Reflections: What Can U.S. Environmental Historians Learn from Non-U.S. Environmental Historiography?

Paul Sutter

I AM AN environmental historian of the United States by training and practice, but, for several reasons, I have been traveling among other environmental historiographies in recent years. In completing a book on the interwar origins of modern wilderness advocacy in the United States, I had to contend with a growing literature that is quite critical of exporting wilderness as a preservationist ideal.1 I also had the opportunity several years ago to teach a graduate course on world environmental history. The idea, initially, was to bring together a number of historians with strengths in African, South Asian, and British-imperial environmental history to complement my own competence in the U.S. historiography. But, for a variety of reasons, I found myself teaching the course alone, with the responsibility for introducing students to various non-U.S. literatures about which I knew little. For someone who fancied himself well-grounded in environmental historiography, I was amazed by the richness of these literatures and embarrassed by my ignorance of them. And I sensed that I was not alone among my Americanist peers in having such a limited knowledge.2 Finally, I have just begun a study that examines U.S. sanitary engineering during the construction of the Panama Canal, and I have been struck by how much more at home my central research questions—questions that have to do with imperialism, disease, race, and ideas of tropical nature—are in the non-U.S. environmental historiography. Such traveling has given me a new perspective on my own field.

1

Before proceeding to explain that new perspective, I want to offer several caveats about this essay. First, it is by no means the product of exhaustive reading in non-U.S. environmental historiography. I have read selectively, and I surely have missed important works that might have contributed to, or even altered, my thinking. Second, I focus on specific historiographies—South Asian, African, and comparative—at the expense of others—European, Australasian, and Latin American. In part, this choice reflects those literatures that I have found most intriguing and useful, and in part it reflects my own continuing thin exposure to these other literatures. Third, this essay is addressed to environmental historians studying the United States, and as such I will be emphasizing those themes and questions that I think most useful to us. (For the sake of brevity, I will be using "we" and "us" to signify my fellow environmental historians of the United States, though I appreciate that it is not as easy to lump this group together as I make it appear.) As a result, I will be ignoring or downplaying critical differences between these U.S. and non-U.S. literatures that to my mind do not fundamentally engage U.S. environmental historiography. My aim is not to provide a thorough introduction to these non-U.S. literatures; others are much more qualified to do that. 3 Nor will I be spending much time discussing what U.S environmental historians can teach those working on the rest of the world. Fourth, my major distinction is between the United States and the rest of the world as subjects of study, not as places of practice. I am less interested in how historians from Europe or South Asia might approach environmental history differently than Americans, and more interested in how those studying Europe or South Asia, whatever their national origin, might differ in their approach from those studying the United States. Finally, and regrettably, I have had to confine my reading to English language sources. Stronger language skills surely would have made my travels more productive.

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