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the problem of THE PROBLEM OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: A RE-READING OF THE FIELD

SVERKER SÖRLIN AND PAUL WARDE

 

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that environmental history has not engaged as fully with social and political theory as it might, and that once it does, environmental historians will find that their concerns are, potentially, much closer to the mainstream of thought in the social sciences and humanities than they might have expected. In fact, environmental history has the promise to be central to the most influential social thought in the academy and among policy makers. The field also needs to consider the roles of knowledge and science, or "knowledge regimes," in translating scientific "facts" into politically realizable decisions.

THE EXPRESSION "ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY" was coined, at least within the genealogy that has led to a recognizable field of academic endeavor, by American historian Roderick Nash in 1972.1 We might reasonably say that the field is a little older than this, although people have been thematizing the kinds of problems that environmental historians are interested in for almost as long as they have been writing narrative texts at all. The standard reference here remains Clarence Glacken and his superb bird's eye view of geographical ideas, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967),which, had it been published in 1997, or even 1987 or 1977, might well have been framed as an "environmental history" of ideas.2 But 1967 was just too early; and perhaps just as crucially, Glacken's great book did not fall within the largely American framework of Nash and colleagues who would found the American Society for Environmental History. Thus professional environmental history has now been in the making for more than a generation, and the time seems right for some constructive reflection. 1
      We would like to present two lines of argument here. First, we want to examine the field from an insiders' perspective, to understand what might give it coherence, meaning, and significance. Perhaps inevitably, working from this perspective for years makes one more keenly conscious of the current weaknesses of the field. But second, we want to look at the broader development of the field in the context of history and other disciplinary approaches to the environment. Here we find many gains, but also a sense that environmental history, especially in some countries, has remained marginalized, a marginalization we would view as unwarranted. Why is this? We wish to provide an analysis, and move toward remedies. 2
      This is not to say that environmental history has hitherto been unreflective; indeed, it has been quite the opposite, although Jane Carruthers might have overstated the case when she recently commented that "It must be seldom, (if ever) that practitioners have dissected the historiography [of a discipline] at such a proximate stage in its evolution."3 There have been quite a number of reflective essays by leading practitioners in the field over the past fifteen years or more: Richard White, Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, William Cronon, and Donald Hughes, to name a few.4 In 2004, to celebrate its tenth anniversary, the journal Environment and History published a special issue with reflective and bibliographical essays on the field in Africa, the Americas, Australasia, China, and Europe, and Environmental History produced an issue with a large number of "state-of-the-art" essays in the same year.5 The tone of these essays has largely been that of a still-young discipline: reflective, but celebratory and often didactic. Environmental history has certainly emerged within a time when methodological reflection has been prominent in the academic world, indeed far too prominent for many people's tastes. One could take a "linguistic turn" at this stage and argue that it is not terribly important to reflect more generally on what environmental history has achieved or where it might be headed: The term is now fairly well entrenched and its future will simply be shaped by its discursive usage rather than any reflective, theoretical, or axiomatic considerations. In fact, we will suggest that the brief history of the term does indeed reflect such a scenario, and that the discipline has relatively little coherence. But if environmental history is to prove useful, or even enlightening, reflection is both timely and necessary.6 3
   

