The Problem of

SVERKER SÖRLIN AND PAUL WARDE
the problem of
THE PROBLEM
OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: A RE-READING OF THE FIELD
ABSTRACT
This essay argues that environmental history has not engaged as fully with social
and political theory as it might, and that once it does, environmental historians will
find that their concerns are, potentially, much closer to the mainstream of thought
in the social sciences and humanities than they might have expected. In fact,
environmental history has the promise to be central to the most influential social
thought in the academy and among policy makers. The field also needs to consider
the roles of knowledge and science, or “knowledge regimes,”• in translating scientific
“facts” into politically realizable decisions.
THE EXPRESSION “ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY” was coined, at least within the

genealogy that has led to a recognizable field of academic endeavor, by American
historian Roderick Nash in 1972.1 We might reasonably say that the field is a little
older than this, although people have been thematizing the kinds of problems
that environmental historians are interested in for almost as long as they have
been writing narrative texts at all. The standard reference here remains Clarence
Glacken and his superb bird’s eye view of geographical ideas, Traces on the
Rhodian Shore (1967),which, had it been published in 1997, or even 1987 or 1977,
might well have been framed as an “environmental history” of ideas.2 But 1967
was just too early; and perhaps just as crucially, Glacken’s great book did not fall
within the largely American framework of Nash and colleagues who would found
the American Society for Environmental History. Thus professional
environmental history has now been in the making for more than a generation,
and the time seems right for some constructive reflection.
Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, “The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-reading
of the Field,” Environmental History 12 (January 2007): 107-30.
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We would like to present two lines of argument here. First, we want to examine
the field from an insiders’ perspective, to understand what might give it coherence,
meaning, and significance. Perhaps inevitably, working from this perspective for
years makes one more keenly conscious of the current weaknesses of the field.
But second, we want to look at the broader development of the field in the context
of history and other disciplinary approaches to the environment. Here we find
many gains, but also a sense that environmental history, especially in some
countries, has remained marginalized, a marginalization we would view as
unwarranted. Why is this? We wish to provide an analysis, and move toward
remedies.
This is not to say that environmental history has hitherto been unreflective;
indeed, it has been quite the opposite, although Jane Carruthers might have
overstated the case when she recently commented that “It must be seldom, (if
ever) that practitioners have dissected the historiography [of a discipline] at such
a proximate stage in its evolution.”3 There have been quite a number of reflective
essays by leading practitioners in the field over the past fifteen years or more:
Richard White, Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, William Cronon, and Donald
Hughes, to name a few.4 In 2004, to celebrate its tenth anniversary, the journal
Environment and History published a special issue with reflective and
bibliographical essays on the field in Africa, the Americas, Australasia, China,
and Europe, and Environmental History produced an issue with a large number
of “state-of-the-art” essays in the same year.5 The tone of these essays has largely
been that of a still-young discipline: reflective, but celebratory and often didactic.
Environmental history has certainly emerged within a time when methodological
reflection has been prominent in the academic world, indeed far too prominent
for many people’s tastes. One could take a “linguistic turn” at this stage and argue
that it is not terribly important to reflect more generally on what environmental
history has achieved or where it might be headed: The term is now fairly well
entrenched and its future will simply be shaped by its discursive usage rather
than any reflective, theoretical, or axiomatic considerations. In fact, we will
suggest that the brief history of the term does indeed reflect such a scenario, and
that the discipline has relatively little coherence. But if environmental history is
to prove useful, or even enlightening, reflection is both timely and necessary.6
RECENT GLOBAL TRENDS

THE MOST INFLUENTIAL work in the field has been done in the United States,
which is also where most of the early teaching programs emerged and where the
large majority of environmental history specialists are active. Of course, work
that might be drawn into the “environmental history” canon is perhaps just as
prolific in other parts of the world; but is (and certainly was) much less likely to
be written self-consciously as “environmental history.” Numbers of publications,
practitioners, and the institutional profile of the discipline in the United States
are far higher than in Europe, which is the other region with an equivalent number
of major universities. Indeed, the recent series of essays in the journal
Environmental History on the future of the field were penned almost entirely by

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THE PROBLEM OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY | 109
people based in the United States, Europe’s contribution being an essay by Petra
van Dam lamenting the difficulties caused by the language of the discipline being
English.7 The geographical features of a low population density, large stretches
of “wilderness,” a mobile “frontier,” and a strong tradition of the “outdoors” have
all been significant for the reception and growth of environmental history in North
America. This is also perhaps true of other regions where environmental history
has gained a foothold: Australasia, and within Europe, in Scandinavia and the
Alpine countries.
This geographical and social background is perhaps also relevant. To take one
example, within the United Kingdom, the only area where environmental history
has established a more prominent institutional presence is Scotland. In this case
the efforts of particular individuals, notably Christopher Smout, within a
relatively small academy might be considered sufficient explanation.8 However,
both the local threat of natural forces and the widely recognized ability of humans
to radically transform their environments in the relatively recent past seem to
have contributed to these trends. Of course, these factors could be in operation
almost anywhere in the world, but the prominence that they, and similar accounts
of exploration and taming of the wilderness, have obtained within popular
narratives of national self-identity (even where these narratives were palpably
inaccurate myths ripe for demolition) may well have contributed to the wider
resonance of the field, and not least made the funding prospects more favorable.
Among the “northern nations,” the case of Scotland is perhaps again indicative:
The experience of the Highlands has functioned as a reservoir of national tropes
since the 1820s, achieving a far greater degree of popular prominence in accounts
of peculiarly “Scottish” human-environmental relations than, for example, the
leading role that Scots played in the development of the British imperial
subjugation of large parts of the globe.9
Within these “northern” contexts, themes within environmental history have
been largely rural or to do with impacts of human activity on rural or supposedly
“natural” environments, even when the forcing agent stems from urban
development. Urban environmental history really achieved its well-deserved
recognition, even in the United States, only in the late twentieth century, though
it is now gaining ground rapidly, often with a specific interest in sanitary
conditions, pollution, and consumerism. Mike Davis, a scholar teaching at a
school of architecture in Los Angeles, has blazed a trail with two pioneering books
on his own city: the first, City of Quartz (1990), as a documentary journalist, the
second time over, in The Ecology of Fear (1998), as a self-professed environmental
historian, leading to keynote addresses for the American Society for
Environmental History.10 Nevertheless, the urban/wilderness ratio in publications
is distressingly low. And despite the fact that American lawns now cover an area
roughly the size of Pennsylvania, the suburbs as yet have hardly registered at all,
although some interesting analytical work on the modern development of suburbs,
and even lawns, has appeared recently.11
In much of continental Europe, environmental history has enjoyed a more
limited impact, often related very specifically to local peculiarities, such as the

