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lucas_hill · Joined: 28 Jan 2020 Posts: 6

“There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian’s enterprise not that will make us Darwinians at last.” Page 2/4

This gives me thoughts of the concepts of the goal and effort that Environmental History has behind combining science and nature with human history and historical records. The word choice “remedy” to me shows that the effort of environmental history is to heal the not complete historical past and historians ideals of what fits under history.

hazelle · Joined: 28 Jan 2020 Posts: 2

1 quick question I had if anyone sees this in time, but is there any chance someone could break down when Cronan talk about the whole “natural time is cyclical time” about the utopias and such? I think I get the gist but specifically I would like to understand better what exactly he is trying to say

Anyways, on page 11 Merchant talk briefly about how the foods from different parts around the world inevitably merged with each other in one from or another which ended up mutually influencing each other. The phrase choice used is “mutually influencing each other” specifically. Which is oddly nice and personally I feel like uncommon to hear. Perhaps this is biased, but I feel like when talking about history we as readers tend to hear these incredibly harsh worded phrases on what colonizers did (which clear it awful)! It is nice to hear one thing about history have a baseline okay/mutual exchange with each other in that sense is what I am trying to grasp at.

guzmankid20 · Joined: 28 Jan 2020 Posts: 3

The phrase I choose is, “the environmental past teaches the hopelessness of the environmental future”. To be honest I am not exactly sure what this means but what I got from it was that you can use elements of environmental history to sort of predict what might happen in the future. Like with the situation with global warming, the predictions of what the world could be like if we do not try to help with global warming are pretty bad. One of the quotes that stuck out to me was, “From environmental histories we can infer that modes of thought and behavior that are more likely than others to be detrimental to the environment we want to live in.” I feel like this quote connects to the phrase I chose in the first text, and what it represents. Another quote I want to recognize, is, “Environmental historians...insist that we have got to go...down to the earth itself as an agent and presence in history.” This quote made me think of the first reading we read with Donald Worster and how he talked about history having layers, and having to dig deep into those layers to really find out the truth about that history.

rhirsch · Site Admin Joined: 13 Oct 2010 Posts: 74

This is from Abbey, who is having tyrouble logging onto the site: "In response to eliza's response to rachel about “humans use the land to gain resources”
I wanted to add on to that idea and connect it to the quote cronan said “saying that a owns b is in fact meaningless until in which the society where a lives agrees to allow a certain bundle of rights over b…”. We also take from these land resources a sense of ownership and pride in that. But as it points out in this quote this pride is only of what they have made and not of reality. Since land cant be owned without the idea of owning to be humanly constructed. We take so much like resources and and satisfaction in ourselves from pieces of land, when really this idea of ownership is not a solid construct."

winterimogen · Joined: 28 Jan 2020 Posts: 2

julias · Joined: 29 Jan 2020 Posts: 2

When reading Cronon I began to imply that environmental historians must accept the unknown complexities of nature in order to attempt in defining the human past. Do you think that this is a crucial dividing point between and environmentalist and environmental historian?

I was also fascinated when Cronon suggests about historians "Rather than make predictions about what will happen, we offer parables about how to interpret what may happen."(9) I also began to wonder in what ways do environmental historians constrict the levels of uncertainty when studying the past while still allowing for a broad range of diversity within the discipline? How do they balance this conflict in their attempt to define the truth about the past?

I also found through Cronon that the rate and scale of the changes within nature and culture "can vary enormously" (9) I believe that due to the aspects being non linear at certain points raises a crucial conflict when environmental historians connect nature to human life.

In Merchants reading I agree to the extent of which the environmental factors can influence race and class, however, other than through reproduction, I am still a bit skeptical in regards to the ways in which the specific effects of gender roles on ecology.

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