Field Of Environmental History Research Articles

From objects of study to worldmaking beings: The history of botany at the corner of the plant turn

AbstractThe “plant turn” of recent years has surfaced as an interdisciplinary position that sees plants as more than inert, passive objects subject to the whims of humans and of more charismatic animal life. Recent research in STEM, the social sciences, and the humanities, alongside scholarly publishing pursuits, have opened a field in which a small yet expanding community of scholars are proposing the worldmaking and agential capacities of plants. While the field of environmental history has already spent decades centering vegetal life and its profound impact on human societies, this essay considers what the plant turn might look like for the history of science and more specifically, the history of botany. What might it mean for plants to transform from objects of study to worldmaking beings in histories of the science? Drawing on two brief historical case studies from the Philippines, the essay invites consideration of plant worldmaking, understood in tandem with alternative ontologies, and of theorizing with plants. Though it may be much too soon to draw conclusions about what the plant turn may portend for the history of science (and the writing that may come from it), historians may have something to offer the plant turn—in discipline and method—in order to make this promising bed of scholarship rigorous and accessible.

A reassessment of source citation issues in The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China by Mark Elvin

Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China is one of the best comprehensive works on the environmental history of China both at home and abroad, and has deservedly garnered much praise. However, the rationality of the sources it cites and the suitability of their application is quite controversial, chiefly centering on how sources in the category of poetry and literature, which are newly drawing attention, can more effectively play a role in the field of environmental history. One of Elvin’s objectives was to outline the true history of environmental development, drawing upon traditional sources from the classical Chinese canons as well as previous Chinese findings, and with respect to the interpretation of specific environmental issues, he essentially realized this vision. However, that he relied solely on interpretations of poetic and literary sources in elevating microcosmic events to macroscopic constructs seems like a stretch, and errors and misinterpretations arising from substituting psychological facts for historical facts are present as well; the addition of “overreaching” value judgments causes him to unwittingly succumb to the pitfall of the theory of linear aggravation of environmental decline. He is not the sole example of such tendencies, which are also clearly reflected in environmental histories of China written by Western scholars, as represented by Robert B. Marks, Elizabeth C. Economy, and so on, and which are in urgent need of correction. Appropriate sources are the basis for an accurate understanding of environmental issues, and objective interpretation is the premise for obtaining rational solutions. Avoiding existing malpractices, transforming the historical sources in various disciplines, and clarifying the place of the “environment” in the past, present and future are still focal points in current research on the environmental history of China.

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat

Reviewed by: Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat Kevin Grove Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South David Silkenat. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. I and 260 pp., figs, notes, bibliog, index. $35.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780197564226) The field of environmental history has often played an influential role in the development of geographic research on human–environment relations. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis and Changes in the Land, for example, helped contour geographic debates on socio-ecological hybridity and the ontological politics of nature during the tumultuous “science wars” of the 1990s and early 2000s. David Silkenat’s Scars on the Land holds similar promise today. Silkenat’s text excavates the environmental impacts of slavery on landscapes and ecologies of the US South, and offers an unwavering emphasis on the need to link environmental destruction to the dehumanizing horrors of chattel slavery, white supremacist ideologies, and opaque practices and landscapes of Black and Indigenous resistance. Much like Cronon’s work three decades earlier, Scars on the Land comes along at a crucial conjuncture in geography — a moment where the broader impact, utility and value of social science and humanities research is being contested and reconfigured. As is well known, calls for a new social contract between science and society have proliferated since the early 2000s, with the demand that science contribute solutions to emergent and pressing social needs. Geography is not immune to these debates. As recent efforts to reorganize the National Science Foundation’s Human-Environment and Geographical Directorate illustrate, some disciplinary colleagues are all too ready to dismiss qualitative and critical geographic research as “unfit” for NSF support on grounds that it does not contribute to solutions-oriented interdisciplinary collaborations (see Grove and Rickards 2022). Given how these directorate changes come on the heels of long overdue interest in Black and Indigenous geographies, the current moment presents geography with a unique problem. Rather than demonstrating the interconnections between nature and society, the challenge is now to excavate how the social production of nature works through the production of racialized difference; and to do so in a way that can speak to novel demands for the social utility of science. Scars on the Land illustrates how interdisciplinary collaborations across environmental history and geography can address both problems. [End Page 215] To be clear, Scars on the Land is primarily written for an audience of historians. As Silkenat explains in the introductory chapter, the text aims to bridge disconnected debates on the social and environmental histories of the American South within the field of southern US history. While the text admirably succeeds in this regard, it perhaps bypasses some opportunities to build bridges with work in other disciplines, particularly research in Black geographies and the geography of the US South (both of which feature prominently in this journal). Its core arguments on the environmental impacts of slavery will resonate strongly with scholars working in fields such as Black ecology and Black geographies, which situate socio-ecological problems in the long history of anti-Black racism and the life-destroying landscapes it produces (Pulido 2002, Wright 2018, Moulton and Salo 2022). Nonetheless, there is much to be gained from a close engagement with Silkenat’s arguments. One major contribution Scars on the Land offers is the robust array of archival materials and secondary sources Silkenat draws on to develop an environmental history of slavery in the US South. Each chapter focuses on a specific environmental attribute, and deftly draws on troves of historical documents to bring to life fragile southern environments, the violent logic of plantation ecology — specifically, its treatment of land and enslaved labor as dispensable and given to free, instrumental use — and its contradictions that created opaque niches of Black resistance and alternative forms of life. Chapter 1 starts from the ground up, focusing on soil. Here, Silkenat introduces the key dynamic between racialized extraction and resistance. On one hand, soil clearly illustrates the plantation system’s compulsive drive to total objectification and consumption of non-white and non-human life. Plantation agriculture cleared forests and overworked fragile soils, creating denuded...

