Reflections: What Can U.S. Environmental Historians Learn from Non-U.S. Environmental Historiography?

Paul Sutter

I AM AN environmental historian of the United States by training and practice, but, for several reasons, I have been traveling among other environmental historiographies in recent years. In completing a book on the interwar origins of modern wilderness advocacy in the United States, I had to contend with a growing literature that is quite critical of exporting wilderness as a preservationist ideal.1 I also had the opportunity several years ago to teach a graduate course on world environmental history. The idea, initially, was to bring together a number of historians with strengths in African, South Asian, and British-imperial environmental history to complement my own competence in the U.S. historiography. But, for a variety of reasons, I found myself teaching the course alone, with the responsibility for introducing students to various non-U.S. literatures about which I knew little. For someone who fancied himself well-grounded in environmental historiography, I was amazed by the richness of these literatures and embarrassed by my ignorance of them. And I sensed that I was not alone among my Americanist peers in having such a limited knowledge.2 Finally, I have just begun a study that examines U.S. sanitary engineering during the construction of the Panama Canal, and I have been struck by how much more at home my central research questions—questions that have to do with imperialism, disease, race, and ideas of tropical nature—are in the non-U.S. environmental historiography. Such traveling has given me a new perspective on my own field.	1
Before proceeding to explain that new perspective, I want to offer several caveats about this essay. First, it is by no means the product of exhaustive reading in non-U.S. environmental historiography. I have read selectively, and I surely have missed important works that might have contributed to, or even altered, my thinking. Second, I focus on specific historiographies—South Asian, African, and comparative—at the expense of others—European, Australasian, and Latin American. In part, this choice reflects those literatures that I have found most intriguing and useful, and in part it reflects my own continuing thin exposure to these other literatures. Third, this essay is addressed to environmental historians studying the United States, and as such I will be emphasizing those themes and questions that I think most useful to us. (For the sake of brevity, I will be using "we" and "us" to signify my fellow environmental historians of the United States, though I appreciate that it is not as easy to lump this group together as I make it appear.) As a result, I will be ignoring or downplaying critical differences between these U.S. and non-U.S. literatures that to my mind do not fundamentally engage U.S. environmental historiography. My aim is not to provide a thorough introduction to these non-U.S. literatures; others are much more qualified to do that. 3 Nor will I be spending much time discussing what U.S environmental historians can teach those working on the rest of the world. Fourth, my major distinction is between the United States and the rest of the world as subjects of study, not as places of practice. I am less interested in how historians from Europe or South Asia might approach environmental history differently than Americans, and more interested in how those studying Europe or South Asia, whatever their national origin, might differ in their approach from those studying the United States. Finally, and regrettably, I have had to confine my reading to English language sources. Stronger language skills surely would have made my travels more productive.	2
THE MOST NOTABLE aspect of non-U.S. environmental historiography lies in its focus on colonialism and imperialism as environmental processes. Indeed, studies of the environmental implications of colonial and imperial encounters have largely fueled the rapid growth of non-U.S. environmental historiography.4 While this is not exactly a revelation, and while there are prominent exceptions to this rule, it is important to emphasize the extent to which non-U.S. environmental historians have made central to their work processes that seem absent from, or at best understated in, U.S. environmental historiography.	3
One question worth popping at the outset, then, is whether U.S. environmental historiography ought to be more attentive to colonialism and imperialism. The answer is an emphatic "yes," though with some qualifications. Certainly the United States has a deep and distinctive history with colonialism, and U.S. environmental historians have paid attention to the ecological consequences of the colonizing process.5 But to this point, few have worked to put this history into a broader colonial context. Environmental historians of the North American colonial experience would be well served by looking at such intellectual, institutional, and ecological themes as acclimatization, plant and animal exchange, the role of colonial science on the periphery, and the various networks that linked colonial encounters in North American environments to other colonial sites.6 A few models exist. Joyce Chaplin's recent book, Subject Matter, which traces the development of an "Anglo-American corporeal identity," is the most ambitious effort yet by an early Americanist to deal with connections between science, nature, and empire that often are made in the non-U.S. literature.7 And Thomas Dunlap's Nature and the English Diaspora, though it focuses mostly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has set an agenda for comparative inquiries into the U.S. environmental experience as a "settler society," a concept most fully developed in the Australasian and South African historiographies.8 Finally, one of the central insights of Richard Grove's work—that colonialism both promoted large-scale ecological change and provided a context in which those on the periphery could witness and think critically about such change—deserves careful application in the North American setting. Part of the importance of Grove's argument lies in its insistence that environmental concern emerged as early as the seventeenth century as a reaction to global processes, an argument that challenges the exceptionalist thread in the U.S. historiography connecting environmental appreciation and nation. We have been too quick, Grove intimates, to see early American environmental sentiment within the context of an emerging national culture to which nature was a central component. Grove's work begs the question of whether the strong U.S. environmental tradition, and particularly its attachment to a declensionist narrative, has its roots in a critical response to a long history of environmental disruption by colonization, a history that was not unique to the United States and that needs to be put in an international context.9	4
As a modern nation, the United States has pursued its own imperial goals in places such as the Caribbean, Latin America, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia (and, for that matter, the American West), efforts that only now are being mined for their environmental significance—more often than not by historians who traditionally have worked on non-U.S. topics. Richard Tucker, whose previous work has been on South Asia and the history of tropical deforestation, recently has produced an important study, Insatiable Appetite, which examines the surprisingly under-explored question of how corporate internationalization and expansive American consumer habits have contributed to the degradation of tropical ecosystems. His study ought to be the first volley in a sustained campaign to better understand the international ecological footprint of the modern United States. Michael Adas, a historian of South and Southeast Asia, is completing a study about how engineers and an engineering mentality shaped and contributed to U.S. efforts to manage people and nature in places such as the Philippines, Panama, and Vietnam. And Warwick Anderson has done fascinating work on imperial public health efforts during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, efforts that linked ideas of tropical nature, race, and health into an ideology of control and supremacy.10