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history of water management in the Netherlands, struggles over nuclear power

in Germany, forestry in the Nordic countries, or pollution in regions of rapid
nineteenth-century industrialization. Despite the prevalence of the English
language in the academic world, and the Anglophone origins of “environmental
history,” the field appears especially weak in England and Wales. In all these
regions, even the United States, however, environmental history has made a fairly
minimal impact on mainstream history writing. This may in part be the product
of increasing fragmentation and specialization in both environmental history
and historical practice in general. With some notable exceptions, within Europe
the “leading lights” in environmental history are virtually unknown outside their
fields, even those who work in areas such as agrarian history with a long-standing
tradition and numerous practitioners. Literature is not yet widely read; the
journals Environment and History and Environmental History are not widely
recognized. This might seem a slightly pessimistic tale, but the field is yet young;
the European Society for Environmental History was founded as recently as 2000.
It is sometimes suggested that the relative strength of historical geography
may account for patterns in the reception and development of environmental
history in the “global north.” Graeme Wynn and Matthew Evenden, two historical
geographers who have themselves taken the “environmental history turn,”
hypothesize that a resurgence of interest in historical geography in 1970s and
1980s Canada may account for the relatively weak development of environmental
history during this period, in contrast to the rapid strides being made south of
the forty-ninth parallel.12 Could the same not be argued for England, where the
inheritance of W. G. Hoskins at Leicester or H. C. Darby at Cambridge, among
others, conquered the ground to which environmental history might later aspire?
It is almost certainly true that a degree of “re-branding” of historical geographers
would make the vigor of environmental history in some parts of Europe appear
more promising than it might at first glance seem.13
Whether the thesis holds more generally, however, is doubtful. This can be
illustrated by selecting a few hypotheses from among the several this thesis might
suggest—and that should be subject to the kind of empirical testing we cannot
undertake here. For example, if the degree of interest of a student in
“environmental history” is set at an early date with relatively little disciplinary
flexibility thereafter, then recruitment to undergraduate departments might tend
to determine the fate of disciplinary approaches over time. Strong geography
departments would lure away those who are interested in the environment and
might otherwise have thought of themselves as “historians.” One could restate
this hypothesis at any point in the career path. However, given the historically
strong institutional presence of historical geography in Scandinavia, where
environmental history also enjoys a relatively strong public presence, this does
not seem a sufficient explanation for why other regions, and especially history
departments within them, have remained more resistant to the field. France is a
case in point: Historical geography was tightly integrated into history via the
agency of the second-generation Annaliste historians, yet environmental history
has only a marginal presence in France, if not so marginal as representation at

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international conferences might suggest. Similarly, a second hypothesis is that

the output of “environmental history” across all disciplines is roughly equivalent
in most countries, but that the institutional importance of historical geography
(in terms of both departments and publications) crowds out self-identified
environmental historians. Again, this deserves testing, but does not seem
immediately convincing, especially given the strength of the cultural turn within
contemporary historical geography.
A rather different case seems to us to be the impact of environmental history
in Africa. The field promised a reinvigoration of African history in the 1980s,
and has recruited some of the leading figures among the historians of the
continent: William Beinart, James McCann, Megan Vaughan, James Fairhead, and
Melissa Leach.14 Instead of establishing a distinct presence, however, the insights
of environmental history have been quite quickly absorbed into regional
historiographies. One might wish to argue that it is precisely this process that
has established the concerns of environmental history within more mainstream
work. Environmental themes of course dovetail neatly, and provide ready
analogies, with colonial and postcolonial history. Processes of invasion,
acculturation, the confrontation of the “indigenous” and the “colonizer,” or the
“indigenous” and the “exotic,” of “local” and “scientific” knowledge, intensive
and extensive forms of cultivation: All these find ready resonance in various
discourses associated with the “global south.” The development of the ranching
and plantation economy, and destruction of indigenous peoples and possibly long-
standing forest habitats in Latin America have also been prominent themes in
its environmental history. This was, of course, part of the territory surveyed by
the geographer Carl Sauer, who was such a prominent figure in triggering North
American interest in themes of historical environmental change, as well as a
lynchpin in providing the global perspectives promoted by the seminal meeting
on “man’s role in changing the face of the earth” in 1955.15 Richard Grove is perhaps
the best known of environmental historians to have insisted on the importance
of the colonial enterprise, especially in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the
Caribbean, for shaping European knowledge of nature.16 The historiography of
South Asia has also increasingly incorporated environmental approaches into
its agrarian history, perhaps most notably in the inheritance of the Indian Forestry
Service and the struggles over property rights generated in the past two centuries
by the imposition of English norms of legal practice. 17 The increasingly
sophisticated history of colonization and migration can take on an environmental
aspect, tracing the pathways of ideas and species around the globe, and indeed is
bringing about an increased use of such analogies and “colonial” understandings
of processes within European history. In these cases environmental history can
be seen as a component of the burgeoning “world history” that realigns the relative
importance of the “north” and “south” in grand narratives of development.18
This brief balance sheet has both positives and negatives, and plenty of
unrealized potential. A case in point is Australasia, where there is a considerable,
and growing, historiography concerned with pressing themes such as the ecology
of settler societies, relations to aboriginal forms of land use, as well as the huge

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infrastructure projects and irrigation schemes that have influenced Australia’s

twentieth-century experience and her modern geographical and historical self-
understanding: for example the shift from a conspicuously void “Dead Heart,” to
a far more vibrant “Red Centre,” increasingly allowing for notions of cultural and
social richness in the Outback.19 Many of these themes are recognizable from the
United States, but an even closer parallel might be Canada, where the
interrelations of nature, science, art, and the issue of national identity and
purpose have been at the forefront for a long time, including issues of ethnic
presence and conflict.20 Other parallels are in evidence in the Scandinavian North
and, more generally, in the Arctic areas, where “White Deserts” have occupied
positions in national and geographical imaginations similar to the Red Desert in
Australia.21 Environmental history can become part of the process of transmitting
such themes from environs where they are more popularly ingrained in the
imagination to those regions and nations where the constructs of center and
periphery, of the cultivated and the wild, of cultures and natures, have not been
as prominent.
DIVERSITY AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY

THIS BRIEF SURVEY gives some sense of the progress, limits, idiosyncrasies,
and perhaps above all the diversity of the field. We do not pretend to present
anything remotely like a comprehensive view of the field, which, pace the
comments of John McNeill in 2003, is now well beyond the ability of two scholars
to produce. There are in any case many excellent regional bibliographies now
available.22 It is partly for this reason that we have thus far refrained from
attempting to provide any kind of definitive statement as to what we think
“environmental history” has been or might be. Of course, such statements do exist.
The best known comes from Donald Worster, who identifies three strands of work
within environmental history.23
· First, the study of “nature itself,” including humans—from an ecological
point of view, examining the behavior of species, including those cultivated
and domesticated, and flows of materials.
· Second, exploring the socio-economic interaction between humans and
nature, production, reproduction, customs, and so forth—the core material
of agrarian history, more recently with a pollution component added in.
· Third, analyzing the “mental interaction”—myths, ideology, and all ways of
thinking about nature.
Such is the range of topics opened up here, it might be supposed difficult to
discern what many different types of environmental historians would have in
common. In fact, few works would even attempt to bind the three levels together
in one single investigation. It may serve the purpose of uniting a stray herd of
seekers, but to present it as the list of what environmental historians “do”—
especially to outsiders—perhaps gives an unrealistic expectation that provides
little else than a bad conscience. Nor as a schema does it provide clear guidelines
to how the three areas themselves are interlinked. And do any of these strands
actually offer a distinctive disciplinary framework, in the sense that other

