A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History 9780817320010, 9780817392086, 1916214142, 0817320016

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A FIELD ON FIRE

a

Field on Fire The Future of Environmental History

Edited by Mark D. Hersey and Ted Steinberg The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 uapress.ua.edu Copyright © 2019 by the University of Alabama Press All rights reserved. Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press. Typeface: Scala Pro Cover design: David Nees Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2001-0 E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9208-6

CONTENTS List of Figures  vii Introduction: A Good Set of Walking Shoes Mark D. Hersey  1

 I. FACING LIMITS 13  1.  Subversive Subjects: Donald Worster and the Radical Origins of Environmental History Ted Steinberg 17

 2.  Can Capitalism Ever Be Green? Adam Rome 28  3.  Seeing Like a God: Environmentalism in the Anthropocene Frank Zelko 40

 4.  The Locked Door: Thomas Midgley Jr., Chlorofluorocarbons, and the Unintended Consequences of Technology Kevin C. Armitage 57

 5.  Malibu, California: Edenic Illusions and Natural Disasters Christof Mauch 72

 6.  Energizing Environmental History Brian C. Black 85 II. WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS 97  7.  The Force of Fiber: Reconnecting the Philippines with Latin America and the American West via Transnational Environmental History Sterling Evans   101

 8.  Hunting and Wilderness in the Creation of National Identities Mikko Saikku 116

 9.  Why We Need Comparative History: The Case of China and the United States Shen Hou 126

10.  The World in a Tin Can: Migrants in Environmental History Marco Armiero 142

11.  Down in the Sky: The Promise of Aerial Environmental History Robert Wellman Campbell 154

12.  Rivers of Dust: An Environmental Historian Appraises the American Legal System Karl Boyd Brooks 172

III. DOING ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 187 13.  Whole Earth without Borders: Earth Photographs, Space Data, and the Importance of Visual Culture within Environmental History Neil M. Maher 189

14.  Beyond Stories: Geospatial Influences on the Practice of Environmental History Sara M. Gregg 209

15.  Low-Hanging Fruit: Science and Environmental History Edmund Russell 227

16.  The Watershed of War: Environmental History and the “Big Civil War” Brian Allen Drake 237

17.  War from the Ground Up: Integrating Military and Environmental Histories Lisa M. Brady 250 Afterword: The Distinctiveness of Environmental History Daniel T. Rodgers 263 Bibliography 273 About the Contributors  305 Index 309

FIGURES  7.1.  Map of the Pacific Ocean with the Manila Galleon trade routes, 1748 106

11.1.  Evangelists depicted in the Book of Kells, ca. 800  159 11.2.  Great Seal of the United States  160 11.3.  Chart of Revolutionary War battles, leaders, and congresses  162 11.4.  State population growth by altitude, 2008–2009  163 11.5.  “Sacred Place” ad, Curtiss-Wright Corporation, 1945  166 13.1.  ATS 3 Earth photograph, 1967  190 13.2.  Apollo 8 Earth photograph, 1968  191 13.3.  Apollo 17 Earth photograph, 1972  192 13.4.  Earth Day 1990 logo  194 13.5.  Cover from NASA’s Remote Measurement of Pollution, 1971  196 13.6.  British Antarctic Survey ozone depletion graph, 1985  197 13.7.  NASA ozone hole, 1985  198 13.8.  Global temperature anomalies, January 2016  200 14.1.  Map of Enlarged Homestead Act lands in Montana, 1916  214 14.2.  US Geological Survey map series, georeferenced and clipped using ArcGIS 215

14.3.  Snapshot of “A View of the World from Houston” visualization  218

Introduction A Good Set of Walking Shoes Mark D. Hersey

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n an influential essay penned in 1988, Donald Worster challenged his fellow historians to rethink the boundaries of their discipline. Motivated by the political and social turmoil of the twentieth century, Worster’s peers had pushed beyond “great man” histories, through sophisticated political studies, and probed deeply into the lives of ordinary citizens. Rescuing the longneglected masses “from the enormous condescension of posterity,” to borrow E. P. Thompson’s famous phrase, historians had made huge strides in exploring the ways in which a multitude of social factors had shaped the everyday lives of people in the past. But historians had not yet pushed far enough. They needed to dig even more deeply, Worster insisted, “down to the earth itself.”1 Historians’ efforts to recover the lives of ordinary people had entailed a rejection of the arrogant assumption that the only lives and decisions that mattered were those of elites, but they had nevertheless perpetuated a hubris of a different kind. Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and others, after all, had highlighted the profound connection people shared with the natural world. The far-reaching ramifications of their insights had revolutionized much of modern society, including a sizable number of academic disciplines, but the implications of evolution—biology as history—had yet to resonate among historians. Consequently, historians had neglected one of humanity’s central stories: the domination of nature by Homo sapiens, an adaptable and immensely influential species with a predilection for pushing ecological boundaries.2 The significance of this story was self-evident, though historians appeared largely indifferent to it, having offered but few studies that might help clarify the forces undergirding the most environmentally destructive century in history. Nor had they paid much attention to the interaction between people and nature over time more generally, the work of some important predecessors to the practice of a self-conscious environmental history notwithstanding. Squirreled away in archives and offices, historians had instead written histories that abstracted people from the rest of nature. Inadvertently or not, historians had collectively bolstered a belief that humans were godlike, inhabiting a planet that had little influence on their affairs. “Environmental historians,” Worster noted, “realize that we can no longer afford to be so naïve.”3 Indeed, it was past time for historians to take the natural world seriously “as an agent and presence” in human history, and to begin crafting narratives

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that accounted for people’s role as biotic members of a planetary community. An obligation to produce more truthful historical narratives, no less than a moral imperative to cultivate an environmental ethic, demanded it. Doing so, however, required that historians reorient their research questions and methodologies to some degree. They would need to “get out of the parliamentary chambers, out of the birthing rooms and factories, get out of doors altogether, and ramble into fields, woods, and the open air,” Worster suggested. “It is time,” he declared, that “we bought a good set of walking shoes, and we cannot avoid getting some mud on them.”4 Worster’s call for a deeply material history that situated human societies in their natural contexts came as the field of environmental history was beginning to mature. Still relatively new—Worster’s essay appeared in a volume intended to “introduce readers to the new and rapidly growing field of environmental history”—the field already had a scholarly organization (the American Society for Environmental History, organized twelve years earlier) and prize-winning books (including Worster’s Bancroft-winning Dust Bowl and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land).5 Nevertheless, questions about the field lingered. Would it be a passing fad, akin perhaps to cliometrics? How should its practitioners approach their studies? Where should the field draw its boundaries? And, above all, what on earth did it mean to write environmental history? The ensuing years have since answered the first question definitively. Over the past few decades, as Paul Sutter pointed out in 2013, environmental history has been “one of the fastest-growing approaches to the study of the past within the larger profession.”6 It has nudged and elbowed its way into the main currents of several historiographies and is making steady progress in others. Academic presses have launched book series with environmental history emphases, history departments have built research clusters in the field, its leading journals have steadily gained prestige, and membership in its professional organizations has grown exponentially. The answers to the questions about its scope and purpose, however, have proven considerably less conclusive. Debates about the best way to approach the field and the kinds of boundaries (if any) that should be imposed upon it remain far from settled, a fact that has caused some consternation for the field and no small degree of navel-gazing in the years since the field’s founders first endeavored to establish an agenda for its practitioners. Unsurprisingly for a maturing field seeking theoretical coherence in an era in which poststructural thought flourished, Worster’s materialist vision proved contested. Disagreements within the emergent field percolated to the surface, most prominently in a roundtable published in the Journal of American History (JAH) for which Worster provided the central essay. Calling

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for an environmental history that employed the environment as a historical lens, Worster laid out a methodological structure for the field that operated on three levels: a material level (to account for the ecosystems themselves), a political-economic level (to assess the role of various political economies in mediating people’s interactions with those ecosystems), and an intellectual one (to make sense of how various cultures at various times had thought about the natural world).7 This left environmental historians with the principal charge of figuring out which directions the arrows of causality pointed in a given case or, for that matter, writ large. For his part, Worster thought environmental historians would find the second level the most productive to explore. Redefining an old Marxian term, he encouraged the field’s practitioners to focus on “modes of production,” which, when boiled down in Worster’s understanding, centered on how people had gotten food into their bellies over time. Historians would find this second level particularly fruitful, Worster believed, because it would allow them to assess “who has gained and who has lost power as modes of production have changed.” His own work offered compelling models in this vein: Dust Bowl (1979) and Rivers of Empire (1985), especially, had highlighted the degree to which the capitalist drive to wring money from the earth had exacerbated inequalities of wealth and power even as it wrought profound ecological transformations; the exploitation of people and ecosystems were of a piece. It was through modes of production that the other-than-human world converged most obviously with the familiar economic and social terrain of historians.8 Predictably, not all of the respondents concurred with Worster’s proposed framework, and in taking issue with his vision for the field, they laid the foundation for the central debates that would shape it for the next decade and beyond.9 Richard White and William Cronon, especially, worried that Worster was too material in his focus and that his model left little room for much of the work being done by environmental historians. While their own studies had proven deeply material and explored issues of power in much the same way as Worster, Cronon and White nonetheless saw an emphasis on “modes of production” as a misguided one, prone to tendentious (perhaps even tautological) argumentation. Moreover, they contended that Worster’s materialist vision tended toward a naïve faith in an outmoded version of ecology, one that had given way to a version in which disturbance, instability, and change was the norm rather than stasis—a version that made assessing human interventions problematic. The most resonant of their critiques, however, rested on the assumptions of poststructural theory. Worster’s base-structure-superstructure model, they argued, ran up against issues of scale and entailed a dangerous bent

