Adam Rome | Anniversary Forum: What Books Should be more Widely Read in Environmental History? | Environmental History, 10.4

ANNIVERSARY FORUM: what books SHOULD BE MORE WIDELY READ IN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY?

TO MARK THE end of Environmental History's tenth year, I asked sixty scholars to write essays about books that should be better known in the field. I was aiming for thirty essays, and I was delighted instead to get thirty-nine! (Another scholar I invited, Spencer Weart, offered to write about a mural—so his essay appears as a "Gallery" in this issue.) Even very busy people, it turned out, were excited about the chance to write about books they admire.	1
The range of the essays is impressive. Six are about works of fiction. Several consider primary sources, often from centuries ago. Some of the essays are appreciations of books by historians from other fields, including urban history, legal history, and intellectual history. Several are about works by scientists. Two discuss books by literary scholars. Many are about works by writers outside academia. A list of all the books is on page 768.	2
I hope the essays will surprise you as much as they surprised me. I had read only about a quarter of the books discussed in this forum, and the essays on those books often gave me wonderful new insights. More than a third of the essays were my introduction to their subjects. Many others made me keen to dig into books that I knew something about—and even own!—but had not read.	3
Like the anniversary forum in the January 2005 issue, these essays collectively attest to the richness of our field. We have a great subject, and we have many, many talented colleagues. As I wrote in January, I can't wait to see what we do next!	4
ADAM ROME

beasts of many burdens

KARL APPUHN

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIANS HAVE long asked domesticated animals to carry a heavy load in the stories they tell. Cattle, pigs, sheep, and horses have all played starring roles in accounts of European expansion, contributing to—and occasionally initiating—the kinds of ecological transformations that are a staple of environmental history. Jared Diamond has even argued that the relative availability of domesticable animals accounts, in part, for the historical success of Eurasian civilizations—a weighty burden indeed.¹ This view of the relationship between humans and domesticated animals stresses the role of the animals as a source of energy, protein, and other commodities, while minimizing the culturally specific roles that the animals have played throughout history. In part, this view is the result of the widespread acceptance of the notion that the use-value of animals drove the process of early domestication. Unfortunately, this view has resulted in a rather limited view of the relationship between humans and domestic animals in our field.

Scholars outside of environmental history have, of course, long been interested in the symbolic meanings that humans have assigned to domesticated animals. Clifford Geertz's study of cockfighting in Bali is among the most widely read and influential pieces of scholarship of the last thirty years, inspiring a slew of imitators—including Claudine Fabre-Vassas's excellent cultural history of the pig.² In such studies the relations between humans and their livestock reveal hidden aspects of the relations between people, an insight that has obvious applications in the field of environmental history.

Ideally, environmental historians would take a broader view of the long and complicated history of domesticated animals, one that recognizes that the human relationship with these animals goes beyond their use-value or their power to transform the landscape. It is with this in mind that I believe every environmental historian should read Richard Bulliet's The Camel and the Wheel.

Bulliet, a specialist in the history of Medieval Islam, became interested in the camel because he could not find an adequate explanation for why, beginning sometime in the fourth century C.E., the animal completely replaced wheeled vehicles as the main means of transportation across a huge swath of Eurasia and Africa. That the camel's range included some of the most advanced civilizations in the world made the question even more intriguing, since in the history of technology wheeled vehicles are seen as a clear marker of technological progress. As Bulliet began to investigate the disappearance of wheeled vehicles—the wheel itself was still used in mechanical applications, just not as transportation—he soon found himself drawn into the peculiar history of the animals that replaced them.

Bulliet's study covers the entire history of camels, beginning with their origins in South America and proceeding through their entry into Eurasia, their eventual domestication and use as a pack and draft animal, their fate under colonial rule in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and concluding with brief discussion of the animal's current plight (its numbers are in decline throughout its range). Along the way the reader will learn a great deal about the differences between one- and two-humped camels, the problems of designing an effective saddle, and the cultural and evolutionary forces that have shaped the animal's history. But rather than further summarize the contents, I would like to offer three reasons why I think this book should be on every environmental historian's shelf.

The first reason is Bulliet's discussion of the spread of camel domestication. As with all domesticated animals, we know very little about how the process of domestication occurred, but what is particularly useful about Bulliet's discussion is that he provides a solid argument for why the use-value theory of domestication is the least likely explanation. The short version is that the number of human and animal generations involved in the process virtually precludes the possibility that domestication was driven by specific human needs. This is especially true of an animal like the camel, which is capable of producing a single offspring every two years. Bulliet's nuanced discussion of the various possible theories of domestication casts doubt on the grand pronouncements about the role domesticated animals have played in human history that are a common feature of environmental-history narratives.

The second reason to read Bulliet's book is the deft manner in which he analyzes how different cultures have looked at the camel throughout human history. He is careful to distinguish between cultures that engaged in camel breeding for reasons that had little to do, at least initially, with its value as a pack animal (Somalia is a key example), and those that were almost exclusively interested in the animal's effectiveness as a pack animal (the Ottomans, for instance, used camels in their Asian territories, and wheeled vehicles in their European possessions). In this way he is able to explain why the animals' use-value alone cannot explain the very different relationships between camels and humans in different parts of the globe. Again, Bulliet's careful analysis offers a clear alternative to the schematic narratives found in many environmental histories.

Finally, Bulliet's discussion of the ways in which the colonial encounter altered both metropolitan and indigenous ideas about the camel also provides a model for environmental historians to follow. His discussion includes the introduction of the camel into Australia's arid interior, the decline of camel use that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and a few ill-fated experiments on the part of colonial officials interested in new uses for what they thought of as an odd and ungainly beast.

But don't take my word for it. I have used this book with great success in the classroom. In an admittedly unscientific sample, The Camel and the Wheel is the unanimous pick as the favorite book of every class that has read it. Obviously the unusual subject helps, but it is also a testament to the fact that Bulliet's exposition is witty as well as sophisticated. In other words, the book is both good history and a good read.

Detail from "Manifest Destiny," by Alexis Rockman, reproduced with permission of the artist. For additional information about this image, see page 770.

Karl Appuhn is an assistant professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. His research focuses on the environmental history of Renaissance Venice.

NOTES

^1. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 157–75.

^2. Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight," Daedalus (1972): 1–37; and Claudine Fabre-Vassas, The Singular Beast: Christians, Jews and the Pig in the Pyrenees (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

