Discuss the broad features of global environmental thought from the end of eighteenth

century till the 1920s. How did colonial communication matrix aid in its development?

Answer:

The underlying fear that extreme natural events will have an influence on humanity led to the

origin of environmental history, although it is in fact much more extensive in approach. The

intellectual origins of environmental history as a self-conscious domain of enquiry can be

traced to the encounter of 17th and 18th century western Europeans, especially naturalists,

medical officers and administrators with the startlingly unfamiliar environments of the tropics

and with the damage done to these environments in the course of resource extraction by

European empires. The roots of Western conservationism and environmental thought are at

least 200 years old. Although colonial empires undoubtedly promoted widespread ecological

destruction, it also helped to create a context conducive to rigorous analytical thinking about

the processes of ecological change and to the formation of a conservation ideology The

primary focus area of environmental thinking at this stage was situated in the colonized

empires of Europe, but although conducted by mainly the Europeans its approach was global.

As early as the mid-17th century intellectuals and natural philosophers like Richard

Norwood, William Sayle, Edmond Halley, were all already aware of high rates of soil erosion

and deforestation in the colonial tropics, and the urgent need for conservationist intervention

especially to protect forests and threatened species. Edmond Halley, made the first accurate

estimates of the global volume of the oceans and the varying quantities of different elements

in marine-land-atmosphere cycling over time. On St Helena and Bermuda this early

conservationism led, by 1715, to the gazetting of the first colonial forest reserves and forest

protection laws.
On French colonial Mauritius which was very widely affected by colonial plantation

activities, Pierre Poivre and Philibert Commerson framed pioneering forest conservation

legislation designed specifically to prevent rainfall decline in the 1760s. In India, the major

British colony, William Roxburgh, Edward Balfour, Alexander Gibson and Hugh Cleghorn

who were all Scottish medical scientists composed alarmist accounts linking the actions of

deforestation to the dangers of climate change. Their distinctively modern environmentalist

views owed a great deal to the precocious commentaries written by Alexander von Humboldt

on India in his Personal Narrative and in the Cosmos.

East India Company scientists were also well aware of French experience in trying to prevent

deforestation and rainfall change in Mauritius. William Roxburgh, together with Alexander

Beatson on St Helena, went on further to observe the incidence of global drought events

known today as the El Nino events. The rise of imperial networks of information thus enabled

the emergence of a new global environmental awareness as well as the first accurate accounts

of global change.

Edward Balfour and Hugh Cleghorn’s writings in the late 1840s constituted some of the first

writings in world environmental history and clearly demonstrated the extent of the

permeation of a global environmental consciousness. Baron Ferdinand Von Mueller in

Australia, George Perkins Marsh and Franklin Benjamin Hough in the US and John

Croumbie Brown in South Africa all followed suite, composing numerous and voluminous

texts that display formidable textual knowledge of evidence of global environmental change

through time and such texts were used to caution others about the dangers of future

environmental profligacy and global ruin. Most of these primary writers on environmental

history published their important texts during the 1860s, which was a period that could be

appropriately called the “first environmental decade”. This period embodied a convergence of

thinking about ecological change on a world scale that may well have been permeated in part
by ontological and existential concerns elicited by the publication of Charles Darwin’s The

Origin of Species in 1859.

It was in the particular circumstances of environmental change at the colonial periphery that

“environmentalism” first made its appearance and its colonial proponents were often in a

position to make use of historical evidence for environmental change in government records

and thus became de facto environmental historians. A growing interest in the potential human

impact on climate change grew into a fear that human activities, such as deforestation, may

lead to global desiccation which affected the early direction of environmental history. After

the 1860s, and the Indian famines of 1876 – and 1899-1902, fuelled and stimulated the idea

that human history and environmental change were closely linked. Until the Second World

War, historians played little or no part in this process of cultural evolution; instead these ideas

were developed by the historical geographers. Also, the mainstream of desiccationist thinking

developed among foresters, geographers and natural scientists working mainly in the colonial

tropics of Britain and France and to some extent in the USSR and the American west as well

as the new Pacific and Caribbean Empire of the US.

The complex notions of state intervention in natural resource protection, connected with new

and highly anthropomorphic valuations of the environment, emerged and were extensively

promulgated in the colonial context before George Perkins Marsh published his famous Man

and Nature in 1864.

