Anniversary Forum

Movement Scholarship

Ramachandra Guha

THE COUNTRIES I know best are India and the United States. Both have vigorous environmental movements, and both also have robust traditions of environmental scholarship.	1
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, USZ62-97735. This photograph captures Alaska's special brand of technological dissonance, with streets awash in an explosion of electric light, yet fully snowed in. Though many scholars have looked at the ways in which electricity transformed the human environment and nature itself, there are still interesting questions to be asked about how electric power and light changed the world. A Winter Night in Cordova, Alaska, 1917.
There is, in fact, a direct connection between the one and the other. In both countries, it was social movements that provoked scholars to study aspects of their history that they had previously ignored. In India, the vast records of the Forest Department were untouched by, indeed unknown to, historians—until the celebrated Chipko movement sent them to search for the roots of peasant discontent with state forestry. In the United States, the environmental movement of the Sixties likewise catalyzed interest in forgotten precursors—so much so that, through the labors of historians, the likes of John Muir and Aldo Leopold have become much better known now than they ever were in their own lifetimes.	. . .