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Doing Environmental History in Environmental Studies Programs: Introduction
Marcus Hall
Swiss Federal Research Institute
| ENVIRONMENTAL CLASSES AND PROGRAMS are infiltrating universities and colleges. The main drive behind this environmental push has apparently come from the students and teachers themselves who see these new educational offerings as ways to address dire local or global concerns, while bridging disparate academic fields and connecting ivory tower to work and dirt. As early as the Sanibel Symposium, a major 1998 meeting of environmental program leaders, the number of environmental programs across North America had more than doubled in just ten years, with related departments and institutes becoming established in all continents. A more recent survey conducted by Macalester College revealed that in the United States alone, some 380 institutions of higher education house 671 environmental programs that enroll at least 65,000 students, if all heads could be counted. And ready or not, history is becoming part of environmental programs where it is increasingly seen as the key humanities topic in a curriculum dominated by the social and natural sciences. As a result, more history instructors are showing that resource management and pollution have histories, as do ecology and environmental politics, along with environmental topics in law, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and economics. Every environmental issue has a past. Exploring these pasts may provide greater educational breadth and depth, while offering insights to resolving even intractable environmental problems.1 |
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But how is one to teach and practice history in environmental programs? Most participating students and faculty still consider their main concern to be biology, or perhaps policy or technology. The enormity of the term "environment" has led academics to use more limiting terms, with environmental science now the most popular program label, followed by environmental studies and environmental engineering. Yet whatever the label, few of these programs currently reinforce the notion that our environment may be as historical as it is biological. In fact, the Macalester study showed that only four percent of American environmental programs provide equal time to humanities, including literature, philosophy, and art, as well as history (although the inclusion of teacher training programs in environmental education would increase this percentage). So even while history seems vital to a better environmental understanding, it is still not a meaningful part of most university programs established for educating students about and preparing them for careers in the environment. There may be the special challenge in redirecting the worried, forward-looking stares of environmental students and staff toward the methodic, backward-looking analyses of historians and the history-minded.2 |
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However much slighted in environmental studies program, environmental history is one of the new histories that arose in the 1970s. Its rise parallels both the environmental movement and the university environmental program movement, and it is now taught in most large history departments and many small ones. It is even earning space in new survey history texts. Environmental historians now meet at annual conferences and publish in specialty journals on a variety of topics concerning humanity's past relationships with the natural world. These historians not only trace the environmental movement that helped nurture their field, they also examine changing concepts of forests and frontiers, expose unforeseen results of early resource laws, show how market forces forged country as well as city, and reveal how privileged or marginalized groups modified (and were modified by) the land that sustained them. With an outpouring of impressive scholarship that appeals to wide audiences, some environmental historians are finding undergraduates majoring in environmental programs to be among their most appreciative audiences.3 |
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The widely interdisciplinary nature of environmental history means that its practitioners are striking up new conversations within and beyond the history department. A few "closet" environmental historians are even joining departments of forestry, geography, anthropology, as well as environmental programs. But because universities are held together by departments, few departments can afford to lend out their environmental historians to environmental programs, at least for very long. Turf struggles, whether over teaching or over research, are recurring dilemmas in environmental programs, and environmental historians can find themselves in the middle of such struggles. A national PKAL curriculum workshop noted that it may be unwise or simply unfeasible for disciplinary faculty to divert much effort to environmental programs. Funding agencies, moreover, may not yet have a place for environmental history.4 |
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But even if historians can surmount the institutional challenges of crossing disciplines, there is the next difficulty of convincing environmental and environmentalist students to take history seriously. While most of these students eagerly read selected passages from John Muir or Aldo Leopold, they may be less willing to confront the harder challenge of placing such thinkers in the political and intellectual climates of the 1890s or 1930s. George Perkins Marsh can make ponderous reading for a budding conservation biologist. Meanwhile, a discussion about fossil pollen grains or tree rings may tax a history major who may be quite uninterested in historical ecology, or who may be quite unconvinced about the explanatory power of microbes, meteorology or municipal waste. Heterogeneous subjects attract heterogeneous classrooms, and dealing with so many different kinds of students is enormously challenging. Historians who teach in environmental programs must remember that their students signed up for "environment," not history. Consequently, a good first class meeting in environmental history might show that the one category is inseparable from the other. |
