Ecology, objectivity and critique in writings on nature and human societies

Journal of Historical Geography

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 1994, Pages 22-37

  Demeritt, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002969920     PISSN: 03057488     EISSN: 10958614     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1006/jhge.1994.1003     Document Type: Article

References (114)

1. For a similar assessment of our limited contribution to this conversation, see Robert W. Kates, The human environment: the road still beckoning Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (1987) 525-34
2. Terry G. Jordan, Preadaptation and European colonization in rural North America Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79 (1989) 489-500. The discipline has not really progressed beyond programmatic statements like Margaret FitzSimmons, Reconstructing nature Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 7 (1989) 1-3
3. Chris Philo, De-limiting human geography: new social and cultural perspectives, in C. Philo (Ed.), New worlds, new words (Aberystwyth 1991) 25
4. fürther justification for this remark would itself require an extended review of the geographic literature which neither space nor time will allow. I submit the following, however, as symptomatic of the disengaged and excessively technical bent of geographic scholarship on global change: R. J. Palm, Natural hazards (Baltimore 1990)
5. B. L. Turner II et al. (Eds.), The Earth as transformed by human action (New York 1990)
6. A. M. Mannion, Global environmental change (New York 1991).
7. Some of the reasons for this are suggested by Margaret FitzSimmons, The matter of nature Antipode 21 (1989) 106-20
8. See, for example, M. Watts, Silent violence (Berkeley 1983)
9. S. Hecht and A. Cockburn, The fate of the forest (London 1990)
10. M. W. Martin, Wagering the land (Berkeley 1992)
11. Donald Worster, Transformations of the earth: toward an agroecological perspective in history Journal of American History 76 (1990) 1089.
12. For reviews of the environmental history project, see
13. Richard White, American environmental history: the development of a new historical field Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985) 297-335
14. Donald Worster (Ed.), The ends of the Earth (New York 1988) and the roundtable discussion of Worster, Transformations of the earth.
15. Alfred W. Crosby, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, William Cronon, and Stephen J. Pyne in Journal of American History 76 (1990) 1087-1147. As the nationality of these authors and their publication outlets would indicate, environmental history is much better established in the United States than in Canada
16. I use the word “nature” here and throughout this essay with some ambivalence. In Keywords (rev. ed., London 1983) 219, Raymond Williams called it “perhaps the most complex word in the language”. It is also one of the most potent. Nature suggests a very troubling distinction between humans and the other organisms and material objects in the world. In this discursive position as “other”, nature has also helped constitute many different sorts of racism, colonialism, sexism, and class domination. In the sense of the inherent force directing the world, nature provides a silent, but transcendent, authorization for scientific and other discourses that are legitimated by appeal to the way the world works. Through such appeals to nature, science has replaced religion as the pre-eminent form of social legitimation. See, W. Wright, Wild knowledge (Minneapolis 1992). Unfortunately, the English language provides few substitutes for the word nature, and so its use becomes difficult to avoid. I have tried to use it with care, but the reader should take note of these different effects sneaking into my text
17. While I am sympathetic to the many local varieties of environmental activism and the many different shades of Green in the environmental movement, I would still maintain that, for all their many differences, environmental critics have all depended on ecological discourse to claim an exclusive and privileged knowledge about nature. As I shall explain, revision in ecological science challenges the environmentalists’ reading of nature. For a discussion of different national histories of the Green movement, see
18. S. P. Hays, Beauty, health, and permanence (New York 1987)
19. A. Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th century (New Haven 1989)
20. J. McCormick, Reclaiming paradise (Bloomington 1989)
21. P. Alphandery, Pierre Bitoun, and Yves Dupont, L’equivoque ecologique (Paris 1991)
22. Robert K. Cowell, What’s new? community ecology discovers biology, in P. W. Price et al. (Eds.), A new ecology (New York 1984) 392
