American Environmental History Research Articles

Martin V. Melosi, Water in North American Environmental History

Martin V. Melosi, <i>Water in North American Environmental History</i>

Note from the Editors

Previous articleNext article FreeNote from the EditorsMark Hersey, Stephen Brain, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyreMark Hersey Search for more articles by this author , Stephen Brain Search for more articles by this author , and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMuch has changed about the practice of environmental history since it emerged as a self-conscious discipline in the last decades of the twentieth century. As it expanded in influence, it pushed beyond the boundaries of North America, influencing historiographies around the world, while the traditions of other continents shaped the field’s approaches to, understanding of, and indeed the very questions it asks about the historical relationships of people to the other-than-human world. At the same time, however, even as methodologies have evolved, the approaches of the earliest environmental historians continue to exert a strong appeal. This issue captures both the continued influence of the founding generation of environmental historians and the impressive methodological and geographical diversity that has come to mark the field.This issue begins with a memorial of Angus Wright, whose pioneering work helped move Latin American environmental history into the main currents of the broader field. The two essays that follow—a reflection by Peter Alagona, Mark Carey, and Adrian Howkins and an article by Philip Slavin—reflect the legacies of the field’s early efforts to engage with science. In their appeal to environmental historians to seriously consider (and esteem) coauthorship, Alagona, Carey, and Howkins encourage environmental historians not only to rekindle the relationship with science that animated many of the field’s foundational works, but to push the relationship further through enhanced collaboration with scientists. Slavin, who has frequently partnered across disciplines in precisely the way the reflection asks, brings new scientific discoveries to bear to shed light on the origins of the Black Death. Much as William McNeill did in the 1970s, Slavin seeks to leverage cutting-edge scientific techniques not merely to answer long-standing questions but to open new lines of inquiry.Articles by Viktor Pal and Michal Pospiszyl set their sights on countries heretofore little studied by environmental historians. Pal’s piece about recycling in socialist Hungary draws attention to the way that Cold War political dynamics created new spaces for environmental protection while simultaneously undermining those very efforts. Pospiszyl’s essay takes as its subject early modern Poland—a country just beginning to develop a domestic cohort of environmental historians—and, like Pal, shows how foreign ideas about environmental management blended with domestic politics to reshape both the actual and the political landscape.Moving back across the Atlantic to North America, William Knight and Kiethen Sutherland explore failed post–World War II experiments to introduce new species of salmon to northern Ontario. While previous historians have noted the unintended outcome of those experiments (in the inadvertent introduction of pink salmon to the Great Lakes), Knight and Sutherland turn the focus to the experiments themselves, highlighting the troubling colonial assumptions that undergirded them.The book reviews in this issue continue to showcase the global nature of the field and the diversity of approaches in it, offering assessments of titles that range from microhistories to sweeping systemic accounts. As is often the case, many reviewers commented upon the utility of the books under consideration for the undergraduate classroom.We also want to formally welcome Fraser Livingston, a newly minted PhD whose research centers on the longleaf pine forests of the southeastern United States, to the editorial team as the journal’s social media coordinator. We’re eager to work with him to call attention not only to the work of the journal but to that of environmental historians around the world.By the time this journal appears in print, the ASEH will have met in Boston for its 2023 meeting, and many of the journal’s readers will be preparing for conferences in places as far flung as Osogbo, Nigeria; Melbourne, Australia; Michoacán, Mexico; and Bern, Switzerland. We encourage you, as always, to look for us (or a member of our editorial board) there. We’re always happy to hear about your projects and do what we can to foster the growth of the field around the world. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ahead of Print Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 28Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723891 Views: 28Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 21, 2023 © 2023 Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos after Zapata, 1920–1940