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There is also the perennial complaint that environmental programs are often too broad to offer students significant employable skills. Critics may also say that environmental science, for example, is a watered-downed version of general biology. Yet history students and instructors (hardly strangers to warnings about inadequate job training) will have ready answers for those skeptical about bringing history into the environmental curricula. They can point, at a bare minimum, to the gains in analytical thinking and clear writing that follow any conscientious historical study. Indeed, because most environmental programs currently offer only superficial opportunities to hone language skills or refine text analyses, adding coursework in history and its cognate fields would seem to provide crucial opportunities for improving the verbal skills useful in any job market. Because students of the environment seem committed to broad-based learning and are heading toward employment or post-graduate study that will benefit by a broad education, there is reason to wonder why environmental history is not already better established in environmental programs—especially in those labeled "environmental studies"(ES). One suspects a bit of false advertising because of 139 approved ES programs—this label suggesting the broadest study of the environment—only 26 actually require significant coursework in environmental humanities.5 |
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Outside the United States, environmental history is still rare in environmental programs, in large measure because both fields are still so new, at least by name. The French Annales School, for example, with its affinity for "total" history that includes considerations of the material environment, should offer an important precedent for environmental history. Yet the intellectual descendant of this school of history in France and across Europe rarely participate in programs of environmental studies, which are most commonly termed "sustainability studies" and focus on environmental planning and economics. Yet with globalization rolling forward, there is little question that history and historians outside of North America will soon be playing bigger roles in environmental studies departments and their equivalents. Just as there are ever more self-labeled environmental historians overseas, there are more American environmental historians pursuing international topics. Even understanding the events of September 11th may require looking at the material intersection of history and the environment. After all, past access to and distribution of such resources as arable land, fresh water, and petroleum would seem to merit special attention in exploring the schisms arising between West and Mideast. |
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The authors of the following essays each have rich experiences working to combine history and environmental studies in the classroom. Collectively, their sample of stories and perspectives seems to support the claim that environmental history—with its methods and its scholarship—can provide strong bridges between diverse environmental fields. Brian Black outlines how environmental history can bring this coherence to undergraduates who study ES; Kathryn Morse explains how history can supplement and occasionally supplant literature in ES courses; and Mark Stemen shows how history can have practical applications in ES, as when students consider ways to repair and restore degraded lands. Critics sometimes point out that short budgets and short time-frames mean that many environmental programs have become a cobbling together of unrelated courses, each with a claim to the environment: "My hunch," warned a participant of the Sanibel Symposium, " is that in most cases university environmental programs are primarily a loosely connected set of courses which are packaged and treated as a coherent environmental curriculum." The following essays suggest that doing environmental history in environmental programs can go a long ways in providing that coherence sought by environmentally concerned students, administrators, and citizens.6 |
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Notes
1. For an excellent
curricular discussion about environmental studies, see "Proceedings
of the 1998 Sanibel Symposium: Academic Planning in College and
University Environmental Programs," edited by Peter Blaze Corcoran,
James L. Elder, and Richard Tchen (with an Afterword by Anthony
Cortese), at <
http://naaee.org/publications/symposium98.pdf
> on Jan. 16, 2003. The best statistical survey of environmental
programs is Aldemaro Romero, Amandea Stern, and Kathryn Benz,
"Not All Are Created Equal: An Analysis of the Environmental Programs/Departments
in U.S. Academic Institutions Until March 2001," Macalester College
Environmental Studies Program, Table 1, at <
http://www.macalester.edu/environmentalstudies/newsletter200011.htm
> on March 19, 2002. The principle organizations devoted to promoting
environmental studies in higher education include: HENSE (Higher
Education Network for Sustainability and the Environment), NAAEE
(North American Association for Environmental Education), ESAC
(Environmental Studies Association of Canada), NEES (North East
Environmental Studies Group), and in Europe there is the EEE~n
(European Environmental Education Newsletter).
2. Romero, et al.
(2001), Figure 4. See also "Breadth vs. Depth: How to Develop
a Solid Environmental Studies Program," PEW Curricular Workshop,
Macalester College, April 7–9, 2000, at <
http://www.macalester.edu/~envirost/pew
> on Dec. 7, 2001.
3. See also Mart A. Stewart, "Environmental History: Profile of a Developing Field,"The History Teacher 31:3 (May 1998): 351–68.
4. "Education in
the Context of Local/Regional Environment," PKAL Workshop Report,
Columbia University (Biosphere 2 Center), Jan. 7–9, 2000,
at <
http://lists.pkal.org/curricul/environm/biosphere2/
> on Dec. 11, 2001.
5. Romero, et al. (2001), Table 1.
6. "Proceedings of the 1998 Sanibel Symposium...," p.49.
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