The Nationalization of Nature

Richard White

Nature, too, has a history, and in the late twentieth century that environmental history seems transnational. The millennium closes with fears about the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, the rise in human populations, the depletion of ocean fisheries, and the loss of biological diversity. None of these problems are national; all are, to varying extents, global. Global environmental events are retrospective as well as prospective. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, historians now argue, pandemics depopulated the Western Hemisphere, ecological invasions precipitated by European expansion began their long march across the world, and climatic change rearranged European agriculture.1	1
But there is something incongruous about global perspectives on the environment: they are to a striking degree confined to the present, the future, and the pre-modern past. In considering the early modern and modern periods—the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and most of the twentieth—historians have de-emphasized the global and transnational and treated environmental issues as largely national. Particularly in the United States, where environmental history is strongest, national boundaries have largely determined studies of the depletion of resources, efforts at conservation and preservation, and ecological change.2 Historians have often framed such studies below the scale of nation—as regional or local—but they have rarely framed them above it. Environmental histories, it seems, parallel the history of the state, even though it is hard to believe that nature itself does. When writing about eras of strong or rising states, environmental historians make their histories state-based. When writing about eras with few or weak states or those when the state seems to be in decline, historians write in other frames than that of the nation.	2
I raise this issue of the relationship between environmental history and national history to consider the place of national histories in an age when the future of the nation-state seems uncertain and when many critical problems seem global rather than national. In posing the issue within environmental history as one of transnational versus national studies in different periods, I seek to emphasize the anachronistic nature of history itself. I am using terms—national, global, environmental—that themselves have histories; they have taken on both existence and meaning over time. I am reading modern meanings back onto a world that did not originally contain them.3 I emphasize my use of such terms to stress both the complexity of the historian's choice and the historian's freedom. We constantly impose categories on the past that the people of the past neither knew nor used, even as we seek to reflect accurately how people in the past understood their world. We sometimes seem to live in the paradoxical hope that concepts we use to rearrange the past will help us to mold—to arrange—the future.	3
Problems of Scale
Global, transnational, national, and local are, among other things, matters of scale. And scale, as I am using it here, is largely a spatial category. Historians have often been notoriously inattentive to spatial issues. We may not, as Edward W. Soja accuses us of doing, write as if history took place on the head of a pin, but we do usually regard space as a simple container for the political, social, or cultural. Our space is the space of Christendom, Islam, the Roman Empire, European culture, or the United States; it is the space of New York, Chicago, or the South. Above all, once the nation emerges, our space is a national space or a subdivision of it, such as a region or a municipality. With relatively few exceptions—William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis being one—historians pay less attention than geographers to the social, as distinct from the strictly political, production of these spaces. We take them as givens.4	. . .