Environmental History: Introduction

Although not the first use of the term, ‘Environmental History’ has been popularised since its use to describe a new approach to history by Roderick Nash in 1972.

At its broadest, Environmental History is the study of human interaction with the natural world, or the other species and processes that occupy the Earth. Its remit can thus be extremely broad, ranging from studies of the aesthetic appreciation of nature, to the modelling of the material flows and ecological systems that underpin human economies.

This field of interest is of course nothing new; human relations with ‘natural (and apparently supernatural) forces’, the role of environmental circumstances in social development, and the delineation of the human and the ‘natural’ have been preoccupations of historians from the very beginning. However, it has only been as a reaction to the immense impact of modern development on the Earth, and the rise of environmentalism as a self-conscious political movement and preoccupation of government, that ‘Environmental History’ has emerged to provide a firm focus on these issues within the discipline of History. Many contemporary environmental historians have also been influenced by the gradual absorption of the approaches of other disciplines such as ecology, anthropology and demography into the documentary-based study of the past during the second half of the twentieth century.

The most commonly cited definition of environmental history comes from the work of American historian Donald Worster. Worster stated that, ‘Environmental History is is the interaction between human cultures and the environment in the past.‘ He identifies three main strands of work:

The study of ‘nature itself’, including humans, often from an ecological point of view: examining species behaviour, evolutionary processes, or flows of materials, nutrients and energy.

Exploring socio-economic interaction between humans and nature, including production, reproduction, customs, and regulation.

The ‘mental interaction’ of humans and nature: myths, legends, ideology, aesthetics, and indeed the development of scientific discourses.

Few works, if any, would attempt to cover all of these approaches. What environmental historians share however is a conviction that a central aspect of human history is how people have interacted with the non-human. Historians today are keen to stress the interactive relationship of the human and non-human: how their relations generate feedback effects and shape each other mutually. In this regard environmental history has distanced itself from some earlier scholarship that saw human societies as being determined by their environmental circumstances with little room for manoeuvre: where survival was a question of adapting to a necessary set of strategies or dying out.

Although the banner of the new environmental history has primarily been taken up by historians working with quite traditional methods, many of its arguments are dependent on utilising data from those areas of the natural sciences that examine environmental change. Unsurprisingly, the field has thus developed a strong interest in interdisciplinarity, and the working relationship between the natural science and the humanities.

Recently, Sörlin and Warde have proposed a different understanding of environmental history as an approach: the study of how societies and individuals create ‘environments’ around themselves that they treat as exterior to their core being or activity. Thus in their very definition of the ‘environment’, we learn much about how people have viewed themselves and behaved. These approaches bring environmental history simultaneously closer to ecological and systems theory approaches, and insights from the history of science.