An Environmental History Historiography
MAKING WISE INSCRIPTIONS ON THE LAND:
AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY HISTORIOGRAPHY
A BRIEF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF INVERSIONS
The inversions that move into Salt Lake City and smother the valley under a blanket of filthy air offer an insight into the potential of environmental history to help better understand the world (and the human presence on it). Historically the inversions have long been a way of life along the Wasatch Front, a unique byproduct of a particular topography where cold air is pressed against the valley floor by high pressure systems that move in warm air and effectively seal the valley like a Tupperware lid. An increased human presence in the region has exacerbated the effects of this phenomenon. In the early 20th century, with the rise of heavy industry and coal and wood burning in valley homes, the air was thick and black. Today, the inversions that settle in and block out the sun are a soupy grey fog, filled with particulate matter that lead to government warnings of red air days and the potential health effects the dirty air can have on certain at-risk groups like children and the elderly.
An environmental history of the Salt Lake Valley might reveal how changing human land use patterns and the rise of industry have fundamentally changed the air quality that settles in with inversion. It could focus on the dire health effects, underscoring the fundamental connection we human beings have with our environment. Assessing the primary contributors to the most toxic forms of particulate matter in the air could reveal deeper social justice issues, relative to where toxins are created and which groups are at higher risk from living in environmentally degraded places. The point is that the opportunities afforded through the method and analysis of environmental history can provide new opportunities for better understanding real world problems that we face, and that this mode of analysis can be applied effectively anywhere on the planet.
The field of environmental history holds powerful potential for helping us better understand human relationships with the world. Its particular forms of analysis and the questions it asks help undermine many assumed myths and binaries that underpin society and attitudes towards environment. It is also in a prime position to help assess the myriad of ways in which human beings over time relate to environment, and the way land is perceived and treated as a product of those conceptions. Environmental history is also in a premium position to explore the ways in which degraded space and environment is invariably tied to compromised human communities. In each of these ways, environmental history reveals itself to be a vital field with approaches and opportunities that position it to serve as a vital component to more nuanced and robust forms of environmentalism, which are increasingly needed in a transnational context where the spread of environmental crisis has transcended borders and nations, and confronts the whole of humanity.
ASSUMPTIONS AND BINARIES
In the constructed worlds of human culture and society it is easy to take for granted that much of what we think and how we behave is situated upon tenuous and changeable binaries and myths. An analysis of the history of the United States reveals the fluidity of our constructs from generation to generation, with each wave of humanity looking to make sense of the world laid out before them in meaningful ways. These constructs can take on the shape of powerful ideologies and national myths that fuel their own logic and their own demands for change. In assessing these binaries and myths, the field of environmental history is in a unique position to offer analysis and comment based on human behaviors and actions in much broader environmental contexts. In many cases this analysis offers powerful retorts that undermine many of the foundational myths that are entrenched in the American ethos and identity.
That human beings carry the seeds of environmental change in our cultures and practices is an easily overlooked truism that is death with by Alfred Crosby in his study of environmental change in North America. In Ecological Imperialism, Crosby directly challenges a persistent myth of pristine wilderness in describing how the first inhabitants of North America potentially caused a complete upheaval of their new ecosystem, as evidenced by the Pleistocene extinction event that took place approximately 10,000 years ago. Debate lingers over the exact causes, but what is known is that at roughly the time of human arrival on the North American continent massive changes were seen in the environment primarily through the extinction of many of the continents mega fauna. These extinction events may have been caused by human overhunting or a complex set of factors triggered by human introduction (resulting in a trophic cascade of energy realignment within the ecosystem). This pattern of change is elaborated on further by Crosby throughout the book as he builds a case that human presence in North America has fundamentally altered the landscape and created a “new” environment.
This exploration of massive environmental change on the American continent prior to European contact in 1492 is picked up by William Deneven. In his article "the Pristine Myth: the Landscape of America in 1492." Deneven directly confronts a myth commonly held of a pristine wilderness that supposedly existed on the North American continent at the time of contact. Denevan makes a provocative assertion that the North America witnessed by white settlers in 1750 may have been ecologically more "natural" than the world Europeans "discovered" at the time of first contact in 1492. This thesis is founded on similar ground that Crosby holds, namely that the arrival of the first human beings onto the continent thousands of years ago irrevocably set into motion environmental changes that remade the foundational flora and fauna components of the continents ecosystems. Denevan's claim that the "original" face of America was reasserting itself in 1750 speaks to a threshold moment in history, which Crosby would label a brief pause in between two, protracted waves of human immigration to the New World. This moment of transition underscores the undeniable fact that human beings inherently reshape and use their environments, even if popular myths of a pristine and harmonious nature encountered by whites at the time of contact has come to dominate conceptions of that era.
Obviously the environmental impacts of each wave of human settlement on the North American continent varied dramatically over space and time, but the field of environmental history offers insights that formally challenge a variety of myths deeply held on how human beings on the continent have used environment. For example, a formal challenge to the myth of an American Indian figure at total peace and harmony within a static, pristine American landscape is taken up by Shepherd Krech in the Ecological Indian. As Krech explains, the myth of a noble, ecologically wise Indian (who has become increasingly popularized in cultural representation) is rooted in the older Romantic-era myth of a noble savage. This Romantic figure assumes a North American environment pre-contact in a state of pristine ecological climax (with Indians fitting naturally and harmoniously into a delicate balance). As Krech asserts, not only is this vision out of touch with the insights offered by environmental history, it also does Indian people a disservice by marginalizing their roles on the landscape and effectively dehumanizing them as simple set pieces living a reality unknowable to any other human group in history.