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scholars, within or without history, did not have the conceptual tools to engage
in studies of these themes before the emergence of “environmental history”?
The lack of genuine coherence is reflected in the routes that scholars have
taken to environmental history. The historical study of the environment can
clearly lay claim to a wide range of disciplinary approaches and this is inevitably
going to be reflected in the approaches scholars take and what they expect from
it. It is notable in reading the regional bibliographies of works of environmental
history provided by the American Society for Environmental History’s website,
how little common ground there is among them. Relatively few clusters of
environmental historians outside of the United States share any kind of
institutional or bibliographical genealogy.24 It seems rather that “environmental
history” has proven a convenient umbrella under which diverse types of work
have been able to place themselves. To what degree this is a strength or a weakness
of the field should be, we believe, an important area for discussion. From a
European perspective, the difficulties are compounded because of the number of
different languages within which European historians work. There are various
new general works, some with a national, some with a wider perspective: Sverker
Sörlin for Sweden (although as much international), Joachim Radkau for Germany,
Marco Armiero and Stefania Barca in Italy, Robert Delort and Francois Walter
from France. The Netherlands has a “green history” by Jan Luiten van Zanden
and Wybren Verstegen, and the Journal for Ecological History. Thus far however,
these books have not crossed borders.25
We have already noted that one of the things that characterizes the different
approaches to environmental history is that they have been done in different
departments, which historically sometimes have had close relations.
Environmental historians often have looked more to the natural than to the social
sciences, both for data and at times for concepts. Ecology has unsurprisingly been
a major influence, though the conceptual diffusion often has been mediated by
other disciplines, such as anthropology, or by ecologists and plant scientists who
have attempted to write history.26 The influence of geography on history, which
was clearly more prominent in the heyday of Annales history, seems to have been
channelled into more specialized areas. Its influence on the history of science,
for example, has grown considerably after the “spatial turn” of the 1990s. As has
been demonstrated by David Livingstone in numerous works since the early 1990s,
and in recent work by Charles Withers and Michael Bravo, the territorial, and
indeed maritime, dimensions cannot be taken out of the history of science.27 This
is not just because space implies resources, dominance and power, but also
because “the field” has been such an enormous reservoir of empirical data, as
was described by Peter Bowler in a comprehensive volume innovatively, and
accurately, entitled The Environmental Sciences (1992).28 As the history of science
and concepts from the natural sciences have had such an impact on the
development of environmental history, we would expect these new turns in those
fields to further stimulate developments.
But rather than simply recasting a new genealogy, we want to highlight one
idiosyncrasy of the field: how little it has engaged with sociological thinkers who

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have been so prominent in other areas of history, from Durkheim and Weber to
contemporary authors such as Anthony Giddens, Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, and
Sheila Jasanoff, whose work might be thought tailor-made for environmental
history. We think this raises a significant issue: the question of the level of
ambition of environmental historians to actually contribute to the vanguard of
scholarship and to the theoretical progress of our profession. It is perhaps not so
hard to trace a number of genealogies of work in environmental history; is it
perhaps equally if not more pertinent to ask what, conceptually, environmental
history is bearing out into the historical mainstream, and in relation to this, how
the field is responding to the most resonant contemporary theorists in the social
sciences? The vocabularies of political science and economics are also
conspicuously absent from the large body of work in environmental history, unless
as a target of indignant criticism, despite the relatively rapid growth of
environmental and ecological economics. Thus environmental history has
engaged with a particular form of interdisciplinarity that has looked more readily
in the direction of the natural sciences, and particularly the life sciences. This
perhaps goes some way to explaining the lack of interest or comprehension from
other historians.
These points can be briefly illustrated by examining ideas from one of the
most prominent contemporary theoreticians and historian of science, Bruno
Latour. In The Politics of Nature (2004) Latour has argued against traditional
dichotomies that have played such a prominent role in Western thought: between
“fact” and “value”; between “Science” conceived of as a validating unitary
phenomenon that alone can comprehend natural phenomena, rather than the
reality of scientific practices, and the merely discursive chatter of “politics”; and,
indeed, between “nature” and “culture.”29 That such distinctions are problematic
is not perhaps news to anyone familiar with any of the West’s intellectual history.
And Latour does not seek to jettison the historical importance of these categories.
Rather, he argues that all “politics” has been underpinned by theories of “nature”
and natural behavior. In turn, what is “natural” and “real” has increasingly come
to be validated by the products of “Science”; a “Science” that in positing its own
unity as practice—a gesture Latour would view as profoundly political—equally
has posited a specious unity to “Nature” (and perhaps the “environment”?).
However, if the validating and regulatory body for how nature functions is
“Science,” then it is in the final instance only “Science” that can determine the
natural order and a proper basis for the conduct of politics. If we understand
“politics” broadly as those discussions that provide for the understanding of, and
rules for, human behavior, we can see that both “fact” and “values” would be
determined in the end by “Science” because of its putative knowledge of “nature.”
Whether Latour’s analysis is plausible is not the primary issue at stake for us. It
is obviously highly suggestive for those interested in environmental history in
its own right, and as a model for understanding how political history can also be
“environmental.” Yet it may also hold a more disturbing lesson. If the form of
interdisciplinarity promoted within the field tends to privilege the natural
sciences, it is hard to see environmental history as anything but an

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epiphenomenon in the study of nature, and it will be equally hard to convince the
natural or social sciences of its importance. This is precisely the charge that
Latour levels at environmentalist politics and the difficulty it has experienced in
carving out a distinct political base.
Of course, none of this should surprise us. Similar lessons could have been
drawn when, in the constructivist spirit of the 1990s, William Cronon edited a
collection, Uncommon Ground (1995). This work assembled a number of
narratives, giving flesh to the notion that, after all, nature had to be both
discovered and named before it could become cherished. Cronon’s insistence that
the very idea of bonding with nature had a history was sensational to a field that
had understood itself normatively, but it would have come as no surprise to those
who had read Marjorie Hope Nicholson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory
(1959), and certainly not to students of Raymond Williams, who had heard him
speak in Cambridge on the history of “nature.”
Nor would it come as any news to those who could recollect their Roland
Barthes, in Mythologies (1957), prophetical as almost always, when he talked about
the “bourgeois promoting of the mountains.”30 Yet the historicizing of “human-
nature” relations still so often holds nature at a distance, as an external object or
set of facts that can be observed, tamed, or destroyed. The idea that “nature” as a
concept and as a set of processes is in fact at work at the heart of all aspects of
our social activity is a notion, amazingly, that sociologists and not environmental
historians are busy promoting today. We will return to this issue.
THE SYNTHETIC AND THE PARTICULAR

IT IS IMPORTANT at this point to examine those works of environmental history
that have achieved a wider resonance, and avoid the discussion drifting into a
rather introspective reflexivity. It seems to us apparent that despite our
reservations an unusually large number of important books have emerged from
the field. Suffice it to mention here some of the perhaps most seminal
contributions: Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980); Donald Worster’s
Rivers of Empire (1985); Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism (1986); William
Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991); Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism (1995);
John McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun (2000). Apart from making the
plain observation that the large majority of these authors are American, one may
perhaps more interestingly note that they are generally, though not all, works of
synthesis. They present new approaches to what Charles Tilly has called “Big
Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons.”31
In a sense they all demonstrate that nature, or ecology, plays a hitherto
unarticulated role in the more or less enduring problems that they have set out
to address. But, perhaps most importantly, they have set the role of the
environment in a framework comprehensible to traditional narratives, even if
their own contributions are original, which they are. Perhaps it should not come
as a surprise that the issues they deal with are big; nature is indeed a large-scale
actor, and the scope of their vision must be big too in order to achieve the
synthesis. Still, one should observe, they are written by historians. The framing

