In a recent article in the Journal of Historical Geography, J. M. Powell began with a well-meaning attempt at humor: “Question. Why is environmental history like Belgium?” Answer. “Because it was entirely the product of a resident collective imagination.”^[1] There is no denying that this is true. I would only add that it is also the product of a resident collective toleration of a good deal of intellectual uncertainty, diversity, and even incoherence.
Most recently, this uncertainty was reflected in the short essays on the essence and future directions of the field that constituted the heart of the January 2005 issue of Environmental History. Harriet Ritvo characterized the field as “an unevenly spreading blob,” while others questioned the utility of the very term “environment.”^[2]
Human ecologists – when there still were such academic beings – long nourished the hope that close study could reveal correlations between types of environments and the kind of adaptations that humans make to them.^[3] Fifty years ago, in June, 1955, Princeton University hosted the international symposium “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.” Setting the tone were the disciplinary approaches of historical geography, cultural anthropology, and human ecology, exemplified by the title of Lewis Mumford’s talk, “The Natural History of Urbanization.” Experts still believed then that humans could be understood largely as biological subjects whose behavior could be explained by importing models from zoology, ecology, and other fields. Scholars still held out hope then that science could identify healthy natural norms and that such knowledge would aid us in identifying and checking modern, self-destructive, human-engineered “pathologies.”^[4]
Whether they were primitive geographical determinists like the earlier Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Semple or more sophisticated researchers like Julian Steward, the picture these scholars drew was predicated on stable, essentialized understandings of nature and culture.
Since the appearance of John Cole and Eric Wolf’s 1974 study comparing the lifeways and household organization of neighboring Italian and German villages in the Trentino, no one can seriously adopt a strong environmental determinist position.^[5] Nature’s role, it turned out, is much more complicated and subtle, defying attempts to establish one-to-one correspondences with social and cultural forms.
Nor are we much clearer about how particular societies have affected their environments. As Richard White has suggested, we can make believable statements about some effects by local actors on environments of local scale, but beyond that we get into a domain better addressed by chaos theory.^[6]
Even if the environment is not determinative in human affairs, and an understanding of our effects on the environment still is viewed through a glass darkly, then surely at least the term must evoke some agreed upon image? Nothing of the kind, argues Anna Tsing; at least no discernable positive figuration has emerged. The “environment” is what and where we variously want it to be. “On the one hand,” she writes, “environmental rhetoric is widely used and accepted. On the other, no one agrees about what this rhetoric should do for humans and nature, and the struggle is on to bend environmental rhetoric to particular, contradictory purposes – Wise Use or preservation; privatization, national heritage, or tribal autonomy; international restructuring or democratic internationalism; and much more.”^[7]
From another angle, if the environment is everything from the microparticle to the universe, then all history, it may be argued, is collapsible to environmental history, which in turn ceases to be distinguishable from history as such. Epistemologically radical geographers and cultural ecologists such as David Demeritt, while taking pains to emphasize that they believe in the existence of a material world out there, argue that it is impossible to know that world in-itself. “[Its] apparent reality is never pre-given,” writes Demeritt; “it is an emergent property,” Demerritt continues, quoting Joseph Rouse, that “depends on the configuration of practices within which [it] becomes manifest.”^[8] In plain English, our cognitive maps of the world are continually being produced and revised, and their production is closely tied up with our systems of politics and economics and the practices associated with those systems. So what we study when we study the human-nature relationship is a set of shadows and distorted images – a moving target. The objects of our study, social actors, are armed with their own socially constructed cognitive maps, which we, armed with our own maps and tools, try to understand.