In the mid-19th century, David Livingstone had recognised lake shoreline features in the

Kalahari as signifying great rainfall episodes in the past and subsequent desiccation. John

Croumbie Brown believed that human agency may have been the reason for deteriorating

conditions in southern Africa. The discovery towards the end of the 19th century of moraines

on Mt Kenya and Kilimanjaro, far below the tongues of present glaciers, showed that the
climate of Africa had been cooler in the past. In West Africa, J D Falconer described in The

Geography and Geology of Northern Nigeria (1911) extensive fields of linear dunes, covered

in vegetation and supporting a large population, stretching well into northern Nigeria, far to

the south of the current limits of the Sahara. Tilho brought back evidence of a great lake

having existed in the Bodele depression, between Tibesti and Lake Chad and all these pointed

to the fact that Sahara had been much more extensive at some times in the past and at other

times much less arid.

Around the 1900’s, reinforced by climatic events there was a renewed interest in millennial

theories of global desiccation similar to contemporary idea about the “inevitable” extinctions

of both indigenous people and large tropical mammals. By the end of the 19th century it was

evident that short-term vicissitudes of the African climate were of considerable economic

importance. In East Africa after heavy rains in 1878 the level of Lake Victoria rose and

within a few months abundant rain happened over the Blue Nile’s catchment area in Ethiopia

and disastrous Nile floods in Egypt. Alexander Knox in The Climate of the Continent of

Africa, pointed to a decline in the rainfall of 19th century Senegal. In 1913 a drought disaster

came and the terrible results of famine in northern Nigeria that year were described by

Hastings in Nigerian Days. In Egypt the flow of the Nile was phenomenally low, and in

southern Africa there was widespread drought.

A number of American geographers came up with a post-glacial desiccation of the

environments of central Asia and China based on the twin tenets that wet conditions

characterised the glacial phases of the Pleistocene Age and that aridity had increased since

the warming of the Pleistocene ice sheets in the Holocene Age. Travellers in central Asia

pointed to the occurrence of dry water courses and lakes and abandoned settlements as

evidence of this desiccation and suggested that deteriorating environmental conditions had

spurred successive nomadic invasions of their more civilised neighbours during periods of
increased aridity. Ellsworth Huntington, a geographer and environmental determinist in first

major work, The Pulse of Asia, (1907) set an agenda for both desiccationism and

environmental determinism. He was critically influenced by the rise of contemporary

anxieties in the tropics and a growing interest in climatic interpretations of history, boosted

by the great Indian famines of the late 19th century.

A small group of geographers of the metropolitan centre began to focus on, in an imperialistic

idiom, in terms of the global relations between environmental change, political power and

societal change. Sir Halford Mackinder’s Britain and the British Seas (1902), a highly

selective historical interpretation of nature, geography and superpower political economy was

the pioneer of such work, followed by The Historical Geography of the British Empire, a

book with some claims to be considered a world environmental history. J L Myre’s The

Dawn of History was an archaeologist’s treatment of the geographical factor in the rise of

ancient civilisations and states was a de facto global environmental history of the ancient

world.

A hiatus ensued in global environmental works which was broken after the First World War,

with publications on themes linking climate and history appearing, starting with a colonial

scientist, C.E.P Brooks, The Evolution of Climate (1922) and Climate through the Ages

(1926) who drew conclusions about changes in world climate from territories far apart, such

as Falkland Islands and Uganda. Huntington also contributed in this new form by 1922

through his work on Climatic Changes. All of these last works reflected a subconscious

connection between notions of the environmental decline of ancient empires and

contemporary fears about imperial disturbances and the emergence of anti-colonial

nationalisms.
Some of the political and existential anxieties produced immediately prior to the First World

War emerged in doom-laden books like William Macdonald’s Conquest of the Desert (1913).

After the war there was a rising awareness of the potential for future human destructiveness

which provoked retrospective views on comparable past narratives of mass human

disruptions of life and environment and helped to account for the flurry of colonial

publications and commissions on the connections between drought and human activity that

appeared in the early 1920s. In 1920 the French started voicing their desiccation fears, in an

article by H Hubert on ‘le dessechement progressive en Afrique Occidentale’. In semi-arid

South Africa that the gospel of desiccation found its most pronounced and didactic post-war

expression in 1919 as E H L Schwartz published on ‘The Progressive Desiccation of Africa:

The Cause and the Remedy’. His book was published in 1923 on The Kalahari; or Thirstland

Redemption, which focused on a desiccation discourse. Schwartz’s message was directly

transmuted into government policies through the 1922 report of the South African Drought

Commission and such alarmism revealed the beginnings of a North American influence in

British colonial soil and forest conservation, at least in South Africa.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the experience of central Asia, continued to influence the

desiccationist school. Geographical periodicals and institutions were important for the

desiccation debate. In Africa the concerns of the 1920s began to include those colonial

territories that had not been talked about in environmental literature before the First World

War, as they came under colonial interest and infrastructure investment. Anglo- Egyptian

Sudan was the first about which some literature on desert-spreading or desertification was to

be written. The pioneer of this was E W Bovill, whose paper on ‘The Encroachment of the

Sahara on the Sudan’ came out in 1921 and the arguments were followed up in an article

‘Sahara’ in 1929. Bovill’s articles were in turn taken much further by G T Renner in one of

the first articles to paint Africa as a potentially famine-ridden continent, under the title ‘A
Famine Zone in Africa: The Sudan’, published in 1926. A widespread semi-arid region meant

that a disproportionately large alarmist South African literature developed on environmental

matters such as the works of J C Smuts on Holism and Evolution in 1926, heavily influenced

by the ecological theories of Arthur Tansley.

