Ellen Stroud

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Ellen Stroud | Postcards from the Edges of a Field | Environmental History, 10.1 | The History Cooperative

Anniversary Forum

Postcards from the Edges of a Field

SUMMER BRINGS the student postcards: of grain elevators, of cornfields, of combines; of sunsets, of gorges, of odd rock formations; of skylines, of highways, of parks. I get more postcards than e-mail from my students during the summer months, though digital cameras may change that soon. The image is as important as the words scribbled next to my address. My correspondents are sharing landscapes they want me to see.	1
The postcard notes have a common theme: a disorienting new view of a nature formerly seen as pure. I am tickled and entertained and sometimes proud that my students take a minute on the hiking trail, on the bike path, or at the postcard rack to remark on the fact that they now see history where they once saw only trees. Teaching people that forests, rivers, oceans, and fields have complex pasts intertwined with human stories has been a major project of environmental historians, and it has worked.	2
But although my students now see something more complicated than before, the images they choose are still just trees. Or rivers. Or farms. Or beaches. Occasionally, the students from my urban environments seminar will send cards depicting cityscapes: tenement housing, a tangle of highways, a well-designed park. But whether "natural" or "built," the common subject of the cards is "environment." The images might be of dirt and worms and leaves, or traffic and smog and trash, but "environment" is always clear; it is the history, the change over time, the human role in a story worth telling that has to be teased out. It is almost never the other way around. I rarely look at a card and see the history, the event, the narrative, and wonder how environment fits in.	. . .

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