SCIENTIFIC ECOLOGY

One such tool, scientific ecology, already has bumped up against the limits of its own abilities to produce a predictive, positivist picture of nature. As early as the mid-1930s Arthur Tansley, in an often-overlooked conceptual breakthrough, cautioned that while ecosystems were, to his mind, ontologically real interlocking networks of the organic and inorganic world ranging in scale “from the universe as a whole down to the atom,” they could be studied only through their “artificial” abstraction out of the skein of life. Researchers could select the scale of the truncated “system” under study for reasons of convenience and relevance to the purposes of the study. “The whole method of science,” he wrote, crediting Hyman Levy’s Marxist-inflected formulation, “is to isolate systems mentally for the purposes of study, so that the series of isolates we make become the actual objects of our study, whether the isolate be a solar system, a planet, a climatic region, a plant or animal community, an individual organism, an organic molecule, or an atom. Actually, the systems we isolate mentally are not only included as parts of larger ones, but they also overlap, interlock and interact with one another. The isolation is partly artificial, but is the only possible way in which we can proceed.”^[9]
In the headlong rush to create a positivist predictive science, as Donald Worster has brilliantly described in Nature’s Economy, ecology imported (and reexported) models and metaphors based on energy flow, ideas of homeostasis in physiology, and attempts to correlate land mass dimensions with species richness.^[10] In all of this, Tansley’s reflective warning got lost, and ecologists mistook their imagined figurations of “nature” for actual empirical objects of study, ironically without ever developing the capacity to wield the predictive power they desired.
By the 1990s, science studies, cultural ecology, and environmental history had caught up with the ecologists, who, with rare exceptions like Norm Christensen, had additionally continued to make the increasingly dubious assumption that the “nature” that they studied was “pure,” untainted by the complications of human “culture.”^[11] Far from being the result of a conscious application of Tansley’s idea that we are condemned to abstract “artificial” units of study from the web of reality, it was, on the contrary, the expression of the field’s understanding of true, “healthy,” untainted nature as one unsullied by human presence. One root of the problem, as cultural ecologist Bruce Winterhalder noted, was that ecology, suffering from physics-envy, had tried to deny history. By the mid-1970s, Richard Lewontin, in Winterhalder’s paraphrase, already recognized that “the full set of functional relationships that would enable us to predict the phenotype for each genotype in all possible environments (technically, the norm of reaction) is effectively ‘hidden’ to analytical view.” That is, the path of evolution is littered with non-repeatable events such as the “origin of life” that preclude a definitive cause-and-effect-based reconstruction because knowledge of both the spectrum of factors at the time and the particular ways in which they interacted with each other will forever remain obscure. Using the same logic, Winterhalder argued that it is similarly impossible to predict how collections of organisms and environments – ecosystems, if you will – will evolve, or to explain exhaustively their past histories.^[12] A genuine acceptance of Darwin’s vision of an emergent evolution precludes the dream of a predictive ecology. As many of us already knew, ecology is no more – or less – scientific than history itself. Tansley’s advice remains as solid as it ever was. Our science, our history, our maps of the world can never be certified as eternally and absolutely true – or complete. They are only as good as the degree to which they allow us to attain certain kinds of real-world objectives, not only in the domain of technology but also the production of systems of science, political economy, and social relations.
Now theorists are pushing us to consider the ultimate implications of this. Kristin Asdal, for example, is but one of a host of thinkers who are asking whether there is a “nature” out there to be represented at all, let alone whether “ecology” can in fact represent it.^[13] She writes: “Environmental history appears today as a sub-discipline within history, and attempts to bring nature in as a co-creator of histories. ...However, in all of this, environmental history has apparently been oblivious to more recent philosophies and histories of science. Feminist philosophy of science, for example, has posed fundamental questions about what we at any given time perceive as science – and nature. The question is thus which nature and which conceptions of science should be brought in. One might also ask, which ethic?”^[14]
Obviously, to restate Demeritt’s point, no one is denying the existence of a real world out there. Neither Demeritt nor Asdal, nor even Donna Haraway, I assume, are about to walk out of Alan Sokal’s twenty-first floor apartment window because they believe that modern physics, with its laws of gravity, is socially produced. It is, but the science also work” on a pragmatic level, which is why we accept its provisional truths, even while appreciating, as Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar have noted, that those truths are artifacts of the metaphors, instrumentation, and worldviews of their scientific creators.^[15] Ecologists must remember that when they go into the field and take measurements with instruments, when they assign a given life form to a given taxon, they are producing in fact the very nature that they study. We as environmental historians, when we borrow from the ecologists, need to be aware of that as well. If we turn our backs on the notion that we socially construct science and nature, we risk buying into a delusory, uncritical, received picture of the “real world.” If we fall silent in response to the challenge of continually destroying and producing new pictures of “reality,” then we abandon the field to those who are not as squeamish or self-conscious. As awful as it seems, we cannot return to the imagined Eden of empiricism. To a great extent, of course, we may lay the blame for this on the irruption of poststructuralism and science studies, but they are merely the messengers bearing the bad news.

