Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 14.2

Environmental History

Background: Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017), ch. 3: “The History of What?”, 108–117
William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17, no. 3 (1993), 1–22
Optional: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009), 197–211

Cronon and Chakrabarty are cited by the journal’s page numbers. Braudel is quoted from On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (1980), as in Week 5.2.

Before 1970 · backdrop

Nature was history’s backdrop, then entered it as a victim

An oil painting of a wide plain: a giant woman in a white robe floats westward stringing telegraph wire, with settlers, a stagecoach and trains below her, while bison and Native people retreat into darkness at the left — John Gast, *American Progress*, 1872 · public domain

“Long the barely noticed backdrop to human activity, the natural world initially entered history as the vulnerable object of human hubris and greed.” Maza, Thinking About History, p. 109

Nineteenth-century Americans told the settling of the wilderness as a triumph. Rival accounts told it as the destruction of nature (p. 109).

1970s · a field with a cause

The field took shape alongside the environmental movement

A color photograph taken from lunar orbit: the gray surface of the Moon in the foreground and, above it in black space, the half-lit blue and white Earth — *Earthrise*, from Apollo 8, 1968 · NASA · public domain

“this field has, since taking shape in its modern form starting in the 1970s, been closely connected with a specific political project, that of environmental conservation.” Maza, Thinking About History, p. 109

Its early books mostly showed people damaging nature (p. 111).

1967 · wilderness

A history of the wilderness idea shaped the fight to protect it

A black and white photograph of two men standing on a rock ledge high above a deep valley with a waterfall behind them: a stocky man in a hat and riding clothes, and a taller bearded man in a dark coat — Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Glacier Point, Yosemite, 1903 · public domain

“Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind has played a significant role in helping frame debates about wilderness protection in the three decades since its publication.” Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” pp. 2–3

Cronon also calls it a “whig history of wilderness consciousness” (p. 22 n. 27).

1979 · decline

A history of the Dust Bowl traced the disaster to capitalism

A black and white photograph of a farmer and two small boys walking bent into a dust storm toward a half-buried wooden shack, with fence posts sticking out of drifted sand — Arthur Rothstein, a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936 · public domain

“Dust Bowl and Rivers of Empire located the origins of environmental degradation in capitalist world-views and modes of production that are as alive in the present as they have been in the past.” Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” p. 3

Maza calls Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl (1979) a “classic, still popular account” (p. 110 n. 62).

1983 · Changes in the Land

Cronon’s first book set two ways of using New England’s land side by side

An oil painting of a river valley seen from a hilltop: at left a storm passes over dark forest and a broken tree, at right sunlight falls on cleared fields around a wide loop of river — Thomas Cole, *The Oxbow*, 1836: the Connecticut River in Massachusetts · public domain

“The pig was not merely a pig … but a creature bound among other things to the fence, the dandelion, and a very special definition of property.” Cronon, Changes in the Land (1983), quoted in Maza, p. 112

Native people moved with the seasons. Colonists fenced, cleared and sold. Cronon avoids “villains and victims” (pp. 111–12).

1986 · Ecological Imperialism

Europeans conquered with weeds, livestock and germs

A black and white photograph of dozens of rabbits crowded shoulder to shoulder around a small waterhole on bare ground, with many more scattered behind them — Rabbits at a waterhole, Wardang Island, South Australia, 1938 · public domain

“they came with invisible and ultimately irresistible biological allies: weeds, proliferating livestock such as rabbits and pigs, and above all pathogens.” Maza, Thinking About History, p. 114

Alfred Crosby’s book asks why Europeans settled so successfully in North America, Australia and New Zealand (pp. 113–14).

1997 · Guns, Germs, and Steel

A bestseller explained Eurasia’s dominance by geography alone

“In short, you don’t need Christianity, capitalism, or the Chinese work ethic, let alone the putative superiority of Caucasian or Asian genes, to account for the Eurasian advantage.”

Maza, Thinking About History, p. 113

Many historians dispute Jared Diamond’s “stark environmental determinism” (p. 113).

Discuss

If geography explains who conquered whom, what is left for people to have decided?

2010 · Mosquito Empires

Mosquitoes became actors in the history of empire

An oil painting of a stone fortress on a rocky headland above the sea: lines of red-coated soldiers climb through a breach in its wall, smoke rises from the ramparts and mortar shells arc in from the left — Dominic Serres, *The Capture of Havana, 1762: Storming of Morro Castle*, 1770s · public domain

“Thanks to their insect allies and despite the weakness of their home country, the Spanish held on to their empire.” Maza, Thinking About History, p. 115

J. R. McNeill’s example: the British took Havana in 1762, but yellow fever killed more of their troops there than died in all of North America during the Seven Years’ War (p. 115).

By the 1990s · subjects

The field took on many more subjects than wilderness

Science and gender

Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (1980): “western science has harmed nature and women in parallel ways” (Cronon, p. 3).

Fire

Stephen Pyne’s histories of fire, written to show managers “the complexity of their task” (Cronon, p. 3).

