Field Of Environmental History Research Articles

Wilderness and the wise province: Benton MacKaye's pragmatic vision

Benton MacKaye's name is rarely evoked in the fields of environmental history and philosophy. The author of the Appalachian Trail in the early 1920s and a co-founder of the Wilderness Society with Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall in the 1930s, MacKaye's unique contribution to American environmental thought is seldom recognized. This neglect is particularly egregious in the current debate over the intellectual foundations of the American wilderness idea, a discussion to which I believe MacKaye has much to contribute. Specifically, I believe that his pragmatic vision for wilderness conservation, a project supported through an appeal to the values of a reconstructed "indigenous" communal environment, owes much to the social philosophy of Josiah Royce, MacKaye's former teacher at Harvard. While the Appalachian Trail never delivered on MacKaye's goals of progressive reform and failed to unite the regional planning and conservation communities of the time, his vision remains highly relevant to our present-day deliberations about the relationship between wild nature and society at the dawn of the 21st century .

Harmaat aallot. Ympäristönsuojelun tulo Suomeen by Simo Laakkonen Sari Laurila Marjatta Rahikainen (review)

584 SEER, 79, 3, 2001 were coopted into governmental positions, leaving a vacuum in the non-state domain of activism. A more Machiavellian story is told by Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen,who argues that West Germans grossly exaggerated the GDR's environmental travailsin order to providejustificationfor shuttingdown existing industryin the East and replacingit with colonial economic investments.Whateverdirty industrythere was, according to the author,was the resultof the initialstages of industrializationin easternGermanyand dependence on lignite,producing effectsnot dissimilarto conditions in the Ruhr or in Manchesterof an earlier period. Positive achievements, such as small and slow cars, household waste recycling, large areas of quiet forestsand lakes, and lack of disposableplastic packaging,have been ignoredby Westerncritics. Certainly,the extreme anti-Communistviews are unbalanced,yet many of the positive featuresBoehmer-Christiansenlistswere more the product of an inefficient, capital-starved economy unable to innovate than of conscious environmental sensitivity. Ultimately, one of the unifyingelements of thiscollection is itsmessagethat the Cold Warcontext caused problemsand theirsolutionsto be posed as a set of unproductivebinarychoices: communism or capitalism,'dirty'communist industry(in the former GDR) or 'clean' de-industrialization,and so on. The editorscall fora Third Way. 'The futureofpoliticalecology lies in constituting a systemic challenge to both free marketorthodoxy and the now discredited centralplanning of ex-actual socialism'(p. 25). In a rich concluding section Tickle and Welsh ponder why the environmental movements of EasternEurope,which had played such unprecedented political roles and which had held aloft the banner of a humane and socially responsive modernity, faded so quickly. Larger exogenous trends, such as globalization and Westernlending policies, they offer,helped to suffocateany incipient social democracy, while at the same time amplifying existing local traditions of patriarchy, civic passivity, and nationalism. The cooption of movement leaders finished the process. The editors are to be congratulated for assemblingthistimely and critical-mindedcollection. Department ofHistory DOUGLAS R. WEINER University ofArizona Laakkonen, Simo; Laurila, Sari, and Rahikainen, Marjatta (eds). Harmaat aallot. rmpdristdnsuojelun tuloSuomeen.Historiallinen Arkisto, I I3. Suomen Historiallinen Seura, Helsinki, 1999. 236 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Price unknown. THE history of environmental problems has only recently been taken up in Finland. One of the projects that has been launched, with funding from the Finnish Academy and the communities involved, is a collaborative, multidisciplinary research exercise investigating the water policies of eight of Finland's largest urban centres. This volume contains parts of the results from six of them. It claims to be a pioneering study in the field of environmental history. The papers collected here are the work of ten separate contributors, REVIEWS 585 but most of the contents are essentially focused on the same questions. The basic subjectmatter is water and sewage, which became problems in Finland forthe firsttime in the nineteenth centurywith the beginningsof urbanization and industrialization. Previous to that period, Finns had been a tiny population inhabitinga largecountry,and living in small,scatteredfarmsand villages. Their water came fromwells, or the nearestlake or stream,and their environment was spacious enough for the disposal of waste to present no problems. They had lived that way for centuries. The research in this study shows how, when such people congregated in towns, they showed little consciousness that water supply or sewage disposal could be a problem and carriedon in the traditionalway. Drinking water came from wells, the waste went into open drains, accumulated solids were removed by horse and cart and in both cases ended up in the nearest convenient open water. The result was cumulative pollution of wells and surface water sources, and chronic outbreaksof water-borne infections such as cholera and typhoid. The effect was compounded since the same waters used for disposal and sewage were also used for bathing and laundering. Further early industrial enterprises assumed as a matter of course a right to feed their effluents into the same water sources. A law of I879 required urban communities to employ their own medical officersand set up Health Boards,and environmentalawareness developed in Finlandthroughtheirwork. By the i88os, recent medical discoveries about bacteria, and how their presence in waterwas linkedto pollution of the water suppliesand the spread of disease were known in Finland as were the techniques available for providing a reliable supply of clean water and, from the i89os they were...