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toward determinism. Nature, they asserted, was inevitably filtered through cultural lenses; human behavior toward the natural world was shaped by how people thought about it as much as by the material resources available to a given group at a given time. To a large degree, in fact, nature was culturally constructed; it was itself a cultural artifact. Questioning the hierarchies implicit in Worster’s model and rejecting the notion that the natural world offered any inherent values against which human behavior might be judged, White and Cronon, then, sought to place the emphasis on the degree to which cultural beliefs mediated the relationship between people and nature, and indeed blurred the line between the two. In his rejoinder, Worster brushed aside the contention that his vision for the field hinged on an uncritical faith in ecology. No one who had read Nature’s Economy (1977), he suggested, could accuse him of a naïve faith in the science. There, in what amounted to the first scholarly treatment of ecology’s history, Worster had traced the growing influence of science as a trusted authority in mediating our understanding of the natural world, paying particular attention to the contingencies of its development.10 Although he had not focused on the history of meaning in the way his critics enamored of poststructural theory wanted, Worster had nevertheless proven unequivocal in his rejection of science as an infallible authority on moral issues. If on balance, he welcomed the rise of ecology, finding in it a rationale for respecting the natural world and embracing a more humble view of people’s place in it, he had been absolutely clear in Nature’s Economy and elsewhere that the questions raised by environmentalists were “too important to be left for scientists alone to answer.”11 The heart of his rejoinder, however, could be readily gathered from its title—“Seeing beyond Culture”—and underscored the fact that the alternatives put forward by his respondents posed dangers of their own: from descending into “the same downward spiral that social history has taken toward fragmentation and a paralyzing fear of all generalization” to getting bogged down in a “relativistic morass” from which there was no ready deliverance.12 More to the point, his respondents’ proposals jeopardized the field’s chief insight by threatening to reduce the field to a subcategory of social and cultural history. Indeed, Worster maintained, the path laid out by his critics threatened to recapitulate the long-standing conceit that people were gods, bending the material world to meet their whims. “No landscape is completely cultural,” he reminded them. By their very definition, landscapes were “the result of interactions between nature and culture.”13 Historians, of course, could produce studies deeply rooted in the natural world that also effectively engaged ideas, as was evident in the fact that each of the contributors to the roundtable had “managed pretty well to integrate the ideal with the

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material.”14 But, to his mind, the discipline’s core innovation would be lost if historians neglected the natural world as an independent entity. Worster’s rebuttals notwithstanding, the perspective of his critics endowed the field with obvious advantages as it blossomed over the next decade. Chief among them was the degree to which it facilitated the field’s acceptance by other historians, who were inclined to focus on things cultural (and then largely by way of poststructural analysis). To this was added the fact that in contrast to a more materialist vision, a cultural approach to environmental history required no special source materials that historians might find unfamiliar. These proved powerful inducements to practice a less material environmental history, and over the course of the 1990s, environmental historians began to speak of the field’s “cultural turn.”15 At the turn of the twenty-first century, the cultural turn was amplified by the steadily growing presence of historians of science in the field, who brought with them a perspective that saw science principally as an object of enquiry, and proved skeptical of drawing on it as a source of evidence, let alone argumentation. Together, the insights of poststructuralism and the erosion of scientific authority transformed the field of environmental history. Undeniably, they brought an increased sophistication to it: problematizing older, linear narratives that had uncritically celebrated the rise of modern environmentalism; incorporating previously marginalized groups and neglected spaces; and, above all, muddying the divide between nature and culture. Collectively, these studies broadened the field’s appeal and contributed to its growing popularity. By the early aughts, the ASEH could claim 1,000 individual members, and its conferences began moving away from smaller venues to major cities.16 Equally indisputably, however, poststructural thinking and the undermining of scientific certainty compromised the field’s moral agenda. The Calvinist jeremiads of the first generation of environmental historians gave way to Universalist musings; tragic emplotments became satires; “declensionist” narratives were ridiculed as a hindrance in the field’s march toward the mainstream. If the nature-culture divide was rightly muddled, the muddling was largely unidirectional. Myriad studies highlighted the degree to which culture had shaped nature; seldom did causality flow in the other direction. It might be overdrawn to insist that the field lost its way, its moral center eroding even as the number of its practitioners grew, but there’s no doubt that it was a sharply depoliticized environmental history that won professional acceptance, nor that environmental historians proved increasingly hard-pressed to delimit the field’s boundaries. To be sure, as an inherently interdisciplinary field, environmental history had long attracted scholars across a wide range of disciplines. The boundary between historical geography and environmental history, for instance, proved fuzzy even under the

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narrowest definition of the field. The walls demarcating the field’s boundaries, in other words, had always been marked by doors and windows. But as the cultural turn gained ascendancy, the field’s demarcations grew even murkier, its scope and purpose more unsettled than ever. As the title of Douglas Weiner’s 2005 presidential address to the ASEH—“A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition for Environmental History”— suggests, this didn’t dissuade environmental historians from seeking to clarify them.17 Indeed, Weiner’s effort proved to be one of many such attempts to define the field and speculate about its future.18 While these efforts surely reflected an expanding interest in environmental history, they just as certainly revealed a deep-seated concern in many quarters about its lack of coherence. This concern notwithstanding, the field as a whole proved reluctant to establish, let alone police, disciplinary boundaries. As John McNeill noted in 2003, environmental history’s “institutionalization remain[ed] limited, its borders undefended.”19 The field never demanded, for instance, that environmental historians employ the environment as a category of analysis in the way that, say, a social historian would be expected to apply gender as a lens. This elasticity succeeded in creating an environment that attracted innovative scholars working in a number of historical subdisciplines, but it resulted in a field that essentially came to function as a tent under which a diverse array of scholars could gather rather than as a discipline with a discreet set of working assumptions and historical tools. The field, in short, disaggregated into a series of island communities (with due apologies to Robert Wiebe), which may or may not be in conversation with one another (or with broader historiographical currents) at any given moment.20 In this regard it has mirrored the historical profession writ large, which, pulled by the same centrifugal forces tugging at the rest of society, has spun off a steadily growing number of subdisciplines in recent decades. Judging by a recent roundtable on the state of the field, environmental historians remain unsure of the degree to which this is to be commended or lamented. Linda Nash, for instance, embraced this development, arguing that the time had come for environmental historians to “acknowledge that theirs is less a coherent ‘field’ of study structured around key archives, topics, or questions—in the sense that Worster once hoped it would be, or that American political or labor history is—than an orientation.” Its success, she continued, should be measured by its incorporation into “works that are not self-consciously environmental.”21 How exactly that might be assessed, given the elastic definition of environmental history, she left open to question. Paul Sutter, on the other hand, who had studied under Worster and who contributed the core essay for the roundtable, proved considerably more ambivalent about the fact that on balance environmental history had

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“proceeded along the more self-conscious and critical path urged by Worster’s respondents.” He found a great deal to like about the field, acknowledging among other things that environmental historians were now telling “more complex, contingent, and counterintuitive stories” than they had been at the time of the first JAH roundtable. Nevertheless, he worried that “they often privilege the social and cultural at the expense of the environmental” and wondered if the field had misplaced its moral compass. Indeed, he concluded by urging his peers to “look up from their tight focus on complexity and hybridity and return some of their attention” to the enormous transformations wrought by people as biotic members of a planetary community.22 If recent discussions about the degree to which the field might have lost its way are any indication, that debate will continue for some time.23 As will the angst. There are few indications, however, that Worster has wasted much energy worrying about the drift of the field. Having framed his position clearly, he has been happy to let others reach their own conclusions.24 “Good,” he noted of his respondents’ critiques about his eagerness “to push the agency of nature” in the 1990 roundtable, “at least I am understood in my tendencies.”25 To be sure, while he has helped keep environmental history vital by carrying the flag for those whose work runs counter to the field’s prevailing currents, his ambitions have always been higher, both in his intended historiographic interventions and in his hopes for a brighter environmental future. The esoteric nuances of scholarly debates have thus interested but never satisfied him. Recognizing, like Carl Becker did before him, that “history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world,” Worster has pushed for something more.26 He has sought to inform broader intellectual currents, to shape more effective environmental policies that account for the historical forces that necessitate them in the first place no less than historiographical debates. This conviction, together with the fact that the environmental issues facing the world in the twenty-first century are often global in scale, has led him to champion environmental history around the world. If the work of environmental historians is to matter in shaping environmental policy going forward, after all, it cannot be parochial in its practice. Indeed, no one has served as a more tireless ambassador for the development of the field beyond the United States than Worster. Among other things, he has worked closely with the now very influential Rachel Carson Center in Munich from its inception and, following his retirement from the University of Kansas, helped to found and direct the Center for Ecological History at Renmin University in Beijing, the leading research center for environmental history in Asia. The growth of environmental history in the United States and around the world, then, has proven a victory for Worster in its own right. If environmental history as a whole is less politically engaged than he hoped it would be, its

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practitioners now have a place at the table; they are solidly entrenched in the broader historiographical discussions. If the field is less firmly grounded in materialist analyses than he envisioned, environmental historians need not fear that other historians will look askance at research that explores “the role and place of nature in human life.”27 In the event, the field’s growth has given Worster a platform that has enabled him to repeatedly enjoin historians to take nature more seriously in their explorations of the past.28 This volume seeks simply to amplify that call. Thus despite the fact, as Sutter noted, that “many of the methodological and analytical tensions laid bare in the 1990 roundtable persist,” it is not our intention to recapitulate the debates of the 1990s.29 Instead, the essays in this collection highlight Worster’s continued centrality to the field and suggest ways environmental historians might draw upon his work going forward. His pioneering work, after all, laid the foundation for many of environmental history’s most vital currents: the history of capitalism, transnational history, environmental biography, the origins of modern environmentalism, resource use, “natural” disasters, the history of science, and the connections between social and environmental exploitation. William Cronon hardly exaggerated when he noted of Worster that “all of us who write environmental history follow in his footsteps.”30 The contributors to this volume would all claim an even more direct tie to Worster: some as his students, others as his colleagues, still others as coworkers in the effort to broaden the influence of environmental history around the world. Connecting their own research to Worster’s, the authors of these essays propose paths that other environmental historians might productively follow. In that sense their essays are invitations: to approach familiar stories differently, to integrate new methodologies, to think creatively about the questions environmental historians are well positioned to answer, and to historicize the ecological problems facing the world today. While these essays do not endeavor to settle long-standing debates about the field, they nevertheless collectively bring some clarity to what it means to write environmental history. To the degree that they do so with courage, an eye on the big picture, and a passion for nature, they offer models for the field truly inspired by Worster. If they encourage their readers to again find a good set of walking shoes and ramble once more into the fields, woods, and open air, unafraid of tracking a little mud into the archives, this volume will prove a success indeed.

