AHR conversation: Environmental historians and environmental crisis

American Historical Review

Volumn 113, Issue 5, 2008, Pages 1431-1465

  Hoffmann, Richard C ^a   Langston, Nancy ^b,c   Mccann, James C ^d,e   Perdue, Peter C ^f   Sedrez, Lise ^g  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^b American Society for Environmental History   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

^d Department of History ^*

^e BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^f YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^g CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 58749104747     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.5.1431     Document Type: Note

References (113)

1. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983).
2. See Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., "The Past and Present of Environmental History," American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (October 1995): 1177-1190;
3. Donald Worster et al., "A Round Table: Environmental History," Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (March 1990): 1111-1146;
4. Richard White, "Historiographical Essay, American Environmental History: The Development of a New Field," Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985) : 297-335;
5. White, "Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature," Pacific Historical Review 70 (2001): 103-111.
6. Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões (Rio de Janeiro, 1911);
7. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Visão do paraíso: Os motivos edênicos no descobrimento e na colonização do Brasil (São Paulo, 1985).
8. As, for example, in José Augusto Pádua, Um sopro de destruição: Pensamento político e crítica ambiental no Brasil escravista, 1786-1888 (Rio de Janeiro, 2002), which revisits well-known Brazilian authors of the nineteenth century;
9. or Reinaldo Funes Monzonte, From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492, trans. Alex Martin (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), an environmental history approach to the sugar economy in Cuba.
10. Crosby, "The Past and Present of Environmental History," 1188.
11. Ibid.
12. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York, 1972).
13. Linda J. Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York, 1997);
14. Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Durham, N.C., 2008).
15. Jean-François Berger and Jacques-Léopold Brochier, "Paysages et climates en moyenne vallée du Rhône: Apports de la géo-archéologie," in Odile Maufras, ed., Habitats, necropoles et paysages dans la moyenne et la basse vallée du Rhône (VIIe-XVe s.): Contribution des travaux du TGV-Méditerranée à l'étude des sociétés rurales médié vales (Paris, 2006), 163-208;
16. Mireille Provansal et al., "Paléohydrologie holocène dans la basse vallée du Rhône, d'Orange à la mere," in Jean-Paul Bravard and Michel Magny, eds., Les fleuves ont une histoire: Paléo-environnement des rivières et des lacs français depuis 15 000 ans (Paris, 2002), 251-258.
17. A slightly earlier parallel study is summarized in Sander van der Leeuw, François Favory, and Jean-Jacques Girardot, "The Archaeological Study of Environmental Degradation: An Example from Southeastern France," in Charles L. Redman, S. R. James, P. R. Fish, and J. D. Rogers, eds., The Archaeology of Global Change: The Impact of Humans on Their Environment (Washington, D.C., 2004), 112-129,
18. and reported in great detail in Sander E. van der Leeuw, ed., The Archaeomedes Project: Understanding the Natural and Anthropogenic Causes of Land Degradation and Desertification in the Mediterranean Basin (Luxembourg, 1998),
19. and Sander E. van der Leeuw, François Favory, and Jean-Luc Fiche, eds., Archéologie et systèmes socio-environnementaux: Études multiscalaires sur la vallée du Rhône dans le programme Archaeomedes (Paris, 2003).
20. For a historian's attempt to integrate traditional evidence and new climatological data in this area, see Frederic L. Cheyette, "The Disappearance of the Ancient Landscape and the Climatic Anomaly of the Early Middle Ages: A Question to Be Pursued," Early Medieval Europe 16 (2008): 127-165.
21. Pfister's methods are described in Werner Schwarz-Zanetti, Christian Pfister, Gabriela Schwarz-Zanetti, and Hannes Schüle, "The EURO-CLIMHIST Data Base: A Tool for Reconstructing the Climate of Europe in the Pre-instrumental Period from High Resolution Proxy Data," in Burkhard Frenzel, ed., European Climate Reconstructed from Documentary Data: Methods and Results (Stuttgart, 1992), 193-210,
22. and more fully in Christian Pfister, Das Klima der Schweiz von 1525-1860 und seine Bedeutung in der Geschichte von Bevölkerung und Landwirtschaft, 2nd ed. 2 vols. (Bern, 1985).
23. For a broader recent overview, see Rudolf Brázdil, Christian Pfister, et al., "Historical Climatology in Europe: The State of the Art," Climatic Change 70 (2005): 363-430.