The larger contrast that emerges out of a reading of what John MacKenzie calls "the historiography of the imperial environment" is one between capitalism (or market economies more broadly) and the state.11 To generalize, U.S. environmental historiography traditionally has been focused on the former, and particularly on the impact of capitalism on wild nature, while much of non-U.S. environmental historiography has been more focused on the latter, and particularly on how colonial and postcolonial states have intervened to upset human ecologies. This is, of course, too neat a distinction; the U.S. historiography has paid significant attention to government conservation efforts, for instance, and scholars such as Donald Worster have shown how the state has been a crucial partner in capitalist development. But only recently have environmental historians of the United States started looking at state conservation as a colonizing force. Such a shift has produced narratives closer to, and sometimes influenced by, non-U.S. literatures.	5
One of the most developed non-U.S. environmental historiographies is that which takes South Asia, and the Indian subcontinent in particular, as its subject.12 South Asian environmental historians have seen the state as "a leading, often the principal, actor."13 A few things are worth noting about this historiography. First, it is preoccupied with the subcontinent's forest history, though the history of irrigation and water manipulation also has received considerable attention. Second, it has, until recently, been mostly concerned with delineating the history of British imperialism as an environmental watershed, which has meant an emphasis on the colonial state, and its legacy, as the premier agent of environmental change. Third, South Asian environmental history has been centered more on the social consequences than the ecological consequences (to the extent that they can be separated) of that change. If the moral of South Asian forest historiography had to be reduced to a single sentence, it would read something like this: The importation of a scientific model of forest conservation by the colonial state upset a complex mosaic of localized forest uses, dispossessed and destabilized Indian peasant societies, and drew their members away from an intimate and useful knowledge of nature and into an endemic cycle of protest and conflict with an interventionist state.	6
South Asian forest historiography raises some useful comparative questions for environmental historians of the United States. One has to do with the contrasting origins of these two historiographies. Just as in the United States, the environmental history of the Indian subcontinent grew out of a desire for historical perspective on contemporary environmental conflicts; in both contexts, environmental history emerged from advocacy. Ramachandra Guha, a leading environmental historian of South Asia, has argued that the focus on forest history emerged out of grassroots protests against India's aborted Forest Bill of 1982. That bill would have tightened state control over, and limited gathering on, the subcontinent's public forests, which, importantly, comprise almost a quarter of the landscape, giving India a public domain comparable to that of the United States, a worthy point of comparison itself. The proposed bill mobilized peasant protest against state controls, and in the process galvanized an agrarian movement, with women at the vanguard, that has embodied and personified the core critique of the South Asian historiography.14 South Asian environmental history followed suit; it largely has been a story of the peasantry versus the colonial and post-colonial state, with the human ecology of the peasant as the ideal worth protecting.	7
One lesson of South Asian environmental historiography, then, is that U.S. environmental historians ought to look for and listen to subaltern voices (to use a phrase close to the South Asian school) that have expressed opposition not only to the environmental costs of capitalist expansion but also to the social costs of state conservation.15 Indeed, a number of scholars, such as Mark Spence, Karl Jacoby, Louis Warren, and Maria Montoya, already have done this to good effect. They have given voice to groups such as Native Americans, Hispanos, immigrants, and working-class rural residents whose experiences on the ecological and social margins have embodied the same sorts of critiques of state-sponsored environmental management that are at the heart of the South Asian historiography. Such voices are there to be found, and they have added—and will continue to add—a level of complexity to the U.S. literature.16	8
South Asian forest historians have in recent years approached the nature of colonialism as an ecological watershed with growing sophistication, navigating through the dangers of painting too stark a before-and-after picture. Yet certain important transformations produced by colonialism still stand out. One is the way in which the colonial state privileged sedentary agricultural production and imposed strict regulatory regimes on non-arable environments—with the goal of providing resources crucial to the colonial project, securing labor, and further encouraging sedentary settlement. Historians of South Asia increasingly have pointed out that precolonial states made demands on agrarian societies that were similar to colonial demands (though the nineteenth century colonial state came armed with industrial technologies and techniques that precolonial states did not possess; in this sense, colonialism was an ecological watershed because it was a technological watershed). But the regulation of non-arable lands, and forests in particular, was an important exception. Precolonial regimes neglected agriculturally unproductive lands, allowing users to develop some autonomy "on the fringes of the cultivated arable."17 The colonial state changed that, affecting both sedentary farmers who had relied on such environments for augmenting their subsistence, and, more importantly, those who had survived primarily by utilizing the resources of marginal landscapes through pastoralism, hunting and gathering, and swidden agriculture. It was not, in other words, that an interventionist state appeared where none had existed before; rather, the colonial state clamped down on precisely those commons landscapes that had previously escaped state scrutiny. This, in part, explains the continuing focus on forest history.	9
This focus on the environmental as well as the social margins suggests a set of lessons for environmental historians of the United States. It helps us to see, for instance, that state conservation and preservation in the United States also have been about regulating non-arable environments and the people living in, or moving into, them. So much emphasis has been placed on seeing conservation and preservation as heroic limitations on capitalist resource exploitation—or, alternately, as policies that privilege resource efficiency or the recreational needs of the leisure class—that we have neglected to recognize that state conservation also arose as an effort to contend with marginal landscapes.18 We still remain captured by notions of land and resource scarcity when, in fact, marginality might be the more useful organizing concept. Or, to put it another way, Frederick Jackson Turner's famous proclamation might have been much more accurate if it had declared the end of arability as of 1890. Certainly almost every major conservation measure that followed, from the Timber Reserve Act of 1891 to the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, involved contending with public lands resistant to the American agrarian dream of a nation replete with sedentary yeoman farmers. Yet we have not paid adequate attention to how such environmental constraints have shaped U.S. conservation.19 Environmental historians of the United States would find it productive to think in terms of this duality, central to the South Asian historiography, between arable and non-arable lands—a distinction, it should be noted, that is at once ecological and cultural. "Mainstreaming the marginal," to invoke the theme of the 2003 ASEH conference, must be a process that takes account of the environmental as well as the social margins.	10