Both Krech and Denevan spend time exploring the multiple ways in which Indians activity prior to contact fundamentally changed the North American environment. Chief among these was the native use of fire management aimed at creating edge habitats that encouraged the presence of particular types of game (often white tailed deer), which Indians groups relied heavily on for hunting. This practice clearly casts human beings as active participants within their ecosystem (as well as the environment responding accordingly to human presence and activity). This is crucial in undercutting both the Romantic myth of a pristine wilderness encountered by white settlers at contact, as well as hobbling the persistent Enlightenment era thinking that distances human rationale and thinking from the natural world. Similar evidence of Indian behavior and its impacts on environment are provided in the example of the large hydraulic projects constructed by the Hohokam people of the Salt Valley (near modern day Phoenix, Arizona). Archaeological evidence of the Hohokam waterworks is still visible on the landscape today, and was actually large enough to be effectively used by later white settlers in the region. The massive Hohokam canals were built to divert natural water courses in order to provide the needed hydration for large scale irrigation in the arid desert. While successful enough to allow for permanent settlement in the inhospitable region, the act of moving water across the landscape may have eventually helped fuel the decline of Hohokam society. One theory asserts that the heavy minerals from available water sources could have built up on the surface through inevitable evaporation in an arid environment, leading to a salinization event that would have crippled the Hohokam agricultural economy. This southwestern example again offers clear evidence of Indian groups utilizing environments in ways that fundamentally undercut the persistent myth of the Ecological Indian.
Another persistent myth that unravels under the scrutiny offered by environmental history is that of the assumed deep divide that supposedly exists between urban environments and the hinterlands of wilderness. This assumption is confronted directly by William Cronon in his environmental history of 19th century Chicago, Nature's Metropolis. Few cities in the United States offer such a vivid example of the dramatic reordering of space to serve human interests as that of Chicago, which effectively served as the 19th century gateway through which raw materials from the American west passed on their way to the markets of the East. This dynamic relationship and constant economic, social, and cultural exchange that took place daily on the streets of 19th century Chicago actively undermines the myth of clear separation between urban and country. An emerging grain industry based out of Chicago led to dramatic changes on the Great Plains, which was converted from high grass fields to high yielding agricultural grain centers. Similarly, the demands of a growing lumber trade (again based in mid-19th century Chicago) dramatically reordered space, as the regions around the city were quickly deforested in the attempts to keep up with demands. With the emerging railroad lines of North America converging on the city commodities flowed in and out, fundamentally reshaping both city and surrounding hinterlands. The examples offered by Cronon clearly show two spaces that consistently merged and interacted with each other in the 19th century. As he posits, it is impossible to know the full history of place without an attentive analysis of these linked environments. The changes seen in Chicago and its hinterlands clearly challenge any myth of a city and nature divide.
But it is not only on the large order of assumed urban/nature divides that a persistent myth separating human beings from their environment exists. On a much more foundational level this drama is played out in the spaces of individual bodies, an ideology with its roots extending into the Enlightenment and the famous words of Kant, “I think, therefore I am.” Clearly such an attitude positions the human body as mere natural machine being driven by the ephemeral guides of logic and reason. But as Linda Nash's Inescapable Ecologies suggests, environmental history has the potential to undermine one of western thinking’s most unrelenting myths. Focusing on the Central Valley of California, Nash's investigation begins with the first white settlement in the Central Valley after the California Gold Rush of 1848. This was an era when prevailing attitudes envisioned a direct connection between human beings and their environments. For many of the whites who began settling in the hot and swampy Central Valley, a feeling that the place caused sickness was commonly held (though that reality has been somewhat obscured in the popular conceptualization of California thanks to booster rhetoric that attempted to conflate California's coastal environs with health). Attitudes and beliefs that maintained that certain landscapes themselves might be “sick” (and in turn cause sickness in white populations) were fundamentally at odds with the larger project of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Because of the need to know more about how environments might affect human health the fields of medical geography and medical topography emerged, each focused on uncovering potential links between places, topographies, and human health.
As Nash describes, this mid-19th century belief in a vital link between body and nature underwent major revision in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries with the emergence of germ theory. Medical professionals began moving away from a focus on the links between environment and health and instead began conceptualizing the human body as a pure space periodically contaminated by diseases that could find their way in through specific pathways. This meant a shift from bodies in dynamic interface and process with their environment to bodies that could be treated and made pure via certain prescriptive means. This move towards a germ theory approach coincided with a shift to the social and political ideology of Progressivism, which relied on specialization and training in constructing a bureaucratic approach to management most commonly seen in industry. The California Office of Public Health became one of the most powerful public health organizations in the country during this period and its policies and growing role in public life marked the larger trend of Progressive era reform that increasingly brought government into people's everyday lives. The policies and practice of the California Board of Health were based on a belief in specialization that increasingly favored germ theory over environmental medicine. This ideological shift in turn allowed for a validation of the white settler project and allowed for an outright rejection of any belief system that conceptualized “sick” landscapes (which in turn affected public health). In this way environments were re-imagined as places with basic elements that could be tweaked and modified by government forces to optimize efficiencies and health among its residents. The belief in germ theory as the ultimate cause of bodily contamination fueled the rise of a strong sanitation movement whose singular focus was on cleaning landscapes and freeing them of the agents that caused disease.
