By: Jan Oosthoek
The Environment has been a prominent part of the political agenda since the 1960s. The expansion of the consumer society after the 2nd 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 and demanded a cleaner and healthier environment. The environmental movement that originated from these concerns was not very historically oriented. The contemporary problems were seen as unique and a 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. The second part deals with some of the issues in environmental history. It 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 periods. But environmental history is not solely an intellectual history. It is also about the impact of humankind on the natural world and the influence of the natural world on human history. The last part of this essay will therefore look at the development of agriculture on the landscape.
This work is not a comprehensive review of all the issues in environmental history. It is limited in scope by time and volume. It is not intended to be an original piece of work, but the text will sometimes reflect the author's own opinions and criticism. 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 it in a few pages. Is this impossibility a sign that environmental history has become a matured academic discipline?
Environmental history? What does it mean? Historians studying natural sciences and scientists learn the language of history and the humanities? That is exactly what Donald Worster is proposing in his book The Wealth of Nature. He argues that the natural sciences and history have become two separate spheres. Historians are not expected to deal with the natural sciences and vice versa. Historians must deal with people, society and culture. Sciences on the other hand must be concerned with nature. In this way nature is set apart from culture. These are two different worlds that are described in different languages.
This state of affairs 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'.1 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.2
Once a historian realises the connection between nature and culture, a whole universe of new subjects opens up. History becomes more interdisciplinary than ever before. It is not only using other human sciences, but it also starts to use the natural sciences. It is true that environmental history brings a lot of 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. It demands that he is not only trained in history and the social sciences, but also in the natural sciences.3 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 vision. Scientists must include human history in their work. They seem to have ignored historical processes for a long time. That is not to say that time has not been a factor in their research. Ever since Darwin scientists have recognised that the natural world, even the whole planet, is the product of a long historical process. But 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 prairie of North America is the product of deliberate burning by Native Americans. This type of management produced a unique ecosystem that European settlers found in the 18th and 19th centuries. Worster concludes that scientists must take serious the impact of human action. This is particularly true in modern times when human impact has become deeper and more far reaching than ever before.4
As said before, environmental history ventures into all human activities. It ranges from economics to social organisation, politics, science, philosophy, and religion. Its timescale is not limited to one thousand, two thousand or even 40 thousand years. 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 timespan.
Although environmental history is not 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, that began 10,000 before present (BP) and still continues. The Holocene is the warm period that started after the last iceage and still continues. It is during this short period of time that humanity developed the civilisations 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.
Neil Roberts starts 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. He 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 no regard to regional differences.5
As the number of human artefacts produced during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages increases the picture gets more detailed and the scale becomes smaller. The history of the last two millennia is often so detailed that it is sometimes confusing to see general patterns in the mass of information available. In this respect isolated research does not provide reliable evidence to reconstruct an environmental history over large geographic areas. Therefore comparative research over large areas is needed.
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. Over large areas in the world there is no documentary evidence until the modern period. To reconstruct past environments we have to rely on indirect evidence or proxy records. The term proxy record refers to any evidence that provides an indirect measure of former climates or environments.6
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. Paleoecological reconstruction also uses information provided in 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 useful for the last ten to hundred thousand years.7
Radiometric methods are much applied and 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 paleomagnetism8 have also been developed.
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.9
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, 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 & 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'.10
Environmental history developed first in North America and is there more advanced than in other parts of the world. This is due to the American experience of settlement and the consequences for the natural environment. Initially American scholars were concerned with the despoliation of nature and the heroic rise of the conservation movement. The studied the institutions and agencies of natural resource policy and protection. They 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 Carsons Silent Spring11 in 1962, the Report for the Club of Rome 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. Historians started to look for the origins of the contemporary problems. We can distinguish several branches in environmental history.
This type of environmental history is anthropocentric and part of the more traditional approaches of political, administrative and intellectual history.12 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 attitude 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. In this book, as she explains in the introduction, she examined 'the thinkers who represent most significantly the roots of ecological ideas'.13 But this kind of history is not limited to the 20th century. It is an intellectual history that traces the origins of our environmental problems back to the very start of civilisation.