Considering the Nature of Wilderness

Roderick Nash helped to define the field of environmental history with his 1967 book, Wilderness and the American Mind . Nash’s work examines the transition of American attitudes toward wilderness from hostility to recognition of the need to create and protect wilderness as places where humans may go but should not stay. This piece considers both Nash’s work and the continued relevance and impact of his ideas. The objective way Nash describes wilderness as a pristine place through much of his work has become increasingly problematic as scholars consider the ways in which humans construct and reconstruct different and often contradictory conceptualizations of nature. Although Nash’s work does not definitively explore the idea of wilderness and its modern significance, it does provide a foundational consideration of the way Americans have interacted with the concept of a reality not modified by human industry, culture, or technology.

Expedient Environmentalism: Opposition to Coal Surface Mining in Appalachia and the United Mine Workers of America, 1945–1975

Environmental historians have only just begun to incorporate the ideas and efforts of American workers and farmers into their narratives. According to the still-prevailing interpretation of environmental politics, conservationism was a movement of elite experts, and modern environmentalism a product of the post-World War II suburban middle class. Samuel P. Hays has argued that conservationism emerged at the turn of the century as the result of efforts by government officials and scientists to manage natural resources more efficiently. Environmentalism, on the other hand, developed in the years after World War II as a result of new interest in quality-of-life issues, expanding material affluence, increased leisure time, and rising levels of education, all of which brought new values into politics. These concerns and values were rooted in middle-class suburbia, and to the extent that others also demonstrated an environmental sensibility, the environmental concerns worked their way from the middle levels of society outward.' A few scholars have initiated a revisionist critique of the narrative outlined by Hays as part of a larger effort to bring social divisions, conflict, and equity into the field of environmental history. They have revealed that farmers and workers formulated their own versions of conservationism and environmentalism, grounded in their experiences tilling fields and working in factories. Andrew Hurley, Robert Gottlieb, and Richard Judd argue that the movements of elites and the middle class had resonance and spread outward because farmers and working people were already thinking ecologically or in terms of aesthetics, and because they lived close to the land or endured urban pollution and workplace hazards. A few historians also have concentrated specifically on the environmentalism of organized labor and further broadened our understanding of the origins of environmentalism beyond the white, suburban middle class. Most importantly, their work has challenged the idea that an inherent conflict exists between the interests of unions and environmentalists. Scott Dewey, Rosemary Feurer, and Robert Gordon have dis

Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History.

Covering a broad array of topics and reflecting the continuing diversity within the field of environmental history, Out of the Woods begins with three theoretical pieces by William Cronon, Carolyn Merchant, and Donald Worster probing the assumptions that underlie the words and ideas historians use to analyze human interaction with the physical world. One of these - the concept of place - is the subject of a second group of essays. The political context is picked up in the third section, followed by a selection of some of the journal's most recent contributions discussing the intersection between urban and environmental history. Water's role in defining the contours of the human and natural landscape in undeniable and forms the focus of the fifth section. Finally, the global character of environmental issues emerges in three compelling articles by Alfred Crosby, Thomas Dunlap, and Stephen Pyne. Of interest to a wide range of scholars in environmental history, law, and politics, Out of the Woods is intended as a reader for course use and a benchmark for the field of environmental history as it continues to develop into the next century.

