|
|
|
interview
donald worster
Donald Worster has been a powerful voice for environmental history within the United States and around the world for more than three decades. His scholarship, along with his many public talks and addresses, have alerted historians, scientists, policy makers, and environmental activists about the rich insights that our field offers to anyone concerned with the relationship of humans and nature. This interview explores the personal and intellectual sources of Worster's scholarship and thought, and his ideas about future directions of the field.
| Mark Harvey: Your scholarship and teaching in American western and Environmental history no doubt rise partly out of your own past. Tell us about your upbringing in the West and about how your roots shaped your early life. |
1
|
| Donald Worster: My parents were both Kansans; my father grew up not far from Lawrence, my mother in Reno County, which is in the middle of wheat country. They both left the state in the late 1930s because of economic problems and found work picking fruit. My father finally found a railroad job in Needles, California, which was a big center for transcontinental trains on their way to Los Angeles. That's where I was born, about a month before Pearl Harbor. My father joined the Marines, and I didn't see him for four years. During that absence my mother moved back to Kansas where her parents lived and tried to survive on her own. My maternal grandparents basically raised me. When my father came back, I didn't know who this scary man was, carrying a bayonet, flag, and other war souvenirs. |
2
|
|
My grandparents had a little farm near Hutchinson, Kansas, on Cow Creek, which flows into the Arkansas River. My grandfather was Ben Ball, and my grandmother was Maud Gamble Ball. She was part of a Scottish family that had settled in the western part of the county. Eventually she pulled our whole family into the Scottish Campbellite Church of Christ, the same church that John Muir and Dave Foreman grew up in. I went to school in Hutchinson, a city of 35,000, with a lot of going back and forth to the countryside. My paternal grandmother, LeFaun Starks, lived in the same town. We went to Colorado for summer vacations: to Gunnison, La Junta, and Rocky Mountain National Park. |
3
|
|
I went to the University of Kansas as an undergraduate, studying little and spending a lot of time in college debate, winning a couple of national championships. It was through the debate team that I met my wife, Beverly Marshall. After marriage, we moved to the University of Maine, where I was debate coach for two years. I thought Maine was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen, far more interesting to me than Colorado. But we left in 1966,when I was admitted into Yale's American Studies Program, opening another new world for me. |
4
|
| Harvey: So you did not have an undergraduate degree in history? |
5
|
| Worster: I have no degrees in history, but I took plenty of history courses, beginning at Kansas with Professor Clifford Griffin, an intellectual historian who drew me into the field. He was still on the faculty when I returned to KU in 1989 to take up my current position as Hall Professor of American History. At Yale, I took seminars with Sydney Ahlstrom and David Hall (in American intellectual history) and L. Franklin Baumer (European intellectual history). Yale was then a rich place for intellectual history—the dominant paradigm in both history and the American studies program. My other professors included Edmund Morgan, Howard Lamar, and C. Vann Woodward. |
6
|
|
Before entering grad school I had read Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (the most important early book in my scholarly life). In my application to Yale I wrote that I wanted to write books like this one. Smith was a historical-minded professor of English at Berkeley and a leader in American studies. Other important academic influences included Leo Marx, Roderick Nash, and Clarence Glacken. It was only later that I discovered Walter Prescott Webb and James Malin. To my regret, I never took a course with Malin at the University of Kansas; he seemed too remote and gruff to this shy undergraduate. |
7
|
|
But mainly, around the mid 1960s, I was reading books by Thoreau, Henry Beston, Rachel Carson, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Edward Abbey. The environmental movement was gathering momentum; the first Earth Day took place while I was a graduate student. By then I had already determined to bring my academic life and environmental concerns together—how I had not figured out. Other than the few books I've mentioned, there were no models. |
8
|
| Harvey: Were any of your mentors interested in nature or the environment? |
9
|
| Worster: None, really. Ahlstrom was mildly interested in the subject, but then he was interested in everything. Norman Holmes Pearson, professor of American literature, encouraged me. But I would say on the whole the Yale faculty had little interest in environmental issues or were not interested in nature as a theme in American history or literature. |
10
|
| Harvey: So you really found the subject yourself? |
11
|
| Worster: I found the subject myself. |
12
|
| Harvey: What role did you play in the founding of the American Society for Environmental History? |
13
|
| Worster: I did not play a major role in the founding of ASEH, except to encourage John Opie in that direction. It was his brainchild. We met at an American studies meeting in San Antonio, Texas, in October 1975; he asked me to go for a walk along the famous Riverwalk where he told me that he wanted to found a journal and society. Later we met with Susan Flader and others; Susan and I were both enthusiastic supporters. I gave John my conference paper on the Dust Bowl for his new journal, and it was published in volume one, summer 1977. |
14
|
|