RECENT GLOBAL TRENDS

 
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL work in the field has been done in the United States, which is also where most of the early teaching programs emerged and where the large majority of environmental history specialists are active. Of course, work that might be drawn into the "environmental history" canon is perhaps just as prolific in other parts of the world; but is (and certainly was) much less likely to be written self-consciously as "environmental history." Numbers of publications, practitioners, and the institutional profile of the discipline in the United States are far higher than in Europe, which is the other region with an equivalent number of major universities. Indeed, the recent series of essays in the journal Environmental History on the future of the field were penned almost entirely by people based in the United States, Europe's contribution being an essay by Petra van Dam lamenting the difficulties caused by the language of the discipline being English.7 The geographical features of a low population density, large stretches of "wilderness," a mobile "frontier," and a strong tradition of the "outdoors" have all been significant for the reception and growth of environmental history in North America. This is also perhaps true of other regions where environmental history has gained a foothold: Australasia, and within Europe, in Scandinavia and the Alpine countries. 4
      This geographical and social background is perhaps also relevant. To take one example, within the United Kingdom, the only area where environmental history has established a more prominent institutional presence is Scotland. In this case the efforts of particular individuals, notably Christopher Smout, within a relatively small academy might be considered sufficient explanation.8 However, both the local threat of natural forces and the widely recognized ability of humans to radically transform their environments in the relatively recent past seem to have contributed to these trends. Of course, these factors could be in operation almost anywhere in the world, but the prominence that they, and similar accounts of exploration and taming of the wilderness, have obtained within popular narratives of national self-identity (even where these narratives were palpably inaccurate myths ripe for demolition) may well have contributed to the wider resonance of the field, and not least made the funding prospects more favorable. Among the "northern nations," the case of Scotland is perhaps again indicative: The experience of the Highlands has functioned as a reservoir of national tropes since the 1820s, achieving a far greater degree of popular prominence in accounts of peculiarly "Scottish" human-environmental relations than, for example, the leading role that Scots played in the development of the British imperial subjugation of large parts of the globe.9 5
      Within these "northern" contexts, themes within environmental history have been largely rural or to do with impacts of human activity on rural or supposedly "natural" environments, even when the forcing agent stems from urban development. Urban environmental history really achieved its well-deserved recognition, even in the United States, only in the late twentieth century, though it is now gaining ground rapidly, often with a specific interest in sanitary conditions, pollution, and consumerism. Mike Davis, a scholar teaching at a school of architecture in Los Angeles, has blazed a trail with two pioneering books on his own city: the first, City of Quartz (1990), as a documentary journalist, the second time over, in The Ecology of Fear (1998), as a self-professed environmental historian, leading to keynote addresses for the American Society for Environmental History.10 Nevertheless, the urban/wilderness ratio in publications is distressingly low. And despite the fact that American lawns now cover an area roughly the size of Pennsylvania, the suburbs as yet have hardly registered at all, although some interesting analytical work on the modern development of suburbs, and even lawns, has appeared recently.11 6
      In much of continental Europe, environmental history has enjoyed a more limited impact, often related very specifically to local peculiarities, such as the history of water management in the Netherlands, struggles over nuclear power in Germany, forestry in the Nordic countries, or pollution in regions of rapid nineteenth-century industrialization. Despite the prevalence of the English language in the academic world, and the Anglophone origins of "environmental history," the field appears especially weak in England and Wales. In all these regions, even the United States, however, environmental history has made a fairly minimal impact on mainstream history writing. This may in part be the product of increasing fragmentation and specialization in both environmental history and historical practice in general. With some notable exceptions, within Europe the "leading lights" in environmental history are virtually unknown outside their fields, even those who work in areas such as agrarian history with a long-standing tradition and numerous practitioners. Literature is not yet widely read; the journals Environment and History and Environmental History are not widely recognized. This might seem a slightly pessimistic tale, but the field is yet young; the European Society for Environmental History was founded as recently as 2000. 7
      It is sometimes suggested that the relative strength of historical geography may account for patterns in the reception and development of environmental history in the "global north." Graeme Wynn and Matthew Evenden, two historical geographers who have themselves taken the "environmental history turn," hypothesize that a resurgence of interest in historical geography in 1970s and 1980s Canada may account for the relatively weak development of environmental history during this period, in contrast to the rapid strides being made south of the forty-ninth parallel.12 Could the same not be argued for England, where the inheritance of W. G. Hoskins at Leicester or H. C. Darby at Cambridge, among others, conquered the ground to which environmental history might later aspire? It is almost certainly true that a degree of "re-branding" of historical geographers would make the vigor of environmental history in some parts of Europe appear more promising than it might at first glance seem.13 8
      Whether the thesis holds more generally, however, is doubtful. This can be illustrated by selecting a few hypotheses from among the several this thesis might suggest—and that should be subject to the kind of empirical testing we cannot undertake here. For example, if the degree of interest of a student in "environmental history" is set at an early date with relatively little disciplinary flexibility thereafter, then recruitment to undergraduate departments might tend to determine the fate of disciplinary approaches over time. Strong geography departments would lure away those who are interested in the environment and might otherwise have thought of themselves as "historians." One could restate this hypothesis at any point in the career path. However, given the historically strong institutional presence of historical geography in Scandinavia, where environmental history also enjoys a relatively strong public presence, this does not seem a sufficient explanation for why other regions, and especially history departments within them, have remained more resistant to the field. France is a case in point: Historical geography was tightly integrated into history via the agency of the second-generation Annaliste historians, yet environmental history has only a marginal presence in France, if not so marginal as representation at international conferences might suggest. Similarly, a second hypothesis is that the output of "environmental history" across all disciplines is roughly equivalent in most countries, but that the institutional importance of historical geography (in terms of both departments and publications) crowds out self-identified environmental historians. Again, this deserves testing, but does not seem immediately convincing, especially given the strength of the cultural turn within contemporary historical geography. 9
      A rather different case seems to us to be the impact of environmental history in Africa. The field promised a reinvigoration of African history in the 1980s, and has recruited some of the leading figures among the historians of the continent: William Beinart, James McCann, Megan Vaughan, James Fairhead, and Melissa Leach.14 Instead of establishing a distinct presence, however, the insights of environmental history have been quite quickly absorbed into regional historiographies. One might wish to argue that it is precisely this process that has established the concerns of environmental history within more mainstream work. Environmental themes of course dovetail neatly, and provide ready analogies, with colonial and postcolonial history. Processes of invasion, acculturation, the confrontation of the "indigenous" and the "colonizer," or the "indigenous" and the "exotic," of "local" and "scientific" knowledge, intensive and extensive forms of cultivation: All these find ready resonance in various discourses associated with the "global south." The development of the ranching and plantation economy, and destruction of indigenous peoples and possibly long-standing forest habitats in Latin America have also been prominent themes in its environmental history. This was, of course, part of the territory surveyed by the geographer Carl Sauer, who was such a prominent figure in triggering North American interest in themes of historical environmental change, as well as a lynchpin in providing the global perspectives promoted by the seminal meeting on "man's role in changing the face of the earth" in 1955.15 Richard Grove is perhaps the best known of environmental historians to have insisted on the importance of the colonial enterprise, especially in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean, for shaping European knowledge of nature.16 The historiography of South Asia has also increasingly incorporated environmental approaches into its agrarian history, perhaps most notably in the inheritance of the Indian Forestry Service and the struggles over property rights generated in the past two centuries by the imposition of English norms of legal practice.17 The increasingly sophisticated history of colonization and migration can take on an environmental aspect, tracing the pathways of ideas and species around the globe, and indeed is bringing about an increased use of such analogies and "colonial" understandings of processes within European history. In these cases environmental history can be seen as a component of the burgeoning "world history" that realigns the relative importance of the "north" and "south" in grand narratives of development.18 10
      This brief balance sheet has both positives and negatives, and plenty of unrealized potential. A case in point is Australasia, where there is a considerable, and growing, historiography concerned with pressing themes such as the ecology of settler societies, relations to aboriginal forms of land use, as well as the huge infrastructure projects and irrigation schemes that have influenced Australia's twentieth-century experience and her modern geographical and historical self-understanding: for example the shift from a conspicuously void "Dead Heart," to a far more vibrant "Red Centre," increasingly allowing for notions of cultural and social richness in the Outback.19 Many of these themes are recognizable from the United States, but an even closer parallel might be Canada, where the interrelations of nature, science, art, and the issue of national identity and purpose have been at the forefront for a long time, including issues of ethnic presence and conflict.20 Other parallels are in evidence in the Scandinavian North and, more generally, in the Arctic areas, where "White Deserts" have occupied positions in national and geographical imaginations similar to the Red Desert in Australia.21 Environmental history can become part of the process of transmitting such themes from environs where they are more popularly ingrained in the imagination to those regions and nations where the constructs of center and periphery, of the cultivated and the wild, of cultures and natures, have not been as prominent. 11
   

