Environmental History: Between

Science and Philosophy

FEBRUARY 1, 1999 / K. JAN OOSTHOEK ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY:
BETWEEN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Introduction

The Environment has been a prominent part of the political agenda since the
1960s. The expansion of the consumer society after the Second World War in
North America and Europe increased the pressure on the environment to such an
extent that it became alarming. A more affluent and better educated population
showed its concern for the environment and demanded a cleaner and healthier
environment. The environmental movement that originated from these concerns
was not very historically oriented and regarded the contemporary problems as a
unique product of 20th century capitalism and industrial progress. However,
some realised that a historical perspective was needed to understand the origins
of the contemporary environmental crisis. This is where environmental history
came into being.
This essay is divided into two parts. The first and smallest part explores what
environmental history is and some or its roots. The second part deals with some
of the issues in environmental history and explores the intellectual and
philosophical background behind our ecological crisis. This looks in the way
people though about the natural world around them during particular different
historical periods. But environmental history is not solely an intellectual history
and is also about the impact of humankind on the natural world and the
influence of the natural world on human history. The final part of this essay will
therefore look at the development of agriculture and the impact on the
landscape.

This essay is not a comprehensive review of the subject area of environmental

history and all the issues it deals with. It is also limited in scope in terms if time
span and geographical area, with a focus on Europe and a number of specific
periods including the industrial period and the Middle Ages. It is not intended to
be an original piece of research, but the text will sometimes reflect the author’s
own opinions and criticism and the content also reflects some of the personal
interests of the author. These are limited because the discourse of modern
environmental history covers such a wide area that it is impossible to review all
of this in a short essay. Perhaps this is a sign that environmental history is
maturing as an academic discipline.

Environmental history

What is environmental history and what does it mean? Historians studying

natural sciences and scientists learning the language of history and the
humanities? In 1959 the famous author and scientist, C.P. Snow presented a
lecture in which he suggested that the critical intellectual weakness of the later
20th century was the separation of humanities from sciences. These were what
he called the “two cultures”, and Snow suggested that in order to solve problems
we need to bring sciences and humanities together.1 Donald Worster, one of the
leading environmental historians in North America, used Snow’s ideas to show
how environmental history in particular needs the talents of historians and
scientists working together. In his book The Wealth of NatureWorster also
argues that the natural sciences and history have become two separate spheres
and therefore historians are not expected to deal with the natural sciences.
Historians must deal with people, society and culture and the sciences on the
other hand must be concerned with nature. In this way nature is set apart from
culture creating two different worlds that are described in different languages.2
The separation of nature from culture obscures the fact that culture is influenced
by the nature surrounding it. But it is not a one-way street because culture is
also asserting its influence on the natural world. Beinard and Coates included
this ambivalent character into their definition of environmental history:
“Environmental history deals with the various dialogues over time between
people and the rest of nature, focussing on reciprocal impacts”.3 To understand
these reciprocal impacts we must try to bridge the gap between culture and
nature, between science and history. Environmental history is an attempt to
unite the two worlds of science and history. Donald Worster described the
essence of environmental history as follows:
Its essential purpose is to put nature back into historical studies, or, to explore
the ways in which the biophysical world has influenced the course of human
history and the ways in which people have thought about and tried to transform
their surroundings.4

Once a historian discovers the connection between nature and culture, a whole
field of new subjects opens up and history becomes more interdisciplinary than
ever before. It is not only using other humanities and social sciences, but it also
starts to use the natural sciences. It is true that environmental history brings
many new “characters” on the stage of history. Among these are sciences such
as geography, geophysics, biology, demography, botany, and ecology. This is a
far from exhaustive list. But working with concepts from other sciences is very
demanding for a historian and it demands that he or she is not only trained in
history and the social sciences, but also in the natural sciences.5 Commanding
all these various specialisms is a formidable task and may require a new type of
academic training to produce a generalist.
But not only historians have to broaden their horizons. Scientists must include
human history in their work and it seems that they have started to look at
historical processes. That is not to say that time has not been a factor in their
research because ever since Darwin scientists have recognised that the natural
world, even the whole planet, is the product of a long historical process.
However, they did not include human culture as an influence in these processes.
Although humans are newcomers in the history of our planet, they have had a
profound impact on the planet for at least two million years. That means that
what we regard as nature is, to some extent, a product of human history. A good
example is the use of fire by prehistoric hunters. We know now that the prairies
of North America are the product of deliberate burning by Native Americans for
thousands of years. This type of management produced a unique ecosystem that
European settlers found in the 18th and 19th centuries. For These reasons
scientists must take serious the impact of human action, in particularly during
the modern period, the past 300 years, when human impact has become deeper
and more far reaching than ever before.6

Timescale and spatial divisions

As suggested before, environmental history ventures into all human activities

ranging from economics to social organisation, politics, science, philosophy,
and religion. Its timescale is not limited to centuries, one thousand, two
thousand or even 40 thousand years and it goes all the way back to the origins of
humanity and even beyond. It takes into account both the grand planetary
processes over long periods of time and the small scale of a locality in a limited
time span. Environmental history is global and local at the same time and
includes short term and long term processes.

Although environmental history is hardly limited in time and space, most

research is focused on the period in which humanity made an increasing impact
on the natural world. This period is the most recent geological epoch, the
Holocene, which began at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago and still
continues today.7 It is during this short period of time that humanity developed
the civilisations agriculture and technologies that had such a profound impact on
the environment of our planet. If we go further back in time environmental
history becomes less detailed and is covers larger geographic areas and longer
time-scales.
Neil Roberts opens his book, The Holocene. An Environmental History, with an
outline of the developments after the end of the last glacial period. Here he
generalises over large areas and paints the developments of the retreat of the ice
sheets in North America and Europe as one grand development. The same
applies to the tropics where he describes the shift of climatic zones with not
much regard to regional differences.8
As the number of human artefacts produced during the Neolithic period and
Bronze Age increases the picture gets more detailed, the scale becomes smaller
and the environmental impact more visible. The history of the last two millennia
is often so detailed that it is sometimes confusing to see general patterns in the
large amount of information available. In this respect research focused on
singular localities and short time spans do not provide reliable evidence to
reconstruct an environmental history over large geographic areas. Therefore
comparative research over large areas combining case studies is important to
reconstruct a more reliable picture of general developments and environmental
changes.

