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Putting History at the Core: History and Literature in Environmental Studies
Kathryn Morse
Middlebury College
| WHEN ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES PROGRAMS broaden their curricular offerings into the humanities, their first stop is often environmental literature, particularly classics such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Brilliant and compelling, such readings can be easily integrated into a science-based curriculum as a taste of the romantic, moral, and ethical foundations of modern environmentalism. If environmental studies students read only a few books in the humanities, these are certainly good ones to pick. Within some environmental studies programs, however, environmental literature has become an entire course or even a program of its own. At Middlebury College, Environmental Studies (ES) majors have for decades benefited from excellent coursework in American environmental literature and religion, traditionally Middlebury's strengths in the environmental humanities. The program's environmental literature course has long been a "core course," required of all ES majors. American environmental history, on the other hand, is the new kid on the block, eagerly sought and entirely welcome, but only recently considered essential to an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies. There are compelling reasons, however, to put environmental history as well as literature at the core of an environmental studies program, for history offers a broad approach to the complexities of the human relationship to nature quite different from that of most environmental literature. |
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Environmental literature courses consider many of the works of American nature writing that you might expect, works that historians as well as literary scholars love to teach. They include Thoreau, Leopold, and Carson, as well as John Muir's The Mountains of California (or other Muir books or essays), Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, Annie Dillard's, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, the essays of Wendell Berry, and collections such as The Norton Book of Nature Writing. These are all important if not crucial works in the study of American ideas about nature. Environmental historians might well teach about those books without necessarily assigning them as readings, for there are many histories contained within the arc traced by these texts.1 |
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One central theme which runs through these works is what Randall Roorda calls the "drama of solitude," or "narrative of retreat." Born with Walden (though with many deep precedents), such stories of retreat take their narrators on a solitary journey out of society into nature. Alone, and closer to nature, the protagonists give up material comforts in order to critique both society and its material trappings. Lawrence Buell characterizes this literature as "the aesthetics of relinquishment," the temporary giving up, first of material goods, and second, of the separate human self. Along the way, the narrator discovers essential truths within both nature and his own soul, and returns to society with renewed strength. This brings full circle the powerful story of the American soul's purification and renewal in nature.2 |
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The literary narrative of retreat into nature has a firm and important place in American environmental history as well as literature. As an ideological wellspring for colonial settlement, for American Romanticism, and for the wilderness parks movement at every stage, that narrative has constantly shaped and reshaped what Americans have done with the physical world around them. The narrative of retreat is central to American intellectual identity and history. Environmental history, however, offers more than the intellectual layer of history. It connects the history of ideas about nature with the history of Americans' actual physical efforts to transform the earth, and to draw material, social, and intellectual sustenance from the world around them. Rolled together, all of the disaster, change, conflict, diversity, inequality, and historical context that makes up American environmental history brings a powerful complexity to environmental studies. That complexity is crucial to understanding the ways in which human beings have shaped, and been shaped by, the environment over time. |
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Glance at the reading list for many American environmental history courses, therefore, and you find little explicit acknowledgment of the literary narrative of retreat. Literature has works such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; history has smallpox and cholera epidemics, garbage and sewers, imprisoned killer whales, chemical warfare, malls, television, millions of dead birds, and kids with cancer.3 In any given year of my own course that list includes some of the following books: Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, Elinor Melville, A Plague of Sheep, Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, Richard White, The Organic Machine and The Roots of Dependency, William Cronon, Changes in the Land and Nature's Metropolis, Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, Donald Worster, Nature's Economy and Dust Bowl (and many others), Jennifer Price, Flight Maps, and Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action. Other readings and lectures draw on the work of Tom Dunlap, Louis Warren, Carolyn Merchant, Edmund Russell, Nancy Langston, Jay Taylor, Mark Fiege, Susan Davis, and many, many others.4 |
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While as an historian I like reading and teaching these history books and enjoy the ways in which they differ from environmental literature, the real challenge is to find a way to make such books, and the stories they tell, a central part of environmental studies. It can be difficult to sell such historical complexity to undergraduate students steeped in their diffuse environmental romanticism and in search of their own narratives of retreat into an idealized nature. However, books such as these provide environmental studies professors with a fine opportunity to stick up for the complicated and wholly unromantic aspects of American environmental history. |