DIVERSITY AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY

 
THIS BRIEF SURVEY gives some sense of the progress, limits, idiosyncrasies, and perhaps above all the diversity of the field. We do not pretend to present anything remotely like a comprehensive view of the field, which, pace the comments of John McNeill in 2003, is now well beyond the ability of two scholars to produce. There are in any case many excellent regional bibliographies now available.22 It is partly for this reason that we have thus far refrained from attempting to provide any kind of definitive statement as to what we think "environmental history" has been or might be. Of course, such statements do exist. The best known comes from Donald Worster, who identifies three strands of work within environmental history.23
  • First, the study of "nature itself," including humans—from an ecological point of view, examining the behavior of species, including those cultivated and domesticated, and flows of materials.
  • Second, exploring the socio-economic interaction between humans and nature, production, reproduction, customs, and so forth—the core material of agrarian history, more recently with a pollution component added in.
  • Third, analyzing the "mental interaction"—myths, ideology, and all ways of thinking about nature.
 12
      Such is the range of topics opened up here, it might be supposed difficult to discern what many different types of environmental historians would have in common. In fact, few works would even attempt to bind the three levels together in one single investigation. It may serve the purpose of uniting a stray herd of seekers, but to present it as the list of what environmental historians "do"—especially to outsiders—perhaps gives an unrealistic expectation that provides little else than a bad conscience. Nor as a schema does it provide clear guidelines to how the three areas themselves are interlinked. And do any of these strands actually offer a distinctive disciplinary framework, in the sense that other scholars, within or without history, did not have the conceptual tools to engage in studies of these themes before the emergence of "environmental history"? 13
      The lack of genuine coherence is reflected in the routes that scholars have taken to environmental history. The historical study of the environment can clearly lay claim to a wide range of disciplinary approaches and this is inevitably going to be reflected in the approaches scholars take and what they expect from it. It is notable in reading the regional bibliographies of works of environmental history provided by the American Society for Environmental History's website, how little common ground there is among them. Relatively few clusters of environmental historians outside of the United States share any kind of institutional or bibliographical genealogy.24 It seems rather that "environmental history" has proven a convenient umbrella under which diverse types of work have been able to place themselves. To what degree this is a strength or a weakness of the field should be, we believe, an important area for discussion. From a European perspective, the difficulties are compounded because of the number of different languages within which European historians work. There are various new general works, some with a national, some with a wider perspective: Sverker Sörlin for Sweden (although as much international), Joachim Radkau for Germany, Marco Armiero and Stefania Barca in Italy, Robert Delort and Francois Walter from France. The Netherlands has a "green history" by Jan Luiten van Zanden and Wybren Verstegen, and the Journal for Ecological History. Thus far however, these books have not crossed borders.25 14
      We have already noted that one of the things that characterizes the different approaches to environmental history is that they have been done in different departments, which historically sometimes have had close relations. Environmental historians often have looked more to the natural than to the social sciences, both for data and at times for concepts. Ecology has unsurprisingly been a major influence, though the conceptual diffusion often has been mediated by other disciplines, such as anthropology, or by ecologists and plant scientists who have attempted to write history.26 The influence of geography on history, which was clearly more prominent in the heyday of Annales history, seems to have been channelled into more specialized areas. Its influence on the history of science, for example, has grown considerably after the "spatial turn" of the 1990s. As has been demonstrated by David Livingstone in numerous works since the early 1990s, and in recent work by Charles Withers and Michael Bravo, the territorial, and indeed maritime, dimensions cannot be taken out of the history of science.27 This is not just because space implies resources, dominance and power, but also because "the field" has been such an enormous reservoir of empirical data, as was described by Peter Bowler in a comprehensive volume innovatively, and accurately, entitled The Environmental Sciences (1992).28 As the history of science and concepts from the natural sciences have had such an impact on the development of environmental history, we would expect these new turns in those fields to further stimulate developments. 15
      But rather than simply recasting a new genealogy, we want to highlight one idiosyncrasy of the field: how little it has engaged with sociological thinkers who have been so prominent in other areas of history, from Durkheim and Weber to contemporary authors such as Anthony Giddens, Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, and Sheila Jasanoff, whose work might be thought tailor-made for environmental history. We think this raises a significant issue: the question of the level of ambition of environmental historians to actually contribute to the vanguard of scholarship and to the theoretical progress of our profession. It is perhaps not so hard to trace a number of genealogies of work in environmental history; is it perhaps equally if not more pertinent to ask what, conceptually, environmental history is bearing out into the historical mainstream, and in relation to this, how the field is responding to the most resonant contemporary theorists in the social sciences? The vocabularies of political science and economics are also conspicuously absent from the large body of work in environmental history, unless as a target of indignant criticism, despite the relatively rapid growth of environmental and ecological economics. Thus environmental history has engaged with a particular form of interdisciplinarity that has looked more readily in the direction of the natural sciences, and particularly the life sciences. This perhaps goes some way to explaining the lack of interest or comprehension from other historians. 16
      These points can be briefly illustrated by examining ideas from one of the most prominent contemporary theoreticians and historian of science, Bruno Latour. In The Politics of Nature (2004) Latour has argued against traditional dichotomies that have played such a prominent role in Western thought: between "fact" and "value"; between "Science" conceived of as a validating unitary phenomenon that alone can comprehend natural phenomena, rather than the reality of scientific practices, and the merely discursive chatter of "politics"; and, indeed, between "nature" and "culture."29 That such distinctions are problematic is not perhaps news to anyone familiar with any of the West's intellectual history. And Latour does not seek to jettison the historical importance of these categories. Rather, he argues that all "politics" has been underpinned by theories of "nature" and natural behavior. In turn, what is "natural" and "real" has increasingly come to be validated by the products of "Science"; a "Science" that in positing its own unity as practice—a gesture Latour would view as profoundly political—equally has posited a specious unity to "Nature" (and perhaps the "environment"?). However, if the validating and regulatory body for how nature functions is "Science," then it is in the final instance only "Science" that can determine the natural order and a proper basis for the conduct of politics. If we understand "politics" broadly as those discussions that provide for the understanding of, and rules for, human behavior, we can see that both "fact" and "values" would be determined in the end by "Science" because of its putative knowledge of "nature." Whether Latour's analysis is plausible is not the primary issue at stake for us. It is obviously highly suggestive for those interested in environmental history in its own right, and as a model for understanding how political history can also be "environmental." Yet it may also hold a more disturbing lesson. If the form of interdisciplinarity promoted within the field tends to privilege the natural sciences, it is hard to see environmental history as anything but an epiphenomenon in the study of nature, and it will be equally hard to convince the natural or social sciences of its importance. This is precisely the charge that Latour levels at environmentalist politics and the difficulty it has experienced in carving out a distinct political base. 17
      Of course, none of this should surprise us. Similar lessons could have been drawn when, in the constructivist spirit of the 1990s, William Cronon edited a collection, Uncommon Ground (1995). This work assembled a number of narratives, giving flesh to the notion that, after all, nature had to be both discovered and named before it could become cherished. Cronon's insistence that the very idea of bonding with nature had a history was sensational to a field that had understood itself normatively, but it would have come as no surprise to those who had read Marjorie Hope Nicholson's Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959), and certainly not to students of Raymond Williams, who had heard him speak in Cambridge on the history of "nature." 18
      Nor would it come as any news to those who could recollect their Roland Barthes, in Mythologies (1957), prophetical as almost always, when he talked about the "bourgeois promoting of the mountains."30 Yet the historicizing of "human-nature" relations still so often holds nature at a distance, as an external object or set of facts that can be observed, tamed, or destroyed. The idea that "nature" as a concept and as a set of processes is in fact at work at the heart of all aspects of our social activity is a notion, amazingly, that sociologists and not environmental historians are busy promoting today. We will return to this issue. 19
   

