Seeing Beyond Culture

Abstract

The centerpiece essay began as a brief paper for a Social Science History Association session, chaired by Robert Swierenga, on connecting ecology to rural history; only later, at the request of this journal's editor, did I try to expand it into a broader statement on environmental history, and then I never intended to make it a definitive survey or a critique of my colleagues. My purpose was merely to indicate some of the big doors environmental historians ought to be opening, although I did immodestly tend to point most strenuously to those doors leading to my own recent work on the nature-agriculture connection. Now with these excellent commentaries included, the field is indeed more adequately characterized, and it should be far more obvious why it is stirring up so much excitement. There are many fundamental, and huge, questions being asked, and they are questions that ought to interest all historians. A decade or two ago, when environmental history was just beginning to take form, all the prominent scholars were writing histories of environmental policy, ideas of nature, and conservation reform. They gave us many stimulating works, but I felt the field was starting off too intellectualistically, too homocentrically, and that it needed to locate some clear, distinct ground of its own; otherwise, the new field would never be able to claim an identity of its own, never expand our understanding of causality beyond human agency, never really challenge the ethical imagination of our time. Since then each of the authors in this round table has helped correct those deficiencies by bringing in the world of nature as an active agent in shaping the past. Each has at the same time managed pretty well to integrate the ideal with the material. Unlike William Cronon, I don't think we have overlooked or neglected the role of ideas; for example, his book, Changes in the Land, offers a superb analysis of economic ideas, notions of property, and the commodification of the environment in early New England.1 All of us have made the point that there are and always have been physical limitations and ecological constraints on society; I would single out that insight as the most important one we have to offer. Now, however, what I sense stirring in a few of these replies is nostalgia for that old narrow focus on the self-referential history of human ideas, society, and culture, with its tendency to dismiss nature as a mere epiphenomenon. Cronon's main complaint seems to be that my doorway into environmental history is too constricted in its materialistic emphasis on the idea of modes of produc-