Environmental History
Jonatan Palmblad
Environmental history is the interdisciplinary study of human–environment interaction over time, or “the history of the mutual relations between humankind and the rest of nature” (McNeill, 2003, p. 6). While this field can be understood as a subdiscipline of history, in which focus lies on environmental topics, it often constitutes a more ambitious endeavor: the environmentalization of history proper. On the one hand, environmental historians can therefore focus exclusively on ecological concerns, and on the other, they can study unexamined environmental aspects of history – thereby broadening the scope of how we understand and interpret the past.
Put differently, environmental history is history informed by the ecological fact that humans, too, are organisms and that we are in no way detached from the ecosystem and the biosphere. Since the correlate of an organism is its environment, this ecological outlook implies that the natural world is understood as a dynamic, interactive scene and not an inert, passive background. Implicitly and explicitly, the work of environmental historians therefore challenges the standard narrative of modernity as a march of progress according to which humanity is successively liberating itself from a state of nature. When looking at the broad strokes of modern history, environmental historians therefore often argue akin to what sociologist Bruno Latour (1993; 2015) has claimed: that “we have never been modern” in the common sense of the word, since our supposed emancipation from natural constraints is in reality an intensified entanglement with ecological reality. Since environmental history often implies a reexamination of the accounts and explanations of earlier historians, it can therefore be understood as “part of a revisionist effort to make the discipline [of history] far more inclusive in its narratives than it has traditionally been” (Worster, 1989, p. 290; cf. Hughes, 2006, p. 4). Environmental history, then, is history studied without abstracting humans and their ideas and culture from the material, relational, and ecological world in which they concretely exist.
A common theme within environmental history is the human transformation of nature (Merchant, 2007, p. xv). At the same time, environmental historians can focus more or less on the human dimension of this interaction, and the question of how human beings and societies have been impacted by nonhuman natural activities is also an important part of their inquiry. Accordingly, the “principal goal” of environmental history is “one of deepening our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time and, conversely, how they have affected that environment and with what results” (Worster, 1989, pp. 290–291). Today’s problems of ecological degradation and the impact of pollution and biodiversity decline on human beings can therefore be understood in light of the events and perspectives studied by environmental historians. While their research can be an end in itself, the relevance of their findings is becoming increasingly relevant for better comprehending present and future ecological challenges. The boundary between activism and advocacy, on the one hand, and disinterested research, on the other, is therefore often blurred by the escalation of the ecological crisis (Palmblad and DeWitt, 2023). At the same time, environmental historians’ critical study of popular concepts like “wilderness” and “nature,” or of the contradictions within some activist movements, sometimes puts their research at odds with both mainstream and radical environmentalism, which is often pivoted on the normative force of these notions.
When conducting research, environmental historians ask and answer questions about how different people and societies have interacted with their surroundings over time; what species were extinct, domesticated, and spread due to human activities; what ideas about nature, wilderness, and the surrounding world were prevalent in different societies and civilizations; how events in human history were influenced or even determined by environmental factors, and more. A study of a specific region at a given time in history could therefore look into many aspects: the content of cultural products but also their materiality; the impacts made by human activities, but also the impacts of natural activities upon humans; and the very conditions that made human life possible, whether it was sustainable or unsustainable. To understand human–environment interaction over time, environmental historians therefore often engage in interdisciplinary work by reading beyond the discipline of history proper.
Although a young discipline, environmental history has a long prehistory – especially when considered broadly as the awareness of the mutual relations between human and nonhuman nature through time. Already in Ancient Greece, the trailblazing historians Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE) and Thucydides (c. 460–400 BCE) wrote about human impacts on their surroundings and vice versa, and one century later the Chinese philosopher Mencius (c. 371–289 BCE) gave advice on how to make human activities more sustainable over time. In the Middle Ages, Arabic and European thinkers continued this tradition, and throughout modernity, intellectuals of different cultures have investigated how humans have interacted with their surroundings (Hughes, 2006). Similar awareness and inquiries can undoubtedly be found in cultures across the word, not least in the concrete science of the world’s diverse and extant indigenous peoples, who all have in common that their societies have been sustainable for millennia. In more recent times, environmentalist Aldo Leopold argued that “an ecological interpretation of history” reveals humanity’s interdependence with other species (Leopold 1987 [1949], p. 205), the French Annales school contributed to a historical understanding of human–environment interaction (Ibid.; Worster 1989), while intellectuals like Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) and Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) applied interdisciplinary methods to understand how cities and regions have developed in consort over time (Palmblad, 2024; Guha, 1991).