However, these new movements (and assumed binaries that posited human beings and environment as separate unconnected entities) were quickly confronted and challenged by emerging postwar realities. The postwar period was marked by heavy chemical and pesticide use in the fields of the Central Valley that were soon tied to a host of environmental changes and health impacts. These changes began to challenge any theory (and associated government policy) that failed to posit direct links between environmental wellness and human health. As the Central Valley of California was rapidly industrialized and filled with chemicals and pesticides the toxic effects of those agents began manifesting in the bodies of the valley's residents. Ultimately this example from Linda Nash provides crucial insights into the powerful ways in which environmental history can be utilized to challenge a myth as entrenched as the assumed disconnect between bodies and environment.
Clearly the foundational myths that underpin and support culture and society are important in assessing real world changes seen in the environment. That these constructs are malleable and shift over time is seen through the broad lens of history. But what environmental history can offer to the assessment is another method of analysis that works to trouble many of these foundational myths and blur the boundaries that so often divide and create barriers, whether they are physical on the landscape or social in various forms of injustice.
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS TO CHANGING ENVIRONMENT
The persistent myths the help construct cultures and ideologies gird a much larger fact that human experience on this planet is marked by constant interfacing that takes place between people and their environment. Human experience offers a variety of ways in which we relate to our world, whether it is through the spheres of economics, government, or recreation. Each of these views of nature is different in spurring actions that are played out on the landscape in different ways. Again, the field of environmental history is in a unique position to assess and speak to these realities (with the environmental history of North America serving as a particularly useful microcosm for larger trends). Through the analysis offered by environmental history we can trace the powerful changes have been conceived and given shape by human beings on the land.
As noted, the insights offered by Shepherd Krech and William Denevan provide formal challenges to long perceived myths of the roles Indian groups played on the landscape. Their work reveals how these groups were not static characters living harmoniously in a pristine nature, but rather that they were active agents in reshaping environment to best serve their needs. That native groups were responsible for changing space to serve their needs doesn't speak to the cultural and social ideas that evolved to govern those actions, however. The land use beliefs guiding native actions might be best seen when contrasted with those of white European settlers who arrived on the continent after contact in 1492. These differences between native and white conceptions of space and its uses are dealt with by William Cronon in Changes on the Land. As Cronon describes, for native groups much of their ideology was rooted in an acknowledgment of the reciprocity that exists between human beings and the natural world. Native groups practiced a form of usufruct property right, wherein any claims to land rights were intrinsically bound to work done on the land. These rights were malleable and didn’t last in perpetuity after use had ended. With European settlement a new set of ideas arrived that fundamentally changed human relationships to the environment on the North American continent. Carrying with them ideas of private property, as well as the potential of natural resources to be converted into tradable commodity, European settlement brought an entirely new set of land use principles that would fundamentally reshape the face of the continent. Herein lay the foundations of the grid system that would eventually find full flower in the Land Ordinance of 1785, an act which has worked relentlessly to overlay boundaries and order on top of physical topographies. These differences clearly show that the environmental history of North America has valuable lessons to impart concerning the human ordering of space.
Perhaps the most important lens offered by environmental history comes in the insights it offers into how human beings relate to their environments through economy. Across time and space human populations have invariably needed to make a living within their unique environmental contexts, a process which inevitably leaves marks on the land that environmental history is in a position to trace and study. This recurring theme is dealt with again by Cronon in Changes on the Land, as he describes the differences in agriculture practiced by indigenous groups and white European settlers. The economies of the Indians were mixed and varied, offering multiple means for relating to their environment. Many native groups relied on mixed economies supported by both hunting and agriculture. When European settlers arrived their own ways of viewing environment through economic practice came into direct conflict with much of the native worldview. As Cronon describes this is most clearly seen in the disparate forms of agriculture practiced by each group. Native agriculture was heavily dependent on staple crops of corn, beans, and squash which were planted in mounds and acted together to fix chemicals in the soil. European conceptions (bound up in ideas of property rights) were radically different. The evidence of these different ways of perceiving the landscape quickly manifested with the European practices of clearing and bounding large areas of land. As Cronon states, these different economic visions of environment effectively bound and ordered the patchwork landscape. The differences in economic visions between natives and settlers described by Cronon is crucial in better understanding how environment is perceived by human groups through the lens of economics.
Another clear example of this economic approach to understanding environment is offered by Mart Stewart in his article, “Rice, Water, and Power: Landscapes of Domination and Resistance in the Lowcountry, 1790-1880.” Here Stewart describes the conditions found in the rice growing fields of the Deep South at the time of the Civil War. The economic vision of the controlling class of southern planters prior to the Civil War was directly fueled by the exploitation of slave human labor. This economic vision played out with powerful effects on the environment. Stewart focuses specifically on the rice growing tidewater regions of South Carolina and Georgia. These were areas that demanded massive irrigation projects, fueled by slave labor, in order to streamline the type of large scale farming that would provide ample commodity for the open market. These massive irrigation efforts dramatically manipulated the local environment to bring in increasingly higher yields. Space in this region was partitioned off and bounded to increase efficiency and productivity. The southern planter’s reliance on slave labor introduced a population who, over time, established a relative degree of autonomy, thanks in part to the task system of labor employed by rice growers. Utilizing the free time and small areas of free space that were found in-between the tidewater cultivations black slaves carried out their own economic visions, carving out small cultivations of their own, while also utilizing the land for hunting and fishing. Ultimately this had the effect of fueling the rise of a culture that managed to stay relatively independent and free of white influence after the Civil War, a fate not seen in most of the black communities of the Deep South. The example offered by Stewart offers two distinct economic visions played out in a shared environment, and again suggests the vital role environmental history has in helping better understand the human attitudes and beliefs that drive massive environmental and social change.