Some years later I did step in to help rescue the society and journal from an early death. In late 1980 or early 1981 two officers of the society, Roderick French and Harold Burstyn, beseeched me to become president. They were desperate, and I consented. No elections were ever held; I was simply named by the board to a two-year term. The journal had nearly ceased to appear, and we needed to find a new editor. Fortunately that year I was at UC Berkeley on a Guggenheim, working on my book on water in the West. I discussed the journal with people at the UC Press and with James Shideler of UC Davis, editor of Agricultural History. The press was interested only in acquiring the name, Environmental Review, while Shideler and I talked about a merger of the two societies and journals (which never materialized). |
15
|
|
In January 1982 the first conference on environmental history was held, on the campus of UC, Irvine, a great shot in the arm for all of us. It was organized by Kendall Bailes. When he learned that there was already a society and that I was president, Ken called me and sought our blessing and cooperation. I helped him draw up the program that included luminaries like Clarence Glacken, Lynn White Jr., Sam Hays, and Rod Nash. |
16
|
|
In a hotel room at that conference we persuaded Don Hughes to take over the journal. It was a very generous move on his part for which we all should be grateful. He wrangled support from the University of Denver, and the journal got back on track. Eventually ASEH found a replacement for me, and I have been happy ever since to take a backseat. |
17
|
| Harvey: You have said in some of your articles and talks that environmental history was clearly inspired by the moral agenda of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In what ways were you aware of that relationship at the time and how exactly did it shape your thinking? |
18
|
| Worster: The ties between movements to reform society and movements to reenvision history are many and familiar. Think of the so-called Progressive historians, or "history from the bottom up," the new social history, women's history, the rise of African American history in the wake of the civil rights movement, and so forth. Environmental history is no different, except that it has had a more limited impact on the disciplinary mainstream, reflecting the fact that most historians remain rather indifferent to the global environmental crisis. I don't think this debt to political reform has tainted environmental history any more than other fields. It has not prevented the writing of books that have won major prizes offered by the profession——three Bancroft Prizes, for example. The argument that environmental history has not been "objective" enough can almost always be turned back on the critics. They object not to the fact that values inform the new field but rather that the values are not ones they hold. |
19
|
|
No one objects when a historian writes that slavery was horrible and needed to be abolished. They only object when someone says that what we have done to the earth is also horrible and should be stopped. |
20
|
|
We are obliged, nonetheless, to aim at "fairness" in our scholarship—not condemning people who cannot defend themselves or misrepresenting their positions. Above all we are obliged to try to explain what happened in the past and why, not simply advocate our personal views and politics. Others may not accept our explanations, but that is normal in historical writing. |
21
|
| Harvey: During the middle 1970s you were at work on Nature's Economy, a book which has gone into a second edition and is considered an important founding text of the field. What brought you to write this book? |
22
|
| Worster: Despite much professorial advice to the contrary, I decided to write a history of ecology for my own edification, which was completed and accepted in 1971. The topic was too broad in chronology and scope, ranging from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century in England and the U.S. The members of my committee—Larry Holmes in the history of science, Cynthia Russett, and Bruce Kuklik—all thought it was too ambitious, but they went along, probably because they didn't know much about the subject. The director of my dissertation, Sydney Ahlstrom, was mainly a historian of American churches, religion, and theology; he was a synthesizer on a grand scale so he didn't have any problems with my choice. Those mentors, by the way, were probably right that Nature's Economy was not the sort of book that a PhD student should undertake. Yet it got me started in the direction I wanted to go, and it is still in print, available now in seven or eight languages. |
23
|
| Harvey:Nature's Economy is in part a commentary on the role of science in environmental history. To what extent do environmental historians rely on science? How much should we infuse science into our work? And how much do we recognize your point that "science is always, in some measure, involved in matters of value and moral perception"? (p. xii) |
24
|
| Worster: When I was writing Nature's Economy, books like Marx's The Machine and the Garden and Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind had recently come out. Science plays almost no role in them. Their sources for ideas about wilderness, nature, or the land were literature or popular culture. I didn't think you could simply talk about Melville's Moby Dick or the periodical press as framing our concept of the natural world and leave out the powerful influence of the sciences. |
25
|
|
In some ways I suppose I anticipated the postmodern critique, which has been primarily an effort to challenge the authority of science and the scientific method. It started with literary critics in France and the United States who felt marginalized in the universities and intellectual life; in reaction, they tried to pull science down from its pedestal and to choke off the influence of science in the social sciences and humanities. Postmodernism in the U.S. got mixed up with multiculturalism, leaving us with the notion that all knowledge and perceptions are equal and that natural science is controlled by white males who want to impose on everyone else their truth and narrative. Nature's Economy anticipated some of that critique. It is a book that deconstructs science to some extent. But I restricted my criticism within certain bounds—not dismissing science but arguing that science is part of culture and shares ideas and values of its time. Since I wrote, postmodernism has sought to deconstruct everything; in the end it has left us in a moral and political cul de sac. |
