Harriet Ritvo

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Harriet Ritvo | Discipline and Indiscipline | Environmental History, 10.1 | The History Cooperative

Anniversary Forum

Discipline and Indiscipline

THINKING ABOUT where environmental history might or should be heading is a formidable assignment. But perhaps it is not quite formidable enough. That is, the editorial request which produced these brief essays was formulated in a way that tacitly assumes ("direction," "heading") that environmental history has developed and will continue to be developed as a unified cohesive subdiscipline. This may have been the case in its earliest days (although all origin stories merit careful scrutiny). It is certainly not the case any more. Both the topics of papers presented at the annual ASEH meetings, where disciplinary boundaries are policed by the program committee, and those of the books submitted for the annual Marsh Prize, where authors (or their publishers) classify themselves, suggest that environmental history is currently perceived as embracing not only a wide range of topics, but also, somewhat paradoxically, a wide range of disciplines. An unevenly spreading blob might better represent this situation than a targeted monodirectional arrow.

Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-062876-D.
From Georgia to Portland, Oregon, and from L.A. to Gary, Indiana, environmental historians have drawn connections between race, environment, pollution, and power. As this image suggests, race, space, nature, and governmental power have come together in significant and costly ways not yet fully understood.

Flag Day, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1941.

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