wetlands aesthetics

LAWRENCE BUELL

RELATIVE TO MANY other forms of environmental advocacy, the history of modern wetlands protection is, so far, a heartening success story. At first sight, it looks like a story chiefly of political activism informed by conservation biology and armed by legal expertise. But no less crucial and even more striking has been the astonishingly rapid transformation of public sentiment toward the intrinsic worth of areas once generally thought repellent—thought to be places any normal person would want to avoid, good for nothing except for draining so as to be fit for commercial use. How do you turn a "swamp" into a "wetland"? It requires breakthroughs in natural science and in litigation, of course, but also a revolution in values, especially in aesthetics.	14
To be sure, wetlands have always attracted some, especially those on the fringes of modernizing society. Swamps have provided haven for fugitives and guerrillas. African American slaves fled to them for sanctuary, as Harriet Beecher Stowe emphasizes in her novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, that neglected sequel to Uncle Tom's Cabin. The eccentric specimen collector William Bartram, whose Travels in Florida (1792) is the closest approximation to a classic of early American nature writing, found swamps enchanting and beautiful despite their clouds of insects and rampaging alligators. Henry Thoreau loved exploring the bogs of Concord, Massachusetts, to the perplexity of his conventional neighbors and even his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Swamps attracted Thoreau, like Bartram, for their botanical richness, but more profoundly because they were wild spaces within the precincts of the nation's oldest inland settlement east of the Mississippi.	15
But what a mentality like Thoreau's found compelling, many more have historically seen as disorienting and repellent. It is no accident that the oldest surviving swamp story in the English language is the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, which portrays monsters as creatures of the miasmatic marsh: the fearsome Grendel and his even more fearsome mother.	16
All these cases except Bartram's and many more besides are taken up in Postmodern Wetlands, by Australian literary and cultural critic Rod Giblett. Let me caution upfront that this is not a book most historians will want to read from stem to stern. Indeed, you'll be sorely tempted to cast it aside before you've reached page 50 (of 250), if not before. A book with chapter titles like "The Melancholic Marshes and the Slough of Despond: The Psycho(eco)logy of Swamps" demands considerable resilience and charity. The book is sloggily written, ridden with theory-speak, and far too given over to the dubious, indeed rather preposterous neo-Freudian thesis that traditional aversion to wetlands arises from their being an uncanny mishmash of liquid and solid felt to be an externalization of the slimy nether places and excretions of the human body, whereas a postmodern liberation from traditional binaries enables a more wholeheartedly positive valuation of wetlands as the landscape form that manifests par excellence the principle of ceaseless generative change. Yet Postmodern Wetlands is nonetheless a valuable book, a book I'm glad to own and to which I find myself returning again and again.	17
As a teacher of very bright but often self-disenablingly conscientious graduate students, I tend to warn against assuming that most scholarly books should be read from start to finish. Such is absolutely the case here. Postmodern Wetlands is a trove of wetland-related myth, historical anecdote, and literary exemplars from classic to modern, from western to aboriginal Australian art. Without going into any one case in great detail, Giblett alerts us that bogs are key to the architecture of hell in Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost and gives new substance and bite to Wordsworth's despairing outcry that England had become a "fen" of iniquity. The author also ticks off a striking number of past attempts to build cities on top of wetlands (Perth is discussed at greatest length); and of groups, individuals, bands, and whole cultures who have used their at-homeness in swamps to strategic advantage to defeat or hold at bay adversaries of superior might who were baffled and frightened by such archetypally scary environments. These include the American revolutionary patriot Francis Marion (the "Swamp Fox"), Florida Seminole resisters of white dominance in the next century, and Vietnamese resistance in the Mekong Delta in the 1960s and 1970s.	18
The value and vitality of Postmodern Wetlands lies in its hopscotch sequences of illustrations, its rich heterogeneous evidential base, rather than in the heavy-footed psychohistorical argument wrung from it. Few readers will be edified by the claim that the Mekong Delta is "the cloaca of Vietnam which serves both reproductive and evacuative functions" (p. 219). Yet the book demonstrates convincingly that, since the beginning of recorded history, settler cultures worldwide have invested marshes, bogs, and swamps with a rich, dense, and mostly eerie symbolic significance as dark and chaotic places of the earth. It thereby underscores one's respect for westerners like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and Irish poet Seamus Heaney who have seen past those stereotypes and for the magnitude of the shift in public perception toward wetlands required for such places to become reunderstood as places of value and even beauty. No other book I know comes remotely close to this one in its demonstration of the resonance, reach, and antiquity of wetlands imagination. The passion half buried within the analytical pedantry is another point in its favor. The author clearly means it when he exclaims that "without the wetland, the world would fall apart" (p. 234).	19
Few monographs mirror the shape of their subject as this one does. Try to immerse yourself in its argument, and you'll bog down almost immediately, boggling at assertions like that one about the Mekong. Read the book from a distance, selectively, for its cornucopia of examples, and it's much more compelling. You may even find that you can't do without it.	20
Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. His books include The Environmental Imagination (Harvard, 1995), Writing for an Endangered World (Harvard, 2001), and The Future of Environmental Criticism (Blackwell, 2005).

the secret lives of plants

JOYCE CHAPLIN

WHAT DO PLANTS do, anyway? Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné claimed that, however quietly they seemed to live and die, plants were actually quite busy—having sex. Yet before Linnaeus saw plants panting with desire, the Reverend Stephen Hales had considered that they might simply be panting for air. Hales's claim came first and may have been the more revolutionary in terms of reconceiving vegetation not only as similar to human life but as functionally related to it.	21
"From half a cubick inch, or 135 grains of heart of Oak, fresh cut from the growing tree, was generated 108 cubick inches of Air"; "Twenty-six cubick inches of Apples being mashed August 10, they did in 13 days generate 968 cubick inches of air." So Hales described the fifty-fifth and the eighty-seventh experiments in his Vegetable Staticks of 1727. In 1733, Hales would produce his related work Haemastaticks and combine both into his Statical Essays. The two experimental works examined the physical circulations of plants and animals, continuing William Harvey's exploration of the circulation of the blood in De Motu Cordis a century earlier and emulating Isaac Newton's experimental protocols, especially their careful measurement of matter and motion. Hales's Vegetable Staticks was a major contribution to the modern definition of plants as essential to the physical atmosphere and it predated, by ten years, the widespread acceptance of Linnaean botany as set out in the Systema Naturae of 1735.	22
Hales fundamentally reconceived plants by positing that they gave something important to the natural world around them. Plants had long been understood to take from the environment, absorbing qualities from earth, water, and air that they then imparted to the animals (including humans) that ate them. Wild trees and shrubs also were associated with ill-health, part of the suspicion of forests as dangerously mephitic sites. But naturalists interested in plants began, at the end of the seventeenth century, to reexamine their structure and functions. And Robert Boyle noted, during his experiments with an air pump, that fruits and grains, when placed into a glass receiver emptied of air, produced air of their own.	23
Having read these works, Hales made multiple and elaborate experiments to examine the movement of fluids into and out of plants. In each trial, Hales placed a glass receiver over a plant, sometimes one whose bark he had scored or foliage severed. The glass receivers indicated that the plants indeed emitted fluid substances, including air. Plants breathed. Moreover, they seemed to do so mostly during the day.	24
Hales was praised as the finest Newtonian experimenter of the eighteenth century. He won the Royal Society's coveted Copley Medal and joined the tiny number of foreign associates of France's Académie Royale des Sciences. Hales also was engaged in social reforms, including criticism of the slave trade, and was prominent in British public life. (His neighbor, Alexander Pope, put "plain Parson Hale" into his verses.) And chemical experimenters, including Joseph Black, Henry Cavendish, Joseph Priestley, and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, regarded Hales as foundational for their work on air. It took a bit longer for Hales's work on plants to have any impact. But a flurry of activity in the 1770s took up where he had left off. Priestley, in his celebrated investigations into air (and other of what would later be called "gases") established that the air which plants respired benefited animals. Priestley had been asphyxiating mice by placing them in glass containers where he, or they, would deplete their air supply. Then a fortunate mouse was shut up with a mint plant—and survived.	25
In his Experiments upon Vegetables (1779), Dutch physician Jan Ingenhousz stated that the vegetable air Hales had first identified, and which sustained Priestley's mouse, was, specifically, the "dephlogisticated" air that was just about to be renamed "oxygen." Ingenhousz performed ingenious experiments in which he fitted living plants into water-filled glass globes. They gradually displaced the water with dephlogisticated air, but only if placed in the light. From this, Ingenhousz concluded that plants, using the sun, created the air that kept mice and all other animals alive. "One of the great laboratories of nature for cleansing and purifying the air of our atmosphere," Ingenhousz explained, "is placed in the substance of the leaves" of plants.	26
It was quite a change from the older views that plants, at worst, contributed to a fetid atmosphere or, at best, quietly took materials from earth, air, and water. Yet Hales's idea has received little attention from modern scholars. A few biographies exist, notably D. G. C. Allan and R. E. Schofield's Stephen Hales: Scientist and Philanthropist (1980). And readers of Green Imperialism (1995) can thank Richard H. Grove for one of the few examinations of Hales's impact on ideas of the physical environment. But Grove argued that Hales's immediate influence was mostly on the French agricultural innovators and colonial reformers who took him as a warning to preserve trees, especially in places, like islands, where they were fast disappearing.	27
This interprets Hales a bit narrowly. It might be better to ask how he and Linnaeus packed a one-two punch, together comparing plants' functions to those of humans and initiating popular anthropomorphizing of the vegetable world. Did Linnaeus read Hales, or Hales Linnaeus? When and how did the general public in Europe begin to think of plants as breathing and as healthy for humans? Did gardeners use Hales's arguments to sell certain plants or indeed more plants? Did Europeans' anthropomorphized plants play any role in colonial expansion or the importation of non-European plants? How did people look at landscapes—or landscape painting—once they began to think about plant respiration? And what about nature writing? Consider one plant character in Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants (1789), who: Dropped on one knee, his frantic arms outspread, And stole a guilty glance toward the bed; Then breath'd from quivering lips a whisper'd vow And bent on heaven his pale repentant brow.	28
Linnaeus may have made the poem's "bed" but Hales had "breath'd" life into the vegetable verse. Environmental historians should be inspired (forgive the pun) to search further for traces of the parson and his book on plants.	29
Joyce Chaplin is professor of history at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius, forthcoming from Basic Books in spring 2006.

