Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde

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Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde | The Problem of The Problem of Environmental History: A Re-reading of the field | Environmental History, 12.1 | The History Cooperative

the problem of THE PROBLEM OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: A RE-READING OF THE FIELD

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that environmental history has not engaged as fully with social and political theory as it might, and that once it does, environmental historians will find that their concerns are, potentially, much closer to the mainstream of thought in the social sciences and humanities than they might have expected. In fact, environmental history has the promise to be central to the most influential social thought in the academy and among policy makers. The field also needs to consider the roles of knowledge and science, or "knowledge regimes," in translating scientific "facts" into politically realizable decisions.

THE EXPRESSION "ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY" was coined, at least within the genealogy that has led to a recognizable field of academic endeavor, by American historian Roderick Nash in 1972.¹ We might reasonably say that the field is a little older than this, although people have been thematizing the kinds of problems that environmental historians are interested in for almost as long as they have been writing narrative texts at all. The standard reference here remains Clarence Glacken and his superb bird's eye view of geographical ideas, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967),which, had it been published in 1997, or even 1987 or 1977, might well have been framed as an "environmental history" of ideas.² But 1967 was just too early; and perhaps just as crucially, Glacken's great book did not fall within the largely American framework of Nash and colleagues who would found the American Society for Environmental History. Thus professional environmental history has now been in the making for more than a generation, and the time seems right for some constructive reflection.	1
We would like to present two lines of argument here. First, we want to examine the field from an insiders' perspective, to understand what might give it coherence, meaning, and significance. Perhaps inevitably, working from this perspective for years makes one more keenly conscious of the current weaknesses of the field. But second, we want to look at the broader development of the field in the context of history and other disciplinary approaches to the environment. Here we find many gains, but also a sense that environmental history, especially in some countries, has remained marginalized, a marginalization we would view as unwarranted. Why is this? We wish to provide an analysis, and move toward remedies.	2
This is not to say that environmental history has hitherto been unreflective; indeed, it has been quite the opposite, although Jane Carruthers might have overstated the case when she recently commented that "It must be seldom, (if ever) that practitioners have dissected the historiography [of a discipline] at such a proximate stage in its evolution."³ There have been quite a number of reflective essays by leading practitioners in the field over the past fifteen years or more: Richard White, Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, William Cronon, and Donald Hughes, to name a few.⁴ In 2004, to celebrate its tenth anniversary, the journal Environment and History published a special issue with reflective and bibliographical essays on the field in Africa, the Americas, Australasia, China, and Europe, and Environmental History produced an issue with a large number of "state-of-the-art" essays in the same year.⁵ The tone of these essays has largely been that of a still-young discipline: reflective, but celebratory and often didactic. Environmental history has certainly emerged within a time when methodological reflection has been prominent in the academic world, indeed far too prominent for many people's tastes. One could take a "linguistic turn" at this stage and argue that it is not terribly important to reflect more generally on what environmental history has achieved or where it might be headed: The term is now fairly well entrenched and its future will simply be shaped by its discursive usage rather than any reflective, theoretical, or axiomatic considerations. In fact, we will suggest that the brief history of the term does indeed reflect such a scenario, and that the discipline has relatively little coherence. But if environmental history is to prove useful, or even enlightening, reflection is both timely and necessary.⁶	. . .

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