Environmental History - Development of The Subject

Development of The Subject

The questions posed and themes covered by environmental history date back to antiquity: historians have always included the effects of natural phenomena on human affairs. Hippocrates, ancient Greek father of medicine, in his Airs, Waters, Places, asserted that different cultures and human temperaments could be related to the surroundings in which peoples lived. However, the origins of the subject in its present form are generally traced to the twentieth century.

In 1929 a group of French historians founded the journal Annales, in many ways a forerunner of modern environmental history since it took as its subject matter the reciprocal global influences of the environment and human society. The idea of the impact of the physical environment on civilizations was espoused by this Annales School to describe the long term developments that shape human history by focusing away from political and intellectual history, toward agriculture, demography, and geography. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a pupil of the Annales School, was the first to really embrace, in the 1950s, environmental history in a more contemporary form. One of the most influential members of the Annales School was Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), whose book A Geographical Introduction to History is now a classic in the field.

The most influential empirical and theoretical work in the subject has been done in the United States where teaching programs first emerged and a generation of trained environmental historians is now active. In the United States environmental history as an independent field of study emerged in the general cultural reassessment and reform of the 1960s and 1970s along with environmentalism, "conservation history", and a gathering awareness of the global scale of some environmental issues. This was in large part a reaction to the way nature was represented in history at the time, which “portrayed the advance of culture and technology as releasing humans from dependence on the natural world and providing them with the means to manage it celebrated human mastery over other forms of life and the natural environment, and expected technological improvement and economic growth to accelerate”. Environmental historians intended to develop a post-colonial historiography that was "more inclusive in its narratives".

Precursors to environmental historians include Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and even Rachel Carson. Environmental history frequently promoted a moral and political agenda although it steadily became a more scholarly enterprise.” Early attempts to define the field were made in the United States by Roderick Nash in “The State of Environmental History” and in other works by frontier historians Frederick Jackson Turner, James Malin, John Muir and Walter Prescott Webb who analysed the process of settlement. Their work was expanded by a second generation of more specialized environmental historians such as Alfred Crosby, Samuel P. Hays, Donald Worster, William Cronon, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, John McNeill, Donald Hughes, Chad Montrie, and Europeans Paul Warde, Sverker Sorlin, Robert A. Lambert, T.C. Smout, Peter Coates and Jan Oosthoek.