24. Some representative applications include Rüdiger Glaser, Klimageschichte Mitteleuropas: 1000 Jahre Wetter, Klima, Katastrophen (Darmstadt, 2001), notably 93-180;
25. Christian Pfister and Rudolf Brázdil, "Social Vulnerability to Climate in the 'Little Ice Age': An Example from Central Europe in the Early 1770s," Climate of the Past 2 (2006): 115-129;
26. and Nazzareno Diodato, "A 425-Year Precipitation History from Documentary Weather Anomalies and Climate Records at Palermo, Italy," PAGES News 14, no. 1 (April 2006): 34-35.
27. Wolfgang Behringer, "Weather, Hunger and Fear: Origins of the European Witch-Hunts in Climate, Society and Mentality," German History 13 (1995): 1-27;
28. Behringer, "Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities," Climatic Change 43, no. 1 (September 1999): 335-351;
29. Emily Oster, "Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe," Journal of Economic Perspectives 18 (2004): 215-228;
30. Christian Pfister, "Climatic Extremes, Recurrent Crises and Witch Hunts: Strategies of European Societies in Coping with Exogenous Shocks in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," Medieval History Journal 10, no. 1-2 (2007): 33-73.
31. Lillian M. Li, Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and Environmental Decline, 1690s-1990s (Stanford, Calif., 2007).
32. Mark Elvin and Liu Ts'ui-jung, eds., Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History (Cambridge, 1995);
33. Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford, Calif., 1985);
34. Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500-1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1987);
35. R. Keith Schoppa, Xiang Lake: Nine Centuries of Chinese Life (New Haven, Conn., 1989);
36. Schoppa, Song Full of Tears: Nine Centuries of Chinese Life around Xiang Lake (Boulder, Colo., 2002).
37. Cronon, Changes in the Land;
38. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991);
39. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1985).
40. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York, 2001);
41. Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1997);
42. Jean M. Grove, Little Ice Ages: Ancient and Modem, 2nd ed. (London, 2004).
43. David Bello, "To Go Where No Han Could Go for Long: Malaria and the Qing Construction of Ethnic Administrative Space in Frontier Yunnan," Modern China 31, no. 3 (July 2005): 283-317.
44. One example is the now-classic Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martínez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London, 1997). Ravi Rajan and José Padua, however, have been working together on a larger comparative project, not yet published.
45. Edmund Russell, "Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field," Environmental History 8 (2003): 204-228.
46. Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, 1999); Joachim Radkau, "Zur angeblichen Energiekrise des 18.
47. Jahrhunderts: Revisionistische Betrachtungen über die 'Holznot,' " Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 73 (1986): 1-37;
48. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., "The Black Death: End of a Paradigm," American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 703-738.
49. Wallace Stegner, "The Sense of Place," in Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992; repr., New York, 2002), 199-206.
50. The citation is in J. Donald Hughes, What Is Environmental History? (Cambridge, 2006), 1;
51. originally in William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative," Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1347-1376.
52. See in particular the work in progress by Dilene Raimundo do Nascimento, from the Fundação Casa Oswaldo Cruz, on the history of dengue epidemics in Brazil. Some of the initial findings are in Dilene Raimundo Nascimento and Anny Jackeline Torres Silveira, "A doença revelando a história: Uma historiografia das doenças," in Dilene Raimundo do Nascimento and Diana Maul de Carvalho, eds., Uma história brasileira das doenças, vol. 1 (Brasília, 2004), 13-30.
53. J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000).
54. John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modem World (Berkeley, Calif., 2003).
55. Victor Lieberman, "The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors: Early Modern China in World History," Social Science History 32, no. 2 (2008): 281-304;
56. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Connected Histories: Notes toward a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia," Modem Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735-762.
57. McNeill, Something New under the Sun;
58. Geoff Wade, Zheng Yangwen, and Asia Research Institute, "Asian Expansions: The Historical Processes of Polity Expansion in Asia" (paper presented at the Workshop on Asian Expansions: Historical Processes of Polity Expansion in Asia, Singapore, 2006).
59. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, Conn., 2004);
60. Robert B Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (Cambridge, 1998);
61. Marks, "Asian Tigers: The Real, the Symbolic, the Commodity," Nature and Culture 1, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 63-87;
62. Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker, eds., JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan's Animal Life (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005);
63. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures (Cambridge, Mass., 1987);
64. Brett L. Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle, 2005).
65. Steven Saylor, Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome (New York, 2007).
66. Peregine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000).
67. Astrid E. G. Ogilvie, "Climatic Changes in Iceland A.D. ca. 865 to 1598," Acta Archaeologica 61 (1990): 233-251;
68. J. Eiriksson, K. I. Knudsen, H. Haflidason, and J. Heinemeier, "Chronology of Late Holocene Climatic Events in the Northern North Atlantic Based on AMS C-14 Dates and Tephra Markers from the Volcano Hekla, Iceland," Journal of Quaternary Science 15 (2000): 573-580;
69. A. G. K. Dawson, K. Hickey, P. A. Mayewski, and A. Nesja, "Greenland (GISP2) Ice Core and Historical Indicators of Complex North Atlantic Climate Changes during the Fourteenth Century," The Holocene 17, no. 4 (2007): 427-434.
70. For consequences, see Thomas H. McGovern et al., "Northern Islands, Human Error, and Environmental Degradation: A View of Social and Ecological Change in the Medieval North Atlantic," Human Ecology 16 (1988): 225-270;
71. P. C. Buckland et al., "Bioarchaeological and Climatological Evidence for the Fate of the Norse Farmers in Medieval Greenland, "Antiquity 70 (1996): 88-96;
72. Thomas H. McGovern, "The Demise of Norse Greenland," in William W. Fitzhugh and Elizabeth. Ward, eds., Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (Washington, D.C., 2000), 327-339;
73. Astrid E. J. Ogilvie and Thomas H. McGovern, "Sagas and Science: Climate and Human Impacts in the North Atlantic," ibid., 385-393. Kirsten Hastrup explored cultural perspectives in Nature and Policy in Iceland, 1400-1800: An Anthropological Analysis of History and Mentality (Oxford, 1990).
74. For the late medieval and early modern Netherlands, an awareness of challenge, response, and consequences both planned and unintended arises from the interplay of issues in William TeBrake, "Taming the Waterwolf: Hydraulic Engineering and Water Management in the Netherlands during the Middle Ages," Technology and Culture 43 (2002): 475-499;
75. Petra J. E. M. van Dam, "Sinking Peat Bogs: Environmental Change in Holland, 1350-1550," Environmental History 6 (2001): 32-45;
76. Charles Cornelisse, "The Economy of Peat and Its Environmental Consequences in Holland during the Late Middle Ages," in Hilde Greefs and Marjolien't Hart, eds., Water Management, Communities, and Environment: The Low Countries in Comparative Perspective, c. 1000-c.1800 (Gent, 2006), 95-121;
77. Richard Unger, "Energy Sources for the Dutch Golden Age: Peat, Wind and Coal," Research in Economic History 9 (1984): 221-253;
78. Petra J. E. M. van Dam, "Ecological Challenges, Technological Innovations: The Modernization of Sluice Building in Holland, 1300-1600," Technology and Culture 43 (2002): 500-520;
79. van Dam, "Harnessing the Wind: The History of Windmills in Holland, 1300-1600," in Paola Galetti and Pierre Racine, eds., I mulini nell'Europa medievale: Atti del Convegno di San Quirino d'Orcia, 21-23 setembre 2000 (Bologna, 2003), 37-53;
80. Milja van Tielhof and Petra van Dam, "Losing land, Gaining Water: Ecological and Financial Aspects of Regional Water Management in Rijnland, 1200-1800," in Greefs and Hart, Water Management, Communities, and Environment, 63-93;
81. and Tielhof and van Dam, Waterstaat in stedenland: Het hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland voor 1857 (Utrecht, 2006),
82. especially when seen as a counterpoint to Jan de Vries and Ad van de Woud, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge, 1997).
83. Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science, n.s. 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203-1207,
84. reprinted in White, Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 75-94.
85. Compare, for starters, E. A. Wrigley, "Meeting Human Energy Needs: Constraints, Opportunities, and Effects," in Paul Slack, ed., Environments and Historical Change: The Linacre Lectures, 1998 (Oxford, 1999), 76-95;
86. and Rolf P. Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2001).
87. Charles Bowlus, "Ecological Crisis in Fourteenth Century Europe," in Lester J. Bilsky, ed., Historical Ecology: Essays on Environment and Social Change (Port Washington, N.Y., 1980), 86-99.