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of the issues is done from an analytical point of view, and the questions asked
concern problems that are valid to historians. It is however the scale of the issues
and the way of answering them that explains their success. We in no sense are
suggesting that synthetic history writing is exclusive to environmental history,
but maybe it is, through its vicinity to science, more marked by it than most other
fields.
In particular, environmental history syntheses seem to have influenced
colonial, imperial, and world history. Although both Crosby and Grove have
received criticism, by and large their views have been assimilated with the main
currents of world history. Grove has been quoted in C. A. Bayly’s recent The Birth
of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (2004), and in Kenneth Pomeranz’s influential,
if controversial, The Great Divergence (2000).32 These successes have been
achieved in a field well-tilled and prepared by the influence of authors such as
Eric Jones, although it is only fairly recently that significant bodies of local studies
have appeared from which any empirically based syntheses could be derived.33
However, the synthesis, for all its obvious and popular appeal, is not the mode in
which most historians are trained to operate, and neither is it the kind of output
that is most rewarded in establishing a historian’s career path. The bulk of the
work written by environmental historians consists actually, of course, of
specialized case studies, often focused on particular nations or regions; the famed
syntheses are, almost by definition, exceptional. In this regard, environmental
historians are like any other, but it is our impression that their specialized work
is not cited much in the leading journals, although it may still be cited within
specific geographical contexts.
The real barrier to the usefulness of environmental history, at least as
perceived by the historical profession, does not lie in its inclination for synthesis.
Rather, there is a somewhat more vague feature of its centrality to the historical
enterprise that plays the biggest role in this regard. Maybe it could be called
human agency. The crucial features of human agency are, it is generally believed,
taken care of by other historians. Historians are perhaps grateful to the great
synthesizers who will provide the environmental canvas on which they can develop
their own work. Fernand Braudel is the most famous of all: Trained as a
geographer, influenced by the work of sociologist-historian Gilberto Freyre on
Brazil, but still inclined in the final instance to place the environment into
“geological time,” into an histoire immobile.34 The environment may frame the
stage but does not provide the drama; too often it does not seem essential to the
discipline. What is left over for environmental history, as its claim to authority,
is the non-human: the professional study of which has however already been
staked out by scientists and geographers. In fact, it is rather striking to note the
large presence of biologists in the annals of what might be termed environmental
history. There is a Jared Diamond with his majestic panoramas on the major forces
of civilization and its disastrous complexities, or an Edward O. Wilson, giving us
an almost biblical version of the story of biological diversity, or a Daniel Botkin,
challenging the conventional wisdom of biological stability, or even a Stephen
Jay Gould, although he was most interested in the paradoxical detail and the

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temptingly odd rather than in the grand narratives.35

Indeed, it may be the proximity that these historical syntheses of
environmental change enjoy to models of “evolution” that has served as a deterrent
to most ordinary historians. The four scientists mentioned above—Americans
again—would not only be interested in evolution as a subject, they would in fact
give evolution considerable explanatory power, although with varying prefixes
and with varying degrees of determination. But, one should observe, always with
some degree of determinism. It is history beyond the confines of human agency,
although it is not history beyond our control. Humans in these narratives have to
adapt, be skillful, rational, enlightened, or else the forces of nature will bear down
destructively upon us all. In an interesting way, this environmental metahistory
therefore reminds us more of history written by an old guard of anthropologists
or archaeologists: a history with no written sources.36 Here intentionality is
reduced to the minimum and a super-interpreter uses his well-informed
imagination to speculate about why societies developed the way they did, why
people moved around, settled, or clashed, or indeed, why they will face disaster
unless they change. Historians often would use these histories, simply because
we need them. But they would mostly serve as some sort of background reading
to the kind of histories that historians are really interested in writing.
Nevertheless, we would like to maintain a perhaps fine, but important, line of
distinction between the “evolutionary metahistories,” often written by scientists,
and most of the syntheses written by professional environmental historians. The
latter deal, mostly, with problems on the human scale; they use conventional
sources, they do invite human agency, although they very often succeed in moving
the historical near enough to the evolutionary to break new ground and bring
home sensational new readings of world or regional history. But to many
historians, they are already way beyond the realms where most methodological
courses would have allowed them to tread. A large proportion of this existing
European work operates on timescales with which most historians are not entirely
comfortable, a fact that is also related to the disciplinary expectations of
practitioners. For example, a book by French scholars Roger Delort and François
Walter self-consciously treads along the path set out by an issue of the journal
Annales in 1974. The section “L’anthroposation du milieu,” which covers the
ground a historian might usually be expected to engage with (fields, systems,
energy, industrialization, the urban environment, aesthetics), fills a third of the
book (or around 130 pages), and ranges across the entire period from the Neolithic
to the present.37
Thus neither the synthetic and nor the particularist trends within
environmental history have spoken to the problems with which most historians
actually spend most of their time. Could environmental history ever hope to be
taken for granted as an essential part of the bigger picture in all major occurrences
in which historians are interested? Clearly, most textbook examples of
environmental history have formed in a certain sense a genre of their own,
preferably comprising mega-events such as the salinization of soils in
Mesopotamia, the deforestation of the American West, the growth of the national

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parks, or the history of the London air and its quality, or the “rationalization”
and “instrumentalization” of landscape, river and forest planning, just to mention
a few standard examples. Indeed, the flip side of particularist trends within
environmental historiography is the development of a pattern of growth in the
field that is cumulative rather than qualitative. The typical environmental history
conference would boast dozens, if not hundreds, of new case studies, serving the
main purpose of demonstrating that there is an environmental history to be told,
of the energy crisis, of the tourism industry, of the Canadian North or the
Argentinean South, of Sunset Boulevard, or anything. Maybe this is to some extent
a phenomenon in many sub-fields of history: there is always an untold history of
anything. Nonetheless, we see this proliferation of specialized case studies as a
symptom of a more disturbing trend within the field.
THE PROBLEM OF THE PROBLEM

WHY? BECAUSE IT IS hard to conceive of a readily articulated set of issues at
stake in environmental history. The fact that an environmental narrative of
change can be set alongside political, social, or cultural ones—what we might see
as the cumulative pattern of disciplinary development—is not sufficient to
persuade anyone of its significance. If its observations were to go no further than
the fact that humans are also subject to “natural laws” and “forcing,” and that
human actions also have consequences governed by these laws, the field could
do no more than hand the interpretation of certain events over to natural
scientists. Or perhaps the problem is simply too profound, of how one can take
the measure of human-environmental relations. How can this be sold as an
agenda?
If that question mark is essential to our argument, we still of course also come
to praise environmental history. Its syntheses and expansion of historiography
into new areas have been, and will be, profoundly important, especially within
the discipline of history, which had neglected to think historically about the
environment. So, what seems missing most of all in an otherwise promising and
lively sub-field of history, is perhaps a problem, or what would be more promising,
a range of common issues and questions to push forward collectively. The strange
situation thus seems to be that the problem of environmental history is to identify
its core problem.
How, then, could environmental history be designed to address
historiographical problems in a more productive way, and somehow bridge the
gap between the grand synthesis and the particularist demonstration that yes,
the environment counts? In fact, we believe that environmental history is already
on this road, but we, as its practitioners, must both reflect on and project out
their work and potential. We would like to conclude by providing a few suggestions
of what developments might prove useful to the field.
Environmental history is indeed ideally situated to bind together approaches
from the natural sciences, social sciences, and history in non-deterministic
accounts of change. It can provide a translatory role between disciplines, both to
explain rapid advances in the environmental sciences to other fields, and to

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provide essential documentation and accounts of change to those environmental

scientists. In this respect, there is much potential in engaging with important
areas of advance in theoretical knowledge, such as social ecology or systems
theory, which have fallen into the view and toolkit of environmental historians
without perhaps having found a wider resonance in the humanities.
Environmental historians are thus again ideally placed to provide a mediating
and indeed innovatory impetus to understanding of these approaches, and
possibly through them, challenging established disciplinary boundaries.
INVOLVEMENT WITH SOCIAL THEORY