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First, where literature offers the drama of solitude, history offers the drama of social conflict and environmental chaos. While many of the works of literature mentioned above show individual Americans in quiet contemplation of the world around them, these environmental histories provide a lot of action. Contesting factions take dramatic and transformative action within their environments, from the building of dams to the political and social battles over the consequences of those dams. These stories show not only humans thinking about nature, but also taking action based on their ideas, and then shifting their ideas when faced with the unexpected consequences of their actions. |
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Second, these historical stories, in contrast with many (but not all) works of nature writing, are concerned with conflict and power, particularly inequalities of power. Whether battling over dams or dust storms or air and water, human beings wield power over each other, and over nature, acting out of socially constructed differences of class, race, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Such stories have social meaning for diverse groups of human beings immersed in very diverse environments from wilderness parks to industrial cities. Environmental history is not limited, in its sources, to works of literature, and thus can draw meaning from historical records of any kind, left by the whole range of human groups. Historians can and do give voice to peoples without a published or fully recognized literary tradition. |
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While many works of nature writing were written in the past, particularly in the 19th century, they are often read in literature classes as objects of imitation and personal meaning in the present. Undergraduate students of nature writing often seek to become Henry David Thoreau rather than to understand the world in which he lived and wrote. Students in environmental studies, after all, are not often interested in the past. They are interested in the environmental crises of the present, and in future solutions to those crises. Students often look to Thoreau's Walden in the hope that a 19th-century reflection on farming and fishing might offer solutions to the problems of the 21st century. They seek Thoreau's relevance to the present without an understanding of the context in which he wrote. And, of course, they are interested in their own personal narratives of solitary retreat, their own ventures to cabins in the woods. |
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In contrast, as a third strength, environmental history offers the full historical context for the American narrative of solitary retreat in to nature. Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac is more fully understood, and made much richer, by the work of historians Louis Warren, Susan Flader, Paul Sutter, and Curt Meine, who have carefully crafted an understanding of the world in which Leopold lived and worked. John Muir's writing unfolded within a particular political and cultural context, which is brought to life with particular power by Stephen Fox, Michael Cohen, Mark David Spence and others. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring seems all the more revolutionary and powerful in light of the history told by Tom Dunlap in DDT and by Edmund Russell in War and Nature.5 |
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The literary narrative of the individual American in contemplation of nature is a rich one, but it is not the only story to be told. Environmental histories tell other stories as well, filled with drama and conflict, inequality and power, context and complexity. Such stories enrich the teaching of environmental studies in any classroom. |
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Notes
1. Works of environmental literature mentioned here include: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854); Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford, 1949); Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: Century, 1894). Also see collected works in John Muir, Muir: Nature Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997). Also: Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903); Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Viking, 1977); Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002); Robert Finch and John Elder, eds., The Norton Book of Nature Writing (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
2. Randall Roorda, Dramas of Solitude: Narratives of Retreat in American Nature Writing (Albany: SUNY Press), 1998; Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapter 5.
3. I am exaggerating for the purpose of argument. There are works of environmental literature which offer stories of environmental degradation and complexity, including Silko's Ceremony and Carson's Silent Spring. At the same time, many of these works of history do analyze the American narrative of retreat as one of the many cultural forces shaping human interactions with nature.
4. Works of environmental history mentioned here include: Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: The Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1987); Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995); White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983); Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991); Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977; 1994); Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Encounters with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999); and Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action (New York: Random House, 1995). Also Thomas Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Dunlap, DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Louis Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Edmund Russell, War Against Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1996); Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1999); Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000); Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
5. In addition to work noted above, these books include: Susan Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude Toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974); Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launches the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002); Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981); Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
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