88. For a hard-line and detailed narrative of the bubonic plague diagnosis, see Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (Rochester, N.Y., 2004).
89. Cohn, "Black Death"; and more recently Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., "Households and Plague in Early Modern Italy," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38 (2007): 177-205;
90. and G. Christakos, R. A. Olea, and H. L. Yu, "Recent Results on the Spatiotemporal Modelling and Comparative Analysis of Black Death and Bubonic Plague Epidemics," Public Health 121, no. 9 (September 2007): 700-720, both of which contain numerous further references.
91. J. Donald Hughes, Pan's Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Baltimore, 1994);
92. and more recently his "Ripples in Clio's Pond: Social Structure and Environmental Impact in the Roman Empire," Capitalism Nature Socialism 15 (September 2004): 29-35,
93. and "Environmental Impacts of the Roman Economy and Social Structure: Augustus to Diocletian," in Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier, eds., Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change (Lanham, Md., 2007), 27-40.
94. Carolyn Merchant, "The Theoretical Structure of Ecological Revolutions," Environmental Review 11 (1987): 265-274.
95. Jill K. Conway, Kenneth Keniston, and Leo Marx, Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment (Amherst, Mass., 1999).
96. But see Vaclav Smil, China's Environmental Crisis: An Inquiry into the Limits of National Development (Armonk, N.Y., 1993).
97. Conference on Natural Disaster in Asian History, Culture, and Memory, Asian Research Institute, Singapore, August 26-28, 2005.
98. Stephen M. Meyer, The End of the Wild (Somerville, Mass., 2006).
99. Howard E. Gruber and Paul H. Barrett, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, Together with Darwin's Early and Unpublished Notebooks (London, 1974), 447, excerpting from the B notebook, p. 232, compiled by Darwin in autumn 1837.
100. Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (Munich, 2000);
101. translated into English as Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York, 2008).
102. William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," appeared almost simultaneously in Environmental History 1 (1996): 7-28
103. and in his Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1995;
104. reprinted in 1996 as Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature), 69-90.
105. Schoppa, Song Full of Tears.
106. Robert P. Weller, Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan (Cambridge, 2006).
107. Orville Schell, "The U.S. and China: Common Ground on Climate," Yale Environment 360, August 18, 2008, http://e360.yale.edu//content/ print.msp?id=2043 (accessed November 14, 2008).
108. Guha and Martínez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism, 230.
109. I am not so ready to say that environmental history is the new Marxism, but only that it echoes historical traditions of full-fledged engagement, both intellectual and social, as relevant for the discipline of history as the "noble dream" of objective scholarship.
110. J. R. McNeill, "Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History," History and Theory 42, no. 4 (December 2003): 9.
111. As I edit my part in this Conversation, I have in my hands the recent report on consumption patterns and sustainability released by the World Wildlife Foundation, Living Planet Report 2008, October 30, 2008, http://assets.panda.org/downloads/living-planet-report-2008.pdf (accessed November 14, 2008). According to the report, the current demands on the planet, increasing at the same rate, would require by the mid-2030s the equivalent of two planets to maintain modern lifestyles. It then occurred to me, maybe a bit too late for this Conversation, that if environmental history must make ecological sense, so should our definitions for environmental crises. That is, environmental crises are connected to an understanding of " unsustainability," for the lack of a better term, or to the concrete limits of ecological resources in a certain "mode of consumption." Environmental historians do have a role in identifying the historical roots of environmental crises; but more than ever, they must rely on an interdisciplinary community to understand the ecological constraints that characterize the concept of crisis, its implications for biodiversity conservation, for social inequality, and for global biocapacity.
112. Guillermo Castro-Herrera and Reinaldo Funes Monzote, "SOLCHA - Boletim Informativo 1," January 2007, http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/solcha/ arquivos/Boletim-1-SOLCHA-2007.pdf (accessed November 14, 2008).
113. Guillermo Castro Herrera, "Environmental History (Made) in Latin America," H-Environment, http://www.h-net.org/~environ/historiography/ latinam.htm (accessed June 23, 2006).