Anniversary Forum

Globalizing American Environmental History

Thomas Lekan

RECENTLY A COLLEAGUE of mine invited me to lead a session on environmental history in his graduate historiography seminar. My task was to moderate a discussion of an article surveying the field of environmental history and to speak about how its ideas applied to my own research. For the discussion my colleague had selected Richard Grove's chapter "Environmental History" in Peter Burke's well-received collection New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Penn State, 2001), an essay I had not read previously. I assumed, erroneously, that it would be a standard survey of the field's intellectual origins and methodological concerns similar to well-known articles on the subject by scholars such as Richard White, Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, Ted Steinberg, and J. R. McNeil. I was thus unprepared for Grove's approach: a scathing, revisionist history of the discipline that lambasted North American scholars' "parochial takeover bid" of the designation "environmental history" in the 1970s. Echoing his arguments in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Grove asserted that evidence of environmental degradation in the colonial periphery spurred the development of Francophone and Old World Anglophone environmental history among geographers, anthropologists, and ecologists long before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) raised environmental consciousness and Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale University Press, 1967) made environmental history a respectable subfield in the United States.	1
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-4848. Like corn (see previous image, page 46), coal, too, created ties between nature and the social world of courtship, gender, and family. The prosperous mines, elevators, and sheds of the S.J. Patterson Coal Company in 1887 made it possible for a prosperous couple to enjoy the comforts of a cozy interior space far different from the hay-filled husking barn of 1858. Their privacy and comfort—thanks to coal—necessitated supervision from the man of the house, an interesting social shift connected to the material transformations of industrialization. S.J. Patterson Coal Company.
Not surprisingly, the seminar turned out to be a decidedly awkward exchange. Since most of the students in the seminar had never before encountered environmental history in any form, Grove's iconoclastic account left most of them uncertain about the definition, scope, and achievements of the field. My attempt to describe familiar works by Worster, Bill Cronon, and Arthur McEvoy only compounded their confusion. I came away frustrated by my inability to reconcile Grove's account with other narratives about the field and to persuade this fresh group of graduate students to consider incorporating environmental themes into their emerging MA and PhD theses. Despite my reservations about the tone of Grove's critique, however, my encounter with his essay did lead me to a series of productive observations and questions about the field of environmental history. These inform my comments about where the field might go next.	. . .