Writing the Columbia Guide to American Environmental History has afforded me the unique opportunity to review and synthesize developments and resources in this relatively new and dynamic field. Environmental history emerged out of 1960s concerns over the impacts of pesticides, population, urbanization, and technologies on the environment. Propelled by popular interest in the state of the environment following Earth Day 1970, many people began rethinking the relationships between the environment and academic fields such as history, ethics, political science, and economics. The American Society for Environmental History was founded in 1977, a year after the journal Environmental Review (subsequently called Environmental History Review), which merged with Forest History in 1996 to become the journal Environmental History. A second journal published in England, entitled Environment and History, was launched in 1995. As the field has continued to grow, articles pertaining to the history of the environment have appeared in many journals and magazines. The Columbia Guide to Environmental History presents a survey of the field that includes an overview of topics and themes, a compendium of persons, concepts, and laws, a chronology of major historical events, and a guide to additional resources. No book of this type can ever be complete in light of the many topics and resources that continue to emerge in the environmental history field, and difficult decisions have led to what is included in this volume.
Although the final product published here is my own, I would like to thank the many persons who have made substantial contributions to the outcome. I owe much to the inspiration and careful guidance of my editor, James Warren of Columbia University Press, editor in chief of the Columbia Guide series, and to Joshua Lupkin, Nickolas Frankovich, and Leslie Bialler for editorial assistance.
The final draft of the book was prepared at the National Humanities Center and I am grateful to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for supporting my work there as a fellow in the ecological humanities. Jessica Teisch compiled the bibliography, incorporating materials she had prepared for the National Humanities Center with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under a grant from the Committee on Research of the University of California at Berkeley, Alison Lozner compiled materials for the topical compendium, bibliographical essay, and the visual and electronic resources sections. Valerie Peters and Joshua Volz contributed many of the details in the chronology and William Yaryan, Earth Trattner, and Yvan Chantery assisted with materials included in the historical overview of topics and themes and in the sections devoted to visual and electronic resources. Celeste Newbrough prepared the index with funding from the University of California at Berkeley’s Committee on Research.
I would like to thank Shepard Krech III and Timothy Silver, colleagues for three different summers in the Nature Transformed seminar at the National Humanities Center, for their ideas, careful reading, and many suggestions for the historical narrative. I would also like to thank my students and teaching assistants in my course American Environmental and Cultural History, taught since 1979, for their ideas and contributions to the intellectual content and methodology of the course and the field. I am indebted to my partner and husband, Charles Sellers, whose inspiration and intellectual contributions over many years have played a major role in my interpretation of American history and to whom I am deeply grateful for reading, editing, crafting, and rethinking portions of the historical narrative. Final responsibility for the content of the book is, of course, my own.
CM
Berkeley, California