Other important lessons for U.S. environmental historians, however, lie in the differences between the U.S. and South Asian settings. The comparative study of the roots of environmentalism and environmental history in the United States and South Asia begs the question of whether the United States has agrarian or peasant traditions of environmental protest comparable to the ones in South Asia, and, if not, how the absence of such traditions has shaped the history of U.S. environmental thought and politics. The demographic histories of the two continents suggest an obvious contrast: The Indian subcontinent is still dominated by Indians, whereas indigenous Americans suffered demographic collapse and then were forced to the margins of American society. Largely because of differences in disease environments, environmental protest in the United States has been a movement dominated by the colonizers, not the colonized.	11
Native Americans are perhaps the closest that the United States comes to a peasant or agrarian tradition, at least in terms of the legitimacy of their traditional land and resource claims and the moral authority afforded them as traditional resource users, and there are some useful parallels to be drawn with the South Asian historiography here. Native Americans suffered at the hands of European expansion in similar ways to indigenous peoples in South Asia, and U.S. environmental historians already have done considerable work on that subject. If there is a new comparative lesson to be learned, it may be that environmental historians of the United States need to take a more careful look at Native American environmental politics, experiences, and perceptions not only as manifestations of traditional environmental beliefs and practices, but also as products of their modern condition of having been continually pushed into more marginal and restrictive environmental conditions by an expanding people and the state that supported them. After all, in the history of confronting American environmental marginality, Native Americans have been at the vanguard, forced to make do on lands most settlers considered useless. To that injury has been added the insult of having to contend with an interventionist state that has withdrawn lands and resources from Native American control and access, often in the name of conservation. Native Americans thus offer to U.S. environmental historians an agrarian tradition worth further examination, not because they were the "original ecologists" but because they have inhabited a position on the political and environmental margins whose study will continue to diversify U.S. environmental historiography.20	12
Several other groups fit the peasant model as well. Hispanos in the American southwest struggled to maintain access to lands and resources as the U.S. government superimposed new conceptions of property and new resource regimes atop a less formal tradition of rights and practices rooted in the Spanish era.21 Backcountry farmers also could be fit into this category. Even ranchers might legitimately be studied as members of an agrarian tradition of protest against the conservation state, though a rigorous comparison of western ranchers and South Asian peasants likely would reveal that their differences—from the political power each enjoys in shaping resource management regimes to the environmental impacts of their activities—outweigh their similarities. Moreover, as Karen Merrill's recent book suggests, while American ranchers often have locked horns with federal resource managers, most public lands ranchers initially saw the conservation state as a key ally in sustaining the open range against agricultural privatization and enclosure. Thus, while Merrill insists that ranchers' claims to public lands and resources deserve a sympathetic and nuanced reading, she also intimates that their relationship to the conservation state has been a complicated and not always contentious one.22	13
Despite these and other exceptions, environmental politics in the United States have not been shaped by persistent conflict between a traditional peasant or agrarian population and the state.23 State conservation in the United States, though it has mirrored the South Asian experience in regulating the non-arable, did not lay itself atop a landscape as crowded with preexisting and traditional uses and claims. Nor did it attempt to tie the control of resources and the control of labor as tightly together. Among other things, this contrast suggests some ways of reconsidering the centrality of wilderness thinking in the United States and the particular complexion of U.S. conservation politics. Environmental historians already have done important work in charting the ways in which the wilderness idea has blinded us to the victims of state conservation (and land colonization more generally). That said, wilderness is an idea that, while hostile to a pre-industrial peasantry, may in fact be quite at home in this postindustrial settler society of ours, with a large public landscape whose management is a contentious issue and without a citizenry who have a deep landed history. This is not to say that wilderness has not been dispossessive in the U.S. context; it has. But those who have most frequently challenged wilderness preservation, and who have thus defined the debate over wilderness, have not usually been peasants. That is one of the most startling contrasts revealed by the South Asian literature—that, compared with other areas of the globe, the U.S. environmental discourse has been constricted by the comparative absence of agrarian environmental protest, at least of the sort most environmental historians would be willing to privilege. And that absence, Ramachandra Guha suggests, has ceded the field of environmental politics in the United States—and particularly public lands politics—to ideological conflicts between utilitarian conservation and preservation.24 In the United States, wilderness advocates, not local resource users, have provided the most potent opposition to technocratic state conservation.	14
The South Asian literature also suggests that we ought to look at the development of resource conservation in the United States with a more global perspective. For instance, we need to appreciate and acknowledge that federal forestry in the United States was shaped by forestry practice in colonial settings. U.S. forest historians have long emphasized the European connections, and particularly the importance of the German forestry model, to the professionalization of American forestry around the turn of last century, but we are only just beginning to discuss the importance of colonial and imperial models of forest management to the U.S. experience. As Gregory Barton and others have pointed out, we recognize that foresters from the German and French traditions trained Gifford Pinchot, but we have not given enough attention to the fact that most of Pinchot's mentors got their practical forestry experience in British India.25 The U.S. Forest Service also was active in managing the forest resources of U.S. imperial holdings, such as the Philippines. These are connections worth exploring in greater detail, and they can be found in areas such as soil conservation and reclamation as well. Indeed, many important American conservationists, from Elwood Mead to Hugh Hammond Bennett, had a surprising amount of international and/or imperial conservation experience, and the activities of federal conservation agencies reached well beyond U.S. borders throughout the twentieth century. Finally, seeing conservation in this international context suggests the need to highlight the work of individuals and agencies whose activities usually have not been seen as central to U.S. conservation historiography—the career of David Fairchild with the Bureau of Plant Introduction is but one example.26
Yet, as influenced as American conservationists were by colonial conservation efforts, resource conservation in the United States has not been the product of an authoritarian colonial state acting outside of democratic control but of a weak state whose actions have been marked by compromise, localism, and capture. (Though, as Tom Dunlap and Donald Worster have pointed out, compared with certain other settler societies, such as Canada and Australia, where conservation policy was largely organized at the provincial level, the U.S. state has seemed strong.)27 That state conservation has served the interests of industrial capital in the United States as often as it has provided regulatory challenges to those interests is an old thesis in American environmental history, but it is one that deserves to be revisited in a comparative light. What may turn out to be the most interesting aspect of American conservation, at least compared to colonial regimes, is the relative weakness of the American state, its reluctant embrace of managerial responsibility for marginal public landscapes, and its subsequent inability to do anything but serve the interests of capital.28	15