Booklist and Notes

Booklist and Notes George Brosi New Releases Aron, Stephen. How the West Was Lost: The Transformation ofKentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996. 285 pages with an index, notes, and illustrations. Hardback in dust jacket. $29.95. In his introduction, Aron, a history professor at Princeton, states, "This book seeks to explain what did not happen: the preservation of indigenous fauna and flora, the coalescence or at least continued coexistence of Ohio Indian and backcountry hunters, the protection of pioneer homesteading privileges...the democratization of legal and political systems, the abolition of slavery..." John Mack Faragher, the author of the definitive contemporary biography of Boone and a professor at Yale enthuses, "This excellent history of early Kentucky resonates with the most important questions in the history of the early republic." Clearly an important work of social history, and especially useful in the new field of environmental history. Berry, Wendell. A World Lost. Washington, D.C: Counterpoint, 1996. 151 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $20.00. "Brilliantly detailed characters and subtle social observations distinguish Berry's unassuming but powerful fifth novel. [Berry] writes with the authority of a man steeped in the culture of a time and place, again the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, familiar to the readers of his previous works...This is simple, soul-satisfying storytelling, augmented by understated humor and quiet insight." —Publishers Weekly. Bial, Raymond. Mist Over the Mountains: Appalachia and Its People. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. 48 pages. Oversized hardback in dust jacket with a bibliography and pictures, some in color. $14.95. George Brosi sells both new and out-of-print books through the mail, and brings a display of books for sale to regional events. His address is Appalachian Mountain Books, Route 2, Whittier, North Carolina 28789. His phone number is 704-586-5319. 73 This fluff-ball book glances over the region with sketchy but sweet commentary, inadequate history, random quotations, and photographs with no locations listed and no photographers credited. Nevertheless it provides a quick, easy, and good-hearted introduction to the region. Bial's other dozen or so trade books and half-dozen or so nonfiction children's books have celebrated the rural Midwest. Garrett, J. T. and Michael. Medicine of the Cherokee: The Way ofRight Relationship. Sante Fe: Bear and Company, 1996. 222 pages, illustrated by Francine Hart and Debi Duke, with a bibliography. Trade paperback. $14.00. J. T. Garrett and his son, Michael, both have ties to the Qualla Boundary in Western North Carolina. This important book emphasizes a holistic approach to healthy living in harmony with nature and includes annotated listings of medicinal plants. Hearn, Chester G. Six Years of Hell: Harpers Ferry During the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. 319 pages with an index and bibliography. Hardback in dust jacket. $29.95. Twenty-eight different commanders controlled Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where the Shenandoah flows into the Potomac, during the Civil War! Nine times the B&O Railroad bridge was destroyed and rebuilt. This well-written and fascinating book begins with John Brown's arrival in town in July 1859 and follows both the civilian and the military life in the area through the summer of 1865. Madden, David. Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. 160 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $19.95. David Madden (b. 1933) is a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, who, before settling in at Louisiana State University in the late sixties, taught briefly at Appalachian State, Centre College, University of Louisville, Kenyon College, and Ohio University. The author of seven major novels , two story collections, eight produced plays and seven books of literary criticism, he has served as editor or coeditor of eighteen additional literary works. For Sharpshooter Madden returns to the East Tennessee setting of four of his first six novels. This novel is the fictional memoir of Willis Carr, a mountain boy who joins first the Union and then the Confederate army. "Madden suffuses the narrative, dialogue and characters with understated thought and emotion so that it resonates like a true story." —Publishers Weekly. 74 Norris, Randall, and Jean-Philippe Cypres. Women of...