It is often said that Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with nature. In his book The Idea of Wilderness Oelschlager shows himself an adherent of this idea. 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. The conception of nature was that humans were part of it. Their conception of time and nature was cyclical. When agriculture was introduced a split between human culture and nature emerged. Humans were no longer regarded as part of nature, but nature was designed and created for his benefit. If land was not suitable, humans had the ability to alter it and make it useful. This is the moment that natural degeneration started. The result of the emergence of agriculture in the Near East was that Mediterranean people became increasingly adept at and aggressive in their endeavours to humanise the landscape. They became aware of their independence of 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. The limitations of mastery over nature were explained with forces beyond human control. But in general the Mediterranean landscape was regarded as divine and designed for humans to live in 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. Judaism rationalised the world in a metaphysical way. It 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 last 2000 years.14
Greek rationalism and Christianity created a concept in which nature was conceived as valueless 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, pointing in one direction to an ultimate goal. This tradition is known as the Judeo-Christian tradition. In environmentalist literature it is very common to blame the roots of our ecological crisis on the attitudes of the Judeo-Christian tradition towards nature. Lynn White, an historian from California, first conceived this hypothesis. In 1967 he published an article in Science with the title 'The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis'.15 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'.16 Nature was created by God to be used and dominated by humankind. According to white, this attitude was translated into harmful attitudes and actions towards nature with the application of technology.
Although White's thesis is almost a piece of faith for the environmental movement, he is also heavily criticised. Pepper sums up some of the most important criticism.17 In the first place he points at the fact that other non-Christian cultures have also abused nature. For example, the ancient Romans exploited nature more intensive than medieval Christianity.
The same can be said about the domination over nature that was given by the Christian doctrine. In this respect it is not unique. 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 more important for most people than White portrays it. White tends to forget 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 influence contemporary values and actions towards nature. It seems that material changes are more important and powerful than religious ones. The rise of capitalism made Christians exploit nature in a way Judaism had never done. Capital had a much greater impact on western attitudes towards nature than theology. 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
But it is also 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.19 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. But we might wonder if people in the Middle Ages actually regarded nature as described by Midgely.
The period before the Renaissance was monistic rather than dualistic. The cosmos was regarded as a whole in which humans were microcosms in a larger order. The Middle Age view of nature was that the world was a divine organism. 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. He spilled over, generating in plenty and bringing life to the things below. This "life-bringing overspill" worked its way down the chain, the hierarchy of being. In this way all things were linked and interdependent as an organic whole. 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. Without it he cannot live. In that respect the Chain of Being was a truly organism. All parts functioned as a whole and depended on each other.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. This book needed to be carefully read 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'. One who understood nature was able to understand the will of God. He was the 'watch-maker'; the designer of nature and this nature was made in his image and according to his plan. Science as instrument to obtain theological knowledge. However, it became soon clear that the founders of modern scientific thought, Bacon and Descartes, abandoned the theological aims 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 the foundation under all human knowledge. The scientific method is analytical, experimental and reductionistic. It 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'. 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. In this way nature disappears behind a facade of measurable quantities. Every quality other than mathematical numbers is lacking from this. What we normally call nature is completely disappeared with Descartes. For Descartes nature was a realm that cannot be observed by our deceptivesenses but can only be known through our ratio, 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 science was progressive in two ways:
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 very 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 seems more critical in this light than at first sight. He is not just proposing a mere reformation of human reason and mastery of nature. Bacon is also aware of the changes in human relations during and after the conquest of nature. He questioned 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 so much 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. But in Evelyn's time the consequences of centuries of forest clearance and transformation of the landscape into cultivated agricultural land were also 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 man and nature, one can only be very sceptical. In spite of all the warnings of the last three centuries human impact on nature has increased manifoldly since the 17th century. It seems that the 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 seems that our current problems and the rise of modern environmental concern in the last few decades are working as a lens that obscures the past. The 19th century debate about climatic change caused by the clearing of the Indian forest shows that concern for the environment is a continuous story. Studying environmental history will show us that our current problems are not so new and unique as many of us think. They are the products of a long historical process.