the culture of highways

MARK CIOC

LEWIS MUMFORD WAS one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals. Best remembered as a critic of modern technology, architecture, and urban life, he wrote twenty-eight books over a span of sixty years, most notably The Culture of Cities (Harcourt Brace, 1938) and The City in History (Harcourt Brace, 1961). I think The Highway and the City (Harcourt Brace, 1963), a collection of essays that he composed as a companion piece to The City in History, is his most overlooked work.	30
The essays in The Highway and the City are vintage Mumford: pithy, perceptive, and provocative. Focused more on current affairs than history, they link together as one long diatribe against the "fashionable blind alleys" of urban planning, especially "the preposterous plans of the highway engineers for gouging out the living cores of great cities with expressways, interchanges, and parking lots, whilst draining off the working population into scattered nondescript suburban housing" (p. v). Mumford's essays celebrate the fast-paced vibrancy of the modern city, while deploring the hydrocarbons that have fueled urban growth over the past two centuries. They exude optimism about the distant future, while reflecting Mumford's sense of gloom about the contemporary environment. And they employ his favorite rhetorical device, that of a pugilist doing battle with the "linear notion of progress" (critics would say that of a quixote tilting at industrialization).	31
The best essay in the collection, "The Highway and the City," is a scathing critique of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. In characteristic fashion, Mumford begins with a series of quick jabs: "the current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation but on the religion of the motorcar" (p. 234); "for most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old" (p. 235); "perhaps our age will be known to the future historian as the age of the bulldozer and the exterminator" (p. 237). He then delivers the hammer blow: "The fatal mistake we have been making is to sacrifice every other form of transportation to the private motorcar—and to offer, as the only long-distance alternative, the airplane. But the fact is that each type of transportation has its special use; and a good transportation policy must seek to improve each type and make the most of it. ... There is no one ideal mode or speed: human purpose should govern the choice of the means of transportation. That is why we need a better transportation system, not just more highways" (p. 237).	32
Mumford's punchy style made him a stimulating and controversial public figure until his death in 1990, but it is the prophetic power of his prose that makes "The Highway and the City" (and many of the other essays in the collection) fresh and insightful even today. He understood better than most that the 1956 Highway Act would have as much impact on America's cities as on its countryside. It would accelerate urban sprawl, inner-city decline, and mall mania. It would promote the demise of the railroad, of walking and bike paths, of waterfront parks and beaches. Over time it would beget soccer moms ("a taxi-driver by daily occupation"), gridlock ("clots of congestion"), and air pollution ("the bad odor of exhausts"). Eventually it would lead to the demise of the city as a center of life and culture: "In that tangled mass of highways, interchanges, and parking lots, the city would be nowhere: a mechanized nonentity ground under an endless procession of wheels" (p. 245).	33
The stark reality of Mumford's dystopia came home to me recently while I was stranded at the Newark International Airport. The distance between the airport and my hotel could not have been more than a fifteen-minute walk, had there been a pedestrian path or a local street linking them. The space between them, however, had been wholly usurped by interchanges and cloverleaves, so I was forced to depend on a thirty-minute shuttle ride along a circuitous route that involved three highways to reach my destination. After checking in, I asked the hotel receptionist to point me to Newark's main attractions. He instantly recommended a nearby shopping mall, "one of the best in the country," reachable by taxi. No one, of course, would assert that Newark was a paradise before the Highway Act, but it is nonetheless hard to imagine how this vast airport-highway-mall conurbation represented in any way an improvement in urban design over the past. Newark's planners (like their counterparts in other cities) followed the logic of highway construction, ignoring Mumford's first rule of urban planning: "a city exists, not for the constant passage of motorcars, but for the care and culture of men" (p. 246).	34
Geographers, architects, and urban planners have long appreciated Mumford, but environmental historians by and large have not. This is surprising since his writings evince a strong conservationist ethic, a concern for ecological wholeness, a sense of global balance, and even a "small is beautiful" mentality. At his worst, Mumford can come across as preachy, splenetic, nostalgic, and hyperbolic. At his best, however, he possesses that rare combination of moral energy, historic sweep, and intellectual edginess that allows him to see—and expose to ridicule—so many of the ill-planned excesses of modern urban-industrial life.	35
Mark Cioc is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (Washington, 2002).

gray literature and other endangered documents

CRAIG E. COLTEN

DURING THE POLITICAL upheavals of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Argentinian citizens adopted the term "los desaparecidos" (the disappeared) to refer to loved ones arrested or otherwise detained by security forces and never seen again. As time passed and witnesses reported on the heinous acts of the secret police, the disappeared ones became widely known as a national tragedy. While my concern here is with documents and not lives, I fear we too face a national tragedy—albeit with less deadly consequences. Nonetheless, in a country that embraces principles of open public records, the abandonment of important historical documents is worthy of our attention.	36
I use a 1949 technical report as a specimen of a much broader set of endangered gray-literature documents—those numerous government technical reports that had limited circulation and have fallen between the cracks of national-level indexing, cataloging, and documentation-retention policies. The U.S. Public Health Service sent its senior sanitary engineer, Hayse Black, to rural north Louisiana in July 1949 to investigate interstate pollution. Quite efficiently, he composed his findings by September of that year and they appeared as a report issued by the Cincinnati Environmental Health Center. This document became a critical primary document that ultimately empowered the Public Health Service to conduct the first public conference, in 1957, on interstate pollution in Corney Creek. Many other similar and equally important reports have been used to document pollution in other waterways around the country.	37
The Hayse Black report—and others like it—have become nearly inaccessible. When I sought to obtain a copy, it appeared in the digital catalog of the U.S. EPA's Breidenbach Environmental Research Center library in Cincinnati—the current incarnation of the former Environmental Health Center. Yet the report proved unavailable via interlibrary loan, and when I contacted the library about a personal visit, the librarian informed me that the facility was no longer open to the public. Not only was it closed to the public, there was virtually no way I could gain access as a scholar short of being hired to work there. Post-9/11 national security concerns were the reason for the library lockdown. Turning to the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), I sought to purchase a photocopy. That option also proved obstructed. I received a note from NTIS that the document had been withdrawn and was no longer available. Only through my persistence and a sympathetic librarian in Cincinnati was I able to acquire a photocopy (for which I am extremely grateful).	38
While not singularly noteworthy for either its methods or conclusions, Hayse Black's 1949 report represents a serious erosion of access to public documents. Under the guise of national security, the primary center of mid-twentieth century water pollution research has been sealed along with the many reports produced by scientists there and not circulated to all government repositories. Facing budget constraints, the NTIS is reducing its inventory and further compressing the range of important historical public documents available to researchers. While some of the water pollution reports remain available via other means, others have proven even more difficult to obtain than the 1949 Corney Creek report. My preliminary inquiry to the National Archives hints that many of the key documents used to build the cases of interstate water pollution have not been archived—although I intend to confirm this personally.	39
Gray literature is always fragile and its survival depends on vigilant librarians to horde documents that administrators sometimes deem insignificant. Several factors can combine to endanger these documents. Government agencies may move from building to building over time and valuable, but old, reports often end up in the landfill. Increasingly in recent years, state and federal agencies have been forced to follow shortsighted document-retention policies, sending even more documents to the shredder or incinerator. Libraries, meanwhile, facing space and budget shortages, have begun placing increased emphasis on digital documents. Will this undercut the preservation of or access to microfilmed and microfiched documents of the late twentieth century?	40
I am troubled by the most current threat to historical documents—and I acknowledge this is not the first time, nor will it be the last occasion when documents have faced destruction. Scholars who rely on historical documents must help librarians and archivists convince administrators of the importance of vital records, lest we be forced to tell our students the shameful tale of our own disappeared ones.	41
Craig Colten is Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University. He is coauthor of The Road to Love Canal (Texas, 1996) and author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (LSU, 2005). Currently he is investigating water pollution issues in the twentieth-century United States.

the densest, richest, most suggestive 19 pages i know

WILLIAM CRONON

MANY OF THE books that have most influenced my own approach to environmental history are in fact British. Some are obvious and unsurprising, like W. G. Hoskins's The Making of the English Landscape or the Oxford English Dictionary; others are more eccentric, and include at quite a deep level the Narnia stories of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Alan Garner's amazing The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, each of which offers loving and closely observed representations of recognizably British landscapes in books that otherwise disguise themselves as fantasies. It was in the British Isles, first from afar in my reading and then much more intimately as a two-year resident during my time at Oxford, that I fully came to appreciate the tremendous time depth and many-layered expressions of past natural and cultural processes that could be read from a given countryside. Reading the landscape has been my passion ever since, and it has profoundly shaped my practice of environmental history.