There is a voluminous literature on Zapatismo during the Mexican Revolution. There is far less, however, on postrevolutionary Zapatismo, especially its hydraulic dimension. After all, the Zapatistas did not just demand land; they also demanded water, without which land was useless for agriculture. And in so doing, Zapatista villagers changed their relationship not only to their environment but also to the federal government.This is the story that Salvador Salinas ably tells in Land, Liberty, and Water. The book builds on a growing historiography focusing on water and revolution in modern Mexico, most notably the scholarship of Alejandro Tortolero Villaseñor, who has also worked on Morelos. Salinas draws on environmental history to show how pueblos exercised their newfound political power acquired through the 1910s Zapatista war for “land and liberty” in order to ensure continued access to critical natural resources, especially water, in the 1920s and 1930s (p. 4). He makes clear that Zapatista villagers “were not protoenvironmentalists with romantic views of the wilderness” but rather “tended to express a pragmatic and evolving view of the environment that sought to balance exploitation and conservation” (pp. 19–20). Unsurprisingly, with economic recovery exploitation trumped conservation, prompting the federal government to mandate conservation measures. But, as Salinas demonstrates through various examples such as deforestation caused by charcoal production, the federal government was frequently unable to enforce such measures.A particularly valuable chapter of the book is on the little-known history of rice production, which sustained an alternative livelihood to larger-scale sugar production. Salinas argues that a “hydraulic revolution” in irrigation made the expansion of a “rice bowl” in Morelos possible. Interestingly, he describes rice as a “democratic crop that supported both the commercial and subsistence economies of the villages” because of villagers' ability to negotiate prices and make it more “accessible to all social classes” (pp. 132, 142). Yet, in the end, rice remained a luxury item in Mexico despite villagers' ability to make rice more accessible. The crop also brought an ecological side effect: an increase in malaria, thanks to the ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes that the Morelos climate and rice paddies in particular created. As a result, the federal government undertook, with the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation, a largely top-down public health campaign to eradicate malaria from rice-growing areas.Salinas's book is insightful and reveals fascinating new material about postrevolutionary Morelos, but his approach to environmental history leaves much to be desired. First, though Salinas cites numerous major works of Latin American environmental history in a footnote, he does not furnish his own definition or conceptualization of environmental history, either more generally or in a Latin American (much less Mexican) context (p. 188n7). Second, though he argues against Eric Wolf's notion of “closed corporate peasant communities” and rightly points out that pueblos were not necessarily conservationist vis-à-vis natural resource management, there is relatively little discussion about divisions within pueblos regarding access to and distribution of resources (p. 15). Third, there is surprisingly no mention either of Mexico's principal federal forester and conservationist, Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, or of Indigenous perspectives on nature, even though both were very influential in Morelos's environmental history.Finally, the last chapter, on the 1934–38 revolt of Enrique Rodríguez (whose nickname was the Noodle), is somewhat disjointed from the other chapters, abruptly shifting the book's focus to a single individual's struggle against the Lázaro Cárdenas government in defense of “agrarian self-reliance, traditional chieftainship, and [pueblos'] religious liberty” (p. 145). While Salinas contextualizes the history of the Rodríguez revolt within the pueblos' environmental and political struggles discussed in the first two chapters, this last chapter is based on a previously published article in the Journal of Latin American Studies. It is of course perfectly fine to incorporate previous work, but for the sake of the book's narrative cohesion, it might have been more fruitful to just reference the article and instead extend the history of the pueblos beyond 1940. For if, as Salinas convincingly argues, postrevolutionary pueblo dynamics in Morelos changed considerably during the 1920s and 1930s, then surely the industrialization and urbanization that greatly accelerated after 1940 transformed the pueblos even more dramatically—particularly their environment.Overall, notwithstanding these criticisms, Salinas's book not only makes an important contribution to modern Mexican history but also makes for illuminating reading for an upper undergraduate course or graduate seminar on the history of Mexico, Zapatismo, water, and agriculture.

