Environmental History Oxford Bibliograph

7/28/2016 Environmental History - Geography - Oxford Bibliographies
Environmental History
Robert Wilson
LAST MODIFIED: 27 JULY 2016
DOI: 10.1093/OBO/97801998740020140
Introduction
Environmental history is the study of the relationship between society and the environment over time. This broad definition hides as much
as it reveals since fields in the natural sciences such as biology and geology (or subfields of geography, such as historical geography and
political ecology) also study the interactions between humans and the rest of nature. What distinguishes the approach of historians and
geographers to environmental history from that of other scholars is an emphasis on historical context and how social divisions such as
class, race, and gender affect people’s relationship with and use of the nonhuman world. Environmental history emerged as a field in the
1970s, although it has deep antecedents in the disciplines of history and especially geography. Although most environmental historians are
from the discipline of history, geographers, with their abiding interest in societyenvironment relations, have played and continue to play a
role in the development of environmental history as a field.
General Overviews
Environmental historians have edited a number of handbooks, compendiums, and other overviews of the field in the 21st century that
enable readers to understand environmental history’s key aims, themes, and methods. Sackman 2010 focuses entirely on the United States
while McNeill and Mauldin 2012 and Isenberg 2014 focus on North America as well as many other regions of the world. All of these books
have chapters devoted to different facets of the field including agriculture, resource use, industrialization, and urbanization. Also, many also
have chapters on the role of race, class, and gender in environmental history. McNeill 2010 provides a succinct history and overview of the
field through the first decade of the 21st century while Sutter 2013 discusses major developments in American environmental history over
the past twenty years especially in the areas of environmental governance, human health and the environment, agrocecology, and urban
settings. Colten 2012 focuses exclusively on scholarship in environmental historical geography, a field closely allied with environmental
history. Wynn, et al. 2013 is a roundtable of geographers and historians reflecting on where environmental historical geography and
environmental history intersect and the major themes in both fields.
Colten, Craig E. “Environmental Historical Geography: A Review.” In Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, 2012.
An exhaustive review of scholarship in environmental historical geography from the mid20th century to the present. Discusses the rather
limited work by historical geographers on environmental questions until the 1990s and the resurgence of work on this topic since then.
Isenberg, Andrew C., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Unlike compendiums such as Sackman 2010 or McNeill and Mauldin 2012, this handbook does not focus on particular nations. Rather, it
examines the environmental history of ecological regions, such as deserts and the tropics, and key themes in the field.
McNeill, J. R. “The State of the Field of Environmental History.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 35 (2010): 345–374.
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199874002/obo-9780199874002-0140.xml?print 1/31
An essential article on trends in environmental history through the first decade of the 21st century and the development of environmental
history in different parts of the world. Also addresses some of the critiques of the field by nonenvironmental historians and other scholars.
McNeill, J. R., and Erin S. Mauldin, eds. A Companion to Global Environmental History. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012.
This companion has chapters on the environmental history of different regions and eras in world history from 150,000 years ago to the
present. Also addresses key topics in the field, most notably forests, fishing, evolution, technology, and industrialization.
Sackman, Douglas Cazaux. A Companion to American Environmental History. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2010.
A compendium of articles on different topics in environmental history and major developments in the country’s environmental history at
different times in the nation’s history. Each chapter is written by a leading scholar on the topic.
Sutter, P. S. “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History.” Journal of American History 100.1 (2013): 94–119.
Sutter’s is the lead piece in this special issue of the Journal of American History about the state of environmental history. He also discusses
major trends in the field since the early 1990s.
Wynn, Graeme, Craig Colten, Robert M. Wilson, Martin V. Melosi, Mark Fiege, and Diana K. Davis. “Reflections on the American
Environment.” Journal of Historical Geography 3 (December 2013): 152–168.
Essays by three geographers and responses by three historians on past trends and current directions in environmental historical
geography. A main theme is the overlap between this subfield and environmental history but also the relationship between environmental
history and other parts of geography, such as political ecology and cultural geography.
Antecedents
Although environmental history emerged in the 1970s, the field’s roots run much deeper. Geographers, with their abiding interest in society
environment relations, are one of the main influences on environmental history. George Perkins Marsh, while not a geographer, had a
profound effect on later geographers through Marsh 2003 (originally published in 1864), which focused on the pervasiveness of human
impacts on the landscape and their potential deleterious consequences. Written by an eminent British historical geographer, Darby 1940
was an exhaustive account of the draining of the fenlands in England. This work anticipated the many articles and books about wetland
drainage elsewhere in the world by environmental historians in the late 20th and early 21st century. Hoskins 1955 did not address
environmental matters in this seminal work, but his close attention to landscape change served as inspiration for future environmental
historians. Glacken 1967 addressed reoccurring questions and themes in Western thought from Antiquity to the early 19th century. Thomas
1956 is an essential mid20thcentury assessment about the degree to which human societies had transformed the globe. Marsh’s Man and
Nature was the primary inspiration for the book. Historical geographers such as Clark 1949, Meinig 1962, Meinig 1968, and Wynn 1980
examine the interplay of society and the environment focusing, respectively, on biological exchange, the expansion of agriculture, and the
timber industry and deforestation.
Clark, Andrew H. The Invasion of New Zealand by People, Plants and Animals: The South Island. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1949.
Far ahead of its time, this book examined the introduction of numerous species by European colonists in the first century after the
beginnings of colonization. Anticipated the later work of Alfred Crosby in Ecological Imperialism.
Darby, Clifford. The Draining of the Fens. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1940.
A pivotal study by the founder of modern historical geography in Britain, Darby explores the draining of wetlands in eastern England
beginning in the 17th century. This work anticipated the work of other geographers and historians in the 21st century who focused on the
draining of wetlands elsewhere.
Glacken, Clarence. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the
Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
An exhaustive study of environmental thought in the Western world. Glacken identified three reoccurring themes in Western thought about
nature: the earth as a made creation, the earth as a habitable place for people, and the degree to which people have modified nature for
their benefit.
Hoskins, William G. The Making of the English Landscape. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955.
Although not an environmental history, Hoskins’s popular and influential work shows how human landscapes reflect complicated layers of
changes from different times, which is a theme explored frequently by later environmental historians.
Marsh, George Perkins. Man and Nature, Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2003.
Although Marsh was not an academic geographer, his work had a major influence on geographers, especially in the mid20th century. His
book is a proto–world environmental history, illustrating the many ways societies have modified the earth. Originally published in 1864.
Meinig, D. W. On the Margins of the Good Earth: The South Australian Wheat Frontier, 1869–1884. Chicago: Association of
American Geographers, 1962.
Like Meinig’s work on the settlement and development of wheat farming in eastern Washington State (1968), this volume also looks at the
connections between grain farming, colonization, and aridity. Focuses on ways settlers employed new technologies to adapt to the
Australian environment.
Meinig, D. W. The Great Columbian Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805–1910. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.
A book based on Meinig’s dissertation that highlights the development of eastern Washington. While the environmental dimensions of the
study are underdeveloped, the book’s focus on the transformation of a region over a time became a key theme of environmental history the
field evolved.
Thomas, William L., Jr., ed. Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
This book came out of a 1955 symposium at Princeton University that brought together leading scholars in geography, anthropology, and
other disciplines to examine how societies had transformed the environment throughout history. The book was dedicated to George Perkins
Marsh, and the conference was coorganized by one of the most prominent geographers of the time, Carl Sauer.
Wynn, Graeme. Timber Colony: A Historical Geography of Early NineteenthCentury New Brunswick. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1980.
One of the earliest historical geographies in Canada that focused directly on environmental matters. Until this time, most Canadian historical
geographers focused on the development of social and economic geographies rather than the environment per se.
Classic Works
Environmental history emerged as a distinct subfield in the 1970s and early 1980s with the publication of a number of key works that went
on to become classics. First among them was Hays 1959 and Nash 1967, which used political and intellectual history approaches to
examine the development of the conservation movement and the wilderness ideal in the United States. The seminal work of Crosby 1972
showed the key role of biological exchange in world history. White 1979 and Cronon 1983 both drew on ecological concepts to show the
interplay among colonists and white settlers, Native Americans, and the environment in the Pacific Northwest and New England. Worster
1979 stresses the pivotal role of capitalism in transforming the southern Great Plains and fostering the conditions that created the Dust
Bowl of the 1930s, and in his book Nature’s Economy, he traced the development of ecology, both as a science and a much broader way of
conceptualizing the relationship between people and the rest of nature. Pyne 1982, the first of many books about wildfire, shows that even
fire has an environmental history. Merchant 1980 is both a founding work in environmental history and key work in the history of science
that shows the importance of gender to both fields.
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.
The first book by William Cronon, an environmental historian who went on to play a pivotal role in developing the field. Explored the different
types of land use and understandings of nature by Native American and English colonists in New England and how the process of
colonization utterly transformed the region.
Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972.
Crosby coined the term “Columbian Exchange,” which refers to the exchange of animals, plants, and pathogens in the Atlantic World after
1492. His work influenced many later environmental historians, and the Columbian Exchange became a key concept for those studying
early modern history.
Hays, Samuel P. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.