23. Robert P. McIntosh, Pluralism in ecology Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 18 (1987) 321-41
24. Donald Worster, The ecology of order and chaos Environmental History Review 14 (1990) 1-18
25. The development of the ideographic/nomothetic distinction in neo-Kantian philosophy is described in J. N. Entrikin, The betweenness of place (Baltimore 1991), 93-102
26. The best histories of recent ecological science are M. Nicolson, The development of plant ecology, 1790-1960 (unpubl. Phd. diss., University of Edinburgh 1984); R. P. McIntosh, The background of ecology (New York 1985)
27. S. E. Kingsland, Modelling nature (Chicago, 1985)
28. T. Soderqvist, The ecologists (Stockholm 1986)
29. Worster, Ecology of order and chaos, 1-18;
30. G. Mitman, The state of nature: ecology, community and American social thought, 1900-1950 (Chicago 1992)
31. J. B. Hagen, An entangled bank: the origins of ecosystem ecology (New Brunswick 1992)
32. R. A. Overfield, Science with practice: Charles E. Bessey and the nurturing of American botany (Ames 1993). Daniel Botkin winds his own idiosyncratic and highly stimulating way across much of this territory as well. D. B. Botkin, Discordant harmonies (New York, 1990)
33. Worster, Ecology of order and chaos, 1-18. Questions about methodological individualism and the fundamental level of biological organization were not unrelated to wider social currents. See Evelyn Fox Keller, Demarcating public from private values in evolutionary discourse Journal of the History of Biology 21 (1988) 195-211
34. Colwell, Demarcating public from private values in evolutionary discourse Journal of the History of Biology 21 (1988). 389
35. Botkin, Discordant harmonies reviews much of the recent uncertainty in ecology about the ontological status of their analytical units
36. Kenneth H. Mann, Towards predictive models for coastal marine ecosystems, in L. R. Pomeroy and J. L. Alberts (Eds.), Concepts of ecosystem ecology (New York 1988) 291-316
37. A. F. McEvoy, The fishersman’s problem (New York 1986)
38. M. L. Heinselman, Fire in the virgin forests of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota Quarternary Research 3 (1973) 329-82
39. John A. Wiens, On understanding a non-equilibrium world: myth and reality in community patterns and processes, in D. R. Strong et al. (Eds.), Ecological communities (Princeton 1984) 439-57
40. Robert M. May, Levels of organization in ecology, in J. M. Cherrett (Ed.), Ecological concepts (Princeton 1988) 339-363
41. H. L. Shugart and D. L. Urban, Scale, synthesis, and ecosystem dynamics, in Concepts of ecosystem ecology, 279-89
42. See, for example, David E. Hibbs, Gap dynamics in a hemlock-hardwood forest Canadian Journal of Forest Research 12 (1982) 522-27
43. S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White (Eds.), The ecology of natural disturbance and patch dynamics (Orlando 1985)
44. The landmark paper here is George L. Jacobson, Thom Webb, III, and Eric C. Grimm, Patterns and rates of vegetation change during the deglaciation of eastern North America, in W. F. Ruddiman and H. E. Wright, Jr. (Eds.), North America and adjacent oceans during the last deglaciation (Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America, The Geology of North America, vol k-3, 1987). Of course, neither the use of phytolith data, nor the argument that species behave individually was new or unique to these authors. In his dispute with Clements, Herbert Gleason used phytolith data. Gleason, Vegetational history of the Middle West Annals of the Association of American Geographers 12 (1922) 78-85. For a recent review of these techniques, see Glen M. MacDonald and Kevin J. Edwards, Holocene palynology: I principles, population, and community ecology Progress in Physical Geography 15 (1991) 261-89 and their, Holocene palynology: II human influence and vegetation change Progress in Physical Geography 15 (1991) 364—91
45. For a brief outline of ecologists’ uses of the idea of a balance of nature, see Frank N. Egerton, Changing concepts in the balance of nature Quarterly Review of Biology 48 (1973) 322-50
46. These particular definitions of resilience, persistence, variability, and resistance come from S. L. Pimm, The balance of nature 7 (Chicago 1991). There are others. See, for example
47. C. S. Holling, Resilience and stability of natural ecosystems Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973) 1-23
48. See, for example, the essays in J. M. Cherret (Ed.), Ecological concepts, (Princeton 1988)
49. [21 ] Laurence R. Pomeroy, Eugene C. Hargrove, and James J. Alberts, The ecosystem perspective, in L. R. Pomeroy and J. J. Alberts (Eds.), Concepts of ecosystem ecology (New York 1988) 17