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Notes I would like to thank Ted Steinberg, Ryan Schumacher, and Tom Okie for their comments on this essay. 1. Donald Worster, “Appendix: Doing Environmental History,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Worster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 289; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 12. 2. Worster had made a similar contention four years earlier in an essay titled “History as Natural History: An Essay on Theory and Method.” “Evolution and history remain, after a hundred years, separate realms of discourse,” he had argued. “There is little history in the study of nature and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we remedy that lag by developing a new perspective on the historians’ enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.” Donald Worster, “History as Natural History: An Essay on Theory and Method,” Pacific Historical Review 53 (February 1984): 1. 3. Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” 290. 4. Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” 289. 5. Donald Worster, preface to Worster, Ends of the Earth, vii. 6. Paul S. Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History 100 (June 2013): 95. For more on the field’s growth, see Robert B. Townsend, “The Rise and Decline of History Specializations over the Past 40 Years,” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, December 2015, https://www.historians.org/ publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2015 /the-rise-and-decline-of-history-specializations-over-the-past-40-years. 7. Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1087– 1106. For earlier discussions about the scope and purpose of the field, see Roderick Nash, “The State of Environmental History,” in The State of American History, ed. H. J. Bass (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970): 249–60; Richard White, “Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (August 1985): 297–335; Worster, “History as Natural History,” 1–19; and “Theories of Environmental History,” special issue, Environmental Review 11 (Winter 1987). 8. Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1091–92, 1090; Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 9. For the responses, see the following from the Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): Alfred Crosby, “An Enthusiastic Second,” 1107–10; Richard

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White, “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning,” 1111–16; Carolyn Merchant, “Gender and Environmental History,” 1117–21; William Cronon, “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History,” 1122–31; and Stephen J. Pyne, “Firestick History,” 1132–41. For a broader take on the roundtable, see Sutter, “The World with Us,” 94–96. 10. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 11. Donald Worster, “The Ecology of Order and Chaos,” Environmental History Review 14 (Spring/Summer 1990): 16. 12. Donald Worster, “Seeing beyond Culture,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1144–45. 13. Worster, “Seeing beyond Culture,” 1144. Emphasis in the original. 14. Worster, “Seeing beyond Culture,” 1142. 15. For a survey of the broad contours of this turn, see Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History” Historian 66 (Fall 2004): 557–64. 16. Thanks to Lisa Mighetto for providing information on ASEH membership. 17. Douglas R. Weiner, “A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of Environmental History,” Environmental History 10 (July 2005): 404–20. 18. For a representative sample, see Alfred Crosby, “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” American Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1177–89; Mart A. Stewart, “Environmental History: Profile of a Developing Field,” The History Teacher 31 (May 1998): 351–68; Adam Rome, “What Really Matters in History: Environmental Perspectives on Modern America,” Environmental History 7 (April 2002): 303–18; Ted Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” American Historical Review 107 (June 2002): 798–20; John R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” in “Environment and History,” theme issue, History and Theory 42 (December 2003): 5–43; “Anniversary Forum: What’s Next for Environmental History,” Environmental History (January 2005): 30–109; Libby Robin and Jane Carruthers, “Introduction: Environmental History and the History of Biology,” History of Biology 44 (April 2011): 1–4; Sarah T. Phillips, “Environmental History,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 285–313; Liza Piper, “Knowing Nature through History,” History Compass 11 (December 2013): 1139–49; and Andrew C. Isenberg, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, ed. Isenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–20. See also Carolyn Merchant, American Environmental History: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Douglas Cazaux

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Sackman, ed., A Companion to American Environmental History (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 19. McNeill, “Observations,” 11. 20. In acknowledging the “fragmentation and reconstitution” of environmental history in recent years, Paul Sutter listed a dozen fields and might well have added several more. See Sutter, “The World with Us,” 97. 21. Linda Nash, “Furthering the Environmental Turn,” Journal of American History 100 (June 2013): 133, 134. 22. Sutter, “The World with Us,” 96, 118, 119. 23. See Lisa Brady, “Has Environmental History Lost Its Way?,” Process: A Blog for American History, December 15, 2015, http://www.processhistory.org/ has-environmental-history-lost-its-way; Joshua Specht, “Finding Its Way: Thoughts on Environmental History,” Process: A Blog for American History, January 19, 2016, http://www.processhistory.org/finding-its-waythoughts-on-environmental-history; Sean Kheraj, with guests Lisa Brady, Mark Hersey, and Liza Piper, “Episode 51: Has Environmental History Lost Its Way?,” Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast, January 27, 2016, http://niche-canada.org/2016/01/27/natures-past-episode-51-hasenvironmental-history-lost-its-way. 24. Bill Cronon made much the same point in a keynote address at a conference in Worster’s honor hosted by Renmin University’s Center for Ecological History in June 2016. A program of that conference is available at http://www. ruc.edu.cn/loadnotice?tid=3&nid=71717 (accessed June 12, 2017). 25. Worster, “Seeing beyond Culture,” 1144. 26. Carl Becker, “Every Man His Own Historian,” American Historical Review 37 (January 1932): 234. 27. Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1089. 28. See, for instance, Donald Worster, “The Two Cultures Revisited: Environmental History and the Environmental Sciences,” Environment and History 2 (February 1996): 3–14; Donald Worster, “A Long, Cold View of History: How Ice, Worms, and Dirt Made Us What We Are Today,” American Scholar 74 (Spring 2005): 57–66; Donald Worster, “Historians and Nature,” American Scholar 79 (Spring 2010), https://theamericanscholar.org/historians-and-nature/ #.WtC19S-ZPUI; and Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 29. Sutter, “The World with Us,” 96. 30. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), xxiii.

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FACING LIMITS Nature, it should be clear, has limits; they are neither inflexible, nor are they constant, but they do exist. Whenever the dust begins to blow, we are being told what those limits are. —Donald Worster, Dust Bowl (1979) The wealth of nature, when appropriated and turned to use, touched off a multifaceted revolution in society, economy, politics, and culture, which swept over the entire globe. It stimulated a shift in perception, but it also changed people’s material conditions. For a while the perceptual change was congruent with the material one, but then perception outran reality. During the twentieth century, however, it became increasingly clear that the modern era of extraordinary material abundance was coming to an end, and that neither scientific knowledge, innovation in technology, or hard work could bring it back. —Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth (2016)

Each of the essays in this section takes as its starting point one of the core threads of Donald Worster’s scholarship: the failure of generations past to acknowledge and account for material limits to economic growth. The degree to which economic imperatives have shaped people’s interactions with the natural world emerged as a theme in Worster’s dissertation in 1971 and has since arced through his scholarship. Over the course of four decades, he has explored the ways in which a shortsighted refusal to face environmental limits has led to profoundly undemocratic and environmentally destructive consequences. Worster identifies the root cause of the problems as capitalism, which he has defined as an economic culture with a distinctive ethos that includes, among other things, the idea that nature must be understood as a form of capital. Leveraging the power of large institutions (most especially the state), capitalism has separated people from the natural world, cultivated an irrationally optimistic view of people’s ability to control nature, fostered an insatiable hunger for resources, and kindled an ill-founded belief in perpetual technological fixes. With the intersection of economy and ecology firmly ensconced at the heart of his research, Worster has continued to return to capitalism for nearly forty years: in Dust Bowl (1979), in Rivers of Empire (1985), in his biographies of John Wesley Powell and John Muir, and most recently in Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (2016). It is with this emphasis in mind that Ted Steinberg reminds us of environmental history’s radical roots. Worster’s indictment of a capitalist economic culture that fostered both social oppression and environmental exploitation

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shared some important characteristics with the work of radical historians, but arguably proved even more radical insofar as it challenged the anthropocentrism of the historical profession. Yet most radical of all, Steinberg contends, has been Worster’s unflinching commitment to moral reason over the course of his career, a commitment driven by a desire not only for a more humane society, but also for one that operates with less violence toward the planet that sustains us all. Adam Rome taps into this thread of Worster’s scholarship by challenging environmental historians to think more deeply about capitalism. Environmental historians, Rome argues, have too often understood capitalism as a discreet set of static assumptions rather than a complex and ever-changing force. Over the past fifty years, as Rome points out, businesses have increasingly taken measures to reduce their direct and indirect environmental impact, but historians have paid them little attention. This, he suggests, is a serious oversight. Some might dismiss the question of whether capitalism can ever lead to harmonious relations with the earth, but the question must be asked if we hope to understand and address the myriad environmental issues facing us today. Although Worster’s conviction that societies need to frankly acknowledge material limits was rooted in the study of history, he pursued his research with an eye on contemporary environmental issues. Following suit, Frank Zelko raises important questions about what environmentalism ought to mean in the age of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch shaped principally by humans. Examining the epistemological questions elicited by this concept, Zelko contends that environmental historians are uniquely situated to examine the perils of the Anthropocene concept. However useful the Anthropocene might be intellectually, Zelko argues, the optimistic enthusiasm for planetary management embraced by some of its advocates threatens to recapitulate the same rejection of environmental limits that created the epoch in the first place. Kevin Armitage, likewise, highlights the intrinsic limits of technological innovation. Taking up the career of Thomas Midgley Jr., who improbably and rather remarkably gave the world both leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons, Armitage asks environmental historians to consider why technological innovation has often carried far-reaching unintended consequences. Midgley’s innovations, he argues, emerged out of a larger social and economic context that locked him into a narrow technological framework that led him to ask the wrong sorts of questions. That framework rested on market pressures that worked to assure that the innovations became an end in themselves and in so doing prevented a consideration of their ultimate consequences. Christof Mauch and Brian Black take up a more willful refusal to face limits

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by considering the ways in which Americans have deliberately ignored, and often downplayed, the possibility of ecological catastrophe. Mauch does so by exploring a single locality in the American West: the affluent, beachfront city of Malibu, California. Highlighting the extraordinary efforts necessary to perpetuate Malibu’s reputation as a veritable paradise in the face of myriad natural hazards, Mauch underscores the promising possibilities open to environmental historians in examining the environmental context of similar cultural landmarks. Black examines this refusal to face limits on a larger scale, exploring the emergence of an American way of life predicated on cheap crude. As Black shows, the consumption of petroleum products defined American society and culture over the latter half of the twentieth century. The ways in which Americans powered their lives, he contends, merit more attention from environmental historians than they have received to date.