Like Nash 1967, Hays’s book is seen as helping launch the field of environmental history. It examines the progressive conservationists,
especially foresters and engineers, who aimed to bring natural resources under scientific management and sensibly exploited under the
watchful eye of the federal government.
Merchant, Carolyn. Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
Part history of science and part environmental history, Merchant’s book shows how “nature” was often constructed as female, especially in
premodern Europe. In the wake of the scientific revolution, nature was more often discussed using mechanical metaphors, stripping it of its
more organic and holistic connotations.
Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967.
Environmental historians have been known for their emphasis on material changes. But Nash’s book focused on ideas, especially the idea
of wilderness. Since then, wilderness has proved one of the most fruitful and controversial subjects in environmental history, and Nash’s
book has also served as an inspiration for generations of environmental activists.
Pyne, Stephen J. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
It is easy enough to convince people that landscapes have a history. But wildfire? Pyne’s book showed that even wildfire has a history. In
this book, and many others, Pyne shows how people have altered the scale and characteristics of wildland fire, primarily by altering the
context in which it spreads.
White, Richard. Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County Washington. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1979.
Like William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, White’s book examines the transformation of a relatively small area, first by Native Americans
and later by EuroAmerican settlers. White went on to be among the most influential of the first generation of environmental historians.
Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
This Bancroft Prize–winning book helped legitimate the field and raise the stature of environmental history. Worster argues the Dust Bowl of
the 1930s was not a natural disaster but a humanmade calamity caused mainly by capitalism and how this system encouraged settlers to
regard the land and nature solely as a commodity.
Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Part environmental history and part intellectual history, Worster’s book explores the origins of set of ideas the coalesced in the field of
ecology. But more broadly, he shows the tensions between two overarching views of nature: the Arcadian view, which emphasizes holism
and interconnectedness, and imperialist, which stresses human control.
Geography and Environmental History
Geography and environmental history have had a close relationship since the development of environmental history as a field in the 1970s.
Baker 2003 explores these connections in depth. But there are some major differences, too, most notably between environmental history
and various strands of critical and radical geography. A special issue of the radical journal Antipode (Walker 1994) about William Cronon’s
Nature’s Metropolis shows how acrimonious the disagreements could become and highlights environmental historians’s often steadfast
commitment to narrative and radical geographers’s embrace of critical social theory, two points of difference that have persisted in the
decades since then. Williams 1994 and Naylor 2006 review key works in environmental historical geography and their commonalities with
environmental history. Finally, Davis 2015 charts the growth of historical political ecology and how, in her view, this scholarship differs
theoretically and politically from environmental history.
Baker, Alan R. H. Geography and History: Bridging the Divide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
The book as a whole is about the development of historical geography and key themes in the field. The chapter “Environmental
Geographies and Histories” explores environmental themes in historical geography and the fields’s relationship with environmental history.
Davis, Diana. “Historical Approaches to Political Ecology.” In The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. Edited by Thomas
Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, 263–276. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Along with historical geography, political ecology is the field of geography with the greatest affinity with environmental history. In this useful
chapter, Davis traces the emergence of historical studies in political ecology and how this work differs from more conventional approaches
in environmental history.
Naylor, Simon. “Historical Geography: Natures, Landscapes, Environments.” Progress in Human Geography 30.6 (2006): 792–802.
Review of recent work in environmental historical geography and compares it to developments in environmental history.
Walker, Richard, ed. Special Issue: William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis. Antipode 26.2 (1994): 113–176.
A collection of reviews of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis and a response by Cronon highlight some of the differences and tensions
between radical geography and environmental history. Key sources of difference centered on use of critical social theory by radical
geographers and importance of narrative to environmental historians.
Walker, Richard, and Sarah Thomas. “Blinded by History: The Geographic Dimension of Environment and Society.” In A
Companion to American Environmental History. Edited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman, 553–578. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell,
2010.
A sympathetic engagement by two geographers with environmental history, arguing that the field would benefit by making greater efforts to
critically engage with the history of urbanization, to employ political ecology as an analytical frame to understand environmental hazards,
and consider issues of place, scale, and space.
Williams, Michael. “The Relations of Environmental History and Historical Geography.” Journal of Historical Geography 20.1
(1994): 3–21.
Useful overview of the connections between the two fields. Highlights the work of historical geographers on environmental topics such as
transformations of landscapes and the capitalist expansion in the modern period.
Journals
Leading geography journals as well as various national history journals publish environmental history articles from time to time. However,
the main journals for the subfield include Environmental History, which is the oldest environmental history journal. The journal was first
published as the Environmental History Review in 1976 before being renamed in 1995. Although the journal publishes work from around the
world, it still has a strong focus on the United States. It was partly because of this American emphasis that a group of nonAmerican
historians founded Environment and History in 1996. The Journal of Historical Geography also regularly publishes articles on environmental
history topics and occasionally has special issues on environmental history themes. Global Environment, while not exclusively devoted to
environmental history, has become an important venue for European and nonNorth American environmental history scholarship.
Environment and History. (1995–).
This journal is known for publishing nonAmerican environmental history and is a particularly strong outlet for European and Asian
environmental history scholarship.
Environmental History. (1996–).
Environmental History was formed by the merging of two other journals, Environmental History Review (1976–1995) and Forest and
Conservation History. The journal is affiliated with the American Society of Environmental History, which is the field’s largest professional
association.
Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and Social Sciences. (2008–).
Like Environment and History, Global Environment is a journal oriented to nonNorth American environmental history topics.
Journal of Historical Geography. (1975–).
Environmental historical geography has many affinities with environmental history. The Journal of Historical Geography is one of the
principal outlets for this sort of work. In addition to research articles, the journal also publishes reviews of environmental history books in
each issue.
Online Resources
The spread of the digital revolution and growth of social media have opened new forums for environmental historians to share information
among themselves and spread their ideas and findings to the nonacademic public. Cronon’s “Learning to Do Historical Research” (Cronon
2009) is an absolutely vital source for guidance on doing research in the field, and the Environmental History Bibliography is the best
database for articles, books, dissertations, and archival materials in environmental history. The Rachel Carson Center’s Environment and
Society Portal and the Network in Canadian Environmental History’s (NICHE) site are excellent places to read blog posts and short essays
about environmental history. Podcasts hosted by geographers and environmental historians, such as Nature’s Past and New Books in
Geography, feature interviews with authors of recent books in the field. Environmental historians are now employing Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) and other digital spatial visualizations, all of which are featured and discussed on Stanford’s Spatial History
Project.
Cronon, William. Learning to Do Historical Research: A Primer for Environmental Historians and Others. Learning Historical
Research, 2009.
A fabulous introduction to doing research in environmental history developed by one of the leading scholars in the field.
Environment and Society Portal.
Maintained by the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany, this digital portal contains a wealth of resources for those interested in
environmental history. Some of these include digital exhibitions, interactive environmental history timelines, and brief articles about new
work in environmental history.
Environmental History Bibliography.
A database of work in the field maintained by the Forest History Society. Students and scholars can search this database not only for books
and articles about environmental history but also for dissertations and archival collections on various environmental topics.
Nature’s Past.
A monthly podcast about topics in environmental history and new books in the field, mostly on Canadian subjects.
New Books in Geography.
Podcast featuring interviews with the authors of monographs and edited collections in historical geography and environmental history.
NICHE: Network in Canadian History and Environment.
A digital storehouse of material related to Canadian environmental history including blog posts, videos from conferences, and profiles of the
field’s scholars and their work.
Spatial History Project.
While this website has resources on environmental history, there are many nonenvironmental history resources, too. Contains digital
visualizations of environmental history of topics such as the transformation of San Francisco Bay and railroads in the American West.
Animals
Animals play a supporting role in many environmental histories, but in these books and articles, they take center stage. Isenberg 2000
probes reasons for the near destruction of one of America’s most iconic animals, the bison, in the 19th century. Geographer Emel 1998 and
Walker 2005 uncover the sustained, brutal campaigns against wolves in the United States and Japan. Cities are often seen as devoid of
wildlife, but Biehler 2013 shows the unsavory wild creatures—bedbugs, house flies, cockroaches, and rats—that live within the modern
metropolis and studies the efforts city officials took to exterminate them. Efforts to control Native peoples and animals have often occurred
in tandem, a theme explored in Thistle 2015. Benson 2010 examines the many ways scientists and wildlife managers have sought to track
animals via radio telemetry. Wilson 2014 and Wilson 2015 illuminate the role of animal migration and animals more generally in American
history.
Benson, Etienne. Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Examines the development and use of radio telemetry to track wildlife from the mid to late 20th century. Explores the contradictions and
controversies that arose by using cuttingedge technology to monitor and help conserve wild creatures.
Biehler, Dawn. Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.
An innovative study that combines insights from political ecology, environmental history, and animal history to investigate pests in American
cities. Biehler deftly shows how pests were central to the history of publichousing development, progressiveera urban policy, and more
recent struggles over environmental justice in cities.
Emel, Jody. “Are You Mean Enough, Big and Bad Enough? Wolf Eradication in the US.” In Animal Geographies: Place, Politics,
and Identity in the NatureCulture Borderlands. Edited by Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel, 91–117. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Drawing on ecofeminist perspectives, Emel explores the connections among racism, sexism, and predator eradication. Also uncovers the
negative stereotyping of wolves as vicious killers and how such attitudes informed wolfkilling campaigns.
Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
The bison was an iconic animal to many 19thcentury Americans, and Isenberg’s book tracks the precipitous decline and near extinction of
the animal. Isenberg shows the multicausal reasons for their near disappearance.
Thistle, John. Resettling the Range: Animals, Ecologies, and Human Communities in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC, 2015.
Thistle’s book recounts the efforts of British and Canadians to resettle the grasslands of central British Columbia formerly occupied by First
Nations peoples. Chronicles the efforts of ranchers to eradicate animals (feral horses and grasshoppers) that they saw as competing with
their cattle for grass.
Walker, Brett L. The Lost Wolves of Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.
Until the mid19th century, the Japanese revered the wolf, yet by the late 19th century they reviled the animal and exterminated them.
Walker shows how introducing modern livestock raising and American views toward predators fostered this change in attitudes.
Wilson, Robert M. “Animals and the American Landscape.” In North American Odyssey: Historical Geographies for the Twenty
First Century. Edited by Craig E. Colten and Geoffrey L. Buckley, 195–206. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014.
A synthesis of various strands of historical geography, environmental history, and animal history that examines how the relationship
between Americans and animals changed over time. Also focuses on how people employed animals to change landscapes, and in turn,
how Americans created landscapes for pets, wildlife, and livestock.
Wilson, R. M. “Mobile Bodies: Animal Migration in North American History.” Geoforum 65 (2015): 465–472.
Examines many types of migratory animals—salmon, bison, waterfowl, among others—and how Americans and Canadians have affected
them throughout the two nations’s histories. Focuses on habitat destruction and overharvesting as well as attempts to monitor migrants and
construct agreements to manage the animals across political borders.
Biological Exchange
Biological exchange has been a crucial topic in environmental history ever since the publication of Crosby 1972, and the movement of
organisms from one part of the world to another is a feature of many environmental histories. In the following books and articles, they are
central themes. In Crosby 1986, Alfred Crosby shows the key role of animals, plants, and pathogens in facilitating European conquest of
temperate regions around the world. Carney 2001 and Carney and Rosomoff 2010 show the pivotal role African slaves played in
introducing Old World crops such as rice and other plants to the Americas. McNeill 2012 surveys all this scholarship and more in his essay
about biological exchange in world history.
Carney, Judith A. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001.
Carney argues that slaves in South Carolina employed their experience in West African rice farming to grow the crop in colonial America.
Rice was part of knowledge system—planting, technologies, and processing after harvesting—that slaves brought with them from Africa.
Carney, Judith, and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Carney builds on Crosby’s work, which stressed the role of European and Asian domesticated plants in settler societies in the Americas.
She shows the many African plants that were cultivated in the Americas and the key role slaves played in this process.
Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972.
A seminal book where Crosby coined the term the Columbian Exchange—the transfer of animals, plants, and pathogens between the Old
World and the New World.
Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
Here Crosby furthers the claims he advanced in The Columbian Exchange, arguing that the organisms Europeans brought overseas,
purposely or inadvertently, enabled them to establish neoEuropes overseas, particularly in temperate regions.
McNeill, J. R. “Biological Exchange in Global Environmental History.” In A Companion to Global Environmental History. Edited by
J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, 433–452. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012.
Although much of the work on biological exchange focuses on the transfer of plants, animals, and pathogens from Africa and western
Europe to the Americas (or viceversa), this chapter by McNeill places such biological exchanges in a larger temporal and spatial
framework. Discusses differences between overland and oceanic exchanges.
Cities
Although early environmental histories once focused almost entirely on rural areas, the environmental history of cities has become one of
the most vibrant avenues of scholarship in the field. Tarr 1996 examines the role of air and water pollution in urban history, while the
seminal volume Melosi 2000 uncovers the role of urban water provision and sanitation in urban development. Cronon 1991 shows how
cities such as Chicago and their hinterland were created together and how the demand of cities for commodities such as grain, beef, and
timber radically transformed the countryside. Colten 2005 shows the herculean efforts by New Orleanians to fashion a livable city amid an
environment prone to floods, diseases, and hurricanes. Keeling 2005 and Gandy 2014 delve further into the history of urban water supplies
and sewerage systems. Klingle 2007 and Rawson 2010 are part of a second wave of environmental history that considers how class and
race factor into urban environmental change.
Colten, Craig. Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
All cities must cope with natural hazards and nuisances as they develop. Beset by disease, flooding, and hurricanes, New Orleans has
faced more than its fair share of environmental predicaments. Colten’s book shows how people in the city overcame these problems and
fostered a habitable metropolis.
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.
A key work in the field, Cronon’s book examines the development of Chicago and its relationship with its hinterland. Unlike later
environmental histories, which focused much more on ecological changes within the city limits, this book charts the flow of commodities
such as grain, timber, and livestock from the countryside to the metropolis.
Gandy, Matthew. The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2014.
Geographer Matthew Gandy’s earlier work examined the environmental history of New York City and its relation with his hinterland. This
book focuses exclusively on urban water and draws on case studies from around the world including Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los
Angeles, and London.
Keeling, Arn. “Urban Waste Sinks as a Natural Resource: The Case of the Fraser River.” Urban History Review 34.1 (2005): 58–70.
Keeling was one of the first historical geographers and environmental historians to study Canadian urban environmental history. In this
article, he shows British Columbia’s Fraser River was incorporated into the city of Vancouver’s sewagedisposal system.
Klingle, Matthew. Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
A key work in the second wave of environmental history in the wake of Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi’s pioneering work. Like earlier urban
environmental histories, Klingle examines how urbanites provide the environmental services necessary for modern cities to function while
also focusing on race and class.
Melosi, Martin V. The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
A culmination of nearly two decades of work, Melosi charts how Americans developed sanitary services—pure water, sewage conveyance
and treatment, and solid waste disposal—for modern cities.
Rawson, Michael. Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Another secondwave urban environmental history that addresses class and how it factored in the development of city parks, the municipal
water supply, and major public works projects. Argues that Boston was among the first cities in the United States to grapple with these
issues.
Tarr, Joel A. The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective. Akron, OH: University of Akron Press,
1996.
A key work in urban environmental history that addresses how American cities in the 19th century dealt with pollutants such as smoke and
toxic chemicals primarily by appropriating river, lakes, and the atmosphere as “sinks” for industrial wastes.
Class and Labor
Some historians criticized early work by environmental historians for being inattentive to class and working people. Hurley 1995 was among
the first environmental histories to examine the intersection of class and environment, especially in an urban context. Some environmental
historians have addressed this weakness, such as Andrews 2008 and Maher 2008, who look at the tangled labor and environmental
histories of Colorado coal miner activism during the early 19th century and the work programs of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
during the Great Depression. Peck 2006 explores some of the persistent tensions between labor history and environmental history and
suggests ways to ameliorate these deficiencies.
Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
A deft blending of labor and environmental history, Andrews’s book shows how the brutal working conditions in the coal mines of southern
Colorado (along with other social factors) laid the groundwork for the Ludlow uprising and subsequent massacre—one of the deadliest labor
disputes in American history.
Hurley, Andrew. Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
A groundbreaking study that steered the field toward greater attention to class and the urban environment. Hurley shows how workers,
especially African Americans, fought for a safe environment as the city’s white middle class fled to the suburbs leaving the poor to cope with
industrial pollution.
Maher, Neil M. Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of American Environmentalism. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008.
Maher’s book shows how the Civilian Conservation Corps, the most popular of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, built
roads, replanted trees, and restored damaged land. In the process, Maher argues, the CCC laid the groundwork for the flourishing of
postwar environmentalism.
Peck, Gunther. “The Nature of Labor: Fault Lines and Common Ground in Environmental and Labor History.” Environmental
History 11.2 (2006): 212–238.
Labor history and environmental history are important fields, but connections between them remain weak. Peck offers a way forward,
advocating for scholars in both fields to focus on the “geographies of labor” that would address the material and ecological connections
fostered through work.
Climate
Climate played an important, albeit infamous, role in the early20thcentury work of geographers Ellen Semple and Ellsworth Huntington
who both argued that climate and other environmental factors determined the destiny of civilizations. This “moral climatology” is
documented well by Livingstone 1991. After this climatic determinism went into disrepute, few geographers studied the historical relations
between climate and society. Now, climate history is a vibrant field in environmental history. Brooke 2014 attempts to survey the role of
climate in human history from the emergence of the first hominids to our modern era of anthropogenic global warming. Davis 2001 and
Carey 2010 show how periodic events such El Niños and longerterm warming affect different societies but also how these events were
affected by issues of social power and other factors such as imperialism and neoliberalism. Written by a historian of science and
environmental historian, Howe 2014 explores the history of climate science and the often fraught attempts of climatologists to influence
policy. The author of Hulme 2011 worries that scientists, scholars, and activists are too eager to attribute current and future societal
changes to climate—a process Hulme calls “climate reductionism.” The influential essay Chakrabarty 2009 argues that anthropogenic
climate change has profound consequences for the discipline of history and how we understand modernity.
