globalizing american environmental history

RECENTLY A COLLEAGUE of mine invited me to lead a session upon environmental history in his graduate historiography seminar. My task was to moderate a discussion of an article surveying the field of environmental history and to speak about in what manner its ideas applied to my hold research. For the discussion my colleague had prefered Richard Grove's chapter "Environmental History" in Peter Burke's well-received collection fresh Perspectives on Historical Writing(Penn State, 2001) an essay 1 had not read previously. I assumed, erroneously, that it would be a standard review of the field's intellectual origins and methodological interests similar to well-known articles upon the subject by scholars similar as Richard White, Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby T Steinberg, and J R McNeil. I was thus unprepared for Grove's approach: a scathing, revisionist history of the discipline that lambasted North American scholars' "parochial takeover bid" of the designation "environmental history" in the 1970 Echoing his arguments in virid Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Eden and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge University Pres 1995) copse asserted that evidence of environmental degradation in the colonial periphery spurr the disentanglement of Francophone and Old World Anglophone environmental history among geographers, anthropologists, and ecologists lengthy before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) raised environmental consciousness and Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale University Pres 1967) made environmental history a respectable subfield in the United States.

Not surprisingly, the seminar make go rounded out to be a decidedly awkward exchange. Since greatest in quantity of the students in the seminar had not at any time before encountered environmental history in any form, Grove's iconoclastic account leftmost of them uncertain about the definition, end and achievements of the field. My attempt to describe familiar works through Worster, Bill Cronon, and Arthur McEvoy single compounded their confusion. I came away frustrated by means of my inability to reconcile Grove's account with other narratives about the field and to persuade this novel group of graduate students to consider incorporating environmental themes into their emerging MA and PhD theses. Despite my reservations about the tone of Grove's critique, however, my clash with his essay did lead me to a series of productive observations and questions about the field of environmental history. These inform my make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss about where the field might make progress next.

As a U environmental historian working upon German and European themes and an active member of the one and the other the ASEH and the ESEH (European Society for Environmental History), I am relate toed that Grove's caustic comments about North American scholarship throw back a deeper if often unarticulated discontent among scholars located or working upon topics outside the United States. woodland is not the first to lament the "Americo-centrism" of environmental history, particularly what he confines the "wilderness obsession." But rife geopolitical alignments give his criticism of U scholars' lack of engagement with the quiet of the world a sharper cutting side that may result in diverging environmental-historical agendas with limited opportunities for trans-continental dialogue, debate, and synthesis. These observations lead me to sum of two units interrelated questions about future directions. Given American academia's perceived overweening influence upon global intellectual trends, how can scholars of other regions of the world benefit from and simultaneously help to globalize the methodologically sophisticated on the contrary sometimes narrow preoccupations of North American environmental historiography? And in what manner can environmental historians maintain their opennes to interdisciplinary approaches and wide-ranging bring under rule matter while fostering a public body of scholarship that enables us to speak to each other across national, linguistic, or cultural divides?

One way to globalize American environmental history would be a renewed commitment within the environmental history community to comparative analysis of major themes across different nations, regions, and cities. Here I envision a series of conversations articles, essay collections, monographs, and grant proposals devot to what J R McNeil has boundaryed "mid-level generalizations" about the character of economic structures, political institutions, legal a whole s cultural values, and technological infrastructures in shaping globally significant patterns of environmental exploitation, adaptation, perception, and crisis in North American and abroad.1 This is not a call for macro-level, world environmental history, which is well-represented in the profession and has produc fine narratives about the agrarian impact of European colonialism and the spread of European diseases among aboriginal nations in the Americas and Australia. The scale of of that kind studies, however, obscures the character of regional and national variation, including the resiliency of local ecosystem the coerciveness of the state, or the character of the political agriculture in shaping the environmental past. Writing in collaborative partnership, environmental historians interested in the middle range of comparative analysis could examine familiar issues in a fresh light and find common sod along thematic lines.