THIS, HOWEVER, RETURNS us to a theme raised earlier; the relative lack of
theoretical engagement with cutting-edge work in the social sciences. This issue
goes beyond the merely academic. It is certainly true that for some practitioners
in the field, environmental history has a profoundly moral and political agenda,
in much the same manner as subaltern studies and groups of social historians
such as the History Workshop in the United Kingdom brought to their
methodological innovations in the 1960s and 1970s.38 It is certainly also
increasingly the expectation of funding bodies that academic work, rightly or
wrongly, should have policy implications. One area of theoretical innovation that
has caught the attention of policy makers has been the sociological work of Ulrich
Beck and Anthony Giddens, both of whom place conditions of environmental
change and “nature” near the heart of their work. It is worth reflecting a little on
their potential for environmental history.
Beck argues that society has reached a state of “reflexive modernization,”
and that we live in a “risk society.”39 By Beck’s account, in late industrial society
the distribution of wealth and distribution of risk no longer map simply over
each other; political problems cannot be solved by a discourse arguing for more
or less equality. Industrial, demographic, and environmental developments have
produced a super-complex matrix of causal chains, toxins, and risks, the
consequences of which are distributed universally but also in a fashion
increasingly incalculable outside of scientific theory. Theory itself, however, may
only be predictive rather than definitive; risk remains generalized and uncertain.
Thus our increased mastery of scientific technique does not reduce risk. On the
contrary, it only serves to make us more aware of both it and its complexities.
This in turn produces further reflexivity, in which science only serves to highlight
further the necessity for political choices about risk, a politics that is compelled
to exist and be validated by science, but for which science cannot, in fact, provide
the answers. The paradigmatic case of risk society is of course the issue of climate
change, though hazards from nuclear accidents or pesticides would do just as
well.
All this is perhaps sufficiently interesting to capture the attention of
environmental historians as a grand narrative. And one does not have to agree
with the characterization of an earlier industrial society as being solidly based
on the politics of class, or that “risk” was roughly distributed along the lines of
“income,” to see that the extended analysis of a politics of risk to other and earlier

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societies may prove a highly productive heuristic tool. It may be that the
immediate consequences of human action in societies of subsistence
agriculturalists might seem of rather less environmental impact and less
complexity than is the case today, but equally that from the point of view of pre-
modern villagers, where moral actions could have unpredictable cosmological
ramifications, the kind of distinctions Beck makes between “reflexive” and “pre-
modern” societies may not be so clear-cut. Either way, the analysis of and politics
of risk is ripe for the picking by environmental history.
Anthony Giddens has provided an analysis—which shares much in common
with the work of Beck—of what he calls a post-traditional society. It will suffice
here to draw attention to just a few aspects of his argument. Giddens points
forcibly to the idea that with the development of super-complex causal chains
and the clear ability of human society to make, yet not control, impacts of
planetary dimensions, clear-cut distinctions between the “human” and “nature”
become increasingly untenable. “The very notion of ‘the environment,’ as
compared to ‘nature,’ signals a more deep-lying transition. The environment,
which seems to be no more than an independent parameter of human existence,
actually is its opposite: nature as thoroughly transformed by human intervention.
We begin to speak about ‘the environment’ only once nature, like tradition, has
become dissolved.”40
Again, one does not have to agree to see the potential import for environmental
history, a field that has certainly paid barely any attention to its most prominent
concept, that of “environment.” Too many have simply equated “environment”
with “nature” in explaining environmental history, as if our categories have not
changed since George Perkins Marsh. But is this really what we mean? Clearly
the word environment has a much wider range of meaning, even than a concept
as expansive as nature. Indeed, even environmental historians often use it in
opposition to “society,” in something like the way that economists oppose the
“market” and “externalities.” Actually problematizing and thinking about the
conceptual uses of “environment” could help clarify areas of our field as well as
provide the theoretical impetus to take it to others.
One might think that Giddens’s comments could underpin a particularly
pessimistic declensionist narrative about environmental change: So debased is
“nature” that in the twenty-first century it becomes doubtful that such a creature
exists. Of course the category of “nature” has always been in doubt, and in the
West, humans have expended much energy policing its borders.41 But now
Industrialism, with the handmaiden of Enlightenment rationality, and perhaps
pace Lynn White, weaned on the inheritance of Judaeo-Christian thought, has
finally brought about its demise. 42 Brute technocratic rationality and its
unintended consequences have been rather more than bugbears for environmental
historians; the failings of the imperious planner, of those who “see like a state,”
would doubtless raise a certain Schadenfreude were the consequences not so
terrible. 43 The post-Enlightenment inheritance of reason and the homo
oeconomicus is supposed to have developed a peculiarly destructive form of
blinkered idiocy that goes beyond the destructive capacity of anything humans

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had attempted before. And in the face of this, the world of “feeling,” the sublime,
the romantic, of “aesthetic spirituality,” becomes restricted to a few carefully
policed reserves. In the struggle between “use” and “delight,” “use” triumphs
(“how many divisions has the poet”?), and there remains a suspicion that what is
left for “delight” is only code for the tourist industry.44 In Donald Worster’s
account, it is technocratic rationality that has become dominant in the struggle
between two offspring of North/West European Calvinism: the “Protestant Ethic”
as articulated by Adam Smith, and the aesthetics of John Muir, traced back to
roots in Presbyterianism and the Disciples of Christ, revivalist and ascetic
protestant movements that stressed the heart, the inner light, and the spirit.45
This more familiar tale serves as a counterpoint to Giddens’s less familiar
turn. Instead of arguing that “reason” has repressed the more environmentalist
“feeling,” Giddens proposes that the wanton destructiveness of the industrial
economy has in fact been the outgrowth of a pathological compulsion that itself
derives from “traditional” patterns of ritual and formulaic behavior shorn of their
previous pre-modern contexts. Far from being “unnatural” and divorced from the
world of feeling, he locates the entrepreneurial drive to generate wealth in a
psychology of compulsion that is more akin to “tradition...[as] repetition… a kind
of truth antithetical to ordinary ‘rational enquiry’.” In other words, he assigns
the capitalist to the world of “feeling,” dominated by an unconscious psychological
drive that is itself a form of anxiety-control in an increasingly complex world. It
is an addiction alongside other forms of anxiety-control like drug-taking or
obsessive compulsive disorder. And put another way, this compulsion belongs to
the area of the mind that Kant would assign to “brute nature,” and not the reflexive
forces of reason and rationality that constituted, for him, the fully human. Thus,
according to Giddens, any remedy to our predicament requires more rationality,
not less; our predicament in part derives from the persistence of a traditional
world of feeling; and the psychology of action is linked intimately and reciprocally
to environmental change.
There is no need to adjudicate between these stories here. These short dips
into sociology simply aim to illustrate the reservoir of thinking that is available
to environmental historians; and to suggest that the concerns of environmental
historians may be, potentially, much closer to the mainstream of thought in the
social sciences and humanities than they might have expected. Environmental
history is not a tangential field or sideshow in modern academic debate; but it
has, to some degree and somewhat surprisingly, failed to notice how central it
might be to the most influential social thought in the academy and among policy
makers. And could we also suggest that some of the ideas contained in this essay
might provide an avenue for environmental history to situate itself at the heart
of the area that still troubles the humanities, and perhaps always will: the division
between materialist, and cultural or constructivist, explanations for human
behavior? Indeed, the “problem” for environmental history might turn out to be
precisely that which sustains the social sciences as a whole: How do societies
and individuals come to perceive, in the assemblage of the elements that make
up their world, some as belonging to the order of reflective action, and others to