A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF THE FIELD

Once upon a time, Environmental History (that is, as an institutional form) and environmental history (as an intellectual project) existed approximately in such a prelapsarian state. The origin story of the field was that it came together in the early to mid 1970s, influenced by activism of a certain type, linked to a particular understanding of scientific ecology, and built on a dichotomized picture of nature and culture facing each other across a formidable ontological divide. Let me say strongly that there was never any kind of “party line” at all. An early issue of the Environmental History Newsletter stressed that “one need not be a card-carrying conservationist to teach in American environmental studies. On the contrary, we need a variety of views and ideologies.”^[16] And one of the first issues of Environmental Review, which was subtitled “an interdisciplinary journal,” boasted that its “historical framework allows many different viewpoints to come together.” “Far too often,” it complained, “our understanding of man’s relation to nature has been distorted by limited technological, economic, and political questions and answers.” True enough. But there was the lurking implication that a “true” picture could somehow emerge from the discussions in the review’s dispassionate pages.^[17]
To account for the rise of Environmental History institutionally, it is also important to recall that the intellectual concerns of its founding scholars – wilderness and the American mindset, pollution, forest history, the histories of conservation, preservation and irrigation, social and intellectual understandings of nature, the relationship between social systems and environmental change, and, conversely, the effects of the environment on societies – could not find an honored place at the table of the so-called mainstream subfields in history, including the history of science and the history of technology. Eventually, historians of agriculture, landscape gardening, and cities, and historically minded geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and others joined our society, our meetings, and our discursive network. Intellectual concord, however, could only be sustained as long as there was general agreement about the objects of our study. Things were fine as long as nature was in its corner, culture was in its corner, and both behaved properly, as neo-Platonic entities are supposed to.
By the mid-1980s, however, the reflux of the science wars and of post-structuralism had finally washed over our field too. In the pages of the Journal of American History, at ASEH meetings, and in other publications we debated the ontological viability and utility of concepts such as wilderness and the balance of nature.
After two decades of tortured language and undecipherable jargon, it is fair to say that, like it or not, we are all poststructuralists now. Every speaker, we recognize, is situated – even the deconstructionist. Although the physical scientists are still bringing up the rear, almost all of us recognize that a posture of epistemological invulnerability, of godlike omniscience, is beyond us mortals. We must give up on the attainment of a perfectly transcendent position, an aperçu that Immanuel Kant had already arrived at in the 1780s.^[18]
Instead, we must content ourselves with an understanding of the world that is an eternally dynamic set of cognitive frameworks in which the brass ring of absolute truth is never grasped. In fact, the material reality that we seek to understand constitutes an evolving, eternally moving target requiring ever newer cognitive maps. We cannot study the emergence of the Asian bird flu today with mental pictures of the world drawn from the epidemiological, geographical, and social understandings of 1919. This situation alone has made our jobs exponentially harder.