The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History

Book Review| January 01 2021 The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History Jedediah S. Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey, eds. The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. Camden Burd Camden Burd Reviewed by Camden Burd is an assistant professor of history at Eastern Illinois University. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Rochester, where he specialized in American environmental history. His environmental history scholarship has been published in The Michigan Historical Review as well as The Conservative Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest (University of Kansas Press, 2020). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Mormon Studies Review (2021) 8: 162–168. https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.8.2021.0162 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Camden Burd; The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History. Mormon Studies Review 1 January 2021; 8 162–168. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.8.2021.0162 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMormon Studies Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Putting the Intellectual Back in Environmental History

At its birth, American environmental history had strong connections with intellectual history. Books such as Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind and Donald Worster's Nature's Economy made the rise of preservationist and ecological thinking central to the field's early identity. But during the last several decades, as intellectual historians have engaged in their own soul-searching, American environmental historians retreated from engagement with intellectual history in favor of a “cultural turn.” In some ways, this retreat was surprising, because environmental historians became more circumspect about the very approaches that intellectual historians were questioning in their own scholarly practices: whether we could generalize from elite sources, disengage ideas from their social or cultural contexts, separate out a distinct intellectual realm and its exemplary intellects from histories of popular knowledge, or locate such a thing as an “American mind.” The second generation of American environmental historians continued to study environmental ideas, of course, but with less willingness to venerate canonical environmental thinkers and more interest in how American ideas of nature were socially and culturally constructed. As environmental historians became more critical of environmentalist ideas—finding in them signs of class position, racial formation, consumer status, and uncritical borrowings from science—we tended to become suspicious of the realm of ideas in general. Despite these parallels within our fields, the moment compelled environmental historians to turn away from intellectual history. One sad result is that environmental historians do not seem to have stayed abreast of intellectual historiography. Another, if my cursory review of this journal's recent tables of contents is any indication, is that environmental topics seem peripheral to the field of intellectual history. For the sake of both fields, it's time to restore the fragmented habitats that have isolated our subdisciplines.

Crucible of the Modern Republic: The Yosemite Grant and Environmental Citizenship

The Yosemite Grant, which established the basis for the state, later national park in the central Sierra, initiated a powerful new force that constituted a tipping point in American environmental history, Jen A. Huntley argues. A moment in US history when the right combination of people and politics and ideas hit a nerve in the broad social psyche of a time and launched a new environmental understanding.

The Gyre Narrows, Again: Vernacular Buildings, Vernacular Landscapes, and Environmental History