I do not mean to imply that U.S. environmental historians have, until now, been unconcerned with the state. In the literature on water, for instance, the state presence has long been a central, if controversial, feature. But U.S. environmental historians have not been quick to integrate much of the new political history into their work.29 It seems time to do so, and I think that South Asian environmental history can be an important comparative touchstone in this regard. (Indeed, South Asian environmental historians are themselves embarking on an instructive reevaluation of the autonomy and capacity of the colonial state, and of the role of conservationists within that state).30 To the extent that U.S. environmental historians have brought the state back in, we have perhaps overemphasized its autonomous reach and underemphasized the political complexity behind its policies—particularly the persistence of localism as a factor in federal environmental management policies and the porousness of state-society boundaries.	16
In sum, South Asian environmental historiography, in its emphasis on state-peasant relationships, provides environmental historians of the United States with a suggestive model, but one that ought not be swallowed uncritically. It is tempting to employ the sort of analysis that James Scott has, in his provocative Seeing Like a State, to argue that the modern state's persistent emphases on legibility and centralized planning have led to ecological simplification and forms of social control that are, by definition, hostile to local knowledge and autonomy. But such an analysis has the weakness of treating the state as a black box.31 I mention Scott's recent book not because I think his approach to the state is unconvincing or entirely representative of South Asian environmental history (though Scott's writing has had a strong influence on this school), but because Seeing Like a State represents both a seductive and a problematic model for importing the insights of state-peasant conflict into the U.S. historiography. Just as we ought to be careful not to project the wilderness idea onto societies with a strong peasantry, so we ought to be careful to avoid importing too strong a peasant tradition and too autonomous a state into the U.S. historiography.32	17
Like the South Asian literature, African environmental historiography has been dominated by analyses of the colonial encounter and its legacies, and in these studies the state also has figured prominently. Indeed, as the South Asian historiography has a wealth of cautionary tales about the social consequences of state forestry, the African historiography is rich in object lessons about the dangers of preservationist and desiccationist rhetoric, and the tendency of outside technocratic authorities and representatives to "misread the landscape." African environmental history also offers innovative models for thinking about disease and public health as imperial and environmental problems. Tying together many of these themes is what seems to me to be the meta-theme of African historiography—that because the history of human land use on the continent is deep, complex, and non-linear, declensionist narratives must be treated with great caution and suspicion, as they often have served colonial and post-colonial critiques of traditional African land use practices.	18
The relative lack of traditional historical sources (i.e., written documentation) has meant that African environmental historians often have relied on scientific, archaeological, and linguistic methods to reconstruct the continent's environmental history. These methodologies are themselves worthy of emulation, particularly (though not exclusively) for those studying pre-Columbian land use history in North America. My sense is that, in the U.S. setting, much of this information is already there for the taking, but it is in the domain of anthropologists, ethnographers, geographers, and archaeologists rather than environmental historians. Following the lead of the African literature, environmental historians of the United States ought to be more interdisciplinary in reconstructing the history of past land use, and we ought to employ a deeper time frame for such reconstructions. It is time to pay more attention to the pre-colonial environmental history of North America, and to render it as more than just a prelude.	19
African environmental historiography's focus on instrumental discourses of erosion, deforestation, and desiccation is the most pressing challenge the field poses to those studying the United States, who, despite a growing appreciation of the difficulties involved in making normative judgments about environmental change, generally remain wedded to narratives of decline. The most stunning African environmental histories are those that take Western observations about environmental degradation and subject them to close ecological and cultural analysis. One of the best examples comes from James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, who show that where Western observers had seen the forest islands in the savanna landscape of Guinea's Kissidougou Province as being a result of deforestation—as remnants of a once-expansive natural forest—in fact they were human creations, coaxed from a savanna that otherwise would have had little forest cover. Such "misreadings," as the historiography attests, have been rife in modern Africa, and they have justified misinformed interventions.33 Indeed, African environmental historians seem keen to find such misreadings and thus to paint conservation interventions as both imperial and ecologically misinformed.	20
Could similar misreadings be made central to the U.S. literature? Scholars such as Nancy Langston have shown that they can be found, but U.S. environmental historiography has yet to tackle fully such analyses.34 The New Deal seems a particularly rich field for such studies, since it represented the first systematic effort by U.S. government experts to address erosion and desiccation. That the most important environmental history we have of that era—Donald Worster's Dust Bowl—swims so counter to the spirit of the African environmental historiography in this regard only heightens the intrigue. This is not to suggest that the African historiography somehow reveals Worster's indictment of the human role in that environmental catastrophe to be misguided. Rather, it suggests that the dissonances between these two historiographies—between the willingness of the U.S. historiography to blame humans and the reticence of the African historiography to do the same—might well reveal instructive differences about the historical contexts and moral impetuses of the two fields.35 The work of Richard White and Marsha Weisiger, who both have examined Navajo grazing controversies during the New Deal, suggests what an analysis more in league with the African historiography might look like.36 Borrowing the Africanist suspicions of degradationist discourses also might prove useful in examining the American South, where such discourses have been rife and where environmental historiography is markedly underdeveloped. Questions central to the African historiography might help scholars open up this region to environmental history—a region that obviously has its own strong ties to African environmental history.37	21