But if I had to pick just one work that has influenced me more than any other, it would probably be the extraordinary volume by the literary critic Raymond Williams entitled The Country and the City (1973), in which Williams explores literary representations of the pastoral in English literature from Virgil's Georgics through Pope and Goldsmith to the Romantics, most especially Wordsworth, on down through George Eliot and Thomas Hardy to the mid-twentieth century. Although the book is rarely cited in my own Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, there's no question that its core concerns and intellectual approaches were among the things that shaped my own reading of Chicago's relationship to its hinterland in the nineteenth century.

Williams was one of the greatest and most influential of British literary critics in the second half of the twentieth century, and his deeply historicist and socio-political readings of texts made him a pioneering cultural historian as well. A child of the working class who had grown up in the Welsh border country, he was perennially an outsider in the privileged halls of Cambridge where he worked. (Although they are not quite as successful as his literary criticism, Williams' novels about the mining country of Wales give valuable insight into the rural miners whose communities and landscapes inform his perspectives in The Country and the City.) Unlike his great contemporaries E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and others who shaped English historical writing in the second half of the twentieth century, Williams never joined the Communist Party and never called himself a Marxist, but he was deeply a man of the Left and much engaged with post-war Labor Party politics. As a result, his writings are always politically engaged, but because he is more interested in analysis than in polemic, he manages to offer probing insights with serious political implications that consistently maintain the highest standards of intellectual rigor.

Among the qualities that most distinguish The Country and the City (and from which American historians can learn the most) is the book's pervading class consciousness. Its core argument is that the myth of the pastoral perennially represents rural nature as a landscape of leisure to which privileged members of the elite classes retreat in search of solace and to avoid social conflict. Williams argues that despite this myth, a pastoral landscape is always the product of immense labor over many generations by the peasants and shepherds without whom no pasture could be sustained. The literature of the pastoral—with a few notable exceptions like John Clare—almost always expresses elite, leisure-class points of view in the idealized representations of nature that have become so foundational to many modern attitudes toward the non-human world. Although the pastoral tradition has been invaluable to the development of modern environmental politics, especially in its romantic expressions, its consistent erasure of human (and, one might add, non-human) labor makes it problematic if one's goal is an environmentalism that also addresses questions of social justice. Anyone who has read my essay on "The Trouble with Wilderness" will recognize the debt it owes to Williams on this point.

I cannot close this discussion of The Country and the City without referring to the astonishing brief essay entitled "Ideas of Nature" that Williams wrote at about the same time that the book was being published. Originally delivered as a lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1971, it is now most readily accessible in the anthology of Williams' writings entitled Problems of Materialism and Culture (1980). Although it is deeply informed by the arguments of The Country and the City, in fact it goes further than any portion of that book in distilling Williams' core insights into a very few pages. The result is an unbelievably dense, rich intellectual history of ideas of nature in European thought from the late middle ages to the early twentieth century, informed by the same analytical rigor and political engagement that characterize the parent book.

I was blown away by "Ideas of Nature" when I first read it, and I am still blown away by it now. I've used it in every seminar I have ever taught in environmental history, and have probably read it several dozen times as a result. I can give it no higher praise than to say that I still gain new insights from it every time I pick it up. It is only nineteen pages long, and those pages are among the densest, richest, most suggestive I have ever encountered. Anyone who cares about environmental history should read it many times, not just for its particular insights, but for its intellectual practice, its rigor, and its moral engagement. It is a truly wonderful piece of work.

Detail from "Manifest Destiny," by Alexis Rockman, reproduced with permission of the artist. For additional information about this image, see page 770.

William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill and Wang, 1983), which was awarded the Francis Parkman Prize, and Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W. Norton, 1991), which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and the George Perkins Marsh Prize.

fish tales we tell ourselves

CAROLE L. CRUMLEY

ONLY IN HINDSIGHT do we recognize folly. The hopeful futures we envision, the stories about events we tell ourselves, and the signs we choose to see are all ways of coping with an imperfect here-and-now and a murky future. At once frightening and mysterious, astonishingly beautiful, and cruelly exacting, the world around us is something we reify and deify, attributing to it characteristics in which only the faithful could believe. In this way, contemporary humans are no different from our distant ancestors, who shared miraculous encounters and the doings of spirits inside the safe circle of a campfire. The particular folly Mark Kurlansky explores in his book Cod is the persistent modernist faith in the resilience of nature.¹	48
T. H. Huxley, the enormously influential nineteenth-century British scientist and philosopher, was a believer. Beyond all doubt he knew that correcting mechanisms assured stability in the natural world, such that a reduction in species' numbers would occur (and fishermen would adjust) long before species themselves disappeared. Today we are much less hopeful and know to look for passenger pigeons not in a pie but a museum. Optimism was everywhere during the Industrial Age, in business and statecraft as well as in science. In the commercial world, restraint was for the cowardly and the undercapitalized; those considered to be true visionaries believed in Adam Smith's argument that the same laws controlled markets and "natural" resources.² Thus Huxley's belief in the inexhaustibility of fish stocks, together with his appointment to three influential British fishing commissions, ushered in a century of unchecked harvesting in the North Atlantic.	49
The catches of the British and other fishing fleets were indeed increasing in size, but significant advances in fishing technology were the reason. Governments began subsidizing fishing fleets, not as a conservation measure but to protect their country's commercial interests and invest in fishermen and their boats as an important military resource. This infusion of capital meant that gigging, driftnets, and other more traditional methods were abandoned for longlines, bottom dragging, and larger ships, hastening collapse. Fishermen began to notice changes in the habits, characteristics, and quantities of their prey, but their observations were dismissed as unscientific. In traditional societies, divination and other practices used to choose auspicious times and places to harvest resources helped limit the impact on species and locales; in Huxley's time and our own, commercial interests race to improve harvesting technology.	50
Kurlansky focuses on the most prolific and profitable of commercial fishes, the cod. In a little over two hundred pages he tells this fish's compelling tale, offering the reader hard lessons about marine ecology, the march of technology, and human greed—a grim story relieved with charming historic recipes. Cod, cash, and rum capitalized the African slave trade. Slaves were brought to work on Caribbean cane plantations where they were fed salt cod from Boston wholesalers; Boston made rum from molasses, and cod and rum then crossed the Atlantic. Kurlansky explains how the geography of marine resources shaped relations among the great European powers from as early as the seventeenth century. Access to cod fishing grounds across the North Atlantic was a central issue in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wars among the great European powers. Cod even played an important role in breaking the American colonies away from British control and in deepening the split between the northern and southern states.	51
All of these momentous events were predicated upon the notion that resources—marine life, agricultural production, human lives—were inexhaustible and their harvest limited only by technology. Even when fishermen began to notice changes, modernist scientific thinking discounted their observations; this dismissal of traditional knowledge is all too familiar to environmental historians and historical ecologists. Kurlansky's book gives a succinct and lively account of how a single element can evoke the larger web that includes the coevolving history of plant and animal species, geography, and climate together with human thought and activity. The author's many other books—on salt, pastry, music, historical treatments of Basques, Jews, the Caribbean, and much more—also dish up a delicious mix of wisdom, whimsy, and history. For those of us who teach and write about environment, ecology, and history, such work illustrates the power of choosing a single thread in the tapestry of nature.³ For me, it represents an important genre of scholarly writing on the subject.	52
Carole L. Crumley is professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She teaches and writes about historical ecology and studies long-term landscape history in Burgundy, France. NOTES ^1. On the modernist faith, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). ^2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). ^3. For examples of scholarly work in this vein, see J. Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel, eds., Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands (New York: Verso, 1998).