Brooke, John L. Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2014.
Looks at climate change in the broad sweep of human history, particularly its role in influencing hominid evolution, the emergence of
agricultural societies, the spread of the black death, and the development of modern societies.
Carey, Mark. In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
A detailed regional history about the role of rapid glacial melt in Peru’s Callejón de Huaylas. Focuses on how rural people, urban dwellers,
and technological elites responded to these disasters.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222.
A sophisticated analysis of what the reality of climate change means for the discipline of history and our understanding of the past.
Chakrabarty is an expert on histories of globalization, postcolonialism, and subaltern studies, and as such, brings a unique perspective to
climate history.
Daniels, Stephen, and Georgina H. Endfield. “Feature: Narratives of Climate Change.” Journal of Historical Geography 35.2 (2009):
215–296.
Special issue of the Journal of Historical Geography focusing on the way ideas and stories about climate change circulate in the public
sphere.
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts?: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. New York: Verso, 2001.
Argues that a number of late19thcentury famines in China, India, and Brazil were due to droughts caused by El Niños. Davis contends that
imperial rule and the imposition of liberal capitalism undermined the ability of peasants to grow sufficient grain for themselves and led to
massive loss of life.
Howe, Joshua P. Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.
A history of the development of climate science, especially in the United States, from the 1950s to the 1990s and the place of climate
science in debates about the earth’s future. Argues that both scientists and activists hoping to reduce carbon emissions relied excessively
on this climate science.
Hulme, Mike. “Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism.” Osiris 26.1 (2011): 245–266.
Argues that the predictive natural and biological sciences have narrowly seen the rise of temperature due to global warming as determining
particular social outcomes. Hulme calls this “climate reductionism” and compares it to the climate determinism that prevailed in geography
early in the 20th century.
Livingstone, David N. “The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations on Race, Place and Virtue.” Journal of Historical
Geography 17.4 (1991): 413–434.
This is perhaps the best article about environmental, or climatic, determinism in the early years of the discipline of geography.
Contemporary geographers are wary of ascribing too much weight to climate as a causal agent in human history, partly because of the
mistakes earlier climate determinists made in their scholarship.
Culture of Nature
Environmental history is known for its focus on material changes to the landscape—felling trees, plowing fields, harvesting fish, and
damming rivers. But some important strands focus squarely on what these sorts of changes meant for people in the past and how they used
art, film, and other media to understand their relationship to nature. Sachs 2013 resurrects the idea of arcadia and shows how this ideal
animated the writings and paintings of some of the most influential writers and artists in 19thcentury America. Mitman 2009 shows the role
of wildlife film in sculpting America’s understanding of wild creatures. Dunaway 2005 and Dunaway 2015 explore the role of images and film
in American environmental reform from the early 20th to early 21st centuries.
Dunaway, Finis. Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
Images have played pivotal roles in environmental protection campaigns and in sculpting Americans’s views toward nature. Dunaway
examines pivotal environmental images from the early to mid20th century and decodes their meaning.
Dunaway, Finis. Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015.
Dunaway continues the exploration of images and environmental reform he began with Dunaway 2005. Through the analysis of films,
photographs, and advertisements Dunaway shows how images illuminated environmental problems while at the same time codifying ways
to address them, particularly via individualistic, marketbased solutions.
Mitman, Gregg. Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009.
By the mid to late 20th century, Americans had little contact with wild animals in the flesh but were bombarded with images of wildlife in
movies and on TV. Mitman examines the principal ways these animals were portrayed and the stories told by Disney studios and other
wildlife filmmakers about animals.
Sachs, Aaron. Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
The market and transportation revolutions swept over the United States during the early to mid19th century and transformed the American
countryside. Amid this tumult, Sachs shows how influential painters, writers, and scholars promoted a view of arcadia where society and
nature coexisted in harmony.
Environmentalism
Environmental historians have devoted a great deal of scholarship to environmentalism and earlier environmental reform movements such
as conservation. This section includes only a small sampling. George Perkins Marsh is often considered a protoenvironmental historian
and environmentsociety geographer, and Lowenthal 2000 shows the development of his conservation vision. Hays 1987, Zelko 2006,
Stradling 2012, and Rome 2013 explain, in various ways, the emergence of postwar environmentalism in the United States and the massive
outpouring of ecological concern on Earth Day 1970. Bess 2003 discusses the growth of environmental consciousness in France in the
postwar period, the failures of environmental politics, and the growth of what he calls the “lightgreen society.” Other European nations,
such as Germany, are praised as leaders in sustainability. Uekötter 2014 shows the role of German environmentalism in helping the nation
attain this vaunted green status. Thus far, few environmental historians have sought to chart the growth of environmentalism globally. Two
exceptions are Guha 2000 and Radkau 2014, both of whom examine the continuities and differences among strands of environmentalism,
especially between the Global North and Global South.
Bess, Michael. The LightGreen Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003.
A nuanced history of the emergence of environmental consciousness in France and other Western democracies. Argues that
environmentalism, in France and elsewhere, failed to significantly check consumerism, which led in turn to a halfrevolution and the
development of a “lightgreen society.”
Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. New York: Longman, 2000.
Intended primarily for undergraduates, but one of the only texts that looks at environmentalism in both the Global North and Global South as
well as socialist countries, past and present.
Hays, Samuel P. Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985. New York: Cambridge
Perhaps the most influential book about environmentalism in the field of environmental history. Hays argues that early20thcentury
conservation was about production while postwar environmentalism focused on consumption. Aesthetic concerns, toxic threats to human
health, and employing the science of ecology are characteristics of the movement.
Lowenthal, David. George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.
A thorough revision of Lowenthal’s classic biography of Marsh published in the 1950s. Marsh was the author Man and Nature, one of the
first books to examine the extent to which people have modified nature, often to the determinant of human societies and nature alike.
Lowenthal explains Marsh’s ideas and places them within their 19thcentury context.
Radkau, Joachim. The Age of Ecology. Malden, MA: Polity, 2014.
An exhaustive study of the growth of environmental consciousness and environmental politics from the late 18th century through the
“environmental revolution” of the 1970s in different parts of the world.
Rome, Adam. The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 TeachIn Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation. New York: Hill and
Wang, 2013.
Earth Day 1970s was the largest public demonstration in American history and the clearest symbol of the outpouring of environmental
concern in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rome has a detailed analysis of the coalition of groups involved in Earth Day, the diversity of
events, and consequences of environmental concern in later years.
Stradling, David. The Environmental Moment, 1968–1972. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.
An extremely useful collection of primary sources from the environmental awakening during the 1960s and 1970s. Stradling’s introduction
and his discussion of each selection places the sources in context.
Uekötter, Frank. The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2014.
Among scholars and activists, Germany is heralded as a nation that exemplifies sustainability. Uekötter assesses the validity of this
common perception and shows the development of environmentalism in Germany over the past century and how it deviates from
environmental reform movements in the United States and elsewhere in Europe.
Zelko, Frank. “Challenging Modernity: The Origins of Postwar Environmental Protests in the United States.” In Shades of Green:
Environmental Activism from Around the Globe. Edited by Christof Mauch, Nathan Stoltzfus, and Douglas R Weiner, 13–40. New
York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
A useful synthesis examining the development of environmentalism in the United States after the Second World War. Traces how
environmental sentiment emerged, in part, from concerns about nuclear fallout, toxic chemicals, and environmentalism as part of an
antimodern sentiment in American culture.
Fisheries
Environmental history remains a terrestrially oriented field. Histories of fisheries are a notable exception to standard fare in environmental
history. McEvoy 1986 remains a classic in the field for the way it examines the intersection of technology, economy, politics, and ecology in
shaping the California fishery. Taylor 1999 and Wadewitz 2012 build on McEvoy’s work by paying careful attention to the geography of
Pacific salmon fisheries and struggles among fishermen divided by race, ethnicity, and manners of fishing. Bolster 2012 argues that
massive depletion of fish stocks in the North Atlantic preceded the development of industrial fishery technologies. Bavington 2010
addresses perhaps the most famous overfishing disaster in North American history, the 1992 cod collapse, and efforts to resuscitate the
fishery since then.
Bavington, Dean L. Y. Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse. Vancouver: UBC, 2010.
This book is much more about efforts to resuscitate the Newfoundland cod fishery after it collapsed in the early 1990s rather than the
collapse itself. Focuses on the role of state management, which ironically probably hastened the demise of the cod rather than saving the
fish from destruction.
Bolster, W. Jeffrey. The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
A history of fishing in the North Atlantic from the age of the Vikings to the early 20th century, Bolster argues that most of the fisheries in the
region were severely overfished before the advent of steam power and industrial fishing.
McEvoy, Arthur. The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fishery, 1850–1980. New York: Cambridge
Pivotal study that influenced fisheries scholars in later years. McEvoy examines how the fishing industry exploited common fishery
resources and the many ways regulations failed to stem destruction of fish stocks. McEvoy takes pains to show the multiple, intersecting
forces that led to the collapse of fish populations.
Taylor III, Joseph. Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1999.
Perhaps the definitive history of the decline of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest from the mid19th to late 20th century. Pays
particular attention to how different social groups struggled for access to fishing sites and fishing grounds and the way fishing regulations
harmed Native Americans and Asian Americans.