THE SYNTHETIC AND THE PARTICULAR

 
IT IS IMPORTANT at this point to examine those works of environmental history that have achieved a wider resonance, and avoid the discussion drifting into a rather introspective reflexivity. It seems to us apparent that despite our reservations an unusually large number of important books have emerged from the field. Suffice it to mention here some of the perhaps most seminal contributions: Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature (1980); Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire (1985); Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism (1986); William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (1991); Richard Grove's Green Imperialism (1995); John McNeill's Something New Under the Sun (2000). Apart from making the plain observation that the large majority of these authors are American, one may perhaps more interestingly note that they are generally, though not all, works of synthesis. They present new approaches to what Charles Tilly has called "Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons."31 20
      In a sense they all demonstrate that nature, or ecology, plays a hitherto unarticulated role in the more or less enduring problems that they have set out to address. But, perhaps most importantly, they have set the role of the environment in a framework comprehensible to traditional narratives, even if their own contributions are original, which they are. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that the issues they deal with are big; nature is indeed a large-scale actor, and the scope of their vision must be big too in order to achieve the synthesis. Still, one should observe, they are written by historians. The framing of the issues is done from an analytical point of view, and the questions asked concern problems that are valid to historians. It is however the scale of the issues and the way of answering them that explains their success. We in no sense are suggesting that synthetic history writing is exclusive to environmental history, but maybe it is, through its vicinity to science, more marked by it than most other fields. 21
      In particular, environmental history syntheses seem to have influenced colonial, imperial, and world history. Although both Crosby and Grove have received criticism, by and large their views have been assimilated with the main currents of world history. Grove has been quoted in C. A. Bayly's recent The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (2004), and in Kenneth Pomeranz's influential, if controversial, The Great Divergence (2000).32 These successes have been achieved in a field well-tilled and prepared by the influence of authors such as Eric Jones, although it is only fairly recently that significant bodies of local studies have appeared from which any empirically based syntheses could be derived.33 However, the synthesis, for all its obvious and popular appeal, is not the mode in which most historians are trained to operate, and neither is it the kind of output that is most rewarded in establishing a historian's career path. The bulk of the work written by environmental historians consists actually, of course, of specialized case studies, often focused on particular nations or regions; the famed syntheses are, almost by definition, exceptional. In this regard, environmental historians are like any other, but it is our impression that their specialized work is not cited much in the leading journals, although it may still be cited within specific geographical contexts. 22
      The real barrier to the usefulness of environmental history, at least as perceived by the historical profession, does not lie in its inclination for synthesis. Rather, there is a somewhat more vague feature of its centrality to the historical enterprise that plays the biggest role in this regard. Maybe it could be called human agency. The crucial features of human agency are, it is generally believed, taken care of by other historians. Historians are perhaps grateful to the great synthesizers who will provide the environmental canvas on which they can develop their own work. Fernand Braudel is the most famous of all: Trained as a geographer, influenced by the work of sociologist-historian Gilberto Freyre on Brazil, but still inclined in the final instance to place the environment into "geological time," into an histoire immobile.34 The environment may frame the stage but does not provide the drama; too often it does not seem essential to the discipline. What is left over for environmental history, as its claim to authority, is the non-human: the professional study of which has however already been staked out by scientists and geographers. In fact, it is rather striking to note the large presence of biologists in the annals of what might be termed environmental history. There is a Jared Diamond with his majestic panoramas on the major forces of civilization and its disastrous complexities, or an Edward O. Wilson, giving us an almost biblical version of the story of biological diversity, or a Daniel Botkin, challenging the conventional wisdom of biological stability, or even a Stephen Jay Gould, although he was most interested in the paradoxical detail and the temptingly odd rather than in the grand narratives.35 23
      Indeed, it may be the proximity that these historical syntheses of environmental change enjoy to models of "evolution" that has served as a deterrent to most ordinary historians. The four scientists mentioned above—Americans again—would not only be interested in evolution as a subject, they would in fact give evolution considerable explanatory power, although with varying prefixes and with varying degrees of determination. But, one should observe, always with some degree of determinism. It is history beyond the confines of human agency, although it is not history beyond our control. Humans in these narratives have to adapt, be skillful, rational, enlightened, or else the forces of nature will bear down destructively upon us all. In an interesting way, this environmental metahistory therefore reminds us more of history written by an old guard of anthropologists or archaeologists: a history with no written sources.36 Here intentionality is reduced to the minimum and a super-interpreter uses his well-informed imagination to speculate about why societies developed the way they did, why people moved around, settled, or clashed, or indeed, why they will face disaster unless they change. Historians often would use these histories, simply because we need them. But they would mostly serve as some sort of background reading to the kind of histories that historians are really interested in writing. 24
      Nevertheless, we would like to maintain a perhaps fine, but important, line of distinction between the "evolutionary metahistories," often written by scientists, and most of the syntheses written by professional environmental historians. The latter deal, mostly, with problems on the human scale; they use conventional sources, they do invite human agency, although they very often succeed in moving the historical near enough to the evolutionary to break new ground and bring home sensational new readings of world or regional history. But to many historians, they are already way beyond the realms where most methodological courses would have allowed them to tread. A large proportion of this existing European work operates on timescales with which most historians are not entirely comfortable, a fact that is also related to the disciplinary expectations of practitioners. For example, a book by French scholars Roger Delort and François Walter self-consciously treads along the path set out by an issue of the journal Annales in 1974. The section "L'anthroposation du milieu," which covers the ground a historian might usually be expected to engage with (fields, systems, energy, industrialization, the urban environment, aesthetics), fills a third of the book (or around 130 pages), and ranges across the entire period from the Neolithic to the present.37 25
      Thus neither the synthetic and nor the particularist trends within environmental history have spoken to the problems with which most historians actually spend most of their time. Could environmental history ever hope to be taken for granted as an essential part of the bigger picture in all major occurrences in which historians are interested? Clearly, most textbook examples of environmental history have formed in a certain sense a genre of their own, preferably comprising mega-events such as the salinization of soils in Mesopotamia, the deforestation of the American West, the growth of the national parks, or the history of the London air and its quality, or the "rationalization" and "instrumentalization" of landscape, river and forest planning, just to mention a few standard examples. Indeed, the flip side of particularist trends within environmental historiography is the development of a pattern of growth in the field that is cumulative rather than qualitative. The typical environmental history conference would boast dozens, if not hundreds, of new case studies, serving the main purpose of demonstrating that there is an environmental history to be told, of the energy crisis, of the tourism industry, of the Canadian North or the Argentinean South, of Sunset Boulevard, or anything. Maybe this is to some extent a phenomenon in many sub-fields of history: there is always an untold history of anything. Nonetheless, we see this proliferation of specialized case studies as a symptom of a more disturbing trend within the field. 26
   

THE PROBLEM OF THE PROBLEM

 
WHY? BECAUSE IT IS hard to conceive of a readily articulated set of issues at stake in environmental history. The fact that an environmental narrative of change can be set alongside political, social, or cultural ones—what we might see as the cumulative pattern of disciplinary development—is not sufficient to persuade anyone of its significance. If its observations were to go no further than the fact that humans are also subject to "natural laws" and "forcing," and that human actions also have consequences governed by these laws, the field could do no more than hand the interpretation of certain events over to natural scientists. Or perhaps the problem is simply too profound, of how one can take the measure of human-environmental relations. How can this be sold as an agenda? 27
      If that question mark is essential to our argument, we still of course also come to praise environmental history. Its syntheses and expansion of historiography into new areas have been, and will be, profoundly important, especially within the discipline of history, which had neglected to think historically about the environment. So, what seems missing most of all in an otherwise promising and lively sub-field of history, is perhaps a problem, or what would be more promising, a range of common issues and questions to push forward collectively. The strange situation thus seems to be that the problem of environmental history is to identify its core problem. 28
      How, then, could environmental history be designed to address historiographical problems in a more productive way, and somehow bridge the gap between the grand synthesis and the particularist demonstration that yes, the environment counts? In fact, we believe that environmental history is already on this road, but we, as its practitioners, must both reflect on and project out their work and potential. We would like to conclude by providing a few suggestions of what developments might prove useful to the field. 29
      Environmental history is indeed ideally situated to bind together approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, and history in non-deterministic accounts of change. It can provide a translatory role between disciplines, both to explain rapid advances in the environmental sciences to other fields, and to provide essential documentation and accounts of change to those environmental scientists. In this respect, there is much potential in engaging with important areas of advance in theoretical knowledge, such as social ecology or systems theory, which have fallen into the view and toolkit of environmental historians without perhaps having found a wider resonance in the humanities. Environmental historians are thus again ideally placed to provide a mediating and indeed innovatory impetus to understanding of these approaches, and possibly through them, challenging established disciplinary boundaries. 30
   

