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Anniversary Forum
Drunks, Lampposts, and Environmental History
J. R. McNeill
| FUTURE AGENDAS in environmental history will be set fairly democratically, by the hundreds of scholars deciding what to work on and how to do it. To some extent, of course, those decisions will be shaped by the examples of admired scholars or by the siren call of paths of least resistance. But young people are often keen to do things differently from their elders, and often inclined to seek rather than shun the difficult paths—as they should be. Nonetheless, we elders (I am 49) are rarely reluctant to try to set agendas—nor should we be, as long as we do not mind much when our suggestions are ignored. |
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What I propose here is what I would like to see happen within environmental history, not what I expect to see. Mine is an academic agenda only, although in these parlous times I am more tempted than ever to suggest, as I trust others will, that the most urgent duty of environmental history is to abandon the shelter of ivory towers for the blood-spattered arena of public discourse and the dangerous task of infiltrating the corridors of power. |
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My proposition is twofold: first, that environmental history—by its very nature an interdisciplinary pursuit—should become still more so, and second, that it should strengthen its links to mainstream currents within the discipline of history. At first blush it will appear self-contradictory to call simultaneously for greater interdisciplinarity and stronger ties to a single discipline. I argue that this is not a contradiction, but a feasible and synergistic agenda. |
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Environmental history necessarily draws on and overlaps with several academic traditions. The frontier zones between environmental history and historical geography or historical ecology, for example, are murky regions with few established rules, middle grounds where profitable exchanges and unprofitable sniping coexist. Interdisciplinary work sometimes seems undisciplined, without clear methodology, or, as Marshall Sahlins once put it, a procedure by which one multiplies the uncertainties of one's own discipline by those of several others. Allowing for the risks, I still think environmental historians should embrace interdisciplinarity more fully. |
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The reason for embracing interdisciplinarity, risks and all, is simple: That is where we are most likely to find something new. For more than a century academics in general have behaved like the drunk searching for his car keys beneath the lamppost, not because that is where he lost them but because that is where the light is. Academic knowledge and inquiry remain structured by the disciplines that arose in German universities in the nineteenth century. They shone powerful beams of light that were very illuminating for a long time. But over time, as more and more of that which could be found within the beams was found, they became progressively less useful as a means of generating new insight. Researchers reached points of diminishing returns, but often preferred meager returns to the risks of searching in the darkness between the beams. Nowadays, the most exciting and rewarding fields, such as brain science or global-change science, are ones that span the traditional disciplines. Environmental history is admirably well positioned to redirect the light into the murk, to the benefit of all. |
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Environmental historians can search between the beams in two ways. They can join or even organize teams of researchers including specialists in, say, geoarcheology, palynology, and dendrochronology. This has obvious merit in assuring higher standards of expertise, but often produces inchoate or unreadable results.1 There are practical and institutional obstacles to coalition building as well. The other way is to hew to the lone-wolf traditions of historians and try to make sense of other disciplines oneself. This has the opposite risks and rewards: It is more likely to yield coherence, but reduces expertise, except in cases of the most remarkable polymaths blessed with generous colleagues. There is probably no reliably right or wrong way to do this: Perhaps different problems, different inquiries, are best confronted with different strategies. |
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While fear of the interdisciplinary darkness carries its risks, straying too far from the central concerns of one's disciplines carries others. Paradoxically, it is by invigorating results with interdisciplinary methods that environmental history can speak most compellingly to the discipline of history as a whole, and escape the sorry fate of overspecialized sub-disciplines: neglect. Exploration of environmental evidence can help illuminate traditional and current concerns of historians, ranging from matters of war and statecraft to the workings of the family. |
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With risk comes opportunity. Environmental historians can help rejuvenate historical research in general by serving as diplomats reporting from other terrains, exploring information that lies beyond the borders of text-bound historians. In particular, environmental history can use new varieties of evidence brought to light by natural scientists but not used by them for historians' purposes. Geomorphologists can tell us that one-half of the soil erosion in the German lands over the past millennium took place in a few weeks in the summer of 1342, but do not readily make connections between that catastrophe and the Black Death, which is of no concern to them. Geneticists can tell us that Yersinia pestis, the bacillus that causes bubonic plague, is a mere 1,500 years old in its current genetic form, but do not easily recognize the significance of that finding for the reign of Justinian, of which geneticists probably (I haven't verified this) know little. Microbiologists can tell us from skeletal teeth what previous human generations ate, and something about their mortality and fertility patterns, but do not connect these data to the demographic and family historiography that has developed over the past forty years.2 Environmental historians are well placed to serve the interests of the historical profession as a whole by filing reports from the geo-archives and bio-archives created by natural scientists. |
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Exploring these technically complex frontiers may seem daunting to those of us with limited scientific educations. But I hope and expect the modern university will make it feasible for young scholars to equip themselves with the necessary skills, or to make the necessary connections and build the requisite scholarly networks, to pursue this agenda. For in finding new ways to speak to old concerns, environmental history can protect itself from that curse of success in intellectual life, the ghettoization of an otherwise successful specialization. |
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J. R. McNeill is professor of history and holder of the Cinco Hermanos Chair of Environmental and International Affairs in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World (Norton, 2000), and coauthor of The Human Web: A Bird's-eye View of World History (Norton, 2003).
Notes
1. A recent exception is Agustí Esteban Amat, ed., La humanización de las altas cuencas de la Garona y las Nogueras (4500 aC – 1955dC) (Madrid: Ministerio de Medio Ambiente, 2004), which treats millennia of environmental history in the eastern Pyrenees using every variety of source imaginable.
2. Some details on these matters appear in J. R. McNeill, "Observation on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History," History and Theory 42 (2004): 39–41; for the erosion of 1342, see Hans-Rudolf Bork and Gabriele Schmidtchen, "Böden: Entwicklung, Zerstörung und Schutzbedarf in Deutschland," Geographische Rundschau 53 (2001): 5–9.
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