Environmental history

[1] The field was founded on conservation issues but has broadened in scope to include more general social and scientific history and may deal with cities, population or sustainable development.

The second category, how humans use nature, includes the environmental consequences of increasing population, more effective technology and changing patterns of production and consumption.

In an address to the Organization of American Historians in 1969 (published in 1970) Nash used the expression "environmental history",[4] although 1972 is generally taken as the date when the term was first coined.

In general terms it is a history that tries to explain why our environment is like it is and how humanity has influenced its current condition, as well as commenting on the problems and opportunities of tomorrow.

[11] Donald Worster's widely quoted 1988 definition states that environmental history is the "interaction between human cultures and the environment in the past".

[13] and, in 2006, as "history that seeks understanding of human beings as they have lived, worked and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the changes brought by time".

[13] Environmental historians are also interested in "what people think about nature, and how they have expressed those ideas in folk religions, popular culture, literature and art".

[29] The questions of environmental history date back to antiquity, including[30] Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who asserted that different cultures and human temperaments could be related to the surroundings in which peoples lived in Airs, Waters, Places.

In 1929 a group of French historians founded the journal Annales, in many ways a forerunner of modern environmental history since it took as its subject matter the reciprocal global influences of the environment and human society.

The most influential empirical and theoretical work in the subject has been done in the United States where teaching programs first emerged and a generation of trained environmental historians is now active.

[15] Moral and political inspiration to environmental historians has come from American writers and activists such as Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson.

[37][38][39] Gregory Barton argues that the concept of environmentalism emerged from forestry studies, and emphasizes the British imperial role in that research.

He argues that imperial forestry movement in India around 1900 included government reservations, new methods of fire protection, and attention to revenue-producing forest management.

Searching for more efficient ways of using natural resources, the British moved flora, fauna and commodities around the world, sometimes resulting in ecological disruption and radical environmental change.

For Paul Warde the sheer scale, scope and diffuseness of the environmental history endeavour calls for an analytical toolkit "a range of common issues and questions to push forward collectively" and a "core problem".

[50] Many of the themes of environmental history inevitably examine the circumstances that produced the environmental problems of the present day, a litany of themes that challenge global sustainability including: population, consumerism and materialism, climate change, waste disposal, deforestation and loss of wilderness, industrial agriculture, species extinction, depletion of natural resources, invasive organisms and urban development.

[56] A critical examination of the traditional environmentalist movement from this historical perspective notes the ways in which early advocates of environmentalism sought the aesthetic preservation of middle-class spaces and sheltered their own communities from the worst effects of air and water pollution, while neglecting the plight of the less privileged.

Interdisciplinary research now understands historic inequality as a lens through which to predict future social developments in the environmental sphere, particularly with regard to climate change.

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs cautions that a warming planet will exacerbate environmental and other inequalities, particularly with regard to: "(a) increase in the exposure of the disadvantaged groups to the adverse effects of climate change; (b) increase in their susceptibility to damage caused by climate change; and (c) decrease in their ability to cope and recover from the damage suffered.

"[57] As an interdisciplinary field that encompasses a new understanding of social justice dynamics in a rapidly changing global climate, environmental history is inherently advocative.

Narratives of environmental history tend to be what scholars call "declensionist", that is, accounts of increasing decline under human activity.

[58] In other words, "declensionist" history is a form of the "lost golden age" narrative that has repeated appeared in human thought since ancient times.

In environmental debate blame can always be apportioned, but it is more constructive for the future to understand the values and imperatives of the period under discussion so that causes are determined and the context explained.

[70] In fact methodologies and insights from a range of physical and social sciences is required, there seeming to be universal agreement that environmental history is indeed a multidisciplinary subject.

Environmental history, like all historical studies, shares the hope that through an examination of past events it may be possible to forge a more considered future.

Hughes comments that environmental historians "will find themselves increasingly challenged by the need to explain the background of the world market economy and its effects on the global environment.

Supranational instrumentalities threaten to overpower conservation in a drive for what is called sustainable development, but which in fact envisions no limits to economic growth".

[75] Against this background "environmental history can give an essential perspective, offering knowledge of the historical process that led to the present situation, give examples of past problems and solutions, and an analysis of the historical forces that must be dealt with"[76] or, as expressed by William Cronon, "The viability and success of new human modes of existing within the constraints of the environment and its resources requires both an understanding of the past and an articulation of a new ethic for the future.