American Environmental History: A New Teaching Frontier

Abstract

Environmental History with the registrar of my university in the spring of 1970. For one thing I thought I was responding to the cries for environmental responsibility which reached a crescendo in the first months of that year. I also felt good about helping make the university, and particularly the Department of History, more responsive to the problems of society. I was, at last, relevant. Moreover, my previous work in American intellectual history, especially the research that led to Wilderness and the American Mind, had familiarized me with the broad pattern of interaction between Americans and their environment.