Essay Review: Exploring the Borders of Environmental History and the History of Ecology

In 1980, when Raymond Williams’s essay “Ideas of Nature” was published, the field of environmental history was just coming into being, and instead of interrogating the many ways in which humans have constructed nature, American environmental historians were confidently adding a historical dimension to the political reform movement that had inspired their discipline – environmentalism. Like environmental activists, environmental historians relied on the science of ecology to guide their narratives of how human culture was altering nature. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), for example, juxtaposed explorers’ and colonists’ accounts of the landscape with recent ecologists’ literature, which Cronon intended to act as a transparent picture of what the New England landscape, sans human interference, was meant to look like. For Cronon and his fellow chroniclers of human impact on the environment, ecological theories held a status not unlike that which Williams noted had long been enjoyed by nature: ecology was seen as describing the essential constitution of the world, as a sort of transcendent principle, which could be counted upon to measure the degree of human folly in interfering with nature’s essence.

The Venezuelan Andes and the Geographical Imagination

For much of this century geographers have wrestled with concept and significance of region (Hartshorne 1939; Entrikin 1991; Livingstone 1993). Some consider discerning description of areal variation to be geography's raison d'etre; others dismiss regional studies as particularistic, theoretically bereft, and incapable of constituting a disciplinary core. But whether science or art, passe or avant-garde, regions are most common spatial abstraction geographers create. And that act of regional construction illustrates geographical imagination at work.(1) The concepts of region, a contiguous bounded territory, and regionalism, sociological characterization of an area, are a spatial shorthand. Regional tags act to amalgamate vast areas like the Orient or smaller subnational entities such as the Pampas. Regional designations highlight meaningful spatial and social networks, though ignoring troublesome anomalies within constructed areas. Invariably, regions become more than territorial delineations, because generalizations about society and culture are embedded within their boundaries. Geographers' regional imaginings unify social base and geographical imagination, a dialectic of people creating places and places shaping people (Agnew 1982, 159). Regional depictions, crafted with care, affirm power of narrative description lauded by Yi-Fu Tuan as that magical idea that mere words can call places into being (1991, 691). Regional studies have incorporated a full range of epistemological approaches, from natural science, to positivism, to interpretive art (Haggett 1990, 70-94; Archer 1993; Meinig 1983). In some regional writing, naturalism pervades regional discourse and overlooks genetic and structural questions (Pudup 1988, 371). When geographers do consider processes that form spatial aggregations, they generally stress material and economic forces over cultural and social drives (Tuan 1991). They seldom consider regional origins, and interpretive and imaginative processes behind their construction too often go unexamined. Outside geography, regions are typically viewed as unproblematic units that naturally spring forth on maps, in literature, and through casual conversation. Yet common regional labels reflect historical and contingent aspects of their creation. In United States, we travel back and out West; sequence of settlement ordains phrases, even if someone is traveling east for first time or returning to a western home. Exactly where East ends and West begins is less important than is notion of core areas with blurred edges. This example suggests three important aspects of regional construction. First, a popular or vernacular mental map of national subdivisions is often widely shared. Regions may not be real, but at least regional tags are collectively understood. Second, regions exist not just in space but also in time, so regional boundaries and identities change. Third, regional identity depends on existence of other regions. For an idea of East to take hold, a distinctive image of West has to have evolved. A most intriguing - and potentially divisive - aspect of regions is that their creation depends on distinguishing not what holds unit together but what separates it from surrounding areas. Geography may have a bigger stake than do most disciplines in defending chorology, but geographers are not alone in their regional interests. American history took a strong regional turn in 1930s and 1940s. Today regions have a relict status with historians, who are ever more likely to explore questions about gender, class, and ethnicity (Limerick 1996, 84). Still, a small but respected circle of historians continues to explore regional formation and change, especially in field of environmental history (White 1980; Cronon 1991; Ayers, Limerick, and others 1996). Cultural anthropologists, especially in 1950s and 1960s, mapped culture regions as energetically as did geographers, largely along ethnic and linguistic lines. …