1 Subversive Subjects Donald Worster and the Radical Origins of Environmental History Ted Steinberg

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f ecology, as Paul Sears once said, is a “subversive subject,” what of environmental history?1 Environmental history had its start in the 1970s at a time when people around the globe began to show increasing concern, both popular and scholarly, in the fate of the earth. Roderick Nash, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, first taught “American Environmental History” the same semester as activists took to the streets on Earth Day. Nash reported that he “felt good about helping make the university, and particularly the Department of History, more responsive to the problems of society. I was, at last, ‘relevant.’ ”2 The newly emerging environmental consciousness Nash perceived had a number of causes. It nevertheless owed a great deal to the radicalism of the 1960s, especially the antiwar movement. Though support for environmentalism was hardly universal among the New Left, radicals began embracing this cause in the second half of the decade. Groups such as the War Resisters League began to articulate the connection between involvement in Vietnam and environmental issues when the extent of the US military’s use of defoliants became more widely known. By the time Nash taught his new course, radical politics had come to inform environmental thinking, a point underscored by national Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes’s turn to the massive 1969 antiwar protests as a model for the event.3 Political commitment helped give birth to environmental history, and radical politics, understandably enough, would come to characterize much of the early important work in this new area of study. William Cronon’s book on New England, written in 1983, raised the issue of how an alienated market in land helped to lay a foundation for the transition to capitalism; Richard White’s work on Native Americans and their descent into dependency, published the same year, drew on Immanuel Wallerstein’s core-and-periphery theory of the global capitalist system; and Carolyn Merchant’s study, a few years later, of nature, gender, and science was described in one review as “overtly political” in the way that it deplored the domination of nature “and the simultaneous exploitation of women, Indians, and the poor.”4 Many of the canonical works, whatever their differences in focus, have a

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decidedly radical cast, if by radical we mean a history interested in the root causes of oppression and exploitation. This radical orientation is especially pronounced in the work of Donald Worster, who came to the field a bit earlier than the above-mentioned historians. Worster’s work can be usefully divided into two periods. The first phase, extending from 1971 to 1985, is important in two respects. It witnessed Worster’s shift toward a concern with ecology and political economy and, growing out of this development, a call for postnationalist history that would transcend the boundaries that historians had for so long taken for granted. Much like the first wave of New Left historians who set out to overturn the consensus school of historiography, Worster combined a concern with the impact and expansion of capitalism with a focus on problems of contemporary importance.5 In the second period (1985–1993), Worster turned toward the thinkers of the Frankfurt School for inspiration and embraced “value-laden” history. The result was an emphasis on the role of the modern technocratic state in the unfolding economic order. Together, the two periods of scholarship amounted to a radical challenge not simply to political history but to those New Left historians who turned to the study of history “from the bottom up” and eventually took to focusing on race, class, and gender as the guiding categories of analysis.6 Today, of course, the field of environmental history has evolved into a mature subdiscipline with a much more catholic set of political concerns and scholarly interests. Those who work in the field sometimes seem to struggle with the issue of its relevance to contemporary ecological problems, and for that reason alone it is important to examine the radical tradition and one of its most important champions, if only to be reminded of why history matters. Worster was born in 1941 in the Mohave Desert town of Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River, a watercourse that would later come to figure prominently in his work. When his father left to serve in World War II, Worster returned to Kansas, where his parents originally hailed but fled because of the economic dislocation brought on by the Great Depression. Worster was thus raised on the Great Plains—the locus for some of his most important scholarly work—on a farm near the city of Hutchinson, Kansas. There, because of the sway of his grandmother Maud Gamble Ball, he came under the influence of the Scottish Campbellite Church of Christ, the same church, as it turns out, attended by John Muir, a figure Worster would later study in a full-length biography.7 After taking a degree from the University of Kansas, Worster moved to the University of Maine in 1964 to work as a debate coach. By his own account, New England seems to have made quite an impression on Worster. Not having grown up around an ocean or forest, Worster was struck by the beauty of

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his new surroundings. He began reading New England nature writers such as Henry David Thoreau as well as other key figures—such as Aldo Leopold—who were shaping the emerging environmental movement. When he wasn’t reading, Worster watched the snow fall and went off for romps in the woods and somehow realized, he later recalled, “that there was a part of me dwelling out there.”8 Worster decided to continue on in the region when he was accepted in 1966 into the graduate program in American Studies at Yale University. He studied intellectual history at Yale but had trouble squaring the study of New England’s religious past—a popular subject among intellectual historians on campus—with the planetary crisis he saw unfolding before his eyes. Mark Lytle, a graduate student colleague (who would later write a biography of Rachel Carson titled The Gentle Subversive), once purportedly asked Worster to explain environmental history to him. “Is this history for the bears?” he inquired. “You’re damn right it’s for the bears,” Worster replied, “the bears and all the rest of us.”9 Working within the confines of this conservative climate, Worster’s dissertation, completed in 1971, was an intellectual history, though admittedly of an unconventional topic, at least for the time in which he wrote. Titled “The Economy of Nature: An Essay on the Development of Ecological Thought,” the dissertation laid the groundwork for Worster’s first book, which traced the history of ecological ideas in Anglo-American culture starting in the eighteenth century.10 Nature’s Economy, as the book was titled, examined the thinking of several key figures and worked to show that what represented progress with respect to the science of ecology was often the product of the respective human values that informed the period in which the scientific ideas took root. It has always struck me that the hero of this book is Thoreau. Worster portrayed Thoreau as an advocate of the arcadian tradition, which sought a far more humble relationship with the earth than the imperial managers who show up later in the book in the form of the Bureau of Biological Survey waging all-out war against wolves and coyotes. The Romantics, Worster wrote, “were the first great subversives of modern times,” challenging, among other things, “the values and institutions of expansionary capitalism.” In the face of the “ecological alienation” caused by industrial capitalism, the factories and the ringing of axes in New England’s forest, Thoreau put forth a philosophy that was radical to its core. It proposed communal relations with the natural world and could find no moral authority for elevating humankind and its colonizing desires toward the land above the rights of muskrats or any other animal or plant for that matter. Nature’s Economy not only explained the origins of the major trends in ecological thinking, but also it made a larger,

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more radical point: that moral reason must play a role in how an intellectual approaches the study of science.11 It is worth pausing to note that if Thoreau inspired Worster, he also animated at least one New Left scholar who pioneered history from the bottom up: Staughton Lynd, who overlapped at Yale with Worster (and who was denied tenure in 1968 subsequent to a defiant trip he took to Hanoi during the Vietnam War). In his intellectual history of American radicalism, published in 1968, Lynd not only tried to explain why Thoreau took the positions he did and how they shaped an American radical tradition, but also looked to the bard from Walden to endorse a form of radical history that was heavy on moral reason, that is, to offer a model for a better world. Drawing connections between Karl Marx and Thoreau, Lynd showed how the latter arrived at a critique of alienated labor every bit as powerful as the man most associated with this strain of radical thought. Lynd also disputed that the goal of society should be the protection of property. Private property only allowed those in possession of it to profit off the labor of those without. A radical tradition dating to Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson, Lynd held, had contended that “the earth belongs to the living.”12 Yet Lynd made nary a mention of the earth itself or Thoreau’s arcadian ethic. Out of these two very different readings of Thoreau (Lynd’s and Worster’s) would emerge two competing forms of radical history—one social, the other environmental. It is a split that remains largely unresolved to this day. Now it was Worster’s turn to not simply interpret the world but to change it. Building on the discussion of the 1930s Great Plains dust storms covered in Nature’s Economy, Worster set off to offer a full-scale study of what he called one of the worst ecological disasters in the history of the world. The resulting book, titled Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, opens with a quotation from Marx that unites a concern with alienated labor and alienated land. It reads: “All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil.”13 Worster later called the epigraph cheeky, but I would argue that it captured his belief that social oppression and environmental exploitation originated on some common economic ground.14 Worster’s focus on capitalism is certainly what made me want to study with him when he relocated to Brandeis University in 1984. The book represents Worster’s shift away from intellectual history toward a concern with the relationship between ecology and political economy. Dust Bowl laid the blame for the dirty thirties at the doorstep of the capitalist system. Worster indicted capitalism at precisely the point in the 1970s when the global economy had entered a state of crisis. Indeed, the book came out in the same year that Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain and Paul

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Volcker reformed US monetary policy in ways that aided the ruling elite at the expense of the poor. Under capitalism, which Worster imagined in much broader terms than Marx as an “economic culture” founded on a set of precepts such as the maximization of natural resource use, the deck was stacked against an appreciation for the limits of nature. This economic culture also helped to erode any sense of community, except among the Mennonites whose communalism fostered, in Worster’s words, “a sense of place to anchor a wind-blown culture.”15 For all the book’s concern with capitalism, for all its emphasis on the limits of nature and the mindless quest to transcend those limits, for all its stress on the massive failure of accommodation that had taken place on the plains, there is still one other element of the book that, in a sense, may represent its most radical component. When I repaired to the dusty basement of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, bookstore in 1983 to purchase a used copy of Dust Bowl, I opened it to find these words, “The Southern Plains are a vast austerity.”16 The year before I had started out from a New York City suburb and traveled some sixteen thousand miles around North America in a Datsun B-210; I had never seen anyone capture better what I saw on those lonely plains roads. Precious few historians can get a reader to care about a place the way Donald Worster does in this book. Environmental history it seemed to me at the time threatened to upend the history profession entirely, even its most radical radicals such as Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, and Howard Zinn, because it threatened the anthropocentrism of those who thought human beings had a set of rights that were somehow higher and above other living organisms. Who was this man, this Donald Worster so eager to take on an entire field of study? The answer came when I managed to get my hands on a copy of a conference paper Worster published, while teaching at the University of Hawaii, in 1982 in Environmental Review, the journal of the American Society for Environmental History. It didn’t look like much, a mere six pages— devoid of a single footnote—banged out on a typewriter. What it said, however, amounted to nothing short of a manifesto. It begins as follows: “An intriguing question that has never gotten much attention is why the study of history, which is the study of social change over time, should itself often be highly resistant to change.” The essay then moves on to offer a stinging critique of the nation-state and its dominance over the discipline, while calling for a “postnationalist history,” a year before Benedict Anderson published his own well-received critique of this issue. The essay ends by invoking Thoreau and that great voice of the American West, Wallace Stegner. Worster held up their philosophies as “guides to academic research.”17 Worster went on to paraphrase Stegner, who grew up in both the United