26
|
|
The scientific community works hard to get a reliable, accurate picture of nature, and they have a good system for correcting their errors or biases. It's not perfect by any means, but the knowledge we get about the natural world from science is far superior to that of a witch doctor or religious fundamentalist. Now I am showing my disgust at the antievolutionist campaign in this country and in the state where I live. But if you follow postmodernism far enough, what's wrong with the concept of Creationism? Why isn't it just as good as Darwin's evolution theory? I think that's where postmodernism leads—to the conclusion that all ideas are equally good and that science offers no better method for arriving at truth and has no special claim to respect. I may disagree with all the money we put into the sciences, but I don't think we should let envy blind us to the extraordinary advancements that the natural sciences have made. The knowledge we have of ecosystems and ecology, for example, is profoundly important for understanding how the world works. |
27
|
|
A central goal of the field of environmental history should be to learn more about the environmental sciences and to apply that knowledge to the study of the past. Historians will always want to subject science to scrutiny, to see it as a product of society, but scientific knowledge is invaluable for understanding our changing relations to nature. |
28
|
| Harvey: Two of the biggest changes in environmental history within the last ten or fifteen years are the internationalization of the field and the cultural turn toward race, class, and gender. How do you see each of these signal shifts in the field? Do they each hold equal promise for furthering the scholarship of the field? |
29
|
| Worster: Since my luncheon address at the UC Irvine conference in 1982, I have been calling for a more transnational or international environmental history. In pursuit of that goal I have lectured on every continent. Many of my graduate or postdoctoral students have come from abroad, including Finland, Canada, Costa Rica, China, and the Czech Republic. |
30
|
|
As for "the cultural turn toward race, class, and gender," environmental history has always been strongly oriented toward cultural analysis—perhaps too strongly, neglecting the analytical aid of the natural sciences. What is new in the field is not "a cultural turn" but "a multicultural turn." So far environmental history has been enriched by multiculturalism; we have learned to pay attention to the groups in which people align themselves, alignments that may be important for environmental thought and change. |
31
|
|
The danger in multiculturalism is that it can distort the past, confusing a claim to moral legitimacy with a claim to having shaped this or that change. It can also direct our attention away from pervasive economic or natural forces that function without much regard for race or gender. If we end up writing merely a multicultural history of attitudes toward nature, we will have created nothing really distinctive. It will lie there alongside the cultural history of sex, religion, advertising, or movies, lost in the pack. Environmental history has always been a part of cultural history, but it has also aimed to be more than that: to understand the material world of nature and of nature altered by technology. Environmental history should focus not only on the cultural history of nature but also on the interaction of culture and nature, where the landscape of economic production becomes the middle ground. |
32
|
|
In early June I attended the European Society for Environmental History's meeting in Amsterdam. The papers being published in their journal, Environment and History, are often rather scientific; there's less emphasis on tracing the idea of nature. They're rightly concerned about material changes in landscape, soils, fisheries, and wetlands. We in the U.S. are still very wrapped up in the culture and politics of conservation. The subject of nature and its protection has long grabbed the American imagination. Europeans are less interested in such history. |
33
|
|
To be sure, many Europeans are becoming interested in wildness and are writing about the re-wilding of their landscape as agricultural land use and population decline. My colleagues abroad tell me about a shift going on from formal, managed landscape ideals in Germany or the Netherlands. So I don't think there is an absolute distinction, but only that the Europeans have given more attention to land-use change, climate change, changes in the material environment. That dimension of environmental history we need to promote in the U.S. |
34
|
| Harvey: Near the end of Nature's Economy you argue that science was the major force of change in the natural world, but by the mid-1980s you asserted that capitalism was. Did you make a transition from seeing science to seeing capitalism as the major force of environmental change? |
35
|
| Worster: I suppose you could say that, but I've always believed that there are two major revolutions on which the modern world rests—the scientific revolution and the capitalist revolution—and they have an interesting relationship. When it comes to thinking about nature—defining what nature is or how it works—you have to look to the natural sciences. The role of capitalism has not been to describe nature so much as to tell us how to use nature, how to value it, how to change it. So I think its not inconsistent to work both sides of the modern street. |
36
|
| Harvey: Was there a point in your career when you began to focus on capitalism as a major or the major force of change in global or American environmental history? What triggered this theme in your work? |
37
|
| Worster: The main trigger was trying to understand the development of agriculture on the Great Plains. My account of the Dust Bowl in Nature's Economy does not say much about capitalism; I was focused more on the sciences. But when I tried to understand why the Dust Bowl occurred, without any preconceptions, I arrived at the influence of capitalism. As I started reading the literature of the 1930s, the significance of capitalism kept coming to the fore, including people in small-town newspapers defending capitalism. I began to see that powerful economic culture, influencing politics and newspapers as well as farming on the Plains. It was close to being the religion of the region. |