Wadewitz, Lissa K. The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2012.
A detailed history of salmon fishing and management along the USCanada border in northern Puget Sound and the southern Strait of
Georgia. Wadewitz shows how humanconstructed borders, such as the international border, divided the Salish Sea, the ancestral area
where Native peoples fished and lived for millennia.
Food
Food, and agriculture in particular, is a major topic in environmental history both in the field’s early works and recent scholarship. This
section has a sampling of key books on the subject. Stoll 2003 shows that worries about soil exhaustion and efforts to develop a more
sustainable agriculture have deep roots in the mid19th century. Fitzgerald 2003 and Walker 2004 explored the development of industrial,
capitalist agriculture and how this model, while developed in the United States, became common globally by the mid to late 20th century.
Soluri 2005 is a transnational history that focuses on the banana to show the connections between food production in the Global South and
consumption the Global North. Freidberg 2009 and Ott 2012 look at the cultural dimensions of our relationship with food through studies of
the idea of fresh food and the history of the pumpkin.
Fitzgerald, Deborah. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2003.
Modernday environmentalists see the industrialization of agriculture as a key source of problems with farming. Fitzgerald shows how this
came apart and how the main attributes of the system were later exported out of the capitalist context where it developed to the evolving
state socialist model in the USSR.
Freidberg, Susan. Fresh: A Perishable History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009.
A history and meditation on the idea of “freshness” told through the history of everyday foods such as beef, milk, eggs, fish, fruit, and
vegetables.
Ott, Cindy. Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.
Part cultural history and environmental history, Ott traces the fate of the pumpkin in American society from relatively worthless crop raised
by poor farmers to a cultural icon displayed, but rarely eaten, annually during Halloween.
Soluri, John. Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2005.
A fascinating transnational history, Soluri’s book uncovers the role of the United Fruit Company in the Honduran banana industry and the
changing cultural meanings of bananas in the United States.
Stoll, Steven. Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.
Stoll examines agricultural reformers in northern states during the antebellum period. Unlike most environmental historians who trace the
destructive aspects of 19thcentury agriculture, Stoll shows the way some reformers tried to foster sustainable farming even as agriculture
became a more commercial affair.
Walker, Richard. The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California. New York: New Press, 2004.
Richard Walker is a leading Marxist geographer, and he uses a political economy approach to analyze the development of California
agriculture, which he sees as pioneering—for better or worse—the main features of capitalist, industrial agriculture common in North
America today.
Forests
Forests occupy an important place in environmental history partly because timbered areas were among the first areas managed by state
conservation agencies. The exhaustive work of Williams 1989 and Williams 2003 shows the role of forests in American history and the
global history of deforestation. Braun 2002 and Kosek 2006 employ poststructuralist theory to examine the different ways forests were
represented by timber companies, indigenous peoples, Chicanos, and government foresters.
Braun, Bruce. The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002.
Drawing on poststructuralist and postcolonial theory, Braun examines how early explorers and white settlers in British Columbia
perpetuated views of the region’s rainforests, principally as timber resources or untouched wild Edens in need of protection. Neither view
accounted for the presence of First Nations peoples or their land claims.
Kosek, Jake. Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Less about the forests of northern New Mexico than the contentious struggles among Chicano villagers and environmentalists, timber
companies, and government resource managers over access to and authority over the forests. Deftly employs critical social theory to
illuminate these conflicts.
Williams, Michael. Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
An extremely detailed study of the role of forests in American history and the development of the United States.
Williams, Michael. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
An invaluable reference. The definitive volume about deforestation in world history from the time of Antiquity to the early 21st century.
Williams describes and catalogues deforestation around the world and discusses some of the driving forces behind this destruction.
Gender
Critics of environmental history have claimed that environmental historians are inattentive to social difference, especially race, class, and
gender. Certainly, in the early decades of the field this was true, although Carolyn Merchant’s pioneering work (Merchant 2010 and
Merchant 1989) was an exception this trend. Beginning in the early 21st century, environmental historians produced a small number of
studies that placed gender at the center of analysis. Scharff 2003 offers a forceful argument about the importance of gender in
environmental history. Rome 2006 and Merchant 2010 highlight the pivotal role of women in progressive conservation crusades. Rome also
shows how critics claimed male conservation leaders were unmanly, which led men in the movement to demonstrate that they could
support conservation and remain masculine. Unger 2012 draws on this literature and much more in her excellent survey of women in
American environmental history.
Langston, Nancy. Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
This sophisticated study examines both the discursive and material construction of women’s bodies. Langston focuses on endocrine
disruptors, which are chemicals that can alter the expression of sexual differences in humans as well as other animals.
Merchant, Carolyn. Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1989.
Focuses on the evolution of New England from a region controlled by Native Americans and an understanding of the natural world as
animate to a world, through the process of colonialism (and later the emergence of capitalism and industrialism) of a region dominated by
EuroAmericans and a less holistic view of nature.
Merchant, Carolyn. “George Bird Grinnell’s Audubon Society: Bridging the Gender Divide in Conservation.” Environmental
History 15.1 (2010): 3–30.
Explores constructions of masculinity and femininity during the progressive conservation era. Highlights the role of women in the Audubon
Society and bird protection more generally.
Rome, Adam. “‘Political Hermaphrodites’: Gender and Environmental Reform in Progressive America.” Environmental History 11
(July 2006): 440–463.
Shows the key role of women in late19th to early20thcentury conservation but also how their involvement posed challenges for male
leaders in the movement, who took pains to demonstrate their masculine qualities in face of critics who depicted them as effete.
Scharff, Virginia J., ed. Seeing Nature Through Gender. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
A collection of essays that focuses mostly, although not entirely, on the discursive construction of gender identities and the relation of
women to the environment.
Unger, Nancy C. Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History. New York: Oxford University Press,
2012.
A survey text that brings together insights from women’s history and environmental history to examine how women have shaped the
American environment and women constructed their gender in different ways throughout the nation’s history.
Health and Disease
Early environmental historians, most notably Alfred Crosby in The Columbian Exchange (1972), have argued that disease played a pivotal
role in world history. This focus on health and disease has broadened and deepened in the decades since then. In particular, as Gregg
Mitman argues (2005), Americans often saw a connection between the health of the land and the health of people. Valenčius 2002
examines how American settlers in the early to mid19th century often assessed the value of land through a lens of health, judging some
places as sickly and others as salubrious. Mitman 2007 demonstrates how landscape changes could foster the spread of allergens and how
people sought relief from allergies in landscapes seen as healthier. Disease, especially malaria and yellow fever, has played in important
role in geopolitics, as McNeill 2010 forcefully argues. Nash 2006 and Langston 2010 explore the role of toxic chemicals in the environment
and how they made their way into permeable human bodies, thus showing that the supposed barrier between humans and nature was a
fiction.
Langston, Nancy. Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
An innovative study about the role of endocrine disruptors in environmental history. Langston uses one of these disruptors, the synthetic
hormone DES, to illustrate how such chemicals affected humans, animals, and travelled through the environment in unexpected ways.
McNeill, J. R. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010.
Explores how the mosquitoborne diseases malaria and yellow fever affected European conquest of the Caribbean and how such diseases
later served to repel European military campaigns during the Haitian Revolution. Also shows how environmental transformations fostered
“Creole ecologies” that aided the spread of malaria and yellow fever.
Mitman, Gregg. “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History.” Environmental History 10.2
(2005): 184–210.
Key historiographic article by a leading environmental historian and historian of science on the role of health, disease, and landscape in
American history.
Mitman, Gregg. Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Examines the role of bodies, places, and allergies in the American landscape. Argues that allergies are not a thing but a relationship and
that over time, Americans have purposely and unwittingly modified landscapes in ways that made people more vulnerable to allergic
reactions and asthma.
Nash, Linda. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006.
Nash examines how understandings about the relationships between human bodies and the environment have changed over time. She
shows how modern conceptions of the body see it as impermeable to toxins. But since the mid20th century, the rise of pesticides has
shown the threats such toxins pose to human bodies.
Valenčius, Conevery Bolton. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and The Land. New York:
Basic Books, 2002.
Valenčius shows how 19thcentury American settlers saw that land as sickly or healthy and made decisions on where to settle and how to
use the land partially based on this criteria.
Protected Areas
Protected areas such as national forests, national parks and wildlife refuges have been a key area of environmental history scholarship for
decades. Wilson 2014 surveys the different types of federal public lands and protected areas in the United States and their historical
development. Keeling and Wynn 2011 examines the challenges in creating and managing Strathcona Park, the first provincial park in British
Columbia. Sayre 2002, Langston 2003, and Wilson 2010 explore the efforts to create wildlife refuges in the western United States and
manage them for migratory birds or other threatened species. Walker 2007 offers a focused study on urban park and green space
protection in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fiege 2011 explores the natural history tradition and how it has influenced National Park Service
understanding of National Parks and how the field of environmental history can contribute to a better understanding of the parks the agency
manages.
Fiege, Mark. “Toward a History of Environmental History in the National Parks.” The George Wright Forum 28.2 (2011): 128–147.