social rights to the use of nature

MARK ELVIN

ONE WAY OF discovering new angles on a familiar field is to explore its scholarship in a different culture. I first found this in my own domain, the economic and environmental history of premodern China, when looking, during the 1970s, at studies by Japanese scholars of two subjects in that period ignored by western research on China: One was what may be called most simply (if over-simply) agricultural "serfdom" in mid-imperial times and the other was the extraordinary variety of local water-control organizations.	53
The second subject is of most relevance when we look at how the Japanese conception of environmental history in general has developed over the last two decades. We find a widespread belief that one of the most effective means of determining why human beings have interacted with nature in the way that they have is to look at the particularities of socially recognized and enforced rights to the use and/or ownership of nature, as well as the concomitant obligations, where these exist. It is here that we can most directly see ideas in action and elucidate the interaction of productive technologies and work- and consumption-organizing institutions both with each other and with natural systems. It is mainly—though not only—in this context that I would like to bring back to the attention of scholars a modest-sized but rich collective volume written by Gotô Akira and ten collaborators in 1989, Rekishi ni okeru shizen [Nature in History].	54
Although only the middle, and largest, of its three sections is explicitly on "the ownership of nature"—specifically in medieval Europe, Tang-dynasty China, and late-imperial China, and among the pastoralist Mongols—chapters in the other sections also touch on this theme. One of these, on the social system underpinning survival in southern India and Sri Lanka on the eve of modern times, is close to 50 percent about this topic. These historians take it for granted that an "economy," let alone a "market," cannot be meaningfully conceptualized outside of the framework of a particular set of social and legal institutions. In some cases, even when commerce and money were well known—as they were in late premodern south India—a large share of what was functionally "wealth" could only be defined in terms of social obligations to and from specific other members of society, and this had crucially important technological and hence environmental correlates.	55
Rekishi ni okeru shizen touches on most of the major centers of civilization in the Old World, and is both implicitly and explicitly culturally comparative. It is free of modern developmental triumphalism and largely free of romanticizing regret for the passing of a sometimes more magical and less human-dominated world. Some of the authors, though, do from time to time note the exaggerated notion that, in their view, people today often have of the benefits of progress. Thus Nakamura Hisashi argues that between Japan—one of the richest and nominally long-lived countries in the world—and Bangladesh—one of the poorest—the difference in life expectancy at age 20 is only eight years, and that if statistical conventions are changed so that the numerous abortions performed in Japan are set against the heavy infant mortality in Bangladesh, the difference appears even more modest. The Japanese expenditure on health per person each year is, however, approximately one hundred times that of Bangladesh. Whether or not one finds this kind of argument interesting or persuasive, it epitomizes the often challenging style of the book.	56
A more complex attack on current conventional economic thinking is Nakamura's historical analysis of south Indian village society—where much of the actual surplus was hidden in human relationships, which are all but impossible for us to quantify. In practical terms, this embedding also served as a powerful defense against the predation of outsiders such as tax-gatherers. In addition to the well-known crisscrossing service obligations, there were also, for example, customs constituting a de facto form of insurance without the costs of an insurance company, such as the mutual support of neighboring farming and fishing communities when one or the other was in difficulties whether through sickness or unfavorable weather. Technical improvement was virtually at a standstill, craftsmen striving to perfect their skills rather than their equipment. What Nakamura slightly misleadingly but interestingly terms "the internalized accumulation of wealth" reduced the destruction of the environment while supporting a sizable population. Economic modernization, when it came, whether in the form of plantations using in-migrant labor or simply the electrification of pumping, was to undermine this complex fabric of interdependencies and lead to an immense but seemingly non-quantifiable loss of well-being for the majority.	57
Some realistic nostalgia is perhaps reflected in Kitada Hideto's description of how the powerful and complex medieval Chinese mix of state-led, quasi-manorial, and small-scale peasant initiatives transformed the lower Yangtze Valley some thirteen hundred years ago. He evokes an earlier landscape of tidal flats and salt-marshes full of numerous birds, of riverbanks thronged with sweetgum trees, of water so clear that the fish swimming below the surface were visible, of forests populated by monkeys, and tidal irrigation that almost effortlessly relied on the tides periodically pushing fresh water upstream into the system, not to mention whales so plentiful offshore that sea-going ships regularly beat drums to frighten them away. He goes on to depict the building of sea walls, desalinization, and then the drying up of the wetlands, the reclamation of the new land for paddy fields, plus the massive felling of woods for charcoal production followed by commercial reforestation with replacement species (and the vanishing of the monkeys with their habitat), while the great river's burden of suspended sediment grew heavier as the slopes were cleared, and a muddy plume extended eleven kilometers out from the estuary. But he also notes the improvements: Wells, for example, no longer were essential for drinking-water, which now could be obtained even from some of the no-longer briny streams; and the Great Lake that lay only a few kilometers inland had been tamed by building dike-barriers across it to reduce its fearsome storm surges. In this premodern world, in contrast to south India, the quest for technical improvement was often a driving force.	58
Yoshida Jun'ichi describes the usage rights of traditional Mongol pasturing groups, made up of from one to several families, over specific areas of the unfenced steppe with their separate branded herds of mares with a single stallion, and of geldings, cattle, goats, and sheep. He then shows how the needs of flexible labor allocation with limited manpower tended to dissolve this cellularity as the herds of individual groups constantly had to be flexibly amalgamated and redivided to optimize the use of a terrain varying seasonally in the quality of grass, the availability of water, and the effects of altitude, temperature, and wind. He also draws attention to two other little-known points: the expansion of the usable steppe from the thirteenth century by the sinking of wells, and the key role played in this animal-dependent economy by the control of animal sexuality. Large herds of horses required the castration of the majority of males or the stallions would fight, and sheep and goats were kept to the most fruitful breeding times by affixing, when necessary, anti-breeding aprons over their hindquarters.	59
A degree of misunderstanding has arisen among economic and other historians recently that late-imperial China had "weak" property rights. Terada Hiroaki's survey of the intricacies of Chinese land-ownership and land-use shows a complex system, based on written, guaranteed, and witnessed contracts underpinned by officially recognized documents of sale and land-tax receipts. There was a finely defined variety of modes of sale (some redeemable by the vendor, some not, and some made by periodic payments not unlike an enhanced rent), multiple levels of ownership (reminiscent of the Scottish feu system), types of mortgage and remortgage, and tenancies that ranged from quasi-servile through share-cropping to the purely commercial and even the permanent. The appearance of weakness may have arisen from the tendency of specifically targeted government taxes to fix the use to which a given piece of land was put. This apart, these sophisticated mechanisms would have been pointless had not enforcement been reasonably certain. There also was a pattern of selling what we might see as rights rather than property as such. An extreme example is the separate sale of fishing rights in the same area of water according to the technique used: lines, nets, or cormorants.	60
I have grouped these brief remarks around only one of the themes of this information-packed book, but I will end by observing that not the least of its charms and lessons—at least for those of us with a taste for new perspectives—is the way in which it makes our own traditions, derived from Europe, look relatively unfamiliar and exotic.	61
Mark Elvin teaches at the Australian National University. He has worked on economic history (The Pattern of the Chinese Past, Stanford, 1973), historical geography (A Cultural Atlas of China, with Caroline Blunden, Checkmark Books, 1998), and environmental history (Sediments of Time, ed., with Ts'ui-jung Liu, Cambridge, 1998; and The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, Yale, 2004). He currently is working on a new approach to reconstructing the dynamics of late-imperial China's population.