Soil erosion had already become a prominent issue in India during the period 1890-1925 and

huge investments to control it were made, for example, in the Etawah region of the United

Provinces of northern India. These efforts, like similar measures in West and South Africa,

long predated the American “dustbowl” alarmism which began in the 1930s and further

supplemented the existing colonial panic over increasing desertification. E P Stebbing, a very

prominent Indian forester, published a three volume work on The Forests of India, with the

history of environmental concern and early conservationism among the first surgeon-foresters

of the East India Company medical service. His visit to the French and British West African

colonies during the dry season provoked him to write a warning on the dangers of desert-

spreading in ‘The Encroaching Sahara: The Threat to the West African Colonies’. Writings

on various themes of global environmental history that had flourished until the 1920s were

carried on from the 1930s again.

The 17th century led to the realization that European colonial rule could be environmentally

destructive and works of some contemporary artists revealed the extent of degradation to

Europeans. In some drawings of colonized Mauritius of 1677, the stark reality of the

demolished ebony forests was depicted and from this period onwards an awareness of the

ecological impact of capitalism and colonial rule started to come to the surface. An urgent

need to understand unfamiliar floras, faunas and geologies for commercial purposes had

emerged and this fascinated many scientists into employment with the trading companies.

They were mostly medical surgeons or custodians of the early colonial botanical gardens and

formed an essential part of the administrative machinery of these colonial enterprises and
were the earliest writers to comment specifically on rapid environmental change in the

context of empires although they were often actors in the process of colonially stimulated

environmental change. People who were part of the colonial regime were keeping records of

the effect of colonial extradition on the indigenous areas. As companies extended territorial

acquisitions, the associated research community grew proportionately. Environmental

theories and an ever growing flood of information about natural history and ethnology were

diffused through meetings and publications.

Mauritius, a French colony from 1721, was one of the first places of conservation. Zealous

anti-capitalist French reformers, tried to stop deforestation that the Dutch had started before.

Earliest experiments in conservation were carried out by scientists like Philibert Commerson,

Pierre Poivre and Jacques Henri Bernardin de St. Pierre. They viewed responsible

stewardship of the environment as an aesthetic and moral priority as well as a matter of

economic necessity.

Colonial conservationism had emerged because the conditions inherent in early Dutch,

French and British colonial rule promoted the rapid rise of a distinctive group of professional

naturalists and scientists to disproportionate influence and these early experts constructed an

effective critique of the environmental effects of colonial rule. As early as 1840, there was an

emergence of fully developed environmental concerns and conservation policies strongly

reinforced by scientific interpretations of environmental interaction. French approaches to the

environment of Mauritius involved a well-developed awareness of the possibility of

ecological regulation and control.

When the French annexed Mauritius in 1721, the commercial rivalry between Britain and

France had begun leading to an intensive contest for control over sources of marine timber

for the navies needed for the growing struggle for global trade and influence. The installation
of a forest reservation system in Mauritius was explicitly based on the fear of the impact of

deforestation on rainfall and soil erosion. Pierre Poivre in 1766 had evolved a conservationist

approach to the environment and he had interest in soil conditions, soil humidity, water table

levels, and the desirability of maintaining an extensive protective tree cover so that

agriculture on the island might prosper and criticised the indiscriminate deforestation. He

emphasised on the high priority attached to preserving the island forests which would assure

the colony a reliable level of rainfall. The first Forest Conservation Ordinance was passed in

November 1769, and it’s essential elements were incorporated in future statutes in, St.

Vincent, the Cape Colony, Natal, and India later.

Saint Pierre was the first to point out that deforestation on the island was contributing to the

rapid siltation of the main rivers and harbours of the island thus developing the twin concepts

of the mountain reserve and the river reserve, ideas which were widely applied in India after

1846. Commerson had the opportunity to observe the inhabitants of Tahiti and believed their

society idyllic in social and environmental terms. His writings indicate that by 1768 he was

already very critical of metropolitan France and its prevailing social values.Both in Mauritius

and later in India and Southern Africa the existence of local scientific institutions proved a

critical stimulus to the formulation of colonial responses to environmental change and

provided a platform for conservation propagandists, such as Louis Bouton in Mauritius and

Edward Balfour in Madras.

