Nature's fortunes: New directions in the writing of European environmental history

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 79, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 112-133

  Ford, Caroline ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34047257197     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/511196     Document Type: Review

References (121)

1. Richard White, "The Nationalization of Nature," Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 976.
2. See also White, "American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field," Pacific Historical Review 54 (August 1985): 297-335;
3. and Alfred W. Crosby, "The Past and Present of Environmental History," American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (October 1995): 1177-89.
4. Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History," Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (March 1990): 1089.
5. William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1375.
6. Richard White also acknowledges the "moral emphasis" in environmental history in the United States ("Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning," Journal of American History 76, no. 4 [March 1990]: 1114).
7. Crosby, "The Past and Present of Environmental History," 1186ff.
8. Ecological activism inspired many of the early works in the field, including Lynn White Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155 (1967): 1203-7;
9. Ian G. Barbour, ed., Western Man and Environmental Ethics: Attitudes toward Nature and Technology (Reading, MA, 1973);
10. John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (London, 1974);
11. and Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980).
12. Caroline Ford, "Landscape and the Environment in French Historical and Geographical Thought: New Directions," French Historical Studies 24, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 125-34.
13. For a discussion of evaluations of France as an "ungreen" nation, see Michael Bess, "Greening the Mainstream: Paradoxes of Antistatism and Anticonsumerism in the French Environmental Movement," Environmental History 4, no. 1 (2000): 6-17.
14. Jean Viard, "Protestante, La Nature?" in Protection de la nature: Histoire et idéologie, ed. A. Cadoret (Paris, 1985), 161-73;
15. and Michael Bess, Mark Cioc, and James Sievert, "Environmental History Writing in Southern Europe," Environmental History 5, no. 4 (October 2000): 545-56.
16. For an alternative perspective, see James Sievert, The Origins of Nature Conservation in Italy (Bern, 2000).
17. An earlier organization, the European Association for the History of the Environment, which was
18. ounded in 1987 and housed at the Historisches Institut der Universität Bern, is frequently ignored in such discussions. R. Delort, "Introduction: Pour une histoire de l'environnement," in Pour une histoire de l'environnement: Travaux du programme interdisciplinaire de recherche sur l'environnement, ed. Corrine Beck and Robert Delort (Paris, 1993), 5.
19. This is a position taken in a recent review article in Environmental History.
20. See Cioc, Linnér, and Osborn, "Environmental History Writing in Northern Europe."
21. Crosby, "The Past and Present of Environmental History," 1184.
22. Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 29, no. 3 (1974).
23. Cioc, Linnér, and Osborn have set much of this work in separate categories, for example ("Environmental History Writing in Northern Europe"). For a discussion of the disciplinary structures of French history in this regard,
24. see the insights of Pierre Claude Reynard, "Disciplinary Imperatives and New Questions: Is There a French Approach to Environmental History?" (paper presented at the annual meeting of French Historical Studies, Ottawa, 2000).
25. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 2003).
26. William Cronon, "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History," Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (March 1990): 1122.
27. Mark Cioc, "The Impact of the Coal Age on the German Environment: A Review of the Historical Literature," Environment and History 4 (1998): 106.
28. Cronon has provocatively and effectively critiqued such notions of wilderness in the United States. See William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, 1995), 79.
29. For discussions of the American "wilderness," see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT, 1982);
30. John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1989);
31. and Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton, NJ, 1993).
32. Michael Bess recently called for such a "re-valuation" of the natural and the artificial in an essay written for an anniversary forum published in Environmental History.
33. See Bess, "Artificialization and Its Discontents," Environmental History 10, no. 1 (January 2005), http://www. historycooperative.org/journals/ch/10.1/bess.html.
34. L. A. Millet-Mureau, Voyage de La Pérouse autour du monde publié conformément au décret du 22 avril 1791 et rédigé par Monsieur L. A. Millet-Mureau (Paris, 1797). Lapérouse's shipwreck was not discovered until 1826. He and his crew were probably killed by native populations on the island of Vanikoro.
35. Quoted in Spary, Utopia's Garden, 223.
36. Alfred W. Crosby has focused both on the export of European fauna and flora to the rest of the world and on their import into Europe in Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT, 1973),
37. and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 1986).
38. Quoted in Spary, Utopia's Garden, 128. This view was not without its critics. Abbé Grégoire stated in a speech delivered in November 1793, "You propose, I have been told, to acclimatize foreign plants and cultures among us; but our soil has everything; nature has placed among us that which is necessary to us" (quoted in Spary, 215).
39. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995), 3.
40. See Ludmilla J. Jordanova, "Environmentalism in the Eighteenth Century," in Nature and Science: Essays in the History of Geographical Knowledge, ed. Felix Driver and Gillian Rose, special issue of Historical Geography Research Series 28 (February 1992): 19-26;
41. Jean-Marc Drouin, Réinventer la nature: L'écologie et son histoire (Paris, 1993);
42. Andrée Corvol and Isabelle Richefort, eds., Nature, environnement et paysage: L'héritage du XVIIIe siècle. Guide de recherche archivistique et bibliographique (Paris, 1995);
43. and Michael Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington, IN, 1994), which examines the history of the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in the nineteenth century.
44. Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600-1850 (Delhi, 1999).
45. See, e.g., Ray Desmond, Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens (London, 1995),
46. and The European Discovery of the Indian Flora (Oxford, 1992).
47. See the essays in David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha, eds., Nature, Culture, and Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia (Delhi, 1995);
48. Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan, eds., Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia (Delhi, 1998);
49. and Kapil Raj's stimulating new Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe (Delhi, 2006).
50. Crosby, "The Past and Present of Environmental History," 1188.
51. Daniel Mornet's early 1907 study Le sentiment de la nature en France de J.-J. Rousseau à Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: Essai sur les rapports de la littérature et des moeurs (Paris, 1907) explores the European Enlightenment's fascination with the natural environment and relies primarily on literary sources. Two classic works, one in Italian and the other in English, were published in the 1950s and 1960s.
52. See Emilio Sereni, History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, NJ, 1997), which was originally published in 1961,
53. and W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London, 1955). More recent works in cultural history by Schama, Cosgrove, and Corbin draw on pictorial and other objects.
54. See Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison, WI, 1998);
55. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995);
56. and among other works, Corbin's Le territoire du vide: L'occident et le désir du rivage (Paris, 1998),
57. translated as The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Cambridge, MA, 1994).
58. Also see François Walter, Les figures paysagères de la nation: Territoire et paysage en Europe, 16e-20e siècle (Paris, 2004).
59. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, xiv.
60. Corbin's books on the subject include Le miasme et le jonquille: L'odorat et l'imaginaire social (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles) (Paris 1982),
61. translated as The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1986),
62. and Le territoire du vide.
63. It complements Alain Corbin, Historien du sensible: Entretiens avec Gilles Heuré (Paris, 2000), which is a set of interviews focusing on Corbin's life and career and the whole corpus of his work.
64. Corbin also explores the auditory environment in his Les cloches de la terre: Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1994),
65. translated as Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thorns (New York, 1998).
66. Also see Simone Delattre, Les douze heures noires: La nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris, 2000).
67. For a similar recent study of the relationship between landscape and the formation of regional identity in France, see François Guillet, Naissance de la Normandie: Genèse et épanouissement d'une image régionale en France, 1750-1850 (Caen, 2000).
68. There are some new notable books in Russian history, namely, Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Bloomington, IN, 1988),
69. and A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley, 1999).
70. Also see Rosalind Gray's Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000).
71. Quoted in Françoise Cachin, "Le paysage du peintre," in Nation, vol. 2.1 of Les lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1986), 476.
72. Caroline Ford, "Nature, Culture and Conservation in France and Her Colonies, 1840-1940," Past and Present, no. 183 (May 2004): 173-98.
73. Stephen Lovell, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 (Ithaca, NY, 2003).
74. A number of new and significant works have been published in recent years on Russia's frontiers. See Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 (Cambridge, 1999);
75. Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington, IN, 2002);
76. and Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827-1905 (Ithaca, NY, 2002). It would be interesting to draw parallels and compare the relationship between frontier and environmental history among Russian and American historians.
77. Also William Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997).
78. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990).
79. For Italy and France, see Sievert, The Origins of Nature Conservation in Italy,
80. and the essays in Cadoret, Protection de la nature.
81. Lekan does discuss the extent to which cultural historians have seen the forest as the symbol of German identity, while many Romantics claimed that the nation's origins were fluvial rather than sylvan. See Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature, 9.
82. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 61.
83. David Blackbourn, "A Sense of Place: New Directions in German History" (1998 Annual Lecture, German Historical Institute London, London, 1999), 16-17.
84. See Marc Bloch, "Le Rhin," Annales d'histoire économique et sociale 5 (1933): 83-84.
85. Two years later, as the situation in Germany worsened, Albert Demangeon and Lucien Febvre undertook a similar, longer study of a river contested by France and Germany (Le rhin: Problèmes d'histoire et d'économie [Paris, 1935]).
