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Anniversary Forum
Rooting Around in Search of Causality
Paul Sabin
| IN HIS FREQUENTLY CITED 1980 essay on ideas of nature, Raymond Williams criticized the intellectual separation of economics and ecology, and called for the two disciplines to be brought together.1 His insight still speaks to how we define environmental history and raises the question of whether closer examination of political economy is in tension with the ecological emphasis of the field. |
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If we see economics and ecology as inseparable, we may realize that a broader set of human activities are "environmental" than we previously recognized. Humans are living creatures that interact with the natural world through all that we produce and consume. When ants carry morsels into their anthills, we call that work ecology. When humans throw up skyscrapers, pocket cell phones, eat popcorn, or sit around in a meeting—that's ecology too. Some things we do, like driving cars, have greater consequences for the rest of the natural world than others. But each of our activities, however mundane, is ecological. |
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Some studies of economic production and consumption, such as William Cronon's account of the lumber industry in Nature's Metropolis, recognize this crucial insight and weave business and ecological analysis together. You can feel the heft of the ax and imagine the physicality of a log floating down stream. Cronon's microeconomic analysis is representative of how environmental history has led historians to rediscover the significance of business and political history, which had fallen out of favor in the history profession. Historians have found in their concern for environmental change a new reason to study the flow of commodities or the development of business enterprises and cities. |
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As we probe more deeply into the history of capitalism, however, we are discovering that many things that we don't think of as environmental have the most powerful determining impact on the land. The state of public education, as well as race and class relations in the United States, have pushed many families into the sprawling suburbs and edge cities of North America. Society's ability to manage social relationships and provide public amenities such as education or safety turn out to be extraordinarily potent drivers of environmental change, perhaps far more important than love for the single-family house, automobile, or suburban landscape. But how do we make sense of education or public safety as "environmental" issues? |
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The trend toward broadening our understanding of what is "environmental" has been embraced by environmental advocates today. The basic structures of modern capitalism, from international trade policy and financial institutions to agricultural and highway finance and American habits of consumption, are understood to be more powerful determinants of our relationship with nature than more clearly environmental activities, institutions, or legislation. |
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As with environmental activists seeking to rewrite international trade agreements, there are risks to environmental historians broadening their scope to examine political and economic history. In telling interdisciplinary stories about environmental change, we could easily begin cherry-picking theories of political and economic change. Increasingly, however, our theories will conflict. Environmental historians then will have to resolve their differences through substantive debate not about forestry or farming, but over how the economy functions and the nature of political life in the United States or internationally. Additionally, as we tell stories about the significance of the International Monetary Fund or World Trade Organization, environmental historians inevitably will be pulled away from stories rooted in ecosystems toward narratives based in international finance and governance. |
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As a young scholar in the field, I have struggled with the question of whether the goal of environmental history should be to explain the root causes of historical environmental change in politics, economics, and culture, or instead to trace changes in the land and our changing relationship to the material world. I recently completed a history of the politics of the California oil market before World War II. In this study, which aimed at greater understanding of how government and politics have shaped our dependence on oil, I found it most fruitful to turn from petroleum's well-known environmental impacts toward the institutional and political factors that actually shaped the California oil market. Tailpipe emissions, sprawl, and oil spills may be the most evident symptoms of the oil economy, but they are just products of our dependence on petroleum. Our dependence resulted instead from cheap oil and an abundant highway infrastructure, and so I sought to understand what political factors influenced oil production and consumption. |
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My book thus explores conflicts over tax policy, property rights, highway finance, and regulation to explain the root causes of one of the most fundamental environmental transformations of the industrial era: the alteration of the earth's climate through soaring human use of fossil fuels. Given the book's overarching environmental concern, you can imagine my dismay when a leading environmental historian privately praised my study of political economy, but suggested that the book was not "environmental history" because it lacked a sufficiently ecological or nature-oriented perspective. |
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The comment highlights a major tension or contradiction facing the field of environmental history. My research on energy politics suggests that the gap between, on the one hand, telling histories of people and ecosystems and, on the other hand, actually explaining the forces transforming the world, threatens to grow over time, with uncertain implications for the discipline. If environmental historians want to identify the root causes of historical environmental change, they may have to forsake fields and streams for industrial politics and business competition. In my study of the California oil market, I have found, for instance, that trends in highway development often were determined by broader public struggles over public finance, with the protection of highway funds in the 1930s linked tightly to something as ostensibly non-environmental as the imposition of a new sales tax. Most environmental historians probably would see the general sales tax as a tax issue quite separate from anything to do with nature. But only by understanding how sales taxes were intertwined with gasoline taxes and per-barrel severance taxes on oil production can we get a full picture of how natural-resource extraction and highway development were promoted in California. |
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As we write about the past, we need to keep up with the times. Outside the academy, the meaning of "environment" has blurred and broadened. Environmental historians face a difficult choice now between developing the subfield by clearly defining disciplinary boundaries and techniques, or by focusing on answering the most fundamental question—what caused historical environmental change? |
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Paul Sabin is a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and executive director of the non-profit Environmental Leadership Program. He is the author of Crude Politics: the California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (California, 2005).
Notes
1. Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature," in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), 67–85.
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