Some science tools

How do we reconstruct past environments? There is a whole range of tools

available to the environmental historian. There are of course the traditional
sources of documentary evidence. The problem is that these records are very
limited in time and space. For large areas of the world there is no documentary
evidence until the modern period. To reconstruct past environments we have to
rely on indirect evidence, the so-called proxy records. The term proxy record
refers to any evidence that provides an indirect measure of former climates or
environments.9
Biological evidence is an important tool for reconstructing past climates and
environments. One of the most widely used and successful techniques is that of
pollen analysis. It is used to reconstruct the vegetation in the past. An analysis
of the pollen grains in each layer can tell us what types of plants were growing
when the sediment was deposited and then inferences can then be made about
the climate based on the types of plants found in each layer. Pollen can also be
used to determine human impact on environments such as deforestation or the
extent of agriculture by counting the number of tree or cereal pollen in a sample.
Paleoecological reconstruction also uses information provided by the extraction,
recording and analysis of the fossil record. This provides us with a time
framework and an idea of the flora and fauna during a certain epoch. The
problem of fossils for dating and reconstructing past environments is that it is
not very useful for the last ten to hundred thousand years.10
Radiometric methods are much applied and are accurate dating techniques. The
best known is the so-called radiocarbon dating technique or C14 method. This
technique is based on the radioactive decay of carbon 14. The measure of decay
is an indication of time that has elapsed since the carbon was formed and
trapped in an organism. In addition to radiometric methods dendrochronology
(tree-ring dating) and paleomagnetism are used to get a more accurate
environmental reconstruction.

Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the method of scientific dating based on

the analysis of tree ring growth patterns. Since tree growth is influenced by
climatic conditions, such as temperature and precipitation, patterns in tree-ring
widths, density, and isotopic composition reflect annual variations in climate. In
temperate regions where there is a distinct growing season, trees generally
produce one ring a year, and thus record the climatic conditions of each year.
Trees can grow to be hundreds of years old and so contain annual records of
climate conditions.

Palaeomagnetic studies the periodic change of reversal of the Earth’s magnetic

field caused that magnetic poles reverse. Paleaomagnetics studies of the rock
exhibiting such reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field have assisted in the
establishment of a time-scale for the last 4,5 million years.
Past climates can be reconstructed from ice cores taken from the icecaps of
Greenland, Antarctica and glaciers all over the globe. By analysing the
composition of air bubbles in the ice we can reconstruct the atmospheric
conditions and thus the climate during a certain epoch. Cores taken from
lakebeds, the ocean floor and peat bogs are also tools to reconstruct past
climates. The changing fossil contents of these cores are indicators of ocean
water temperatures, environmental change on the land and increasing or
decreasing erosion, which is linked to precipitation.11
Landscape reconstruction is the work of geologists and geomorphologists. The
geologists provide information on the structure beneath the land, past changes in
this structure, sedimentation and the time framework. The geomorphologist
looks at the shape of the landscape and combines the information of endogenic
processes (processes from within the earth), provided by the geologist, with the
erosive power of water, wind and other exogenic influences. One such influence
is the human impact on landscapes, soils, drainage systems and vegetation. In
this respect we humans are a geological power. The understanding of the
influence and development of human impact on the landscape is the domain of
archaeology. Archaeologists reconstruct the development of field systems,
occupation patterns and technology available in the past.

The techniques to understand environmental changes in the past developed

independently within different disciplines, and are commonly practised without
much concern to the record of human influence. However Mercer and Tipping
observed that “increasingly … the influence of the landscape on people, and of
people on the landscape, have come to be regarded as seminal problems in
palaeoenvironmental research”. They concluded that the combined range of
techniques from the different disciplines have “the potential to move beyond
providing a ‘background’ to human settlement, and to explore the complex
‘feedback’ linkages between anthropogenic and natural processes, and to
generate a more holistic understanding of … landscape evolution”.12

Origins of environmental history

At the beginning of the twentieth century geographers stressed the influence of

the physical environment on the development of human society. The idea of the
impact of the physical environment on civilisations was first adapted by
historians of the French Annales School to describe the long-term developments
that shape human history. Other influences were the emergence of world history
and the interdisciplinary method. By the late 1960s the term environmental
history was coined by Rodrick Nash and he provided one of the earliest
definitions.
Environmental history is probably more developed and institutionalised in
North America than in other parts of the world.13 This is due to the American
experience of settlement and the consequences for the natural environment.
Initially American scholars were concerned with the damage done to nature and
the heroic rise of the conservation movement. They studied the institutions and
agencies of natural resource policy and protection and were concerned with
conservation heroes such as David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold.
The rise of this new type of history coincided with the rise of the modern
environmental movement and the emergence of public concern over
environmental issues as a major public concern in the 1960s. This was fuelled
by the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, the Report for the
Club of Rome, Limits to Growth, at the beginning of the 1970’s and the
foundation of the Greenpeace movement, among others. It was in this mood of
environmental concern that the new discipline of environmental history came
into being and historians started to look for the origins of the contemporary
problems. We can distinguish several branches in environmental history
including green history, the ideas of environment and nature throughout history,
pollution and degradation history, to mention only a few. Let’s consider some of
these areas in more detail.