At the same time as the scientific revolution Europe was in the phase of rapid expansion. To make the new discovered lands economic useful, the study of plants, animals and geography was stimulated. In this light we must understand 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. He saw a perfect hierarchy in the natural world and thus he categorises all plants in families and genera. This reflects that the belief in the 'divine order of nature' had not yet disappeared. Curiosity about the environment 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. This proved vital to the creation of ecology as a science. Darwin recognised, according to Derek Wall, other species as 'our fellow brethren' and was critical about animal abuse, deforestation and hunting.30 The publication of The Origin of Species coincided with that of Haeckel's work on ecology. Ernst Haeckel coined the word 'ecology' in 1866. He defined it 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.32 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 and extinction of plant and animal species. The first botanists, mostly physicians and surgeons of the Indian Companies, were alarmed by these developments. This led to an increased anxiety about artificial induced climatic change and species extinction during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the wake of this concern the first measures were taken to prevent deforestation and protect rare species. This concern for the environment reached a climax around 1860. These years were coined by Grove as the 'environmental decade'.33 Colonial history added the global perspective to environmental history. It explored the destructive powers unleashed on a global scale by European colonialism and expansion. Alfred Crosby explored in this context the role of bio-ecological factors in the Europeanisation of large parts of the world. 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 take-over. 1+3
temperate zones; 2 tropicalzone. Gray areas are the areas of demographic
take-over by the west.
The biological differences between both zones defined the success of European settlement. Between 1820 and 1930 about 50 million people emigrated from Europe. Most of them settled in the temperate zones where they have been extremely successful. In the tropical zone, European settlement practically failed. 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, cattle, horses, rats and weeds caused a disaster among the indigenous plants and peoples. The fate of the Middle American Indians is well known. They where practically decimated after the arrival of the Spanish at the start of the 16th century. The Spanish conquerors brought smallpox and venereal diseases. Most of the population died. 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. They adapted very fast and overthrew the local species. In this way they provided a sustainable environment for the European settlers. Without the success of the European ecological system in the white colonies, it would not have been possible to occupy North America, Argentina, New Zealand and Australia within 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
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 important role of epidemics and diseases 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'.36 McNeill's and Crosby's work on ecological imperialism and epidemics brings the natural world into historical explanation.
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 caused by environmental degradation. Ponting's environmental 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.37
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 regard most changes as decay caused by humans is probably a narrow-minded approach. 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 respect that Beinart and Coates write that 'the very notion of a self-regulating, stable ecosystem may be more metaphysical than actual'.38 They added that concepts of the natural world are always cultural statements. Worster wrote in this respect about scientists 'that their ideas of nature, ... are the products of the cultures in which they live'.39 According to David Pepper one of the tasks of environmental history to is study these ideas and perceptions. He argues those different representations of 'wilderness' and 'nature' have political and ideological dimensions. Environmental history is an instrument to dissect these representations and reconstruct them and trace their origins. In doing so historians can show how little these ideological perceptions have to do with the real natural world. Stephen Budiansky commented that most perceptions of nature are 'good poetry but bad science'.40
One of such perceptions is that nature is capable of quick recovery 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. On the other side of the 'perception spectrum' we find the idea that nature is very vulnerable and potentially damaged by human activity. Therefore humans must be cautious about any development. This perception is coined the 'myth of nature ephemeral' and is popular among 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'.41
According to Pepper each perception or 'myth' functions as a cultural filter. This filter determines how adherents of different perceptions perceive the environment at the present day and in the past. The concept of the cultural filter is used by Oelschlager in his book The Idea of Wilderness. The thesis of Oelschlager's book 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'.42 Oelschlager tries to drop the modern lens, and even attacks it. 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. It will help us understand how others and ourselves arrived at the present set of attitudes and ideas and to evaluate them critically. This will help us to identify misconceptions in environmental thinking and perceptions about nature. It will contribute to stimulate the development of new environmentally healthy concepts and attitudes. Here we touch directly upon the political and ideological aspect of environmental history. There is a long tradition in western thought about the 'noble savage' living in harmony with nature. Much contemporary environmentalist literature pictures pre-industrial and pre-colonial communities as 'children of nature' or 'paradise people' who did not loose their innocence. They lived in the land never 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 these people 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 overhunting 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'.43
Politics and ideology can also play a role in environmental history. Worster seems sometimes to aim at no more or less than a reform of society to counter the ecological crisis. He advocates that historians can help understanding of the crisis and the social, political and cultural reforms that are needed. It is interesting to note that he is creating a new perception that has no connection to the natural world. In the end not the salvation of nature is the aim, but social reform. It seems to me doubtful if that is enough to solve the ecological crisis that we are facing. Worster stated that scientists have described the crisis, but that they are not equipped to answer why we are in a state of crisis with the global environment. That is only reserved for historians and the other humanities.