Another annoying insight of those naughty French (and other) theorists also refuses to go away. Knowledge also is relative because it is always linked in some way to power. What we produce as narrative accounts and historical understandings always bears some relation to our social aims, our visions of desired and abjured social relationships, notions of justice and political organization, and, most fundamentally, notions of selfhood and psychologies, all considered as an integrated posture toward the world. Our accounts, however carefully and dispassionately written, are always at the service of some understanding of common sense, some reading of “human nature” and social dynamics. Our accounts therefore also help to constitute environments – and social relations. We are unavoidably always on one or another side of power. Pierre Bourdieu once called sociology a “contact sport” and we can certainly say the same for history.^[19]
That our scholarship cannot avoid taking sides is not a pleasant realization for folks like us who, for the most part, landed in academia to pursue a quiet, contemplative life. Yet, this appreciation of the saturation of history and knowledge with questions about power give us the most powerful tool to reconstitute the “environment” as a central and prepossessing category of analysis. To respond to Anna Tsing’s complaint, the reason that the idea of a generic environment in environmental history appears to be, and is, incoherent – and this applies equally to the idea of generic “humans” in history – is that at every invocation, “environment” is a figure and a metonym.^[20] What we are doing when we speak about “the environment” is always instantiating it in some particular fashion: as a polluted river, as wilderness, as wildlife habitat, or as “virgin lands.” These images of the “environment” seem to call out for some kind of action: clean-up and restoration, preservation, management, or exploitation. Yet at the same time these images seek to conceal and suppress alternative imaginings of a place and its uses. They also hide the fact that behind each figuration of “the environment” is a social agenda. Because “the environment” is a term that has a universal ring to it and pretends to embrace the general good, it serves as an excellent mask for particular interests.
Consequently, every “environmental” struggle is, at its foundations, a struggle among interests about power. In fact, I would go further. Every environmental story is a story about power. Who will control access to resources and amenities? What are the trade-offs? Who is expected to bear the risks and encumbered costs? Who believes that they will benefit? Who controls the range of choices that are made available to publics as they decide major questions? What are the conditions of those choices? Who is actually doing the choosing? What outcomes are being projected by “experts”? How are the expected risks and benefits being represented? How will social structures and relationships change as a result of particular choices?
We may either write a celebration of power or exhume the dark side of power. It matters little whether it is a story about Panama Disease and bananas, a park in Rio de Janeiro, a famine in late nineteenth-century India, exobiology, landscape change in southeastern Spain, the rise of suburbia, Chernobyl, environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Amazonia, burial practices, a donkey massacre in Bophuthatswanaland, alleged deforestation in Ethiopia or Guinea, or logging and forest management in the Pacific Northwest. Nor may we content ourselves with producing stories with cardboard cut-out characters, with black hats and white hats, although it’s always nice to take a swat at venality. The dark side of power is never that obvious. Let me provide an example from my own research.
By the 1930s the Soviet had regime embarked on a course of deep transformation (or production) of society and nature, aided by an “industrial strength” repressive apparatus. Practically the lone public opponents of these death-dealing megalomaniacal and tributary schemes were the activists and members of the USSR’s nature-protection movement, most prominently a group of botanists and zoologists. They miraculously survived the bloody 1930s and even succeeded in nurturing a new generation of heterodox activists. As I developed the story in the early 1990s, I thought to myself, “what incredible luck! I’ve stumbled on the story of the origins of Soviet and Russian civil society – this is the motherlode!” It would have been easy, and temporarily beneficial – from the standpoint of my career – to tell the story that way, but I knew it was wrong. I realized with a certain regret that I could not tell the story that Western public opinion and Soviet and Russian Studies wanted to hear. That realization came not only because I was a trained – that is, disciplined, historian – who honors the duty to account for all of the facts as I have [co-]produced them through my investigation, but also because I had begun to take seriously Jacques Derrida’s admonition that we should not content ourselves with our previous excavations but continually make new incisions. I needed to reveal that these heroic conservation activists were themselves elitists, not democrats, and were serving their own unarticulated professional interests that often were at odds with those of farmers, pastoralists, and other groups. Not only were they not the nucleus of a future Russian civil society, the activists, with their guild mentality, were in fact evidence precisely of the inability of such a civil society to cohere across group lines.^[21] Ultimately, the activists remained a part of the problem of a society continually unable to resist the depredations of tributary elites, a story that still requires further excavation.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/weiner1.jpg>

Fig. 1. “Under the Leadership of the Great Stalin – Forward to Communism!” (http://www.happydeathinc.com/propaganda/Soviet/Pages/stalinleadership.htm)
Communism here is figured as the consolidation of a diverse assemblage of ethnicities into a unified Soviet people and the transformation of a “backward” and parched southern Soviet landscape into a “rational” productive grid of shelterbelts and hydropower stations – all under the guidance of the supreme planner, Stalin.