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States and Canada and was no stranger to crossing borders: “I no longer really think of myself as an American. I know what it is to feel intense attachment to a specific locale and acknowledge the need for geographic roots, for a tenacious, manageable sense of identity. And I answer, on the other hand, the call to a greater world citizenship that reaches out to embrace the interests of all humanity, all nature, as my own.” Whether Stegner actually wrote this or not—there is no footnote to check—is beside the point. This is as much Worster speaking as Stegner, speaking deeply radical thoughts that go all the way back to Tom Paine’s 1792 injunction: “My country is the world.”18 Could there have been a more articulate plea for the new social historian and the gritty environmental historian to join hands? There wasn’t much joining of hands, barely even a handshake at first. Radical history evolved to focus on the triad of race, class, and gender. Environmental history, meanwhile, began to set off on a somewhat different course, one that questioned the bright-line division of the so-called natureculture dichotomy. Those working in the field, under the influence of poststructuralism, tended instead to embrace the idea of nature as a cultural construction. Instead of Worster’s autonomous natural world, many environmental historians began writing about hybridity and second nature—that is, viewing all environments as the product of natural and cultural forces. Worster, however, stuck to his guns. “I’m not a detached scholar,” he told the New York Times in 1985.19 Not indeed. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West20 is a textbook example of what Howard Zinn in 1970 called “value-laden historiography.” By this, Zinn did not mean making up facts or distorting the past to fit some preconceived value set. He meant that current political concerns could be used to help historians formulate questions about the past. Repulsed by the idea of history as a form of what he called “private enterprise”—centered on professionalism, promotion, and garnering prestige— Zinn instead advocated for what he viewed as an engaged form of history that elevated “ultimate values” over “instrumental ones.”21 That was precisely the agenda of Rivers of Empire. The central question that motivates Worster’s book is this: How did the American West emerge as a “hydraulic society,” that is, a social order founded on large-scale technological control of water in an arid environment?22 To answer this question, Worster turned to the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, including Karl Wittfogel, who formulated the concept of hydraulic societies, and especially Max Horkheimer. Though Worster’s reliance on Wittfogel is often mentioned in discussions of the book, in truth, Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason published in 1947 may well have been the

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most important influence on this project, especially Horkheimer’s thoughts on instrumental reason that privileges means over ends or, in Worster’s own words, involves knowing “more and more about how to do things, [and] less and less about what it is that is worth doing.”23 According to Worster, the waterbased empire in the American West rested on a capitalist state made up of private agriculturalists underwritten by public planners, technocrats, and their representatives in government who had little patience with “ultimate matters” and instead employed instrumental reason to the West’s rivers. This approach reduced rivers to little more than a means to an end, that is, a tool for “maximum yield, maximum profit.”24 Instrumental reason as deployed across the American West resulted in ecological and social consequences. The ecological impact involved rampant fertilizer use, pesticide poisonings, and a salinization disaster that left a trail of birth defects for bird life including missing eyes and deformed feet. The instrumental approach to rivers also brought with it social oppression. By this, Worster meant that the domination of water led to the centralization of power. The net result was indeed, as the book’s title suggests, an empire that was “antidemocratic and antihuman” to its core. The book ends with a call not just for participatory democracy, but with an appeal for a full-scale change in values “from nature domination to nature accommodation.”25 Although the intellectual tide within the environmental history profession was moving against Worster and his efforts to bring moral reason to bear on the practice of history, this former debate star refused to give up. In the same year—1988—that James Hansen of NASA went before Congress to voice concern about human-induced climate change, Worster called for a “planetary history” that would examine the transformations that had taken place “on a shrinking island in space.”26 He continued to hammer away at the importance of understanding capitalism if historians were to come to grips fully with the sweeping transformations of the natural world that have happened over the last five hundred years. And to point out that students of capitalism such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, whatever their differences, remained materialists to the core and thus helped to promote “a fanatical drive against the earth.” He drew on the work of political economist Karl Polanyi, who indicted the profit motive—once rarely even recognized as legitimate—and its move to the forefront of daily life, to argue that a “capitalist mode of production” worked to reorganize relations with nature and turn land into a commodity. He kept alive his complaint that for the most part historians remained woefully ignorant of the role of plants and animals, soil and water and to fear that to overlook ecology was proving terribly damaging “to our intellectual and moral life but also to the natural world of western Kansas and to planet Earth.”27

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He also argued that Protestant religion—at least the reformed varieties— could be a force for ecological good. And he remained insistent on the importance of moral imperatives in the face of new developments in the science of ecology that rejected the idea of a balanced ecological order as mythical and substituted instead a vision of ecology founded on disturbance and chaos. “What, after all, does the phrase ‘environmental damage’ mean in a world of so much natural chaos?” Worster inquired. Was the ecological tradition of John Muir, Paul Sears, Eugene Odum, and Rachel Carson no longer relevant? He brashly questioned why the world should allow scientists, and scientists alone, to formulate the answers to these questions.28 Perhaps most radical of all is that Worster seemed willing to sacrifice the historical method at the altar of his radical moralism. Worster made his overriding philosophy clear. He was advocating “antimaterialistic materialism,” by which he meant a “less grasping” and more spiritually rich form of materialism that would realize transcendent meaning in the autonomous world of nature. That philosophy that included a plea for an acceptance of limits on economic growth put Worster at odds with the “radical historicizing” taking place in ecology, which took a very long view in the thousands or millions of years and arrived at the conclusion that there is nothing orderly at all about nature. The only constant, if there was one, was “a process of endless change.” Worster worried that as historical consciousness wove its way into ecology, the end result would be a disabling “total relativism” that might be used to legitimate even cutover land and “opencast coal mines” as simply natural.29 One can ask how radical historicizing that takes in thousands and thousands of years even counts as historicizing at all if by that term we mean a commitment to exploring historical context that is preciously hard to discern, even going back a hundred years. The problem in ecology is not simply the overuse of the historical method. Rather, it is that the field has been too inclined to espouse the instrumental reason that Horkheimer warned against. Worster’s tendency during the post-1985 period of his career to wear his political commitments on his sleeve, as it were, led to criticism from some historians. Lawrence Rakestraw, in a particularly negative review, regarded Rivers of Empire as a bunch of “diatribes against dams” and “poor history.”30 Michael Malone protested that sometimes the book seemed “more polemical than objectively historical.”31 This type of criticism became more difficult to sustain in the wake of Peter Novick’s conclusion in 1988 “that to say of a work of history that it is or isn’t objective is to make an empty observation; to say something neither interesting nor useful.”32 Nevertheless, my sense is that Worster’s concern with ultimate values makes at least some historians uncomfortable. In a 2007 interview reflecting on his role in the field of

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environmental history, Roderick Nash went so far as to say that he himself “wanted, in sum, to be known as an historian rather than a partisan.”33 It’s a false distinction because there is no way to make the judgment calls the historian is called on to make—with respect to one’s approach to the evidence, with regard to what kind of tack to take in historical writing, and something often left unsaid, with what to omit from one’s studies—without recourse to one’s political views and moral commitments.34 An argument can be made that all history is about political decisions whether historians want to admit this or not. Thus there is something refreshing about Worster’s embrace of ultimate values that calls to mind Zinn’s observation that historians are human beings first and scholars after that.35 Human beings with obligations to work for a world with less starvation and fewer bombs. And, Worster would add, less violence toward the earth. No historian has illuminated the connections between capitalism and nature better than Donald Worster. No one has done a better job to date of explaining how vital it is to consider how natural constraints impinged on the past. No one has worked harder to globalize historical study. And no historian seems better prepared to answer the question: What on earth is history for?

Notes I would like to thank Mark Hersey and Jim O’Brien for their comments on this essay. 1. Paul B. Sears, “Ecology: A Subversive Subject,” BioScience 14 (July 1964): 11–13. 2. Roderick Nash, “American Environmental History: A New Teaching Frontier,” Pacific Historical Review 41 (August 1972): 362. 3. Adam Rome, “ ‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 546, 547, 549. Rome argues that apart from young radicals, middle-class women and liberals also played important roles in the emergence of environmentalism. 4. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Michael M. Bell, review of Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England, by Carolyn Merchant, Geographical Review 81 (July 1991): 369. 5. On Studies on the Left, founded in 1959, and the focus on capitalism, see Jonathan M. Wiener, “Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959–1980,” Journal of American History 76 (September 1989): 407–8.

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6. See, for example, Jesse Lemisch, “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up,” in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Vintage, 1969), 3–45. 7. Mark Harvey, “Interview with Donald Worster,” Environmental History 13 (January 2008): 140–41. 8. Donald Worster, interview by Lisa Mighetto, Boise, ID, March 13, 2008, p. 1, ASEH Founders—Oral Histories, http://aseh.net/about-aseh/copy_of_oralhistories-with-aseh-founders/Donald%20Worster.pdf; and Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vii. 9. Worster, interview by Mighetto, 2. 10. Donald Eugene Worster, “The Economy of Nature: An Essay on the Development of Ecological Thought” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1971). 11. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 58, 83; and Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 157. 12. Staughton Lynd, The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 77. 13. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 3. 14. Andy Hyland, “16 Things: KU History Professor, Environmental Historian Recounts Personal History,” Lawrence Journal-World, September 12, 2011, http:// www2.ljworld.com/news/2011/sep/12/16-things-ku-history-professorenviromental-histo/. 15. Worster, Dust Bowl, 6, 176. 16. Worster, Dust Bowl, 3. 17. Donald Worster, “World without Borders: The Internationalizing of Environmental History,” in “Papers from the First International Conference on Environmental History,” special issue, Environmental Review 6 (Fall 1982): 8, 9, 13. 18. Worster, “World without Borders,” 13; and Fred R. Shapiro, ed., The Yale Book of Quotations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 576. 19. Michael Molyneux, “London Bridge in the Desert,” Sunday Book Review, New York Times, February 23, 1986, http://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/23/ books/we-enjoy-pushing-rivers-around.html?pagewanted=all. 20. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985). 21. Howard Zinn, The Politics of History, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 36, 18, 20. 22. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 7. 23. Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 71.

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24. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 55, 7. 25. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 57, 332. 26. Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 6. 27. Worster, Wealth of Nature, 219, 56, 20. 28. Worster, Wealth of Nature, 189, 169–70. 29. Worster, Wealth of Nature, ix–x, 175–76. 30. Lawrence Rakestraw, review of Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, by Donald Worster, Western Historical Quarterly 18 (July 1987): 349. 31. Michael P. Malone, review of Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, by Donald Worster, Montana: The Magazine of Western History 37 (Spring 1987): 68. Worster argued that objectivity itself constituted a form of alienation from nature. See Worster, Nature’s Economy, 89–91. 32. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 6. 33. Mark Cioc and Char Miller, “Interview with Roderick Nash,” Environmental History 12 (April 2007): 403. 34. This point was made recently in Joan W. Scott, “The New Thought Police,” Nation, April 15, 2015, http://www.thenation.com/article/newthought-police/. 35. Zinn, Politics of History, 1.

