|
|
|
Anniversary Forum
Environmental History Without Historians
Steve Pyne
| WHAT IS the future of environmental history? |
1
|
|
It will be what the next generation of practitioners make of it. It will emerge from their felt sense of nature, and it will arise out of the urgings, overt or implied, of their professional colleagues. I can't speak for the first. I would disappointed if the same themes persisted, leading to a dreary scholasticism of thesis, counter-thesis, and revisionisms, burdening future generations with the intellectual equivalent of debt peonage. But in the matter of professional settings, I can comment. |
2
|
|
When ASEH members speak of "environmental history," they mean history done by professional historians, typically in the Academy, but perhaps on detached duty as public historians. The environment, however, attracts a great many scholars, and increasingly they are conceiving the subject in historical terms. Anthropologists, geographers, archeologists, foresters—all are incorporating, or rediscovering, the valence between history and nature. Even ecology is becoming (if grudgingly) a historical science, rather like geology. Each group defines the topic in its own way, indifferent to the methodological sound and fury of the others. Collectively, they challenge environmental history; they complement it; and they offer opportunities for scholarly colonization. |
3
|
|
Regarding our status within academic history, I won't speak. My sense is that the tug of political and social issues will, like the ring of Sauron, pull powerfully against our fellowship. I know I couldn't make it work. Instead, I transferred into what has become a School of Life Sciences (SoLS), specifically a Human Dimensions Faculty (the Lost SoLS). |
4
|
|
What has my experience been? In recent decades, critics have dismissed C. P. Snow's "two cultures" argument. All my experience suggests he was right; not on his quirky particulars, but in his broad appreciation that the sciences and the humanities operate very differently. They do. The growth of the sciences depends on research, that of the humanities on teaching. The fundamental unit of scientific inquiry is the funded project, of which a published article is but one product. The sciences are revenue sources, the humanities, revenue sinks. For every NSF grant someone in SoLS gets, ASU adds a 54 percent surcharge. For every NEH fellowship someone in the History Department gets, the university loses money. As even public universities become more privatized, the scramble for external funding wedges the two castes further apart. |
5
|
|
But the difference is also one of style. By training and temperament, scientists are problem-solvers. Academic historians are problem-illuminators, although they seem to pride themselves recently on being simple problematizers. The sciences are moving rapidly toward multidisciplinary collaborations; they enthusiastically team-teach; they are willing to include within their congregation whoever might contribute. What they hope to get, especially, is help on data, policy, and ethics. How this contributes to historyqua history, they care little, any more than historians might fret over the complexities of Bayesian statistics. For postmodern babble and the sneering ironist, they have only scorn. |
. . . |
There are about 540 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