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the forces of “brute nature,” “externalities,” as “environs”? For this is surely not a
given, but a process of differentiation that inflects all human activity, and all
those assemblages of things in which humans are active. This might be one track
to take in a history of the environment, but it would not be a history that preserved
traditional delimitations of the natural and social sciences, bowing down to the
greater expertise of other disciplines. Nor is it a problem that other disciplines
can afford to ignore.
THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENT

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIANS should be well situated to deal with these issues.
Their work on, and across, the boundaries between the natural and the social
should have provided insights into where and how explanatory factors may be
sought. Our argument here is, simply, that a thorough involvement with social
and political theory would increase the likelihood of fulfilling this high ambition
of the discipline; it may even be a sine qua non for its success. Indirectly, such an
involvement may at the same time contribute to the traditions of the discipline
to engage in environmental issues from a policy perspective, the “legacy of 1972,”
if we might call it so.
How and with what purpose we write environmental history is crucial, not
just the mere fact that we write it. Put in other words it seems to us a matter of
regaining an initiative that has perhaps become lost in translation between the
plethora of micro histories of the environment that we have alluded to above and
the policy relevance that was once claimed as a defining feature of the new
discipline. Despite, or perhaps because of, the absence of historians, it seems as
if the grand science-based meta-narratives fare better in this regard, providing
scenarios on climate, natural resources, or demography. In contrast to these
narratives, the middle range historical synthesis could provide insights that are
better related to human agency and therefore to policy. In fact, in the works of
Merchant, Crosby, Richard Drayton, and others, it is actions on the historical
timescale such as the production of scientific knowledge, colonization, trade, and
imperial agricultural improvement that provide the analytical focus and explain
changes in human-environmental relationships.46 What these books describe is
how parts of humanity in the early modern period were breaking out of their
biological and geographical confines in Europe and used the rest of the world as
the—extremely lively and interactive—stages for their expansionist efforts.
Soon this was followed by further emancipation from material restrictions
as agrarian and industrial production began to accelerate. By the beginning of
the nineteenth century this expansion prompted Thomas Malthus to present his
dismal analysis, but despite repeated later outbursts of neo-Malthusian
pessimism, the dominant tendency has been to regard human expansion and
economic growth as largely non-restricted by ecological and social limits.47
Although limits have become more accepted and pronounced in the last several
decades (Club of Rome 1972, the Brundtland Commission Report to the UN 1987,
the Rio summit 1992, the Kyoto Protocol 1998), mainstream economic thinking

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still regards technological progress, “ecological modernization,” or a “decoupling”

of economic growth from environmental impact, as the ways to confront the
ecological costs of growth.48
These attempts have fitted well with a general narrative of human progress,
led by the West and by Western values. While there may still be reason to support
policy initiatives based on the conventional techno-scientific approach to
progress, there are also signs—beyond the theoretical arguments taken by Beck
and Giddens—indicating that the world may not be headed in this benevolent
direction. If we take longer time perspectives, or if we focus on other features of
the past than humanity’s progress, we might as well find a human history marked
by crises, regime shifts, disasters, and constantly changing patterns of
adjustment to limits and confines. Indeed, this now emerges as a new historical
meta-narrative, linking humanity’s creative past with its destructive
consequences and nature-culture interplay. If previous humanistic meta-
narratives have underscored the breaking out of confines, a new historical
understanding needs to accommodate what we are learning about the complexity
of human-nature relationships in different periods and in different parts of the
world.
In other words, as much as there are crucial shortcomings in previous attempts
to synthesize human experience into functioning narratives, there are histories
of interactive social-ecological systems and of sustainable governance of natural
resources to be written. On a growing scale this is also indeed happening.
Geographers and historians have increasingly focused on new dynamics of
conservation and adaptation: on how to integrate more efficiently human
presence and resource use with long-term preservation of diversity and (often
contested) landscape values.49
Given the track record of environmental history (in particular in North
America), with it emphasis more on nature than on the environment, it may be
instructive to take as an example a concrete policy area, that of spatial planning,
which puts environment and equity into focus. It seems increasingly important
to understand sustainable spatial planning as a co-production of cities and
landscapes. The concept of “co-production,” derived from the ecological sciences,
explains relations between the two that are mutual, interactive, and never-ending.
This has become a lasting policy-relevant feature of William Cronon’s Nature’s
Metropolis (1991), which demonstrates how, through a wide range of
infrastructures, policy decisions, and technological regimes, Chicago and the
West developed in a lock-step fashion. The midwestern landscape “produced,”
literally, the city, and the city, with its increasing demand for resources and its
vigorous trade and economy, equally produced the surrounding landscape. The
result was a “remote landscape,” a nature shaped by the metropolis, and vice-
versa: nature’s metropolis. However, only small portions of Chicago’s resource
flows came from beyond the region. Chicago’s footprint on distant regions of the
world was limited.
Today, with growing volumes of flows, local, global, and regional, the
interaction occurs over longer distances and with a spatial distribution that is

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more patchy, and possibly even more unjust, than before, and fundamentally
difficult to control with conventional governance. What seems fully attainable,
however, is an empirically based understanding of the interwoven character of
cities and landscapes in flow-intensive economies operating simultaneously on
a number of spatial levels, ranging from the local to the global, including a better
understanding of how the resilience and vulnerability of this relationship has
developed historically.
If attention to socially relevant issues is a way to move environmental history
into closer contact with social theory, it could also be worthwhile to consider the
roles of knowledge and science in relation to environmental politics. In parallel
with resource management regimes we could speak of “knowledge regimes.” The
concept not only signifies a certain continuity of knowledge interests and the
way they are organized. It also implies that there is a built-in power dimension
which is a central component of the modern knowledge project. As Sheila Jasanoff
has repeatedly insisted, central concepts in democratic theory, such as citizenship
and accountability, need to be analyzed in relation to the politics of science and
technology. She has also noted how certain national styles of regulatory power
have emerged in, for example, environmental politics.50 The political agenda of a
particular country may be rooted in different scientifically informed models of
thought, which is the result of recent work on the environmental politics of
Norway, where a particular form of Social Democratic science-based instrumental
rationality has prevailed.51
While this particular knowledge regime is quite uniquely tied up with a
benevolently nationalist post-Second World War Protestant Welfare State
Scandinavian country, the observation as such is perhaps both general and
illuminating. The case of modern Norway prompts us to note that environmental
history demands attention both to democratic theory and science politics on the
one hand, and to the historical study of nationalism, one of the mainstream fields
of history. Around the world, environmental policy, perhaps more than any other
kind of policy, has become science-based policy. It may even, in a practice-oriented
and performative analysis, be stated that modern nature (or, dare we say,
environment) is defined by environmental policy and differentiated via the
categories created by the policy’s own minimum requirements, emission goals,
and sensitive areas. In this way, the technologies of environmental policy
emanating from an active intercourse with the results and advocates of the natural
sciences, created the nature/natural environment we had during the last decades
of the twentieth century. Society’s nature is a political product.52
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a pattern of far greater complexity
and increased tension is in the process of being established. Scientific knowledge
can no longer exclusively be used to support demands for the protection of
individual species, regions or even entire ecosystems. While the application of
Norwegian environmental policy showed that it functioned performatively and
in practice formed the nature that had been its political object, it also showed
how hard it is to translate scientific “facts” into politically realizable decisions.53
Environmental policy as an assumed value-free technology may never have