The Gyre Narrows, AgainVernacular Buildings, Vernacular Landscapes, and Environmental History Michael J. Chiarappa (bio) While in graduate school, I listened to Henry Glassie’s lectures on Ireland’s vernacular landscapes and read about them in greater depth in his book Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community. Those familiar with this work know that its ethnographic depth is largely attributable to Glassie’s intimate immersion in the vernacular landscape. But since its publication thirty-eight years ago, I have often been struck by what I see as one of its most overlooked contributions to those who study every day buildings and everyday landscapes— its ecological resonance. Whether he is describing the repair of thatched roofs, the burning turf fires in houses, or the spatial logic of farmsteads nestled amidst undulating hills and the nearby lough, each feature assists in calibrating the bodies of Irish men and women to the biological rhythms and physical constraints of nature. When Charles W. Joyner— a historian and folklorist— assessed Passing the Time in Bally menone, he titled his review essay “The Narrowing Gyre,” inverting the frayed societal sensibility William Butler Yeats expressed in the line “the widening gyre” from the poem “The Second Coming” to praise Glassie’s ability to intellectually reconcile disciplines, a step in getting us to the heart of buildings’ uses and meanings.1 Joyner pointedly identified nature in this enterprise, citing a line from one of Glassie’s endnotes: “For I begin at texts [material and nonmaterial], at forms created by the people themselves, and move through them to the culture and the environment, and swing from the culture and the environment back to the texts . . . attempting to gain some understanding of the world as viewed from Ballymenone.”2 Such sentiment emerged from the influence of a line of thinking shaped by geographers and historians who made environment central to their inquiries of cultural landscapes: Carl Sauer, Fred Kniffen, E. Estyn Evans, and W. G. Hoskins. Perhaps most telling, Glassie’s ecologically-charged handling of Ballymenone’s wrought setting conveys a place that breathes, “where environment is inherently useful, and the human task is to discover through work the logic of its construction,” where organic, biological cognizance is honored in the measured crafting of “smooth meadows, trim hedges, trees in a line, crisp white houses arranged on a green field: the landscape of farmwork is a work of art.”3 But for me, the “narrowing gyre” was only beginning to take shape as I sought greater insight into how I might find congruence between the fields of vernacular architecture studies and environmental history. Coinciding with Glassie’s handling of landscapes in Ulster— and critically influenced by it— Robert St. George’s essay, “ ‘Set Thine House in Order’: The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England,” although rarely acknowledged as such, framed the treatment of vernacular architecture in terms that squarely connected with the concerns of American environmental historians. For St. George, the seventeenth-century New England landscape emerged from a view of nature deeply dialectical in scope— a divinely held notion of the “immanence and utilitarianism” contained in God’s earthly bounty. Belief in the perfectibility of nature forged a paradoxical [End Page 1] view that runs through the American vernacular landscape to this very day, one where, in St. George’s examination, the yeomanry embraced “the philosophical conservation of resources” and, at the same time, “their sanctioned exploitation.” Glorifying God’s design of nature meant understanding it. Collapsing disciplinary boundaries, St. George noted that “man learns the most about nature and God’s universe when he alters it” through artifice, and that “Puritans legitimized their mission as they symbolically broke open their landscape. As a result, the yeoman could improve his lands, build miles upon miles of stone walls, and turn trees into towns, while still heeding the words of his minister as he urged the detailed study of nature.”4 Such interpretation of vernacular landscape redounded with the emerging tide of American environmental history scholarship, and, perhaps not surprising, corresponded with another work dealing with the same region— William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology...

Reconstrução dos eventos e documentos da institucionalização ambiental em Moçambique

o presente artigo apresenta a reconstrução histórica dos eventos e documentos que caracterizaram a institucionalização do ambiente em Moçambique, entre 1980 e 2014. Inicialmente, apresenta a metodologia que orientou o artigo e debates teóricos, estabelecendo diálogo entre a História Ambiental da América Latina, abordagens pós-coloniais e Sociologia do Conhecimento. Na sequência, apresenta os eventos que delimitaram a dimensão local dos riscos ambientais, e documentos que marcaram a visão global destes.&#x0D;