Water, Bodies, Space: New Directions in World Environmental History

Water, Bodies, Space:New Directions in World Environmental History Jack Bouchard Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire. By faisal husain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 278 pp. ISBN 9780197547274. $35.00 (hardcover); $35.00 (ebook). An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic. By kate luce mulry. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 362 pp. ISBN 978-1-4798-9526-7. $35.00 (hardcover); $35.00 (ebook). Mapping Nature Across the Americas. Edited by kathleen a. brosnan. and james r. akerman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. xii + 416 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-69643-0. $70.00 (hardcover); $69.99 (ebook). Sometimes it is the sudden intrusion of new questions, and the unexpected perspectives they offer, into the field of World History which has galvanized efforts to push our work and teaching forward in new directions. What does the Ottoman Empire look like from the viewpoint of a marsh in southern Iraq? How could England's Charles II dream of improving his subject's physical health in eastern England by radically transforming the landscape in which they lived? What does an Indigenous place-name on a European colonial map signify, and what can that tell us about local ecologies? These are some of the inquiries posed by a new generation of environmental historians, and they speak to the potential for their works to change how we study the past on a global scale. We are living through a transformative moment in the field of environmental history. The climate crisis has catalyzed both a surge in interest and a revolution in methods. Not only are more and more [End Page 133] explicitly "environmental history" studies appearing on the market, but increasingly other fields are producing works with an environmental inflection. A proper survey of recent publications in environmental history is becoming increasingly untenable, given the volume of output, such that to understand these transformations it is useful to examine the edges of the field, the places where scholars are pushing into new subject, methods, and conceptual approaches. Three new works offer a snapshot of the evolving field, and its potential to contribute to world history: Faisal Husain's Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire; Kate Luce Mulry's An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic; and Mapping Nature Across the Americas, a collected volume edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan and James R. Akerman. ________ Faisal Husain's Rivers of the Sultan is a wonderful addition to global environmental history, and a welcome contribution to histories of the Mideast and early modern empires. Of the three works, Husain's is perhaps the most explicitly environmental but also the most ambitious in its methods, combining several overlapping environmental history approaches. Rivers of the Sultan explores the history of the Tigris-Euphrates basin from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. As Husain argues, historians have treated these waterways as "dismembered bodies," a practice which flies in the face of science, historical memory, and the behavior of states. This new study instead "[adopts] a hydro-scale that considers the fluvial system as a continuous whole. Unified under Ottoman hegemony, the natural drainage pattern of the twin rivers fostered intimate bonds between upstream and downstream provinces, transporting not only water and sediment but also boatloads of men, guns, and grain that cemented the Ottoman presence in the east" (p. 5). This builds on recent advancements in water history, and a push for more river-stories in our literature.1 Such an integrative approach allows him to explain the ways that regional hydrographies and ecologies were exploited by, and thwarted, the Ottoman state: "From the sixteenth century, Istanbul put this natural [End Page 134] waterwheel to work for the benefit of its imperial project" (p. 3). We are meant to see empire from the perspective of a riverbank, and the view upends how historians have spatially oriented Ottoman history. Husain's work is divided into three parts. Part I, "The Amphibious State," examines the problem of fortification and shipbuilding in the Ottoman Empire and Tigris-Euphrates basin more broadly to understand the practical...