The first application of Poivre's ideas outside Mauritius happened in St. Helena. Surveys

carried out by Alexander Beatson, on Mauritius in 1794 indicated that by then the scientific

rationale behind forest reservation on Mauritius was becoming more widely known. He was

appointed Governor of St. Helena, where his programmes to plant trees and prevent soil

erosion became well known through his own publications, particularly the Tracts on St.

Helena (1816).
The employment of medical surgeons as superintendents India had already expanded the

professional role of the surgeon outside the medical service and laid the foundations for a

technical infrastructure of scientific expert and they concerned themselves with the effects of

forest clearance. As early as 1778 the Company had begun to employ eminent surgeon-

botanists, such as J. G. Koenig, Patrick Russell, and William Roxburgh in official capacities

as naturalist. Wherever attempts were made to establish conservancies or teak plantations in

Malabar, in Bengal, or in Burma between 1805 and 1822 the Medical Service quickly became

involved and lobbied heavily against the deforestation. Nathaniel Wallich, the director of the

Calcutta Botanic Garden, was pre-eminent among these early campaigners.

Throughout the 1820s and 1830s anxieties about deforestation were already frequently

expressed by experts such as Bishop Heber. After 1839 Humboldt's arguments linking

deforestation, increasing aridity, and temperature change on a global scale were widely

quoted by the medical service in India in its increasingly determined efforts to elicit

government controls on deforestation and as part of a wider campaign for public health

reforms. After 1837 the Company authorities changed course and sought instead to legitimate

an increased degree of government intervention in forest control too. Several Scottish

scientists, including Alexander Gibson, Edward Balfour and Hugh F. C. Cleghorn, became

enthusiastic proselytizers of the conservationist message. They advocated establishing a

forest system in India that was unequaled in scale. In an 1852 report, they warned that a

failure to set up an extensive forest system would result in ecological and social disaster. Also

series of droughts between 1835 and 1839, in the early 1860s and between 1877 and 1878

were all rapidly followed by state programs to strengthen forest protection.

Although the formal structure of an all-India Forest Department was organised in 1865

specifically to exclude the activities of private capital from the forests, the colonial

environmental debate, in which state forestry originated had already been going on in
Southern India for three decades, was dominated by the conservationist thinking of the

surgeons appointed to superintend the first two Presidency Conservancies in Bombay and

Madras.

Drought prompted environmental policy in other colonies like in Cape colony where John

Croumbie Brown was a pioneer of conservation. The South African drought of 1862 had

implications that extended far beyond conservation policies in Africa and encouraged the

development of an entire school of desiccationist theory that related the colonial experience

to the world at large for the first time. Many scientists became convinced that most of the

semiarid tropics were becoming arid as a result of colonial deforestation. The debate about

climatic change had become international in scope by the mid-1860s. Detailed research

raising the possibility that the very composition of the atmosphere might be changing

reinforced the concerns. Contemporary fears about global warming, found early advocacy in

the writings of J. Spotswood Wilson who believed that the transformation in climate was

caused by the changing proportions of oxygen and carbonic acid in the atmosphere.

By the mid-19th century long-established anxieties about artificially induced climatic change

and the loss of species had reached a climax. The spread of Western economic development,

initially through colonial expansion, was increasingly seen by more perceptive scientists as

eventually threatening the survival of humanity.

Concerns about the environment globally, have a long trajectory and various theories to

protect and conserve it and discussions on the same have been carried on for centuries. The

colonial governments were a big influence on such practices as well as the spread of ideas

about environmentalism was aided by them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Hughes, Donald J. ‘Global Dimensions of Environmental History’ in Pacific Historical Review, Vol.
70, No. 1 (2001), pp. 91-101

Grove, Richard. ‘Conserving Eden: The (European) East India Companies and Their Environmental
Policies on St. Helena, Mauritius and in Western India, 1660 to 1854’ in Comparative Studies in
Society and History, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1993), pp. 318-351

Grove, Richard. ‘Scottish Missionaries, Evangelical Discourses and the Origins of Conservation
Thinking in Southern Africa 1820-1900’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2,
(1989), pp. 163-187

Grove, Richard and Damodaran, Vinita. ‘Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental
Change Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History, 1676-2000: Part I’ in Economic and
Political Weekly Vol. 41 No. 41(2006) pp. 4345-4354

Grove, Richard. ‘Origins of Western Environmentalism’ in Scientific American, Vol. 267, No. 1
(1992), pp. 42-47