86. William Cronon, "Foreword: Time and the River Flowing," in Cioc, The Rhine, ix-x. Sara Pritchard has recently undertaken a similar study of the Rhône in France, though her most recent article takes a more cultural approach. She is preparing a large book-length manuscript.
87. See Sara B. Pritchard, "Reconstructing the Rhône: The Cultural Politics of Nature and the Nation in Contemporary France, 1945-1997," French Historical Studies 27, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 765-99.
88. Martin Bürgener, Pripet-Polessie: Das Bild einer polnischen Ostraum-Landschaft (Gotha, 1939).
89. In the summer of 1942, three thousand Jews were sent from the East Galician town of Drohobycz to the death camp in Belzec ostensibly to participate in the reclamation of the Pripet marshes (Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, 266).
90. For a new perspective on this subject, see Eagle Glassheim, "Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, nd Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia's Borderlands, 1945-1989," Journal of Modern History 78 (March 2006): 65-92.
91. One such recent international conference was "Forêt et vigne: Bois et vin, XVIe-XXe siècles," which took place in Dijon. See Andrée Corvol, ed., L'homme aux bois: Histoire des relations de l'homme et la forêt, XVIIe-XXe siècles (Paris, 1987),
92. and La forêt malade, XVIIe-XXe siècles: Débats anciens et phénomènes nouveaux (Paris, 1994);
93. Andrée Corvol, Micheline Hotyat, and Paul Arnould, eds., La forêt: Perceptions et représentations (Paris, 1997).
94. For recent work in English on the history of forests in France, see Peter McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France, 1780-1830: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières (Oxford, 1999);
95. and Tamara L. Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France (New Haven, CT, 2000).
96. Andrée Corvol-Dessert, L'homme et l'arbre sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1984).
97. Andrée Corvol and Isabelle Rochefort, eds., Nature, environment et paysage: L'héritage du XVIIIe siècle, guide de recherche archivistique et bibliographique (Paris, 1995);
98. and Andrée Corvol, ed., Les sources de l'histoire de l'environnement (Paris, 1999).
99. Beck and Delort, Pour une histoire de l'environnement.
100. See Keith Thomas's pathbreaking Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1983).
101. See Bess, Cioc, and Sievert, "Environmental History Writing in Southern Europe," 548-49;
102. and Caroline Ford, "Landscape and the Environment in French Historical and Geographical Thought," 134.
103. See Lucien Febvre, La terre et l'évolution humaine (Paris, 1922);
104. and Marc Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale (Paris, 1931). For a discussion of use of the term "milieu" and "environnement" among scholars in France,
105. see Jean-Louis Tissier, "Du milieu à l'environnement: L'emergence d'un concept dans le discours des géographes français," in Les français dans leur environnement, ed. René Neboit-Guilhot and Lucette Davy (Paris, 1996), 11-41.
106. Jacques Le Goff contends that "environnement" was an old French word dating from the thirteenth century that was taken up by the English in the nineteenth century and that it reentered the vocabulary of human geography in 1921 before gaining common currency in France in the 1970s ("Pré face," in Delort and Walter, Histoire de l'environnement européen, 7).
107. See Robert Delort, Le commerce des fourrures en Occident à la fin du Moyen Age (vers 1300-vers 1450) (Paris, 1999),
108. and Les animaux ont une histoire (Paris, 1984);
109. François Walter, Les Suisses et l'environnement: Une histoire du rapport à la nature du XVIIIe à nos jours (Geneva, 1990);
110. and Martin Körner and François Walter, eds., Quand la montagne aussi a une histoire (Berne, 1996).
111. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant.
112. James Winter, Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment (Berkeley, 1999).
113. White has recently raised the question of the place of environmental history in national and global histories ("The Nationalization of Nature").
114. Luc Ferry, Le nouvel ordre écologique (Paris, 1992).
115. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," 89.
116. Bruno Latour has been particularly influential in challenging this dualism (Politiques de la nature [Paris, 1999]).
117. Philippe Collomb and France Guérin-Pace, Les français et l'environnement: L'Enquête "Populations-Espaces de vie-environnement" (Paris, 1998), 27.
118. See Bartolemé Bennassar, ed., Les catastrophes naturelles dans l'Europe médievale et moderne (Toulouse, 1996);
119. and Alessa Johns, ed., Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophes in the Age of the Enlightenment (New York, 1999).
120. Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, vol. 1 of History and Environment, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York, 1989), 31.
121. White, "The Nationalization of Nature," 976.