Fiege argues that while National Park Service officials are just now coming to appreciate the field of environmental history, the NPS has
long relied on insights from natural history, typified by the work of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and George Perkins Marsh.
Fiege also notes the influence of geographers on park history.
Keeling, Arn, and Graeme Wynn. “‘The Park Is a Mess’: Development and Degradation in British Columbia’s First Provincial Park.”
B.C. Studies 170 (2011): 119–150.
While national parks receive much of the media and scholarly attention regarding protected areas, state and provincial parks have even
more visitors than these federal areas. Geographers Keeling and Wynn rectify this oversight by examining the history of Strathcona Park in
western Canada’s’ British Columbia.
Langston, Nancy. Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2003.
Riparian areas are among the most important ecosystems in arid regions such as the intermountain area of the western United States.
Langston uses the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon to examine the challenges of conserving and managing such environments.
Sayre, Nathan F. Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest: Species of Capital. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2002.
The book is a case study of the evolution of areas in southern Arizona from grassland to wildlife refuge. But more broadly, it is an analysis
of the contested nature of managing protected areas in the region.
Walker, Richard. The Country in the City: The Greening of San Francisco Bay Area. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.
Walker’s study of environmentalism in the Bay Area is not exclusively about protected areas. But it shows in detail the efforts by middle and
upperclass residents in the region to create parks, protect green space, and limit suburban sprawl especially in the decades after the
Second World War.
Wilson, Robert M. Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010.
Examines how federal, state, and provincial wildlife managers in the United States and Canada created a chain of refuges along migratory
bird routes in western North America. Addresses the challenges of managing wild nature amid industrial, irrigated agricultural landscapes,
especially in California.
Wilson, Randall K. America’s Public Lands: From Yellowstone to Smokey the Bear and Beyond. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2014.
The best onevolume work on the evolution of federal public lands in the United States. Also contains invaluable overviews of the four
principal federal landmanagement agencies: National Park Service, National Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land
Management.
Race
Race, like other types of social difference such as class or gender, have become fundamental categories of analysis in recent
environmental history. Glave and Stewart 2006 shows how groups such as African Americans understood and used nature, often in ways
different from the dominant white culture. Pioneering scholarship in Pulido 1996 examined the struggles of Latinos in the southwest over
land and livelihood. Chiang 2008 shows the racial divisions that plagued the fisheries in California’s Monterey Bay, and later, how the
tourism economy highlighted ecological diversity while downplaying social diversity of the community. Wilson 2011 and Baldwin, et al. 2011
show how cultural constructions of landscapes and nations occurred in conjunction with constructions of white identity, often to the
determinant of those seen as nonwhite.
Baldwin, Andrew, Audrey Kobayashi, and Laura Cameron, eds. Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature, and the Historical
Geographies of Whiteness in Canada. Vancouver: UBC, 2011.
The volume contributors employ insights from critical race theory and political ecology to critique prevalent notions of race and the
Canadian landscape. In various ways the authors show how cultural constructions of whiteness as a racial category, and popular
understandings of the northern landscape, went hand and hand.
Chiang, Connie. Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2008.
Charts the conflicts between two uses of the coastline in central California: fishing and canning versus elite tourism. As Chiang shows, this
was also a battle between middleclass white users of coastline, who valued it for recreation, and Chinese fishermen who depended on the
nearby ocean and coastal areas for their livelihood.
Glave, Dianne D., and Mart A Stewart, eds. To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
African Americans have not received the attention they deserve in most American environmental history scholarship. This edited collection
seeks to rectify that somewhat with essays that examine African American use of land and wildlife for sustenance in the rural South,
conflicts over access to parks, and other topics.
Pulido, Laura. Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1996.
An important work on historical environmental injustice by geographer Laura Pulido that focuses on two case studies: an antipesticide
campaign by the United Farmworkers and the struggle of Chicanos in northern New Mexico to gain access to grazing land.
Wilson, Robert M. “Landscapes of Promise and Betrayal: Homesteading, Reclamation, and Japanese American Incarceration
during the Second World War.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101.2 (2011): 424–444.
Using perspectives from environmental history and critical race theory, Wilson shows how ideas of whiteness informed federal efforts to
irrigate arid Western landscapes and how establishing Japanese American internment camps in the midst of these reclaimed lands
challenged white settlers’ understanding of the proper racial makeup of the region.
Rivers and Wetlands
Rivers and wetlands, along with forests, have received much attention from environmental historians in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries. This section highlights some of the most important recent scholarship. Among the most influential of this work is White 1995,
which uses the ideas of work and energy to understand the transformation of the Columbia River and other rivers more generally. Evenden
2004 examines conflicts between fishers and hydropower on western Canada’s Fraser River, while Stunden Bower 2011 studies the
massive wetland irrigation and drainage schemes in late19th and early20thcentury Manitoba. Colten 2014 explores the American South,
a region plagued by too much and not enough water in parts and the attempts to drain wetlands and construct waterworks to contend with
these problems. Gumprecht 1999, Kaika 2005, and Castonguay and Evenden 2012 show the important role or rivers and waterworks in
cities, until recently, an understudied topic in environmental history. Evenden 2015 shows how mobilization for the Second World War led to
massive transformations of waterways in Canada to provide power for the war effort.
Castonguay, Stéphane, and Matthew Evenden. Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
A collection of essays focusing on urban rivers in North America and Europe. Discusses how rivers were appropriated for drinking water,
sewage disposal, and industrial waste, especially during the period of rapid urbanization and industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
Colten, Craig. Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2014.
Colten shows how the southern United States is at once plagued by both too much and not enough water. Focuses on the disputes over
water (and water control) that have troubled the region for centuries and the sometimesharebrained schemes to divert water from the
Mississippi River to Texas.
Evenden, Matthew. Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004.
The Fraser River is one of the largest undammed rivers in North American. Employing a transnational perspective, Evenden shows how
agreements between the United States and Canada to secure hydroelectric power from the Columbia River and a commitment to protecting
salmon runs led Canadians to keep the Fraser dam free.
Evenden, Matthew. Allied Power: Mobilizing HydroElectricity During Canada’s Second World War. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2015.
Mobilizing for the Second World War required the massive harnessing of natural resources by different nations. Evenden shows a Canadian
dimension of this by examining how the state and industries appropriated and refashioned the nation’s rivers to serve the war effort.
Gumprecht, Blake. The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death and Possible Rebirth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
A biography of the Los Angeles River. Shows the importance of the river to early settlers in the region and how decades of engineering left
the river as little more than a floodcontrol structure. Also chronicles incipient efforts to revitalize the river, which have only intensified since
the book was published.
Kaika, Maria. City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City. New York: Routledge, 2005.
A thin volume that examines the links between modernity and the development of urban water systems. Argues that potable water should
be viewed as a produced commodity, like many other natural resources, and demonstrates how urban water systems changed the scope
and depth of urbanites connection to the natural world.
Stunden Bower, Shannon. Wet Prairie: People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba. Vancouver: UBC, 2011.
Much of the environmental history of water is about irrigation projects. But wetland drainage was also extremely important, especially in late
19th and early 20th centuries when state, provincial, and federal governments undertook massive drainage schemes to create agricultural
land. Bower shows such efforts in the Canadian province of Manitoba.
White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
Perhaps the most influential book of river history—and among the most influential in environmental history—since the 1990s. White argues
that nature and culture are not separate realms. Rather, the two are deeply intertwined, and White uses the history of the Columbia River in
to explore this relationship.
Nations, Regions, and the World
Environmental history began in the United States, but in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, scholarship about other regions has
flourished. Since this literature is vast, the articles, chapters, and books in this section are restricted mostly to works of synthesis or
historiographic essays on the state of environmental history in various regions. Readers can use the references in these articles, chapters,
and books to delve more deeply into the environmental history of respective areas.
World
Ecological regions are not confined by national borders and environmental historians have sought to address this by writing histories that
encompass large spatial and temporal scales. World environmental historians seek to identify the longterm patterns and connections
among different parts of the globe and compare and contrast the environmental histories of different regions. Perhaps the preeminent world
environmental historian is J. R. McNeill, who in his classic book Something New Under the Sun (McNeill 2000) seeks to tell the
environmental history of the 20th century, while Richards 2003 attempts to do the same thing for the early modern world, 1500–1800.
McNeill is also the coeditor of McNeill and Mauldin 2012, a superb collection of essays about important themes in world environmental
history and different regions of the globe. Marks 2015 is not exclusively an environmental history, but this brief textbook on the evolution of
the modern world places environmental history at the core of the narrative. Burke and Pomeranz 2009 is a splendid edited collection with
particularly good coverage of the environmental history of regions outside the United States and western Europe to better understand world
environmental history. Moore 2015 is a theoretically sophisticated book drawing on worldsystems theory and Marxian political economy to
place capitalism at the center of world environmental history over the past few centuries.
Burke, Edmund, III, and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds. The Environment and World History. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009.
Edited by two leading world environmental historians, this collection tackles major global transformations, such as shifting energy regimes,
and environmental histories of regions beyond the United States and western Europe, such as China, India, Russia, and Latin America.
Marks, Robert B. The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth Century to the
TwentyFirst Century. 3d ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.
