Themes of Environmental History

Environmental historians are a varied group as far as their individual interests and approaches are concerned, as well as their philosophies in regard both to historical methods and subjects and to the environment. But their choice of themes falls into three very broad categories: (1) the influence of environmental factors on human history, (2) the environmental changes caused by human actions and the many ways in which human-caused changes in the environment rebound and affect the course of change in human societies, and (3) the history of human thought about the environment and the ways in which patterns of human attitudes have motivated actions that affect the environment. Many studies of environmental history lay emphasis primarily on one or two of the themes, but perhaps most have something to say about all three.

An example of a book that deals with the three themes is Warren Dean and Stuart B. Schwartz's With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest,5 which is in some ways a model for the writing of environmental history. The authors begin by talking about the evolution of the forest itself, continuing with its influences on the people who came to live there. They describe the successive stages of removal of forest and its replacement by agriculture and industries, and analyze the attitudes toward the forest and its development by inhabitants before and after European colonization, including such groups as plantation owners, scientists, politicians, industrialists, and conservationists. They blend the themes in virtually every chapter.

Let us briefly examine each of the three themes. The first considers the environment itself and its effects on humans. Environment can be understood to include the Earth with its soil and mineral resources; with its water, both fresh and salt; with its atmosphere, climates, and weather; with its living things, animals and plants from the simplest to the most complex; and with the energy received ultimately from the sun. It is important to understand these factors and their changes in order to do environmental history, but environmental history is not simply the history of the environment. The human side of the relationship is always included. Geology and palaeontology concern themselves with the study of the vast reaches of the chronology of Planet Earth before humans evolved, but environmental historians include these subjects as part of their narratives only insofar as they affect human affairs. This means that environmental history inevitably has a human-centered approach, although environmental historians are keenly aware that humans are part of nature, dependent on ecosystems, and not entirely in control of their own destiny. Indeed, environmental history can be a corrective to the prevalent tendency of humans to see themselves as separate from nature, above nature, and in charge of nature.

Studies of the influences of the environment on human history include such subjects as climate and weather, variations in sea level, diseases, wildfire, volcanic activity, floods, the distribution and migration of animals and plants, and other changes that are usually regarded as nonhuman in causation, at least in a major part. Usually, environmental historians have to depend on reports by scientists for background in studying the impact of these factors, and geographers or other scientists, in discussing the implications of their work, often become in effect environmental historians. Some, such as Jared Diamond,6 argue that it is the general conditions of the environment – the scale and arrangement of land and sea, the availability of resources, and the presence or absence of animals and plants suitable for domestication, and associated micro-organisms and disease vectors – that make the development of human cultures possible and even predispose the direction of that development. A near-exclusive emphasis on the formative role of the environment in human history has been termed “environmental determinism,” an idea that has a long history of its own.

The role of diseases in history is an example of the theme of environmental influence. The idea that various illnesses arise from environmental conditions has been held at least since the time of Hippocrates, the father of medicine in ancient Greece.7 Human activities have played a critical part in the spread of communicable diseases, but their horrendous inroads into unexposed human populations and the loss of life experienced as a result of the great plagues identify disease as a force often operating beyond human control. William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples is a wide-ranging survey of this subject.8 In one of the masterpieces of environmental history, The Columbian Exchange,9 Alfred W. Crosby argued that a major reason for the success of the European conquerors of the Americas was that they inadvertently brought with them communicable diseases to which they had developed resistance by long exposure, but to which the “virgin” populations of the New World were disastrously susceptible. The Europeans found that they met less resistance from the defeated and reduced population of Native Americans, but also were deprived of the labor force that a larger population might have provided. They tried to fill the latter need by importing slaves from Africa who shared to some extent, along with the Europeans, a resistance to Old World diseases. Among studies on this subject are John Iliffe's work on AIDS in Africa and John R. McNeill's work on mosquito-borne diseases in the New World.10