2 Can Capitalism Ever Be Green? Adam Rome

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y vote for the most influential sentence in the literature of American environmental history comes from the introduction to Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl (1979): “Capitalism, it is my contention, has been the decisive factor in this nation’s use of nature.” For a generation, at least, that argument defined an agenda for the field. But environmental historians have not thought as much about capitalism lately. That’s unfortunate. A lot has changed in the world economy since Dust Bowl came out, and environmental historians are missing a great opportunity to shed light on one of the most pressing questions of our time.1 Critiquing capitalism has never been popular. But when Worster wrote Dust Bowl, the countercultural and radical questioning of the 1960s still shaped discourse about environmental issues. Many people argued that an economic system committed to endless growth eventually would destroy the planet. In the mid 1970s, the environmental thinker Wes Jackson—now one of Worster’s best friends—often gave a lecture simply titled “Capitalism Sucks.”2 Worster’s argument in Dust Bowl was subtler. As a historian, he readily acknowledged that capitalism was “constantly evolving.” It took different forms in different places at different times. But Worster argued that capitalism had “a recognizable identity all the same: a core set of values and assumptions more permanent than these outer forms—an enduring ethos.” In Worster’s view, three ecological ideas were part of that cultural core. First, “nature must be seen as capital.” The environment only has value as a storehouse of commodities. Second, “man has a right, even an obligation, to use this capital for constant self-advancement.” That idea made capitalism “an intensely maximizing culture,” always working to get more profit out of the world’s resources. Third, “the social order should permit and encourage this continual increase of personal wealth.” Those three ideas gave capitalist societies “a greater resource hunger than others, greater eagerness to take risks, and less capacity for restraint.”3 Not surprisingly, several of Worster’s students have expanded on the arguments of Dust Bowl. The best example is Ted Steinberg’s Nature Incorporated, which argued that the rise of industrial capitalism “involved a profound restructuring of the environment,” at great cost. New England’s pioneering industrialists had no regard for rivers as habitat or lifeblood. They saw flowing water as a productive input and a cheap repository for waste. Indeed, they

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transformed water into a commodity: the mill-power. They also thought that society had a duty to use the productive power of water to the fullest. To let water go unused was irresponsible. Because the common law favored agricultural uses of water, the mill owners needed the help of the state, and legislators and judges eagerly acted to encourage industrial development: Officials rewrote water law to give manufacturing priority, and they allowed water pollution despite protests. The new factories produced great wealth, as the industrialists promised. But they also flooded fields, destroyed fisheries, and turned rivers into sewers.4 Many other scholars also have analyzed the environmental destructiveness of capitalism. We now know that turning beaver into “commodities of the hunt” nearly wiped them out in New England—and indeed in all of North America. In just a generation, the commercialization of the forests of the Great Lakes left a cutover wasteland. The drive to exploit gold and copper destroyed landscapes from California to Tennessee. Even before the mechanization of fish harvesting, the expansion of commercial fishing in the Atlantic brought many species close to the breaking point. To meet the “insatiable appetite” of consumers for sugar, bananas, coffee, rubber, and beef, American companies destroyed many of the world’s tropical forests. The list could go on and on.5 But a funny thing happened when environmental history was on the way to prominence: the political world turned rightward. Even while Worster was writing Dust Bowl, a conservative backlash against environmental regulation was gaining strength. Then Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide. In the 1980s, while the Reagan administration tried politically to undo the environmental initiatives of the 1970s, conservative intellectuals cheered for capitalism. They argued that environmentalists grossly exaggerated the downsides of prosperity, that the free market ensured the wisest use of resources, that voluntary action to protect the environment was best, that private property owners were far better stewards of the land than government bureaucrats, and that environmental improvement required continued economic growth. As Rush Limbaugh wrote, “The key to cleaning up our environment is unfettered free enterprise, our system of reward.” By 1991, when Nature Incorporated came out, many conservatives saw the environmental movement as “anti-development, anti-progress, anti-technology, anti-business, anti-established institutions, and, above all, anti-capitalism.”6 Looking back, however, the powerful and polarizing conservative counterattack seems to be only half of the story of the 1980s. By the early 1990s, some business leaders, management experts, and commentators were beginning to argue that capitalism needed to be greener. They saw business as the most dynamic force in society—but they admitted that business had caused

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serious environmental problems, and they took for granted that those problems wouldn’t just go away with greater wealth. What would be required to make business sustainable? Paul Hawken’s 1993 classic The Ecology of Commerce was one of the first attempts to answer that question. In the generation since, the dream of greening capitalism has become commonplace.7 Now the sustainable-business bookshelf has hundreds of manifestos, and the number is exploding. Some are the work of business-school professors. Green to Gold, for example, explains “How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage.” A few business leaders have written about their efforts to lead a green revolution. Some were keen from the first to do things differently, but others were late converts to the cause. Because expertise in environmental management has become valuable, green consulting is a thriving business, and some of the new books are by successful consultants. Even environmental activists are getting into the game. Adam Werbach’s Strategy for Sustainability offers insights from a Sierra Club president turned corporate adviser.8 Business schools are training green managers and entrepreneurs. Students at several top schools now can concentrate on business and sustainability. Yale University and the University of Michigan offer joint degrees that combine an MBA with graduate training in environmental science or policy. Several business schools have green-capitalism institutes. The University of North Carolina has a Center for Sustainable Enterprise, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has an Institute for Global Environmental Leadership. At the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, environmental historian Christine Rosen teaches MBA classes on corporate environmental management and strategy.9 Corporate practice also has changed. As Andrew Hoffman argued in From Heresy to Dogma, environmental management slowly became institutionalized in the decades after the inaugural Earth Day. At first, most companies responded defensively to calls for improved environmental performance. Their environmental departments had little prestige or authority—and some were part of public relations. By the early 1990s, however, the issue had become a “strategic” concern. Hoffman’s evidence came mostly from the chemical and oil industries, but other evidence suggests that the trend is general. In the jargon of management, many companies have moved “beyond compliance” with environmental regulations. They have dramatically reduced how much energy they use and how much waste they produce per unit of output. Some have pressured their suppliers to do the same. Many companies also have redesigned products to lessen their environmental footprint. A few now take responsibility for the ultimate fate of some consumer goods.10 Here are a few examples, drawn from the green-capitalism literature:

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Among manufacturers, 3M was a pioneer in the pursuit of eco-efficiency. In 1975, as businesses were struggling to comply with the requirements of the clean air and clean water acts, 3M launched the Pollution Prevention Pays program. The company’s environmental manager did not want just to install scrubbers and filters: Pollution-abatement technologies were costly and might not work as well as expected. Could employees come up with cost-effective ways to reduce waste generation? They could. In 1990, after the first 15 years of the program had helped cut emissions by 50 percent while saving millions of dollars, the company announced an expanded waste-prevention effort. That commitment affected product design, not just manufacturing operations. A few years later, for example, 3M’s CEO vowed that the company would not develop new products that required use of a particularly polluting solvent. Keeping to that pledge sometimes slowed innovation, but executives were convinced that the loss in potential sales would be outweighed by lower pollution compliance and monitoring costs.11

Alcoa, the world’s biggest aluminum company, has become a model of environmental planning. When the state of California denied the company a permit to expand a facility because of concern about water scarcity, Alcoa concluded that water use might become a huge constraint on future growth. Instead of expanding somewhere else, the company made reducing water demand a priority at all its facilities. Alcoa similarly realized that concern about climate change had strategic implications for the industry. It reengineered a key process to reduce emissions of a potent greenhouse gas, created a company-wide database to track all greenhouse gas emissions, and redoubled efforts to lessen electricity consumption. At the same time, the company has supported efforts to raise automobile fuel-efficiency standards: One way to improve mileage is to lower vehicle weight, and aluminum is lighter than other structural materials. Because reusing scrap aluminum is twenty times more energy-efficient than smelting bauxite and avoids the environmental costs of mining, Alcoa also has worked to improve can recycling rates.12 Though not a household name, modular carpetmaker Interface has drawn attention for trying to make every aspect of its operations sustainable. Like 3M, Interface set a goal of dramatically reducing factory pollution and waste. But that was just the start. The company has made the use of its products more environmentally benign. The modular tile system allowed customers to replace pieces of carpet rather than entire rooms, and the company reinforced that efficiency by offering a line of nondirectional “entropy” designs that look attractive in any arrangement. To avoid the environmental hazards of using glue, Interface developed a no-glue method of installation. The company also

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pioneered in carpet recycling. A key part of that effort was offering carpet leases. Because Interface took back old carpet at the end of every lease, the company had to design products for reuse. Now Interface tiles are made for easy separation of the backing from the fabric cover, and the company uses recycled material to make new carpet.13 Working with environmental consultants, Walmart launched an ambitious sustainability effort in 2006. In addition to making its stores and trucking fleet more eco-efficient, Walmart began to use its tremendous purchasing power to improve the performance of suppliers. The company decided to stock more clothing made with organic cotton, and that decision encouraged farmers to switch to organic methods. To save energy in transportation, Walmart pushed detergent manufacturers to sell their product in concentrated form. The company asked all computer makers to meet European standards that restrict toxic components in laptops and monitors. In 2009, Walmart promised to devise a “sustainability index” for everything it sells. The index would help Walmart’s buyers to lessen the impact of the company’s supply chain—and success in improving the sustainability of suppliers now is a metric in buyers’ annual evaluations. Eventually the index will be made public. In the meantime, Walmart is identifying “sustainability leaders” in many product categories.14 Of course, the corporate world still is far from sustainable. Many companies still resist efforts to enforce higher standards of environmental protection. Some companies have improved in a few ways while continuing in many other ways to degrade the environment. Almost every company remains committed to growth. As even the most ardent advocates of green capitalism acknowledge, that commitment is problematic.15 Do the continued failings of business mean that capitalism never can be green? Ted Steinberg—one of the few environmental historians to address that question—argues that the efforts of Paul Hawken, Ray Anderson, and other eco-minded business leaders are inherently limited. “No company will foreclose on growth and profits for the sake of a greener planet,” he concludes. “Corporate environmentalism . . . does not address the fundamental structural problems at the core of the capitalist system.”16 Yet I think dismissing the changes in corporate practice as trivial is a mistake. Even if capitalism proves to be inescapably anti-ecological, the effort to green the business world surely is historically significant. In the same way that environmental historians demonstrated the destructiveness of unrestrained capitalist development, we now should turn our critical energies to analyzing the business response to environmental challenges. How much has really changed? Why have some businesses and some industries done more than others? What have been the most formidable obstacles to reform?