Although not exclusively an environmental history, Marks’s succinct survey of world history places environmental questions at the heart of
his narrative. Some environmental topics he addresses include biological exchange, disease and depopulation, and climate change.
McNeill, J. R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
In this ambitious book, McNeill surveys the environmental history of the last century focusing on changes to the hydrosphere, biosphere,
lithosphere, and atmosphere. He also assesses the role of economic, political, and demographic factors behind the monumental
environmental changes during the 20th century.
McNeill, J. R., and Erin S. Mauldin, eds. A Companion to Global Environmental History. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012.
An exceedingly useful collection of chapters about different facets of world environmental history and the key themes of the environmental
history of separate regions
Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso, 2015.
A theoretically ambitious work that combines insights from political economy and world environmental history to explain the development of
capitalism over the past few centuries. Also seeks to break down the distinction between society and the environment, which is still
prevalent in environmental thought in the social and natural sciences.
Richards, John. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003.
A monumental survey of world environmental history, c. 1500–1800. Richards focuses on four themes: deforestation and land settlement;
the biological exchange of organisms among different regions; the exploitation of fish and terrestrial wildlife (“the world hunt”); and the
emerging global energy and resource crisis.
Usa
The United States was the first country where environmental history emerged as a standalone field, and consequently, it has the largest
literature. These surveys, companions, and historiographic essays offer an entry point into this scholarship. Sutter 2013 provides a concise
survey of key scholarship in the field in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and references earlier work and other historiographic essays.
Steinberg 2012 is the leading textbook of American environmental history and is now in its third edition. Fiege 2012 is less a survey of
American environmental history than an exploration of how scholars can use an environmental history perspective to examine key topics
and themes in American history not normally considered “environmental.”
Fiege, Mark. The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2012.
Despite what the title suggests, this is not a survey of American environmental history. Rather, this book examines key events or topics in
American history through the lens of environmental history. Subjects include the environmental history of the Salem witch trials, the Battle of
Gettysburg, and the development of the atomic bomb.
Steinberg, Ted. Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Now in its third edition, this is the standard textbook of American environmental history. Particularly strong on material changes to the
American landscape—felling trees, creating farms, damming rivers, building cities—and the role of capitalism in the process.
Sutter, P. S. “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History.” Journal of American History 100.1 (4 June 2013):
94–119.
The most recent survey of trends in American environmental history scholarship since the 1990s. Sutter identifies three key themes that
environmental historians have focused in particular: the environmentmanagement state, agroecological history, and histories of disease
and health.
Australia and New Zealand
Although these two countries are in a similar region of the world and British settlers colonized both places, Robin and Griffiths 2004 makes
the case that the environmental histories of both countries are quite different. Griffiths 2015 is the most uptodate survey of scholarship in
Australian environmental history while Pawson and Brooking 2013 is an edited collection that provides a superb overview of New Zealand’s
environmental history written by new and established scholars.
Griffiths, Tom. “Environmental History, Australian Style.” Australian Historical Studies 46 (January 2015): 157–173.
Article reflects on the meaning of “deep time” for understanding Australian history. Also delineates the major themes of Australian
environmental history scholarship over the past fifty years: histories that explore nature as historical agent, histories that employ biology and
ecology, and histories that engage with aboriginal history.
Pawson, Eric, and Tom Brooking, eds. Making a New Land: Environmental Histories of New Zealand. Dunedin, New Zealand:
Otago University Press, 2013.
The principal textbook of New Zealand environmental history. Contains nineteen chapters by experts on the nation’s geography and history,
including sections on Māori (i.e., aboriginal) landscape use, deforestation, the creation of pasture, early conservation efforts, and other
topics.
Robin, Libby, and Tom Griffiths. “Environmental History in Australasia.” Environment and History 10 (2004): 439–474.
A nuanced essay that explores the commonalities in the environmental history between Australia and New Zealand, especially their
common background as settler societies incorporated into the British Empire but also the persistent difference between the two nations,
especially their ecology and different indigenous populations.
Canada
Canadian environmental history only developed as a distinct subfield of history in the late1990s, but since then, the field has flourished.
Unlike environmental history in many other countries, geographers, and especially historical geographers, comprise a significant portion of
environmental history scholars in Canada. Evenden and Wynn 2009, Piper 2013, and MacEachern 2014 all review the development of
Canadian environmental history and key themes in the field. Surveys of the nation’s environmental history include Wynn 2007 and
MacDowell 2012.
Evenden, Mathew, and Graeme Wynn. “‘54:40 or Fight’: Writing Within and Across Boundaries in North American Environmental
History.” In Nature’s End: History and the Environment. Edited by Paul Warde and Sverker Sorlin, 215–246. London: Palgrave,
2009.
A historiographic chapter by geographers Evenden and Wynn about the development of environmental history in Canada. They identify
some of the key themes in the nation’s environmental history, including aboriginal life, disease diffusion, resettlement and environmental
change, and wilderness and wildlife politics among other topics.
MacDowell, Laurel Sefton. An Environmental History of Canada. Vancouver: UBC, 2012.
The leading textbook of Canadian environmental history. MacDowell sees the country’s environmental history chiefly as one of ecological
ruin brought on by imperialism and industrial development.
MacEachern, Alan. “The Text That Nature Renders?” Canadian Historical Review 95.4 (2014): 545–554.
MacEachern’s piece is an introduction to a special issue of the Canadian Historical Review, titled the Landscape of Canadian
Environmental History. It includes articles by leading environmental historians in Canada as well as nonCanadian environmental historians
familiar with the country’s history about the state of the field and avenues for future research
MacEachern, Alan, and William J. Turkel, eds. Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2009.
An edited collection of recent and classic works in Canadian environmental history by historians and geographers aimed mostly at an
undergraduate audience.
Piper, Liza. “Knowing Nature Through History.” History Compass 11.12 (2013): 1139–1149.
One of the defining features of environmental history is the focus on the interaction between society and the environment. Yet in this survey
of Canadian environmental history work Piper argues that despite what they might say, scholars in the field focus on people more than
nonhuman nature.
Wynn, Graeme. Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCClio, 2007.
Written by a historical geographer, this volume is a survey of the development of Canada and Alaska from an environmental history
perspective from the first aboriginal settlement of the country to the late 20th century.
China
Chinese environmental history has close affinities with historical geography, and environmental history as a distinct field practiced by
historians only emerged in the 1990s. Bao 2004 discusses the growth of the field and summarizes some of its principal themes. Elvin 2004
is a declenionist history of the growth of China, the spread of agriculture, and loss of the nation’s biodiversity and large mammals such as
elephants. Marks 2012 is superb text and survey of China’s environmental history from three thousand years ago to the 21st century.
Bao, Maohong. “Environmental History in China.” Environment and History 10.4 (2004): 475–499.
Useful historiographic essay by a historian in China about the slow development of environmental history in the country. Discusses
connections between the field and allied areas of research, especially historical geography.
Elvin, Mark. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
A vast, threethousandyear environmental history of China. Argues that growth of agriculture and rise of the state led to the squandering of
the land’s wealth and the retreat and destruction, perhaps most notably, of the native elephants that once roamed over much of the country.
Does not cover the postrevolutionary period.
Marks, Robert B. China: Its Environment and History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.
The principal survey of China’s environmental history. Addresses different waves of transformations that led to the massive exploitation of
the nation’s environment. Like Elvin 2004, Marks shows how the growth and intensification of agriculture led to a massive loss of
biodiversity.
Latin America
Cultural geographers such as Carl Sauer (b. 1889–d. 1975) and his many students focused on the history of environmentsociety
relationships in Latin America. This section highlights a few key works and surveys of research in the region. Denevan 1992 is an extremely
influential article about how aboriginal people modified the landscape in the Americas (mostly Latin America) prior to 1492. While not a
survey per se, Sluyter 2002 introduces a conceptual approach to Latin American historical geography that will be of interest to
environmental historians of the region. Miller 2012 is a key essay surveying major themes in the region’s environmental history Miller 2007
is the principal survey of Latin American environmental history. While acknowledging the strengths of Miller’s survey, Carey 2009 criticizes
it, and other declenionist histories like it, for ignoring the complexity of landscape construction in the region and preferring instead to narrate
straightforward stories of capitalist exploitation. Sedrez 2009 identifies some of the key themes in the region’s environmental history and
connections between Latin American environmental history and other fields.
Carey, Mark. “Latin American Environmental History: Current Trends, Interdisciplinary Insights, and Future Directions.”
Environmental History 14.2 (2009): 221–252.
Carey discusses the main processes—colonialism, capitalism, and conservation—Latin American environmental historians have identified
as the main drivers of humancaused change in the region. Argues that the declenionist tales have serious limitations and suggests
different themes. Instead, Latin American environmental historians should focus on landscape construction.
Denevan, William M. “The Pristine Myth?: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492.” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 82.3 (1992): 369–385.
Key article summarizing a generation of work by cultural ecologists demonstrating that Latin America prior to European contact had high
population levels and was extensively modified by people via agriculture, wildlife harvesting, and anthropogenic fire.