50. W. Dean, Brazil and the struggle for rubber (New York 1987) 53-66
51. S. J. Pyne, Fire in America (Princeton 1982)
52. W. Cronon, Changes in the land (New York 1983)
53. M. Williams, Americans and their forests (New York 1989)
54. T. Silver, A new face on the countryside (New York 1990)
55. Emily W. B. Russell, Indian-set fires in the forests of the northeastern United States Ecology 64 (1983) 78-88. Also see the exchange between
56. R. T. T. Forman and E. W. B. Russell, Evaluation of historical data in ecology Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 64 (1983) 4-5
57. R. L. Myers and P. A. Peroni, Approaches to determining aboriginal fire use and its impact on vegetation Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 64 (1983) 217-218. For an analysis of the fossil pollen data, see
58. William A. Patterson III and Kenneth E. Sassaman, Indian fires in the prehistory of New England, in G. P. Nicholas (Ed.), Holocene human ecology in northeastern North America (New York 1988)
59. William A. Patterson III and Andrew E. Backman, Fire and disease history of forests, in B. Huntley and T. Web III (Eds.), Vegetation history (Dordecht 1988) 603-32
60. John H. McAndrews, Human disturbance of North American forests and grasslands: the fossil pollen record, in B. Huntley and T. Web III (Eds.), Vegetation history (Dordecht 1988)., 673-98
61. Worster, Nature’s economy (San Francisco 1977); R. Tobey, Saving the prairies (Berkeley 1981)
62. Donald Worster, Review of Changes in the land by William Cronon Agricultural History 58 (1984) 508-509
63. Worster, History as natural history: an essay on theory and method Pacific Historical Review 53(1984) 13
64. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 242, 241
65. Worster, Ecology of order and chaos, 16
66. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 241
67. Very similar politics of representation are at work in the debate about women’s reproductive rights. By claiming the exclusive right to speak for the unborn, anti-abortionists silence pregnant women who are discursively reconstituted as beings with opposing interests. Donna Haraway, The promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d Others, in L. Grossberg et al (Eds.), Cultural studies (New York 1992) 311-15
68. Worster, Nature’s economy, 241, 345
69. J. Perkins, Insects, experts, and the insecticide crisis (New York 1982)
70. C. Merchant, The death of nature (San Francisco 1980). For a rather different view of these changes, see Denis Cosgrove, Environmental thought and action: pre-modern and postmodern Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new series 15 (1990) 344-58
71. Merchant, Ecological revolutions
72. McEvoy, Ecological revolutions
73. Steve Woolgar, Irony in the social study of science, in K. D. Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (Eds.), Science observed (London 1983) 262. For a fuller critique of this instrumental irony
74. S. Woolgar, Science, the very idea (Chichester 1982) 89-111, Richard White has also expressed some ambivalence about this use of irony in western American history. White, Trashing the trails, in P. N. Limerick et al. (Eds.) Trails (Lawrence, KA 1991) 34-35
75. Richard White, Environmental history, ecology, and meaning Journal of American History 76 (1990) 1114. For similar concerns, see
76. Richard White, American environmental history: the development of a new historical field Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985) 334
77. John Opie, Environmental history, pitfalls and opportunities Environmental Review 7 (1983) 15
78. Leibhardt, Interpretation and causal analysis: theories in environmental history Environmental Review 12 (1988) 26
79. For critiques of Geertz in human geography and anthropology, see, C[arolyn] Mills, “Life on the Upslope’': the postmodern landscape of gentrification Environmental and Planning D: Society and Space 6 (1988) 171-72
80. Bob Scholte, The charmed circle of Geertz’s hermeneutics: a neo-marxist critique Critique of Anthropology 6 (1986) 261-79
81. J. Clifford, The predicament of culture (Cambridge, Mass. 1988)
82. Elizabeth Ann R. Bird, The social construction of nature: theoretical approaches to the history of environmental problems Environmental Review 11 (1987) 255-64
83. B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory life (Beverley Hills 1979), 176
84. Bird, Laboratory life (Beverley Hills 1979)., 25
85. Bird, Laboratory life (Beverley Hills 1979), 261
86. P. Novick, That noble dream (New York 1988)
87. T. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd edn. Chicago 1970)
88. H. Putnam, Reason, truth, and history (Cambridge 1981) 50
89. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the mirror of nature (Princeton 1979).