In his recent synthesis of African environmental history, James McCann notes that one of his fundamental premises is that "Africa's landscapes are anthropogenic."38 This is a premise that could serve to summarize the historiography in general, and it underlies the "misreading" school in the literature on Africa in particular. African environmental historians have thoroughly problematized the notion that normative natural landscapes exist—landscapes shaped almost solely by natural processes against which human transformations can be qualitatively measured and assessed. As Gregory Maddox has written, African environmental history "subverts the 'before' and 'after' distinction common to environmental history by demonstrating the ways in which human societies and the natural world have mutually constructed each other."39 The results of that subversion can be dizzying. The lament that Western thinking has long separated humans from nature has prompted many environmental historians of the United States to try to think humans and nature together into a single fabric. If we want a model for doing so, African environmental historiography provides an excellent one. But it may not be an entirely satisfying model, in part because some U.S. environmental historians (myself included) have wanted to be able to talk about nature as a separate, and separable, category—as an entity that can be transformed in ways good and bad, and that can shape the human experience. Indeed, as Ted Steinberg recently has argued, nature's agency is a fundamental premise of U.S. environmental historiography and perhaps its strongest claim on U.S. historiography more broadly.40 In African environmental historiography, by contrast, nature often ceases to be an independent variable (with climate as perhaps the major exception), making it difficult to distinguish nature from culture in ways that are analytically or normatively useful. African environmental history is thus a complex story of conjuncture, adaptation, and cultural and environmental flux.	22
African environmental historiography does offer U.S. environmental historians an intriguing model for thinking beyond our preoccupation with wild nature: the notion of environmental control. Rather than thinking in terms of a dichotomy between wild and humanized landscapes, with wild nature as a baseline against which to measure human-induced change, the environmental-control model offers a spectrum running from the feral to the controlled to the exploited, with environmental control as a normative middle ground. In this model, equilibrium is as much a cultural state as it is a natural one.	23
This notion of environmental control has been worked out most coherently (at least in the African setting; as we will see, it has a European analogue) in the literature on trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, a disease whose ecology has long dictated that Africans living in the zone of its vector, the tsetse fly, must control vegetation and maintain a separation between livestock and wildlife. Climate and climate change have been crucial in determining the ebbs and flows of vector zones; indeed, climate history has been a much more prominent part of African, and for that matter European, environmental historiography than of the U.S. literature.41 More importantly, human environmental control has worked to keep the tsetse and its preferred habitat, the bush, at bay. When forces disrupted that control—colonial policies and practices most notably—and the landscape went feral, the disease wreaked havoc with human and livestock populations. The history of trypanosomiasis control in Africa (which is far more ecologically and culturally complex than I can render it here) provides a poignant and concrete example of how the protection, and in some cases the expansion, of wild nature at the expense of human control can have a dramatic impact on human populations and economies.42	24
There are also a few fine examples of environmental control as a model deployed in European environmental history. John McNeill, in The Mountains of the Mediterranean World, suggests that throughout the long history of these fragile mountain environments, much of the worst erosion occurred not when humans entered and transformed them, but when they left the mountains and their systems of control broke down. Humans, in other words, were a stabilizing force, not a disruptive one. Marcus Hall, in his recent dissertation comparing U.S. and Italian models of ecological restoration, has shown that Italians have, until quite recently, been much more likely to see humans as having an improving influence on the natural world, and have tended to see nature unmanaged as a source of degradation and decay.43 That is a disorienting notion for a culture preoccupied with wild nature—a preoccupation rooted not only in a romanticized notion of pristine nature in which human activity is almost by definition destructive, but also in a reverence for untrammeled nature, unyoked and free to determine its own course. The model of environmental control thus challenges environmental historians of the United States to interrogate our cultural commitment to natural self-determination, one with obvious connections to our political tradition, and to think through why these different settings have produced such divergent thought on wildness and degradation.44	25
Should environmental historians of the United States embrace this model of environmental control? If so, in what contexts might the notion prove most useful? Perhaps the place to begin is to recognize (as a few scholars already have) that preservation is itself a model of environmental control in which natural forces can be destabilizing and human interventions restorative. In examining the history of national parks and wilderness areas, for instance, one is immediately struck by how much human intervention is involved in keeping these places "wild"—and, for that matter, how much of what Americans have read as wild has been the product of human management. Yet to the extent that environmental historians of the United States have recognized this, we have couched it as deeply ironic—which, within the logic of the American wilderness discourse, it is. But if we were to look at preservation in the United States as a form of environmental control, then some of this sense of irony might melt away. Or, to reiterate one of the most exciting intimations of Marcus Hall's study, preservation in the United States, despite rhetoric to the contrary, almost always has involved restoration.45 That does not mean we need to see restored landscapes as fundamentally human artifacts, give in to aggressive management visions, or lose the landscapes that we today treasure as wild. But such an understanding does allow us to escape the logic that either a place is wild or it is managed, a logic that has been as crucial to critiques of wilderness as it has been to the wilderness idea itself. There are degrees of wildness, and human actions often are crucial to enhancing wild landscapes or increasing biodiversity, as scholars such as Gary Nabhan have shown.46 Developing notions of environmental control might allow us to see such instances more clearly, and to breathe new life into the environmental history of North American agriculture, broadly conceived to include all sorts of pre- and post-Columbian environmental-management techniques.	26
As U.S. environmental historians pay more attention to disease and public health as environmental phenomena, we also might learn from the analysis of disease in African and other environmental historiographies. Perhaps most importantly, these literatures have emphasized the imperial and instrumental nature of Western public health efforts in colonial settings. Many African diseases also have natural histories that interweave in complicated ways with human history—they are not only more obviously included in what we traditionally think of as "nature," but they provide fascinating ways of integrating nature, technology, and the body as categories of analysis. This is particularly true for those diseases that have insect vectors. Two things are important about these diseases for U.S. environmental historians. First, many of them—yellow fever and falciparum malaria in particular—made the trip from Africa to the Americas, an exchange that has not received the attention from environmental historians that it deserves. Second, because of the great achievements in sanitation and medical care in the twentieth century, those studying the United States have tended to forget the period when disease was seen as a part of the landscape, and the landscape was viewed through the lens of disease and health. The modern revolution in medical care has distanced most Americans from a past in which disease and nature were much more interrelated categories, intellectually as well as ecologically (though our recent experience with the West Nile virus has provided an unwelcome reminder of such connections). Recent work by Margaret Humphreys, Conevery Bolton Valencius, and Linda Nash suggests how fruitful such studies can be, and the environmental historiography on Africa and the rest of the developing world has much to teach us in this regard.47	27