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existed, but it was certainly more valid a generation ago than it is today. It has
become a project burdened with an increasing number of anomalies and problems
of actualization. Research results in the sciences, in themselves often uncertain,
must be combined with social research and inevitably be confronted with ethical
questions and conflicts of interest. Rarely is a single scientific standpoint raised
above every other opinion; when it is, it may be trivial. Even in those cases where
the scientific front is more or less unbreached there is, as a rule, no consensus as
to the measures to be taken.
How do we understand knowledge regimes historically? And how do we connect
the experiences of rich, environmentally and scientifically advanced
Scandinavian nations, and other European democracies, with power dimensions
that are global and bound up with modern Western science and its institutions?
This is, we may note, how the concept was applied in the document prepared by
the African nations for the international summit on sustainable development in
Johannesburg in 2002: “The existing technologies and knowledge regimes must
be changed.”54
Environmental history has already crossed many boundaries. Nonetheless,
some of the most important ones are those that are quite nearby, unnecessarily
dividing the discipline from theories and conceptual approaches that have
enlightened the humanities and the social sciences. We should consider crossing
them as well. In doing so we are perhaps most useful, both to our fellow historians
and to our teammates in the sciences.
erk
Sver Sörlin
ker Sör lin works at the Office for History of Science and Technology, Royal
Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. P Pa War
aul W ard
arde works at the Centre for
History and Economics, University of Cambridge, UK.
NOTES
We would like to thank all those who have participated in the project, “The uses
of environmental history,” based at the Centre for History and Economics, King’s
College, University of Cambridge, where we have sounded out and developed many
of the ideas contained in this article. Special thanks go to audiences for earlier
versions of the arguments presented here in King’s College, Cambridge, in
February 2005; and at the Nordic Environmental History Conference, “Thinking
Through the Environment,” held at Turku, Finland, in September 2005.
1. Roderick Nash, “American Environmental History: A New Teaching Frontier,” Pacific

Historical Review 41 (1972): 362-77; Richard Grove has identified an earlier use in a
course taught at Strawberry Hill College in London by Henry Bernstein in 1969. Richard
Grove and Vinita Damodaran, “Imperialism and Environmental Change: Unearthing
the Origins and Evolution of Environmental History from Edmond Halley to John
Richards, 1676-2000,” Unpublished paper, January 2006.
2. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western
Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).

on 23 May 2018
3. Jane Carruthers, “Africa: Histories, Ecologies and Societies,” Environment and History
10 (2004): 379.
4. Richard White, “American Environmental History: The Development of a New
Historical Field,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985): 297-335; Richard White,
“Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature,” Pacific Historical Review
70 (2001): 103-11. Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in The Ends of the
Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 289-307; Alfred Crosby, “The Past and Present of
Environmental History,” American Historical Review 100 (October, 1995): 1177-89;
William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review
17 (Fall, 1993): 1-22; Donald Hughes, “Global Dimensions of Environmental History,”
Pacific Historical Review 70 (2001): 91-101.
5. Environment and History 10 (2004).
6. The observation on the lack of coherence of the field has also recently been made in
Douglas R. Weiner, “A Death-defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Vision of
Environmental History,” Environmental History 10 (2004): 404-20.
7. Petra van Dam, “Euro-English and the Art of Environmental History,” Environmental
History 10 (2004): 103-05.
8. See T. C. Smout, Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern
England since 1600 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
9. T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815 (London: Penguin, 2003), 346-60.
10. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage,
1990); Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
(New York: Vintage, 1998). Other important interventions in a rapidly expanding
literature include Joel A. Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy, Technology and the Rise of the
Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988);
Joel A. Tarr and Christine Meisner Rosen, “The Importance of an Urban Perspective in
Environmental History,” Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 299-310; Martin Melosi,
Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform and the Environment, 1880-1980 (College Station
and London: Texas A&M University Press, 1981); Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City:
Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2000); Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin and Geneviève Massard-
Guilbaud, eds., Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of
Modern Europe (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2005).
11. Georges Teyssot, ed., The American Lawn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press
with the Canadian Center for Architecture, 1999); Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the
Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);and now Ted Steinberg, American
Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006).
See also Peter Coates, “Emerging from the Wilderness (or, from Redwoods to Bananas):
Recent Environmental History in the United States and the Rest of the Americas,”
Environment and History 10 (2004): 413; Suburban development forms a component
of the research project on waste at the AHRC Centre for Environmental History in St.
Andrew’s, Scotland.
12. Graeme Wynn and Matthew Evenden, “Fifty-four, Forty, or Fight?: Writing Within and
Across Boundaries in North American Environmental History,” Unpublished paper
delivered at the conference “The Uses of Environmental History: Cross-Disciplinary
Conversations,” University of Cambridge, January 2006.
13. One noted a pattern at a recent environmental history conference in Cambridge of
historical geographers beginning their presentations by stating that they were not
environmental historians, before delivering magisterial papers on environmental
history!

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14. William Beinart and Peter Coates, Environment and History (London: Routledge, 1995);
William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor, eds, Social History and African Environments
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); James C. McCann, Green Land, Brown Land,
Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa 1800-1990 (Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1999); Megan Vaughan and Henrietta L. Moore, Cutting Down Trees:
Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in Northern Province, Zambia, 1890-1990
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann and James Currey, 1995); James Fairhead and Melissa
Leach, Reframing Deforestation: Global Analyses and Local Realities—Studies in West
Africa (London: Routledge, 1998).
15. Published as William L. Thomas, ed., Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).
16. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996).
17. David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha, eds., Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on
the Environmental History of South Asia, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Gregory A. Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); Kevin Hannam, “Utilitarianism and the Identity
of the Indian Forest Service,” Environment and History 6 (2000).
18. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Richard
Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the “Improvement” of
the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
19. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia
(Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 8, “Journeys
to the Centre.” Recent works include Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin,
eds., A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia (Canberra: National
Museum of Australia Press, 2004); and Mandy Martin, Libby Robin and Mike Smith,
Strata: Deserts Past, Present, and Future (Canberra, 2005).
20. See the brief overview of Canadian environmental history by Graeme Wynn included
in his “‘Should We Linger along Ambitionless?’: Environmental Perspectives on British
Columbia,” BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly 142/143 (2004): 31-35. L.
Anders Sandberg and Sverker Sörlin, eds., Sustainability—the Challenge: People, Power,
and the Environment (Montreal, New York and London: Black Rose Books, 1998),
contains a range of contributions on Canadian and Scandinavian environmental
history, although only few of them comparative. Suzanne E. Zeller, Inventing Canada:
Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1987).
21. Michael T. Bravo and Sverker Sörlin, eds., Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of
Nordic Scientific Practices (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2002), e.g.
Sörlin, “Rituals and Resources of Natural History: The North and the Arctic in Swedish
Scientific Nationalism.”
22. John McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,”
History and Theory 42 (2003): 5-43.
23. Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth.
24. One could take examples such as the Christian Pfister (Zürich) “school” of Alpine
climate history, medievalists such as Verena Viniwarter (Vienna) and Petra van Dam
(Amsterdam), the cluster of historians of environmental politics in Scandinavia, Lars
J. Lundgren (Stockholm), Erland Mårald (Umeå), Johan Hedrén (Linköping), Kristin
Asdal (Oslo), resource-oriented economic historians such as Timo Myllyntaus (Turku),
Magnus Lindmark (Bergen), Astrid Kander (Lund), Paul Warde (Cambridge), Poul Holm
(Roskilde), or environmental science/historical geography approaches by Christer

