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Anniversary Forum
"Follow the Buyer"
Tom McCarthy
| EVER SINCE I read Bill Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, I've been thinking about those Plains farm families as they looked at the Sears Roebuck Catalog. How could we understand Chicago and everything that city represented about the extraordinary transformation of the North American continent without knowing more about the hopes, dreams, motivations, and behavior of these people? How do we explain the unprecedented amount of human energy that they expended in pursuit of their personal and family agendas? If human economic activity—especially what people did as workers to feed, clothe, shelter, and otherwise entertain themselves—has been the major reason for human-caused environmental change, Cronon's farmers also brought to mind that old business school cliché that it takes a buyer as well as a seller to make a market. The folks out there changing the natural would not be out there for very long if customers were not paying for the work. More often than not, what those customers wanted had nothing to do with the transformation of the natural world. Yet that world changed nonetheless. |
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Cronon urged his readers to "follow the seller, follow the buyer." Good advice. He also argued that the stories of the city and the country are best told together. I believe that stories of consumers and producers are best told together and must be told together if we are to better understand human-caused environmental change. So I've been following the buyers. Let me share some observations from the field. First, there is plenty of evidence about the behavior of consumers. While few people confided their innermost thoughts to diaries when they went out and bought something, by the twentieth century a veritable army of interested people observed and tried to explain consumer behavior. The evidence that these people left behind in mass-circulation periodicals, general business publications, trade journals, memoirs, the occasional open company records, and academic studies allows historians today to look over their shoulders and discern patterns in consumer behavior and even peak into that black box of motivation, the mind of the consumer. There are challenges to interpreting this evidence (often explained by the frustrated sales and marketing professionals who were paid to make sense of it in the first place), but no shortage of material. |
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Second, literature in the three historical fields most relevant to tracing connections between consumers, producers, and the environment is expanding rapidly. The creative ferment over the past quarter century in consumer and environmental history is pretty well known, although as yet there have been relatively few explicit attempts to connect the two. The reason for this is undoubtedly that much of the impact of the consumer on the natural world is mediated by the actions of producers, so that making the connections requires working in a third field, business history. But even that stodgy old field is in the midst of a creative revolution, thanks in good measure to the folks associated with the Hagley Museum, who have been encouraging and funding scholars who are "pushing the envelope." Historians interested in exploring connections between consumers and the environment now have a solid and growing body of scholarly work to build on in the relevant fields. |
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