As the 19th century progressed and the industrial revolution began to fully entrench itself and reshape the American social fabric, another manipulation of space (driven by yet another unique view of the human in relation to environment) was underway. This example goes beneath the Earth itself, into the coal fields of southeastern Colorado and northwestern New Mexico. As Thomas Andrews explains in Killing for Coal the industrial revolution in America created a demand for new energy resources that moved beyond the organic forms of wind, water, and muscle power. These demands led to the creation of new, alien workscapes in the coal mines of the Rocky Mountains. Dangerous spaces were carved out and entered into in the pursuit of buried energy reserves left over from the remains of carboniferous plant materials long buried and compressed beneath the Earth. Once unearthed, this new energy source served as the needed fuel to power massive growth and change on the continent.
It is in this era of industrial revolution that many of the effects of reordered space (often changed to serve the needs of emergent industrial capitalism) were to manifest, as clearly shown in the example Cronon offers of Chicago in Nature's Metropolis. Among the best example of the ways space was reordered to serve this emerging form of industrial capitalism is the rise of a railroad network that linked the country and moved commodities across the landscape in previously unheard of ways. As Cronon notes, a crucial component of Chicago’s explosive growth in the 19th century is directly related to the fact that this growing railroad network converged in the city, effectively moving resources and commodities between the spaces of east and west. This industrial revolution powered by fossil fuel resources had potent and immediate impacts all across the landscape, whether it came in the form of demographic shifts that saw individuals move from the country to urban areas, or in the enhanced presence of government regulations that emerged as a response to the powerful growth of industrial capitalist interests.
But while industrial capitalism has acted to fundamentally reshape individual spaces through the appeals to better serve the demands of efficiency, it is in the dramatic examples offered by government management policies and the construction of massive government projects that the most vivid examples of reoriented space and human/environment relations emerge. In Crimes Against Nature, Karl Jacoby focuses on individual case studies of government management of space to show not only the deep changes brought about by the force of government, but the often unseen effects that manifest on the land from environmental management policy. In the examples of Adirondack State Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Grand Canyon National Monument (later Grand Canyon National Park), Jacoby shows how the motivating ethos of conservation that pushed for the creation of protected and managed spaces had another consequence of often casting those already living on the land as criminals. This was based on the outlawing of traditional land use practices employed by local groups, who often lacked the political power to mount effective resistance. In order to facilitate its distinct vision for each place, government agencies would often engage in the practice of state simplification, wherein physical landscape was manipulated through the creation of boundaries, borders, infrastructure, and mapping, all in the attempt to make space more manageable for administrators. That these attempts were often undermined by “outlaw” locals again reveals how space is contested when competing visions for its use come into conflict, an insight that environmental history is uniquely qualified to assess and comment on.
The dramatic power government can wield in shaping particular views of nature gains even more traction in the historical account of western reclamation offered by Donald Worster in Rivers of Empire. The story of western reclamation is fundamentally the story of attempting to change the hot and arid western spaces through the process of building technological infrastructure aimed exclusively at rerouting water on the landscape. These massive government efforts are responsible for the immense dams, reservoirs, canals, and irrigation works scattered across the western landscape. What Worster reveals through his work is that this wholesale manipulation of vast western space was accomplished through the union of government means capitalist vision. In effect the irrigated western spaces created by reclamation laid the foundation out of which modern agribusiness would grow. This hydraulic, watered west has become the seat of America's 20th century empire, according to Worster, but is based on an unstable and crumbling foundation. With the potential failure of these considerable systems the inevitability of new unexpected spaces appearing is ever-present. Worster’s analysis offers an insight that human history is an ongoing story of various human attempts to change space, with the natural world inevitably responding, often in completely unexpected ways. When this “new nature” has asserted itself human societies have invariably been left in the position of needing to reassess and reorient their social and cultural positions in response to new, fundamentally changed spaces. It is an ongoing drama reoccurring throughout time, and the field of environmental history is in the best position to analyze how these powerful environmental changes have redirected the course of human history.
Increasingly in the 19th and 20th centuries another human method for relating to nature has emerged in the form recreation. The roots of this can be traced to Romantic-era Transcendentalism and beliefs in the restorative powers of wilderness to “cure” the degradation to human beings brought on by the rapid push for urbanization and industrialization. That these ideas were powerful is shown clearly by Jacboy in Crimes Against Nature in his discussion of the creation of both Adirondack state park in New York as well as the designation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908 (both precursors to the larger government National Parks Service agency). In bounding off these areas and setting them up as places of recreation, the government acted to fundamentally reshape an important way people relate to the natural world. Coupled with industrialization and modernization, which have increasingly taken human populations out of economies based in rural framing and moved them into areas of consumption, the power that this restorative wilderness ideal has taken on cannot be discounted. The environmental history of places like Yellowstone and the Adirondacks provide an insight into places that have been specifically bounded and managed to attract tourists, many of whom see their limited visit to these places as their only point of contact with environment (a troubling construct that will be treated later).
