Which World Is with Us? A Tocquevillian View on American Environmental History

Abstract

“Theworld” is not something “out there,” something separate fromhuman actors; “theworld [is] with us,” according to Paul Sutter. The title of his article perfectly captures the shift toward “hybridity” in American environmental history. “Man and nature” and nature and culture are no longer polar opposites; over the last few decades they have merged in environmental historians’ understanding. Sutter has done an excellent job of reviewing the literature, categorizing different types of histories, identifying historiographical developments, and analyzing the narratives and engagements of environmental historians in the United States since the 1990s. Sutter’s observations about the moral implications of the concept of hybridity are particularly perceptive. Indeed, once the line between human actors and nature is blurred, the concept of responsibility for the environment seems to lose its force and vitality. How can environmental historians draw moral lessons from their stories if humankind, together with all other organisms on this planet, is entangled in a complex web of mutual dependencies, exchanges, and movements? The epistemological dilemma at the core of Sutter’s essay is, to a large extent, an American dilemma. From a Tocquevillian (detached, non-U.S.) standpoint, American environmental historians’ achievements over two generations are truly amazing. Their research has branched out in many directions, often through the adoption of insights from other disciplines. Americans are the inventors of the field of environmental history as it is known today. They are the creators of powerful narratives that demonstrate how human activity and production have dominated and destroyed the natural world, and they have complicated these narratives in very imaginative ways. Both the declensionist plot (the story of the destruction of “pure nature”) and the more recent and sophisticated “hybrid stories” (with nature as a persistent force in humanized settings) appear to be very American; in other parts of the world there has been less interest in “unoccupied” spaces, with research focused instead on dense settlements and scarce resources, and with environmental history writing being less reflexive and more empirical. The dilemma of hybridity is rooted in the