The second, and undoubtedly the dominant theme of environmental history in terms of the number of works written by environmental historians is evaluation of the impacts of changes caused by human agency in the natural environment, and reciprocally on human societies and their histories. The kinds of human activities included are some that provide basic sustenance, such as hunting, gathering, fishing, herding, and agriculture. Others create the increasingly complex organization of human settlements from villages to great cities, including provision of basic materials by water management, forestry, mining, and metallurgy. Technology and industries, affecting most human activities including warfare, have become more sophisticated and taken up more human energy as centuries passed. This is true of the Industrial Revolution since 1750, which harnessed energy from fossil fuels and created machines with powerful effects. All of these affect the natural environment in many ways both positively and negatively, from human points of view. Many of them make the environment more amenable to human use. But all cause other changes that can be damaging, such as deforestation and erosion, reduction of biodiversity through extinctions, desertification, salinization, and pollution. In recent decades, newly recognized damaging changes include radioactive fallout, acid precipitation, and global warming due to the effects of a growing concentration of carbon dioxide, methane, and other “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere. Some environmental historians describe the ways in which societies have tried to accent the positive changes and limit the negative ones through pollution control and conservation of natural resources, including the preservation of selected areas as national parks, wildlife reserves, etc., and the protection of endangered species. Others trace the course of political decision-making in regard to the environment, and the struggles between the environmental movement and its often powerful opponents.

Women and children carrying firewood, Canda, Gorongosa, Mozambique. One of the ways people depend on ecosystems. Photograph by Domingos Muala, 2012.

Environmental historical studies may give attention to human actions affecting the natural environment, and many of them will be considered in what follows. It should be noted that there are other varieties of history that study many of these types of human activity, such as urban history, history of technology, agricultural history, forest history, etc., and that many of them have questions and interests in common with environmental history. For example, forest history and environmental history share so much in their approach that in the United States, since 1996, the Forest History Society and the American Society for Environmental History have published a single journal together entitled Environmental History.

Works that emphasize the second theme are so numerous, and many are so excellent, that it is difficult to select only a few for mention here, but following are three books that study human impact on the environment and may serve as examples. Robert B. Marks, in Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt,11 shows how the expansion of rice cultivation – in part as an imperial policy aimed at meeting the needs of a growing population – and marketing changes, including silk exports, transformed the landscape of a region of South China. John Opie wrote a study of a Great Plains aquifer, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land,12 that shows how demands for water in the American West drove the tapping and depletion of an underground reservoir of fossil water that underlies a huge area of the high plains. Something New Under the Sun, by J. R. McNeill,13 traces the unprecedented human effects on the land, atmosphere, and biosphere that marked the last century, and points out the engines of change that operated to produce those effects: population and urbanization, technology, and the ideas and politics that drove human efforts.

A third theme of environmental history is the study of human thought about the natural environment and attitudes toward it, including the study of nature, the science of ecology, and the ways in which systems of thought such as religions, philosophies, political ideologies, and popular culture have affected human treatment of various aspects of nature. It is impossible to understand what has happened to the Earth and its living systems without giving attention to this aspect of social and intellectual history. It has led, as Donald Worster put it, to a uniquely human encounter “in which perceptions, ethics, laws, myths, and other structures of meaning become part of an individual's or group's dialogue with nature.”14

A notable book that investigates attitudes to the environment is Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind, first published in 1967 and now, with Char Miller, in its fifth edition.15 Nash discusses varied attitudes, positive and negative, of European Americans toward nature, and their effects on preservation and/or development of wild areas in North America, from their roots in Europe to the twentieth century. He shows the ways in which Native American Indians appeared to the European Americans, but does not attempt to examine their own views of nature. I have explored American Indian environmental views in North American Indian Ecology, as has Shepard Krech, from a contrasting standpoint, in The Ecological Indian.16 In a thoughtful article, Gregory D. Smithers attempts to get beyond the stereotype of the “ecological Indian” to a “more meaningful engagement with Native American environmental knowledge and social practices.”17 Changing cultural attitudes to nature through history are traced in Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times by Peter Coates.18

Many environmental historians maintain that what people think and believe exerts a motive force on how they will behave in regard to the natural world. Others point out that people are skillful at adapting their attitudes, whether enjoined by commandments or evolved by personal philosophies, to their needs and desires, and that this is as true of the environmental sphere as of any other.