the maestro of the church steeple

BRIAN FAGAN

UNTIL THE 1970s and 1980s, many scholars assumed that comments about the weather in historical sources were trivialities. Was the winter of such-and-such year really the coldest in memory? And even if it was, so what? Both archaeologists and historians discounted climate change as anything more than minor background noise. For all practical purposes they assumed that the climate over the past five thousand years or so had remained constant. Such views are outmoded today, when there is widespread concern about future climatic change. A generation of research into atmospheric changes and sea-surface temperatures, new computer models, satellite observations, and ground-breaking research using dendrochronology (tree-ring studies) and ice cores have shown us that climate was a major, if often indirect, player in history. Until this new science came along, historical meteorology was basically an anecdotal science, the work of a handful of pioneers. Arguably, the greatest of these climatic adventurers outside the historical mainstream was Hubert Lamb.	62
Lamb (1913–1997) was one of the greatest climatologists of the twentieth century and a pioneer in historical meteorology. He spent most of his career at Britain's Meteorological Office, where he worked on long-range weather forecasting, world climatology, and climate change. In 1971, Lamb became the first director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, now one of the leading players in paleoclimatology. Widely respected by his colleagues, Lamb's work has not received the attention it deserves from historians, many of whom were trained in an era when climatology acquired a challengingly technical and quantitative apparatus.	63
Lamb was the quintessential Englishman, a modest man with a passion for descriptive, historical meteorology. He loved climatic jigsaw puzzles, which he assembled from a diverse array of often-obscure clues to produce mosaics of past climatic events. In his day, there were no satellites, no floating ocean buoys. As he once pointed out, meteorology for much of his career was a church-steeple science, based on observations from high ground of clouds and other phenomena. The basis for his research was two hundred years of meteorological observations in Europe, most of them of dubious accuracy, and scattered accounts of major weather events that survived in diaries, government documents, and a plethora of other sources. He worked with dauntingly inadequate data. Nevertheless, Lamb wove intricate webs of past climate, which he published in a series of important general books that still are cited surprisingly often by climatologists but largely ignored by historians.	64
Climate, History and the Modern World (1982), represents the best summary of the art in his time. Five chapters cover the basics of past climates and climatology, where there is only passing mention of radiocarbon dates, archaeology, deep-sea cores, and tree-rings. Most climatology, writes Lamb, is derived from painstakingly assembled compilations of long-forgotten climatic records, "endless comparisons of overlapping records from places not too far apart" (p.68). He was himself a pioneer in the process of submitting farm and estate records and other contemporary sources to meteorological analysis, but barely scratched the surface of a form of micro-research that has been somewhat neglected with the advent of tree-rings and other methods. He drew attention to the monastic records of the Venerable Bede, to eighteenth-century chronicles of weather published in Germany, and to compilations of storm floods and river inundations in the Netherlands over many centuries. From general principles, Lamb moves on to "climate and history." He describes climatic shifts such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age in outline, illustrating his narrative with dozens of fascinating vignettes—bridge building at the Danube's Iron Gates during the warmer centuries of Roman times, glacial advances in the Alps, details of Norse voyages to Greenland and beyond, and of the intensely cold winters of eighteenth-century Europe. He comments on volcanic dust, the number of westerly wind days in 1785, French wine harvests, and the Irish potato famine. As Lamb would be the first to admit, all of this is little more than a very general synthesis—he could do nothing else given the inadequate climatological data of the time. What is important is the way in which he melded climate change into a multidisciplinary narrative that is surely a key to environmental history. "If we wish to assess the impact of climatic shifts and changes on human history, or on human affairs today, we must first recognize the many different ways in which an impact can occur," he remarked (p.273). Climate, he observed, has a destabilizing influence and is a catalyst for change. In recent years, the rapid maturing of climatology has produced a great deal of evidence that confirms Lamb's work.	65
One of Lamb's last works appeared in 1991, written with Danish meteorologist Knud Frydendahl. Historic Storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwest Europe is a compilation of North Sea storm activity, using carefully defined criteria, on a year-by-year basis over the past five hundred years. The analysis is comprehensive, starting as early as 1509, culminating in the great storm of October 1987. Here one finds reconstructed weather maps and a plethora of often obscure meteorological information from a wide diversity of scientific and historical sources. Few historians appear to be aware of the existence of this remarkable book, a fundamental source for people studying such esoterica as the dates of wine harvests, naval campaigns, even individual battles, to say nothing of social upheavals.	66
As Lamb himself would be the first to admit, the advance of climatology has overtaken much of his painstaking historical meteorology. But a discerning historian concerned more with people than with the minutiae of climate change will find a great deal of value here, and, if nothing else, a refreshing dose of multidisciplinary history. Hubert Lamb's writing is conservative, even quaint, but he knew of what he wrote and there is much food for thought in his books. He left us an enduring legacy.	67
Brian Fagan is emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His many books include The Little Ice Age (Basic Books, 2001), The Long Summer (Basic Books, 2004), and, forthcoming, Fish on Friday.

pig earth

DEBORAH FITZGERALD

"OVER THE COW'S brow the son places a black leather mask and ties it to the horns. The leather has become black through usage. The cow can see nothing. For the first time a sudden night has been fitted to her eyes. It will be removed in less than a minute when the cow is dead. During one year the leather mask provides, for the walk of ten paces between fasting-stable and slaughter-house, twenty hours of night" (p. 3).	68
John Berger's stories of a French Alpine village, circa 1950, explore the slow transformation of traditional peasant life into something different, yet not exactly modern. Over the course of three small volumes—Pig Earth, Once in Europa, and Lilac and Flag—Berger follows the paths by which villagers are pulled away from their traditional lives and into the world of petty commerce and wage labor in larger towns across the mountain range. In Pig Earth, this process has barely begun. This set of vignettes shows the daily routines and seasonal events that comprise French peasant life—the worries, smells, vistas, frustrations, climate, and triumphs of their days. It is too mean a story to be called sentimental, yet the telling is highly evocative of a nearly imagined past that few scholars have experienced.	69
This trilogy offers two powerful things often lacking in our professional repertoire—a landscape of subsistence, and a sketch of the raggedy way that shifts to modernity might happen in a particular time and place. The first thing, the landscape, is concrete and sensual. This is a landscape of unrelenting work. In the village everyone must operate in a working relationship with others, usually family, or try to scratch out a subsistence without cows or pigs or land. The central character in the book, Lucie Cabrol ("the Cocadrille"), exemplifies this marginal condition. When she is disinherited by her siblings following her father's death, Lucie must figure out how to survive: "It was the moment for killing kids and she had no goats. It was the time when last summer's cheeses were ready to eat, and she had no cows." Her solution, ultimately, was to rely upon the land around her, to turn it into not just a larder, but a commissary. She was intimately familiar with each slope and creek; "She knew exactly where to crawl along the border of the forest to find wild strawberries.... She knew by which walls whole settlements of snails came out of hiding." And so on with wild flowers, mushrooms, cherries, greens, all manner of delicacies. She found her way to the village beyond the mountains and thus began a routine of scavenging and selling (not to mention importing cigarettes to sell in her village) that became her sustenance. As the following two books show, Lucie's problem is a microcosm of the dilemmas that will forever change her village.	70
In Berger's story, peasants really are nature. The distinction between nature and humans seems nonsensical. All categories are blurry, and work itself offers a queasy intimacy with blood, shit, and rot. As the narrator describes one villager, "she smelt of the floor of the forest into which the sun never penetrates, she smelt of boar." The cow described at the beginning is at once a familiar and particular part of this family's life, as well as "sides of meat such as the hungry have dreamt of for hundreds and thousands of years." The leather mask "protects the executioner from the last look of the victim's eyes," as well as disguising the upcoming event from the animal. The slaughter of a family pig is likewise punctuated with the animal's "screams" and "yells," and the young narrator's report shifts easily between this death and that of his father, in the same barnyard. Little distinction is made between various forms of life because all relationships are held in tension; everyone, including animals and plants, it seems, needs something from someone else. Breaking the bonds between them is a perilous act; "independence" is no one's goal.	71
The second thing we often lack, a story of shifting economies and identities from traditional to modern, is here a much less linear event than we have become accustomed to in American history. People leave the mountains looking for opportunity, but they often come back, as our narrator does. Some find the city beyond the mountains, but others do not. The agents of modernity find the mountain an unattractive venue—too harsh, too backward, too ingrown. Transformation happens slowly, shrouded in uncertainty. Will a motorbike melt the natural borders around the village? Will the new factory in the valley ignore the villagers, help them, or destroy them? Will the peasant's fatalism serve as a shield or an ankle-chain? Is there room in this world for Lucie Cabrol?	72
As an Americanist, I find this visit to rural France provocative. The differences between the two places in 1950 is stunning—the chasm between enthusiastic, blinding confidence in the technoscientific future, and the age-old embrace of tradition, a somewhat hostile craftiness that is rooted in a fruitful and isolated landscape. These stories challenge any easy romanticism we might harbor toward both the natural world and the landscape of work. The persistent ambiguity of this transformation remains compelling today.	73
Deborah Fitzgerald is professor of the history of technology at MIT. She is the author of Every Farm A Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (Yale, 2003), and is now working on food and agriculture in World War II.

african diaspora studies

DIANNE D. GLAVE

TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED, the American novel and a history of sorts, is a sinister yet intimate account of enslavement, the bloody social, political, and economic foundation of twenty-first century society bound to Africa through the Middle Passage. The novel details the experiences of Sethe, a runaway slave, pressed between enslavement in Kentucky and freedom across the river in Ohio. All of this is wrapped in her personal relationships, some dysfunctional and others loving. From Sethe's tortured enslavement to her rush to freedom, resilience is a key theme tied to a narrative of nature. Beloved is one template for the future of environmental history in the tradition of African American Diaspora Studies, a discipline that explores the experiences of blacks in interdisciplinary and global contexts.¹

Early in the novel, Morrison describes a tree, a metaphor for the African American family and enslavement. Sethe recounts what Amy Denver, a "Whitegirl," found on Sethe's striped back, the recently etched wounds from a rawhide whipping. Sethe is about to go into labor with her fourth child: "That's what she called it. I've never seen it and never will. But that's what she said it looked like. A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves" (pp. 15–16). The tree represents the branches of Sethe's family line with the fruit as individual members and the scars from the whipping pointing to institutionalized enslavement with befouled fruit—a bittersweet testament to the elastic African American family bolstered by women and a denunciation of the violence by whites during slavery.

