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from the editor
| GREGG MITMAN BEGINS this issue with a provocative and wide-ranging discussion of places where environmental history meets the histories of science and medicine. One part of his essay considers the roots of Aldo Leopold's conception of "land health." Another section explores the historic relationships between empire and disease ecologies. Mitman ends by offering new ways to interpret the wellsprings of the conservation and preservation movements. |
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Diana Davis's article is probably the first Environmental History has published about the historical effects of forests that didn't exist! In colonial Morocco, French environmental policy derived from a powerful vision of a once-lush landscape degraded by centuries of deforestation and overgrazing. (The painting on the cover of this issue is a fine example of nineteenth-century French depictions of North Africa.) Derived from classical literary texts, the degradation narrative gained new authority from the emerging science of plant ecology, which allowed officials to create "potential vegetation" maps. Yet modern paleoecological research casts doubt on the underlying assumptions of those maps—and the policies derived from them. |
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In the early 1960s, ecologists began to imagine what would be required to create livable environments in outer space, and Peder Anker considers the many legacies of that effort. Some were practical: Research into the ecology of space travel inspired the Biosphere II experiment in Arizona as well as the development of many environmentally friendly technologies. But Anker is more interested in the intellectual legacies. His article is a stimulating argument about how the concept of "spaceship earth" has shaped the way we conceptualize environmental problems. |
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To eat or not to eat whale? For Nancy Shoemaker, that question leads to suggestive and important insights into the environmental history of taste. Today, most readers of this journal will recoil at the idea of eating whale meat. Yet people in many places and times have eaten whale. As Shoemaker shows, the history of taste preferences has important implications for international conservation policy. |
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Jonathan Spaulding provides a thoughtful reflection on the making of a museum exhibit about the natural and cultural history of Los Angeles. The exhibit curators had to make a host of decisions—not just about what objects to include, but also about interpretive "tone." They debated the best way to encourage visitors to think harder about the environmental predicaments of modern urban life. Should the museum try to provoke, or inspire? |
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In the "Gallery" essay, Kate Showers critiques African soil maps produced by two United Nations agencies in the 1970s. Showers concludes that the maps are "apparently authoritative misinformation."
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| THE ANNIVERSARY FORUM on "What's Next for Environmental History" in the January issue impressed many readers, so I have decided to include another special section in October. |
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This time, I am asking people to write about a book that they think ought to be better known in the field. The book could be a work of history that isn't by someone known as an environmental historian but that raises issues of great importance for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between people and nature over time. It could be a work from another academic discipline. It could be a classic of some sort that ought to be revisited. Or it could be a primary source—perhaps even a work of fiction. Whatever the type of book, I hope that the contributors will turn their discussions of the books into arguments about how to expand the horizons of environmental history. |
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Two books in particular suggested to me the possibilities for this special section. The first was a brilliant work of social history, which I recently reread: Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. The book was not reviewed in Environmental History Review—it was published by Cornell in 1992, four years before the merger that created Environmental History—and even now many in our field probably have not read it. Yet The Park and the People offers a fresh way of looking at several issues in environmental history. My other inspiration was Robert Pogue Harrison's The Dominion of the Dead, published by Chicago in 2003. Unlike Harrison's previous book, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, The Dominion of the Dead is not obviously relevant to the concerns of environmental historians. Yet the book forces readers to consider the relationship between two seemingly unrelated sets of ideas—about the dead, and about nature. |
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After I began to consider the possibility of a section about neglected books, I skimmed the contents of old book-review sections of Environmental History Review and Environmental History, and I was struck by the range of books reviewed. Really, the task of a review editor for a journal in our field is almost impossibly difficult, because environmental history is so interdisciplinary. So is forest history. How can someone pick just sixty, or eighty, or even one hundred books a year to bring to the attention of readers? Since I began to subscribe in 1991, four people have taken on that challenging task—Hal Rothman, Mark Harvey, Ed Russell, and Dave Hsiung—and we owe them all a great debt for doing such good work! |
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ADAM ROME
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