The philosophical approach: green history

This type of environmental history is anthropocentric and part of the more

traditional approaches of political, administrative and intellectual history.14 It
can be described as “green history” and charts the origins of environmentalism
and the roots of our modern attitudes towards nature. To understand the origins
of modern environmentalism and our attitudes to nature we need to enter into
debates about the nature and origins of contributing fields and currents such as
the Frankfurt school, Romanticism, oriental philosophy, monism, rationalism
and even Nazism. That is what Anna Bramwell does in her book Ecology in the
20th Century. This book, as she explains in the introduction, examines “the
thinkers who represent most significantly the roots of ecological ideas”.15 But
this kind of history is not limited to the 20th century and its origins can be
traced all the way back to antiquity.
It is often said that Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with nature.
In his book The Idea of WildernessOelschlager shows himself an adherent of
this idea and for him it is the starting point of the evolution of the human
perception of nature and wilderness. During the Palaeolithic time of harmony
there was plenty of food and resources for humans and the conception of nature
was that humans were part of it an that time and nature was cyclical. During the
Neolithic period when agriculture was introduced a split between human culture
and nature emerged. Humans increasinglu regarded themselves as separated
from nature, and that nature was designed and created for their benefit. If land
was not suitable, humans had the ability to alter it and make it useful. According
to Oelschlager is this development the moment that natural degeneration began.
The result of the emergence of agriculture in the Near East was that
Mediterranean peoples became increasingly adept at and aggressive in their
endeavours to humanise the landscape. On the other hand the increasing reliance
also made them aware that their civilisations depended on nature but also of
their distinctiveness of nature. As a result of this contradiction they devised
increasingly abstract and complicated explanatory schemes to explain human
separation and domination of nature but also failure to control nature, for
example in the case of flooding or drought. The limitations of mastery over
nature were explained with forces beyond human control such as deities. But in
general the Mediterranean landscape was regarded as divine and designed for
humans to live in, to alter at will and to dominate.
Out if these rationalisations emerged Greek philosophy and Judaism. Both
traditions rationalised the world in their own way. Greek rationalism abandoned
mythology for explicit theory and definition and Judaism rationalised the world
using a metaphysical framework that explained the world in a metaphoric,
allegorical and symbolic way. Judaism and Greek rationalism came together in
Christianity within which the philosophical edifice of Platonism was used to
create the concept that ruled the west for the past 2000 years.16
Greek rationalism and Christianity created a concept in which nature was
conceived as having no value until humanised. Two other aspects of this
tradition are anthropocentrism and the linear conception of time instead of
cyclical. This meant that history was teleological, which means that it was
pointing in one direction to an ultimate goal of perfection. This manner of
thinking is known as the Judeo-Christian tradition. In environmentalist literature
it is not uncommon to blame the roots of our ecological crisis on the attitudes of
the Judeo-Christian tradition towards nature. Lynn White, an American
historian, first conceived this hypothesis in 1967 and published his ideas in an
article in Science entitled “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis”. In
this article he argued that Judeo-Christianity preaches that humans are separate
from and superior to the rest of nature. He wrote that “Christianity … not only
established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will
that man exploit nature”. In this view nature was created by God to be used and
dominated by humankind. According to White, this attitude has translated into
harmful attitudes and actions towards nature with the application of technology
during.17
Although White’s thesis has become a forceful argument used by the
environmental movement, it has also been heavily criticised. Pepper sums up
some of the most important criticisms and notes that other non-Christian
cultures have also abused nature. For example, the ancient Romans exploited
nature more intensive than medieval Christianity by exhausting soils in North
Africa and destroying forests around the Mediterranean.

The same can be said about the idea of the domination over nature granted by
the Christian doctrine. Again, it is not unique and other religions are also
stressing human domination over nature. A very important aspect of criticism is
the fact that during the Middle Ages older magical, astronomical and spiritual
traditions were still more important for most people than White presents it and
he tends to overlook other and older cultural influences that are present under
the Christian surface. Last but not least, Pepper adds that White overestimates
how much religious values influenced general values and actions towards nature
during the Middle Ages. It appears that material changes are more important
and powerful than religious ones. The rise of capitalism made Christians exploit
nature on a scale never seen under the Judeo-Christian doctrines. In the end
capitalism had a much greater impact on western attitudes towards nature than
theology because the rise of capitalism commoditised nature, labour, and land.
The cause of this development was the transformation from feudalism to
capitalism during which previous pressures to get more out of the land were
intensified. Thus the ideology of (scientific) agricultural improvement gained
sway.18
It has also been argued that there were theological reasons to drain marches and
clear forests. According to Midgley was wilderness a challenge to the medieval
mind. It was regarded as a “horrid desert of wild beasts” and as the source of all
paganism and evil. Cultivating and taming the wilderness was seen as a
contribution to the fulfilment of God’s plan (the linear conception of time).
Simultaneously it exercised human dominion over nature and exterminating
paganism.19 But we might wonder if people in the Middle Ages actually looked
upon nature as described by Midgely.
The period before the Renaissance was monistic rather than dualistic, which
means that the cosmos was regarded as a whole in which humans were
microcosms in a larger order. The medieval view of nature was that the world
was a divine organism in which every plant, creature, every thing had its place
given by God. This place was to be found on the “Chain of Being”. This chain
hung from the top of the hierarchy, the place were God resided, to the four basic
elements, earth, air, water and fire. God was the source of life and did not
remain in himself and spilled over, generating in plenty and bringing life to the
things lower on the chain. In this way all things were linked and interdependent
as an organic whole and if one part of the chain was removed, the whole chain
of being was in jeopardy. It was as if an organ was cut out of a humanbeing and
without the organ he cannot live.20 Achterhuis adds that the metaphor used for
the divine organism was that of the ancient image of Mother Earth. This
metaphor was used until the start of the modern period.21
During the Renaissance nature was seen as a book made up of a system of signs
and this book needed to be carefully read and studied in order to understand the
cosmos and our place in it. The endeavour to “read the book of nature” carried
the seed for the Scientific Revolution. The search for the cosmic order led to the
discovery of the heliocentric cosmos, Kepler’s laws of the planets’ orbits and
ultimately Newton’s laws describing gravity.22 In the 17th century scientists and
philosophers tried to understand God’s creation with the new scientific
paradigm that was emerging. They saw the scientific method as an instrument to
read the book of nature. Anyone who could read the book and understand nature
was able to understand the will of God. He was regarded as the “watch-maker”;
the supreme designer and engineer of nature which was made in His image and
according to His plan. However, it became soon clear that the founders of
modern scientific thought, among them Bacon and Descartes, abandoned the
theological foundations of science. For Bacon the aim of science was “to lay the
foundation, not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power” in order
to “conquer nature in action”.23 To achieve this goal the scientific method was
seen as the foundation of all human knowledge. The scientific method is
analytical, experimental and reductionist and seeks to understand the world by
taking the “machine of nature” to pieces to see how it works. Mathematics
became the language to describe real knowledge about the world. In doing so
the new paradigm became: what truly real is, is mathematical and measurable;
what cannot be measured cannot have true existence.24 According to Descartes
nature is governed by “natural laws”, which can be measured but as a result
nature disappears behind a facade of measurable and abstract quantities. What
we normally call nature is completely disappeared with Descartes and reduced
to numbers; hence this is called the reductionist method. For Descartes nature
was a realm that cannot be observed by our own sense but can only be known
through the power of reason, what means by rational thinking. In this way
nature is reduced to a tool that can be used for the benefit of human society.25
According to Descartes and his contemporaries was science progressive in two
ways:

 It was build upon the secure basis of facts, advancing from them towards
greater and greater truth.