ИСТОРИЧЕСКИЙ ИСТОЧНИК КАК ФЕНОМЕН КУЛЬТУРЫ И ОБЪЕКТ ИСТОРИИ ОКРУЖАЮЩЕЙ СРЕДЫ: К СТОЛЕТИЮ СО ДНЯ РОЖДЕНИЯ ПРОФЕССОРА С.О. ШМИДТА И ПРОФЕССОРА О.М. МЕДУШЕВСКОЙ

Professor S.O. Schmidt and professor O.M. Medushevskaya of decade have worked in Russian State University for the Humanities, and earlier at the Moscow State History and Archives Institute. They have made a powerful contribution to preparation of several generations of experts in the field of the humanities. Article is devoted to the analysis of views of two scientists, in process of development by them of the previous historiographic experience and supervision over changing scientific reality, on a key problem of humanitarian and natural-science knowledge - a historical source as cultural object and object of history of environment, interaction of the person and the nature in historical movement. From definition of historical sources as the material objects created in the course of human activity, to the serving purposes of historical research, obtaining information on the social phenomena and processes, O.M. Medushevskaya has gradually passed to understanding them as real cultural objects which consider from the subject positions natural and the humanities. The concept of a historical source was formed by S.O. Schmidt under the decisive influence of the historical and philosophical-historical concepts of outstanding Russian scientists of the 19th - early 20th centuries, as well as the latest Western European historiography. The formula “historical source-all that exhales historical information”, opened a way to free understanding of a historical material. Historical sources which are really exhaling information on mankind as parts of the nature, allow to find data and on environment history. The co-evolutionary relations of man and nature create the conditions not only for the preservation of civilization in the conditions of the global ecological crisis, but also for ensuring its overcoming. Sources, as direct evidence of these relationships, form a necessary information resource for research activities in the field of environmental history.

Capitalização da natureza e políticas ambientais na Província do Paraná (1854-1865): um retrato dos sentidos de natureza na modernidade

At the end of the 18th century and especially in the 19th, a series of policies was undertaken in Brazil, by the central government, which aimed, in general terms, to curb the depredation of the natural environment. These took the form of: land burning, illegal hunting, irregular fishing and the systematic felling of trees. In this sense, from an epistemological look at Environmental History, we seek to verify how the environmental policies of the Imperial government were present in Paraná Provincial. This research was carried out through the analysis of documentation referring to the official legislation of the time, present in laws, decrees and decisions of the Empire, the Province and the reports of these presidents. In this way, Imperial Brazil is a moment for defining the first legal-administrative bases of the then nascent Brazilian State. That said, thinking about the actions of exploitation of natural resources at this moment becomes relevant insofar as we can understand perspectives of the Brazilian historical formation and the posture of our State and society towards the natural world. Therefore, within our time frame from 1854-1865, this research project seeks to fill the gap in the field of Environmental History in relation to the analyzes of the legislative power. This project proposes to carry out a comparative analysis between the environmental agenda of the central government and that of Paraná provincial.