Every historical figuration of the environment has contained within itself social trade-offs, and, at the extreme endpoint of its logic, dispossession and even genocide. Most environmental historians already are familiar with the research of Kenneth Olwig and Karen Fog Olwig, Mark Spence, Jane Carruthers, John MacKenzie, Ted Catton, John Sandlos, and others, who have shown that the idea of “wilderness” was predicated on the mental and physical dispossession of locals, be they Scottish Highlanders, Arawaks and Caribs, Native Americans, South African Bantus, Maasai, Inuit, or others.^[22]
Many also are aware of the growing scholarship on nature protection and landscape planning in Nazi Germany.^[23] Here, too, a naive reading of this history – “well, the Nazis accomplished at least something positive” – can no longer can be indulged as stemming from a lack of information.^[24] The celebration of an idealized, well-tended nature created by German Kultur presupposed a contrasting, debased nature of the Poles, Jews, and Russians that “cried out” for its own obliteration. This figuration legitimated the “cleansing” and improvement of the eastern lands.^[25] Heinrich Wiepking-Jorgensmann, a professor of landscape gardening who was tapped by Heinrich Himmler to help in the redesign of the landscapes of the “Annexed East Lands,” wrote: “The landscape is always a form, an expression ... of the people living within it. It can be the gentle countenance of its soul and spirit, just as it can be the grimace of its soullessness or of human and spiritual depravity. In any case, it is the infallible, distinctive mark of that which a race feels, thinks, creates and does. ... Therefore the Germans’ landscapes differ in all ways from those of the Poles and the Russians – just as do the peoples themselves. The murders and cruelties of the Eastern races are engraved, razor-sharp, into the grimaces of their native landscapes.”^[26] The Basics of Planning for the Building-Up of the Eastern Areas took for granted the mass elimination of the existing population and its replacement by German settlers.^[27]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/weiner2.jpg>

Fig. 2. “Peoples without Land and Lands without People in Europe” (Wolfgang Preuss (Hg.). Grosser Volksatlas. Das Jubiläumswerk des Verlages zu seinem hunderjährigen Bestehen. Bielefeld und Leipzig: Velhagen und Klasing, 1939, Map no. 15).
This Nazi map prefigured and “justified” German expansion from a dense homeland to the relatively sparser populated lands to the east.

Ruling elites have attempted to redesign entire landscapes, not just with warped racial figurations but also under the aegis of “science and progress,” perpetrating horrendous crimes in the process. The Bolsheviks early had come to the consensus that the landscape of “Communism” would be a gleaming industrial one. To pay for and build that hoped-for landscape of progress, Josef Stalin needed to create an actual landscape of renewed serfdom, confining peasants in the new collective farms where their labor and productive power was completely captured. Against the backdrop of peasant resistance and severe drought, Stalin’s regime continued to requisition grain in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, condemning perhaps 5 million or more to horrible deaths from starvation.^[28] An additional 1.5 million – a full 25 percent of the population of the Kazakh ethnos – perished as “backward” nomadic herding was classed as incompatible with the Soviet vision of a “progressive” agrarian landscape of state farms. Thirty-three years later, in a colossal act of historical re-touching, Nikita Khrushchev could call those regions purged of herders “virgin lands,” awaiting their wheat planters from Ukraine, Russia and from among the political deportees already in the east. Also taking a cue from Stalin, China’s Mao Zedong, trying to industrialize in record time, precipitated a famine unparalleled in human history: estimates of the famine dead range from between 20 to 50 million people.^[29]