 Science was equal to human progress; it was an instrument to improve

humanity’s material circumstances.
During the enlightenment the idea of human progress was extended. Science
was to be not just the means of improving society’s material circumstances, but
also the means of commanding human nature to improve social and moral
conditions.26
It is fashionable within environmentalist and conservationist cycles to regard
Descartes and Bacon as villains who are guilty of degrading nature from a living
organism into a dead mechanism that can be manipulated at will. But this
judgement is possibly too simple. In his introduction to Bacon’s New Atlantis
Weinberger notes that Bacon “knew that the scientific transformation of the
world would have extraordinary moral and political consequences and that it
would pose new problems in place of old ones”.27 Bacon’s writings about
modern science seem more critical in this light than at first sight. He is not just
proposing a mere revolution in human reasoning and mastery of nature but is
also aware of the changes in human relations during and after the conquest of
nature guided by science. Bacon questions if the outcome of this project is
always positive one.
The period during which European society regarded nature as something that
could be used at will and changed limitlessly to meet our needs did not last for
long. Already during the 17th century the destruction of nature in Europe
intensified to such an extent that it was probably more visible for the people
than our contemporary environmental problems are for us. A much-cited text to
illustrate the extent of environmental problems in the 17th century is John
Evelyn’s description of the air pollution in London. He wrote:

This pestilent smoak, which corrodes the very yron, and spoils all the movables,
leaving a soot upon all things that it lights: & so fatally seizing the lungs of the
inhabitants, that the cough and the consumption spare no man.28

One might argue that this was only a local environmental problem that cannot
be compared with our continental-wide and even global problems such as global
warming. But in Evelyn’s time the consequences of centuries of forest clearance
and transformation of the landscape into cultivated agricultural land were
painfully visible. Evelyn published in 1664 Silva: or a Discourse of Forest
Trees in which he pointed at the destruction of the last forests in England. He
was among the first to plead for conservation and a sustainable management of
the forests. This classic of the so-called Conservation Movement is followed by
many publications repeating the same message: there are limits to human
exploitation of nature. To avoid an environmental crisis humanity must behave
more responsibly and act as a steward managing and protecting nature.
This is also the message of the so-called Brundtland Report that was published
by the United Nations in 1987. This report stated that we have to behave as
good stewards of the earth, creating sustainable development. The Brundtland
Report defines this last aspect as “meeting the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.29
But would the call for more responsible behaviour and sustainable use of nature
work this time? If we look at the history of the relationship between humans and
nature, one can only be very sceptical. In spite of all several warnings of the
past three centuries human impact on nature has intensified manifold since the
17th century. It seems that modern proposals for solving environmental
problems are merely old ideas in new guise. We are reinventing the wheel and
present sustainable development and good stewardship as new solutions to
recent problems. It appears that our current problems and the rise of modern
environmental concern in the last forty years or so are working as a lens that
obscures the past. The 19th century debate about climatic change caused by the
clearing of the Indian forest and the debate about the effects of overpopulation
(Malthus) shows that concern for the environment is a continuous story.
Studying environmental history shows us that our current problems are not so
new and unique as many of us think and that they are the products of a long
historical process.

The colonial context

At the same time of the scientific revolution the European powers were in the
process of rapid colonial expansion. To make the new discovered lands
economic useful, the study of plants, animals and geography was stimulated and
it is with this context that we must put the appointment of botanists and other
scientists in service of the East Indian Company and other colonial authorities
and the activities of missionaries and surgeons as naturalists.

The publication of Linnaeus’ The Oeconomy of Nature in 1749 laid the

foundation of modern botany and biology. He saw a perfect hierarchy in the
natural world and thus he categorises all plants in a system of families and
genera. This reflects the belief in the “divine order of nature” which is related to
the medieval idea of the chin of being and which had not yet entirely
disappeared. Curiosity about the environment and natural world was thus rising
and in this atmosphere Alexander von Humboldt voyaged the world to discover
how the balance of nature was achieved. Humboldt was a German scholar and
explorer whose interests encompassed virtually all of the natural and physical
sciences. He laid the foundations for modern physical geography, geophysics,
and biogeography and helped to popularise science. However, another voyage,
that of the Beagle, led to the development of the theory of evolution by Charles
Darwin. The idea of evolution proved vital to the creation of ecology as a
science. Darwin recognised, according to Derek Wall, other species as “our
fellow brethren” and he was critical about animal abuse, deforestation and
hunting.30 The publication of The Origin of Species coincided with that of the
work by Ernst Haeckel who coined the word ecology in 1866. He defined
ecology as the study of the web of relationships that link all species, including
humanity.31 This definition of ecology provided the later green movement with a
scientific underpinning of their belief in “holism”.
The link between the development of ecology and the colonial context provided
the background for a distinct type of environmental history: the impact of
imperialism and colonialism on the natural world. Where the Americans had
taken Thoreau, Leopold and Muir as the beginning of modern environmentalism
and conservation, Richard Grove is pushing the origins back into the 18th
century. He argues that the European expansion produced a situation in which
tropical islands were seen as symbolic locations for idealised landscapes,
images of the Garden of Eden. The commercial exploitation of tropical islands
and India led to environmental degradation of these islands and local extinction
of plant and animal species.32 The first botanists, mostly physicians and
surgeons of the Indian Companies, were alarmed by these developments. This
led to an increased anxiety about human caused regional climatic change and
species extinctions during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the wake of this
concern the first measures were taken by colonial authorities to prevent
deforestation and protect rare species. This concern for the environment reached
a climax around 1860, when the Indian Forest Service was established, almost
60 years before such as service emerged in Britain. Grove typified these years as
the “environmental decade”.33 Colonial history added the global perspective to
environmental history and explores the destructive powers unleashed on a
global scale by European colonialism and exploitation as well as interaction
with local environmental management regimes. Alfred Crosby explored in this
context the role of bio-ecological factors in the Europeanisation of large parts of
the world, in particular South America. He argued that there are two distinctive
ecological realms. The first contains the temperate zones of the earth comprising
North America, the southern part of South America, South Africa, Australia and
New Zealand. The second area covers roughly the tropical belt of the world
(map 1).

