What is Environmental History?

‘Environmental history is porous’

Joy Porter is 125th Anniversary Chair, Indigenous, Environmental & Heritage History at the University of Birmingham

Environmental history is a comparatively young field of enquiry with strong American roots. Roderick Nash, emeritus historian at the University of California, is usually credited with inventing the term in 1967 in his book, Wilderness and the American Mind. Often defined as simply the study of human interactions across time with the natural or non-human world, Donald Worster in 1988 subdivided the sub-discipline into the study of ‘nature’ itself, including humans; socio-economic interaction between humans and nature; and the ‘mental interactions’ of humans towards nature, including myths, ideologies, even scientific discourses.

However, this is just one definition. Perhaps because environmental history grew out of the 1960s counter-culture and in tandem with the activism of the environmental movement, it has taken time for it to grapple with its own culturally specific nature. Indigenous figures such as Potawatomi scholar-activist Kyle Whyte, Muskogee Nation writer Daniel Wildcat, and Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier have pointed out that a conceptual divide between ‘nature’, humans, and other aspects of society does not translate to many Indigenous traditions. In an American context, distinct conceptual categories, they argue, are products of non-Indigenous histories of thought traceable back to the works of Plato and Aristotle. The idea that humankind is superior to, or, as in the Christian Bible, has been awarded dominion over, other forms of life, is often held up as foundational to today’s environmental woes. Another critique is that environmental history, like environmentalism, is too male dominated. From the 1970s, ecofeminist writers such as Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen have linked the destruction of life-sustaining environments to female oppression arguing that the persistence of both is a result of patriarchal structures embedded in capitalism.

Environmental history is porous, and much of what is labelled as such also qualifies as economic, urban, resource, or postcolonial history, or environmental geography. Its strength is its capacity to transcend boundaries, be they scales of analysis, nation-states, or left-right polarisation. I hope the near future sees a right-leaning rediscovery of environmental awareness, given that the US’ foundational environmental protections were put in place by President Richard Nixon.

‘Environmental history encourages taking a longer view’

Richard Jones is Associate Professor of Landscape History at the University of Leicester

At the core of environmental history lies a simple feedback loop: that humanity and the environment are in a perpetual and mutually transformative relationship. How this cycle manifests itself is contingent on the factors in play in any given place or moment. This is why historical perspectives matter.

Acknowledging the environment as a history-maker enriches our understanding of the past. But some of the most exciting approaches are those that have obvious contemporary application. Today, to take just one example, human-forced atmospheric warming is spawning extreme rainfall events. Floods of seemingly greater frequency and magnitude, and their devastating socio-economic impacts, are forcing people to reconsider their relationship with rivers and adapt to the threat of uninvited water in unwanted places. This is the feedback loop in action.

In the UK, media reports of recent floods often describe them as ‘unprecedented’. This is untrue. Such headlines are written because we have allowed the short, scientific, measured record of floods (c.250 years) to define our historical memory. If we take a longer view, as environmental history encourages, c.800-1000 emerges as a period of interest and importance. These were centuries characterised by atmospheric warming, high rainfall, and flood events of equal or greater magnitude than those recently witnessed. It was also when our towns and villages were established in the locations they still occupy.

Early medieval place-makers closely observed rivers, occupying ground only after establishing their floodlines. In many places they communicated knowledge of flood threat in the names they gave to their homes: Averham (Notts) ‘[settlement] at the floods’; Broadwas (Worcs) ‘wide expanse of land that floods and drains rapidly’. Our error has been two-fold: to transgress the medieval floodline and build into the floodplains; and to ignore the warnings in place-names passed down to us by those who knew rivers intimately, and who built resilient and sustainable communities just beyond their reach.

These are the kinds of insights that environmental history delivers, and why it is one of the most informative and relevant branches of historical scholarship today.

‘The nonhuman world is more than an inert stage’

Erin Stewart Mauldin is John Hope Franklin Chair of Southern History at the University of South Florida

At its heart, environmental history is the study of humankind’s interaction with nature and the role nature has played in shaping human affairs. Environmental historians argue that the nonhuman world is more than an inert stage on which human drama unfolds – human stories gain depth when placed in a more holistic context that considers soils, forest composition, climate, bacteria, air pollution, water quality, and bird populations. While many environmental historians do study environmentalism – political efforts to preserve or redistribute natural resources – many do not. They examine fish spawning in the North Atlantic and malaria’s environmental triggers; they track mineral extraction in imperial borderlands and historical memories of extreme drought. They analyse religious texts, novels, poetry, and art to understand how societies conceptualised nature over time. Environmental history’s scope is so vast, its borders so elastic, and its methods so varied that defining what the field is, and what environmental historians are, can be a challenge.

My own corner of this discipline focuses on the material history of warfare, specifically the military operations of the American Civil War that ripped up crop fields, sparked epidemics, and devastated forest cover – reconstructing physical changes to landscapes caused by conflict and their effects on human lives. Warfare is one of the most dramatic ways humans interact with their environment, and to show how nature is central to the progress and outcome of armed conflict, I often rely on nontraditional historical sources from the sciences. Like many material environmental historians, I consult soil geomorphologists, climatologists, and epidemiologists. The groundbreaking arguments that some environmental historians have made by incorporating scientific literature – J.R. McNeill’s Mosquito Empires (2010), for example – are what make this approach so compelling.

Despite its explicit interdisciplinarity, environmental history still contends with the structural limitations of higher education. Though broad graduate training is possible on an individual level, departmental boundaries have remained largely unchanged throughout the field’s existence. Ultimately, environmental history is a challenge to imagine new ways of knowing across disciplines.

‘It needs to be a call to look up’

Timothy Cooper is Senior Lecturer in Social and Environmental History at the University of Exeter

On the night of 15-16 October 1987 an enormous cyclone devastated property, people, and woods in the southeast of England. Anyone who lived through it will remember the near supernatural terror. Stephen Dudeney, a trainee firefighter at Poplar, recalled: ‘The trees were almost bent sideways and the air was filled with debris like something out of The Wizard of Oz.’

The great people’s historian Raphael Samuel once wrote that a great storm or flood was more likely to endure in folk memory than great wars or revolutions. He may have been thinking of the ‘Night of the Big Wind’, the storm of 1839 long remembered in Irish folk memory. Britain’s ‘Great Storm of 1987’, like that of 1703 made famous by Daniel Defoe, left a deep imprint on popular memory. It is often recalled as a national in-joke. Weatherman Michael Fish’s notorious failure to predict the ‘hurricane’ was even shown during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. However, at the time the storm was not a laughing matter – it killed 22 people. Neither was it a mere meteorological event. Its social geography was key. While the metropolitan media and political elites set about shaping torn roofs in the most affluent part of the kingdom as a ‘national’ disaster, northern and western Britons noted both the frequency of their own tempests and the hurricane of unemployment and industrial catastrophe that they had endured under Thatcherism. As one mass observer acidly remarked, set against this modern-day Harrying of the North, the storm appeared as an act of vengeance: ‘like God was on our side for once’.

The Great Storm marked a new era, and the vulnerabilities it exposed were as much about social inequity as they were the material impacts of extreme weather. Few commentators at the time connected it to global warming, but not long after such events would routinely be regarded as signs of the ‘Great Acceleration’ of socioeconomic change and climate crisis. In this sense, it was the last great natural gale in England.

Historians of the modern global North are students of an increasingly controlled environment. But as global warming has begun to disarrange the commonplaces of the weather, the comforts of the postwar era are more susceptible to the elements than ever. Today it is less a question of what environmental history is, than of what it needs to be: a call to look up, because a greater storm is coming.