“Down Beside where the Waters Flow": Reclaiming Rivers for American Studies (Introduction)

Over the past three decades, rivers have become a fascinating and popular subject of scholarly interest, not only in the field of environmental history, where river histories have developed into a distinct subgenre, but also in the emerging field of environmental humanities. In this scholarship, rivers have often been reconceptualized as socio-natural sites where human and non-human actors interact with the natural world, generating complex legacies, path dependencies, and feedback loops. Furthermore, rivers have been described as hybrid “organic machines,” whose energy has been utilized by humans in many different ways, including the harvesting of both hydropower and salmon. Indeed, as several environmental historians have noted, in many regions of the world, watercourses have been transformed by technology to such an extent that they increasingly resemble enviro-technical assemblages rather than natural waterways. Rivers have also been discussed through the lens of “eco-biography,” a term coined by Mark Cioc in his influential monograph on the Rhine River, a book informed by “the notion that a river is a biological entity—that it has a ‘life’ and ‘a personality’ and therefore a ‘biography’.” Quite surprisingly, despite this “river turn” (to use Evenden's phrase), rivers have played a marginal role in recent American Studies scholarship. To address this gap, this issue of RIAS brings together scholars from different disciplines, countries, and continents to analyze a wide variety of river experiences, histories, and representations across the American hemisphere and beyond. Hence the title of this volume, Rivers of the Americas, should be seen as both an allusion to the Rivers of America book series (a popular series of sixty-five volumes, each on a particular US river, published between 1937 and 1974) and as a reminder of the still untapped potential of hemispheric, transnational, and comparative modes of critical engagement with rivers in American Studies.

Fluid Terrains: Approaches in Environmental History

Focusing on a particular environment, the urban wetland, this article demonstrates and examines two different approaches that are emerging in Australian environmental history, and are beginning to play prominent roles in shaping the field. The first engages with postcolonial studies, and the second with more-than-human or multispecies scholarship, perspectives that respond in part to wider environmental and cultural concerns that call for more diverse and inclusive histories that reflect the complex nature of past interactions between peoples and their environments more fully. As we show, their discernibly different genealogies reflect the fluid terrain of environmental history. Here, we engage with these different approaches through two case studies of urban wetlands in settler Australia, the first in Perth, Western Australia, and the other in Toowoomba, Queensland, during the long nineteenth century. We conclude with a consideration of the implications of these genealogies and approaches for the field of environmental history.

Extractivismo marino-colonial. Apropiación asimétrica de recursos marinos en el golfo de California (México) siglos XVI-XXI

En la península y en el golfo de California, el proceso de conquista colonial impuso un proceso de antropización-colonización de la relación sociedad-naturaleza a lo largo del tiempo moderno y contemporáneo. Desde el siglo XVI, este cambio se implementó mediante la inserción de los recursos naturales terrestres y marinos disponibles en el territorio sudcaliforniano en el marco de la Economía Mundo. La península y el golfo de California se vieron sometidos a un proceso, a largo plazo, de saqueo y despojo territorial que denomino “Apropiación Asimétrica” (que se traduce en una línea temporal de cuatro momentos históricos, algunos coetáneos, desde el siglo XVI al siglo XXI). En el primer momento de esta línea temporal, se describe en el texto cómo la Corona transfirió, mediante diversos sistemas de cesión territorial, el control de recursos (perlas, acuacultura, guano, sal, etc.) hacia empresarios privados encargados de extraer el capital natural para comercializarlo en mercados globales entre el siglo XVI y el siglo XX. Esta capitalización/privatización de recursos costeros-marinos a lo largo del siglo XX se evidenció en un proceso de especulación financiero territorial, orientado al desarrollo del turismo de masas como eje del modelo de desarrollo económico (tercer y cuarto momento histórico de la Apropiación Asimétrica que se analiza en el texto. La propuesta de metodología de investigación parte del trabajo que desarrollamos en el campo de la Historia Ambiental, entendida como estudio sobre las relaciones entre sociedad y naturaleza a lo largo del mundo moderno y contemporáneo, estudiado mediante el análisis de los documentos archivísticos y bibliografía de coetáneos, viajeros o documentos institucionales. Esta propuesta metodológica supone el estudio de los cambios territoriales, ambientales y socioeconómicos junto al impacto de los mismos en el capital natural del territorio sudcaliforniano, procesos que generan conflictos y luchas contra el extractivismo y despojo como modelo económico. Desde el campo de la Historia Ambiental, el concepto de extractivismo es definido como transferencia de bienes naturales de manejo comunitario hacia la esfera del mercado, enajenados los pueblos y beneficiados sectores empresariales con este proceso de privatización. De igual manera, el concepto de apropiación asimétrica implica la identificación de cómo la transferencia verificada mediante el extractivismo y despojo territorial impacta sobre la arquitectura del modelo de desarrollo económico generando episodios y realidades de injusticia ambiental, dando lugar a importantes desequilibrios territoriales. Estos desequilibrios territoriales tienen una matriz histórica que la Historia Ambiental permite narrar como un contínuum, pero que como práctica de colonización del territorio llega hasta inicios del siglo XXI como demuestra el estudio del impacto del capitalismo financiero en Baja California.