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The subject is rich. That’s especially true for the last fifty years. But even before the rise of modern environmentalism, businesses often were forced to address environmental problems. They faced lawsuits or citizen protests. Some businesses also had bottom-line reasons to try to protect parts of nature, use natural resources more sustainably, or seek collective action to improve the environment. To ensure that logging didn’t harm tourism, the Board of Trade in Asheville, North Carolina, lobbied for the creation of a state park in the Black Mountains. Because air pollution lowered property values and damaged dry goods, urban developers and merchants sometimes sought antismoke ordinances. Occasionally businesses tried to do better and failed. In the 1930s, Ford bought junk cars to salvage for scrap, but the company’s “disassembly line” never made economic sense.17 Hugh Gorman’s study of the petroleum industry, Redefining Efficiency, is a model of what we might do. Gorman showed that oil engineers and executives in the early twentieth century readily acknowledged that every aspect of the industry caused environmental problems. Drilling produced briny wastes, blowouts spewed oil onto the land, refineries polluted the air and water, pipelines leaked, tankers emptied oily ballast into oceans and harbors, and slick port waters caught fire. Officials also understood that many industry practices wasted crude. Yet they resisted calls for corrective legislation. They argued that pollution and waste would diminish as the industry worked to make its operations more efficient. They were partly right. But Gorman made clear that the win-win ideal of eco-efficiency was inadequate to address all of the industry’s problems. Though oil companies did better in many ways, air and water pollution still increased. Some environmental problems weren’t profitable to address. The reductions in waste generation per unit of output also were far outweighed by the tremendous growth in the scale of the industry. By the 1960s, therefore, the argument for self-regulation no longer was convincing. The pioneering environmental laws of the 1970s forced the industry to accept new management goals.18 I hope that a collection I coedited with business historian Hartmut Berghoff also will suggest how compelling and relevant the environmental history of business can be. The book’s opening section offers thoughts on green capitalism from the perspective of both environmental and business history as well as a big-picture look at the role of business in shaping systems of governance, which determine the rules that control the market. The second section considers environmental reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two chapters show that business efforts to improve the efficiency of resource use often were problematic. Another chapter lays out a typology of responses to pollution. What prodded business leaders to act? The third section looks at failed efforts to deal with growing concern about

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the environment in the decades after the first Earth Day. The last section focuses on cases where businesses made significant changes. The five case studies focus on different sectors of the economy—raw-materials processing, auto manufacturing, power generation, alternative-energy production, and waste management—so this section invites readers to consider what kinds of business enterprises have been most open or most resistant to green initiatives and why. Because the case studies come from Europe as well as the United States, they also raise questions about capitalism in different cultural, political, and social contexts.19 Our collection was inspired by a two-day “Green Capitalism?” conference that brought business and environmental historians together, and that experience made me appreciate the importance of getting inside the heads of entrepreneurs and executives. For business historians, that’s second nature: the firm is their basic unit of analysis. But few works of environmental history focus on specific companies—and most of those books speak to the destructiveness of industrialization, not the response of business to concern about environmental degradation. When environmental historians write about specific industries, we rarely look at the subject from the perspective of insiders. My book about suburban homebuilding is a good example. Though I briefly discussed business opposition to some reform proposals, my principal interest was the public response to the environmental problems homebuilders created.20 Because environmental historians aren’t trained in management theory, we need help thinking about business decision-making. I’ve found the green-capitalism literature surprisingly useful. To be sure, the sustainability manifestos address the future more than the past. They also are boosterish: they downplay the many barriers to reinventing the corporation. But they provide frameworks for analyzing key issues. What might motivate businesses to become greener? Environmental historians have focused on government action and citizen activism as catalysts. But the management literature makes clear that pressure for reform can come from several other sources. Businesses can be challenged by other businesses. Insurance companies might demand action to reduce the risk of claims. Banks might refuse to lend money for projects that might not pay off if new regulations change the rules. Because environmental issues are becoming increasingly important in supply-chain management, companies might be forced to change to meet the requirements of their business customers. Of course, consumers might refuse to buy products that aren’t green enough. Stockholders might press for change as well, especially if they fear that failure to develop a more sustainable business model might make the company uncompetitive or devalue the company’s assets. Even employees might put pressure on

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executives: Most people want to be proud of their employer, and many companies now see sustainability as a recruitment issue.21 As the management literature acknowledges, some companies and some business sectors have more at stake than others. They face greater scrutiny, are especially vulnerable to changing ecological conditions, or have more opportunity to gain competitive advantage from green innovations. Recruitment is particularly important in the high-tech sector, where talented employees often are a company’s principal assets. The consumer-electronics industry is likely to face growing pressure as e-waste increasingly comes to symbolize the unsustainability of a throwaway society. To assure future supplies of essential natural resources, some businesses will need to organize conservation efforts. Companies with substantial “intangible value” need to be extra careful to avoid problems that might destroy “goodwill,” while firms with great market power have more freedom to make decisions that might raise costs or pay off only in the long term.22 The management literature also offers useful ways to measure corporate change. Most companies have focused on eco-efficiency gains that directly benefit their balance sheets. That’s the “low-hanging fruit.” Some firms also have worked to reduce environmental risks. But the management literature points to many other possible sustainability efforts. Some are internal to the firm. Have companies changed what products or services they offer? Have they changed the kinds of skills they seek in employees? Other efforts involve rethinking relationships with business partners, customers, and environmentalists. Have businesses sought to lessen the environmental footprint of their supply chain, worked with consumers to reclaim products that no longer are useful, or partnered with environmental organizations? Ultimately, the question is how deep the commitment goes. Are green initiatives “bolted on,” or are they “embedded” in corporate culture? Are companies just “reducing unsustainability,” or are they truly reimagining how they do business?23 I realize that what I’m proposing seems quite distant from Dust Bowl. I can’t imagine Worster pouring over documents in the DuPont archives, or chatting with environmental managers in corporate lounges, or reading Interface CEO Ray Anderson’s Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise. Worster always has wanted scholars to get dirt under their fingernails, and working on environmental histories of business isn’t likely to allow that. The distance isn’t just a matter of subject. Worster was certain in 1979 that capitalism never could be part of an “ecologically adaptive” culture. As he wrote in the epilogue to Dust Bowl, “all its drives and motives tend to push the other way, toward overrunning a fragile earth.” He has elaborated that argument in several works, including a critique of the concept of sustainable development.24 I started to read the management literature because I don’t have Worster’s

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certainty about the impossibility of reforming capitalism. Though I’m convinced that capitalism has serious environmental flaws, the argument that those flaws are impossible to overcome strikes me as too much a matter of definition. I’m not interested in debating whether the defining characteristic of capitalism is the endless accumulation of capital (an unsustainable drive) or the profit motive (which perhaps can be reconciled with a world of limits). When my students ask me if we really can green capitalism, I say that I’m not sure, but I’m keen to see everyone try.25 For me, trying to build an enduring economy requires taking a hard look at what business has done and not done so far to address the environmental destructiveness of capitalism. That effort is very much in the spirit of Dust Bowl. Worster set out to put the “dialogue between ecology and economy” at the center of historical inquiry, and he did that brilliantly. Every time I reread Dust Bowl, I’m inspired by the book’s clear-eyed and courageous analysis. Now I hope that many scholars in the field will follow Worster’s lead, again.

Notes 1. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 5. Though I don’t think environmental historians have paid enough attention to capitalism lately, I see signs of a resurgence of interest in the subject. The 2015 American Society for Environmental History meeting included a capitalism session, and at least two recent conferences on the history of capitalism had environmental panels. Editor Andrew C. Isenberg included a chapter on capitalism in the Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): Steven Stoll’s “A Metabolism for Society: Capitalism for Environmental Historians,” 369–97. The West Virginia University Press launched a Histories of Capitalism and the Environment series edited by Bartow J. Elmore, author of Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015). 2. For the radical questioning of the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 37–46. 3. Worster, Dust Bowl, 6–7. 4. Ted Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 12. Many of Steinberg’s other books also speak to the environmental destructiveness of capitalism, from Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) to Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). For work by other Worster students, see Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Adam

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Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Kent A. Curtis, Gambling with Ore: The Nature of Metal Mining in the United States, 1860–1910 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2013). 5. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Duncan Maysilles, Ducktown Smoke: The Fight over One of the South’s Greatest Environmental Disasters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 6. Judith A. Layzer, Open for Business: Conservatives’ Opposition to Environmental Regulation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 140, 194. 7. Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (New York: Harper Business, 1993). 8. Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Adam Werbach, Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2009). 9. Ray C. Anderson, Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011), 236–37; Stuart L. Hart, Capitalism at the Crossroads: Next Generation Business Strategies for a Post-Crisis World, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2010), xv–xvi. 10. Andrew J. Hoffman, From Heresy to Dogma: An Institutional History of Corporate Environmentalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Esty and Winston, Green to Gold. 11. Esty and Winston, Green to Gold, 106–8; Hoffman, From Heresy to Dogma, 217; Hart, Capitalism at the Crossroads, 89. 12. Peter M. Senge et al., The Necessary Revolution: Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 45, 180–82, 191; Andrew J. Hoffman, Carbon Strategies: How Leading Companies Are Reducing Their Climate Change Footprint (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 103–12. 13. Esty and Winston, Green to Gold, 47–48, 110, 134–35; Interface, Entropy (brochure), August 2017, http://www.interface.com/US/en-US/detail/entropy-