Map 1: The countries of demographic takeover. Zone 1 & 3:

temperate zones. Zone 2: Tropics.

The biological differences between both zones defined the success of European
settlement. Between 1820 and 1930 about 50 million people emigrated from
Europe and most of them settled in the temperate zones where they have been
extremely successful. In the tropical zone, European settlement practically
failed and the causes for this phenomenon are of an ecological kind. The
ecological system of the Old World was extremely aggressive in comparison to
the ecological system of the Americas and the other white settlement colonies.
The invasion of European diseases, such as measles and smallpox, and the
introduction of animals and plants caused a disaster among the indigenous
populations and ecosystems. The fate of the Central and South Americans
empires is well known. Their where practically decimated by disease after the
arrival of the Spanish at the start of the 16th century. The Spanish conquerors
brought smallpox and venereal diseases and over 90% of the population died in
the decades that followed. Before the European conquest the Mexican
population is estimate to have numbered between 25 to 30 million. By 1568,
less than 50 years after the first contact with Europeans, the population had
shrunk to about three million.34
In their new environments, European crops and cattle flourished better than in
the Old World and they adapted quickly and overwhelmed many local species.
In this way they provided a sustainable environment for the European settlers
and without the success of the European ecological system in the colonies, it is
unlikely that the settlers would have succeeded in occupying North America,
Argentina, New Zealand and Australia in only a few generations. Crosby
assigns what he calls the “biotic portmanteau” of plants, animals and diseases a
leading role in the process of demographic take-over.35 Crosby has dubbed this
exchange of disease, plants and animals between Europe and the America’s the
Columbian exchange.36
But Crosby was not the first to recognise biological factors as a driving force in
history. William McNeill discussed in his book Plagues and Peoples the
importance of epidemics and disease in world history. He concluded that
“Infectious disease which antedated the emergence of humankind will last as
long as humanity itself, and will surely remain, … , one of the fundamental
parameters and determinants in human history”.37 McNeill’s and Crosby’s work
on ecological imperialism and epidemics brought the microbiological world in
the realm of historical explanation.
Degradation of the natural world

Another important leitmotif in environmental history is the degradation of the

natural world caused by human activities. A good example of this theme can be
found in the introductory chapter of Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the
World in which he describes the decline of the civilisation on Easter Island,
which was in part caused by environmental degradation. Ponting’s green history
is one of degradation and devastation of the natural world caused by humans.
Ponting points out that:
Over the last 10.000 years human activities have brought about major changes
in the ecosystem of the world. The universal expansion of settlement and the
creation of fields and pastures for agriculture, the continual clearing of forests
and other wild areas, … , have steadily reduced the habitats of almost every
kind of animal and plant.

Ponting concluded:

Past human actions have left contemporary societies with an almost insuperably
difficult set of problems.38

This is a rather gloomy vision of history, however, one cannot hide from the fact
that past human action has affected the planet on a global scale, changing the
natural world. But to present most changes as decay caused by humans is
probably a rather narrow-minded approach because the natural world itself is
never static but always evolving. It is changing so rapidly and leaves such a
deep imprint on human society that we might search in vain for a recognisable
stable state of nature. It is in this context that Beinart and Coates write that “the
very notion of a self-regulating, stable ecosystem may be more metaphysical
than actual”.39 They add that concepts of the natural world are always cultural
statements. Worster also observed this and wrote about the work of scientists
and other scholars “that their ideas of nature, … are the products of the cultures
in which they live”.40According to David Pepper one of the tasks of green or
environmental history to is study these ideas and perceptions about nature. He
argues those different representations of “wilderness” and “nature” have
political and ideological dimensions. The task of environmental historians is to
dissect these representations, reconstruct them, trace their origins and place
them in their historical context. In doing so historians can show how little these
ideological perceptions have to do with the real natural world. In the words of
Stephen Budiansky, most perceptions of nature are “good poetry but bad
science”.41
One of such perceptions is that nature is capable to quickly recover from human
interference, especially if aided with good management policies. Pepper calls
this the “myth of nature benign”. Many proponents of the free market economy
favour this perception because it does not require any action or interference
from humans, or narrowly defined the free market. On the other side of the
perception spectrum we find the idea that nature is very vulnerable and easily
damaged by human activity. Therefore humans must be cautious about any
development and even regarded as acting outside of unspoiled nature. This
perception is coined the “myth of nature ephemeral” and is popular among deep
of radical environmentalists. A third perception is that of the idea of “nature
perverse/tolerant, that holds that development is acceptable as long as the limits
and laws of nature are observed”.42
The cultural filter

According to Pepper each perception or myth functions as a cultural filter that

determines how adherents of different perceptions perceive the environment at
the present day and in the past. Oelschlager uses the concept of the cultural filter
in his book The Idea of Wilderness and his thesis is that the perception of
wilderness depends on the historical and cultural filter humans used in different
periods. He argues that the modern historical lens obscures the idea of
wilderness in ancient times: “Through the lens of history human experience
takes place outside nature”.43 Oelschlager tries to drop the modern lens, and he
argues that historians must always be aware that images of the world around us
are not the same as the real world. They are mental categories, concepts that try
to describe the real world. These past concepts might differ from ours but we
must careful in judging it because is always easy to be wise after the event.
By studying the social and historical filters, historians can reconstruct a
perceived environment and explain particular opinions and actions of distinctive
groups. This will help us understand how others and ourselves arrived at the
present set of attitudes and ideas and to evaluate them critically. This will also
help us to identify misconceptions in environmental thinking and perceptions
about nature. It will contribute to stimulate the development of new
environmentally sound concepts and attitudes. Here we touch directly upon the
political and ideological aspect of environmental history and we must be aware
that there is a long tradition in western thought about the “noble savage” living
in harmony with nature. Much contemporary environmentalist literature
portrays pre-industrial and pre-colonial communities as “children of nature” or
“paradise people” who did not loose their innocence. These people are portrayed
as having lived in harmony with the land and not disturbing its natural balance
through the application of technology or demographic pressure. This idea is also
an important force in political arguments used by native people especially in
North America, Australia and New Zealand. Unfortunately for these people
recent historical, archaeological and anthropological research showed has that
their ancestors were capable to manipulate and modify the natural world to their
advantage through the use of fire and hunting. Pre-historic settlers of the
America’s, Australasia and Europe might have been partly responsible for
upsetting the ecological systems and the extinction of many grazing animals
through over hunting and persistent burning of large areas. According to Beinart
and Coates these early migrants were aggressive colonisers in their own right.
They concluded that the revival of “aboriginal ideas” of nature by descendants
of native people “is a powerful ideological statement rather than good history”.44

