This essay is an outgrowth of an earlier paper I wrote for a Soviet-American conference that was held in Moscow in October 1991, later published as “Demythologizing Environmentalism.”^[1] There I argued that there was and could be no such thing as a disembodied, pure “green” politics. A “pure” “green” politics presupposes an identifiable, incontestable set of directions for humans as to how to live in the world, based on an equally unassailable image of “healthy” nature that we need to maintain. Such an agenda also presumes that “green” politics could be detached from questions of power and interests, in the name of overriding generic “human” interests. When examined, however, these assumptions cannot be defended, and “greens” cannot and never have escaped links to a larger politics; Nazism, Communism, Zionism, American providentialism, colonial rule, religious and spiritual thought, and, most lately, corporations have either accommodated nature protection or claimed to be “green.” One person’s wilderness is another’s former home; there is no universal agreement regarding how “best” to use resources or the land or what a harmonious “green” human habitat should look like. All landscapes are ultimately cultural and political.
In the years following the Moscow conference I reflected on other protean terms and concepts: “environment,” “democracy,” “sustainability,” “development” and “progress.” My presidential address to the American Society for Environmental History in early 2005 – the article below – provided a convenient opportunity to try to tie together these ideas. I am still bemused to think of the shock of my announcement to several hundred environmental historians that our field did not exist as a coherent discipline – unless we recognized how suffused all “environmental” stories are with questions of power and conflicting interests.
In retrospect, I may have been too cavalier in some of my judgments. Historical ecology is doubtless more useful than my account would suggest. Even with their limitations, historians’ and scientists’ efforts to reconstruct past ecologies and landscapes and to connect their transformation with changing patterns of human use provide imaginative possibilities to explain the human past. Diana Davis, for example, would not have been able to critique French colonial botanists as forcefully as she did for falsely blaming Bedouins for the “deforestation” of the Maghreb (thus justifying transfer of their lands to the French colonists) without reasonably reliable new scientific data on the history of climate and vegetation in that region that undercut the botanists’ claims.^[2]
Nonetheless, I still think that it is important to always be aware that science, like our own narratives, is provisional; our duty continually to interrogate ourselves is as inescapable for the historian as our desire to create explanations.
Finally, this article I believe has much to say to the Russian and post-Soviet reader. Under the banner of a succession of ideologies and justifications – autocracy’s divine mission to protect the Orthodox people, imperial-era modernization, the “progressive” construction of “socialism,” and, most recently, a “democratic,” “free-market” “transition” – control over resources has been monopolized by elites. This has repeatedly resulted in calamities for large groups of people, not only for semi-colonial peoples in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia, but for Ukrainians, Balts, and for ethnic Russians themselves. It is time that we take a good, long, skeptical look at those who seek or hold power claiming to “improve” things; more often than not, predation, elevated levels of risk, and even lethal dispossession hide behind the lofty claims of those unwilling to transparently provide specifics or to be restrained by political rules and an empowered citizenry.^[3]