from the editor

I HOPE THAT our new look has made you smile with pleasure. The redesign took three months. Steve Anderson worked with me at every stage of the redesign process, and I very much appreciate Steve's efforts. When we first met with Don Mikush and John Long of MCreative, a Winston-Salem design firm, we already had decided that we wanted to change the journal's cover. Because environmental history is a graphics-rich subject, we were keen to have a design that made space for a cover photograph, cartoon, painting, or botanical illustration. We also wanted the new cover to make more of a statement the journal offers exciting and fresh insights into history, insights that flow from our appreciation of nature. Though we started out focused mostly on the cover, we also hoped that the redesign would give greater prominence to each of the journal's sections. Designer Catherine Clegg found ways to achieve all of our goals and more. Steve and I both are grateful to everyone on the MCreative team.       Our first cover image comes from the wonderful collection of photographs at the Forest History Society. Two men one white, one apparently black are in a stand of giant cypress in Arkansas. What do the trees mean to them? What is their relationship to each other, and to the photographer? The photograph is a fascinating historical artifact. Thanks to an ongoing digitization project, thousands of images from the Forest History Society collection now are accessible on the internet by clicking special projects on the society s website: http:// www.lib.duke.edu/forest.       With this issue, I am pleased to introduce Kathryn Morse as the journal's first graphics editor. Kathy earned her B.A. in history at Yale, served as the editorial fellow for the Western Historical Quarterly while doing her master's work at Utah State, and then earned her Ph.D. at Washington under the direction of Richard White. She has drawn extensively on photographic collections in her research on the Klondike Gold Rush. She makes creative use of images in her courses at Middlebury College. As graphics editor, Kathy will choose the cover images and oversee a new section, Gallery, which will debut later this year.. She also will work to increase the number of illustrations accompanying our articles. I am excited about the opportunity to work with her.

IF WE ARE to develop a true environmental ethic, a growing number of scholars argue, we need to have new stories about our place in nature. We also need to understand more fully the stories people have told in the past about their relationship to the land. In the lead article in this issue, David Nye considers a powerful set of narratives about the destiny of the United States. As a historian of technology, Nye is struck by the central role in those narratives of nature-conquering technologies. His essay gives a fresh perspective on several familiar topics in American environmental history.       Linda Nash's article joins environmental history and the history of medicine to provide rich insight into the settlement of the American West. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many doctors and settlers thought that the nature of the landscape shaped human health. They believed that people could make the land healthier. But they also believed that development could change the land in ways that undermined the well-being of families and communities. In Nash's view, the efforts of doctors and settlers to come to terms with the medical topography of California suggest that the process of settlement was not simply a matter of subjugating the land.       As Jack Davis shows, the remarkably long career of Marjory Stoneman Douglas reveals much about the evolution of environmentalism in the twentieth century. In the 1920s, as a journalist in Miami, Douglas supported a host of progressive causes, including improved sanitation in cities, child-welfare laws, and equal rights for women. She then became interested in wildlife conservation. She won national renown with the publication of a classic history of the Everglades in 1948. Two decades later, she helped to found the grassroots organization Friends of the Everglades, and she continued to lobby on environmental issues until her death in 1998.       Andrew Mathews offers a provocative case study of the struggle between state officials and community members over forests in the Sierra Juarez of Mexico. The forest bureaucracy used a discourse of environmental degradation to argue for government control, but residents of the region selectively appropriated that discourse to challenge the state's claims. In both cases, the environmental-degradation discourse obscured critical aspects of the region's forest history. To reach that conclusion, Mathews combined oral history, documentary research, and ecological fieldwork.       This issue also includes a new section, Reflections, which will appear periodically. One of my goals as editor is to publish more essays that reflect on broad issues in the field. I am particularly interested in reflections that draw on personal experience. Paul Sutter's essay is a brilliant exploration of the ways that grappling with the environmental history of South Asia and Africa can change the questions we ask about the environmental history of the United States. ADAM ROME

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