Nature's Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park by Mark Kinzer

Reviewed by: Nature's Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park by Mark Kinzer T. Robert Hart Nature's Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park. By Mark Kinzer. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 308. $39.99 ISBN 978-1-61117-766-4) Located southeast of Columbia, South Carolina, Congaree National Park has never attracted the visitor numbers associated with larger, more recognizable parks such as Yellowstone or Yosemite. Likewise, historians have overlooked the park, despite its role in preserving the largest remaining stand of old-growth floodplain forest on the East Coast. The first monograph on Congaree National Park, Nature's Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park, provides a welcome addition to the historiography of national parks and American environmental history. Moving chronologically, author Mark Kinzer traces the history of human impact on the area now known as Congaree National Park. The Native American presence was light and seasonal, Kinzer notes, with the most intensive activity coming during the Mississippian era and in the form of firing the forests to remove underbrush and drive game. Colonial Americans raised livestock and cut cordwood during the eighteenth century; they also grew indigo, corn, cotton, and rice. As Kinzer argues, however, plantation agriculture was never intensive because of the precarious nature of planting crops in a floodplain. Relying heavily on estate sales, deeds, plats, and ledger books, Kinzer demonstrates that Congaree plantations served primarily as auxiliary enterprises for Lowcountry elites interested in supplying their more lucrative lands near the coast. Two planters, James Adams Sr. and William Weston III, attempted to reclaim the swamp but failed, leaving only some old dikes as a legacy. Kinzer devotes the last two of his eight chapters to the impact of industrial logging on the park. Though some South Carolinians (most notably James A. Peterkin) conducted small-scale timber operations along the Congaree River during the late nineteenth century, heavy logging came with Francis Beidler's arrival in the 1890s. A wealthy lumber magnate from Chicago, Beidler formed the Santee River Cypress Company with partner B. F. Ferguson to harvest old-growth bald cypress on the Santee and Congaree Rivers. Having halted its operation after World War I, the Beidler family began logging its Congaree lands again in the late 1960s. This move sparked a grassroots movement to save the Congaree forest. Surprisingly, Kinzer devotes minimal attention to this movement, which led to the creation of Congaree Swamp National Monument in 1976, redesignated Congaree National Park in 2003. Kinzer's failure to include the post-1960s history of the park is perhaps the one weakness of this otherwise well-researched and detailed study of Congaree National Park's human and environmental past. General readers may find the meticulous attention to land use and property transactions tedious, but Kinzer makes clear that this material is not simply academic. The National Park Service Organic Act tasked the National Park Service (NPS) with preserving nature "unimpaired," but how can this goal be best accomplished in a park that has a [End Page 137] history of human impact? Moreover, how can the NPS determine whether historic disturbances were the result of human or natural forces? These are the questions that inform Nature 's Return. And for this reason, Kinzer balances archival research with tree-ring and soil studies, forestry reports, and personal observations to provide answers. The evidence is not always clear, Kinzer admits, but he argues that natural disturbance has contributed more to the Congaree's forest composition than has human disturbance, and visitors looking for a "window onto the past" are likely to find one, even if "it is one with a number of wavy and clouded panes" (p. 192). T. Robert Hart University of North Carolina Wilmington Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Aguzar la mirada colectiva, el gran desafío de la historia ambiental latinoamericana

Este ensayo propone que el gran desafío de la historia ambiental latinoamericana es alterar el panorama de la historia de la región, haciéndolo más completo y preciso, no solo para los historiadores ambientales sino para todos. La inclusión del medio ambiente en la historia permite examinar desde nuevos puntos de vista viejos problemas históricos, así como proponer nuevos temas de investigación. El reto entonces no se centra tanto en identificar vacíos en el campo de la historia ambiental, sino en buscar estrategias para permear la lectura general del pasado regional. El texto revisa la trayectoria de la inclusión de temas ambientales en la historiografía colombiana e invita a los lectores a escribir monografías contundentes, hacer trabajos comparativos y buscar socios dentro y fuera de la academia para así construir una visión del pasado más compleja, nítida y colorida, y lograr una mejor comprensión de nuestra realidad actual.

Fashion Forward? Reflections on the Environmental History of Style

Fashion—the never-ending remaking of the style of goods—has become a major driver of environmental destruction. Yet environmental historians have written little about that destructiveness. This essay explores the significance of fashion in American environmental history. Fashion began to shape the American landscape in the late 1500s when growing European demand for stylish hats inspired a 300-year-hunt for beaver in the New World. In the twentieth century, Americans were critical in the rise of the modern fashion-driven economy, where style is part of the marketing of everything from automobiles to smartphones. Now the United States is one of the centers of a global movement to make fashion sustainable, if that is possible. Because understanding fashion requires considering what motivates consumers, this essay sheds light on the environmental history of consumption, still a relatively neglected subject. It also raises new questions about the prospects for greening capitalism.

Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896

The sprawling volumes in the long-running Oxford History of the United States series are intended to serve as comprehensive surveys for a general audience, a task at which Richard White's nearly thousand-page chronicle of the postbellum decades admirably succeeds. But the main interest of such syntheses for historians lies in their reconsideration of the master narratives that organize divergent developments at multiple levels into a cohesive account of American society as a whole in a pivotal period, constructing a framework for past scholarship and a platform for future work. The author's previous field-shaping studies of Native American history, Western history, environmental history, and business history make him well-suited to offer an overarching understanding of an era of climactic upheavals in all of these realms: the age of the last Indian wars and the extensive development of the Great Plains, the slaughter of the buffalo and the industrialization of agriculture, unprecedented class warfare, and the ascendance of big business, along with the meteoric career of Reconstruction and the violent restoration of white supremacy in the New South.

DOCUMERICA and the Power of Environmental History

DOCUMERICA and the Power of Environmental History

Species Complex: Classification and Conservation in American Environmental History.

How does the classification of biological organisms shape efforts to conserve them? This essay addresses this key question through the scientific, administrative, and legal histories of steelhead and rainbow trout. Members of the diverse salmon family, these two fish have different life histories and physical appearances, but since the 1930s scientists have considered them the same species. Over the past 150 years, however, their histories diverged. Today, rainbow trout are bred by the millions in hatcheries and are among the world’s most common and widespread fish, while steelhead are listed as threatened or endangered all along the West Coast of the United States. Their remarkable story shows that conservation is not merely a political struggle over things that exist in nature; it is a perennial competition to prove the existence and define the very nature of those things that are the focus of such struggles. Biological taxonomy and classification are central to these debates, as they are to environmental history and the history of science more generally.

Moral Ecologies: Conservation in Conflict in Rural England

The collision between ‘official’, elite and state-sanctioned conservation schemes and those reliant on the use of the land and its resources for their livelihood has long been a touchstone of North American environmental history. In the still emergent environmental history movement in the UK, however, such concerns remain obscure. This paper offers a departure. Drawing on Karl Jacoby’s concept of ‘moral ecology’ developed in the context of dispossessions enacted in the making of US national parks, the paper examines three ‘moments’ when, in the name of ‘conservation’, elites attempted to delimit and restrict customary ways of being in rural Gloucestershire. In so doing, the paper not only shows that such schemes were resisted and were a critical way in which demotic-elite and local-central relations were shaped, but also that externally imposed conservation schemes placed nature-culture relations as a critical wellspring of protest and politics in the countryside. Moral ecology therefore allows for a close attention to the importance of the material – and discursive framings of the material – in the study of conflict and protest past and present, and forces historians of the countryside to take seriously the ways in which vernacular environmental ethics shaped both past landscapes and social relations.

Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies. By Thomas G. Andrews

Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies . By Thomas G. Andrews. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. xi + 331 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $29.95.) In Coyote Valley, Thomas G. Andrews seeks to explain broader patterns of human interaction with nature by delving deeply into the long history of Rocky Mountain National Park’s Kawuneeche, or Coyote, Valley. In doing so, he asserts that exploring the history of a single place over as long a time span as both scientific and historical evidence allow can provide useful and important lessons about the course of American environmental history that broader, more global approaches often overlook. Rather than “passe” or even “parochial,” small-scale investigations … westrec{at}gmail.com

Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America. By Ian Tyrrell.

Ian Tyrrell has long been interested in ways that Americans connect with other parts of the world through nature, whether by importing alien species of trees and plants or ideas about conservation. In this fascinating study, Tyrrell brings his perspective to bear on one of the oldest chestnuts of American environmental history: the early conservation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians have typically portrayed that movement as originating from diminishing forests and wildlife, threats to scenic wonders, and schemes to irrigate the arid West. Tyrrell concurs while also pointing out that the push for conservation gained strength following the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and other areas in the tropical world. The making of the American empire, he argues, greatly shaped how American leaders—notably, Theodore Roosevelt—thought about diminishing forests, minerals, and water sources around the world. Tyrrell traces their thinking with regard to global trends in deforestation, demand for fossil fuels, interest in irrigation, and concerns over public health. In their minds, the time had come for Americans to regulate forests, game animals, and energy sources, but so too ought the rest of the world, not least because American prosperity and imperial power increasingly depended on prudent use of natural resources.