Miller, Shawn William. An Environmental History of Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
The main survey of Latin American environmental history. Assesses how sustainable different societies were in the region both before
European contact and after as well as themes such as technology, views toward nature, and attitudes toward consumption.
Miller, Shawn W. “Latin America in Environmental History.” In A Companion to Global Environmental History. Edited by J. R.
McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, 116–131. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012.
Miller outlines the major themes in Latin American environmental history: the depth and extent of precontact transformations of the
landscape by indigenous peoples, the environmental consequences of conquest and colonization, the development of plantation
agriculture, and efforts at conservation.
Sedrez, Lise. “Latin American Environmental History: A Shifting Old/New Field.” In The Environment and World History. Edited by
Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, 255–275. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Sedrez discusses key themes in Latin American environmental history and how anthropology and historical geography have influenced its
development. Also discusses the influence of environmental historians in the United States on the scholarship of this region.
Sluyter, Andrew. Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Sluyter’s book offers a theory of colonialism in Latin America that pays equal attention to Native peoples and Europeans as agents while
also emphasizing the role of landscape in the colonization process.
Middle East and North Africa
Until recently, the Middle East and North Africa were among the countries that received the least attention from environmental history
scholars. However, the early 21st century has witnessed an outpouring of important work about this longneglected region. In addition to
authoring two important monographs on Middle East and North Africa environmental history, Alan Mikhail has written a survey (Mikhail
2012a) of the key themes in the region’s environmental history and the challenges and opportunities facing those wanting to study the
history in depth. Mikhail 2012b is an edited collection showcasing new work about the environmental history of the region. Davis and Burke
2012 explores the important environmental representations of the region and their consequences for the people and environments of the
Middle East.
Davis, Diana K., and Edmund Burke III. Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa. Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2012.
An edited collection by two of the most prominent environmental historians of the region, this volume looks at the interplay between
representations of the region, especially by government officials, and the environmental consequences of acting on those representations.
Mikhail, Alan. “The Middle East in Global Environmental History.” In A Companion to Global Environmental History. Edited by
J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, 167–181. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012a.
Of all the world’s regions, the Middle East has received among the least attention from environmental historians. Mikhail stresses the
importance of the region as a zone of ecological exchange between Europe and Central and South Asia and argues the region has a wealth
of untapped source material for scholars.
Mikhail, Alan, ed. Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa. New York: Oxford University Press,
2012b.
Edited collection featuring chapters by scholars on new developments in the environmental history of the region. Also contains excellent
chapters by editor Mikhail on the development of environmental history of the region and J. R. McNeill comparing the environmental history
of the Middle East to other parts of the world.
Russia
The environmental history of Russia focuses almost entirely on the Soviet period (1922–1991). The most prominent scholars are Douglas
Weiner, known for his scholarship on Soviet conservation and environmentalism (Weiner 2006), and Paul Josephson, who in a number of
monographs and in an edited book (Josephson, et al. 2013) has explored the role of the socialist state and the consequences of bruteforce
technologies on the Russian environment.
Josephson, Paul, Nicolai Dronin, Ruben Mnatsakanian, Aleh Cherp, Dmitry Efremenko, and Vladislav Larin. An Environmental
History of Russia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Despite the title, this is really an environmental history of the Soviet Union (1922–1991). Focuses on the role of the socialist state in
encouraging rapid industrial development (with its associated ecological and human costs) and fostering environmental degradation in
places such as Lake Baikal and the Aral Sea.
Weiner, Douglas. “Environmental Activism in the Soviet Context: A Social Analysis.” In Shades of Green: Environmental Activism
from Around the Globe. Edited by Christof Mauch, Nathan Stoltzfus, and Douglas R Weiner, 101–134. New York: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2006.
Weiner’s chapter explores the limited environmental activism, especially by scientists, in Russia during the Soviet period and the severe
constraints that state placed on these conservationists.
Southeast Asia
Scholarship about the environmental history of Southeast Asia is still in its infancy. Boomgaard 2007 is a survey of the area’s environmental
history and reviews the relatively modest literature about the region (Boomgaard, 2012).
Boomgaard, Peter. Southeast Asia: An Environmental History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO, 2007.
A survey of the region’s environmental history from the 5th century CE to the 21st century, focusing mostly on rising population and
economic growth as drivers of environmental change. A brief bibliographic essay at the end of the introduction notes some key
environmental history works about the region.
Boomgaard, Peter. “Southeast Asia in Global Environmental History.” In A Companion to Global Environmental History. Edited by
J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, 81–95. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012.
Traces major themes in the region’s environmental history through the 1950s, especially a “twotrack pattern” where lowland areas were
often dominated by wetrice cultivation with networks to other trading centers and highland areas where huntergathering and shifting
cultivation continued to dominate into the 20th century.
SubSaharan Africa
“Africa,” as historian Gregory Maddox writes, “was humanity’s first home” (Maddox 2006, p. 5). As such, Africa, and particularly sub
Saharan Africa, occupies a unique place among regions of the globe. Despite the great depth of human presence in Africa, environmental
history is a relative newcomer to scholarship about the continent. Carruthers 2012 surveys key works about Africa and assesses some of
the challenges of writing environmental history of the region. Maddox 2006 is the principal survey of subSaharan Africa
Carruthers, Jane. “Environmental History in Africa.” In A Companion to Global Environmental History. Edited by J. R. McNeill and
Erin Stewart Mauldin, 96–115. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012.
This survey of topics and trends in African environmental history addresses some of the major difficulties faced by those studying the
environmental history of the continent: the challenges and expenses in doing research, the little archaeology to draw upon, and the myriad
languages spoken on the continent.
Maddox, Gregory H. SubSaharan Africa: An Environmental History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCClio, 2006.
A synthesis and overview of the environmental history of subSaharan Africa emphasizing the antiquity of human occupation of the
continent, the extreme variability of African environments, and African peoples’ ingenuity in controlling their landscapes.
Doing Environmental History
Environmental historians, much like other historians and historical geographers, have not written a great deal about methods. They are far
more likely to have explored the field’s historiography or discuss theoretical approaches. Still, there are a few resources wouldbe
practitioners can draw upon to learn the methods of environmental history. Worster 1988 is a classic statement on methods in
environmental history in an influential edited collection about the field. Cronon 2009 is the best place to start. His site on doing
environmental history walks the reader through the key aspects of doing historical research. Keeling and Sandlos 2011 provides an
invaluable primer on how to use digital cameras and computer software to digitize documents and share them among a team of
researchers. Neither Don Mitchell nor Richard Schein is an environmental historian, but their chapters (Mitchell 2008 and Schein 2010)
provide useful suggestions on ways to study landscape, including which sources to use. Wyckoff 2014 describes and explains different
types of landscapes in the American West, but his approach, outlined in essays and “further reading” sections throughout the book,
illustrate environmental history methods. Egan and Howell 2001 shares approaches to ecological history, a field comprising mostly natural
scientists, but one that overlaps with environmental history and shares some common methods.
Cronon, William. Learning to Do Historical Research: A Primer for Environmental Historians and Others. Learning Historical
Research, 2009.
A superb resource for the novice or experienced research doing historical research. Covers all aspects of environmental historical research
such as formulating a research question, identifying relevant sources, and interpreting different sorts of documents.
Egan, Dave, and Evelyn A. Howell, eds. The Historical Ecology Handbook: A Restorationist’s Guide To Reference Ecosystems.
Washington, DC: Island, 2001.
Historical ecology and environmental history have strong connections, although most people practicing historical ecology are natural
scientists. This book discusses some of their principal scientific methods, but chapters discussing the use of maps, oral history, and archival
material will be of interest to wouldbe environmental historians.
Keeling, Arn, and John Sandlos. “Shooting the Archives: Document Digitization for HistoricalGeographical Collaboration.”
History Compass 9.5 (2011): 423–432.
The digital revolution is altering the way historical geographers research, write, and disseminate historical geographical knowledge. This
article discusses ways to digitize archival sources as well as how to use such digitized material in projects that entail collaboration among
research team members.
Mitchell, Don. “New Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Paying Attention to Political Economy and Social Justice.” In Political
Economies of Landscape Change. Edited by J. L. Wescoat and D. M. Johnston, 29–50. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer,
2008.
Mitchell is not an environmental historian, so consequently, he does not examine the role of nonhuman processes in sculpting landscape.
Still, this essay provides a useful set of tools readers can use to interpret and understand the formation of cultural landscapes.
Schein, Richard H. “Cultural Landscapes.” In Research Methods in Geography. Edited by Basil Gomez and John Paul Jones III,
222–240. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2010.
The chapter is technically about cultural landscapes, but the methods Schein describes are mostly historical in nature. Suggestions on
using insurance maps, census data, historical photos, and other types or primary sources used by historical geographers.
Worster, Donald. “Appendix: Doing Environmental History.” In The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental
History. Edited by Donald Worster, 289–308. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Focuses on different types of environmental history and suggests ways historians and other scholars might research and write such
histories.
Wyckoff, William. How to Read the American West: A Field Guide. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.
A guide to landscapes in the American West, from National Parks and National Forests to interstate highways and African American
neighborhoods. Shows how geographers, and environmental historians, can use photography, historical evidence, and other tools to better
understand landscapes.
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