Having discussed at some length South Asian and African environmental historiography, let me briefly mention some recent comparative and transnational scholarship that I think has much to teach environmental historians of the United States.	28
To note that ideas of nature in the United States have been intricately connected with nationalism is nothing new. But while reading in the environmental literature beyond our borders, I was struck by the extent to which connections between nature and nation have traditionally kept U.S. environmental historians within national borders and focused on American identity. Embracing a more comparative approach will necessitate letting that guard down, but it will yield (and already has yielded) some excellent new insights. In some cases, we will recognize new ways in which American ideals of nation have affected how we understand nature and how we have enacted environmental policy. Thomas Dunlap has shown how connections between nature and nation—for instance, in the embrace of native flora and fauna in the wake of settler efforts to transform landscapes into more familiar, Old World forms—are strong characteristics of other settler societies as well as ours.48 In two recent essays that have compared U.S. and Canadian views of wilderness and development myths respectively, Donald Worster has shown how extensive the differences can be between nations whose profiles seem so similar.49 Marcus Hall has revealed a set of distinctively American ideas about nature and restoration in his comparative study of the United States and Italy. William Beinart and Peter Coates, in their comparison of settlement processes in the United States and South Africa, have, among other insights, suggested the inadequacy of notions of American frontier exceptionalism.50 And, as I have already noted, a number of scholars have suggested the importance of situating American conservation efforts within a global context.	29
In perhaps the most impressive recent comparative study, Ian Tyrrell has shown how the connection between nature and nation obscured important ecological and cultural exchanges between California and Australia that were at once transnational, regional, and peripheral. Tyrrell suggests that to understand key natural ideals that evolved in California, and particularly what he calls a "renovationist" or horticultural garden ideal, scholars would be better served to look to connections between California and Australia than to connections between California and the rest of the United States. This lesson—that environmental sentiment in the United States often has been shaped as a result of transnational and cross-cultural exchange—is hugely important. Among other things, it allows Tyrrell to suggest that the conservation-preservation dichotomy that has defined so much of U.S. historiography has been a product of the nationalist focus of the U.S. literature, and that when we expand that focus to look at transnational cases, or even constrict our vision and look at regional ideals, we often see previously unrecognized competing ideals. As Tyrrell concluded after looking at the Australia-California connection, "[n]either the idea of wilderness nor the modern idea of conservation for rational economic use encompasses the full range of 19th century environmental thought." 51 Through the use of the comparative method, Tyrrell has highlighted for historians of the United States another environmental tradition with which to reckon.	30
IF I COULD digest all the lessons from my historiographical travels into one emblematic maxim for environmental historians of the United States, it would be this: Pay more attention to George Perkins Marsh. There has been something of a Marsh renaissance in recent years, and it is a timely one.52 Marsh not only presented a nascent vision of state conservation, but he viewed environmental change in the context of world history and his influence was truly international. Marsh's insights about past environmental transformations were the products of travel and comparative observation, and he offered them in the context of international trends. Indeed, Marsh is perhaps the key figure for understanding and knitting together a picture of conservation as a global phenomenon—for linking a seventeenth and eighteenth century tradition of conservation concern that emerged on the colonial periphery (as described by Richard Grove) not only to the birth of American environmental thought, but also to colonial state forestry in British India and the emergence of the various discourses of environmental degradation that have preoccupied environmental historians of Africa. As Ramachandra Guha has noted, it was no mistake that Marsh's magnum opus, Man and Nature, appeared in the same year, 1864, as the creation of the Indian Forest Department, or that it was surrounded by various other pioneering colonial conservation initiatives, including forest protection acts in the Cape Colony (1859), Cochinchina (1862), Java (1865), and Australia (1871).53 Yet, surprisingly, environmental historians of the United States have paid less attention to Marsh than have non-U.S. environmental historians, who see him as perhaps the most important figure in the American environmental tradition. Appreciating Marsh's international importance, and the importance of his internationalism, are valuable object lessons taught by the non-U.S. literature, not only in terms of rethinking Marsh's place in the American environmental tradition, but also in rethinking the American place in the history of global environmental thought and action. But Marsh ultimately was concerned with the United States, and it was that concern that makes him the very embodiment of what I hope will be the central message of this essay: We must move beyond our borders as a way of making sense of our home ground. U.S. environmental historiography needs more such travelers.	31
Paul S. Sutter is an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (University of Washington Press, 2002). Notes I would like to thank my fellow panelists at the 2001 ASEH Conference in Durham, N.C., where I first presented much of this material, and particularly the panel organizers, Mark Fiege and Mark Stemen. I also had the great privilege of having Ramachandra Guha and Patty Limerick read and comment on an earlier draft of this paper. Finally, I would like to thank Adam Rome for his comments and encouragement. 1. Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). 2. This may be changing somewhat, given the explosion of non-U.S. content in Environmental History and at the ASEH meetings, and given the useful historiographic literature that has emerged in the last couple of years. The journal Environment and History, published in England, also has provided an outlet for important non-U.S. environmental historiography. 