Humans and the physical world

The preceding pages have dealt with the intellectual and philosophical side of
environmental history. But what is the place of humans in the natural world?
Human history is not only the story of the impact of its actions on the physical
environment. It is also the story of human reaction to the changing natural
world. It is the story of climatic change, slow geological processes, species
extinctions and biological changes. The history of the relation between humans
and their natural surroundings is a tale of interaction and no one way street. The
following paragraphs will focus on the importance of the natural environment in
the development of human history from prehistoric times up to the Middle
Ages.
Where do Humans fit into nature? It is possible to apply all kinds of definitions
to our species, such as intelligent, tool-using, social, able to think abstractly,
conscious of the environment and of time. Organised in massive groups and
armed with technology we manipulate the environment, transforming the face of
the earth to satisfy our needs. It is only during the last 2.5 million years that the
genus Homo has formed part of the biosphere. Up to about 10,000 years ago the
various human species lived the same kind of life: that of nomadic hunter-
gatherers. Then at the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 ago some people in
the Middle East and slightly later in other places began to cultivate some edible
plants and domesticate animals. In a process that took centuries or even
millennia, agriculture and stockbreeding became the major forms of subsistence.
This development occurred first in the so-called Fertile Crescent in the Middle
East but during the following millennia agriculture developed independently in
the Yellow River Valley, the Indus Valley, in New Guinea, in the region south
of the Sahara and in Mexico and Peru. These regions are called the core regions
of agriculture.45
It is very likely that humans manipulated nature much earlier than the first
development of agriculture. An intriguing question is why prehistoric hunter-
gatherers did abandon their way of life in favour of agriculture? The classical
explanation is that in the core regions the climate changed and humans and
animals were forced to retreat into refuges around rivers and in oases. They had
to look for more efficient ways to produce food. The solution was agriculture.
This so-called ‘oasis hypothesis’ was first introduced by Childe in 1923. But
research in recent decades has made clear that the pattern is more complicated.
Pollen records and lake sediments point to a wetter climate at the start of the
Holocene, not a drier. The same applies to Mexico. The result of this was that
plants, the ancestors of our major agricultural crops, spread over larger areas. In
this way the plants became more abundantly available than before.46
In the Sahel/South Sahara conditions got drier so that cultivation of crops was
not an option. The savannah landscape that developed attracted large herds of
animals. Some species were domesticated and stockbreeding became the
dominant means of subsistence. Childe’s hypothesis was related to the whole
area of the Middle East. But it is very likely that the most important recourses
were found in the area immediately adjacent to where people lived. This led to
diversity in the development of agriculture. Agriculture probably did not
originate in a few core regions but over large areas. The problem is that the
evidence is very sparse and scattered over enormous areas.47
The rise of agriculture and domestication led people to give up their nomadic
life and settle down. In this way the first villages came into being and became
the forerunners of the first urban concentrations. The oldest known walled city
in the world, Jericho in Israel, dates from 9800 BP. The development of urban
centres sparked off a cultural revolution that transformed humankind radically.
Social hierarchies, specialisation, art and science emerged. Societies evolved
from tribal bands via chiefdoms into states. This cultural revolution speeded up
with the development of metallurgy and writing. It caused also environmental
degradation.

The most damaging activity was undoubtedly agriculture. It transformed

complete landscapes. According to Roberts the link between people and nature
weakened with the advent of complex agricultural societies. Nature became less
the “habitat” for the farmer and more a set of economic resources to be managed
and manipulated.48 However, the impact of early agriculture was limited,
although here we can not generalise. In Europe the majority of wildwood
remained untouched for a long time. The fate of the early agriculturists was
interwoven with the habitats they occupied. In the Middle East the local impact
was much greater due to sedentary settlement and permanent farming. In Europe
farming took for a long time the form of shifting cultivation.49 But over the
course of time farmers settled permanently and during the Bronze Age the
impact of farming was considerable through the introduction of the scratch
plough and animal traction. According to Roberts this epoch was the ‘high tide’
of upland farming in the British Isles. A combination of climatic change and
human misuse of fragile environments afterwards caused the decline.
It was believed for a long time that when the Romans came to the British Isles
they encountered a dense, inhospitable and undisturbed forest wilderness. A
penetrating description of this perception can be found in Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He describes the arrival of a Roman army officer
in the British Isles and what impression it might have been made on him.
Here and there a military camp lost in the wilderness, like a needle in a bundle
of hay – cold, fog, tempest, disease, exile, and death – death skulking in the air,
in the water, in the bush.

And further:

Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the
savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him, – all that mysterious life of
the wilderness that stirs in the forest.50

However, it is very unlikely that anyone sailing to the British Isles two thousand
years ago would have found a dense, forested wilderness. The later Bronze Age
and pre-Roman Iron Age (3000-2000 BC) was probably the most active period
of forest destruction in British history. Thus the Romans encountered not a
thick-forested Island but took over a landscape that was already largely
agricultural.51 According to Rackham the Romans found a landscape that was
already parcelled into ownership. What the Romans found was a pattern of
enclosed fields. In the literature these field are often labelled Celtic Fields. This
is the traditional name for small, enclosed fields in all kinds of regular shapes
that covered thousands of miles on chalk down land, moorland, and other
terrain.52 It is very likely that the size of the fields differed and that older field
systems of the Bronze Age were still in use. Climatic changes and the local
geography also defined local differences in cultivation. In Dartmoor agricultural
land on marginal upland sites was abandoned during periods of climatic
deterioration. In the colder period between 500 BC – 400 AD villages were
displaced to the valley bottoms. Climatic deterioration in the 14th century
affected elevated fields from Dartmoor to the Scottish Highlands. Many
elevated fields were abandoned. Elevated marginal grounds are extremely
vulnerable to the slightest change in temperature and humidity. But human
misuse of the land also contributed to changes in the landscape. Germanic
settlers caused soil erosion on chalk, gravels and sand by overexploitation in the
5th to 7th centuries. They were forced to abandon these lands and use the
heavier clay grounds.53
After the Roman period the enclosed fields were replaced by the so-called open-
field system. The origins of this type of field system remain obscure. The open-
field arable was made up of long strips aggregated in furlongs and these into
fields. Each farmer worked one or more strips in one or more fields. The
woodlands and swamp area near a river or stream were normally used for
grazing. I will not discuss the way that communities had organised the use of
the land and practices used. Figure 1 shows a typical example of an open-field
system. The open fields disappeared in the 18th and 19th centuries because of
the introduction of a series of enclosure acts.54

