Understanding Environmental History: Definition, Scope, and Development

Defining the Field and Its Core Areas of Inquiry. Environmental history is broadly defined as the study of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature. This encompasses three primary, overlapping areas of inquiry. The first is material environmental history, which examines the tangible interplay between humans and the natural world—from forests and cholera to coal and frogs. This approach studies both human impact on nature and nature’s influence on human affairs, positioning human events within the larger context of Earth’s systems where humans are not the sole actors. In practice, most work concentrates on the last two centuries, a period where industrialization drastically amplified humanity’s ability to alter environments.

Political, Policy, and Cultural Dimensions. The second area is political and policy-related environmental history, focusing on conscious efforts to regulate society-nature interactions and social conflicts over resources. This includes soil conservation, pollution control, and struggles over land use. The key distinction lies in outcomes that significantly affect the landscape itself. While resource conflicts are ancient, systematic policy efforts generally date to the late 19th century, with most scholarship focusing on the period after 1965, when state and organizational environmental activism surged. The third form is cultural and intellectual environmental history, analyzing human thought, belief, and artistic expression concerning nature. Evidence ranges from ancient rock art to published texts, often focusing on major religious traditions or influential thinkers like Mohandas K. Gandhi and Arne Naess, as well as popular environmentalism as a cultural movement.

Interdisciplinary Methods and Early Precedents. Environmental history is inherently interdisciplinary. Many practitioners are trained as geographers or historical ecologists. Beyond traditional texts, they utilize bio-archives (e.g., pollen deposits) and geo-archives (e.g., soil profiles) to reconstruct past ecologies and land use. The subject matter overlaps with historical geography and ecology, though sources differ. Climate history, for instance, is pursued by scholars from multiple disciplines. The field’s roots are deep and tangled. Early texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh addressed human-induced environmental change, while thinkers like Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu considered nature’s influence on society. Historical geographers charted landscape change from the 1870s, and professional historians like Fernand Braudel emphasized geographical constraints.

Institutionalization and the American Pioneering Role. As a self-conscious academic enterprise, environmental history emerged around 1970, energized by the popular environmental movement. In the United States, scholars like Roderick Nash, Donald Worster, Susan Flader, and Donald Hughes came together intellectually and institutionally. Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) is credited with first using the term ‘environmental history’. Foundational texts soon followed, including Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972), Worster’s Dust Bowl (1978), and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1984). They were joined by influential figures like Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, Martin Melosi, and Joel Tarr.

Globalization and the Limits of American Influence. These US scholars achieved remarkable institutional success, forming the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) in 1976-77 and launching the journal Environmental History. Their vigorous academia and the global reach of English propelled their international influence. Themes like colonization, cultural clash, and concepts like White’s ‘middle ground’ resonated with historians in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. However, the intellectual prominence of this American model eventually waned. Its emphasis on wilderness had limited relevance globally. As the field globalized, scholarship in Spanish, German, Italian, and other languages proliferated. While key non-English works like Joachim Radkau’s Natur und Macht (2000) were translated, most Americanists, constrained by language, primarily read each other, creating an uneven intellectual exchange even as environmental history became a truly global discipline.