Worster concludes that only the humanities are capable of providing the raw material to solve the problems. However, Worster forgets here that the ecological crisis is not only a social or cultural problem but also a technical and scientific problem. Of course, we must change the attitudes of people to check excessive population growth, abuse of soils, depletion of our forests and the growing garbage mountain. To keep the billions of people on this planet alive in a ecologically healthy world, social and cultural reform is not enough. It does not solve the negative effects of our technology and ways of poduction. The best way to solve these problems is more likely achieved by both stimulating social change as well as technical development of more environmental modes of production. The other route available is to drop modern technology all together and go back to nature, living in a more primitive state. However, that seems quite unrealistic with the huge population we have now on this planet.
Environmental pollution has existed since people began to congregate in towns and cities. Ancient Athenians removed their refuse to dumps outside the main part of the city. The Romans dug trenches outside the city to hold garbage and wastes, a practice, which may have contributed to outbreaks of viral diseases. But at least the Romans did transport their garbage out of the cities. The adverse effects of pollution became more noticeable as cities grew during the Middle Ages. In Europe, medieval cities passed ordinances against throwing garbage into the streets and canals, but those laws were largely ignored. In 16th-century England, efforts were made to curb the use of coal in order to reduce the amount of smoke in the air, again with little effect. In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution placed greater pressures on the environment, and pollution changed and increased dramatically. Although industrial development improved the standard of living, there was a great environmental cost.
The rapid changing technology and its consequences since the dawn of the industrial revolution is an important theme for environmental historians. The development of new European technology lifted many restraints on the expansion of human activity. The origins of this development stem from the scientific revolution that took place in the 17th and 18th centuries.
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 and biological changes. The history of the relation between humans and their natural surroundings is a tale of interaction. The following pages will focus on the importance of the natural environment in the development of human history.
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 BP (Before Present) humans began to cultivate some edible plants and tameable animals. Agriculture and stockbreeding became the major forms of subsistence. This development occurred first in the so-called Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. During the following millennia agriculture developed independently in the Yellow River Valley, the Indus Valley, in the region south of the Sahara and in Mexico and Peru. These regions are called the core regions of agriculture.44
It is very likely that humans manipulated nature much earlier than the first development of agriculture. Why did prehistoric hunter-gatherers shift from their way of life to 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.45
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.46
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.47 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.48 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.49
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 BP) 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.50 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 downland, moorland, and other terrain.51 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.52
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.53
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.54 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'.55 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.56
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.57 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.58
This is not only true for the Middle Ages but for every period in history. The interaction between the environment and culture is always a highly complicated one.
In this essay we explored some of the themes, results and issues in world and British environmental history. It is far from comprehensive 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. This is an intellectual history of the relationship between humans and nature. For writing this kind of history, historians are looking for help from literature studies and, even more important, philosophy to reconstruct our justifications for transforming nature in the past.
The latter part of this essay deals with the interaction between humans and the physical world. Here historians are looking for help 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 nature. It is for this reason that there cannot be an ultimate environmental history. This is probably why the intellectual/philosophical explanation of our relationship with nature takes such a prominent place in environmental history. It explains the way we make sense of natural world and by doing that justify our exploitation of it, 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 lables 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 devided 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. 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'. They said that history is everything, and everything is history. However, by realising this as many historian experience a feeling of unease and even fear. They become engulfed by the buzzing confusion of past voices, forces, events and relationships but also a dynamic changing natural environment, 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. It is now the task of historians, scientists, philosophers and others to come together and make sense of it all.
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1 Beinard, William & Coates, Peter, Environment and History: the Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (London, 1995), p. 1.
2 Worster, D., "Path Across the Levee", In: The Wealth of Nature. Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (Oxford, 1993), p. 20.