The creation of centers of consumption (often found in recreational wilderness) and the ways in which they are often balanced against the binary of centers of production (which is the environment that actually sustains life via economy) is of primary interest to Matthew Klingle in Emerald City. The environmental history of the city of Seattle offers a microcosm of larger trends seen throughout North America with the displacement of indigenous cultures followed by the rise of industrialization. The intensive form of industrial capitalism and government management that reshaped the land (in the forms of the hill leveling projects and city park beautification efforts) had another effect of consolidating wealth into the hands of increasingly smaller numbers of individuals, which has had powerful implications for the fate of place. With the rise of leisure areas in Seattle an emerging politics over who had rights to access and use those areas was born. Outdoor recreation became a huge commodity for the city, as the rise of a moneyed leisure class necessitated the rise of leisure markets to effectively sustain it. As Klingle notes, this has created a popular image of Seattle as an ecotopia where environmental issues have been integrated into urban planning and development. The popular conception is of “nature’s city” where the effects of a restorative wilderness are felt, reaffirming a myth that human beings spend most of their lives disconnected from environment in any meaningful way beyond the means offered by recreation. However, Klingle’s environmental history shows how troubled the foundations of this premise are, as the veneer of Seattle has been built on the same foundational manipulations of space (and social injustice issues) seen in other major urban areas developed in the era of industrial capitalism.
Clearly, one of the most foundational and important insights offered by the field of environmental history is that human beings fundamentally use space and impact environments and ecosystems through that use. In this reconfiguration of environment, societies develop a host of ideologies and cultural constructs to best explain and justify their actions, each powered by different visions born out of the various ways in which human beings interact with the natural world. These frames of reference can come in the form of economic interaction, government presence, or time spent in recreation. Environmental history is important in tracing these malleable and shifting perceptions over time, offering insights that might otherwise be lost in broader, and more anthropocentric historical treatments. These insights offer a potent lens in assessing issues from new perspectives, as the issue of environmental injustice will clearly show.
ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE
The powerful ways in which human beings relate to space and change environments to meet their needs often come with great costs. The most obvious are changes in the land that degrade ecosystems and negatively impact life, but another insidious cost can be seen in the form of environmental injustice. This form of injustice is marked and defined by poor environmental conditions that emerge in communities that lack the political power and capital to effectively resist. Environmental history offers a powerful and increasingly needed perspective and insight into how abuse of an environment tends to breed a parallel degradation in social justice.
The deep connections between environment and justice issues emerged almost immediately after first contact between white European settlers and indigenous Indian groups in 1492. White mistreatment of Indian groups is a tragic moment in American history. As whites moved onto the North American continent, and began the process of changing space to serve their needs, Native groups increasingly began to bear an unjust burden from these efforts. As Alfred Crosby explains in Ecological Imperialism, the complex means by which this process of converting space took place began in an ecological sense at the moment of contact. The flora, fauna, and (perhaps most importantly) diseases that whites brought with them to the New World quickly began to alter the face of North American ecosystems. As diseases decimated Native groups, and fundamentally limited their control over certain spaces, white settlers began to associate what they were seeing on the ground as divine manifest of the worthiness of their settler mission. Such ideologies are partially responsible for white actions that demonstrate clear forms of environmental injustice (one obvious example being the forcible moving of Indian groups onto reservation lands of lower environmental productivity).
This issue of environmental injustice is also discussed by Klingle in his analysis of how the changing environment of Seattle affected the indigenous groups of the region. Seattle offers an insight into an ongoing racist assumption many white settlers had of native populations that helped fuel injustice. These assumptions were based on a deep misreading of the cultural differences that marked the two groups. For many white settlers coming into new lands and encountering natives engaged in traditional practices, an supposition was made that Indians were naturally lazy based on their assumed “failure” to “develop” the ample resource base in which they were enmeshed. As white settler ethos and ideas of private property began to spread across the Seattle landscape, Indian groups found themselves increasingly marginalized and left out of decision making processes that would ultimately impact the places in which they lived. As space was reoriented to serve white settler populations, Indians (among other groups lacking voice or political will) were pushed to the margins, and forced to occupy areas where their presence wasn’t as contested. The environmental history of Indians groups in Seattle are microcosmic of larger trends that help show an enduring form of environmental injustice practiced against Indian groups in North America after contact with White European settlers in 1492.
The seeds of injustice that were cultivated early in American history took root and spread across the continent much like the flora, fauna and disease described by Alfred Crosby. With the onset of massive change brought about by the industrial revolution evidence for the spread of environmental injustice becomes readily apparent in the newly emergent industries created to fuel industrial growth. In Killing for Coal, Thomas Andrews focuses on the injustices suffered by miners in the southern Colorado coal fields at the turn of the 20th century, and how these injustices exploded into the violence witnessed in miner strikes and the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. As Andrew notes, the coal miners of the west were engaged in an industry that was paradoxical in nature, as the product of their labor fueled explosive growth across the country at the same moment that the actual work they did remained underground and relatively organic and muscle driven. Work in the coal mines was extremely dangerous and performed in an utterly alien environment to which human beings are not evolved for. In addition to the potential for violent deaths that could result from mine explosions, coal workers also had to deal with the environmental impacts on their health from the various drafts and bad airs that could fill a mine, as well as the enveloping coal dust that could lead to chronic black lung. The strikes of the southern Colorado coal fields were fundamentally rooted in the deep injustice miners, many of them immigrants, felt at their labor being exploited for the profit and benefit of industrial capitalists. Miners perceived the dangers of the environmental conditions in which they were forced to operate and unionized in attempts to address injustices they felt at those dangers being overlooked by mine operators. Andrews’s environmental history of the southern Colorado coal fields helps articulate the deep environmental and social injustices that emerged with the rise of industry, as well as the vast interconnectedness of the natural world and the human actions that reshape it.
