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ANNIVERSARY FORUM: what books SHOULD BE MORE WIDELY READ IN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY?
| TO MARK THE end of Environmental History's tenth year, I asked sixty scholars to write essays about books that should be better known in the field. I was aiming for thirty essays, and I was delighted instead to get thirty-nine! (Another scholar I invited, Spencer Weart, offered to write about a mural—so his essay appears as a "Gallery" in this issue.) Even very busy people, it turned out, were excited about the chance to write about books they admire. |
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The range of the essays is impressive. Six are about works of fiction. Several consider primary sources, often from centuries ago. Some of the essays are appreciations of books by historians from other fields, including urban history, legal history, and intellectual history. Several are about works by scientists. Two discuss books by literary scholars. Many are about works by writers outside academia. A list of all the books is on page 768. |
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I hope the essays will surprise you as much as they surprised me. I had read only about a quarter of the books discussed in this forum, and the essays on those books often gave me wonderful new insights. More than a third of the essays were my introduction to their subjects. Many others made me keen to dig into books that I knew something about—and even own!—but had not read. |
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Like the anniversary forum in the January 2005 issue, these essays collectively attest to the richness of our field. We have a great subject, and we have many, many talented colleagues. As I wrote in January, I can't wait to see what we do next! |
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ADAM ROME
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beasts of many burdens
KARL APPUHN
| ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIANS HAVE long asked domesticated animals to carry a heavy load in the stories they tell. Cattle, pigs, sheep, and horses have all played starring roles in accounts of European expansion, contributing to—and occasionally initiating—the kinds of ecological transformations that are a staple of environmental history. Jared Diamond has even argued that the relative availability of domesticable animals accounts, in part, for the historical success of Eurasian civilizations—a weighty burden indeed.1 This view of the relationship between humans and domesticated animals stresses the role of the animals as a source of energy, protein, and other commodities, while minimizing the culturally specific roles that the animals have played throughout history. In part, this view is the result of the widespread acceptance of the notion that the use-value of animals drove the process of early domestication. Unfortunately, this view has resulted in a rather limited view of the relationship between humans and domestic animals in our field. |
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Scholars outside of environmental history have, of course, long been interested in the symbolic meanings that humans have assigned to domesticated animals. Clifford Geertz's study of cockfighting in Bali is among the most widely read and influential pieces of scholarship of the last thirty years, inspiring a slew of imitators—including Claudine Fabre-Vassas's excellent cultural history of the pig.2 In such studies the relations between humans and their livestock reveal hidden aspects of the relations between people, an insight that has obvious applications in the field of environmental history. |
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