90. C. G. Prado, The limits to pragmatism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1987) provides a sympathetic introduction to Rorty
91. See, for example, J. Derrida, Of grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore 1976)
92. See, for example, J. W. Scott, Gender and the politics of history (New York 1988)
93. J. H. Hexter, The history primer (New York 1971) 270
94. quoted in Novick, The history primer (New York 1971)., 594. Novick’s book provides a useful roadmap of the debate over realism in the American profession, although he is not especially sensitive to the political implications of these challenges. For all their other differences, both the Left and the Right defend realism by indiscriminate assaults postmodern theories and theorists. In tone, the fulminations of B. Palmer, Descent into discourse (Philadelphia 1990) read much like D. Harvey, The condition of postmodernity (Oxford 1989). On the Right, see G. Himmelfarb, The new history and the old (Cambridge, Mass. 1987)
95. Certainly it would be possible to qualify this broad-brush assessment somewhat. Many quarters of the discipline, particularly feminist, post-colonial, and intellectual historians, have taken up these questions about language and the social construction of knowledge. But in the main, historians have continued their research undisturbed by these esoteric and seemingly irrelevant debates
96. White, Environmental history, ecology, and meaning, 1114
97. William Cronon, A place for stories: nature, history, and narrative Journal of American History 78 (1992) 1347-76 The quotation is from p. 1352.
98. William Cronon, A place for stories: nature, history, and narrative Journal of American History 78 (1992). 1370
99. Donald Worster, Doing environmental history, in Ends of the earth, 289
100. Cronan, Doing environmental history, in Ends of the earth. 1370-74
101. The phrase, of course, belongs to Michel Foucault, quoted in L. Kritzman, (Ed.), Michel Foucault (New York 1988) 118. His extensive writings provide a diverse and insightful guide to the workings of discursive formations and the relations between power and knowledge
102. Cronon, loc. cit. 1372
103. On the changing interpretations of the Civil War, see Thomas J. Pressly, Americans interpret their Civil War (2nd edn. New York 1965)
104. Novick, Americans interpret their Civil War., 72-80
105. B. Latour, Science in action (Cambridge, Mass. 1987) describes the tremendous resources aligned behind facts and the great difficulty of challenging them
106. S. E. Morrison, History of U.S. naval operations in World War II, Vol. 1 (Boston 1947)
107. D. Van Der Vat, The Atlantic Campaign (New York 1988)
108. G. Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (New York 1992)
109. R. J. Bernstein, Beyond objectivism and relativism (Philadelphia 1983) provides a very useful guide in the effort to escape the trap of this dichotomy
110. Worster, Nature's economy, 241
111. For a discussion of this very danger, see Peter J. Taylor, Technocratic optimism, H. T. Odum, and the partial transformation of the ecological metaphor after World War II Journal of the History of Biology 21 (1988) 213-44
112. Some of the first discussions of these measurements took place at a 1972 conference at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. G. M. Woodwell and E. V. Pecan (Eds.), Carbon and the biosphere (Oak Ridge, Tenn. 1973)
113. One of the best guides to new and different relationships created by the deforestation and development of the tropical rainforests is Hecht and Cockburn, Fate of the forest
114. Both the phrase and the vision of situated knowledges belong to Donna Haraway, Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective, reprinted in her, Simians, cyborgs, and women (New York 1991) 183-201