Globalizing American Environmental History

Globalizing American Environmental History Author(s): Thomas Lekan Source: Environmental History, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan., 2005), pp. 50-52 Published by: Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985840 Accessed: 13/10/2010 12:26 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=fhs. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Environmental History. http://www.jstor.org 50 j ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 10 (JANUARY 2005) THOMASLEKAN globalizing american environmental history A COLLEAGUE of mine invited me to lead a session on environmental RECENTLY history in his graduate historiography seminar. My task was to moderate a discussion of an article surveyingthe field of environmentalhistory and to speak about how its ideas appliedto my own research. Forthe discussion my colleague had selected RichardGrove'schapter "EnvironmentalHistory"in Peter Burke's well-receivedcollectionNewPerspectiveson HistoricalWriting(PennState,2001), an essay I had not read previously. I assumed, erroneously,that it would be a standard survey of the field's intellectual origins and methodological concerns similar to well-knownarticles on the subject by scholars such as RichardWhite, Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, Ted Steinberg, and J. R. McNeil. I was thus unpreparedfor Grove'sapproach:a scathing, revisionist history of the discipline that lambasted North American scholars' "parochial takeover bid" of the designation "environmentalhistory" in the 197os. Echoing his arguments in GreenImperialism:ColonialExpansion, TropicalIsland Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, i6oo-186o (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995), Grove asserted that evidence of environmental degradation in the colonial periphery spurred the development of Francophone and Old World Anglophone environmentalhistory among geographers,anthropologists,and ecologists long before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) raised environmentalconsciousness and RoderickNash's Wildernessand the American Mind (YaleUniversity Press, 1967) made environmental history a respectable subfield in the United States. Not surprisingly,the seminar turned out to be a decidedlyawkwardexchange. Since most of the students in the seminar had never before encountered environmentalhistory in any form,Grove'siconoclastic accountleft most of them uncertain about the definition, scope, and achievements of the field. My attempt to describe familiar works by Worster, Bill Cronon, and Arthur McEvoyonly compoundedtheir confusion. I came awayfrustratedby my inability to reconcile Grove'saccount with other narratives about the field and to persuade this fresh groupof graduatestudents to consider incorporatingenvironmentalthemes into their emerging MA and PhD theses. Despite my reservations about the tone of Grove'scritique,however,my encounter with his essay did lead me to a series of productiveobservations and questions about the field of environmentalhistory. These inform my comments about where the field might go next. As a U.S. environmentalhistorian working on Germanand Europeanthemes and an active member of both the ASEHand the ESEH (EuropeanSociety for WHAT'S NEXT? EnvironmentalHistory), I am concerned that Grove'scaustic comments about North American scholarship reflect a deeper if often unarticulated discontent among scholars located or working on topics outside the United States. Groveis not the first to lament the "Americo-centrism" of environmental history, particularlywhat he terms the "wildernessobsession." But current geopolitical alignments give his criticism of U.S. scholars' lack of engagement with the rest of the worlda sharperedge that mayresult in divergingenvironmental-historical agendas with limited opportunities for trans-continental dialogue, debate, and synthesis. These observationslead me to two interrelatedquestions about future directions.GivenAmericanacademia'sperceivedoverweeninginfluence on global intellectual trends, how can scholars of other regions of the worldbenefit from and simultaneously help to globalize the methodologically sophisticated but sometimes narrow preoccupations of North American environmental historiography?Andhow can environmentalhistorians maintain their openness to interdisciplinaryapproachesand wide-rangingsubject matter while fostering a common body of scholarship that enables us to speak to each other across national, linguistic, or cultural divides? One way to globalize American environmental history would be a renewed commitment within the environmental history community to comparative analysis of major themes across different nations, regions, and cities. Here I envision a series of conferences, articles, essay collections, monographs, and grant proposals devoted to what J. R. McNeil has termed "mid-level generalizations"aboutthe role of economicstructures,political institutions, legal systems, cultural values, and technological infrastructures in shaping globally significant patterns of environmentalexploitation, adaptation,perception, and crisis in North American and abroad.'This is not a call for macro-level,world environmental history, which is well-represented in the profession and has producedfine narrativesaboutthe agrarianimpact of Europeancolonialism and the spread of Europeandiseases among aboriginalpeoples in the Americas and Australia.The scale of such studies, however,obscures the role of regional and national variation, including the resiliency of local ecosystems, the coerciveness of the state, or the characterof the political culture,in shaping the environmental past. Writing in collaborativepartnership,environmentalhistorians interested in the middle range of comparativeanalysis could examine familiar issues in a new light and find common ground along thematic lines. Such mid-level synthesis has recently proven fruitful in spurring scholarly exchange between U.S. and European scholars, as indicated by the numerous panels and articles devoted to Daniel Rodger'simpressive Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a ProgressiveAge (Belknap,2ooo). Environmentalhistory awaits a similar work;numerous themes cry out for comparativeanalysis. Forexample, is wilderness truly a productof an "Americanidentity crisis"with little relevance to other regions, as Groveasserts? Surelyrecent analyses of Americanwilderness fascination as product of capitalist core-peripheryrelationships on the North Americancontinent parallelGrove'sexaminationof British imperialgeographers' metropolitan interest in overseas environmental degradation on the colonial I 51 52 I ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 10 (JANUARY 2005) periphery.Bill Cronon'scritique of Americans'bifurcation of their landscapes into "pristine"and "fallen"zones also reflects global patterns of post-colonial environmental perception, as African environmental historians' attempts to debunk Western scholars' "degradationnarratives"about sub-Saharanregions have demonstrated.Anothertheme that animates cross-continentalscholarship is natural disaster. European scholars have produced an impressive record of natural disasters, particularlyflood events, dating back to the medieval period. Theyare keenly interested in the role of local political systems, propertyregimes, and religious beliefs in exacerbating, mitigating, or rationalizing the effect of these "actsof God."Yetat a recent ESEHconference,there was no mention of Ted Steinberg's Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (Oxford,2ooo), a work that addresses the social and economic injustices that producenatural calamities. This lack of cross-culturaldialogue seemed to me a missed opportunity-for collaborative research, for multi-year and multiinstitutional grants, for a common historiographical agenda, which are indispensable for a global communityof environmentalhistorians. Tom Lekan is an assistantprofessorofhistoryat the Universityof South Carolina. His first book, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and GermanIdentity,1885-1945, appeared in 2004. His current research focuses on the relationship between nature tourism, landscape change, and environmental politics in Western Europe from i8oo to the present. NOTES . J. R. McNeill, "Observationson the Nature and Cultureof EnvironmentalHistory," History and Theory,ThemeIssue 42 (December2003): 5-43,here 9. McNeill'sexcellent surveyof globalenvironmentalhistory in this article informsmanyof my observations in this piece. McNeill'sbook SomethingNew Underthe Sun:AnEnvironmentalHistory of the Twentieth-Century World(NewYork:W.W.Norton,2ooo) offers tantalizingplaces to begin formulating a comparative research agenda. See, for example, McNeill's comments on ecological footprint analysis and pollution control in chapter3.