Introductory Note to Bibliography of Atlantic Canadian Environmental History

Introductory Note to Bibliography of Atlantic Canadian Environmental History Teresa Devor Hall (bio) THE FIELD OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY is still relatively young in Canada, where scholarship explicitly focused on the mutual relations of humans and the rest of nature only became firmly established in the 21st century.1 Yet Canadian historical geographers and historians had already established traditions of inquiry into the relations between people and natural environments. For example, scholars analysed the development of modern Canada in the context of staple trades and the role of hinterland and metropolis in the distribution of resources, population, and finance.2 This bibliography recognizes a lineage of “environmental (or environmentally aware) history in Atlantic Canada” in its tracing of three generations of scholarship, starting with texts by William Francis Ganong, Harold Innis, Arthur Lower, and Andrew Hill Clark.3 Early works tended to treat nature deterministically, as a backdrop or obstacle presenting limits to human will and action, or as primarily a source of staples such as codfish and lumber, rather than as dynamic partner in the making of human communities, industries, and daily life.4 The next generation of scholarship represented in this bibliography emerged in the 1970s. Researchers sought to understand the transformation of particular spaces (geographical), places (cultural), and structures (economic and political) in Atlantic Canada while engaging earlier work and exploring the larger implications of close, bounded studies.5 Some practitioners, including historical geographer Graeme Wynn, described the transformations that humans wrought to the [End Page 163] landscapes that sustained them. But environmental history was not a significant area of exploration for historical geographers or other scholars of the region.6 This bibliography is, primarily, a testament to the f luorescence of environmental history within regional scholarship over the past two decades. Scholars continue to build on the themes and approaches in previous writings while drawing on new intellectual frameworks, and responding to contemporary ecological, scientific, cultural, social, economic, and political developments. These texts reflect theoretical work, including American historian Donald Worster’s tripartite explanation of the field as focusing on “nature, socioeconomic relations with nature, and intellectual and cultural relations with nature.”7 The latter two categories are especially well-represented in the historiography, much of which focuses on fishing, agriculture, and forestry. Most of the French-language Acadian history titles in the pages that follow centre on these three areas of study. Yet regional scholars have also made significant contributions to topics in environmental history, including national parks and heritage sites, environmental movements, natural history, the ecological knowledge of Indigenous and settler inhabitants, transportation, cultural representation, and climate history.8 This predominantly English-language bibliography represents a preliminary survey of over 100 years of inquiry into nature-society dynamics in the region’s past. The author’s choice to cast a wide net in the search for titles reflects a desire to represent the living environmental history of the region’s inhabitants, many of whom have a deep lived experience of interdependence with nature. The inclusion of titles in popular history, Indigenous history, and natural history demonstrates approaches and topics that can effectively foreground our mutual interrelatedness.9 A broad conceptualization of the field thus offers practitioners [End Page 164] innovative strategies and insights.10 Furthermore, the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission require that scholars of the regional past recognize and seek to repair the silences perpetuated within our disciplines. For those of us of settler ancestry, this includes creating opportunities for Indigenous people to speak – within and beyond the academy. The 2020s mark a social-ecological conjuncture of epic proportions. The architects of the United Nations Paris Agreement on climate change inform us that human actions in this decade will be decisive in setting a course for the future of life on Earth.11 Researchers in social and natural sciences refer to the current era as the Anthropocene to demarcate the high degree of human influence on the composition of the Earth and atmosphere.12 Students of the emerging field of planetary health argue that environmental degradation creates the context for novel pandemics such as COVID-19.13 Research into past relationships between people and the rest of nature, and the broad dissemination...

