By: John Soluri
“If the freaks could only unite.” —Red Hot Chili Peppers | |
| I FEAR FOR the future of environmental history. Distracted by jazzed-up journal covers and cozy conference venues, we are unaware of the risks posed by what we have become: an increasingly professionalized and disciplined subfield of history. While some of us may long for an opportunity to be a talking head on the History Channel, I suspect that the next revolution in history will not be televised (even on cable). Instead, to preserve the wildness of the field, I urge environmental historians to freak out! | 1 |
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, U. S. News & World Report Collection, LC-U9-35046. Scholarship on environmentalism could expand to include the science, technology, labor, and culture of the workers for corporate and governmental institutions charged with measuring levels of pollution and determining their environmental and health effects. How did institutions decide how to define and measure “pollution” and what did employees think about their work and its meaning? A Woman Technician Tests Car Emissions, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1970s. | |
| What is a freak? Merriam-Webster offers four principle definitions:A sudden and odd or seemingly pointless idea or turn of the mind;A whimsical quality or disposition (archaic);One that is markedly unusual or abnormal;An ardent enthusiast. | 2 |
| To judge by this evidence, 75 percent—a clear majority—of the meanings of “freak” are positive or at least neutral: freaks are creative, whimsical, and passionate. Still not ready to embrace freakdom? Consider this interesting fact: The etymology of “freak” is unknown. The absence of a traceable lineage makes it ripe for appropriation by people regardless of race, class, gender, or age. Of course, dictionary definitions ignore the fact that freakiness is fluid and best understood in relation to other socially constructed identities. | 3 |
| In the interest of fomenting a freaky future for environmental history, I offer the following provisional guidelines: | 4 |
| 1. Freaks eschew the mainstream, but they are not abnormal: The pejorative use of “freak” is nasty because it seeks to impose a dualistic world of fixed margins and centers—it tries to push people out of society’s bounds. This is very dangerous because nature is nothing but never-ending variation. We are all descended from mutants—we are all freaks of a historical nature. | 5 |
| 2. Freaks are intellectuals, but they are not always academics: Freaks may or may not give a damn about tenure and citation indices. But they are committed to questioning and at times subverting mainstream ways of thinking about life in general and environments in particular because this is a vital social function that freaks play for the (shifting) center. | 6 |
| 3. Freaks are intellectually kinky, but freaks are not sluts: Freaky environmental historians are always on the lookout for attractive ideas emanating from other disciplines including, but not limited to, the biological sciences. | 7 |
| However, interdisciplinary relationships must be based on equity and mutual self-respect. If environmental historians find that scientists are not prepared to recognize the intellectual rigor and analytical power of their methodologies, theories, and practices, then they should not waste precious time and energy trying to gain legitimacy through intimate connections with Big Science. In practical terms, this means that environmental history freaks will need to seek out science freaks: New intellectual models will result from “edge effects”—fringe places where domains of knowledge overlap. | 8 |
| 4. Freaks value a sense of place, but freaks are not nationalists: Freaks speak and write in many languages and live in many places. They struggle to overcome imperial geographies by reading and thinking in both comparative and transregional frameworks. In order for this to be more than pie-in-the-sky rhetoric, freaks affiliated with powerful and wealthy institutions will have to think long and hard about how to assist the production of environmental histories in historically impoverished places. Freaking out is seldom free. | 9 |
| 5. Freaks value life, they oppose capital punishment: Freaks appreciate the historical power of capital and the ability of economic theories to help explain that power. They also grasp the historical limits of capital’s power and the inability of economic theory to account for those limits. People and non-human life forms have value but they are not commodities. Therefore, freaks resist the imposition of lifeless labels such as “human capital” and “natural capital.” | 10 |
| 6. Freaks tend to inhabit the land, but they are not afraid of the water: Most of the planet is not solid, yet environmental historians—myself included—tend to focus on “changes in the land.” Wouldn’t it be freaky to write histories that truly linked land, sea, and sky by following the flows? | 11 |
| 7. Freaks are PC compatible, but their strength lies in the past: Freaky historians make good use of DVD, GIS, JSTOR, TCP/IP, TIFF, and ZIP. They also know that nothing can replace a sturdy ASS for reading in archives and listening to old folks. | 12 |
| 8. Freaks are counterhegemonic, but freaks are not fools: Freaks respect—indeed thrive upon—different approaches to life. They possess multiple identities that influence their thoughts, actions, and habitats. Consequently, embracing intellectual freakiness does not commit oneself to any particular political agenda or intellectual paradigm beyond questioning all agendas and resisting programs that seek to manage—rather than respect—diversity. | 13 |
John Soluri is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. His book on banana production and consumption is to be published by the University of Texas Press in 2005. He currently is doing research on animals, geopolitics, and nationalism in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. | |
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