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in search of health: LANDSCAPE AND DISEASE IN AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
GREGG MITMAN
The most important characteristic of an organism is that capacity for internal self-renewal known as health.
There are two organisms whose processes of self-renewal have been subjected to human interference and control. One of these is man himself (medicine and public health). The other is land (agriculture and conservation).
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| Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac |
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| HEALTH. TO ALDO LEOPOLD it was the most vital function of living organisms. Land, like the human body, Leopold argued, was subject to disturbances that resulted in sickness and possessed a physiological capacity for self-renewal once disturbed. The allusions to land health in A Sand County Almanac, a text heralded for laying the foundations of biocentrism, are striking.1 How are we to make sense of this seemingly incongruous mixture of medicine—the most anthropocentric of scientific arts—with conservation—the province and values of which Leopold hoped to ground largely in nonhuman nature? Why, if health was so central to Leopold's conservation thought and practice, has it not been a subject more central to environmental history?2 |
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Perhaps it is because we have too readily embraced the dichotomies—humans versus nature, urban versus rural, local versus global—that have structured environmental thought and debate and the historical narratives we write about them. One consequence is that concerns about natural resources are separated chronologically, conceptually, and spatially from those of human health. Consider, for example, the main themes that get played out in undergraduate courses and texts addressing one important strand of American environmental history: the emergence of American environmentalism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the conservation movement was driven predominately by middle- and upper-class urban professionals, whose focus on the efficient management or preservation of the nation's forests, streams, fish, and wildlife for recreation and use led to the establishment of the first national parks, forest reserves, and federal and state agencies governing the regulation and control of natural resources. After the Second World War, rising standards of living led increasing numbers of Americans to embrace environmental concerns associated with health and well-being that formed the seeds of the 1960s environmental movement.3 So the story goes. |
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Over the last decade, urban environmental historians have attempted to dislodge this prevailing view. The historical scope of American environmentalism, once focused upon wilderness preservation and natural-resource management, has expanded to include the struggles of citizens and scientists combating environmental hazards of the city and the workplace. In the battle that Progressive reformers such as Alice Hamilton launched against the pollution and waste of the industrial city, health emerged as both a medical and environmental concern.4 But even with this much-needed revisionist perspective, the city remains remote from the country; health is a subject that occupies a place distant from conservation. And the history of environmental ideas, values, and social movements in the United States takes place in a relative vacuum, largely isolated from the movements of scientific ideas, people, and flora and fauna across the globe. |
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What if we were to take Leopold's metaphor of land health, not as a mere rhetorical flourish, but one grounded in the historical, material, and social relations of knowledge and place? How might a focus upon health reveal new patterns in the historical landscape of American environmentalism, whereby the spaces between health and conservation, humans and nature, city and country, and American and European environmental history appear not so vast? |
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