Imperial Science Rescues a Tree: Global Botanic Networks, Local Knowledge and the Transcontinental Transplantation of Cinchona

Abstract During the course of the nineteenth century, the rise in the number of British troops stationed in India, along with the increasing number of women and children who joined the colonial administrators, made military and public health a matter of imperial concern. Malaria in particular was responsible for thousands of English deaths. Worried at the South American monopoly over the quinine trade, British colonial administrators and scientists put together an ambitious plan that was to result in the establishment of an enormous global network of exploration, collection and systematisation of botanical knowledge, a centralised array of botanical gardens, and a colonial science of natural resource management. This paper follows the official records of the quinine story, in particular the memoirs of Sir Clements Markham, an employee of the East India Company and an amateur geographer who volunteered to undertake the exploration of the Peruvian forests in search of the cinchona tree. I use the case of the cinchona tree to examine the rhetoric of colonial science in conjunction with its economic and political functions. I suggest that in order to understand how ideas of progress are constituted by historically specific constructions of nature, we can draw methods and insights from at least three fields. I write this from within the field of Science Studies, which I seek to open up to insights from the study of colonial political economy and from the field of Environmental History

Oaks, Wolves and Love: Celtic Monks and Northern Forests

In 1967 Lynn White, Jr., published a controversial paper, Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis'1 which suggested that part of blame for Western culture's abuse of nature lay at door of Christian tradition. Through long scholarly battle precipitated by White's analysis, historians, theologians, and environmental managers have both lauded and condemned Christian writings and attitudes concerning nature. In field of environmental history, academic squabble over worth of Christianity as an ethical basis for environmental management has unfortunately resulted in sweeping summaries of hundreds of years of European and Middle Eastern religious thought and technological development. Dedicated to extracting an overall evaluation of Christian ecotheology, such summaries have paid very little attention to differences among individual religious sects or to social milieus in which they arose. The literature has tended to rely on a few well-known texts, such as first chapters of Genesis, and to dwell on best-known figures and groups, such as Saint Francis of Assisi. The result has been a historiography that dabbles in most accessible literatures and then summarizes information from widely disjunct sources and eras. Most modern students of environmental history are familiar with Saint Francis's The Canticle of Brother Sun and with such stories as Wolf of Gubbio from Little Flowers of St. Francis.2 Fewer are familiar with Saint Antony of Egypt, despite available translations, and only those very conversant in folklore, archaeology, medieval art, or Celtic history are likely to have studied Saint Coemgen (Kevin) or Saint Columban. Eclectic scholarship and lack of interest in primary sources have given false impression that early Christian appreciation of wild nature was isolated and strongly suppressed throughout church. In Wilderness and American Mind, Roderick Nash addresses common misconception that early Christian and monastic interest in nature was limited to a handful of insightful saints. Although Nash recognizes Christian monasticism as a possible exception to supposed early Christian antagonism to wilderness, he suggests, however, that monks paid little attention to their environment and had few, if any, aesthetic concerns. He distinguishes Saint Basil's fourth-century written description of the forested mountain on which he lived as unusual for time because it seems to acknowledge natural beauty in wilderness.3 Nash concludes, On whole monks regarded wilderness as having value only for escaping

Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s

In mid 1930s, North America's Great Plains faced one of worst man-made environmental disasters in world history. Donald Worster's classic chronicle of devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells story of Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms. Now, twenty-five years after his book helped to define new field of environmental history, Worster shares his more recent thoughts on subject of land and how humans interact with it. In a new afterword, he links Dust Bowl to current political, economic and ecological issues-including American livestock industry's exploitation of Great Plains, and on-going problem of desertification, which has now become a global phenomenon. He reflects on state of plains today and threat of a new dustbowl. He outlines some solutions that have been proposed, such as the Buffalo Commons, where deer, antelope, bison and elk would once more roam freely, and suggests that we may yet witness a Great Plains where native flora and fauna flourish while applied ecologists show farmers how to raise food on land modeled after natural prairies that once existed.