38
|
|
I started reading Karl Marx, R. H. Tawney, Robert Heilbroner, and Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Rinehart, 1944), a very important book in my thinking. And of course I read Max Weber. If I had had more time, I would have tried to develop a more elaborate theoretical analysis. But I needed to get the story written. I introduced the phrase "economic culture" because I was still thinking in terms of ideas and culture, rather than systems of labor. Few historians then seemed to pay any attention to economic culture; they talked about political or literary or religious culture, but not about economic culture—the structure of values, beliefs, and logic that have had so powerful an impact on the earth. |
39
|
| Harvey: Perhaps the biggest critique of your focus on capitalism is that the concept is a black hole that draws all historical forces into it and ultimately does not explain the nuances or local factors in history. Do you agree with those critics? |
40
|
| Worster: Of courses, capitalism has had different interactions with different places. That's why when you look at the arid West it's not quite simply a story of pure, unmediated capitalism. Capitalism is an evolving set of ideas, practices, and technologies; nature has had some influence in shaping it. But if you look only at the local, you don't see the larger system of thought and institutions. That's what I was trying to do—help people see the larger system. I didn't do that as thoroughly as Bill Cronon has in Nature's Metropolis (W.W. Norton, 1991). His great book is about capitalist logic remaking nature and the landscape, creating a highly unified system of production. Like me, he was looking for system. But no system is exclusive or monolithic or covers everything. I would never claim that everything in modern history can be explained by capitalism. But what we have done too often is to ignore political economy, the large-scale configuration of power. |
41
|
|
How can we understand the process of land and resource commodification, the invention and proliferation of new technologies, the application of science to our lives, the endless quest for economic growth, the role of the state as a facilitator, or the processes of globalization without acknowledging the importance of capitalism? The historian may choose to regard the capitalist revolution as one of the most beneficial, progressive developments in history, but she or he has to acknowledge that the capitalist revolution happened, that it was important, and that we are still living with the consequences and ramifications. Silence or evasion will no longer be permitted. |
42
|
| Harvey: Perhaps historians have misread some of your work because of your prose style, which is sweeping and compelling in its generalizations. Wallace Stegner once called you a "passionate" historian. |
43
|
| Worster: I hope my language does not obscure the analysis I'm making. Too often most of us—myself included—read other people's books hastily, passing over nuances. When we put the book down and go away for a week, what we remember are only a few sentences. I'm always surprised when I go back and reread other historians and discover how subtle their language may have been. I hope my language, in addition to being passionate if you like, is subtle enough to allow for nuance. |
44
|
| Harvey: What inspired or motivated you to write Dust Bowl? How long did it take you to write it and did you have any inkling at the time that you were writing a book that would define this newly emerging field? |
45
|
| Worster: Although I was born in the Mohave Desert, I grew up on the Great Plains and have spent nearly forty years altogether in this region. My ancestors were immigrant farmers here. I still think that the natural world of the Great Plains is one of the world's most beautiful. I cannot say the same for the man-made environment here—the towns and industrial farms are often plug-ugly—but I feel a deep tie of belonging even to that ugliness. As Wallace Stegner wrote, "I may not know who I am, but I know where I'm from." Growing up on the Great Plains gave me, as it gave Malin and Webb, a sense of the power of the natural world, the ephemerality of human achievements, the limits that nature imposes on our ambitions. It is, as you know, a vast boneyard of failed settlements, native and European. |
46
|
|
In 1974 I was picked to be in the first class of Mellon Fellows at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. Traveling across the plains that spring I saw evidence of severe wind erosion, which I had paid no attention to for twenty years, indeed since the time when I was a kid caught in a Kansas dust storm. My summer in Aspen was devoted to world food problems, including the threat of desertification, and I began to make connections with my family's past. Hence I added a section on the Dust Bowl to Nature's Economy, exploring the connections between the science of ecology and environmental issues on the Plains. Within a year I had decided to do a short book on the Dust Bowl and signed a contract with Oxford University Press. I got a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, allowing a twelve-month leave of absence from the University of Hawaii, to do the book. That's all the time I had to give it—research and writing combined. |
47
|
|
Of course it would have been a better book had I devoted a few more years to the project. But my situation did not allow that. I was aware then, and have become more aware with time, how much more I could have done with the ecology of agriculture and with the economic culture that preceded the dirty thirties. Nothing, however, has altered my view of why the Dust Bowl happened when and as it did. To some extent I am an environmental determinist, or at least I allow nature some agency in history, but we cannot dismiss the Dust Bowl as a purely "natural" phenomenon. |
48
|