That is a woman's story; here is a man's. Paul D, the man destined to become Sethe's second love after slavery in free Ohio, is sold off after he attempts to murder Brandywine, his slaveholder. Morrison depicts the inhumanity of Paul D and others being chained in irons and shoved into boxes overnight during their travels—all set against the trees: "They chain-danced over the fields, through the woods to a trail that ended in the astonishing beauty of feldspar ... They sang lovingly of graveyards and sisters long gone. Of pork in the woods; meal in the pan; fish on the line, cane, rain, and rocking chairs" (pp. 106–109). Morrison juxtaposes the bleakness of African American men jogging to new owners against woods filled with life. Paul D survives, finally escaping to freedom and finding Sethe, his true love.

In Ohio, Sethe, her daughter Denver, and Paul D—all free at this point—arrive at a carnival: "Up and down the lumberyard fence old roses were dying. The sawyer who had planted them twelve years ago to give his workplace a friendly feel—something to take the sin out of slicing trees for a living—was amazed by their abundance; how rapidly they crawled over the stake-and-post fence that separated the lumberyard from the open field next to where homeless men slept, children ran and, once a year, carnival people pitched their tents. The closer the roses got to death, the louder their scent, and everybody who attended the carnival associated it with the stench of the rotten roses" (p. 47). When Morrison mentions the lumberyard, the rape of the forests for construction and kindling is inferred. The rape of the forest parallels an assault on Sethe by white boys who held her down and stole her milk meant for her baby. In addition, the carnival is a lark for Sethe; yet the rotting roses serve as a reminder that enslavement is close and recent, and that African Americans still struggle against racism even in freedom.

Yet Sethe is strengthened by her spirituality. She goes to the woods with her daughters Denver and Beloved to create an ephemeral, ever-shifting shrine to Sethe's dead husband Halle. The shrine—a spot among the trees—is reminiscent of African-ancestor veneration of nature. One day, she rushes to get to the clearing before "the light changed, while it was still the green blessed place she remembered: misty with plant steam and the decay of berries.... When they reached the woods it took her no time to find the path through it because big-city revivals were held there regularly now.... The old path was a track now, but still arched over with trees dropping buckeyes onto the grass below" (p. 89). Amongst the trees, she relives fragments of a violent past as a slave, one of many "rememories"—repeatedly remembering traumatic incidents, a term coined by Morrison in Beloved.

Beloved is Morrison's homage to African Americans, ancestry, memory, resilience, and nature in her many modes of novelist, historian, and naturalist of the South. She depicts the strength of African Americans who rebounded from the adversity of enslavement within the African Diaspora. Environmental historians can learn much from Morrison's lyrical style in the tradition of African Diaspora Studies—interdisciplinary, diverse, and global in scope. Her novel encapsulates many disciplines, drawing on literature, religious studies, geography, and environmental studies to tell a story of diversity with connections to Africa. In the future—no, now!—environmental historians need to draw from African Diaspora Studies typified by Morrison's Beloved.

I dedicate this to two women from the Caribbean, one stream of the African Diaspora: my Aunt Vernice Glave, whom I imagine might have preached and danced in the woods much like Baby Suggs in Beloved, and my grandmother Gladys Gibson, whom I never met but sometimes imagine was a composite of the best of all of Morrison's women.

Detail from "Manifest Destiny," by Alexis Rockman, reproduced with permission of the artist. For additional information about this image, see page 770.

Dianne D. Glave currently is an Aron Senior Environmental Fellow at Tulane and Xavier universities. She has published in Environmental History, The International Journal of Africana Studies, The Griot: The Journal of Black Heritage, and African American Review. She is revising Fields and Gardens: An Environmental History of Rural African Americans in the South, 1890–1930 for the University of Virginia Press. With Mark Stoll she has co-edited a collection of essays on African American environmental history, which will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in fall 2005.

NOTES

^1. On the African Diaspora, see Carole Boyce Davis, et al., Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003); James L. Conyers, A Structural Analysis of Enslavement in the African Diaspora (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001); Michael A. Gomez, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Rosalyn Terberg-Penn and Andrea Benton Rusing, eds., Women in Africa, and the African Diaspora: A Reader (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1997).

menfish and the great hydrosphere

LORNE HAMMOND

A FEW YEARS ago I came across an old copy of The Silent World by Captain Jacques Yves Cousteau and Frédéric Dumas. It triggered memories of the exploits of the captain and crew of the research vessel Calypso as they set out to explore the earth's oceans for their film and television audiences. The Silent World is a remarkable text about the beginning of a revolution in our interaction with the world's oceans.	81
Cousteau clearly saw himself as part of the five-thousand-year history of diving. Divers plunged into the sea holding rocks for weight and descended to harvest food from the sea or to gather sponges, pearls, or abalone for global and indigenous trade. Accounts of diving and salvagers are as old as written history and are to be found in the works of Aristotle, Herodotus, Homer, Pliny the Elder, and Thucydides. Diver-warriors cleared harbor defenses at Tyre for Alexander the Great (332 BC). Technological diving problems inspired inventors from Leonardo da Vinci to Roger Bacon and the designers of Elizabethan prototypes for diving masks, the diving bell, and the submarine, to Augustus Siebe's invention of the twelve-bolt brass diving helmet with air hose (1839). Sir Robert H. Davis provided the classic text, Deep Diving and Submarine Operations (1909), which Cousteau studied in the 1930s. Cousteau's own contribution to diving, the Aqua Lung, was conceived in war and used afterward for peace, to clean France's harbors of war's debris and explosive mines.	82
Cousteau did more than perfect the Aqua Lung. He helped improve the physiology of diving. He pioneered in the use of pressurized gases that allowed divers to work for weeks underwater from his Conshelf habitats of the early 1960s. Those tests provided data useful to NASA in preparing for life above the earth. Cousteau also helped develop and test underwater research vehicles: In 1948, for example, he descended in Auguste Piccard's bathyscaph, an undersea dirigible designed to drift along undersea currents. (In 1960, Piccard's Trieste reached the deepest spot in the world, seven miles down in the Marianas Trench.)	83
But Cousteau was always about more than just technology. He saw all of this as a means to prepare humans to live on the other two-thirds of the planet, in what he called the "Great Hydrosphere." On the last page of The Silent World he noted that "menfish" could now swim freely. But he called his own breathing invention primitive, because it only took humans halfway to the six-hundred-foot depth at the edge of the continental shelf.	84
In The Silent World Cousteau also discussed the political, economic, and ecological dimensions of the continental shelf. He noted the intense battles over tideland oil resources along the coasts of Texas and California. He viewed the pursuit of the food and mineral resources of the continental shelf as not just inevitable, but necessary for human survival (p. 152). Yet he worried that humans were "not yet able to occupy the ground claimed by the statesman."	85
Cousteau's greatest work was as a teacher about the world's oceans and the life within them. He produced fifty books and over 115 television programs and documentaries that circled the globe. The now rarely seen documentary of The Silent World won both the 1956 Cannes Festival Palme d'Or and an Oscar. Cousteau's decades of work in environmental education received recognition through the Legion of Honor, the U. S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Geographic Society Centennial Award, and a United Nations International Environmental Prize.	86
Yet my purpose here is not to nominate another "green saint" for the pantheon of environmental history. To achieve global awareness of the Great Hydrosphere involved all the problems of deliberately constructed edutainment. Cousteau's career contains ethical dilemmas, paradoxes, and problematic shortcuts: accusations of the dynamiting of a reef; creating and promoting "monsters of the deep"; and becoming himself a victim of his own creation, parodied most recently by Bill Murray in the film The Life Aquatic (2004).	87
Hand in hand with the first dives of Cousteau's "menfish" or mousquemers (musketeers of the sea) came destruction. The book tells how Dumas bet he could spear his own weight in fish in an hour. He exceeded it, killing 280 pounds of large older fish to prove it. Cousteau describes how divers wiped out older generations of fish from wrecks and rocky reefs that had defied fishermen's nets for thousands of years. The impact of his divers and the thousands who followed was so severe that protests of fishermen along the Mediterranean coast led to the passage of government regulations on spear-fishing but "from Menton to Marseilles the shore had emptied of large fauna" (p. 9). That process continues today as the diving revolution brought with it geologists, marine biologists, film makers, oil field workers, diving tourists, and recreational and commercial aquatic hunters and poachers. This ecological destruction is part of the story of dramatic rapid change along the continental shelves of the world. It connects to our existing literature on terrestrial hunting, poaching and class, imperialism, eco-tourism, and the development of parks. Today we routinely sink aircraft and ships in order to entertain the free-spending recreational diver.	88
For the environmental historian, Cousteau's Silent World offers a text filled with man/machine cyborg technologies and a highly gendered frontier. But Silent World is more than a document to deconstruct. When I look at textbooks and course syllabi for the field, I find myself looking for content on the other two-thirds of our planet, the Great Hydrosphere—the blue water planet we live upon. Cousteau remains relevant as we assess the incredible pace of change in the ocean. Simply look at the alarm and recommendations of the Pew Ocean Commission, or any of the other global marine studies. The changes that have occurred in the oceans in the last fifty years are dramatic and perhaps permanent.	89
The Silent World appeared soon after Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us (1951). Carson's endorsement is at the top of the first page inside my thirty-five-cent Cardinal paperback edition of The Silent World. Carson must have watched with interest the progression of the book through society—an article in National Geographic (October 1952), a hardcover book (February 1953), adoption by Reader's Digest (April) and Book-of-the-Month Club (July), United Features serialization (July), a Scholastic Magazine edition (April 1954), and then the awarding-winning documentary of the same name (1956). The Silent World's success provided a model for how to begin to educate people about new environmental issues. Carson's Silent Spring took a similar path through society in 1962.	90
Cousteau claimed that people will protect what they love. Do we teach our students to love the sea around us, as Rachel Carson requested in 1951? Is the ocean part of our definition of "nature"? Is it integrated into our teaching? Cousteau's challenge to us is to be more than terrestrial environmental historians. There is no other way to be a planetary historian.	91
Lorne Hammond curates at the Royal British Columbia Museum and teaches at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He lives between the forest and the sea.