And the inexpressible tragedy of the Holocaust cannot occlude the painful realization that from the first aliyah, or wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine from Europe in the 1880s, Zionists armed themselves with a European-derived colonialist figuration of “progress.” That vision involved afforestation and efforts to turn the Jewish state into a productive garden (“making the desert bloom”) at the expense of lands confiscated from Arab use. This view, in large measure, was partly based on the presumption that Arab traditional agriculture and pastoralism were somehow more primitive, and therefore less justifiable, uses of the land.^[30] In the 1910s, no less a figure than David Ben Gurion, the future prime minister, described Zionist settlers such as himself as “a company of conquistadors,” likening their settlement to that of the New World with its “fierce fights” with “wild nature and wilder Redskins.”^[31] Selig Soskin, closest aide to Otto Warburg, even pointed to “Aryan” German colonization in Africa as the model for the development of agricultural technology in Palestine.^[32] Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, admitted that: “Any native people... will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs... Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance and strength of will, but... [t]hey look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie... Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.”^[33] Regrettably, it must be conceded that these candid early sentiments – reworked for public international consumption as the slogan “A land without people for a people without land” – prefigured the later dispossession of Arab Palestinians as they were overtaken by their own Catastrophe (Nakba).^[34] Here too, further exhumation is necessary, for much of the afforestation campaign developed by the Jewish National Fund (first in 1912 as the Olive Tree Fund) was of “marginal” economic value, instead serving as a symbol of the settlers’ “struggle with nature and the conquest of the land.”^[35] More than that – like the Kiev ravine of Babi Yar that Nikita Khrushchev filled in and planted over, rendering invisible the actual site of the Nazi slaughter of 33,000 Jews – smiling forests grow over the specters of razed Arab villages: true landscapes of green oblivion.^[36]
Not just Israeli, but all state forestry projects – whether American, Indian or Russian – derive generally from the same source of cameral absolutism in Europe. Ravi Rajan has provided an important genealogy of colonial forestry practices showing that the rational, optimistic, science-based scenario of sustained-yield forest management was inescapably based on a denigration of allegedly “inefficient” folk uses of the forest, whether by German peasants or Indian farmers and tribals, to justify enclosures and removals.^[37] Through force and hegemony, the European cognitive map has carried the day and become the global standard.
The African American experience is another ocean of examples of how power inflects environmental histories. In an incisive study, Sylvia Hood Washington has shown that with emancipation, the tar and turpentine industry in North Carolina and Georgia collapsed, as former slaves refused to perform such environmentally hazardous work. In response, Southern states enacted laws permitting the states to lease convict labor to private interests. By 1890, almost thirty thousand prisoners were leased out, and the tar and turpentine industries were again assured of a labor supply. We can only wonder how many of those almost entirely African-American prisoner-lessees were arrested in order to provide for the recovery of the industry.^[38] Similarly, James Giesen has shown how it is impossible to write about the boll weevil infestation in the Mississippi Delta (or anywhere else in the United States) without also talking about the racialized nature of the labor force. Should we really be surprised that, as Giesen tells us, a successful experiment by African Americans in renting and managing a cotton plantation ended after only a couple of years, because the experiment promised to overturn the public shibboleth that African Americans could not work without white supervision?^[39] Or that the town of Rosewood, Florida, had to be destroyed because it gave lie to the myth that African-Americans could not run their own farms successfully?
These examples, it bears repeating, attest to the truism that part of the production of “knowledge” is the production of “ignorance.” I use ignorance here in two senses. On the one hand, the bearers of “superior knowledge” counterpose their “enlightenment” to the beliefs and practices of those who still are in the dark, producing a picture of ignorance. On the other, the new knowledge makes its own adepts ignorant by its arrogant dismissal of whole realms of experience, whole universes of possibilities – or by destroying them when they threaten to subvert the legitimacy of the “superior knowledge.”