Cities

Joel Tarr’s studies of “pollution and waste streams,” aimed at policymakers (Cronon, p. 3).

Fisheries

“People mismanage fish” when they misunderstand ecosystems (Cronon, p. 9).

Unequal environments

“the socially unequal impact of urban physical environments” (Maza, p. 111).

Animals

The “shifting status of animals in human societies” (Maza, p. 115).

A second generation · hybrid

Later historians stopped treating nature and culture as opposites

An aerial photograph of a long concrete dam across a wide river, water spilling white down its center, with a reservoir behind it and dry brown hills around — Grand Coulee Dam, Columbia River, 1986 · U.S. Bureau of Reclamation · public domain

“current scholarship mostly rejects the myth of a pure, unsullied nature in favor of the view that ‘all environments are hybrid.’” Maza, Thinking About History, p. 110, quoting Paul Sutter

Earlier historians described a dam as nature destroyed. Later ones called the dammed river a “second nature” (p. 110).

Discuss

Is a dammed river still nature?

Cronon · 1993 · the question

Cronon’s students finished his environmental history course in despair

“What my students had apparently concluded from their encounter with my subject was that the American environment had gone from good to bad in an unrelentingly depressing story that left little or no hope for the future.”

Cronon, "The Uses of Environmental History," p. 1

The essay asks what the field is good for, and for whom (pp. 2–7).

Cronon · 1993 · findings

Cronon lists practical lessons the field has already taught

Markets hide their effects

Buyers and sellers “link together ecosystems and encourage change, rarely understanding the full ecological implications” (p. 8).

Migrants bring company

People who move “carry with them other organisms—plants, animals, microbes” (p. 8).

Tools depend on culture

Technology’s effects “are powerfully mediated by the cultures in which they are embedded” (p. 8).

Trash shows values

“If you want to understand people’s environmental values, watch what they throw away” (p. 9).

Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” pp. 8–9

An oil painting of mounted warriors galloping across a green plain, each rider hanging along the far side of his horse so that only a leg and an arm with a bow show over its back — George Catlin, *Comanche Feats of Horsemanship*, 1834–35 Another of Cronon’s lessons: the horse “was not simply a European invader, but a complex cultural entity.” A conquistador’s horse was not a Comanche trading horse (p. 9).
(Smithsonian American Art Museum. Public domain.)

Cronon · 1993 · thinking like a historian

Cronon finds the field’s best use in four habits of thought

Nature is always there

“All human history has a natural context.” People “are not the only actors who make history” (p. 13).

Nothing stands still

“Neither nature nor culture is static.” Eras of balance are “almost surely golden-age myths” (p. 13).

Knowledge has a history

“All environmental knowledge is culturally constructed and historically contingent—including our own” (p. 14).

Parables, not predictions

“Historical wisdom usually comes in the form of parables, not policy recommendations or certainties” (p. 16).

Compare · Week 13.1

Constructivists treated scientific knowledge as made, not found. Cronon agrees, but nature still “exists quite apart from what we believe about it” (p. 15).

Cronon · 1993 · parables

Cronon offers stories about the past, not forecasts

“Rather than make predictions about what will happen, we offer parables about how to interpret what may happen.”

Cronon, "The Uses of Environmental History," p. 17

Discuss

A city council deciding whether to build on a floodplain asks a historian what will happen. What can the historian usefully say?

An oil painting of an ironworks at night: a huge orange and yellow glow from furnaces lights up smoke, chimneys and cottages, while a team of horses pulls a wagon along a dark road in the foreground — Philip James de Loutherbourg, *Coalbrookdale by Night*, 1801 English iron furnaces burning coal. Some scientists date a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, to the late eighteenth century, when carbon dioxide in the air began to climb (Chakrabarty, p. 209).
(Science Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)

Chakrabarty · 2009 · climate

Chakrabarty: humans have become a geological force

“To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human. … we can become geological agents only historically and collectively, that is, when we have reached numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself.”

Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History," pp. 206–7

Biological, then geological

Environmental historians had shown people as biological agents, carrying germs, crops and animals. Changing the climate is a different scale of power, acquired only since the Industrial Revolution (pp. 205–7).

Braudel and Chakrabarty

Braudel’s slowest layer of history can now move fast

Braudel, preface to The Mediterranean (1949)

“a history that is almost changeless, the history of man in relation to his surroundings” (On History, p. 3)

Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History” (2009)

“this slow and apparently timeless backdrop for human actions transforms itself with a speed that can only spell disaster for human beings” (p. 205)

Prisoner, or maker

Braudel made the environment active when most historians left it as scenery (p. 205). Even environmental history, Chakrabarty says, was “still a vision of man ‘as a prisoner of climate,’” in Braudel’s phrase, “and not of man as the maker of it” (p. 206).

Chakrabarty · 2009 · freedom

Chakrabarty ties modern freedoms to fossil fuels

“The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive.”

Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History," p. 208

Discuss

Historians since the Enlightenment have told modern history as a story of growing freedom. Does coal belong in that story?

The take home