INVOLVEMENT WITH SOCIAL THEORY

 
THIS, HOWEVER, RETURNS us to a theme raised earlier; the relative lack of theoretical engagement with cutting-edge work in the social sciences. This issue goes beyond the merely academic. It is certainly true that for some practitioners in the field, environmental history has a profoundly moral and political agenda, in much the same manner as subaltern studies and groups of social historians such as the History Workshop in the United Kingdom brought to their methodological innovations in the 1960s and 1970s.38 It is certainly also increasingly the expectation of funding bodies that academic work, rightly or wrongly, should have policy implications. One area of theoretical innovation that has caught the attention of policy makers has been the sociological work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, both of whom place conditions of environmental change and "nature" near the heart of their work. It is worth reflecting a little on their potential for environmental history. 31
      Beck argues that society has reached a state of "reflexive modernization," and that we live in a "risk society."39 By Beck's account, in late industrial society the distribution of wealth and distribution of risk no longer map simply over each other; political problems cannot be solved by a discourse arguing for more or less equality. Industrial, demographic, and environmental developments have produced a super-complex matrix of causal chains, toxins, and risks, the consequences of which are distributed universally but also in a fashion increasingly incalculable outside of scientific theory. Theory itself, however, may only be predictive rather than definitive; risk remains generalized and uncertain. Thus our increased mastery of scientific technique does not reduce risk. On the contrary, it only serves to make us more aware of both it and its complexities. This in turn produces further reflexivity, in which science only serves to highlight further the necessity for political choices about risk, a politics that is compelled to exist and be validated by science, but for which science cannot, in fact, provide the answers. The paradigmatic case of risk society is of course the issue of climate change, though hazards from nuclear accidents or pesticides would do just as well. 32
      All this is perhaps sufficiently interesting to capture the attention of environmental historians as a grand narrative. And one does not have to agree with the characterization of an earlier industrial society as being solidly based on the politics of class, or that "risk" was roughly distributed along the lines of "income," to see that the extended analysis of a politics of risk to other and earlier societies may prove a highly productive heuristic tool. It may be that the immediate consequences of human action in societies of subsistence agriculturalists might seem of rather less environmental impact and less complexity than is the case today, but equally that from the point of view of pre-modern villagers, where moral actions could have unpredictable cosmological ramifications, the kind of distinctions Beck makes between "reflexive" and "pre-modern" societies may not be so clear-cut. Either way, the analysis of and politics of risk is ripe for the picking by environmental history. 33
      Anthony Giddens has provided an analysis—which shares much in common with the work of Beck—of what he calls a post-traditional society. It will suffice here to draw attention to just a few aspects of his argument. Giddens points forcibly to the idea that with the development of super-complex causal chains and the clear ability of human society to make, yet not control, impacts of planetary dimensions, clear-cut distinctions between the "human" and "nature" become increasingly untenable. "The very notion of 'the environment,' as compared to 'nature,' signals a more deep-lying transition. The environment, which seems to be no more than an independent parameter of human existence, actually is its opposite: nature as thoroughly transformed by human intervention. We begin to speak about 'the environment' only once nature, like tradition, has become dissolved."40 34
      Again, one does not have to agree to see the potential import for environmental history, a field that has certainly paid barely any attention to its most prominent concept, that of "environment." Too many have simply equated "environment" with "nature" in explaining environmental history, as if our categories have not changed since George Perkins Marsh. But is this really what we mean? Clearly the word environment has a much wider range of meaning, even than a concept as expansive as nature. Indeed, even environmental historians often use it in opposition to "society," in something like the way that economists oppose the "market" and "externalities." Actually problematizing and thinking about the conceptual uses of "environment" could help clarify areas of our field as well as provide the theoretical impetus to take it to others. 35
      One might think that Giddens's comments could underpin a particularly pessimistic declensionist narrative about environmental change: So debased is "nature" that in the twenty-first century it becomes doubtful that such a creature exists. Of course the category of "nature" has always been in doubt, and in the West, humans have expended much energy policing its borders.41 But now Industrialism, with the handmaiden of Enlightenment rationality, and perhaps pace Lynn White, weaned on the inheritance of Judaeo-Christian thought, has finally brought about its demise.42 Brute technocratic rationality and its unintended consequences have been rather more than bugbears for environmental historians; the failings of the imperious planner, of those who "see like a state," would doubtless raise a certain Schadenfreude were the consequences not so terrible.43 The post-Enlightenment inheritance of reason and the homo oeconomicus is supposed to have developed a peculiarly destructive form of blinkered idiocy that goes beyond the destructive capacity of anything humans had attempted before. And in the face of this, the world of "feeling," the sublime, the romantic, of "aesthetic spirituality," becomes restricted to a few carefully policed reserves. In the struggle between "use" and "delight," "use" triumphs ("how many divisions has the poet"?), and there remains a suspicion that what is left for "delight" is only code for the tourist industry.44 In Donald Worster's account, it is technocratic rationality that has become dominant in the struggle between two offspring of North/West European Calvinism: the "Protestant Ethic" as articulated by Adam Smith, and the aesthetics of John Muir, traced back to roots in Presbyterianism and the Disciples of Christ, revivalist and ascetic protestant movements that stressed the heart, the inner light, and the spirit.45 36
      This more familiar tale serves as a counterpoint to Giddens's less familiar turn. Instead of arguing that "reason" has repressed the more environmentalist "feeling," Giddens proposes that the wanton destructiveness of the industrial economy has in fact been the outgrowth of a pathological compulsion that itself derives from "traditional" patterns of ritual and formulaic behavior shorn of their previous pre-modern contexts. Far from being "unnatural" and divorced from the world of feeling, he locates the entrepreneurial drive to generate wealth in a psychology of compulsion that is more akin to "tradition...[as] repetition... a kind of truth antithetical to ordinary 'rational enquiry'." In other words, he assigns the capitalist to the world of "feeling," dominated by an unconscious psychological drive that is itself a form of anxiety-control in an increasingly complex world. It is an addiction alongside other forms of anxiety-control like drug-taking or obsessive compulsive disorder. And put another way, this compulsion belongs to the area of the mind that Kant would assign to "brute nature," and not the reflexive forces of reason and rationality that constituted, for him, the fully human. Thus, according to Giddens, any remedy to our predicament requires more rationality, not less; our predicament in part derives from the persistence of a traditional world of feeling; and the psychology of action is linked intimately and reciprocally to environmental change. 37
      There is no need to adjudicate between these stories here. These short dips into sociology simply aim to illustrate the reservoir of thinking that is available to environmental historians; and to suggest that the concerns of environmental historians may be, potentially, much closer to the mainstream of thought in the social sciences and humanities than they might have expected. Environmental history is not a tangential field or sideshow in modern academic debate; but it has, to some degree and somewhat surprisingly, failed to notice how central it might be to the most influential social thought in the academy and among policy makers. And could we also suggest that some of the ideas contained in this essay might provide an avenue for environmental history to situate itself at the heart of the area that still troubles the humanities, and perhaps always will: the division between materialist, and cultural or constructivist, explanations for human behavior? Indeed, the "problem" for environmental history might turn out to be precisely that which sustains the social sciences as a whole: How do societies and individuals come to perceive, in the assemblage of the elements that make up their world, some as belonging to the order of reflective action, and others to the forces of "brute nature," "externalities," as "environs"? For this is surely not a given, but a process of differentiation that inflects all human activity, and all those assemblages of things in which humans are active. This might be one track to take in a history of the environment, but it would not be a history that preserved traditional delimitations of the natural and social sciences, bowing down to the greater expertise of other disciplines. Nor is it a problem that other disciplines can afford to ignore. 38
   

THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENT

 
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIANS should be well situated to deal with these issues. Their work on, and across, the boundaries between the natural and the social should have provided insights into where and how explanatory factors may be sought. Our argument here is, simply, that a thorough involvement with social and political theory would increase the likelihood of fulfilling this high ambition of the discipline; it may even be a sine qua non for its success. Indirectly, such an involvement may at the same time contribute to the traditions of the discipline to engage in environmental issues from a policy perspective, the "legacy of 1972," if we might call it so. 39
      How and with what purpose we write environmental history is crucial, not just the mere fact that we write it. Put in other words it seems to us a matter of regaining an initiative that has perhaps become lost in translation between the plethora of micro histories of the environment that we have alluded to above and the policy relevance that was once claimed as a defining feature of the new discipline. Despite, or perhaps because of, the absence of historians, it seems as if the grand science-based meta-narratives fare better in this regard, providing scenarios on climate, natural resources, or demography. In contrast to these narratives, the middle range historical synthesis could provide insights that are better related to human agency and therefore to policy. In fact, in the works of Merchant, Crosby, Richard Drayton, and others, it is actions on the historical timescale such as the production of scientific knowledge, colonization, trade, and imperial agricultural improvement that provide the analytical focus and explain changes in human-environmental relationships.46 What these books describe is how parts of humanity in the early modern period were breaking out of their biological and geographical confines in Europe and used the rest of the world as the—extremely lively and interactive—stages for their expansionist efforts. 40
      Soon this was followed by further emancipation from material restrictions as agrarian and industrial production began to accelerate. By the beginning of the nineteenth century this expansion prompted Thomas Malthus to present his dismal analysis, but despite repeated later outbursts of neo-Malthusian pessimism, the dominant tendency has been to regard human expansion and economic growth as largely non-restricted by ecological and social limits.47 Although limits have become more accepted and pronounced in the last several decades (Club of Rome 1972, the Brundtland Commission Report to the UN 1987, the Rio summit 1992, the Kyoto Protocol 1998), mainstream economic thinking still regards technological progress, "ecological modernization," or a "decoupling" of economic growth from environmental impact, as the ways to confront the ecological costs of growth.48 41
      These attempts have fitted well with a general narrative of human progress, led by the West and by Western values. While there may still be reason to support policy initiatives based on the conventional techno-scientific approach to progress, there are also signs—beyond the theoretical arguments taken by Beck and Giddens—indicating that the world may not be headed in this benevolent direction. If we take longer time perspectives, or if we focus on other features of the past than humanity's progress, we might as well find a human history marked by crises, regime shifts, disasters, and constantly changing patterns of adjustment to limits and confines. Indeed, this now emerges as a new historical meta-narrative, linking humanity's creative past with its destructive consequences and nature-culture interplay. If previous humanistic meta-narratives have underscored the breaking out of confines, a new historical understanding needs to accommodate what we are learning about the complexity of human-nature relationships in different periods and in different parts of the world. 42
      In other words, as much as there are crucial shortcomings in previous attempts to synthesize human experience into functioning narratives, there are histories of interactive social-ecological systems and of sustainable governance of natural resources to be written. On a growing scale this is also indeed happening. Geographers and historians have increasingly focused on new dynamics of conservation and adaptation: on how to integrate more efficiently human presence and resource use with long-term preservation of diversity and (often contested) landscape values.49 43
      Given the track record of environmental history (in particular in North America), with it emphasis more on nature than on the environment, it may be instructive to take as an example a concrete policy area, that of spatial planning, which puts environment and equity into focus. It seems increasingly important to understand sustainable spatial planning as a co-production of cities and landscapes. The concept of "co-production," derived from the ecological sciences, explains relations between the two that are mutual, interactive, and never-ending. This has become a lasting policy-relevant feature of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (1991), which demonstrates how, through a wide range of infrastructures, policy decisions, and technological regimes, Chicago and the West developed in a lock-step fashion. The midwestern landscape "produced," literally, the city, and the city, with its increasing demand for resources and its vigorous trade and economy, equally produced the surrounding landscape. The result was a "remote landscape," a nature shaped by the metropolis, and vice-versa: nature's metropolis. However, only small portions of Chicago's resource flows came from beyond the region. Chicago's footprint on distant regions of the world was limited. 44
      Today, with growing volumes of flows, local, global, and regional, the interaction occurs over longer distances and with a spatial distribution that is more patchy, and possibly even more unjust, than before, and fundamentally difficult to control with conventional governance. What seems fully attainable, however, is an empirically based understanding of the interwoven character of cities and landscapes in flow-intensive economies operating simultaneously on a number of spatial levels, ranging from the local to the global, including a better understanding of how the resilience and vulnerability of this relationship has developed historically. 45
      If attention to socially relevant issues is a way to move environmental history into closer contact with social theory, it could also be worthwhile to consider the roles of knowledge and science in relation to environmental politics. In parallel with resource management regimes we could speak of "knowledge regimes." The concept not only signifies a certain continuity of knowledge interests and the way they are organized. It also implies that there is a built-in power dimension which is a central component of the modern knowledge project. As Sheila Jasanoff has repeatedly insisted, central concepts in democratic theory, such as citizenship and accountability, need to be analyzed in relation to the politics of science and technology. She has also noted how certain national styles of regulatory power have emerged in, for example, environmental politics.50 The political agenda of a particular country may be rooted in different scientifically informed models of thought, which is the result of recent work on the environmental politics of Norway, where a particular form of Social Democratic science-based instrumental rationality has prevailed.51 46
      While this particular knowledge regime is quite uniquely tied up with a benevolently nationalist post-Second World War Protestant Welfare State Scandinavian country, the observation as such is perhaps both general and illuminating. The case of modern Norway prompts us to note that environmental history demands attention both to democratic theory and science politics on the one hand, and to the historical study of nationalism, one of the mainstream fields of history. Around the world, environmental policy, perhaps more than any other kind of policy, has become science-based policy. It may even, in a practice-oriented and performative analysis, be stated that modern nature (or, dare we say, environment) is defined by environmental policy and differentiated via the categories created by the policy's own minimum requirements, emission goals, and sensitive areas. In this way, the technologies of environmental policy emanating from an active intercourse with the results and advocates of the natural sciences, created the nature/natural environment we had during the last decades of the twentieth century. Society's nature is a political product.52 47
      At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a pattern of far greater complexity and increased tension is in the process of being established. Scientific knowledge can no longer exclusively be used to support demands for the protection of individual species, regions or even entire ecosystems. While the application of Norwegian environmental policy showed that it functioned performatively and in practice formed the nature that had been its political object, it also showed how hard it is to translate scientific "facts" into politically realizable decisions.53 Environmental policy as an assumed value-free technology may never have existed, but it was certainly more valid a generation ago than it is today. It has become a project burdened with an increasing number of anomalies and problems of actualization. Research results in the sciences, in themselves often uncertain, must be combined with social research and inevitably be confronted with ethical questions and conflicts of interest. Rarely is a single scientific standpoint raised above every other opinion; when it is, it may be trivial. Even in those cases where the scientific front is more or less unbreached there is, as a rule, no consensus as to the measures to be taken. 48
      How do we understand knowledge regimes historically? And how do we connect the experiences of rich, environmentally and scientifically advanced Scandinavian nations, and other European democracies, with power dimensions that are global and bound up with modern Western science and its institutions? This is, we may note, how the concept was applied in the document prepared by the African nations for the international summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg in 2002: "The existing technologies and knowledge regimes must be changed."54 49
      Environmental history has already crossed many boundaries. Nonetheless, some of the most important ones are those that are quite nearby, unnecessarily dividing the discipline from theories and conceptual approaches that have enlightened the humanities and the social sciences. We should consider crossing them as well. In doing so we are perhaps most useful, both to our fellow historians and to our teammates in the sciences. 50