Just as “ignorance” of African Americans’ real capabilities continually had to be enforced, so too did ignorance of native practices in the Canadian North, which, as John Sandlos has shown, also involved a large dose of misrepresentation of “the Other.”^[40] Moreover, as Sandlos takes pains to point out, “the misrepresentation of tradition is more than a mere misunderstanding. By extending a degree of intellectual ownership over traditional Native sources of legitimacy and by appealing to a romantic ideal of the Native hunter whose only legitimacy lies in a dimly remembered past, [Canadian] federal bureaucrats could now define the northern landscape completely in accordance with their own political, social, and economic goals. The federal government’s efforts to preserve a wilderness sublime for the last remnants of the large buffalo herds necessitated a parallel effort to legislate Native people, their culture, and their values out of the wild northern landscape.” Such a “wilderness sublime” – as figured by white bureaucrats and zoologists – was promoted as embodying the general good of the nation, which was imperiled by alleged overhunting by natives corrupted by modernity.^[41] Similar to the story told by Ted Catton about Alaska, Sandlos’s story is about a set of framings that put marginalized native people in a double-bind: remain “unspoiled” and thereby, under the new conditions, unviable, or try to adapt, which stimulated charges that they were betraying their heritage and therefore did not deserve continued “rights” to their territory.^[42] The ignorance of the colonizers, among other things consisted precisely in ignoring that their beliefs and practices necessarily had to lead to this double-bind, to the condemnation of natives to a status of non-viability.
Perhaps the account that most powerfully reveals the high stakes associated with our environmental maps and the practices based upon them is Mike Davis’s controversial history of the millenial-scale El Niño events toward the end of the nineteenth century.^[43] Late Victorian Holocausts makes the case that the environment that the British imperialists saw in India was a landscape of potential profits – whether from opium, cotton, indigo, wheat, or taxation. In the process of realizing that landscape of profit, Davis shows, the British created a landscape of unprecedented mass death, as they did in Ireland. With the delusory and self-deluding logics of “progress” and “improvement of the natives,” the British sought at once to naturalize and legitimate their rule. With the rhetorics of “free trade” and Social Darwinism they sought to bury the fact that the famines and epidemics of 1876–1879 and 1896–1902, which took between 12 and 29 million lives, were not the mere consequences of El Niño, not principally acts of nature, not the responsibility of a “lazy,” “improvident,” “inefficient” and Malthusian rural underclass who deserved to go under (as Lytton, Lord Cromer, and an 1881 official report put it), but the products of state terror and coerced dispossession. They were the ultimate products of the landscape of cotton, opium, wheat, and indigo tribute.
Davis’s book, like no other, highlights the trade-offs between the “primitive” yet locally adaptive millet-sorghum-pulse subsistence economy, with reasonably sustainable well-water-based irrigation, coppicing, and grazing in communal forests and pastures, supplemented by community-based provisions for famine relief, on the one hand, and on the other, the “progressive” colonial economy, with its commercially driven irrigation that ruined the village wells, waterlogged the soils, created malaria epidemics, and drove millions of people to horrible starvation deaths, but made plenty of money for British banks, commercial houses, and the state, on the other. In the Earl of Lytton’s and Lord Elgin’s India, as Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China, environmental history must reveal how the social costs of the production of environments of “progress” are paid for with the bodies of millions.
But Americans are also paying. While Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner in Deceit and Denial make the case that the production by corporations of ignorance about the risks of industrial pollution was willful, Christine Rosen’s research points to an even more nuanced, and hence more dangerous, situation.^[44] Because the citizenry, in the pre-Environmental Protection Agency era, did not possess the proper tools and knowledge to recognize what is truly health-threatening, the law and business practices allowed the production and discharge of harmful substances as long as they were generally “unrecognized” as such and unchallenged in the courts. As long as the onus was on claimants, the law permitted businesses to claim plausible deniability because it placed the prevention of social risk below the production of commodities.

WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY?

Because of the diffuse nature of its original suite of concerns, Environmental History has become over the past thirty years a very big tent. That is attractive. But that has also created an institutional “boundary problem” of cetacean proportions. There are no ways to license “environmental historians,” no collectively accepted criteria to distinguish “true” environmental historians from “impostors.” Anyone who can claim to be an environmental historian and get away with it becomes one. This is exactly what stimulated Powell’s “collective imagination” quip, which opens up onto a much more serious question, first raised a few years ago by James Secord – namely: “Who should be credentialed to interpret the world and our place in it?”^[45]
These two questions – what is environmental history and who can interpret the world – must be resolved in tandem. While there is of course plenty of room for all kinds of research under the big tent of Environmental History, I would propose that the most important work that we can do and the work that can unite all of our various efforts is to bring to the light of day the unexamined metonymic “shadows” of environmental figurations and practices. Every figuration of the “environment” – by distributing different opportunities for environmental access and decision-making power to different “types” and groups – potentially encodes exclusion, dispossession, or even genocide.
