| ECOCRITICISM AND
AMERICAN environmental history share a common ancestor. Many of
the pioneering scholars in both fields were inspired by such works
of intellectual, cultural, and literary history as Perry Miller's
Nature's Nation, Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, and
Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden. The early issues of
Environmental Review—one of Environmental History's
predecessors—often included articles about literature. Yet
ecocriticism and environmental history have grown apart. Each field
now has its own society and its own journal. To bring the two closer
together, I asked Michael Cohen to reflect on the state of ecocriticism
today. His essay is a wonderful example of scholarly introspection:
He looks critically at the fundamental assumptions of his field.
Paolo Squatriti asks a seemingly
simple question: What were the environmental impacts of a massive
dike constructed by the Anglo-Saxon ruler Offa in the eighth century?
His answers are fascinating. Yet his work is more than a neat
case study. Squatriti invites us to pay more attention to the
environmental history of medieval Europe. Though we might imagine
that the pre-industrial landscape was static, Squatriti writes,
Offa's earthworks make clear that medieval Europeans "lived
in environments that they modified, sometimes spectacularly, and
not always in intended ways."
In a fine contribution to forest
history, Emily Brock considers the first American experiments
in reestablishing forests after clear-cutting. To a large extent,
the experiments of the 1920s and 1930s failed, and Brock argues
that contemporary forest managers can learn from those failures.
Brock's article also deepens our understanding of the history
of ecology, because the early restorationists sought to apply
theories of plant succession and climax to a problem of great
economic importance.
Almost everyone today supports
recycling, yet our opinions of the people who work with waste
often are much less positive. Carl Zimring explores the stigmatization
of the waste trade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Because many of the first scrap firms were run by immigrants,
Zimring argues, the industry's reputation was shaped profoundly
by xenophobia. The early history of the trade was marked by many
efforts—some more successful than others—to establish
waste-handling as a legitimate enterprise. In the 1920s, for example,
the National Association of Waste Material Dealers began to use
conservationist rhetoric. The scrap industry should be part of
our histories of conservation.
In a provocative analysis of efforts
to establish a salmon fishery in Lake Michigan in the 1950s and
1960s, Kristin Szylvian sheds new light on several important topics.
Her work is at once a study of the environmental impact of tourism
and the conflict between recreational and subsistence/commercial
uses of a natural resource. Szylvian also adds to the scholarly
literature on the rise of the environmental movement.
The "Gallery" image is
something new,, and Virginia Anderson's essay is a gem. What can
a seventeenth-century Bermudan coin tell us about the experience
of colonizing a new world? I don t want to spoil the mystery,
so I won't summarize Anderson's argument. You'll just have to
read the essay!
The cover shows two German peasant
women, probably in the winter of 1910-1911. The photograph was
taken by Jonathan Keith Esser, a student at the Biltmore Forest
School, while on a school field trip. The caption—"peasants
carrying fire wood 1 mile"—suggests that Esser was struck
by the distance the women had to go to meet a basic need. Like
the photograph on our January 2003 cover, this image comes from
the wonderful photographic archive at the Forest History Society.
When Kathy Morse and I decided
to use the Esser photograph on the cover, I was planning to end
my editor's note with a call for environmental historians to think
more about the issue of gender. Then, as the deadline for this
issue approached, I got the chicken pox. Luckily, I didn't get
any of the potentially fatal complications that often follow chicken
pox in adults. But I was too tired for several weeks to write
anything. That means I'll have to wait to make my gender pitch.
For now, instead, I can't resist a poxy reflection: There's nothing
like a serious illness to remind us just how complex our relationship
to nature really is.
ADAM ROME
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