Among the Scholarly Disciplines

Environmental history, as John R. McNeill succinctly put it, “is about as interdisciplinary as intellectual pursuits can get.”19 With interests in matters that cross the usual subject boundaries, including the formidable and seldom-bridged chasm between the humanities and the sciences, environmental historians find themselves gathering information from widespread specialties and reading books that historians ordinarily have neglected or avoided. At the same time, scholars from a number of disciplines have been caught up in environmental history and have often done a very good job of writing it themselves. To a degree not common for most other historical subjects, books on environmental history are written by authors from other disciplines such as geography, philosophy, anthropology, and biology. The following sections will comment on the relationship of environmental history to the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences including ecology.

Related to other social sciences

History is a discipline sometimes regarded as one of the social sciences. Environmental history, as a subdiscipline of history, can also be considered in this way because it is in one sense the study of how human societies have related to the natural world through time. Donald Worster, in his influential essay, “Doing Environmental History,” treated environmental history as an innovative movement within the discipline of history, but the three “clusters of issues” he notes as its major themes each draws “on a range of outside disciplines.”20 The Australian historical geographer J. M. Powell counters that environmental history is not a subdiscipline of history, but an interdisciplinary methodology.21 There is empirical evidence, at least, for Powell's assertion, in that even the environmental historians most closely identified with the historical profession admit that much valuable work, and not a small proportion of all work in environmental history, has been done by scholars who have their feet in other disciplines.

William A. Green observes that no approach to history is more perceptive of human interconnections in the world community, or of the interdependence of humans and other living beings on the planet.22 Environmental history, he adds, supplements traditional economic, social, and political forms of historical analysis.

This may be the result of the interdisciplinary nature of the subject itself, since to do environmental history properly requires familiarity with ecology and other sciences, the history of science and technology, and geography and other branches of the social sciences and humanities. There are several historical fields so closely allied to environmental history that a rigid line of separation cannot always be drawn. Further, as Stephen Dovers remarked, “It is hard to define the boundary between historical geography and environmental history.”23 Historical geographers discovered that they shared a border with environmental history, a border that they crossed with impunity, writing some fine environmental history. Among the geographers who have done so is Ian Gordon Simmons, whose Changing the Face of the Earth24 is a brief, technically based review of the subject that considers varying rates of environmental change, problems of prediction, and issues affecting policy decisions and execution. His Environmental History25 too is a valuable overview that stresses the scientific bases of historical study. Andrew Goudie's useful text, The Human Impact on the Natural Environment, has reached its seventh edition.26

The ecological paradigm was applied to the social sciences in a series of essays edited by Riley E. Dunlap in 1980. In his own essay, he noted that the social sciences largely ignored the fact that human societies depend on the biophysical environment for their survival, and exempted humans from the ecological principles that govern all other forms of life.27 As a corrective, he and other authors applied models derived from ecology to their own disciplines: sociology (William R. Catton, Jr. and Dunlap), political science (John Rodman), economics (Herman E. Daly), and Anthropology (Donald L. Hardesty).28 History was not represented, but a growing number of historians such as William H. McNeill and Alfred W. Crosby29 were already considering how the ecological paradigm might transform our understanding of the human past and present.