Triangular Landscapes: Environment, Society, and the State in the Nile Delta under Roman Rule by Katherine Blouin (review)

Reviewed by: Triangular Landscapes: Environment, Society, and the State in the Nile Delta under Roman Rule by Katherine Blouin Brendan Haug Katherine Blouin. Triangular Landscapes: Environment, Society, and the State in the Nile Delta under Roman Rule. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xxvi + 429 pp. 14 halftones, 28 tables, 5 maps. Cloth, $150.00. American journalist Hal Boyle is often said to have remarked, “What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.” Restful, perhaps. But the single-mindedness of a river’s flow can also be a source of anxiety. In contemporary America, the Lower Mississippi’s steady westward shift is a prominent example. Were its floodgates removed and the river allowed to “get where it is going,” it would soon abandon the cities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, decimating their port-dependent economies. An awareness of such fluvial hazards has percolated into the study of ancient history over the last decade and a half, and works on the ancient Mediterranean’s riverine environments have been appearing with frequency. As in ancient environmental [End Page 528] history more broadly, Francophone scholars have led the way; Philippe Leveau’s work on the Rhône and the multiple colloquia spearheaded by Ella Hermon are particularly notable (e.g., Philippe Leveau, ed. “Le Rhône romain,” Gallia 56 [1999]; Ella Hermon, ed. Riparia dans l’Empire romain [2010]). On the Anglophone side, Gregory Aldrete’s Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome 2007, Peter Thonemann’s The Maeander Valley 2011, and Brian Campbell’s Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome 2012 are essential. Katherine Blouin’s new study of the Mendesian nome (administrative division) in Egypt’s northeastern Nile Delta unites these twin streams. The book, an updated version of a French dissertation supervised by Hermon, focuses on the changing course and eventual extinction of the Nile’s Mendesian branch, documenting the effects of a shifting fluvial landscape, environmental stressors, and Roman agro-fiscal policy on the society and economy of the Delta during the first few centuries c.e. By merging Francophone scholarship on rivers, theoretical perspectives drawn from American environmental history, and a thorough command of the papyrological evidence, Blouin has made a significant contribution to the emerging field of ancient environmental history. In her introduction, Blouin grounds herself in what Hermon dubs “l’approche écosystémique” to environmental history. Casting aside environmental determinism and lachrymose tales of pristine nature violated (“l’approche égologique”), ecosystems thinking characterizes environments as “dynamic, multidimensional entities made up of a complex amalgam of continuities and ruptures” (7). While humanity is regarded as a constituent element of the natural world, human beings nonetheless possess the ability to adapt natural phenomena in significant ways. Thus, nature’s impacts upon society are never predetermined, for they are always mediated by human decision-making at multiple levels. The rest of the book is divided into four thematic sections. Part I situates the reader within the geomorphological and hydrological contexts of the Mendesian nome and reviews the surviving evidence. Parts II and III reconstruct the landscape and investigate agricultural diversification. Part IV offers environmental perspectives on a fiscal crisis in the late second century c.e. and the famous revolt of the Boukoloi. Synthesizing previous geomorphological and archaeological scholarship, chapter 1 traces the evolution of the Nile Delta from at least seven major branches to the modern two—the Rosetta and Damietta—by the early Arab period, a process significantly abetted by large-scale canalization projects (35). (See also John P. Cooper, The Medieval Nile [2014], who carries the story forward.) In chapter 2, Blouin surveys the archaeological and papyrological evidence for the Mendesian nome. Although excavations at its two ancient metropoleis of Mendes (Tell al-Rub’a) and Thmuis (Tell al-Timai) are ongoing—the latter partly under Blouin’s own direction—their evidence is secondary to her arguments, which depend primarily upon the papyri. This corpus is comprised of some ninety texts spanning the fourth century b.c.e. to the sixth century c.e., the majority...