The rise of industry in the United States was in many ways paralleled with the growth of government. This trend was deeply felt in the American west where circumstances dictated a larger federal presence than that seen in the east. With this spread of government power there emerged a variety of practices and projects that acted in their own ways to facilitate the growth of environmental injustice on the landscape. In Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster describes the process by which federal presence in the west drove spurred massive environmental change and environmental injustice through acts of reclamation. Western reclamation effectively began with the passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902 which provided a means for large-scale building projects that would come to completely reshape the way water moved on the western landscape. Worster argues that the 20th century seat of American Empire can be found in these irrigated western lands, created through the construction of massive dams, reservoirs, and canals. However, it wasn't through mere manipulation alone that empire was born, but rather the directed efforts that resulted from the marriage of government power and expertise with the motivating impetus of agricultural interests in the west. This union of government and capitalist interests created the massive grid work upon which modern day agribusiness is built. Often the rhetoric used for spending public money to advance western reclamation was founded on the idea of opening new lands that could be obtained and used by small farmers, thus appealing to the ideal of Jeffersonian agrarianism that underpinned so much of the American settler ethos. The reality played out on the land, however, didn't match the promise, particularly when agribusiness and corporate interests interceded and worked with government to advance projects that actively undermined any ideas of equitable land distribution. The agribusiness apparatus that eventually emerged in California's Central Valley was one where large acreages of land were owned and operated by massive corporate interests. These business interests in turn relied on masses of migrating (often immigrant) workers who could quickly appear when demand was high, perform the work needed, and leave just as rapidly. These migrant populations were increasingly at risk of exploitation, and in the post war period (as agribusiness increasingly relied on pesticides and chemicals to increase farm efficiencies) the full brunt of environmental injustice is seen. The populations who tended to suffer the most in the face of such practices tended to be the same groups who lacked the political and social power to mount effective resistance. Again, it is utilizing the method of environmental history that these deeper truths linking social injustice with the larger sphere of environmental degradation and injustice become evident.
Karl Jacoby's, Crimes Against Nature provides another example of how government efforts to manage land effectively instituted rules that prevented certain forms of use and access to certain people. In the Adirondacks this was played out powerfully in the hunting laws that came to govern the landscape. Many of these laws were created with the input and influence of elite sportsmen hunters, and thus the laws became advantageous to their particular uses. Those who were excluded (and often labeled outlaw poachers) tended to be rural populations engaged in forms of hunting that served as a vital means of subsistence. This injustice engendered by government management and state simplification reappears in Jacoby's analysis of the Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon where indigenous groups were forcibly removed or marginalized on landscapes they had relied on for thousands of years, again providing a vivid insight into how Indian groups in America were increasingly marginalized and unjustly treated with the spread of white settlers across the North American continent.
Another analysis of government policies spreading environmental injustice is offered by Marsha Weisiger in her article “Gendered Injustice: Navajo Livestock Reduction in the New Deal Era,” where she explores New Deal conservation efforts aimed at directly reducing livestock herds among Navajo groups in the 1930's. These government attempts were founded on conservation principles that had taken deep root in American land management practice during the Progressive-era of the early 20th century. Working on the premise that “wise” conservationists needed to act on behalf of ignorant locals, government managers determined that Navajo livestock practices were causing massive over-grazing and environmental ruin on western lands. The New Deal response promoted by Indian agent John Collier called for massive livestock reductions as well as the issuing of grazing and use permits among the Navajo people. What was not considered in this evaluation was the social fabric of Navajo life. In the social context of the Navajo both the livestock herds and lands the used were under the direct control of Navajo women (called the Dine). The federal government’s paternalistic approach completely neglected the realities of a matrilineal society. Dine women were outraged when the government began targeting their livestock herds, in some instances slaughtering animals to meet quota’s (animals that were directly connected to not only Navajo subsistence but also Dine status). Ultimately the Dine were able to mobilize effective resistance against the New Deal conservation policies on their land, but the event is still remembered among the Navajo today as a moment of betrayal by the federal government, a collective memory that still impacts and colors government management efforts. In assessing the Navajo interaction with conservation, Weisiger concludes that “in our quest to restore ecological diversity and conserve land, we cannot ignore the people who make their living from it. That constitutes environmental injustice, which – as this story suggests – also has ecological consequences” (455).
The insights of environmental history can help assess the deeper roots of environmental injustice. One explanation offered is founded on a human tendency to conflate certain people with certain types of environment. Returning to the Central Valley of California, this tendency has been increasingly played out in the postwar period as the use of chemical pesticides has increased. In Inescapable Ecologies, Linda Nash illuminates the forms of injustice that conflated certain bodies with toxic environment. She describes the ways in which public health officials in California, struggling to link pesticides with poor health, often relied on rhetoric that supported a false premise that certain populations might be more prone to disease than others. This tendency acted to unjustly position people as the source of sickness and disease, and not the practices of larger, powerful agribusiness interests. This logic has not completely disappeared from public health thinking, as Nash points to the rise of toxicogenomics, an emerging science that attempts to utilize new insights from the human genome to look for specific traits in certain populations that might make them more prone to disease.