Figure 1: Typical Open-field system

(Source: Oliver Rackham, 1996, p. 166)

One of the central features in the history of the later Middle Ages is the
expansion of population and economic activity between about 1000 and 1300.
Marc Bloch labelled this period ‘the great age of clearing’ in France. According
to Smith this also applied to Britain and Germany.55 However, Roberts
concluded “that the distribution of wooded and non-wooded land … recorded in
Domesday England had already then been in existence for at least a thousand
years”.56 According to him, the changes in woodland cover that occurred in
medieval times lay almost entirely in the hands of the dominant social class
(nobility, clergy and monarch). In contrast to earlier periods there was no longer
common access to woodland resources. The regulation of access to woodlands,
conservation and management made economic sense. The reason for this is that
during the later Middle Ages the value of timber rose steadily. This provided the
landowners with additional income. Therefore forests were protected against
damage, theft and misuse.57
Around 1340 the pressure on the land had become critical due to population
growth. The Black Death did not end the pressure on agricultural land. This is
probably caused by the fact that grain prices remained high until at the end of
the 1370s when grain prices declined 30 to 40 percent. It seems that there is a
connection between population decline in the 14th and 15th centuries and
changes in land-use and agricultural practice. It is suggested that more land
came in fewer hands and that there was a shift to more extensive use of the land
for grazing. On the other hand increased production of luxury products such as
hop and grain for beer production asked for more intensive use of fertile land.
However, we must be careful with making generalisations. Bruce Campbell
warns that there is not enough evidence for broad generalisations because the
data available is too regional.58 Delano and Perry concluded the same: medieval
society was complex. There are, therefore, many circumstances that could have
affected the ecology of a settlement, and considerable care must be exercised
when attributing to climatic variations.59 This is not only true for the Middle
Ages but for any period in history. The interaction between the environment and
culture is always a highly complicated one.

Applied science

Now we have to consider briefly how environmental history works and what its
key characteristics are. Environmental history is not so much a subject but a
market place in which various subjects come together. For example, it is deeply
attached to economic history, social history and cultural history; it is closely
attached to conservation biology science, environmental science and the earth
sciences but also archaeology, which studies the material past and many other
subjects. It is almost like a stage where all these actors come on and make their
contribution to the field.

Perhaps we can divide the subjects involved in two broad categories: on the one
hand there is the study of the material past involving natural processes that
shape the world and on which we depend. It also includes the production cycles
of agriculture, resource extraction and the use of what we now call ecosystem
services. On the other hand there is the study of the cultural past and realm of
ideas. How did people in the past perceive the landscapes and environments
they were living in? How did they construct narratives to explain the natural
world or to justify its exploitation?60
How does an historian approach an environmental history subject in practice?
Take for example forest history in the United Kingdom. How to study the forest
history of a particular landed estate? There are many documents stored in
archives relating to estate management throughout the United Kingdom that go
at least several hundred years back in time. Here we can use a straightforward
historical approach: go to the archives and see what documents emerge from
landed archives. In addition there is also an immense volume of contemporary
printed literature related to forestry. In general early scientific literature
provides a wonderful story of discovery and the way these people related to the
landscape and environment. Examples of this literature are the publications of
the Royal Scottish Arboriculture Society, or the proceedings of the learned
societies, to mention only a few. There is also a body of instruction books on
forestry starting with John Evelyn’s Silva in the 17th century providing insights
into the scientific ideas about forestry at the time. All these printed primary
sources must be taken into account.

The next step is to see if we can find any cartographic or aerial photographs as
well as old paintings, engravings or landscape photographs that show how the
appearance of the landscape has changed over time. In addition it is a good idea
to consult archaeological surveys to get an indication how long the landscape
has been altered and in what ways.

The literary, archival and cartographic research form the bases for your field
work in the locality of your study. It is a good idea to bring a camera and
photograph elements and things of interest that you have identified in the
archival material and on the maps and images so that you can compare this. But
this fieldwork can also reveal features in the landscape, such as wood banks, the
remains of wears or ancient woodlands that were not mentioned in the archival
material or shown on maps. It throws up new questions, for example how long
have these woodlands been there? Without documentary evidence this is where
science can help out.

For example palynologists, scientists who study fossil pollen, can discover from
the pollen cores taken from peat bogs or lake sediments, what the wood, or any
vegetated environment, has been like in the past. So, suddenly a historian
discovers that science can take him back centuries before there were any
documents. Or by comparing data that historians have found in historical
documents with his findings a scientist can suddenly learn that a change in land
use or the land management regime can explain sudden changes in vegetation
that cannot be explained by natural processes. For these reasons collaboration
with scientists is one of the most exiting and potentially profitable elements of
environmental history.

In more recent times forestry management has become a science and historians
should learn some of this when dealing with the 19th and 20th centuries. But
there are always areas that are too specialist and which need addition
explanation. To get this additional explanation it is an obvious step to approach
a forester or a forest expert in a forestry or environmental studies department. In
addition as a historian you do not often know exactly where to look for relevant
sources and here scientists can also help out.

To summarise the working method of the environmental historian: behave like a

historian but learn a little science. This will help to formulate questions that you
are not able to answer as a historian and take these to scientists to help you out.

Environmental history has very practical uses and can be applied to help
formulate conservation policies, resource management and to understand
climate change. For this reason environmental history is a very public type of
history that can contribute to contemporary environmental issues. The bottom
line is that Environmental history is more of an applied science or an applied
humanities subject, depending from which angle you approach it.