Nothing New under the Sun? George Perkins Marsh and Roots of U.S. Physical Geography

U.S. geomorphologists and biogeographers often cite early theoretical roots dating back to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exemplars such as Powell, Gilbert, Cowles, and Clements, or earlier European contributors like Hutton, Lyell, von Humboldt, and, of course, Darwin. Yet reviews of our intellectual roots often overlook an early and important U.S. contributor: George Perkins Marsh. Marsh’s work on Man and Nature is more often cited in the field of environmental history, where it is appropriately noted as a prescient review of human impacts on the landscape. We suggest, however, that his significance extends beyond early environmental activism and that in fact Marsh describes many concepts and analytical approaches that continue to underlie modern geomorphology and biogeography. Moreover, Marsh’s ideas and approach presaged fundamental concepts central to our current study of the Anthropocene and coupled human–environment systems, as he emphasized interconnections among biotic, geomorphic and human elements, perhaps most notably with regard to impacts of deforestation on flood regimes. There is, therefore, much to learn from Marsh—both about early thinking in physical geography and about the depth of scientific analysis underlying our discipline’s early interest in human impacts.

Far from heaven, Grounded on Earth: Environmental (In)justice in South Korea

For years we have been developing several research projects in the field of environmental history, paying special attention to studies on environmental conflict. This look towards the resistance in defense of the territories, assumed by NGOs, researchers, academics but, in a special way, civil society that suffers the impact of industrial processes. The set of extractive activities carried out by industrial consortiums with the permissiveness of governments has consequences on the living and health conditions of the population as a whole. The historical processes of colonial appropriation of natural and energetic resources, at the service of a voracious capitalism or in its Chinese side, have turned each human activity into a new commodity. Extracting, Appropriating and Circulating energy and matter on a global scale has enormous consequences on the local population as well as on the structures of Metabolic Systems/Processes and sustainability on a global scale. Methodologically we use the tools provided by the EJOLT project (www.ejolt.org) to apply it in a decolonial key and proceed to apply the research in non-Eurocentric contexts. With this article we laid the foundations of research in the field of political ecology on environmental conflicts, putting as a novelty the application of research in the field of Asian studies, in its most innovative aspect as is the case of Korea. 

Clarence Glacken: Pioneer Environmental Historian

Abstract Clarence Glacken's magnum opus Traces on the Rhodian Shore, first published in 1967, was an intellectual history about ideas of nature and culture from ancient Greece to the end of the eighteenth century. The Professional Geographer called it 'One of the best and most important books published by a geographer in the English-speaking world in the last hundred years'. Traces remains in print five decades after its initial publication, and is regarded as one of the foundational classics in the field of environmental history. Glacken himself is considered a path breaker in the discipline and is read widely by environmental historians. Little, however, is known about this pioneering scholar and especially, that he was prolific in his later years, having written an unpublished (and lost) sequel to Traces, and a full draft of another book. Drawing extensively upon the Glacken archives at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, this paper describes his intellectual evolution as a scholar, and explores his contributions to the field of environmental history.

The Wardian Case: Environmental Histories of a Box for Moving Plant

Abstract The Wardian case was a simple box that had major ecological impacts. It was invented in 1829 and allowed for the successful shipping of live plants between many countries and continents. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, humans using Wardian cases facilitated major plant migrations across the globe. As a result humans have overtaken earth processes as the largest mover of vascular plants on the planet. Boxes and cases have largely been neglected as important movers of species and ecologies; with a focus on the Wardian case this essay offers a unique contribution to the field of environmental history. It also positions the importance of the case in contemporary discussions about the movement of plants in the Anthropocene.

Environmental History and World History: Developments in Congruence

Abstract Patrick Manning, in his book Navigating World History, suggests that world history “has the potential to become a scholarly nexus linking many fields of study” that will enable historians to escape the “national paradigm that continues to constrain most studies in humanities and social sciences.” This article will test Manning’s proposal in the developing field of environmental history by examining the topics of panels and papers selected for the annual conferences of the American Society of Environmental Historians in the years following the 2003 publication of Navigating World History. Environmental history has evolved to enlarge its lens of analysis to span both borders and time frames. Born with a strong interdisciplinary base and shaped by works that straddle world and environmental history, the field has had a natural affinity with world history. Increasingly, research topics have served to blur the line between environmental and world history.