3 Beinard & Coates, Environment and History, pp. 2-3
4 Worster, D., "Path Across the Levee", pp. 24-25.
5 Roberts, Neil, The Holocene. An Environmental History (Oxford, 1989), Chapter 1.
6 Lowe, J.J. & Walker, M.J.C., Reconstructing Quarternary Environments (London, 1997), p. 17.
8 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 has assisted in the establishment of a time-scale for the last 4,5 million years.
9 Lowe, J.J. & Walker, M.J.C., Reconstructing Quarternary Environments, p. 7.
10 Mercer, Roger & Tipping,Richard, "The Prehistory of Soil Erosion in the Northern and Eastern Cheviot Hills, Anglo-Scottish Borders", In: Foster, S. & Smout, T.C., The History of Soils and Field Systems (Aberdeen, 1994), p. 1.
11 Carson, Rachel, Silent spring (Boston,1962).
12 Beinard & Coates, Environment and History, pp. 1-2.
13 Bramwell, Anna, Ecology in the 20th Century. A History (London & New Haven, 1989), p. xi.
14 Oelschlager, Max, The Idea of Wilderness from Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (London & New Haven, 1991), p. 33.
15 White, Lynn, 'The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis', Science, 10 March 1967, vol 155, no. 3767, pp. 1203-1207.
17 Pepper, David, Modern Environmentalism. An Introduction (London, 1996), pp 154-159.
18 Midgley, Mary, Science as Salvation. A Modern Myth and its Meaning (London, 1992), p. 72.
19 Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, pp. 131-133.
20 Achterhuis, Hans, "Van Moeder Aarde tot Ruimteschip: Humanisme en Milieucrisis", In: Natuur Tussen mythe en Techniek (Baarn, 1995), p. 44.
21 Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, pp 125-126.
22 Bacon, Francis, New Atlantis and The Great Instauration (Wheeling, 1989), pp. 16, 21.
23 Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, p. 125.
24 Achterhuis, Mythe en Techniek, pp. 42-43.
25 Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, pp. 145, 147.
26 Bacon, Francis, New Atlantis, p. ix.
27 Evelyn, John, London Revived (Oxford, 1938), p. 6-7.
28 Quoted in: Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, p. 74
29 Wall, Derek, Green History. A Reader in Environmental Literature, Philosophy and Politics (London, 1994), p. 6.
30 Bramwell, Anna, Ecology in the 20th Century, pp. 40-41.
31 Grove, Richard H., "The Origins of Environmentalism", Nature, vol. 345, 3 May 1990, pp. 11-14.
32 Grove, Richard H., "The Evolution of the Colonial Discourse on Deforestation and Climate Change, 1500- 1940", in: Ecology, Climate and Empire. Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400-1940(Cambridge 1997), p. 20.
33 McNeill, William H., Plagues and Peoples (London, 1976), p. 189.
34 Crosby, Alfred W., "Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon", in: Worster, Donald, The Ends of the Earth. Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 103-116.
35 McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, p. 268.
36 Ponting, Clive, A Green History of the World (London, 1991), pp. 61, 407.
37 Beinard & Coates, Environment and History, p. 3.
38 Worster, "Across the Levee", p. 25.
39 Budiansky, Stephan, Natures Keepers. The New Science of Nature Management (New York, 1995), p. 4.
40 David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, p. 3.
41 Oelschlager, The Idea of Wilderness, p. 7.
42 Beinart & Coates, Environment and History, pp. 4-5.
43 Priem, Harry N.A., Earth and Life. Life into Relation to its Planetary Environment (Dordrecht, 1993), pp. 51-55.
44 Roberts, The Holocene, p. 110.
48 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, p. 19.
49 Roberts, The Holocene, p. 150.
50 Rackham, Oliver, The History of the Contryside, pp. 158-160.
51 Delano, Catherine & Parry, Martin, Consequences of Climatic Change (Nottingham, 1981), 31, 35.
52 Rackham, History of the Countryside, 164-166; Fussel, G.E., Farming Technique from Prehistory to Modern Times (Oxford, ), p. 50.
53 Smith, C.T., An Historical Geography of Western Europe before 1800 (London, 1978), p. 163.
54 Roberts, The Holocene, p. 150.
56 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.
57 Delano & Perry, Consequences of Climatic Change, p. 37.