| Harvey: Various critics of Dust Bowl have charged that your focus on capitalism as a major cause of the calamity was ahistorical since many plains farmers in the 1920s and 1930s were simply ignorant of soil conservation methods and of the damaging effects of the Great Plow-Up on the fragile ecology of the plains. How do you respond to this view? Has the reception of Dust Bowl and the ensuing debates led you to change your mind in any way? |
49
|
| Worster: Ahistorical? Only if it makes no sense to describe twentieth-century American agriculture as capitalistic. I don't really understand the critics you mention. Are they saying that farming had not become capitalistic by the 1920s? That farmers were pre-capitalistic or that it was merely ignorance that caused the Dust Bowl? Well, there was plenty of ignorance. But there were also informed, experienced observers around who thought it was a mistake to plow up so much of the Great Plains; they were not heeded. Why? Waving a hand at "ignorance" is simply a way of avoiding any deeper, more systematic analysis of the political economy that plains farmers were part of, or the history of attitudes and practices out of which they came. |
50
|
|
Ted Steinberg, in Acts of God, has effectively shown how this pattern of avoidance thinking shows up again and again in American history. It is natural, I suppose, to want to avoid responsibility for big messes, but the recent Katrina episode and so many other disasters are now firmly established as the joint product of nature and culture. So I believed in writing the book, and so I still believe. |
51
|
| Harvey: But what about more recent criticisms and arguments, such as Geoffrey Cunfer's book, On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment (Texas AM, 2005). |
52
|
| Worster: Geoff Cunfer is a fine historian, and I have learned much from his research. No one has ever questioned that there were dust storms and soil erosion on the great plains; James Malin thumped on this point in the 1940s, but then even Malin admitted that the "dirty thirties" was special, an aberration in scale. When he tried to explain that aberration, he introduced the argument that Geoff also uses, that this was a pioneering culture that didn't yet understand the land. But this is trying to have it both ways—explaining the Dust Bowl as simply nature's work and then allowing it was due to culture—that is, a "pioneer" culture that didn't know the place very well. Supposedly, we learned, and now we'll never do that again. |
53
|
|
But the fundamental point that Cunfer and Malin cannot deny is that soils erode when soils are bare. Nature makes bare soils—nobody disputes that—but man also makes bare soils. Geoff argues that most of the Great Plains still remain in some kind of grass. But a third does not, and that's millions of acres. |
54
|
|
What I have learned from Wes Jackson and the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, is the remarkable soil holding capacity of native grasses. The Land Institute has been growing these native grasses in plastic tubes, then pulling the tube away and letting you see the massive root structure. It's like an iceberg. What's above the ground is nothing; under the surface grows an enormous root structure. You put a wheat plant's roots up against those grasses and it looks puny because almost all its growth goes into the stem and seed. That's the way it is with annuals; there's not much underground to bind the soil, and when you have a drought those nonnative plants die, whereas native grasses hold on. Eventually they too may die, but they hold on and keep their root structure intact. So you can't get around the fundamental ecological fact that native plants have evolved root structures to capture every drop of moisture, hold the soil in place, and create a buffer between us humans and the physical elements. If you destroy that ecosystem on millions of acres of land and leave bare soil or soils planted to wheat, you're going to have erosion. I don't see how you can get around that. What kills native grasses enhances the capacity for erosion. |
55
|
|
Undoubtedly I could have underlined more firmly than I did the role that climate (i.e. drought) played in making the Dust Bowl. But that explanation was so entrenched and unquestioned that I felt I needed to make a very emphatic statement in opposition. Even now many historians and scientists simply refuse or don't know how to think about the role of culture and economics in creating disasters. Either they are not trained to make that sort of analysis, or they are not allowed by their biases to entertain such explanations. |
56
|
| Harvey: You teach both agricultural and environmental history and have been doing both for much of your career. There has always been an odd and somewhat strained relationship between agricultural history and environmental history. Some agricultural historians would say this is because environmental historians have a powerful moral agenda or sense of advocacy in their work that they do not share. How can environmental historians work to overcome this image of their field? |
57
|
| Worster: My sense is that agricultural history was founded by men (mostly) who grew up on farms or in rural communities, did not want to farm themselves, but went away to university jobs with a certain nostalgia and defensiveness about their past. By the 1970s and 1980s they were retiring, and no one was taking their place. Agricultural history was almost dead in the universities. Then we invented environmental history, which covered some of the same ground but from a different perspective. Older agricultural historians resented this challenge and accused environmental historians of having "a moral agenda," as though they did not. |
58
|
|
I was once rather disillusioned with agricultural history—even though I thought it was a very important subject in world and U.S. history—because so much of it was narrowly conceived. The field never came to terms with agriculture as it impacted the land or interacted with all the complexities of nature. Mainly agricultural history was, for a long while, a kind of economic history, a history of the business of food production. We needed to bring ecology into the subject. On the other hand, I can't see how issues of food, farming, soils, or use of lands and resources can be kept out of environmental history. They should be at the very center. So I see environmental history as basically incorporating agricultural history and trying to put it into a larger framework. |
