The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History introduces the many dimensions of human interaction with nature over time. As people have lived and spread out over the planet, they have modified its forests, plains, and deserts. Those changes in turn have affected the ways in which people organize their social and religious systems. The Guide offers the reader a brief history of that interaction as it took place in North America; a mini-encyclopedia of concepts, laws, agencies, and people pertinent to the field; a timeline of important events; and a set of print, visual, and electronic resources for further reading and research.
Environmental history is both one of the oldest and newest fields within human history. All cultures have oral and written traditions that explain human origins and encounters with the natural world through stories about local landscapes and ways to perpetuate life from the land. Many cultures developed these early ideas into elaborate oral and written traditions, and finally into modern scientific approaches to explaining and managing the vicissitudes of nature. Religion, science, art, and literature provided ideas as they evolved over time, while records such as calendars, diaries, account books, treatises, and museum collections give access to human practices that modified the landscape.
Environmental history comprises a set of approaches to doing history that brings nature into the story. Natural conditions such as climate, rainfall, terrain, vegetation, and animal life create possibilities for the quality of human life. Human systems of producing and reproducing life over time entail technologies, economies, governance, and social structures. Such systems include gathering, hunting, and fishing; agriculture; and industrialization. These human systems, however, result in a transformed nature, and the character of that transformation is a major theme for environmental history. And, as nature changes, people’s ideas of what it ought to look like also change. For some a vanishing “wilderness” has positive value; for others it is a tragic loss. The character of such evolving ideas and how to implement or reverse landscape changes is another major topic for environmental historians.
Environmental historians ask the following kinds of questions:
• How did American Indians use, manage, and conserve the land?
• What ideas, animals, plants, diseases, and systems of producing necessities were introduced by European, African, Asian, and other immigrants? How did they change the land?
• How did various racial and ethnic groups interact in transforming the various regions of North America?
• What resources and commodities were important in various regions and to various groups of people?
• What kinds of practices, regulations, and laws were used from earliest times to the present to manage the land? (E.g., timber cutting, firewood, fires, water, range, etc.)
• What was the impact of the rise of cities on the surrounding country? What contributions did cities make to resource use?
• What environmental problems were created by urbanization? (E.g., air and water pollution, disease, hazardous wastes, noise, etc.)
• What were the sources of opposition to development? (E.g., the wilderness preservation, resource conservation, and environmental movements.)
• What were some of the ideas driving environmental change? These might include: religion—replenish and subdue the land; stewardship or reverence for nature; manifest destiny; wise use of nature.
• How did past ideas about nature, such as wilderness, the Jeffersonian ideal of farms on the land, concepts of land reclamation, ideas of hydraulic societies, and the aesthetic appreciation of nature help to propel change?
Because of its vast scope, environmental history is very complex. Among the most complicated aspects of the field are the very meanings of terms such as nature, environment, wilderness, garden, conservation, and ecology. Not only do such terms mean different things in different eras, they mean different things to contemporary historians. A concept such as wilderness, for example, was synonymous with home for Indians, anathema to Puritans, the basis for national pride to romantics, and a way to retain masculine, frontier virtues to turn-of-the-century urbanites. For contemporary historians wilderness may be a complex idea that has no foundation other than its changing historical meanings, or it may mean a real, forested landscape that has evolved over millions of years and exists today only in isolated remnants. Debates such as these have great practical consequences. How wilderness is defined lies at the core of development policies. If it is an evolved reality that can be documented through evolutionary and ecological science and areas of pristine “wilderness” can be identified, then laws to preserve these remnants can be passed, implemented, and adjudicated through the courts. If, on the other hand, what wilderness means is an ephemeral semantic debate having different meanings in different eras, then some will argue that no particular place has any greater claim to preservation or development than any other. Environmental history therefore lies at the core of current policy choices.
Environmental historians approach their field from a variety of perspectives. One approach is to focus on biological interactions between humans and the natural world. Animals, plants, pathogens, and people form an ecological complex in any one place that can be sustained or disrupted. When Europeans settled in North America and other temperate regions of the world, they introduced diseases, such as smallpox, measles, and bubonic plague; livestock, such as horses, cattle, and sheep; European grains such as wheat, rye, barley, and oats, along with varmints, such as rats; and weeds, such as plantain and dandelions. These ecological introductions, especially diseases, devastated the lives of native peoples. While some of the introductions, such as the horse, gave some Indians a temporary advantage over Europeans, the introduced ecological complex as a whole altered the landscape in ways that benefited the settlers and disrupted Indian lifeways.
A second way to think about environmental history is in terms of a series of levels of human interactions with nature, such as ecology, production, reproduction, and ideas. On the first level is nature itself. Nature’s own history can be described in terms of the evolution of the geology and biology of a given place; the ecological succession of plants and animals found there; and the variations in temperature and climate that create the potential for human systems of production. At the second level, human forms of production also vary over time. North American Indians evolved complex systems of gathering, hunting, fishing, and horticulture, combined with trading across tribal boundaries. European settlers who arrived on the continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed sophisticated technologies such as ships, gunpowder, iron tools, clothing, and agricultural systems that created complicated, often uneven systems of interaction among Europeans, Indians, and nature. At the third level is reproduction. This includes biological and social forms of reproducing human and non-human life, as well as means of reproducing human social and political life over time. Finally, on the fourth level, are ideas, such as narrative, science, religion, and ethics that explain nature, the human place within it, and means of behaving in relation to it.
