Angela Gugliotta

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Angela Gugliotta | Environmental History and the Category of the Natural | Environmental History, 10.1 | The History Cooperative

Anniversary Forum

Environmental History and the Category of the Natural

I KNOW A historian who has written a wonderful book about the political deployment of nature ideologies and their centrality to national identity. She does not want to be known as an "environmental historian." She imagines, I think, that environmental history is too focused on environmental damage and activist struggle, not attuned enough to the way historically malleable appeals to nature—to a given cosmological order, to the soil, to what is pure or savage—can be used to shape culture.	1
Richard White's call for attention to knowledge of nature through labor, and William Cronon's focus on commodification and alienation, address fundamental questions and have set a research program for a generation. Both presuppose a slippery element—the "unmade"—which can problematically be commodified and from which one can be alienated. They argue against Bill McKibben's view that there is no nature once climate is marked by human influence. The unmade and the made are everywhere mixed, yet Cronon and White agree that unmade elements deserve reverence and protection, and still "in wildness is the preservation of the world."	2
In contemporary political, moral, and consumer discourse, we are constantly exhorted to choose the natural, or we are absolved from the consequences of choices already made by interpreting them as having been dictated by nature. Historians should easily recognize the cultural contingency of such appeals. What is "natural" or "unnatural" about agriculture, air travel, kingship, petroleum, AIDS, the family wage, nectarines, asbestos, monogamy, rape, low infant mortality, or eight-decade life spans? Yet, because the slippery category of the natural has long been central to human self-understanding, we also should try to uncover what is commensurable among changing concepts. Perhaps the best candidate for a timeless standard of the natural is Rachel Carson's, which compares the pace of biological and cultural evolution. That which is older on an evolutionary time-scale, to which everything around it has had a better chance to adapt, is the more natural. Apply Carson's approach to the list above: It raises many difficult questions.	. . .

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