Another perspective on this tendency to conflate environmental degradation with human groups is offered by Carl Zimring in his article “Dirty Work: How Hygiene and Xenophobia Marginalized the American Waste Trades, 1870-1930.” In this piece Zimring traces the rise of America's waste trade industry, which was often an industry populated by immigrant groups (due primarily to the relatively low startup costs and prevalence of available work). Zimring explains how, in spite of efforts by the waste trade to organize and legitimate their activities, the profession was increasingly marginalized in the public mind as dirty work performed by dirty (often immigrant) people. The effects of this are still felt in the modern day. In spite of the modern discourse on the increased need to recycle, many waste trade jobs are still staffed by members of minority populations. The ongoing stigmatization of these individuals with the perceived dirtiness of their industry is witnessed in ways that again show the deep entrenchment of environmental injustice in American society. Often waste trades are positioned in areas outside the boundaries of urban centers, periodically in poor communities who lack the political voice to resist the citing. As Zimring shows, the environmental history of America's waste trade offers insight into the ways certain people have been labeled as unclean “other” partly out of a conflation with their occupation in the waste trade. And on another level Zimring's work demonstrates how individuals who lack the will to resist are often exploited by decisions that dirty their ecosystem, or isolate them in regions of toxic and degraded environment.
A final example of how environmental history provides new insight into the ways in which social injustice is perpetuated through environment is found in Ellen Stroud's article, “Troubled Waters in Ecotopia.” Focusing on an area in the north Portland peninsula (between the Columbia and Willamette Rivers), Stroud describes the Columbia Slough as a place where “the planning bureaucracy handed down the decision to continue developing North Portland as a haven for heavy industry with little regard for the people living there” (85). The effects of the dirty water and air created from this crossroad of industry and environment have been played out in the bodies of local residents since the 1940’s, a large majority of whom are immigrant and minority groups who have traditionally lacked the political voice or capital to mount an effective resistance to how the space around them is used. Stroud’s analysis of the history of the slough offers an insight into a feedback loop that has been created in the area, which has led to the perpetuation of injustice. In the building up of heavy industry (and designations that allowed for dumping of waste into the slough) city planners relied on racist ideas that constructed the area as largely black and already run-down (whether demographic numbers at any given point validated this perceived reality or not). As a result the environment of the slough has become more and more contaminated, with resulting health effects on the increasing poor and minority populations who have moved into the area's growing housing developments, which were built on cheap land partially subsidized by the environmental degradation that has taken place there since the 1940’s.
Human history is replete with moments of deep inequity and injustice, but it is through the prism of environmental history that these issues can be linked to larger forms of environmental degradation. The perspective offered by environmental injustice potentially broadens the ways in which justice issues can be confronted and dealt with. Through this singular example, the field of environmental history reveals itself to be a versatile method for assessing a wide range of issues. This versatility and broad linking of human history to the deeper history of the world all around us offers the potential for environmental history to help fuel a much broader and more effective environmental movement.
SEEDS FOR A NEW MOVEMENT
Environmental history as a method of analysis and discourse has the ability to assess the ecological history of human beings on this planet and provide new insights to the massive changes seen throughout history. In doing this it helps to undermine myths and cultural constructs while providing a way of seeing how human beings utilize space, and the potential for injustice that lies at the heart of that use. Moving toward the practical application of environmental history in a larger sense, it becomes quickly apparent that the deep understanding offered by the field has the potential to inform new perspectives of the role human beings have historically played on the planet. Through application of this understanding the potential exists for the emergence of a more robust and nuanced environmentalism.
In William Cronon's provocative article, “the Trouble with Wilderness” he directly confronts the uniquely American conception of wilderness, which he argues has acted to fundamentally narrow and limit the impact of the environmental movement. This premise is supported by the work of Jacoby, who traces the roots of restorative wilderness to ideas that emerged with 19th century romanticism. These Romantic-era ideologies emerged partly out of deep social anxieties felt with the rapid changes witnessed throughout the country, spurred by intensive industrialization and urbanization. The practice of designating wilderness and setting aside specific (often aesthetically impressive) places as protected was first seen with the designation of Yellowstone Park in 1872. This trend has led to a network of federally and locally managed and protected wilderness areas across the landscape today. But in spite of this recognition of a purported need for restorative wilderness, environmental injustice remains entrenched and our global environmental crisis worsens. This reality leads Jacoby to state that “the only way to achieve a healthy environment is through a truly democratic society” (198). This twin goal of improving both environment and the people living on it is one currently not being met by the modern environmental movement. A new, more robust movement that is deeply informed by the valuable lessons offered by environmental history is needed now more than ever.
A fundamental problem with the ideas of wilderness that help steer modern environmentalism is the fact that they help reinforce a binary of nature and city which the realities offered by environmental history scholarship deeply trouble. Cronon contends that current American conceptions of wilderness are highly problematic for multiple reasons. In one respect, the ideal of restorative wilderness tends to imagine environments in which human beings are missing. On another level the wilderness challenged by Cronon reinforces a sense of humanity alienated from pristine wilderness environments that we can visit, but never truly occupy. This sense finds real world repercussions when human beings begin to see wilderness as the only thing left to protect, in effect relegating the environments that support daily living to something less than wilderness (and not worthy of the same protection). Again, environmental history is situated in the position of being able to directly challenge these attitudes, whether it is the writing of Alfred Crosby who shows that the “natural” landscapes we assume are actually the creation of a form of ecological imperialism that began at contact, or the lessons of Jacoby who unravels the complicated history that led to the designation and cultural construction of these areas of restorative wilderness. Cronon's argues that human beings across time have made marks on the land, and instead of focusing on the protection of specific wilderness areas our gaze should be larger and more nuanced in assessing the types of marks we leave. This recognition forces us to consider our actions in all environments that we use and occupy (urban or wild).