3. There are quite a few good historiographic essays covering these non-U.S. literatures. See, for example: James McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800–1990 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1999); James McCann, "Causation and Climate in African History," H-ENVIRONMENT Historiography series, (http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~environ/historiography/africa.htm); Gregory Maddox, "Africa and Environmental History," Environmental History 4 (1999): 162–67; William Beinart, "African History and Environmental History," H-ENVIRONMENT Historiography Series, (http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~environ/historiography/africaeh.htm); Ramachandra Guha, "Appendix: Indian Environmental History (1989–1999)," in The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000): 211–22; Mahesh Rangarajan, "Environmental Histories of South Asia: A Review Essay," Environment and History 2 (1996): 129–43; Phia Steyn, "The Greening of Our Past? An Assessment of South African Environmental Historiography," HENVIRONMENT Historiography Series, (http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~environ/historiography/safrica.htm); Don Garden, "Where Are the Historians?: Australian Environmental History," H-ENVIRONMENT Historiography Series, (http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~environ/historiography/australia.htm); Stephen Dovers, "Australian Environmental History: Introduction, Review and Principles," in Australian Environmental History: Essays and Cases, ed. Stephen Dovers (Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press, 1994): 2–19; Guillermo Castro Herrera, "Environmental History (Made) in Latin America," H-ENVIRONMENT Historiography Series (http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~environ/historiography/latinam.htm); Matt Osborn, "Sowing the Field of British Environmental History," H-ENVIRONMENT Historiography Series, (http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~environ/historiography/british.htm); Marc Cioc, Bjorn-Ola Linner, and Matt Osborn, "Environmental History Writing in Northern Europe," Environmental History, 5 (2000): 396–406; Michael Bess, Marc Cioc, and James Sievert, "Environmental History Writing in Southern Europe," Environmental History, 5 (2000): 545–56; J. R. McNeill, "China's Environmental History in World Perspective," in Mark Elvin and Liu Ts'ui-jung, Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); J. R. McNeill, "Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific," Journal of World History 5 (1994): 299–349; Peter R. Mulvihill, Douglas C. Baker, and William R. Morrison, "A Conceptual Framework for Environmental History in Canada's North," Environmental History 6 (2001): 611–26. 4. John MacKenzie, "Empire and the Ecological Apocalypse: The Historiography of the Imperial Environment," in Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, ed. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). 5. See Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). 6. On these themes, see Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperialism, and the 'Improvement' of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000); Michael Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Thomas Dunlap's Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) is a good model for placing the American experience into broader context. 7. Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 8. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora. Dunlap's work builds from many of Alfred Crosby's foundational insights, though his work is more attentive to the intellectual and institutional aspects of settler societies, and he is much more successful at teasing out instructive differences between these societies. Stephen Pyne's work on fire history also has been attentive to colonial comparison. On the concept of "settler societies," see Griffiths and Robin, Ecology and Empire. 9. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism. For a fine example of the colonizing model applied to U.S. agricultural expansion, see Frieda Knoblauch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Historians of the U.S. West have perhaps been the most active in adopting such a colonial framework. 10. Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Steve Marquardt's work on the Central American banana industry is also important in this regard. See his article, 'Green Havoc': Panama Disease, Environmental Change, and Labor Process in the Central American Banana Industry," American Historical Review 106 (2001): 49–80. Michael Adas' book-in-progress is tentatively titled Dominance By Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission. For an example of where Adas' work is going, see his article, "Improving on the Civilizing Mission?: Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonisation of the Philippines," Itinerario 22 (1998): 44–66. Warwick Anderson, "Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 1900–1920," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70 (1996): 94–118. My next project, tentatively titled "Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics: Environment, Disease, Race, and the U.S. Sanitary Program in Panama," will tackle some of these issues as well. 11. MacKenzie, "Empire and the Ecological Apocalypse." 12. Among the best sources on South Asian environmental history are: Guha, The Unquiet Woods; Guha and Madhav Gadgil, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Guha and Gadgil, "State Forestry and Social Conflict in British India," Past & Present 123 (1989): 141–77; Guha and David Arnold, Nature, Culture, and Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Richard Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan, Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Mahesh Rangarajan, "Environmental Histories of South Asia." 13. Arnold and Guha, Nature, Culture, Imperialism, 12. 14. See Guha, The Unquiet Woods, which is focused on the Chipko Movement. 15. For a good discussion of subaltern studies, see the AHR Forum on the subject: American Historical Review 99 (December 1994): 1475–1545. 16. See Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Jacoby notes the influence of the South Asian school, though he also borrowed from a British historiography on hunting rights and class relations. Other works in this vein include Louis Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth Century America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997); Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Maria Montoya, Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Richard Judd, Common Lands, Common Peoples: The Origins of Conservation in New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Steven Hahn, "Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South," Radical History Review 26 (1982): 37–64; Benjamin Heber Johnson, "Conservation, Subsistence, and Class at the Birth of Superior National Forest," Environmental History 4 (1999): 80–99. 17. Mahesh Rangarajan, "Environmental Histories of South Asia," 132. 18. Certainly some scholars have pointed to aspects of this fact. Alfred Runte's "worthless lands" thesis—that most national parks were created from lands that were not valuable for economic production—captures this spirit, and Donald Worster's insistence that we see aridity as a defining quality of the American West also has paid big dividends, particularly in thinking about the social aspects of making such marginal environments productive. See Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985). 19. Donald Worster makes this point in his recent essay, "Two Faces West: The Development Myth in Canada and the United States," in Terra Pacifica: People and Place in the Northwest States and Western Canada, ed. Paul Hirt (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1998): 71–91. 20. For a good overview of these and other issues, see David Rich Lewis, "Native Americans and the Environment: A Survey of Twentieth-Century Issues," American Indian Quarterly 19 (1995): 423–50; and his book, Neither Wolf Nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Scholars such as Karl Jacoby, Louis Warren, Joseph Taylor, and Mark Spence have looked at the experiences of Native Americans as they came into contact with early state conservation. 21. See Montoya, Translating Property. 22. Karen Merrill, Public Lands and Political Meaning: Ranchers, the Government, and the Property between Them (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 23. See Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000). Guha sees agrarianism, scientific conservation, and preservation as the three most prominent strands in the environmental movements that have emerged globally over the course of the last two centuries. 24. I am indebted to Ramachandra Guha for many of these observations, some of which he lays out in Environmentalism: A Global History, and some of which come from a recent conversation. 25. See Gregory Barton, "Empire Forestry and American Environmentalism," Environment and History 6 (2000): 187–203; William Beinart and Peter Coates, Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995); Ravi Rajan, "Imperial Environmentalism or Environmental Imperialism?: European Forestry, Colonial Foresters and the Agendas of Forest Management in British India, 1800–1900," in Grove et al, Nature and the Orient, 324–71. 