Posted: Tue Jan 04, 2011 3:30 pm Post subject: Blanking Environmental History
I just finished the first essay of tonights reading, and here are my ideas!
This reading (William Cronan) definately related back to the previous readings in how in connected history of people and the history of the environment.
The Idea of linear time and cyclical time fascinates me, and I think I understand what it means. Nature is like a circle, like in the Lion King song "circle of life" and people (humans) managed to disrupt that circle, making it more of a linear cycle, as in once things are done, there is no changing what has happened or its affects.
Also, applying environmental history to the present is interesting as well, however I wish the author could have elaborated more on how this is helpful.
I will update this again after reading the second reading
Okay, I have finished the second reading, and I have to say I really did not enjoy it. I feel that Merchant jumped around with topics and time periods and it just confused me a lot. She stated many facts that seemed perfectly valid, but I am just not sure what she was trying to prove. If anyone understood this better, I would love to hear?read your interpretation on it!
Last edited by Knaideface on Tue Jan 04, 2011 8:17 pm; edited 1 time in total
Unfortunately, I didn't really like either of these essays/articles. Cronon seemed to try to prove there was hope for environmental history, but did the opposite for me. He raised so many why questions I felt overwhelmed, and didn't know which to think of first. I did draw some ideas of my own from what he said, though. Morals seem to be an important part of environmental history, and figuring out why humans interacted with nature in the way they did. Change was another big thing in Cronon's piece. He related it to politics a lot, and seemed to suggested that the only reason this form of history was invented was to get the people in power more money and higher ranking political positions. "...many if not most environmental historians aspire to contribute to contemporary environmental politics..." (page 8 ) This quote reminds me of Merchant's article. She stressed the importance of minorities and smaller communities or cultures, and examining their stories. I found that ironic compared to Cronon's quote, mostly because he seemed to say that environmental history is created by a select group of people, for a select group of people. I did like his idea of, "nature is assumed to be stable," (page 8 ) because it reminded me that we have to be careful of the assumptions we make. Not all groups of people may believe this, as he later said, and environmental history is a very subjective study. Merchant's essay makes more sense based on that idea. If everyone has a different view, it is important that we study all of those ideas to get a better understanding. "Knowing who is writing environmental history is important." (page 11) Not really going to sum that up, since I just did, but it goes along with the rest of this post.
The quote I chose is on page 14, third full one from the top. "We may be entering a new phase of history..." I really liked this because it mentioned power, responsibility, and sense of community. Power seems to be very important, because history is generally written by those in power, but here we seem to be trying to reinvent that idea. Responsibility jumped out because it reminded me of a part Cronon's article, and historians generally, "...are reluctant to predict the future course of events." (page 9), but we have an obligation to do so, because we know we can. Finally, the sense of community jumped out not because I go to CSW and love our cliches, but because of Merchant's article. She mentioned the importance of working together and understanding the past, present, and future of those around us, which seemed very community-like to me.
The End.
Like Knaide, I have only read the first article and intend to return for comment on the second.
So...Cronon. What absolutely fascinated me about his reading was his insistence that environmental history and its associated historians/"environmentalists" needed to JUSTIFY their study into the subject. While I understand his skepticism towards environmentalists as they, like Dylan pointed out, attempt(ed) to fit their ideas into a political (verses historical spectrum) yet not for naught.
Unlike Dylan, I DON"t think Cronon's distaste for this practice had to do with some idea of creating careers or padding pockets but instead, Cronon seems to dislike the fact that "...They want their histories to be useful not just in helping us understand the past but in helping us change the future..." ( 8 )
So...whats the problem here?? No one seems to question why Americans must study Colonialism in school. Why does environmental history need to justify itself as current and applicable to be a valid school of thought?
"Even those scholars whose work has been less explicitly political have consciously sought to make it relevant to contemporary environmental concerns," ( 8 )
I get Cronon's beef (expressed in his #4 tenet of environmental history) that historian's should be cautious in making predictions of the future. I also get that, as we discussed in class, environmental history is a HUGE umbrella that isn't as LITERAL as Cronon's making it. Yet to skirt around dealing with the present? I don't get it.
So, I have to say I enjoyed last nights’ readings a little more than tonight, but I still enjoyed what Cronan and Merchant had to say. I like that Cronan broke down “environmental history” for us and made it very clear what he was talking about, especially since a bunch of it was stuff we came up with in class today. I think the most interesting aspect of his arguments was the bit about time and how neither culture nor nature is static. They are both somewhere in the middle of the two extremes of “permanent equilibrium” and “reductively universal human nature”. Also what I found interesting was his argument that nature affects humans and humans affect nature, so this is a somewhat precarious relationship between the two.