We must persist with investigations in order to uncover how, at the end of the day, actors and Others in our stories were left with deficient choices. Why were they asked to choose between, or among, dispossessions? It is the history of the narrowing of choices that ultimately will be the most useful for us if we are to turn around our nihilistic, fatalistic century and begin to build a world of increasingly rich choices. One clarification must be made. This should not be read to mean that only the history of power and conflicts may be written. That would be silly as well as exclusivist. What I have tried to underscore, simply, is that all of our histories must reflect an awareness that their subjects, and our writing of them, are inflected by power.
Others will object that the framework I propose fails to take seriously the agency and power of the nonhuman world. After all, Mike Davis’s book would be unthinkable without the current scientific discourse about the ENSO (El NiZo/La NiZa) phenomenon, but, more importantly, without the unprecedented extreme weather events of the late nineteenth century. That is a given. I would add only that what is of interest to us is precisely the reactions of specific societies to these events. Nature is a part of the dialectic, but its impact is always refracted through the social structures and pathways of power of our societies, which was the point that Davis tried to underscore in his study.
I am not bothered by the absence of a coherent, essentializable object of study – “the environment” – and continue to proudly define myself as a member of the field of Environmental History, understood as a locus for exploration and intellectual adventure rather than as a capturable, bounded entity in the way that, for example, Medieval British History or United States history, 1877 to the present, seem to be and claim to be – although we know better! As an aside, I cannot resist noting that a decade and a half ago, Leo Marx similarly suggested, in a death-defying review essay that appeared in Technology and Culture, that his own discipline, the history of technology, had no coherent object of study.^[46] The only problem with his incendiary essay was that he didn’t extend his logic!
Seriously, those fields with seemingly well-delineated boundaries, which have little difficulty justifying their academic existence, easily slide into comfortable ruts. They continue to operate with yesterday’s commonsensical categories of analysis, even as the world has moved on. We continue to teach national histories even as there is an “erosion of the nation state, national economies and natural cultural identities” before our very eyes.^[47] On the other hand, those fields (like our own) with visibly imperfectly delineated, or worse, highly permeable, migratory, or even barely discernible boundaries provide unexcelled opportunities for intellectual conversations and explorations of a scope, variety, and daring rarely encountered in more fixed fields.
We in environmental history are aware that we are not producing a “correspondence” of the world in a primitive scientistic sense, but rather a situated, inspired understanding of the world – a story that could be useful as a guide to refashioning ourselves. We also are providing a model of the process whereby people may arrive at a disciplined, reflexive knowledge of themselves, open to revision. These are not simply professional aims. They are models for democratic citizenship. We are, regrettably, past the point where we can blithely believe we are generating a positivist picture of empirical reality. The alternatives are actively to serve power, to become an antiquarian (which is the same thing), or to develop cognitive models of the world that will help us create a future where the exercise of domination will become just a little bit harder.
By virtue of our academic positions we have somehow ended up as socially “credentialed” interpreters of the world. However, our official credentials mean nothing if we do not produce interpretations of the world that are increasingly shared, not hoarded, and that create in our publics a toleration for, if not comfort with, uncertainty, reflexivity, ideas of an evolving selfhood in an evolving world, and the public’s responsibility for the conscious production of that world. Unlike the Wizard of Oz, if we are to help build a demystified and democratic social order we must reveal our feet of clay. We must tear that scientistic curtain that protects our “exalted” status within the social hierarchy to reveal ourselves as seekers who are only a couple of steps ahead of the rest of the population in learning how to be reflexive interpreters and creators of our lives. Along with de-essentializing our field, we need a renewed turn, as I once called for, to an attention to process, to means as opposed to ends.^[48] As practitioners of a fearlessly reflexive scholarly venture, Environmental Historians can set a model for a new open praxis that needs to emerge if human civilization on Planet Earth is to have a chance. And if anyone wants to know what “environmental history” is, you just send them to me!