59
|
|
These days a new group of agricultural historians have appeared on the scene, and the "strain" you mention is disappearing. Scholars like Deborah Fitzgerald and Shane Hamilton are bringing new life to the study of agriculture. They are less likely to see (and celebrate) their subject as a subcategory of business history. They are coming to environmental history meetings, and we are seeing some fresh cross-fertilization going on, as in the fine work of Geoff Cunfer, Brian Donahue, Sarah Gregg, Mark Fiege, Steve Stoll, Jack Kirby, Lynn Nelson, Jr., and Jim and Bonnie Sherow. |
60
|
| Harvey: Like Dust Bowl, Rivers of Empire featured the role of capitalism and concentrated economic and political power in shaping waterways. How and why did you decide to write Rivers of Empire? |
61
|
| Worster: It was my plan at one time (later abandoned) to follow the Dust Bowl refugees to California and write about the landscape they encountered there. I applied for a Guggenheim to write on "the history of industrial agriculture in California." After that, I thought I might write a book on the environmental history of Los Angeles. Two things changed my plan: No one offered me a university position in California, which would have helped the logistics of the plan; and the flow of water in California and the West captured my imagination and narrowed, or altered, my focus. Having been born on the banks of the Colorado River, I guess I was destined to write about the great river of the West and its uses and abuses. |
62
|
|
Did I really feature the role of capitalism? Actually, I wanted to explore how forces other than private capital influenced the use of water. It seemed important to understand how capitalism alone has not been responsible for the modern environmental crisis, that state planners also have contributed, in part on their own and in part through collaboration with capital, an argument that James Scott has also developed in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998). I came to see that when the state gets involved in "economic development," the results can be just as bad or worse than private developers. The state loses its capacity to serve as a counterweight to the market economy, to promote social justice and environmental protection. |
63
|
| Harvey: Critics of this book claimed that you overstated the role of centralized forces (government, capitalism) in modern water politics and policy making, and that water politics is far more often affected by fragmented interests and conflict. Others remarked that Rivers of Empire is heavily weighted toward California's waterscape, and that California is vastly different from say, Wyoming or Colorado. As with Dust Bowl, critics of Rivers of Empire seemed to say that there are just too many exceptions and nuances in western water history to allow your critical interpretation of capitalism to stand up. |
64
|
| Worster: Historians seem to have trouble with any large explanation, or perhaps any explanation at all, for why things happen the way they do. They nibble and chew on any general observation, repeating the old truism that things are "more complicated" than anyone else has supposed. That's what goes for sophisticated analysis in many circles. Of course, Wyoming is not exactly like California—Wyoming is not even like Wyoming. But it is absurd to argue that the differences are huge. I am reminded of the historian I once heard describing the significance of a cultural gap separating Unitarian Boston from Congregationalist New Haven. Talk about hair splitting! Like Protestantism in New England, the history of water development shows major continuities across the entire arid West. Capital markets, food processors, federal land and water agencies all enforce that sameness. |
65
|
|
It would be nice to think that local communities anywhere in America have much power over their lives or resources or even ways of thinking. The fact that they do not does not mean that everything is planned in Washington or on Wall Street. There are a few ways in which local communities now and then assert themselves against centralizing forces. But in doing so they generate demands for more control and planning in the name of efficiency or rationality or public interest. |
66
|
|
The late Robert Kelley, an ardent follower of Herbert Croly's Hamiltonian ideal of a "new republic" and an ardent critic of Thomas Jefferson, convinced some western water historians that what was needed in the West was more state and federal authority, not less. I respectfully disagree. |
67
|
| Harvey: Earlier in your career you said that biography was not an especially revealing method of scholarship. That view seemed compatible with the body of your work centering on overriding economic forces in history. Then, in 2001 you published a major biography of John Wesley Powell and you are now on the verge of publishing a new book on John Muir. How and why did you change your mind about biography? Did this shift to writing biography in any way reflect misgivings about your earlier concentration on big forces? |
68
|
| Worster: I think you must be referring to a comment I made at a Western History Association meeting. What I said has been misquoted or misunderstood. Somebody from the audience asked why these "new western historians" don't ever write biography. My response was that there is a difference between biography and history. Some people understood me as saying that biography is not important, when I was only pointing to a distinction. These are different genres, requiring rather different perspectives, different methods of research to some extent. I've long admired many biographers. |
69
|
|