Old Roots, New Shoots: Early American Environmental History

Some two hundred years before publication of William Cronon's Changes in Land, widely acknowledged text of early American environmental history, Indians in Spanish American borderlands were looking to environment to help interpret history legacv of European-Native encounters.1 In one account, Indians told a hunter who had found a mineral deposit in Spanish Louisiana that ore was the white treasure, and that amongst these mountains of Oar a noise was often heard like explosion of a Cannon . . . which Indians said was Spirit of white people working amongst their Treasure.' A similar tale recounted how uncommon Animal [was] seen by Natives in a lake in . . . New Mexico. It is compared to upper part of body of a Spaniard with his broad brimmed hat. The Indians express a dislike or abhorrence of place . . . assert that departed Spirits of first Spaniards who conquered their Country dwell in lake.3 Such stories record Natives'-or, perhaps, Anglo-American recorders'- enduring associations among death, Spaniards, precious metals, environments where all these things converged. These environmental histories, it seems, offered a fitting lens for interpreting key aspects of early contact era.Why ought environmental historians to pay more attention to early America Atlantic world, why, in turn, should early Americanists (and we define that term in its broadest terms, hemispherically) become more invested in telling stories about ecologies-about plants, animals, rivers, climates, all that? This is question that we asked ourselyes as we proposed organized this special issue of Early American Studies. After all, these are fields that do not necessarily jump to mind as easy allies. Scholars such as Peter Mancall have commented on irregular (if undeniably growing) appearance of environmental history in major journals of early American historv equally rare sightings of early Americanists at venues such as annual conference of American Society for Environmental History.4 Covering a time place before advent of sorts of scientifically minded sources that inform a great deal of more modern environmental historv' without an obvious stake in sort of moral project imagined for environmental historians Avho seek to influence policy public opinion about natural catastrophes both forecast already occurred-who seek nothing less than saving world, according to Donald Worster-studies of early American environments have lacked energy that has made field one of most dA'namic today.5Yet environment mattered to peoples of early America. At most obvious level, this was because they realized their health wealth were caught up in environmental circumstances as diverse as population of white-tailed deer, Avinter frosts, urban miasmas, rising floodAvaters. Decades centuries of priA'ation suffering created colonial communities attuned to local emdronments, millennia of experience created indigenous communities with a deep knowledge of American places. But early Americans' engagement with environment was also narrative historical: they told stories in which relationship between man nature was central to explaining past, present, future conditions of peoples places.This should challenge us as we consider genealogy of environmental history as a practice, for it suggests that environmental history has deeper roots in early American history than might often be appreciated. The standard historiographical periodization of environmental history tends to place its origins in twentieth century or, according to some borderlands scholars, Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis of 1890s. As Alfred Crosby put it, American environmental history got momentum in mid-twentieth century because legacy of Turner thesis had ensured that the historian of frontier was . …

Borderlands of Knowledge about Nature: Crossing and Creating Boundaries in Early America

Histories of nature and the environment have become a vital pathway of historical scholarship, offering richly varied veins of research and interpretation for a wide range of time periods and regions. This issue of Early American Studies brings to light new research on the themes of nature, knowledge, technology, and the permeable boundaries of colonial North America. The articles demonstrate the ways in which the production of knowledge was closely linked to the cultural production of space in different ecological regions and historical periods. These studies bring to our attention different kinds of knowledge and applications of science to the historical creation of borderlands among diverse peoples and physical environments in the Americas. This concluding essay develops these integrative themes, emphasizing the points that constitute a dialogue among them. In addition, it brings to this overview of “the environment in early America” relevant comparative references from Latin American environmental history to illustrate more fully the continental scope of the themes and problems that integrate this issue.