The reading by Merchant was a different take on environmental history, actually stuff that we began to discuss in class today. Looking at this new form of history through the lens of other topics, i.e race, gender, class. She gives some really good examples of how these different people interact with their environment and I found it was a reading similar to Diamonds from last night, in that there were a lot of solid concrete evidence and anecdotes to support her. One thing jumped out at me was when she was talking about it from the class perspective. “working class people often interact most directly with the land in extracting resources for the market…middle and upper-class citizens are often the most conspicuous consumers of environmental goods and energy sources.” I totally agree with this, and I think its an interesting relationship with the environment. Why do lower class citizens interact more physically with the land while when one moves up the class system you get farther and farther removed from it? Does anyone disagree? Worth discussing?
. Why do lower class citizens interact more physically with the land while when one moves up the class system you get farther and farther removed from it? Does anyone disagree? Worth discussing?
Sorry to post again, But i want to reply to Olivia's question here.
I think this relate back to the idea in our first reading that People can be considered seperate from nature, or 'supernatural'. as in, the more in-tune with nature one is, perhaps that can be considered as less civilized.
mmkay.
Like others, my head is kind of swirling from the readings.
I'm going to start with one of the quotes.
Quote:
There is little history is 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, one that will make us darwinians at last.
I picked this quote because of last night's reading and the discussion my group had in class today. I really hope we look at Darwinism in this class… not only because the origin of species may have been the first … kind of, radically environmental-history ish text that was widely spread in western culture, but also because some of the ways people have falsely interpreted darwinism (i.e. colonizers who claimed "social darwinism") kind of used a poor interpretation of environmental history. I thought about this the most with the sort of fatalistic sense in Diamond's "predicting environmental history"
The ideas of being born a certain way and born into certain environments thus that it dictates the course of the rest of your life. I mean, that was a dramatic statement, but do you kind of get what I'm saying?
Maybe this is all tangential. I'll stop.
Anywho, my interest was way more piqued by the cronon reading than the Merchant reading. Namely because Merchant's writing style was like "Race (or insert other facet of identity; gender, class) is important for environmental historians. Blah Blah (valid points) Blah, and thats why I think race is important for environmental history."
I think she made a lot of good points, but in a fashion that discredited her.
With Cronon I absolutely loved how he started the essay:
Quote:
I also think there's something off about an academic subject that seems to require such an antidote against despair.
That's how I've felt more than once in a CSW history class, particularly facing history. (which says something about our history curriculum, I think. in a good way)
If environmental history goes after the "why/how" of history more so than the "what", it no longer becomes possible to accept devastating historical facts as nothing more than facts, with a "thats just the way things are" attitude. History becomes more personal when you take that extra step, because you start to think about your own involvement.
Also, the idea towards the beginning of page 8 about how historians are kind of activists is just totally rad. I was into it.
I'm sorry this post is so all over the place. I should go to bed.
Sooo… The quote from the Worster reading “Nature is an order and a process that we did not create and in our absence it will continue to exist” and the quote from the Cronon reading “Implicit in this opposition is the belief that ideal nature is essentially without history as we know it” say to me that nature is best off without people. To me history means the involvement of people, so without people it will continue to exist in its ideal state that it could not reach with humans present.
When Cronon says that “As a corollary, most environmental historians would add that human beings are not the only actors who make history. Other creatures do too, as do large natural process, and any history that ignores their effects is likely to be woefully incomplete.” Is he implying that environmental history is the only complete or accurate form of history?
A few of the things in the Merchant essay made me more confused about what environmental history actually is. She mentions several times how people have done things bring new types of food to a different area, or how the economy of an area affects its surroundings. So is environmental history how humans affect the environment, how the environment affects human activity, or can it be both?
oliviabecker wrote:
Why do lower class citizens interact more physically with the land while when one moves up the class system you get farther and farther removed from it? Does anyone disagree? Worth discussing?
I'm not sure if this is the type of response you were looking for but....
Working class jobs often involve manual labor, which are often done outside and in nature. Something like this also can be a distinction of someone's class status. As someone progresses into say a business executive position, it would not be common or acceptable behavior for someone in a 4000 dollar suit to be outside cutting down trees or digging up dirt.
I think the question of why environmental historians feel the need to justify the study is really interesting. Cronon gave a pretty concise, direct justification, writing, "The answers we environmental historians give to the question 'Whats the story?' have the great virtue that they remind people of the immense human power to alter and find meaning in the natural world- and the even more immense power of nature to respond. But in the second reading Merchant seemed intent on showing that environmental history is relevant to all different historical disciplines/lenses. It's not that that point isn't worth making (it certainly is true, although you could argue that every type of history is relevant to the next). But it does seem to indicate a need to justify that reminds me a little bit of the marxist argument (I don't really know if this is marxist, but I've heard self described marxists make it) that all human conflict is at its core a class struggle. The argument is a reasonable one for a marxist political figure to make because it justifies communism, but for even the most left-leaning historian it seems a) wrong; and b) unneccessary. Even if class disputes aren't the universal source of evil in the world, it doesn't render their study worthless.
