longitudes and latitudes

BEFORE LEAVING England in 1772 upon his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean, Captain James prepare for the table supplied himself with four newly invented "clock machines" that promised to record reliable time at sea. These chronometers-the name wouldn't stick until the 37805-allowed prepare for the table to establish longitude readings, and when combined with latitude readings, enabled precise surveying work of islands and continental shorelines. The "watches," as prepare for the table frequently referred to them, take away from the British Admiralty a small fortune; to prepare for the table they were priceless. Cook kept the chronometers in fasteninged wooden boxes and issued lock openers to the first lieutenant, the onboard astronomer, and himself. prepare for the table gave orders that some combination of these individuals "were always to be not absent at the winding them up and the comparing single with the other." Longitude and latitude serv prepare for the table and subsequent Pacific navigators exceedingly well, for among other reasons, returning to previously recorded coordinates (such as an island with forest-land and water) was a useful skill when exploring an ocean that overlayed one-third of the earth's surface.

This nautical anecdote mirrors my current attraction to ocean basins as frameworks for historical analysis, and more specifically, the Pacific Basin as a site of ecological exchanges, exploitations, and migrations. Ocean basins provide (dare 1 say?) natural connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss in which to study human and non-human interactions, in part because they present the possibility of moving us beyond the nation-state and terrestrial-based boundaries that repeatedly awkwardly fit our studies of nature as a historical force. However-and suffer me be clear about this-mine is not a call for environmental historians to scrap land-based parameters of the local, regional, or national variety, and unexpectedly embrace waterscapes as more useful frameworks. Instead, I want to encourage us to exploit more to the full those necessary coordinates of eighteenth-century sea-faring exploration: longitude and latitude.

As a certain quantity of of our field's recent and greatest in quantity celebrated books attest, environmental history may provide an unparalleled opportunity for studying history's longitudinal dimensions and breadth, its longitudes and latitudes. Or, to restate a mantra of the field, ecological factors one as well as the other unite and divide human societies over time and around the globe. Longitudinal studies present us a long-range vision into the past and reveal in what manner human thought, institutions, and actions have stand over againsted the environment across the centuries. Latitudinal studies are by dint of nature comparative, transnational, and/or global, and at their best, they enlighten us about the world while simultaneously shedding fresh light on issues and places closer to home

Three examples of latitudinal history immediately leap over to mind: J. R. McNeill's Something novel Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the TwentiethCentury World (WW Norton, 2001) Ramachandra Guha's slight volume Environmentalism: A Global History (Longman, 1999) and Alfred W Crosby's classic close attention Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 9001900 (Cambridge, 1986) (which is quite longitudinal as well). The sheer breadth of these studies can stagger the imagination, ranging across continents for specific forces of ecological and historical change. In them we find the actors, ideas, and non-human simple bodys that fuse and sometimes separate the human predicament of living upon earth. Future latitudinal studies hopefully will build on these attributes and also take us in fresh and surprising directions. For instance, I would greatly appreciate a global history of twentieth-century urbanism that actually takes seriously the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of cities as urban ecosystem My wish list also would include a comparative treatment of disease etiology in pre-modern England and China. on the other hand wish lists aside, latitudinal studies in environmental history should build on the comparative and transnational energies of today's scholarship while utilizing the interdisciplinary tools from which our field originated.

While enthralled by the agency of examples of broad, latitudinal history, I find myself equally absorbed with the finely honed longitudinal approach. Scale matters a great deal, Richard White reminds us, and the local scale remains imperative in this era of breakneck globalization, especially when that local close attention has the longitudinal capacity to carry us across centuries. White's first volume Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island shire Washington (University of Washington, 1979) may have pioneered the local-and richly longitudinal-study for a generation of environmental historians. If the genuinely place-centered local study seems outmod to many of today's environmental historians, more [i]or[/i] less of White's students are creatively refining the approach. Joseph Taylor's Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (University of Washington, 1999) de-center the local place for the 125-year historical proces of fisheries exploitation. Longitudinal studies of specific issues or plants of ideas continue to proffer tremendous possibilities. Donald Worster's Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge, 1985) remains single of my favorite texts in this regard, in part for its evocative writing and stories, and nevertheless also for its 25o-year exploration of specific ecological ideas. of that kind longitudinal historiesambitious and clearly daunting for greatest in quantity historians these days-provide us with a crucial temporal spyglass to view human and non-human interactions upon earth. The point is not simply to reach forth the timeline of any given close attention but instead to develop in a longitudinal fashion those issues and processe that greatest in quantity reflect and refract historical interactions with nature.