American Environmentalism and Environmental History

Abstract

This chapter provides a historical account of the emergence of American environmental history mainly from American environmentalism in the 1960s, traces the transformation of the field to a mature subject asserting how America became the pioneer and trend-setter in the birth of environmental history as a separate discipline within history. The works of environmental historians from early thinkers like Walter Prescott Webb to recent scholars like Donald Worster have been incorporated with an analytical treatment. It captures the South-Asian perspective of looking into and understanding American environmental history bringing out the sharp lines of bifurcation between ‘ecology of affluence’ and ‘environmentalism of the poor’. The chapter finally ends with theorizing what it calls the ‘World Environment History’. Environmental history as a separate sub-set or sub-discipline of history actually emerged out of the growing environmental crisis due to massive industrialization and urbanization that paved the way towards preservationist, conservationist approaches, and environmental movement or environmentalism in the United States. Concern for nature reflected much earlier in the writings of scholars like Thucydides and Herodotus and also in the narratives of Fernand Braudel (Braudel was perhaps the first historian of the Annales school who wrote the history of the Mediterranean world beginning it with a chapter on ‘The Role of Environment’ in 1939), Le Roy Ladurie, Bodin, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, More and Bacon, but there is a need to understand the bifurcatory line between environmental consciousness and environmental history as a discipline. The US was the pioneer and trend-setter in the birth of environmental history as a separate discipline of history with its well-sketched out methodological canon.