The field of environmental history can use a few more biographies. We need to be aware of the complex lives and thoughts of the founding figures of environmentalism. This country has a great tradition of writing about the land and nature. It's one of our most distinctive characteristics as a people. And the stars in that tradition were interesting people that we need to understand. So I make no apologies for writing biography myself. I do think that biography is not a good thing to try to write when you are a newly minted PhD student in your 20s or early 30s. You should have more life experience before you write biography. If you are writing about someone who has been a father or a mother and you've never been one yourself or never had to deal with raising children, how much are you going to get of that person's life? I'm 65, a perfect age for writing about old people. (Laughs). Thinking about big-scale geological and political economic forces in history is a wonderful, heady adventure for energetic young scholars. I recommend it as a way to expand the imagination. But focusing on individual lives can be a good thing for older scholars, who have been through a lot of experiences and want to reflect on the strange, unpredictable turns that life can take. |
70
|
| Harvey: What drew you to Powell and Muir? |
71
|
| Worster: I first thought about doing a book on Powell in graduate school days but shifted instead to a history of ecology. Muir has appealed to me as a subject ever since his papers were opened up and made available in microform. Those two individuals were founding figures of modern environmentalism. We needed to understand them better, to appreciate how rich and diverse our tradition of thinking about nature has been. |
72
|
| Harvey: It might be interesting for readers to get a preview of your forthcoming book on John Muir. The woods are full of biographies of Muir, so what will be different about yours? |
73
|
| Worster: The overall outline of his life is familiar, but there are lots of bits and pieces that haven't been examined closely. The only other person I know who has done a detailed, thorough reading of Muir's vast correspondence is Steven Holmes, author of The Young John Muir (Wisconsin, 1999). Muir's papers were not easily accessible for earlier writers, so they tended to rely heavily on his published writings. Additionally, as a historian I may bring a different perspective than the literary scholars who have written so much about Muir. |
74
|
|
I may be the only American biographer who has been to Dunbar at least twice, done archival research in Scotland, and made use of people who are working on Muir in his home country. I've been to his Civil War hideout in Ontario, up the Big Head River to the site where he worked on a mill. In fact, I've been to almost all the Muir places, including the North Island of New Zealand and Mt. Cook, the place where he stopped in Perth, Australia, where I saw the same tree species he looked at; Cedar Key in Florida; the Bonaventure cemetery in Savannah, Georgia; what's left of the Muir Glacier in Alaska. It gives you a better perspective when you go and experience what he experienced. Also, there is more secondary literature now to incorporate than when earlier biographers worked—the literature of America's Gilded Age and Progressive Era. |
75
|
|
A theme that has emerged in my thinking about Muir is the debt he owes not only to New England Transcendentalists but to writers like Wordsworth, Milton, and Robert Burns–particularly to ideas that came out the French Revolution and the rise of liberal democracy. I will argue that Muir's passion for nature and wild places, his belief in the rights of other creatures, derived not only from Protestantism but also from the late eighteenth-century revolutionary spirit. I believe that Muir's trail was the trail of liberal democracy and that at the end of that trail stands our relationship to nature. |
76
|
| Harvey: What is the value of environmental history in today's world? |
77
|
| Worster: It has different values for different people. The public is very interested in the relationships we've had with the natural world over time. Witness the popular success of Jared Diamond's work or Tim Egan's The Worst Hard Time (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert (Viking, 1986). The public wants to know how we got to where we are today. Unfortunately, they often don't want a very deep, probing analysis. Journalists have asked me for a reading list in environmental history to help them understand the issues they are dealing with. Policy makers have done the same now and then. I understand that former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt found my book Under Western Skies useful. We historians don't provide remedies or solutions, but we do offer analyses that allow a better, fuller understanding. |
78
|
|
The environmental movement also needs our field; if it's ignorant of where it came from it can be too simplistic about where it's going. People in the environmental movement need to know who Howard Zahniser was and how this man, who was quiet, mild, not a heroic rock climber, achieved something. That's inspirational. But we don't just turn Rachel Carson or John Muir or Aldo Leopold into a saint; we try to understand what they saw or didn't see, and that can help the environmental movement become more sophisticated and thoughtful. One of the biggest criticisms you can make about the movement today is that it doesn't think hard or deep enough about a lot of issues. Eric Freyfogle has made this argument in a recent book (Why Conservation Is Failing and How It Can Regain Ground (Yale, 2006). He provides a long list of books, some of them environmental histories, that conservation leaders ought to read. Gus Speth, in Red Sky At Morning (Yale, 2004) says that we need to understand the cultural forces behind environmental problems; it's not enough just to try to understand what are the best scientific solutions. I read this as an invitation to historians to step forward to help probe those cultural drives and influences. |
79
|
|
Most people have no idea of what the environment looked like fifty, one hundred, or two hundred years ago. They often have no understanding of what good, healthy land looks like because they've never seen it. They have no idea of how dynamic and changing our relationship with the earth is. |
80
|
|
But don't forget that our first mission is also to help other historians get outside their narrow framework. If we could just make most historians aware that our concept of history has been too narrow, we would have achieved something important. |
