Ellen Stroud

Anniversary Forum

Postcards from the Edges of a Field

SUMMER BRINGS the student postcards: of grain elevators, of cornfields, of combines; of sunsets, of gorges, of odd rock formations; of skylines, of highways, of parks. I get more postcards than e-mail from my students during the summer months, though digital cameras may change that soon. The image is as important as the words scribbled next to my address. My correspondents are sharing landscapes they want me to see.	1
The postcard notes have a common theme: a disorienting new view of a nature formerly seen as pure. I am tickled and entertained and sometimes proud that my students take a minute on the hiking trail, on the bike path, or at the postcard rack to remark on the fact that they now see history where they once saw only trees. Teaching people that forests, rivers, oceans, and fields have complex pasts intertwined with human stories has been a major project of environmental historians, and it has worked.	2
But although my students now see something more complicated than before, the images they choose are still just trees. Or rivers. Or farms. Or beaches. Occasionally, the students from my urban environments seminar will send cards depicting cityscapes: tenement housing, a tangle of highways, a well-designed park. But whether "natural" or "built," the common subject of the cards is "environment." The images might be of dirt and worms and leaves, or traffic and smog and trash, but "environment" is always clear; it is the history, the change over time, the human role in a story worth telling that has to be teased out. It is almost never the other way around. I rarely look at a card and see the history, the event, the narrative, and wonder how environment fits in.	3
And those would be cards that would please me the most. I want a postcard from the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, on which my student explains how important "environment" is to the history told there. I want a picture of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall that inspires my student to reflect on environmental history's contribution to helping her understand the war. I want people who have taken my classes to choose images of monuments, of protest sites, of battlefields and government buildings and legislative halls, marveling at how they can now see nature where it had earlier been obscured. I love that they can see history in the trees; now I want them to see trees everywhere they turn.	4
My favorite card to date was slipped under my door in spring 2002. It was homemade, the picture on the front a radiant smiling photograph of one of my sharpest graduating seniors, who was (and remains) a committed activist for justice and peace. Beaming and completely limp, she was being carried away from U.S. Senator Mike DeWine's office by two police officers. She and nine others had been at DeWine's Columbus, Ohio, office that day as part of a sustained campaign of protest against U.S. policies in Colombia. The politics on the card were clear; environment, at first, was not.	5
My student and her fellow protesters, she explained, saw explicit connections between the United States' war on drugs, the destruction of coca plantations in Colombia, exposure to environmental hazards, compromised health and nutrition among impoverished Colombians, and unnecessary violence and suffering. She was beaming in the photograph because she was successfully calling attention to a point that she felt had to be made: Drug policy is environmental policy is social policy is health policy, all of which must be judicious and just, and understood as intertwined. I want more cards like hers, but they don't arrive.	6
It isn't because my students don't know what I want. The books I assign, the lectures I give, the debates we have in class, the projects we work on together are all centered on the theme of environment in unexpected places. And they get it: Our most animated time together is when they uncover nature in a place they had not expected it to be. When they realize that environmental history can help them understand the Revolutionary War, the Great Depression, the 1977 New York City Blackout—when they realize that our class is not going to be all about parks and rivers and environmental politics—that is when they get the most excited. So why doesn't it carry over to the cards?	7
I think because it's truly hard to make that mental shift. On an intellectual level, they get it, but at the postcard rack, they don't. And here is where the cards distill a central challenge in our field: Like my students, we keep coming back to rivers and parks and trees, even when we know the bigger questions lie somewhere else. We return again and again to obvious nature, to nature we can touch and see and enjoy, to environments that can be pictured on a postcard and seemingly comprehended at a glance. We then explain how complex that nature really is, how much the surface comprehension in fact obscures. But even so, the easy nature is most often where we start. I would like to see us reach more often for stories where environment, not history, is hard to see.	8
There is a danger in that, of course. We risk losing the distinctive center of our field. These days, the pictures my students send me stand out from the ones my history department colleagues receive: They get museums, historic buildings, monuments and battle sites, art and artifacts and people, and I get trees and trails. Do I really want my cards to be the same as theirs? Oddly, I do, and think it worth the cost, because I want all of us—historians and students both—to see environmental history everywhere we look, on every postcard we pick up. Only when we see unexpected nature as clearly as the trees will we catch sight of the true importance of environment in our histories and our lives.	9
Ellen Stroud is an assistant professor of history at Oberlin College. She is on leave this year at Harvard's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, with support from an American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Junior Faculty Fellowship. She is completing revisions on the manuscript for her first book, Seeing the Trees: Reforestation and Urbanization in the Northeastern United States, and is spending this year working on a new book project, Dead As Dirt: An Environmental History of the Dead Body.

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