| THIS ISSUE BEGINS
with Carolyn Merchant's 2003 presidential address to the American
Society for Environmental History. If we hope to promote environmental
justice, Merchant argues, we need to reflect on the ideas about
race held by earlier generations of conservationists and environmentalists.
Merchant focuses on Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold.
But Merchant also considers Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, and
Zora Neale Hurston.
Dianne Glave explores one of the most important ways African
American women related to the non-human world gardening. After
the abolition of slavery, African American women in the rural
south joined folk traditions and scientific precepts in their
garden designs. Glave's article adds to our understanding of race
and gender in environmental history.
When we want to study changing attitudes toward nature, we typically
look at how people have viewed wild creatures and wild landscapes.
Yet as Peter Baldwin s wonderful article shows we also can learn
much by studying ideas about everyday phenomena. In the late eighteenth
century, Americans were afraid to open windows while they slept
because they considered night air unhealthy. By the early twentieth
century, especially in cities, night air had become something
good: fresh air. That shift in thinking had many causes, including
new medical knowledge, new anxieties about the body, and new respect
for wilderness.
Thaddeus Sunseri's study of colonial forestry in German East
Africa is a fine example of the revisionist power of environmental
history. The creation of forest reserves at the end of the nineteenth
century undermined local economies in many ways. By looking closely
at the social and environmental effects of German forest policy,
Sunseri is able to offer new insight into the roots of a rebellion
that scholars long have considered one of the pivotal events in
colonial African history.
Elena Songster considers the rise of scientific forestry in China.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the leaders of
the new Republic of China saw forest policy as a powerful tool
of nation building. Because the Chinese looked to American foresters
as teachers and models, Songster s article is a contribution to
American as well as Asian forest history.
In the Gallery essay, Robin Schulze discusses a historic photograph
of a Nature Study class. The photograph first appeared in a 1902
book, Clifton F. Hodge's Nature Study and Life, and Schulze argues
that Hodge saw nature study as a critical counter to the growing
virtual quality of modern American life. In some ways, then, Hodge
spoke to concerns that many environmentalists have today. Yet
Schulze makes clear that Hodge and other Progressive-era advocates
of Nature Study were responding to the great social forces of
the late nineteenth century urbanization, industrialization, and
immigration.
The image on the cover of this issue also comes from Hodge's
book. Taken by educator Henry Lincoln Clapp, the photograph shows
a school garden in Roxbury, Massachusetts, circa 1900. Like many
Nature Study advocates at the time, Hodge thought that every school
should have a garden, so that every child could work in the fresh
air and sunshine, with the soil and growing things. Where home
gardens are lacking or neglected, he wrote,, nothing can so awaken
the children to the resources and possibilities of life and nature.
FOR ME, the photographs from the Hodge book are a reminder of
a great scholarly opportunity. Perhaps because we are so predisposed
to think of nature as something apart from the metropolis, we
have not looked in detail at the role of non-human forces and
creatures in the daily lives of metropolitan people. The subject
is rich.
Water is a fundamental element of most urban landscapes, and
we can learn much more about the changing relationships of city
dwellers with their rivers, swamps, and lakes. Though few urbanites
earn their living from the land, many are landowners, and their
decisions about how to use their land have had profound environmental
consequences. Metropolitan residents have lived with pets, farm
animals, and wildlife. They also have warred on a host of pests
from cockroaches to pigeons, from mosquitoes to raccoons. In different
ways at different times, urban and suburban children have found
relatively wild places to play. Though most urbanites now have
little sense of where their food comes from, that was not always
true. In many ethnic neighborhoods in the United States, for example,
families once raised chickens, made wine and beer, and grew produce
in their yards and they observed peasant rituals to mark the passage
of the seasons. Even the meaning of the weather has changed over
time in cities and suburbs.
The more we look for nature in the metropolis, the more we will
see.
ADAM ROME
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