Sverker Sörlin works at the Office for History of Science and Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Paul Warde works at the Centre for History and Economics, University of Cambridge, UK.



NOTES

We would like to thank all those who have participated in the project, "The uses of environmental history," based at the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, University of Cambridge, where we have sounded out and developed many of the ideas contained in this article. Special thanks go to audiences for earlier versions of the arguments presented here in King's College, Cambridge, in February 2005; and at the Nordic Environmental History Conference, "Thinking Through the Environment," held at Turku, Finland, in September 2005.

1. Roderick Nash, "American Environmental History: A New Teaching Frontier," Pacific Historical Review 41 (1972): 362–77; Richard Grove has identified an earlier use in a course taught at Strawberry Hill College in London by Henry Bernstein in 1969. Richard Grove and Vinita Damodaran, "Imperialism and Environmental Change: Unearthing the Origins and Evolution of Environmental History from Edmond Halley to John Richards, 1676–2000," Unpublished paper, January 2006.

2. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).

3. Jane Carruthers, "Africa: Histories, Ecologies and Societies," Environment and History 10 (2004): 379.

4. Richard White, "American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field," Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985): 297–335; Richard White, "Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature," Pacific Historical Review 70 (2001): 103–11. Donald Worster, "Doing Environmental History," in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 289–307; Alfred Crosby, "The Past and Present of Environmental History," American Historical Review 100 (October, 1995): 1177–89; William Cronon, "The Uses of Environmental History," Environmental History Review 17 (Fall, 1993): 1–22; Donald Hughes, "Global Dimensions of Environmental History," Pacific Historical Review 70 (2001): 91–101.

5.Environment and History 10 (2004).

6. The observation on the lack of coherence of the field has also recently been made in Douglas R. Weiner, "A Death-defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Vision of Environmental History," Environmental History 10 (2004): 404–20.

7. Petra van Dam, "Euro-English and the Art of Environmental History," Environmental History 10 (2004): 103–05.

8. See T. C. Smout, Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

9. T. M. Devine, Scotland's Empire 1600–1815 (London: Penguin, 2003), 346–60.

10. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1990); Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage, 1998). Other important interventions in a rapidly expanding literature include Joel A. Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy, Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Joel A. Tarr and Christine Meisner Rosen, "The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History," Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 299–310; Martin Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform and the Environment, 1880–1980 (College Station and London: Texas A&M University Press, 1981); Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, eds., Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2005).

11. Georges Teyssot, ed., The American Lawn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press with the Canadian Center for Architecture, 1999); Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);and now Ted Steinberg, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006). See also Peter Coates, "Emerging from the Wilderness (or, from Redwoods to Bananas): Recent Environmental History in the United States and the Rest of the Americas," Environment and History 10 (2004): 413; Suburban development forms a component of the research project on waste at the AHRC Centre for Environmental History in St. Andrew's, Scotland.

12. Graeme Wynn and Matthew Evenden, "Fifty-four, Forty, or Fight?: Writing Within and Across Boundaries in North American Environmental History," Unpublished paper delivered at the conference "The Uses of Environmental History: Cross-Disciplinary Conversations," University of Cambridge, January 2006.

13. One noted a pattern at a recent environmental history conference in Cambridge of historical geographers beginning their presentations by stating that they were not environmental historians, before delivering magisterial papers on environmental history!

14. William Beinart and Peter Coates, Environment and History (London: Routledge, 1995); William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor, eds, Social History and African Environments (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); James C. McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa 1800–1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999); Megan Vaughan and Henrietta L. Moore, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in Northern Province, Zambia, 1890–1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann and James Currey, 1995); James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Reframing Deforestation: Global Analyses and Local Realities—Studies in West Africa (London: Routledge, 1998).

15. Published as William L. Thomas, ed., Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).

16. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

17. David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha, eds., Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Gregory A. Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Kevin Hannam, "Utilitarianism and the Identity of the Indian Forest Service," Environment and History 6 (2000).

18. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the "Improvement" of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

19. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 8, "Journeys to the Centre." Recent works include Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin, eds., A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2004); and Mandy Martin, Libby Robin and Mike Smith, Strata: Deserts Past, Present, and Future (Canberra, 2005).

20. See the brief overview of Canadian environmental history by Graeme Wynn included in his "'Should We Linger along Ambitionless?': Environmental Perspectives on British Columbia," BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly 142/143 (2004): 31–35. L. Anders Sandberg and Sverker Sörlin, eds., Sustainability—the Challenge: People, Power, and the Environment (Montreal, New York and London: Black Rose Books, 1998), contains a range of contributions on Canadian and Scandinavian environmental history, although only few of them comparative. Suzanne E. Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987).