A third approach to doing environmental history is in terms of environmental politics and transformations in political and economic power. The history of the conservation and preservation movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, can be delineated in terms of political struggles within a presidential administration, the role of citizen movements in pressing for the preservation of natural areas, and the creation of government and state agencies to manage and conserve natural resources.
A fourth approach to the field is to focus on the history of ideas about nature. Histories of a philosophical idea such as wilderness, a scientific idea such as ecology, or an aesthetic idea such as natural beauty form the topics of numerous books about the nature of nature in North America. These works examine the ideas and creative products of artists, nature writers, science writers, explorers, and travelers for clues as to how people felt about nature and how their feelings led to actions with respect to its visual or economic resources. Such intellectual histories help us to understand how changing ideas about nature and beauty can be influential in creating the environments we see around us today.
A fifth way to do environmental history is in terms of narrative. One can argue that all peoples interpret their world through stories, whether the origin stories of Native Americans or Europeans, the stories of various fields of science as they progress over time, or morality stories that tell us how to behave in the world. Environmental historians often contrast their histories with histories of progress and enlightenment, inasmuch as developments for human well-being—such as industrialization—often result in the degradation of the environment through pollution and depletion. Yet all environmental history does not necessarily view history as a decline from a pristine environment that was irrevocably and negatively transformed when humans entered it. Environmental historians write narratives that are both progressive and declensionist, comic and tragic, intricate and bold. Nevertheless, the stories have a message. They explain the consequences of various past interactions with the natural world and warn us of potential problems as we form policies and make decisions that affect our lives and those of our children. Knowing and doing environmental history is therefore critical to the continuance of life on earth, whether that life be human or that of the other animals and plants that occupy the landscapes in which we dwell.
Part I of the Columbia Guide to American Environmental History is a historical overview of topics and themes in environmental history. The overview does not attempt to treat comprehensively every event, but rather to explore some of the themes that environmental historians have used to interpret the field. It is presented chronologically, beginning with the natural environment and proceeding through Native American lifeways to European settlement, the formation of the nation and industrialization, to the conservation and environmental movements of the present day. The dates associated with each section are somewhat arbitrary, and hence risk simplifying complex, interlocking events. The purpose of the overview, however, is to offer a framework within which further reading and research can be interpreted, elaborated, or contested. Many of the theories about doing environmental history introduced above appear in the historical overview. The reader is encouraged to approach this section critically and creatively—to think about how the story could have been written differently and what other topics would help to round out the presentation. Then, by using the materials in the Resource Guide (see part IV below), readers may become environmental historians on their own.
Part II of the guide is a topical compendium of agencies, concepts, laws, and people. It is arranged alphabetically within each category, but each entry can be accessed directly through the index. Here the reader can find out quickly who influential writers, ecologists, conservationists, and artists were; what the major thrust of a law is; or how an agency or environmental group is organized. Concepts relevant to the history of the environment are elaborated together with controversies and changes in their historical meanings. This section assists the reader in understanding these variations and controversies in meanings, as well as giving brief developments of major ideas and actors critical to the history of the environmental change.
Part III of the guide is a chronology of major events in environmental history. It is presented as an environmental history timeline, into which major political events—such as the American Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, and the two world wars—are inserted for reference and context. The timeline shows events in sequence—events that in some cases may have been formative and causal to each other or, in other cases, apparently unrelated—so that relationships among events can be perceived in new ways. Many of these environmental events are also elaborated in the historical narrative and the topical compendium, to which the reader can turn for additional details.
Part IV is a resource guide. As such, it offers visual, electronic, and print resources for further reading and research. The visual resource guide is a list of videos and films with brief synopses of their content, along with information on how to obtain them. They are arranged to dovetail with topics in the historical narrative. The visual materials can be used with courses on environmental history or as alternative means of understanding environmental change over time. The importance of electronic materials such as CD-ROMs and the Internet makes it imperative to include materials currently available in digital format. These resources, however, are the most ephemeral of all the materials in the resource guide. Some Web sites and links vanish without warning; others appear or are updated and changed in name; many become outdated as technology changes. They are included, however, to give a sense of the possibilities for doing environmental history and offering on-line courses in the field.
The bibliography of printed materials is arranged topically, and hence reinforces information in the historical narrative. It is introduced by a bibliographical essay that discusses many of the sources relevant to environmental history. The reader can gain a sense of what types of books and other printed materials constitute environmental history’s primary sources. The bibliographical essay also discusses some of the most important books in environmental history in order to orient the reader to the field’s historical evolution. The bibliography that follows the introductory essay is meant to be used for further reading and research on doing the environmental history of one’s own region or for pursuing one’s favorite topic or time period.
In summary, the overall goal of the Columbia Guide to American Environmental History is to provide a concise “first-stop” reference book on the history of the North American Environment for high school and college students, teachers, researchers, and readers. The book places the subject of environmental history in the context of recent scholarship, introduces key questions about the topic, and includes brief sketches of significant persons, events, and themes. It provides an accessible overview of environmental history; a mini-encyclopedia of concepts, legislation and agencies, and people; a chronology of events and their significance; and a bibliographical introduction to printed materials, as well as to lists of films, videos, CD-ROMs, and on-line resources.