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Nordlund (Umeå) and Michael Bravo (Cambridge). By and large all of these “clusters”
—which of course have many more individual members than those here given—operate
within their own cognitive and bibliographical spheres; insofar as they share
references, these are perhaps more likely to be synthetical works of non-European
origin (for this strand of environmental history writing, see below).
25. Sverker Sörlin, Naturkontraktet: Om naturumgängets idéhistoria [The Nature
Contract: On the History of Environmental Ideas] (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1991); Sverker
Sörlin with A. Öckerman, Jorden en ö: En global miljöhistoria [The Earth an Island: A
Global Environmental History], (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1998, rev. ed. 2002);
Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (München: Beck,
2002); Marco Armiero and Stefania Barca, Storia dell’ambiente (Rome: Carocci, 2004);
Robert Delort and François Walter, Histoire de l’environnement européen (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 2001); Jan Luiten van Zanden and Wybren Verstegen,
Groene geschiedenis van Nederland (Utrecht, 1993).
26. Influential exponents of such work are Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside
(London: Dent, 1986); A. T. Grove and Oliver Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean
Europe: An Ecological History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001);
and Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands
and People (New York: George Braziller, 1995). Joseph Needham’s seminal works on
Chinese science and development, although very different in scope, came from a similar
route; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1954-1992).
27. David N. Livingstone, “The Spaces of Knowledge: Contributions towards a Historical
Geography of Science”, Society and Space 3 (1995); Putting Science in Its Place:
Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Charles W. J. Withers, Geography, Science, and National Identity: Scotland since 1520
(Cambridge and New York, 2001). Michael T. Bravo, “Geographies of Exploration and
Improvement: William Scoresby and Arctic Whaling (1782-1822),” Journal of Historical
Geography 32 (2006).
28. Peter Bowler, The Fontana History of the Environmental Sciences (London: Fontana,
1992). On the concept of the “field”, see Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, eds.,
Science in the Field, theme issue, Osiris 11 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1996); Michael T. Bravo and Sverker Sörlin, “Narrative and Practice: Introduction,” in
Narrating the Arctic, ed. Michael T. Bravo and Sverker Sörlin: 3-32; Robert E. Kohler,
Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).
29. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
30. William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1995); Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The
Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959: reprint, Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1997); Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957; English transl., London:
Jonathan Cape, 1972), 101.
31. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 1984).
32. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (Blackwell: Oxford, 2004), 450;
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the
Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 57-58.
33. Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the
History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
34. Peter Burke, “Elective Affinities: Gilberto Freyre and the Nouvelle Histoire,” The
European Legacy 3 (1998): 1-10; Gilberto Freyre, Nordeste: Aspectos de influencia da

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anna sobre a vie e a paizageio de nordeste do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Olympio, 1937).
Braudel’s principles are laid out most famously in Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean
and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London: Collins, 1972); but perhaps
most obviously in The Identity of France. Vol. 1. History and Environment (London:
Collins, 1988).
35. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last
13,000 Years (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997); Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Survive (London: Allen Lane, 2005); Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Daniel B. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies:
A New Ecology for the 21st Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1990); Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
(New York: Norton, 1980); The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).
36. A recent (January 2006) plan, ambitious indeed, for an integrated human-global history
by a large team of cooperating scientists in fact does not even identify historians as
among the core competencies needed. The program, entitled “Developing an Integrated
History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE),” states that the following three
“constituent communities,” with particular experience in data collecting, will
cooperate: “1. Archeologists and anthropologists with the knowledge of what happened.
2. Geographers who manage analyzed data over various temporal and spatial scales 3.
Earth System scientists who are interested in derived products that can be used as
inputs to evaluate impacts on say, hydrologic processes, carbon cycle, etc.” http://
www.glp.colostate.edu/Rome/16.IHOPE_SCI_PLAN_v2_ojima.pdf, p. 11. See also R.
Costanza, L. Graumlich, and W. Steffen, eds., Sustainability or Collapse? Integrated
History and Future of People on Earth, Dahlem Workshop Report 96 (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2007), a book in which there are contributions also by anthropologists and
historians.
37. Robert Delort and Francois Walter, Histoire de l’environnement européen (Paris:
Universitaires de France, 2001).
38. See, for example, the essays by Donald Worster, who has does done as much as anyone
to promote the field of environmental history, in his The Wealth of Nature:
Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993).
39. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).
40. Anthony Giddens, “Living in a Post-traditional Society,” in Reflexive Modernisation:
Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, ed. Ulrich Beck, Anthony
Giddens and Scott Lash (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 77.
41. For the early modern period, for example, see Keith Thomas on fears of bestiality in
his Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London:
Allen Lane, 1983).
42. Lynn T. White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
43. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).
44. See T. C. Smout, Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern
England since 1600 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), chap. 1.
45. Worster, The Wealth of Nature, 184-219.
46. Drayton, Nature’s Government.
47. Björn-Ola Linnér, The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-war Population-
Resource Crisis (Isle of Harris: White Horse Press, 2003).
48. Maarten A. Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization
and the Policy Process (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). For a concrete attempt to provide
policy advice along those lines, see Adam Tooze and Paul Warde, “A Long-run Historical

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Perspective on the Prospects for Uncoupling Economic Growth and CO2 Emissions,”
submission to the HM Treasury Stern Review, December 2005.
49. In a vast literature, see, for example, William M. Adams, Future Nature: A Vision for
Conservation (London: Earthscan Publications, 1996), and Against Extinction: The
Story of Conservation (London: Earthscan Publications, 2004); Sverker Sörlin, ”On
the Trading Zone between Articulation and Preservation: The Production of Meaning
in Landscape History and the Problems of Heritage Decision-making,” in Rational
Decision-making in the Preservation of Cultural Property, Dahlem Workshop Report,
ed. Norbert S. Baer and Folke Snickars (Berlin: Dahlem University Press, 2001), 47-59.
50. Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United
States (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 1.
51. Rune Slagstad, “Shifting Knowledge Regimes: The Metamorphosis of Norwegian
Reformism,” Thesis Eleven 77(2004). Kristin Asdal, Politikkens teknologier:
Produksjon av regjerlig natur [The technologies of politics: Production of governable
nature], University of Oslo: Series of Dissertations Submitted to the Faculty of Arts
188 (Oslo, 2004).
52. Kristin Asdal, “The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist Challenge
to Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (2003).
53. Asdal, Politikkens teknologier, 60-74.
54. Report on the African Civil Society Forum, Nairobi, Kenya on the 15th to 16th October
2001: An African Civil Society Position (2001) http://www.worldsummit2002.org/texts/
AfricanCivilSocietyForumOct1516.rtf.

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SVERKER SÖRLIN AND PAUL WARDE

THE EXPRESSION “ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY” was coined, at least within the

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RECENT GLOBAL TRENDS

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history of water management in the Netherlands, struggles over nuclear power

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international conferences might suggest. Similarly, a second hypothesis is that

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infrastructure projects and irrigation schemes that have influenced Australia’s

DIVERSITY AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY

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THE SYNTHETIC AND THE PARTICULAR

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temptingly odd rather than in the grand narratives.35

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THE PROBLEM OF THE PROBLEM

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provide essential documentation and accounts of change to those environmental

INVOLVEMENT WITH SOCIAL THEORY

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THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENT

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still regards technological progress, “ecological modernization,” or a “decoupling”

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1. Roderick Nash, “American Environmental History: A New Teaching Frontier,” Pacific

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