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.

Trends and potential expansions in the environmental histories of British Malaya

AbstractThe field of environmental history has been incredibly useful in further understanding the British Empire. Studies of Empire have explored a myriad of areas and intellectual themes, these encompassing political, material, and cultural environmental histories. Nonetheless, new trends in the field have yet to be applied to the region of British Malaya, where issues of colonial development such as those pertaining to cash crops, mining, and forestry remain the primary focus. The study of cultural environmental history, or how nature has been represented in various media, remains under‐explored. Given the potential of British Malaya in contributing to cultural environmental history and vice versa, the following article provides an overview of British Malayan environmental historiography and suggests a number of ways in which it can be expanded. Additionally, it offers a brief example of how texts such as historical novels might be read as an alternative source.

Yaron Ayalon, Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire: Plague, Famine and Other Misfortunes

Yaron Ayalon’s book fits into the field of environmental history with its focus on the phenomenon of natural disasters which has its own genealogy of historical studies. As works that look into climate, water and irrigation, pollution, animals, and other issues related to rural or urban environments are proliferating, topics on disasters such as fires, earthquakes, famines, epidemics, and floods are increasingly becoming attractive for academicians. A reason for this attraction should be the fact that the moment of a natural disaster is usually the peak of a process produced by the inter-relationship between nature and society. This usually violent moment is indispensable for understanding how the environment affects human society and vice versa.

The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast by Andrew Lipman

Reviewed by: The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast by Andrew Lipman Stephen McErleane (bio) The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast. By Andrew Lipman. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xix, 339. $38.00 cloth) What if we considered the contested coastal region between seventeenth-century Plymouth and New Amsterdam “not just as part of the continent but as part of the ocean?” (p. 1). And what if we saw the territories of New Netherland and early New England as “overlapping maritime zones with a shared history rather than as discrete territories with separate pasts”? (p. 4). Andrew Lipman offers answers to these questions in his Bancroft Prize–winning book The Saltwater Frontier. Part “borderlands” or “frontier” history and part “Atlantic” history, The Saltwater Frontier’s reach spans the width of the Atlantic, [End Page 269] concerning itself not only with the interactions between Indians and Europeans in the American Northeast but also with the movement of Indians eastward across the ocean. As Lipman cautions, the “saltwater in this book’s title is not strictly literal.” It “refers to the many kinds of maritime and Atlantic connections—cultural, political, martial, ecological, and material—that formed this borderland that was not entirely based on land” (p. 5). Employing a source base composed largely of published transcriptions and translations, Lipman explores these oceanic links in six roughly chronological chapters, covering the period from pre-contact up to 1750. An epilogue then brings the narrative into the nineteenth century. What emerges is a violent tale of colonization with “saltwater as the primary stage of cultural encounters” and Native peoples at its center (p. 7). In keeping with recent scholarship that portrays Indians as active participants in the shaping of colonial societies, Lipman asserts that historians have given the sea prowess of Natives short shrift, largely missing their crucial role in shaping maritime colonial encounters and their subsequent influence on the whaling industry. Taking a cue from the field of environmental history and its tendency to challenge conventional spatial frameworks, Lipman envisions the Atlantic coast between Cape Cod and the Hudson River as a continuous borderland. He contends that historians have needlessly placed New Netherland, New England, and the region’s Indian sachemships into “artificial frames,” studying them in isolation (p. 22). Not only did this meandering shoreline have “a nearly uniform climate and range of land and marine species,” Lipman asserts that the “colonial bounds were shifting and porous, unable to contain either people or events” (pp. 22, 4). A key example is the intersection of the Pequot War in New England and Kieft’s War in New Netherland. Not only were these two wars fought on overlapping territories, but they also shared some of the same actors. With a touch of humor, Lipman highlights the English-born, Dutch-trained mercenary who was known as John Underhill in New England but Jan Underhill in New Netherland. As Lipman ably demonstrates, imagined political [End Page 270] borders can act as a barrier to a deeper understanding of a region and its peoples. Meticulously mining the latest scholarship, Lipman brings his work into a conversation with the field’s latest developments, themes that broadly stress agency, interconnectivity, reciprocity, and collaboration. Demonstrating the “communicative codependence” of colonists and Natives, Lipman shows how Indians were not only letter carriers in the service of colonists but also occasionally commissioned letters on their own behalf (p. 172). Indians could also gain power by withholding information, as when the legendary Squanto “began to toy with the flow of information” in his role as an interpreter (p. 101). Lipman has a gift for writing prose that the general reader will appreciate, though uninitiated readers may miss the extent to which he has framed his arguments historiographically. Conversely, many readers already familiar with early American historiography will be delighted with Lipman’s ability to weave various threads into one largely compelling narrative. A third group who are not yet convinced of the merits of such a broad historiographical framework will undoubtedly see Lipman’s highly acclaimed book as a new battleground and a reliable sign that reports of the death of...

Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History by Nathaniel Osborn

Reviewed by: Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History by Nathaniel Osborn Christopher M. Church Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History. By Nathaniel Osborn. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. xii, 210. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-6161-0.) Rejecting the declensionist narratives pitting humanity against a pristine environment that often characterize environmental histories, Nathaniel Osborn deftly explores the ecological history of Florida’s Indian River Lagoon—a water system along Florida’s Treasure Coast once teeming with wildlife but now plagued by algae blooms and lesioned fish. Osborn describes the lagoon as “a complex system that has at various times been conducive and hostile to animal and plant health” (p. 3). Central to his story is the interaction of humanity with this ecosystem from the pre-Columbian era to the present. This environment engendered conflict between Native Americans and Europeans and, eventually, boosters and settlers. The Indian River ecosystem provided as often as it took away, and Osborn’s central point is that humanity does not stand apart from nature. Humans are not external destroyers of pristine systems but are part of, and contribute to, nature’s roiling instability. As Osborn explains in chapter 2, the waterway has always been unpredictable. The lagoon’s location at the boundary between salt water and the inland watershed, as well as between Florida’s subtropical and the South’s temperate climate, has historically led to massive plant and animal die-offs due to wide swings in salinity and temperature. In a departure from fellow Floridian historians such as David McCally and Jack E. Davis, who have suggested that restoration efforts could return Florida’s waterways to some Edenic state, Osborn shows that no original state existed to which one [End Page 192] could restore the Indian River Lagoon. As an interstitial ecosystem, the waterway has shifted and changed, with and without the interference of humanity, over centuries. Osborn does not lose sight of the ecological impact of humanity, however, whose movement from a transitory to a sedentary lifestyle and concomitant population growth amplified the lagoon’s instability. In his treatment of the region’s industrial and commercial development in chapters 3 and 4, Osborn situates these historical developments as internal to the system rather than as external influences, arguing that Anglo settlers’ ambitions to exploit the region’s fantastic aviaries and fisheries influenced the lagoon as much as the settlers themselves were influenced by the environment. Perversely, it was precisely settlers’ attempts to stabilize the inherently unstable hydrologic system that sapped it of its health. Ultimately, the story takes a tragic turn in chapter 5, when rapid postwar growth, spurred by air conditioning and insect control, hastened the lagoon’s deterioration and dramatically altered its nature through residential construction and gentrification. With an eye toward the region’s several failed remediation projects, Osborn concludes with some difficult and rather fatalistic questions about how and whether humanity can fix a permanently transitional ecological body. Somewhat dismally, he offers no clear solution. Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History makes interventions that are well established within the field of environmental history, and though they bear repeating for Florida, Osborn’s work is generally light on historiography—he does not note the important work of William Cronon or William M. Denevan on the myth of pristine nature, for instance. Nevertheless, Osborn’s work speaks to current political discussions in Florida; his prose is accessible to nonspecialists; and his claims are firmly established through governmental reports, contemporary periodicals, published primary sources, and the substantive use of secondary literature. Osborn also does an admirable job pulling together insights from a variety of disciplines, namely, archaeology, geography, and environmental science. At just over two hundred pages, Indian River Lagoon does not dwell on any one topic for long, but it is nonetheless a clear, succinct look at the mutability of Florida’s wetlands that should be of interest to a general educated public and be particularly well suited for use in undergraduate classrooms. Christopher M. Church University of Nevada, Reno Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association