When environmental history became a distinct and established discipline in the 1970s, it continued this long tradition of studying past ecological interactions, but gained an identity of its own. At this time, in the wake of the environmentalist movement of the preceding decade, many disciplines turned their eyes toward ecology, and historians made an effort to become not only more environmentally aware but also more interdisciplinary. The field also influenced other disciplines at this time, and in About Behaviorism (1974), the famous psychologist B. F. Skinner argued that an organism’s “environmental history” must be considered in order to understand its behavior (Skinner, 1974). Compared to history in general, the self-proclaimed environmental historians realized that they had to go beyond ideas, not only by considering social organization but also the earth itself, and they therefore ended up studying how nature, material culture, and ideas related to each other as a single whole. In effect, it became a discipline of synthesis (Worster, 1989). As such, environmental history has naturally become a major field within the environmental humanities, a “metadiscipline or superfield” (Bergthaller et al., 2014, p. 264) in which scholars with an ecohumanistic approach join forces by interchange and overlap (see ecological humanities). Not only is this because environmental history is older and thereby anticipated and informed the environmental humanities, but also because environmental historians have found common ground with scholars of other humanities disciplines.
Today, environmental history is one of many disciplines that study human–environment relations over time. Human ecologists and historical geographers have long studied this interaction from their respective vantage points, and so have environmentally and historically minded anthropologists and archaeologists. What sets environmental history apart is usually its historical theories and methodologies, but historians also borrow perspectives and tools from other disciplines. They cannot afford to stay only within the world of humanistic theory, methodology, and jargon, but must learn to speak more languages, and “the most outlandish language that must be learned is the natural scientist’s… Together the natural sciences are indispensable aids for the environmental historian, who must begin by reconstructing past landscapes, learning what they were and how they functioned before human societies entered and rearranged them” (Worster, 1989, p. 294). Interdisciplinary literacy, especially but not exclusively in relation to ecology, is therefore imperative for a historical investigation of events not restricted to the cultural sphere (Ibid.; Hughes, 2006; McNeill, 2003). Without doing natural science, then, environmental historians often inform themselves by scientific work in order to contextualize history with aspects and events of the natural world.
As McNeill (2020) has argued more recently, historians might even be approaching “peak document,” a point at which the usefulness of textual documents for historical research is exhausted, and they therefore might consider expanding their use of non-textual sources and tools from other disciplines. Historians of the environment have always made use of secondary sources by scientists and ecologists, but the future may demand an adoption of scientific and ecological methodologies. If it is true that environmental historians often glean insights from other academic fields, it is also true that academics not trained in history are welcome under the umbrella of environmental history. The pathways to environmental history are often diverse, and important contributions – like anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985) – come from outside the field.
Although environmental history is characterized by going beyond a mere history of ideas, methods for studying ideas, discourses, and concepts remain important. One of the first works of the field was Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1994 [1977]), which looks into the complex history of ecological thought, and Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980) connects historical shifts in ideas about nature and women with the history of science and environmental degradation. While constituting a pivotal contribution to environmental history in general, Merchant’s book also contributed to the rise of ecofeminism, and it brought the experience of women into the purview of a field that up then had been dominated by men both as researchers and objects of study.
The study of particular concepts has also become an important part of the environmental historian’s toolbox, such as in William Cronon’s essay “The Trouble With Wilderness” (1996), a now canonical essay, in which he shows that the idea of wilderness is neither natural nor neutral, since its meaning shifts radically across time and place with sometimes devastating consequences. This study shows how the idea of wilderness, by artificially separating humans and nature, has been used to justify displacement of indigenous peoples, thereby bringing environmental history in relation to ecological and social justice.
It will probably always be the case that environmental history remains a hermeneutic discipline, meaning that it approaches its sources chiefly through interpretation rather than scientific experimentation. As such, doing environmental history will to some extent always remain the endeavor of environmental and ecological contextualization of the past. “As a method,” writes J. Donald Hughes, “environmental history is the use of ecological analysis as a means of understanding human history” (2009, p. 4). This means studying humanity, not in the abstract, but as species in the concrete, meaning that all individuals are ecologically entangled and related to other organisms and each other, while constituting parts of systems at higher orders of organization.
Environmental history has today become a vibrant and diverse field with researchers young and old from around the globe. Regional organizations that host conferences include the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), the Asian Association for Environmental History (AAEH), the Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History (SOLCHA), and the Asian Association for Environmental History (AAEH). At a global level, the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO) works for further integration and internationalization of the field, organizing a conference every five years. The future of environmental history will likely be an even more synthesizing attempt at understanding past human–environment interaction – for the sake of addressing the present ecological crisis.
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