Anniversary Forum

Body and Place

Susan D. Jones

ENVISIONING FUTURE directions for environmental history presents little difficulty; rather, the challenge lies in elucidating the details of the routes it will travel and the setbacks it might encounter. Environmental history will become increasingly interconnected with other disciplines. What follows is a brief examination of some of the field's strengths, one example of a future path, and some obstacles to its continuing journey.	1
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-91166. By tradition, young men and women gathered to perform both agricultural and social tasks: husking and courting. Finding the red ear entitled a man to kiss any of the women present. This image suggests the ways in which gender, courtship, family, community, and celebration were tied to agricultural cycles and through them to agro-ecosystems. Corn, as nature and as culture, had meanings historians might yet explore. "Husking the Corn in New England," 1858.
Environmental history offers much to other historical sub-disciplines, to the broader study of the past, and to other fields of inquiry. Scholars have plumbed the ecological sciences for theory, using ideas about climax and succession and material flows, for example. From Frederick Jackson Turner to Cold War rhetoric, these theories have found social and political purchase, yet they represent only the tip of the iceberg. Indigenous or "street level" knowledge of the environment and the cycles of living things has long informed the social practices and cultural beliefs of peoples throughout time and around the world, and these theories deserve the attention that more formalized "scientific" theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have drawn. Methodologically, environmental history reminds historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and others that nonhuman actors have played important roles in "making history," influencing cultural practices and determining the shape of social institutions. These theoretical and methodological contributions have been particularly useful to the increasing number of scholars engaged in transnational and interdisciplinary studies.	. . .