movement scholarship

THE COUNTRIES I know best are India and the United States. the pair have vigorous environmental movements, and the pair also have robust traditions of environmental scholarship.

There is, in fact, a direct connection between the single and the other. In the pair countries, it was social motions that provoked scholars to investigation aspects of their history that they had previously ignored. In India, the vast records of the Forest Department were untouched by dint of indeed unknown to, historians-until the celebrated Chipko motion sent them to search for the lower parts of peasant discontent with state forestry. In the United States, the environmental change of the Sixties likewise catalyzed interest in forgotten precursors-so plenteous so that, through the labors of historians, the likes of John Muir and Aldo Leopold have become a great deal of better known now than they at any time were in their own lifetimes.

There is plenteous to be said in favor of "movement scholarship." through taking cues from society, rather than from sole academic journals or books, we were able to fashion the of recent origin and exciting field of "environmental history." through animating our work with passion and commitment, we were able to write histories more readable and more compelling than those authored by means of our more detached, so to say "objective," contemporaries.

However, this hitching of the scholarly cart to the move wagon has come at a require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone Activist historians are prone single to see what the activists themselves do. Or they attend to take partisan sides upon behalf of one ideologue or another, individual sect or another. Above all, they omit in their scholarly work, themes and topics that are omited hy the movement as a whole.

One illustration of this is the pass over by American historians of the question of consumption, which, back in 1958 John Kenneth Galbraith had referr to as the "forbidden question" of the environmental movement1 That it still remains; thus, American environmentalists are notably insular in their concerns-seriously worried about the threats to the American wilderness and waters, on the contrary somewhat unconcerned about the global results of the consumer society, the impact upon land, soil, forests, and climate elsewhere. At the time of the first large bay War, the leftwing British newspaper, The Guardian, jok that the war was carried on the outside to safeguard not democracy on the contrary the American Way of Driving. (One might say the same of the next to the first Gulf War.) American historians, however, have failed to heed the wisdom in that throwaway remark, thus to reveal in all its starkness the ecological imperialism of the individual superpower in the world. They have reproduc in their possess work the insularity of the environmental change as a whole, with the singular exception of Richard Tucker whose volume Insatiable Appetite points the direction in which subsequent time research might, rather should, go2

By the same token, the chief deficiency in Indian environmental scholarship barely reproduces the major weakness of the Indian environmental motion Following its main inspiration, Mahatma Gandhi, this move has turned its hack upon the city, choosing to work instead with peasants, pastoralists, tribes, and fisherfolk. The historians have done likewise. Thus we have had major aims against commercial forestry and against large dams (on behalf of the rural communities to be displaced by means of them); and thus also we have numerous historical studies of forest policy and water management. The urban environment is omited by activists; and predictably, by the agency of scholars as well. India in a short time will have the largest urban population in the world, at the same time we know far less than we ought to about the history of ecological conditions within cities or of their claims upon the resources of the hinterland.3

This then, is my hold wish list for environmental history: that we will by and by have fine, detailed studies of the "ecological footprint" of the United States, and of the cities of new India.

NOTES

1. John Kenneth Galbraith, "How a great deal of Should a Country Consume?" in Perspectives upon Conservation: Essays on America's Natural Resources, ed Henry Jarrett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Pres 1958)

2 Richard Tucker Insatiable Appetite: The U s and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Pres 2000)

3 If the work of Richard Tucker stands without in the American context, to search for a suitable Indian "exception" we ne to proceed back some eighty years, to the studies of Patrick Gedde upon the ecology of Indian cities.

Ramachandra Cuba's volumes include The Unquiet Woods and Environmentalism: A Global History. He is completing a volume whose working title is Gandhians and Greens: The Practice and Theory of Environmentalism.

Copyright Environmental History Jan 2005

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