A developed environmental historical narrative, properly speaking, should be an account of changes in human society as they relate to changes in the natural environment. In this way, its approach is close to those of the other social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics. One good example of this would be Alfred W. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange,30 which showed how the European conquest of the Americas was more than a military, political, and religious process, since it involved invasion by European organisms including domestic species and opportunistic animals such as rats. European plants, whether cultivated ones or weeds, crowded out or replaced native ones, and the impact of European micro-organisms on the indigenous population was even more devastating than warfare.

An important thrust in environmental history is the study of political expressions of environmental policy. Many nations have embodied this in the creation of environmental law, administrative departments such as environmental ministries, and governmental agencies entrusted with enforcement of environmental protection. The struggle to enact legislation is also part of the story, with environmental organizations on one side and interest groups on the other. A study examining the structure of politics and the results of policy in the United States is A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 by Samuel P. Hays.31 Oliver A. Houck included eight well-chosen case studies of environmental law from around the world in his Taking Back Eden.32 For the history of the study of global environmental politics, there is a helpful entry by Dimitris Stevis in the International Studies Encyclopedia.33

Environmental history is also related to economics. The “eco-” in economics comes from the same root as the “eco-” in ecology, from the Greek oikos, “household,” implying household management, whether of budget or of the oikoumene, the inhabited world. Economics, trade, and world politics are regulated, whether humans wish it or not, and whether or not they are conscious of it, by the availability, location, and finite nature of what, in words derived from economics, are called “natural resources.” The field of ecological economics achieved recognition at about the same time as environmental history and has a somewhat parallel trajectory.34

Related to other humanistic inquiries

Like history itself, environmental history is also a humanistic inquiry. Environmental historians are interested in what people think about the natural environment, and how they have expressed their ideas of nature in literature and art. That is, at least in one of its aspects, environmental history can be a subfield of intellectual history. If this inquiry is to remain history rather than philosophy, it should never stray too far from the question of how attitudes and concepts affect human actions in regard to natural phenomena. But it is also a valid part of the environmental historical enterprise to establish what the significant views were on the part of individuals and societies. One of the first achievements in this area was Clarence J. Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore,35 which examined three major environmental ideas in Western literature from ancient times to the eighteenth century. Those ideas were that the cosmos is designed, that the environment shapes human beings, and that humans alter the environments in which they live, whether for good or ill. The roles of religious and cultural traditions in encouraging or inhibiting practices affecting the environment have been the subject of much commentary and argument. A much-noted controversial example is Lynn White's article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,”36 which argued that medieval Latin Christianity, as a religion that exalted humankind over nature, prepared the way for Western science, technology, and environmental destruction. White sought a more ecologically friendly Christianity exemplified by Francis of Assisi, teaching the “democracy of all God's creatures, organic and inorganic.”37

In The Decline of Nature, Gilbert LaFreniere presents a comprehensive survey of Western thought on nature and culture in the light of the contemporary understanding of environmental history.38

Related to the natural sciences

Environmental changes are frequently held to be the result of climatic variations over the decades or centuries, and have been the subject of study over the past generation or two. For example, in France Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000.39 Reliable records of weather observations do not date back more than 200–300 years or so, and in most locations not that far, but proxy data on historical climates have emerged from sources as diverse as tree rings in species in the temperate zones, and air trapped in the accumulated layers of snow in the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland. Hubert H. Lamb and his Climate Research Institute in the UK were pioneers in climatic studies.40 Christian Pfister and associates in Switzerland and Western Europe have mined written sources for hints on European climate in times from the Middle Ages onward.41 Spencer R. Weart's The Discovery of Global Warming is an historical account of theories and discoveries about climatic change.42 Several scholars, including Richard Grove and John Chappell, have engaged in speculation about how a phenomenon such as the Pacific warming cycle called El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) affects the activities of people even at great distances, and may have played a role in historical events.43 Environmental historians are concerned by the need to differentiate the effects of climatic change on the environment from those caused by human agency. Were the retreat of forests and the advance of the desert in North Africa in Roman times and afterwards mainly due to a dryer climate or to tree cutting, stream diversion, and grazing of goats by the inhabitants?44 As information on climatic change becomes more available, it may be possible to give balanced answers to questions like these.

