History and Theory, Theme Issue 42 (December 2003), 1-4 © Wesleyan University 2003 ISSN: 0018-2656

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: NATURE AT WORK

BRIAN FAY

Historians have always known that the natural environment plays a significantrole in how humans behave, relate to one another, and organize themselves.Thucydides’ plague, Montesquieu’s climate, and Turner’s frontier are a fewinstances of nature influencing history in deeply important ways. How could itbe otherwise, given that humans are biological creatures through and through, inconstant interchange with their natural environment? But despite all this, it isalso the case that only in the past twenty-five years or so have historians method-ically pursued a systematic exploration of this interchange, in the process estab-lishing a distinct branch of history: environmental history. Given this, it seemedto the editors of History and Theory an auspicious time to survey the nature andtheoretical underpinnings of environmental history, and to examine its crucialideas. This is what this Theme Issue does.

The Issue is divided into three sections: I, “The Nature of EnvironmentalHistory”; II, “The Nature of ‘Nature’”; and III, “The Environment at Work.”Section I explores the nature and state of environmental history; section II is adetailed analysis of the fundamental concept “nature”; and section III is devotedto two critical topics in environmental history: that of space (and consumptionwithin it), and that of the relationship between colonialism and environmentalism.

Section I is given an enormous boost by the very first essay in the collection,J. R. McNeill’s “Observations on the Nature and Culture of EnvironmentalHistory.” In it McNeill provides a masterful account of environmental history asa whole, from its origins to the various forms it has assumed in the last twenty-five years or so. (He organizes this account in part by country, showing the waysthat environmental history is itself shaped by political and cultural differences.)The essay is careful to show the links between environmental history and otherfields within history, and with other related disciplines such as geography, and todevelopments in the natural sciences. The essay successfully argues that envi-ronmental history is now a “legitimate field within the historical profession, andhas a bright future.” All of this is done with such panache and such control of thisdisparate material that one would be hard pressed to find a more comprehensive,informative, and accessible review of the field as a whole than this essay.

Of course, readers of this journal know full well that all historical accounts,including historical accounts of history itself, are selective, incorporating broadepistemic commitments and particular theoretical predilections. So it’s interest-ing to read another account of environmental history from a different perspec-

tive. In “The Environmental Approach to Prehistoric Studies: Concepts andTheories,” Olena V. Smyntyna examines the main approaches to prehistoric envi-ronmental studies, and she does so from the viewpoint of a practitioner of pre-history working in the Ukraine. Besides giving a detailed account of the pro-foundly different ways prehistory has invoked the environment in the recent past,this essay also shows why particular theories and concepts used in it came to beseen as problematic and therefore requiring revision. The essay itself concludeswith a plea for the concept of “living space” as a way to address certain problemsin interdisciplinary studies of prehistoric societies.

Mention of problematic concepts is the cue to introduce the next set of threeessays, grouped together in Section II and devoted to the question of the mean-ing of “nature.” For what concept could be more central to environmental histo-ry than “nature”? And yet a moment’s reflection reveals that this concept is byno means simple or unproblematic. Is nature the purely physical environment, akind of field that shapes human actions and relations only indirectly? Or isnature’s influence more direct—and, if so, how does it affect human activity? Isnature something independent of human activity, culture, and politics, or do theysaturate it? If nature is not independent of human activity, culture, and politics,how is it best conceived?

In “The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist Challenge toEnvironmental History” Kristin Asdal challenges the dichotomy of nature andculture—a dichotomy she claims mars much environmental history—and juxta-poses the way the post-constructivist authors Donna Haraway and Bruno Latourconceive of nature and culture as intimately interconnected. Asdal claims thattheir approach “represent[s] a radical and arguably more truly historical way ofintroducing non-human actors into the historical narrative.”

