Thomas Lekan

Anniversary Forum

Globalizing American Environmental History

RECENTLY A COLLEAGUE of mine invited me to lead a session on environmental history in his graduate historiography seminar. My task was to moderate a discussion of an article surveying the field of environmental history and to speak about how its ideas applied to my own research. For the discussion my colleague had selected Richard Grove's chapter "Environmental History" in Peter Burke's well-received collection New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Penn State, 2001), an essay I had not read previously. I assumed, erroneously, that it would be a standard survey of the field's intellectual origins and methodological concerns similar to well-known articles on the subject by scholars such as Richard White, Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, Ted Steinberg, and J. R. McNeil. I was thus unprepared for Grove's approach: a scathing, revisionist history of the discipline that lambasted North American scholars' "parochial takeover bid" of the designation "environmental history" in the 1970s. Echoing his arguments in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Grove asserted that evidence of environmental degradation in the colonial periphery spurred the development of Francophone and Old World Anglophone environmental history among geographers, anthropologists, and ecologists long before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) raised environmental consciousness and Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale University Press, 1967) made environmental history a respectable subfield in the United States.

Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-4848.
Like corn (see previous image, page 46), coal, too, created ties between nature and the social world of courtship, gender, and family. The prosperous mines, elevators, and sheds of the S.J. Patterson Coal Company in 1887 made it possible for a prosperous couple to enjoy the comforts of a cozy interior space far different from the hay-filled husking barn of 1858. Their privacy and comfort—thanks to coal—necessitated supervision from the man of the house, an interesting social shift connected to the material transformations of industrialization.

S.J. Patterson Coal Company.

Not surprisingly, the seminar turned out to be a decidedly awkward exchange. Since most of the students in the seminar had never before encountered environmental history in any form, Grove's iconoclastic account left most of them uncertain about the definition, scope, and achievements of the field. My attempt to describe familiar works by Worster, Bill Cronon, and Arthur McEvoy only compounded their confusion. I came away frustrated by my inability to reconcile Grove's account with other narratives about the field and to persuade this fresh group of graduate students to consider incorporating environmental themes into their emerging MA and PhD theses. Despite my reservations about the tone of Grove's critique, however, my encounter with his essay did lead me to a series of productive observations and questions about the field of environmental history. These inform my comments about where the field might go next.

As a U.S. environmental historian working on German and European themes and an active member of both the ASEH and the ESEH (European Society for Environmental History), I am concerned that Grove's caustic comments about North American scholarship reflect a deeper if often unarticulated discontent among scholars located or working on topics outside the United States. Grove is not the first to lament the "Americo-centrism" of environmental history, particularly what he terms the "wilderness obsession." But current geopolitical alignments give his criticism of U.S. scholars' lack of engagement with the rest of the world a sharper edge that may result in diverging environmental-historical agendas with limited opportunities for trans-continental dialogue, debate, and synthesis. These observations lead me to two interrelated questions about future directions. Given American academia's perceived overweening influence on global intellectual trends, how can scholars of other regions of the world benefit from and simultaneously help to globalize the methodologically sophisticated but sometimes narrow preoccupations of North American environmental historiography? And how can environmental historians maintain their openness to interdisciplinary approaches and wide-ranging subject matter while fostering a common body of scholarship that enables us to speak to each other across national, linguistic, or cultural divides?

One way to globalize American environmental history would be a renewed commitment within the environmental history community to comparative analysis of major themes across different nations, regions, and cities. Here I envision a series of conferences, articles, essay collections, monographs, and grant proposals devoted to what J. R. McNeil has termed "mid-level generalizations" about the role of economic structures, political institutions, legal systems, cultural values, and technological infrastructures in shaping globally significant patterns of environmental exploitation, adaptation, perception, and crisis in North American and abroad.¹ This is not a call for macro-level, world environmental history, which is well-represented in the profession and has produced fine narratives about the agrarian impact of European colonialism and the spread of European diseases among aboriginal peoples in the Americas and Australia. The scale of such studies, however, obscures the role of regional and national variation, including the resiliency of local ecosystems, the coerciveness of the state, or the character of the political culture, in shaping the environmental past. Writing in collaborative partnership, environmental historians interested in the middle range of comparative analysis could examine familiar issues in a new light and find common ground along thematic lines.

Such mid-level synthesis has recently proven fruitful in spurring scholarly exchange between U.S. and European scholars, as indicated by the numerous panels and articles devoted to Daniel Rodger's impressive Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Belknap, 2000). Environmental history awaits a similar work; numerous themes cry out for comparative analysis. For example, is wilderness truly a product of an "American identity crisis" with little relevance to other regions, as Grove asserts? Surely recent analyses of American wilderness fascination as product of capitalist core-periphery relationships on the North American continent parallel Grove's examination of British imperial geographers' metropolitan interest in overseas environmental degradation on the colonial periphery. Bill Cronon's critique of Americans' bifurcation of their landscapes into "pristine" and "fallen" zones also reflects global patterns of post-colonial environmental perception, as African environmental historians' attempts to debunk Western scholars' "degradation narratives" about sub-Saharan regions have demonstrated. Another theme that animates cross-continental scholarship is natural disaster. European scholars have produced an impressive record of natural disasters, particularly flood events, dating back to the medieval period. They are keenly interested in the role of local political systems, property regimes, and religious beliefs in exacerbating, mitigating, or rationalizing the effect of these "acts of God." Yet at a recent ESEH conference, there was no mention of Ted Steinberg's Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (Oxford, 2000), a work that addresses the social and economic injustices that produce natural calamities. This lack of cross-cultural dialogue seemed to me a missed opportunity—for collaborative research, for multi-year and multi-institutional grants, for a common historiographical agenda, which are indispensable for a global community of environmental historians.

Tom Lekan is an assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina. His first book, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945, appeared in 2004. His current research focuses on the relationship between nature tourism, landscape change, and environmental politics in Western Europe from 1800 to the present.

Notes

^1. J. R. McNeill, "Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 42 (December 2003): 5–43, here 9. McNeill's excellent survey of global environmental history in this article informs many of my observations in this piece. McNeill's book Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000) offers tantalizing places to begin formulating a comparative research agenda. See, for example, McNeill's comments on ecological footprint analysis and pollution control in chapter 3.

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