So let's imagine for a second (because I know it's not the case) that Cronon's first tenet "All human history has a natural context" isn't true, and that Merchant's attempts at justification failed and environmental history has little relevance to other aspects of history. Does that mean it's not worth studying? Are the only things that matter things that connect to everything?
I don't think so. I think there's intrinsic value in environmental history, not just contextual value. But the only reading that's espoused anything close to that idea was Worster's, and Cronon describes him as one of the most ideologically charged environmental historians/environmentalists. So that's probably just me buying in to one of the "antihistorical" ideas of nature as an absolute good that Cronon warnms against. But that leads you to the question, Is there any middle ground? Is there a way to justify the study that doesn't depend on it being universally relevant to "human history" (which apparently IS self-justifying and inherently worthwhile), but also doesn't depend on "antihistorical" environmentalist beliefs?
P.s. I my post is a lot more relevant to the ones further up on the forum because other people posted while I was writing mine in response the the ones further up. So sorry if it seems like i've backtracked the conversation
ooooh i did not like merchant's excerpt. Not for the same reasons as olivia, but because the fluctuation between big idea and specific example was hard to track with.
yet something that WAS pretty cool and interesting i thought (as opposed to the predictable "oppression tangent") was when Merchant started discussing Native American methods of population control in contrast with colonial Americans.
What was cool about this was that, while I know of species that practice infanticide, the range of cultural contexts for infanticide, abortion, contraceptives and senilicide seems pretty unique to humans. While most species (as understood in Darwin's theory) simply fight for survival and population growth = success = biological win, the control humans may use to alter their numbers, and therefore, effect on the environment is pretty crazy...going back to discussion today about the lack of precedent and comparison in terms of special behavior. I know this post could have more to do with environmental history but...there yah go.
I enjoyed both readings but found Interpreting Environmental History a little easier to understand. I think it was easier for me to understand because of the examples given about how race, gender and class can effect the way people interact with the environment and how by looking at these categories environmental historians can see how each of the categories have effected the environment in different cultures and throughout different timeframes. For me this reading makes environmental history a lot more concrete and easier to understand and less of a confusing concept. Merchant seems to have answered one of the big questions in class, which was what exactly is environmental history and what does it encompass. I think Will Blum asked or brought up the point of are things like race and class somehow tied into environmental history and I think this reading explained and answered that question nicely.
When Merchant brings up how different classes effect the environment I started to get the impression that she believes that working class people are more environmentally aware because they work closely with the land and do less harm than middle and upper class people. But than I realized that unfortunately no matter how much people try and what they do or consume no one can live without changing the environment. “On the other hand, many of those who are closest to the land practice conservation movements and have developed an intimate environmental awareness, while many middle and upper-class individuals become environmental leaders and activists who help to spear conservation movements and to develop environmentally friendly technologies.” (11) This really shows that everyone can help the environment if they try but history demonstrates that no matter how much humans try there will always be an impact on nature and most times it will not be good.
Going from that in the Cronon reading I really can understand how the students in his class “seemed profoundly depressed by what they had learned in it.” (7) I can see how they would feel this way because of the little I know so far it seems that most of the events in history have effected the environment negatively and there does not seem to be an easy answer of how humans can thrive and co-exist well with nature. But I think one of the reasons for environmental history is that it shows people events about the past from a natural perspective and from showing that can maybe help the way people move forward and create new history. What do people think about that?
I started writing this before Olivia posted, so hers is the most recent post I'm going to reference... sorry if I reiterate a recently-made point.
Like Rachel, I was really surprised that Cronon was so wrapped up in making Environmental History seem significant and practical. Do all “New Histories” go through this? I do think Environmental History self-justifies, especially in the context of an existing historical lens (ie when it has implications for an older branch of history).
But frankly, I think it’s impressive that Cronon is critical of a field he has had a hand in making. Even in his opener [p 7, when he tries to make his students feel less depressed about what they’re studying] Cronon is making excuses for a discipline I thought he would support unwaveringly.
On p14, Elizabeth Bird was quoted as saying: “From environmental histories, we can infer the modes of thought that are more likely than others to be detrimental to the environment we want to live in. A primary element of such histories should be the social analysis of scientific knowledge construction, because many technologies that are science-based cause so many environmental problems”.
Bird justified E.Hist by saying that it should discourage us from hurting the environment. But Cronon was ambivalent about letting E.Hist get preachy or depressing. Maybe that was why he was so angsty about assigning his field a significance- it is significant because it has implications for how we are currently behaving.