"wings dusted with gold"

ROBERT POGUE HARRISON

MICHEL TOURNIER'S NOVEL Friday, first published in France in 1967, is the book I would recommend most emphatically to environmental historians who have either never read it nor heard about it. This rewriting of the Robinson Crusoe story combines third-person narration with lengthy excerpts from the journals that Crusoe keeps over the many years in which he finds himself marooned and isolated on a remote Pacific island, which he names Speranza. While it is based on Defoe's novel, it tells a very different story than its progenitor: a story of the spiritual-somatic changes that Crusoe undergoes in his relationship to nature over the years under extreme, self-revealing circumstances of solitude and deprivation.	92
The story is not linear or teleological per se, yet it unfolds in clearly identifiable stages. The first stage concerns Crusoe's single-minded efforts to devise a means to escape the island. When this fails, he falls into an aggravated depression that takes the form of debilitating lethargy and self-degradation: a literal sinking into the "mire." (Subsequently he will occasionally relapse into this inert and symbolically pre-historical or even pre-human state.) Emerging from his depression, he undertakes an exhaustive survey of the island, followed by years of backbreaking labor to domesticate it and bring it under cultivation. In a quasi-literal sense he becomes the island's husbandman, full of love for and devotion to its earth, into which he periodically releases his own seed in acts of symbolic compulsive copulation. As he goes about taking possession of Speranza, he follows the dictates of his Quaker and western-rationalist heritage, naming himself "governor" of the island and imposing a rigid order and work-ethic on his days. With the arrival of Friday—a mulatto boy whom he saves from death on the single occasion in which human beings visit the island—the relationship of husbandry and governance continues, as Friday is simply incorporated into Crusoe's established order. But gradually things begin to change, in part because of accidental events (like the destruction of the storehouse), and in part because of Friday's completely "other" mode of being in his body and relating to nature. These changes bring about, slowly but surely, a fundamental transformation in Crusoe's self-awareness.	93
Until this point Crusoe's allegiance has been entirely to the earth—its elemental heaviness—with all that this entails in terms of his efforts to domesticate, cultivate, and "govern" the island. Yet in Friday he is exposed to an "airy" spirit that is unfettered and free, despite Friday's servile subordination to Crusoe. Crusoe is gradually initiated into this aerial spirit of lightness, lifting his eyes up to the cosmos, as it were. As his spiritual allegiance shifts from the earth to the sky (above all the sun), Crusoe comes to inhabit his body in a wholly new way. There is, no doubt, a connection between Crusoe's rebirth to the sun and his Quaker religion's exaltation of the self's "inner light," yet this shift of allegiance clearly also represents a turn away from Crusoe's former will to possession and self-mastery toward the unappropriated elementary plenitude of nature. Here is how Crusoe puts it in his journal: Although the earth repelled him, Friday was as elemental by nature as I had become by force of circumstance. Under his influence, and the successive blows he had dealt me, I have traveled the road of a long and painful metamorphosis. The man of earth dragged away from his element by a spirit of the air could not of himself become a creature of air. He was too dense in substance, too sluggish in his movements. But the sun with its wand of light touched the soft, white grub sunk in the shadow of the earth, and the grub has grown into a moth with a corselet of metal, its wings dusted with gold, a creature of the sun, hard and impervious to the elements, but of a terrifying weakness when the rays of the sun-god are not there to sustain it (pp. 209–10). This passage represents neither the climax nor the moral of Tournier's exquisitely composed novel. It merely offers an example of how the evolution of Crusoe's consciousness on Speranza is determined by, and is in fact a function of, the evolution of his relationship to the elements. Indeed, consciousness is so indissociably correlated to nature in this novel that one could say that the former is nothing but the spiritual and mental introjections of that relationship.	94
If Friday offers a completely different kind of "environmental history" than the ones we are accustomed to, it is because it narrates the history of one man's relationship to an environment that was untouched by history until he clambered onto its shores, bearing with him all the legacies of a historical consciousness. While Crusoe sets out to alter the environment of Speranza—to turn it into the "objective correlative," as it were, of that consciousness—it is finally the environment itself, with Friday's help, that becomes the ultimate transformative agent in this story. I employ the words "finally" and "ultimate" in a relative sense here, for the novel has a completely surprising and unpredictable ending which I am not about to give away, so as not to compromise the profound effect that reading this novel for the first time has on anyone who is at all sensitive to the question of the relationship between people and nature over time. All I can promise is that the novel is not simply an allegory of some programmatic ideology, and that, by the end, it is impossible to say whether nature is located inside or outside of the self—and that's the way it should be.	95
Robert Pogue Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian at Stanford University. He is the author of four books, among them Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992) and The Dominion of the Dead (2003), both published by the University of Chicago Press.

managing the wild

MARK HARVEY

IN RECENT YEARS, the historical literature on American wilderness has come into its own. Building on the foundation provided by Roderick Nash's classic work, Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale, 1951), currently in its fourth edition, Max Oelschlaeger, Paul Sutter, and Doug Scott have given us extended studies fleshing out important phases of the history of wilderness appreciation. In addition, a variety of biographies, anthologies, and memoirs have greatly enhanced our understanding of the personalities, politics, and philosophies within this movement. What now begs to be done are environmental histories of particular wilderness landscapes which detail ecological change and human impacts. Such studies could enrich our knowledge, while also helping those responsible for managing these areas for the future.	96
To glimpse the possibilities of such work, consider the merits of Jack Turner's Teewinot, a celebration of the Grand Teton Range of northwestern Wyoming. Turner, who works for Exum Mountain Guides in the summers, lives in a small cabin near the base of Mt. Teewinot in Lupine Meadows. He shares his delights with the birds, moose, elk, bald eagles, coyotes and all manner of critters and plants that inhabit the park. In many respects, Teewinot is a familiar type of literature of place, its focus on animals and plants, weather, and nature's rhythms.	97
Teewinot is also a celebration of the high peaks and of those who climb them. Like much climbing literature, the book offers stories of adventure, risk, and harrowing encounters with weather and challenging routes. Yet Turner is not interested in impressing rock jocks with discussions of the athleticism required to ascend a 5.12 buttress. Instead, he wants to take us deeper into what the mountains have to offer the human mind and spirit. On his way up a guided climb of the