21. Michael T. Bravo and Sverker Sörlin, eds., Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2002), e.g. Sörlin, "Rituals and Resources of Natural History: The North and the Arctic in Swedish Scientific Nationalism."

22. John McNeill, "Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History," History and Theory 42 (2003): 5–43.

23. Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth.

24. One could take examples such as the Christian Pfister (Zürich) "school" of Alpine climate history, medievalists such as Verena Viniwarter (Vienna) and Petra van Dam (Amsterdam), the cluster of historians of environmental politics in Scandinavia, Lars J. Lundgren (Stockholm), Erland Mårald (Umeå), Johan Hedrén (Linköping), Kristin Asdal (Oslo), resource-oriented economic historians such as Timo Myllyntaus (Turku), Magnus Lindmark (Bergen), Astrid Kander (Lund), Paul Warde (Cambridge), Poul Holm (Roskilde), or environmental science/historical geography approaches by Christer Nordlund (Umeå) and Michael Bravo (Cambridge). By and large all of these "clusters" —which of course have many more individual members than those here given—operate within their own cognitive and bibliographical spheres; insofar as they share references, these are perhaps more likely to be synthetical works of non-European origin (for this strand of environmental history writing, see below).

25. Sverker Sörlin, Naturkontraktet: Om naturumgängets idéhistoria [The Nature Contract: On the History of Environmental Ideas] (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1991); Sverker Sörlin with A. Öckerman, Jorden en ö: En global miljöhistoria [The Earth an Island: A Global Environmental History], (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1998, rev. ed. 2002); Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (München: Beck, 2002); Marco Armiero and Stefania Barca, Storia dell'ambiente (Rome: Carocci, 2004); Robert Delort and François Walter, Histoire de l'environnement européen (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001); Jan Luiten van Zanden and Wybren Verstegen, Groene geschiedenis van Nederland (Utrecht, 1993).

26. Influential exponents of such work are Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: Dent, 1986); A. T. Grove and Oliver Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001); and Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People (New York: George Braziller, 1995). Joseph Needham's seminal works on Chinese science and development, although very different in scope, came from a similar route; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954–1992).

27. David N. Livingstone, "The Spaces of Knowledge: Contributions towards a Historical Geography of Science", Society and Space 3 (1995); Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Charles W. J. Withers, Geography, Science, and National Identity: Scotland since 1520 (Cambridge and New York, 2001). Michael T. Bravo, "Geographies of Exploration and Improvement: William Scoresby and Arctic Whaling (1782–1822)," Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006).

28. Peter Bowler, The Fontana History of the Environmental Sciences (London: Fontana, 1992). On the concept of the "field", see Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, eds., Science in the Field, theme issue, Osiris 11 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); Michael T. Bravo and Sverker Sörlin, "Narrative and Practice: Introduction," in Narrating the Arctic, ed. Michael T. Bravo and Sverker Sörlin: 3–32; Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).

29. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

30. William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the bbbbsthetics of the Infinite (1959: reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957; English transl., London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 101.

31. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).

32. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Blackwell: Oxford, 2004), 450; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 57–58.

33. Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

34. Peter Burke, "Elective Affinities: Gilberto Freyre and the Nouvelle Histoire," The European Legacy 3 (1998): 1–10; Gilberto Freyre, Nordeste: Aspectos de influencia da anna sobre a vie e a paizageio de nordeste do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Olympio, 1937). Braudel's principles are laid out most famously in Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London: Collins, 1972); but perhaps most obviously in The Identity of France. Vol. 1. History and Environment (London: Collins, 1988).

35. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997); Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (London: Allen Lane, 2005); Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Daniel B. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1980); The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).

36. A recent (January 2006) plan, ambitious indeed, for an integrated human-global history by a large team of cooperating scientists in fact does not even identify historians as among the core competencies needed. The program, entitled "Developing an Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE)," states that the following three "constituent communities," with particular experience in data collecting, will cooperate: "1. Archeologists and anthropologists with the knowledge of what happened. 2. Geographers who manage analyzed data over various temporal and spatial scales 3. Earth System scientists who are interested in derived products that can be used as inputs to evaluate impacts on say, hydrologic processes, carbon cycle, etc." http://www.glp.colostate.edu/Rome/16.IHOPE_SCI_PLAN_v2_ojima.pdf, p. 11. See also R. Costanza, L. Graumlich, and W. Steffen, eds., Sustainability or Collapse? Integrated History and Future of People on Earth, Dahlem Workshop Report 96 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), a book in which there are contributions also by anthropologists and historians.

37. Robert Delort and Francois Walter, Histoire de l'environnement européen (Paris: Universitaires de France, 2001).

38. See, for example, the essays by Donald Worster, who has does done as much as anyone to promote the field of environmental history, in his The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

39. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).

40. Anthony Giddens, "Living in a Post-traditional Society," in Reflexive Modernisation: Politics, Tradition and bbbbsthetics in the Modern Social Order, ed. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 77.

41. For the early modern period, for example, see Keith Thomas on fears of bestiality in his Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983).

42. Lynn T. White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

43. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).

44. See T. C. Smout, Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), chap. 1.

45. Worster, The Wealth of Nature, 184–219.

46. Drayton, Nature's Government.

47. Björn-Ola Linnér, The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-war Population-Resource Crisis (Isle of Harris: White Horse Press, 2003).

48. Maarten A. Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). For a concrete attempt to provide policy advice along those lines, see Adam Tooze and Paul Warde, "A Long-run Historical Perspective on the Prospects for Uncoupling Economic Growth and CO2 Emissions," submission to the HM Treasury Stern Review, December 2005.

49. In a vast literature, see, for example, William M. Adams, Future Nature: A Vision for Conservation (London: Earthscan Publications, 1996), and Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation (London: Earthscan Publications, 2004); Sverker Sörlin, "On the Trading Zone between Articulation and Preservation: The Production of Meaning in Landscape History and the Problems of Heritage Decision-making," in Rational Decision-making in the Preservation of Cultural Property, Dahlem Workshop Report, ed. Norbert S. Baer and Folke Snickars (Berlin: Dahlem University Press, 2001), 47–59.

50. Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 1.

51. Rune Slagstad, "Shifting Knowledge Regimes: The Metamorphosis of Norwegian Reformism," Thesis Eleven 77(2004). Kristin Asdal, Politikkens teknologier: Produksjon av regjerlig natur [The technologies of politics: Production of governable nature], University of Oslo: Series of Dissertations Submitted to the Faculty of Arts 188 (Oslo, 2004).

52. Kristin Asdal, "The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist Challenge to Environmental History," History and Theory 42 (2003).

53. Asdal, Politikkens teknologier, 60–74.

54.Report on the African Civil Society Forum, Nairobi, Kenya on the 15th to 16th October 2001: An African Civil Society Position (2001) http://www.worldsummit2002.org/texts/AfricanCivilSocietyForumOct1516.rtf.

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