26. On the work of the U.S. Forest Service in the Philippines, see Tucker, Insatiable Appetite. On Mead's career, see Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Sarah Phillips traces Bennett's influence on South African dryland farming practices in "Lessons from the Dust Bowl," Dryland Agriculture and Soil Erosion in the United States and South Africa," Environmental History 4 (1999): 245–66. In my own research on Panama, I discovered that Bennett wrote several soil reconnaissance reports for the Panama Canal Zone, the first one in 1912, as well as a book on Cuban soils. See Bennett, The Agricultural Possibilities of the Canal Zone (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912); Soil Reconnaissance of the Panama Canal Zone and Contiguous Territory (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1929); The Soils of Cuba (Washington, D.C.: Tropical Plant Research Foundation, 1928). Sarah Phillips's dissertation-in-progress, titled "Acres Fit and Unfit: Conservation and Rural Development in the New Deal Era," (Boston University, forthcoming) will trace the how the technical expertise developed by New Deal conservation agencies was dispersed internationally during and after World War II. On David Fairchild's work, see his The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer, and Philip Pauly's article, "The Beauty and Menace of Japanese Cherry Trees: Conflicting Visions of American Ecological Independence," Isis 87 (1996) : 51–73. 27. See Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora; Worster, "Two Faces West." 28. See, for instance, Brian Balogh, "Scientific Forestry and the Roots of the Modern American State: Gifford Pinchot's Path to Progressive Reform," Environmental History 7 (2002): 198–225. Beinart and Coates make a similar point in Environment and History, 44. 29. Karen Merrill makes a similar point about historians of the U.S. West in "In Search of the 'Federal Presence' in the American West," Western Historical Quarterly 30 (1999): 449–73. 30. See Rajan, "Imperial Environmentalism or Environmental Imperialism." Rajan argues that the sorts of simplification and social control many have attributed to imperial forestry were an integral part of forestry method as it was worked out in Germany and France during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that forestry did not change that much in the imperial setting, and that colonial foresters often clashed with colonial administrators. For works that use the local level to revise traditional forest historiography, see K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Anand Yang, The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India's Central Provinces, 1890–1914 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). Richard Grove's work has been crucial in suggesting that colonial scientists/conservationists were not merely servants of imperialism, but that they often pointed out the serious environmental consequences of imperial expansion. As such, he sees these figures as early environmentalists. While I am not quite comfortable with this categorization, I do think that Grove's basic point is a sound one—that conservation discourses were often counterhegemonic. See Grove, Green Imperialism. 31. See James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); Morton Keller, "Looking at the State: An American Perspective," American Historical Review 106 (February 2001): 114–18. 32. Karen Merrill has made similar arguments quite convincingly in "In Search of the 'Federal Presence' in the American West." 33. Fairhead and Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Leach and Robin Mearns, eds., The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996); Fairhead and Leach, Reframing Deforestation: Global Analysis and Local Realities: Studies in West Africa (New York: Routledge, 1998). 34. Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). 35. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl; Sarah Phillips, "Lessons from the Dust Bowl." 36. See Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983): 212–314; Marsha Weisiger, "Dine Bikeyah: Environment, Cultural Identity, and Gender in Navajo Country," (Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2000). Beinart and Coates also suggest this comparison in Environment and History, 66–67. 37. Carville Earle offered an interesting variant on this sort of argument in his essay, "The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner: Macrohistory, Agricultural Innovation, and Environmental Change," in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 175–209. See also Jack Temple Kirby, Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). On environmental connections between Africa and the U.S. South, see Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 38. James McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land, 2. 39. Gregory Maddox, "Africa and Environmental History," 163. 40. See Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 41. A good example of this attention to climate in African environmental history is James Webb's Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 42. On this literature, see Helge Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: The Case of Tanganyika (1977; reprint, London: James Currey, 1996); James Giblin, The Politics of Environmental Control in Northeastern Tanzania, 1840–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Giblin, "Trypanosomiasis Control in African History: An Evaded Issue?" Journal of African History 31 (1990): 59–80. The classic in this literature, though it is a dense one, is John Ford's book, The Role of Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: A Study in the Tse Tse Fly Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 43. J. R. McNeill, The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Marcus Hall, "American Nature, Italian Culture: Restoring the Land in Two Countries" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1999). Gary Paul Nabhan has noted a similar belief among the native peoples of the Sonoran Desert. See Nabhan, "Cultural Parallax in Viewing North American Habitats," in J. Baird Callicott and Michael Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998): 636–37. 44.On wildness as a peculiar American attachment connected to our political traditions, see Donald Worster, "Wild, Tame, and Free: Comparing Canadian and American Views of Nature," in Parallel Destinies: Canadian-American Relations West of the Rockies, ed. Ken Coates and John Findlay (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). 45. On preservation as restoration in the U.S. literature, see Justin Reich, "Re-Creating the Wilderness: Shaping Narratives and Landscapes in Shenandoah National Park," Environmental History 6 (2001): 95–117. 46. In his work on Sonora, for instance, Gary Nabhan has shown that landscapes managed by native peoples often supported greater biodiversity than so-called "wild" deserts. See Nabhan, "Cultural Parallax in Viewing North American Habitats," and his chapter titled "Where the Birds Are Our Friends: The Tale of Two Oases," in his book, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982). 47. See Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Linda Nash, "Transforming the Central Valley: Body, Identity, and Environment in California, 1850–1970" (Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 2000); and, elsewhere in this issue, Linda Nash, "Finishing Nature: Harmonizing Bodies and Environments in Late-Nineteenth Century California," Environmental History 8 (2003): 25–52. Margaret Humphreys' recent history of malaria in the United States, though not explicitly an environmental history, does situate this disease in an environmental context. See Humphreys, Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 48. Thomas Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora. 49. Worster, "Wild, Tame, and Free," and "Two Faces West." 50. Beinart and Coates, Environment and History. 51. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods. Quote is from pages 12–13. 52. David Lowenthal's thoroughly rewritten biography, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), has been a springboard for this renaissance. 53. Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: 25–29.

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