81
|
| Harvey: Have we made progress on that front? |
82
|
| Worster: Not enough. Environmental history has grown up rather quickly and won a place for itself in and outside of departments of history, but it's still a place relegated to the margins. To be sure, a lot of other fields have likewise been relegated to the margins: the history of science and technology, agricultural history, economic history. All of these fields have been pushed aside to make room for one kind of history and one only—the socio-cultural history of race, class, and gender. There was little attention to those themes when I was in graduate school. They have exploded over the past thirty years, often showing intolerance toward other themes or concerns. |
83
|
|
Environmental history has made good progress in many of our public universities, but we have not done so in many of our elite institutions. How many people are there teaching women's history? You can argue that there aren't enough, but in comparison to environmental history they look numerous. Environmental history is surely as relevant to people as any thing else that we can talk about. |
84
|
|
When I set out to become an environmental historian, my goal was a paradigm shift that would put the natural world into all of our history textbooks, that would challenge the narrowness of our historical interpretations. That has still not happened, although events in the world are continuing to push history departments in that direction. We are seeing more and more historians who may not think of themselves primarily as environmental historians but who have written excellent books from that perspective: for example, Michael Bess's The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000 (Chicago, 2003) or David Blackbourn's The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (W.W. Norton, 2006), or my colleague Bill Tsutsui's forthcoming environmental history of Japan in World War II. Give us another thirty years and we will teach all our colleagues how to say "environment," "nature," "ecology," and "evolution."
MARK HARVEY
Lawrence, Kansas, July 29, 2007
|
85
|
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DONALD WORSTER
BOOKS
|
| A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).The Inhabited Prairie (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).Bust to Boom: Documentary Photographs of Kansas, 1936–1949 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996). (Edited by Constance B. Schulz).An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
|
EDITED WORKS
|
| The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).American Environmentalism: The Formative Period, 1860–1915 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973).
|
SELECTED ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
|
| "Epilogue: Nature, Liberty, and Equality," in American Wilderness: A New History, ed. Michael Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 263–72."Why We Need Environmental History," in Views from the South: Environmental Stories From the Mediterranean World, 19th-20th Centuries, ed. Marco Armiero (Naples: Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche, 2006), 11–21."A Long, Cold View of History," American Scholar 74 (Spring 2005): 57–66."John Muir and the Modern Passion for Nature," Environmental History 10 (January 2005): 8–19.Wild, Tame, and Free: Comparing Canadian and American Views of Nature," in Parallel Destinies: Canadians, Americans, and the Western Border, ed. John M. Findlay and Ken Coates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 246–73."The Grand Canyon," in American Places: Encounters With History, ed. William E. Leuchtenburg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 353–63."Environmental History: Leopold and the Changing Landscape of History," in The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries, ed. Curt Meine and Richard L. Knight (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 237–54."Fear and Redemption in the Environmental Movement," in Ideas, Ideologies, and Social Movements: The United States Experience Since 1800, ed. Peter Coclanis and Stuart Bruchey (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 158–72."Climate and History: Lessons from the Great Plains," in Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment, ed. Jill Kerr Conway, Kenneth Keniston, and Leo Marx (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 51–77."Two Faces West: The Myth of Development in Western North America," in Terra Pacifica, ed. Paul Hirt (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1998), 71–91."Nature and the Disorder of History," in Reinventing Nature: Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease (Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1995), 65–85."Beyond the Agrarian Myth," in Trails: Toward A New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 3–25."The Kingdom, the Power, and the Water," in Great Basin Kingdom Revisited: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Thomas G. Alexander (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1991), 21–38."The Ecology of Order and Chaos," Environmental History Review 14 (Spring/ Summer 1990): 1–18."Transformations of the Earth: Toward An Agroecological Perspective in History," Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1087–1106."The Vulnerable Earth: Toward A Planetary History," Environmental Review 11 (Summer 1987): 87–103."New West, True West: Interpreting the Region's History," Western Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987): 141–56."The Dirty Thirties: A Study in Plains Ecology and Agricultural Capitalism," Great Plains Quarterly 6 (Spring 1986): 107–16."History As Natural History: An Essay on Theory and Method," Pacific Historical Review 53 (February 1984): 1–19."Hydraulic Society in California: An Ecological Interpretation," Agricultural History 56 (July 1982): 503–15."World Without Borders: The Internationalizing of Environmental History," Environmental Review 6 (Fall 1982): 8–13."Grass to Dust: Ecology and the Great Plains in the 1930s," Environmental Review 1 (Summer 1977): 2–11.
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|