I had an “oh, for chrissakes” gut reaction to Merchant’s opener. Does Environmental History have to include gender, class, and race politics? No objection to any of those fields, but I do feel like the bullets she lists on page 10 are examples of Environmental History applied to other topics, and that Merchant is trying to pass them off as a single unified discipline. It is still pretty awesome to see what we can learn from applying what we know from E.hist., though… its implications for food culture looked especially cool.
Ps. Olivia, Fukuyama ROCKS MY SOX. I’m curious- do people think that there would be anything worth studying in history if history was cyclical, or our world simply homeostatic? [I do but am too tired to argue it here.] Can history ever really “end” if there are infinite degrees of long-term forces at work on the planet?
The first reading didn’t really appeal to me. It was very broad and didn’t seem to attempt to answer the questions it posed. I really enjoyed the second reading, Merchant explored how a person’s gender, race, and class can influence their interactions with the environment. Since it had a lot of new information instead of concepts and questions, I liked it more than the first one.
One quote that grabbed my attention was the second to last one:
“Environmental history..refer(s) to the past contact of man with his total habitat...The environmental historian like the ecologist (s)hould think in terms of wholes, of communities, of interrelationships, and of balances.”
-Roderick Nash
This quote reminded my of the second reading “Interpreting Environmental History”. In the essay, Merchant talks about how race, gender, and class affect relationships and interaction with the environment (like we talked about on the thread yesterday!). Merchant implies that you cannot look at history through only an environmental lens, since race, gender, and class influence how people interact with the environment. In the section on race, Merchant discussed Native American, African American, European, and White American interactions with the environment and with each other, and how each group shaped the environment they lived in.
In the section on gender, Merchant mostly focused on the role of women. She mentioned the struggles between men and women, their interactions, and the environment. One of the quotes in this section that interested me was “Women’s access to resources to fulfill basic needs may come into direct conflict with male roles in the market economy” (23).
The section on class seemed very relevant in today’s world. Working class people often do work that deals directly with the earth, whereas middle and upper class citizens have jobs that are more removed from nature. It would be cool if we could discuss this tomorrow in class. I agree with the points other people have made on this topic.
Sorry if I didn't respond to the last couple of posts, people posted while I was writing mine.
Oops! Forgot to talk about one of the quotes. Here it is:
"From (environmental) histories we can infer the modes of thought and behavior that are more likely than others to be detrimental to the environment we want to live in. A primary element of such histories should be the social analysis of scientific knowledge construction, because many technologies that are science-based cause so many environmental problems."
I think the first sentence is the most important of this quote. Tying it back into how I said I understand the way the students felt at the end of Cronon's environmental class I think this quote really highlights what I said one use of environmental history is and should give hope to the students. I believe environmental history besides science can really help people understand how to better co-exist with the environment and not repeat the damage that has been done to the environment in the past.
When I was reading through the posts Olivia’s struck me as exactly what I was thinking about while reading. With the question of why does going up classes mean going further and further away from the land, I think of the ovious ‘because its dirty and they don’t have to’ but when you actuly go back and think about it that’s not a good reason. So I have a hard time answering the queston, espeshaly when you think of the fact that the more wealthy you are the more land you own. But then again you can hire people to work it for you if your rich. So, I don’t know.
The 7th quote I found irrelevant and it made no sense to me because thought it is not seen well by some I see a lot of nature in history, and if you think of nature as where we live then there is a lot of history in the city’s, but there is also history in the center of Australia or at a dinosaur bone sight. I was going to say this in class but the opportunity flew away.
The 12th quote I found interesting because it relates to Merchant’s essay, with taking about men’s and women’s roles and how they co-act with Nature, but that nature is its own character.
"There is little history in the study of nature and there is little nature in the study of history...."
The first passage written by William Cronon was extremely confusing to me at first. His complex ideas were hard to fully understand in detail. Although the individual details of his passage might not have made total sense, but his final statement clearly defined what all his points meant. After teaching a similar course to college students, his pupils were left with a sense of distress, with no hope for the future that seems to be continuing on a predetermined path. Cornon explains that his goal for the course was to realize that the combination of our Environment and our personal Actions determines how history will play out. The two can equally affect one another as well. The misconception that our environment is just trees and nature can get in the way of how we thing about the connection it has with history.
"Enviromental history..refer[s] to the past contact of man with his total habitat....The environmental historian like the ecologist [s]hould think in terms of wholes, of communities, of interrelationships, and of balances"
Carolyn Merchants passage was much more straight forward thinking. Understanding her ideas of Environmental history as it relates to race was interesting and worth delving into more. I think her writing relates more to the quote above (page 16). Both her passage and this quote speaks to how the environment in which history took place is the basic "habitat" of mankind.
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