Conclusion

In this essay we explored some of the themes, results and issues in

environmental history. It is far from comprehensive survey but several themes
are emerging from the previous pages. A considerable part of environmental
history is dealing with our perceptions of nature and the environment, which is
an intellectual history of the relationship between humans and nature. To write
this kind of history, historians are using literature studies and, even more
important, philosophy to reconstruct peoples justifications for transforming
nature in the past. The latter part of this essay dealt with the interaction between
humans and the physical world. Here historians are using studies from the
natural sciences to reconstruct past environments and the modifications of it
caused by human activity.

One of the striking aspects in all of this is the relative truth of environmental
history because there are, as should be, no ultimate benchmarks to judge what is
good or bad. A “truth” is the product of an interpretation derived from our
perceptions of the natural world and the value systems in which these are
formed. Val;ue systems change over time and therefore historians studying the
past must step back from contemprorary values and reconstruct those of past
societies. It is for this reason that there cannot be an ultimate environmental
history. This is probably why the intellectual and philosophical explanation of
our relationship with nature takes such a prominent place in environmental
history. It explains the way in which people make sense of natural world and by
doing so formulate justifications for their exploitation of nature, at present and
in the past. It is looking for the values applied to the environment by other
societies at different locations in time and space. We must therefore realise that
research such as excavations, climate reconstruction and pollution histories are
not value free. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are therefore difficult labels to use in
environmental history. In many cases the modification of the environment was a
logic and necessary step for the people involved, because for them it had
practical, political or economic advantages. It is always easy to be wise after the
event and condemn people for what they did or did not. Therefore
environmental historians should realise more than anybody else that the world is
not divided in black and white. There are only shades of grey and it is the task
of the environmental historian to explain these shades and make sense of them.

But doing this is a formidable task because there are so many lines of
investigation possible, it may seem that environmental history has no coherence
and is rather eclectic. It includes virtually all that has been in the past and that is
affecting us. Environmental history could be the crossroad between the
humanities and the natural sciences. It links scientific reasoning with
philosophical criticism; the physical world with the world of ideas.
Environmental history is probably close to what the French Annales-school
called “total history” and they argued that history is everything, and everything
is history.61 However, by attempting to do this many historians experience a
feeling of unease or even fear and become engulfed by the buzzing confusion of
past voices, forces, events and relationships but also a dynamic changing natural
environment, almost defying any coherent understanding. The totality of
environmental history may leave us with a seemingly unmanageable burden of
trying to write a “history of everything”, but it is also a challenge and a promise.
We did not create nature or the past. Both simply exist and are an integral part
of our world and it is the task of historians, scientists, philosophers and others to
come together and make sense of it all.

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5 Beinard & Coates, Environment and History, pp. 2-3
6 Worster, D., “Path Across the Levee”, pp. 24-25.
7 The amount of sediment, rock and soil shifted because of human activity now
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8 Roberts, Neil, The Holocene. An Environmental History (Oxford, 1989),
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9 Lowe, J.J. & Walker, M.J.C., Reconstructing Quarternary
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10 Ibid., p. 6.
11 Lowe, J.J. & Walker, M.J.C., Reconstructing Quarternary Environments, p.
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research in Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. This is reflected in the
creation of the European Society for Environmental History, the South Asian
Society for Environmental History and the Latin American Society for
Environmental history. See links to their websites on the Links page.
14 Beinard & Coates, Environment and History, pp. 1-2.
15 Bramwell, Anna, Ecology in the 20th Century. A History (London & New
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17 White, Lynn, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, Science, 10
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19 Midgley, Mary, Science as Salvation. A Modern Myth and its
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21 Achterhuis, Hans, “Van Moeder Aarde tot Ruimteschip: Humanisme en
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22 Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, pp 125-126.
23 Bacon, Francis, New Atlantis and The Great Instauration (Wheeling, 1989),
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24 Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, p. 125.
25 Achterhuis, Mythe en Techniek, pp. 42-43.
26 Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, pp. 145, 147.
27 Bacon, Francis, New Atlantis, p. ix.
28 Evelyn, John, London Revived (Oxford, 1938), p. 6-7.
29 Quoted in: Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, p. 74
30 Wall, Derek, Green History. A Reader in Environmental Literature,
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31 Bramwell, Anna, Ecology in the 20th Century, pp. 40-41.
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34 McNeill, William H., Plagues and Peoples (London, 1976), p. 189; Crosby,
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35 Crosby, Alfred W., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of
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36 Crosby, Ecological Imperialism
37 McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, p. 268.
38 Ponting, Clive, A Green History of the World (London, 1991), pp. 61, 407.
39 Beinard & Coates, Environment and History, p. 3
40 Worster, “Across the Levee”, p. 25.
41 Budiansky, Stephan, Natures Keepers. The New Science of Nature
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42 David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, p. 3.
43 Oelschlager, The Idea of Wilderness, p. 7.
44 Beinart & Coates, Environment and History, pp. 4-5
45 Priem, Harry N.A., Earth and Life. Life into Relation to its Planetary
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Steel, pp. 83-191
46 Roberts, The Holocene, p. 110
47 Ibid., pp. 110-111
48 Ibid., p. 128.
49 Ibid., pp. 119-12
50 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, p. 19.
51 Roberts, The Holocene, p. 150
52 Rackham, Oliver, The History of the Contryside, pp. 158-160.
53 Delano, Catherine & Parry, Martin, Consequences of Climatic
Change (Nottingham, 1981), 31, 35.
54 Rackham, History of the Countryside, 164-166; Fussel, G.E., Farming
Technique from Prehistory to Modern Times (Oxford, ), p. 50.
55 Smith, C.T., An Historical Geography of Western Europe before
1800 (London, 1978), p. 163.
56 Roberts, The Holocene, p. 150.
57 Ibid., p. 151.
58 Campbell, Bruce M.S., “A Fair Field once Full of Folk: Agrarian Change in
an Era of Population Decline, 1348-1500”, Agricultural History Review, 41
(1993), pp. 60-70.
59 Delano & Perry, Consequences of Climatic Change, p. 37.
60 Worster, Donald, The ends of the earth. Perspectives on Modern
Environmental History (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), pp. 289-308; See also:
Sverker Sorlin and Paul Warde, “The problem of the problem of environmental
history: a rereading of the field”, Environmental History, 12 (2007) 1, p. 112.
61 Harsgard, Michael, “Total History: The Annales School”, Journal of
Contemporary History, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1-13 (1978), pp. 1-13.