Environmental history derived to an important extent from recognition of the implications of ecological science on understanding the history of the human species. A herald who called forth a response across the crevasse of the two cultures, science and the humanities, was Paul B. Sears, who in 1964 published an essay provocatively entitled “Ecology – A Subversive Subject.”45 In it, he pointed out:

[T]he view of nature derived from ecological studies called into question some of the cultural and economic premises widely accepted by Western societies. Chief among these premises was that human civilization, particularly of advanced technological cultures, were above or outside of the limitations, or “laws” of nature.46

Ecology, in contrast, placed the human species within a web of life, dependent on cycles of food, water, minerals, air, and on constant interactions with other animals and plants. Sears called ecology “the subversive science,” and it has certainly subverted the accepted view of world history as it was up to the twentieth century. Adopting this controversial adjective, Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley published a collection, The Subversive Science,47 whose 37 articles from various disciplines included two written by Sears. Shepard criticized the paradigm of human mastery, underlining the absurdity of believing that “only men were found to be capable of escape from predictability, determinism, environmental control, instincts and other mechanisms which ‘imprison’ other life.” It amazed him that “Even biologists, such as Julian Huxley, announced that the purpose of the world was to produce man, whose social evolution excused him forever from biological evolution.”48 Environmental historians, however, have not always come to grips fully with the implications of ecology, particularly community ecology.

One of these implications is that the human species is part of a community of life. It evolved within that community by competing against, cooperating with, imitating, using, and being used by other species. Humankind's continuing survival depends upon the survival of the community of life, and upon achieving a sustainable place within it. History's job includes examining the record of the changing roles our species has enacted within the biotic community, some of them more successful than others, and some more destructive than others.

Victor Shelford, a leading ecologist in the twentieth century, asserted:

Ecology is a science of communities. A study of the relations of a single species to the environment conceived without reference to communities and, in the end, unrelated to the natural phenomena of its habitat and community associates is not properly included in the field of ecology.49

A similar assertion can be made about environmental history, where the species studied is humankind. To a large extent, ecosystems have influenced the patterns of human events. The activities of the human species, in turn, have to an impressive degree made them what they are today. That is, humans and the rest of the community of life have been engaged in a process of coevolution that did not end with the origin of the human species, but continues in the present. Historical writing should not ignore the importance and complexity of that process.

What needs emphasis is that all human societies, everywhere, throughout history, have existed within and depended upon biotic communities. This is true of huge cities as well as small farming villages and hunter clans. The connectedness of life is a fact. Humans never existed in isolation from the rest of life, and could not exist alone, because they are only one part of the complex and intimate associations that make life possible. The task of environmental history is the study of human relationships, through time and subject to frequent and often unexpected changes, with the natural communities of which they are part. The idea of environment as something separate from the human, and offering merely a setting for human history, is misleading. The living connections of humans to the communities of which they are part must be integral components of the historical account.

As Aldo Leopold wrote:

One of the anomalies of modern [ecological thought] is that it is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics, and history. The other studies the plant and animal community and comfortably relegates the hodgepodge of politics to “the liberal arts.” The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of the present century.50

Environmental history is an active part of that fusion.

Environmental History and the Older History

Before the early twentieth century, historical writers regarded the exercise of power within human societies, and the struggle for it within and between human societies, as the proper subject of history. Thus wars and the careers of leaders dominated their narratives. It is significant that the first two great writers of history in the West, the Greeks Herodotus and Thucydides, each chose a war as his subject. Marxist historians turned their attention to the proletariat, the workers and peasants who did societies' labor, but if the narrative added economics to politics it was still the story of the power struggle in society. The older history, when it recognized that nature and the environment were present, treated them as a setting or backdrop, but environmental history treats them as active, formative forces.