Ellen Stroud, in “Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt throughHistory,” also shares the view that the concept “nature” remains problematic inenvironmental history, with the result that, despite the impressive work in envi-ronmental history in recent decades, the role of the environment remains tan-gential in historical study. But she is equally sensitive to the ways environmen-tal history might go astray as it tries to develop an adequate conception of nature:some historians have argued that “nature” should be seen as a parallel categorywith “race,” “class,” and “gender”—that is, as categories devoted to uncoveringpower relationships in societies. Stroud rejects this parallelism as inappropriate,and urges instead an approach that demonstrates “significance of material naturefor histories beyond the environmental realm.”

While Stroud’s essay is largely negative and critical, Theodore R. Schatzki’s“Nature and Technology in History” is largely positive: it proposes a new con-ception of nature that does not separate nature and society. In contrast to the viewthat separates nature and human culture, politics, and activity, Schatzki offers “asocial ontology that depicts social existence as inherently transpiring in nexusesof practices and material arrangements.” This ontology in turn transforms howhistorians should conceive of their discipline: not as focusing on human activi-ties and relations, but on past “practice-arrangements.” This means, further, that

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nature becomes part of society, and vice versa. Any history that is adequate to itstask cannot therefore ignore nature, and must conceive its subject as inherentlysocial-natural. Schatzki shows how all this works by means of an analysis oftechnology and its role in human history (of course, given his social ontology, heoffers a distinctive account of what technology itself is.) All this is done withsuch clarity and force that one can’t help but think that his approach offers thephilosophical basis for an extremely promising way for historians to inject natureinto their histories.

Section III (“The Environment at Work”) addresses the way the environmenthas figured, or should figure, in actual historical practice. In “Spaces of Con-sumption in Environmental History” Matthew W. Klingle focuses on the wayconsumption is deeply affected by changes in the material world, but he does soin a way that transcends the split between materialist and cultural analyses.Borrowing techniques from geography and ecology, he shows how space issocially produced through time, an insight that can help to connect material andcultural change in a sustained manner. As he puts it: “Spatial histories can alsounmask the relationships between production and consumption, and nature andculture, and thereby transcend and subvert seemingly fixed boundaries, from thelocal to the global. They can also further propel environmental historians intonew realms of inquiry, such as international trade and the human body.”

The collection concludes with an essay that might at first sight seem to besomewhat irrelevant to the Theme Issue’s main focus, contemporary environ-mental history. Aaron Sachs devotes his essay “The Ultimate ‘Other’: Post-Colonialism and Alexander von Humboldt’s Ecological Relationship withNature” to discussing the career and writings of the explorer-scientist-abolition-ist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Not only is Humboldt a figure out ofthe dim past of environmental history, but he has been severely criticized by MaryLouise Pratt in her canonical post-colonial study, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writingand Transculturation. Pratt argues that Humboldt embodies the colonialist powerdynamics in which, as Sachs puts it, “all Euro-American elites, devoid of per-sonal agency, are always already in an exploitative relationship with the peopleand natural resources of the developing world.” But through a close reading ofHumboldt’s work, Sachs shows this post-colonial reading is wrong in the case ofHumboldt, and stultifying as a general historical perspective. Instead, Sachsargues, Humboldt, properly understood, provides an exemplar for a historicalanalysis (as well as political practice) that simultaneously recognizes the waynature is saturated by human activity and at the same time is deeply different fromit. Sachs shows how such recognition “can be seen as radical both in his day andin ours,” offering the basis for “a healthy post-colonial environmentalism.”

A principal theme runs through all these essays, one that becomes more promi-nent as the collection proceeds: the deep interconnection between nature and theenvironment on the one hand, and human activity, culture, and politics on theother. In other words, the authors in this collection articulate, and then criticize,an important underlying presupposition of much environmental history, namely,its dualistic conception of nature and the environment, one that conceives the

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physical reality of nature as something separate from the cultural reality ofhuman actions and relations. In its stead they argue for a more complex concep-tion that sees nature and society as intertwined entities that cannot be understoodapart from each other. They propose that if this more complex conception wereemployed, environmental history would become even more able to capture therole of the environment in human history than it has to this point.

Wesleyan University

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