In moving beyond diagnosis to prescriptive ways in which environmental history might be directly utilized to help inform a more robust and nuanced environmental movement, a central path could be through its dynamic ability to broaden the scope of what environment means. If environment is expanded to mean more than places that are only periodically visited the environmental movement might have a greater impact in effecting real world change. Another potential value of this approach is that in broadening the definition of environment to include all places (including the urban environments where we live and the agricultural environments that sustain us) a greater impact might be felt in effecting the deep forms of environmental injustice that appear throughout time and space. One example of how environmental history might be used to broaden the definition of environment is provided by Nash's Inescapable Ecologies. In her study Nash traces the changing conceptions of body and health, ultimately arriving at clear examples born in the wake of poisoned postwar landscapes, that industrial landscape invariably creates industrial bodies. Health and sickness are among the most personal and vital components of an individual’s life. In advancing the reality that our skin isn’t a protective barrier from the outside world, but rather a permeable membrane in constant contact with the environments we occupy Nash offers a vital insight that better connects human beings to the planet. By illuminating the myriad of ways in which environmental health is unequivocally connected to bodily health the very definition of nature could be broadened to appeal to people on a level that might incite greater changes in determining how land is used.
Another example of how environmental history can be used to broaden current conceptions of environment is offered by Nature's Metropolis where Cronon attempts to undermine the myth of a separation between nature and city. In presenting the explosive growth of 19th century Chicago from an environmental history perspective, Cronon persuasively shows how human activity in both the urban center and surrounding hinterlands acted to fundamentally reshape both. A central example of this comes in the revolution of the meat industry which effectively took its modern shape in Chicago. When the space on the south end of the city was set aside for use as the Union Stock Yards a process was started that deeply impacted American citizens and their consumption habits. The centralized and intensive processes born in the Union Stockyards created a higher availability of meat, at the same moment that railroads were expanding and technology was enhancing the ways in which meat could be stored and shipped (via refrigerated car). Chicago soon became the capital for a meat empire that was critically linked to environmental changes in the hinterlands as ranchers began using space in new ways to support the growth of industry in the city. Meat consumption in the U.S. spiked as a result, and set the stage for the intensification and industrialization of the entire meat growing and packing process, a form of massive agribusiness that is engaged in a variety of ecologically destructive practices in the modern day. Cronon's example offers another avenue that might help broaden conceptions of environment and the costs of its degradation, this time through a direct appeal to something as fundamental as the food on our table. And again, environmental history demonstrates how it is uniquely positioned to offer more nuanced perspectives that might be utilized in a new environmental movement (one capable of effecting greater change that that currently seen).
But perhaps the most important component environmental history can offer to a new form of environmentalism is a deep (and vitally needed) sense of hope born of the fact that throughout time human cultures have shown tremendous abilities to adapt and change. In the context of a transnational age connected by the internet, the true principles of a “think globally, act locally” ethic must find greater traction, and draw on the deep lessons of change offered by environmental history. Among these lessons is one acknowledged by Alfred Crosby who notes that it is the adaptability of the human species (often through the means of culture) that has helped make us among the most successful species on the planet. This isn't to say that we are guaranteed success, but rather that human history shows how we are in a position to better assess our marks on the land and strive to improve them. Often this work is done in the face of environmental realities over which we have no control. As Donald Worster notes in Rivers of Empire, this reality could soon face the American west as the hydraulic works in the region that have facilitated its rise as the seat of 20th century American Empire slowly begin to crumble in the face of age and natural world shifts. Worster articulates a vision of new approaches to environment, specifically the desert regions that have been so thoroughly manipulated and changed to advance human progress. He speaks of a relationship that acknowledges the intrinsic value of the desert. There is no room for waste in such an environment, and tremendous potential to rethink our place in relation to environment and topography, which may be indifferent to human beings, but can still (if interfaced wisely) provide us with an authentic and potentially spiritual way of living. Expanding Worster’s vision, this idea of reorienting ourselves to fit environmental realities is one that can be deeply informed and better realized through the lessons offered by environmental history.
SEARCHING FOR AN ETHIC OF PLACE
Ultimately, one of the most enduring lessons that can be drawn from any historical analysis is that change is unrelenting and forces adaptation (or extinction) from both the human and non-human world. Environmental history provides insights into how these changes have played out over time from a perspective that can impart a deep sense of humility for just how tenuous the human condition often is when balanced against natural world change. Reconnecting people to the ways in which we are fundamentally connected to environment is vital in formulating new, nuanced ways of dealing with the ecological crisis that we currently face. One way in which this connection can take place is through the cultivation of deep ethics of place for the environments we know, use, and depend on for our survival. An ethic of place is not easily arrived at or even clearly definable as human conceptions of place can be as permeable and unfixed as light dust carried on the breeze. But for as potentially ephemeral as place ethic might be, the potential for it to be deeply grounded and informed by the deep perspectives and vital insights of environmental history are readily apparent. An evolved place sense would recognize the tenuous nature of many social and cultural constructs, and how easily they can be undermined by the realities of the natural world. Similarly this evolved place sense might be able to better parse out the ways in which human beings perceive environment, and how land use decisions are made based on those changing perspectives. And ultimately, a robust and informed place sense might be better able to recognize the destructive ways in which environmental destruction causes not only the needless suffering of the non-human world, but fundamentally acts to unjustly harm members of our own species who lack the voice to effectively resist. In all of these ways environmental history proves itself to be an invaluable force in helping articulate nuanced and effective responses to the myriad of environmental issues confronting all life on this planet.
SOURCES
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