from the editor

THIS ISSUE BEGINS with Carolyn Merchant's 2003 presidential address to the American Society for Environmental History. If we hope to promote environmental justice, Merchant argues, we need to reflect on the ideas about race held by earlier generations of conservationists and environmentalists. Merchant focuses on Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. But Merchant also considers Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Dianne Glave explores one of the most important ways African American women related to the non-human world gardening. After the abolition of slavery, African American women in the rural south joined folk traditions and scientific precepts in their garden designs. Glave's article adds to our understanding of race and gender in environmental history. When we want to study changing attitudes toward nature, we typically look at how people have viewed wild creatures and wild landscapes. Yet as Peter Baldwin s wonderful article shows we also can learn much by studying ideas about everyday phenomena. In the late eighteenth century, Americans were afraid to open windows while they slept because they considered night air unhealthy. By the early twentieth century, especially in cities, night air had become something good: fresh air. That shift in thinking had many causes, including new medical knowledge, new anxieties about the body, and new respect for wilderness. . . .