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variations-1178001999G15S001. In addition, see Ray C. Anderson, Mid-Course Correction—toward a Sustainable Enterprise: The Interface Model (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 1998); Anderson, Business Lessons. 14. Edward Humes, Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution (New York: Harper Business, 2011); Marc Gunther, “Game On: Why Walmart Is Ranking Suppliers on Sustainability,” GreenBiz, April 15, 2013, https://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/04/15/ game-why-walmart-ranking-suppliers-sustainability. 15. For a succinct discussion of the problematic commitment to growth by a green-capitalism booster, see Andrew S. Winston, The Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, and More Open World (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), 68–70. 16. Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 261. In addition, see Steinberg’s essay “Can Capitalism Save the Planet? On the Origins of Green Liberalism,” Radical History Review 107 (Spring 2010): 7–24. 17. Christine Meisner Rosen, “Businessmen against Pollution in Late Nineteenth Century Chicago,” Business History Review 69 (Autumn 1995): 351–97; Frank Uekoetter, “Divergent Responses to Identical Problems: Businessmen and the Smoke Nuisance in Germany and the United States, 1880–1917,” Business History Review 73 (Winter 1999): 657–60; Timothy Silver, Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 150–53; Tom McCarthy, Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 92–96. 18. Hugh S. Gorman, Redefining Efficiency: Pollution Concerns, Regulatory Mechanisms, and Technological Change in the U.S. Petroleum Industry (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001). 19. Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome, eds., Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). That volume includes an essay of mine—“The Ecology of Commerce: Environmental History and the Challenge of Building a Sustainable Economy”—that makes many of the same arguments as this piece. See pages 3–12. 20. The conference “Green Capitalism? Explorations at the Crossroads of Environmental and Business History” was cosponsored by the Hagley Museum and Library and the German Historical Institute in October 2014. Steinberg’s Nature Incorporated focused on one company. For another example of a company-centered environmental history of industrialization, see David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

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21. Hoffman, From Heresy to Dogma, 202–12. 22. Esty and Winston, Green to Gold, 20. 23. The quoted phrases are from Senge et al., Necessary Revolution, 310; Chris Laszlo and Nadya Zhexembayeva, Embedded Sustainability: The Next Big Competitive Advantage (Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books, 2011), 105–6; John R. Ehrenfeld and Andrew J. Hoffman, Flourishing: A Frank Conversation about Sustainability (Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books, 2013), 54. 24. Worster, Dust Bowl, 243. In addition, see Worster’s “The Shaky Ground of Sustainable Development” in his essay collection The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 142–55. In a less direct way, Worster’s Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) also raises profound questions about capitalism. 25. For a recent critique based on the idea that the endless process of capital accumulation defines capitalism, see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism: A Citizen’s Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).

3 Seeing Like a God Environmentalism in the Anthropocene Frank Zelko

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n the fall of 1968, Stewart Brand, an enthusiastic technophile and countercultural entrepreneur, launched the first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog. The publication, which Brand believes was the first example of desktop publishing, was intended to help do-it-yourselfers and back-to-the-landers build a life for themselves outside of mainstream society. Brand has always eschewed false modesty, and his opening line insisted that the rest of humanity dispense with it as well: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” It was a jarring first note for a publication aimed at people whose goal was to reduce their impact on the natural world. In any event, it’s not clear that anyone took Brand’s assertion very seriously at the time. The catalog rose to popularity amidst the incipient environmentalism of the era, which emphasized humans’ destructiveness and the need for self-restraint. From this perspective, humans acting “as gods” was the planet’s major problem. The answer was not to get better at it but to abandon such hubris in favor of a more modest presence on the planet.1 Four decades later, Brand reprised his exhortation in Whole Earth Discipline, this time underscoring the urgency of our species’ mission in the face of global climate change. We were still as gods, but now we had to get good at it.2 The times had clearly changed. Unlike in 1968, Brand’s cri de coeur now resonated with other significant trends in environmental thought. What happened in the interim? How did an unapologetic and adamantly anthropocentric worldview emerge from a discourse that a few decades earlier had extolled the intrinsic value of nature and minimal human intervention? The short answer, in a word, is the Anthropocene. Proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000, the notion of a new geological era characterized by intense human activity gave conceptual coherence to the enormous transformations and challenges our world was facing at the dawn of a new millennium.3 Suddenly, a statement such as “we are as gods” appeared to some environmentalists as not only reasonable, but a foregone fact, and major ecological interventions like geoengineering looked increasingly attractive. The act of naming is never neutral. In characterizing the state of the world in the twenty-first century as the “Anthropocene,” Stoermer and Crutzen sought to emphasize the ways in which humans have become the dominant

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geophysical force on the planet. Scientifically accurate or not, it’s hard to imagine a neologism that could be more historically loaded and fraught with potential political controversy.4 What some see as a clear-eyed acknowledgment of humanity’s environmental impact, others view as an act of rhetorical hubris likely to exacerbate the trends it seeks to describe.5 Among environmental scholars and activists, the “epoch of man” has already significantly influenced conservation philosophy and practice. While to some extent Anthropocene-inspired conservation—with its notions of “ecosystem services,” “natural capital,” and “resilience”—is merely an updated version of Gifford Pinchot’s utilitarian conservation, it also suggests a new degree of confidence in our ability to manage the global environment, not as a last desperate act to stave off environmental catastrophe but because we are now technologically sophisticated and self-aware enough to do it right. To better understand this new anthropocentric environmentalism and its mantra of ecological “management,” we need to examine the conditions that gave birth to it and investigate its rise both within the realm of ecological ideas and emergent cultural trends that have reshaped the way we perceive history and nature. This involves revisiting some of the major developments in environmental thought since the mid-twentieth century, particularly the rise of nonequilibrium ecology and the critique of wilderness. Seen in this light, the Anthropocene is part of a broader trend toward a more human-centered view of nature, a trend it has markedly exacerbated.

From Equilibrium to Chaos It’s no surprise that the southeastern region on the island of Hawaii, an area of near-constant volcanic activity, would be of considerable interest to geologists. But Kamilo Beach, a remote sliver of sand and solidified lava at the southern tip of the island, offers igneous attractions of a different kind. Its unfortunate proximity to the North Pacific subtropical gyre, one of several giant trash-accumulating vortexes circulating throughout the world’s oceans, exposes its shoreline to wave after wave of plastic debris. Despite this unsightly mess, Kamilo attracts a small but steady stream of intrepid campers. Unbeknownst to them, the heat from their campfires melts small chunks of plastic, which then fuse with particles of basalt, coral, shell, and wood to create “plastiglomerate,” the fittingly unlovely name chosen by geologists who first investigated these new lumps of matter. Characterized as an “indurated, multi-composite material made hard by agglutination of rock and molten plastic,” plastiglomerate is probably being formed throughout the world, and not just through direct anthropogenic activities such as campfires. Lava flows, forest fires, and extreme temperatures also do the trick. In light of plastic’s notorious ineradicability, it seems likely that the substance

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will endure, recording like flies in amber humans’ presence on the planet and leaving its flourish as a geological signature of the Anthropocene.6 Plastic’s persistence aside, the International Union of Geological Sciences, the only body with the scientific credentials and widely accepted authority to rule on such issues, has not as of this writing formally accepted the proposed addition of Anthropocene to earth’s geological timeline. Nonetheless, the concept has gained such widespread currency among the global research community and the scientifically informed public that even a negative ruling from geology’s official body is unlikely to diminish its cultural valence. Scientists and historians engaged with the topic are no longer discussing the conceptual legitimacy of the Anthropocene; rather, they are debating when the epoch began. Whether it becomes a formal epoch or remains an informal designation for a human-dominated planet, it appears that the Anthropocene is here to stay.7 If the concept of the Anthropocene is a product of the new millennium, environmentalism is a child of the 1960s. Its roots go much further back, of course, but only in the postwar era do we see, in Michael Bess’s apt description, “the reinvention of nature as a bounded and fragile space, requiring intensive human nurturing and protection.”8 The environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s reflected the assumptions of a particular strain of holistic ecology in which nature with a capital N was constantly striving for balance. Left undisturbed, an ecosystem such as an ancient savannah or an old growth forest, would reach a “climax” stage in which all the members of the natural community interacted in ways that promoted the general harmony and stability of the system. Occasional disturbance was always part of the picture, but left to their own devices, ecosystems gradually passed through predictable phases of succession until once again reaching climax. This concept of ecological equilibrium was first developed in the early to mid-twentieth century by ecologists such as Victor Shelford, Frederic Clements, and Eugene Odum and further popularized by Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Arne Naess, and other writers. Its practical and moral implications were clear: stable ecosystems could endure a certain degree of disturbance, but twentieth-century industrial societies were far too disruptive. By drastically interrupting successional processes and stymieing ecological climax, modern humans were profoundly and irrevocably altering the balance of nature. Consequently, the only way to prevent ecological collapse was to rein in our exploitative activities and place restrictions on growth. Modern-day environmentalism had barely begun to gain political traction when the ecological theories underpinning it were severely challenged. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, a handful of population biologists and mathematicians, influenced by chaos theory and armed with increasingly powerful

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computers, were subjecting ecosystems to rigorous modeling and collecting detailed data. By the 1980s, many considered the findings unequivocal: the “balance of nature” was a myth. Far from being governed by orderly processes of succession and climax, ecosystems were intrinsically unstable and constantly in flux. Stochastic disturbance was the norm, rather than the exception, and human activity was merely the latest—although admittedly severe and widespread—form of disruption. While the proponents of this new paradigm did not necessarily wish to see environmental despoliation intensify, critics couldn’t help but observe that disturbance ecology dovetailed all too nicely with the logic of capitalism and an economic culture that emphasized competition and individualism at the expense of cooperation and community. Regardless of their sociopolitical implications, proponents of this view, such as Daniel Botkin, insisted their models of nature were more accurate than those of Clements and Odum.9 At the same time that the core assumptions of holistic ecology were coming under scrutiny, environmentalism’s cherished foundations were also under attack. Forcefully critiquing what they saw as an elitist settler colonial worldview, postmodern and postcolonial scholars exposed the ahistorical bias of environmentalist discourse, particularly the rhetoric of wilderness dominant in the United States. Humans, they argued, had been modifying global ecosystems for millennia. What New World settlers perceived as wilderness was actually an illusion facilitated by genocide and perpetuated by racism. This erroneous view of history, moreover, underpinned twentieth-century policies that removed native inhabitants from lands they had lived in for centuries in the interest of creating national parks and wilderness preserves no less artificial in their ecological interventions than suburban parks.10 Driven by new archaeological evidence, however, assumptions about “pristine wilderness” began to give way from the 1980s forward to greater understanding of the ways Native Americans had managed their environments to various degrees for eons, before succumbing to the onslaught of old world diseases.11 To a certain extent, critics of equilibrium ecology and wilderness ideology were guilty of caricature. Few scientists believed categorically in the idea of timeless, pristine wilderness, and most scholars understood instinctively if not substantively that attitudes toward the natural world change over time. Nevertheless, many found the scientific and political implications of disturbance ecology and postmodern theory deeply disturbing. In a world where flux and disturbance were the norm, was anything worth protecting or preserving? What incentive was there to minimize humans’ impact, much less espouse self-restraint and frugality, if nature itself operated according to principles of volatility, adaptation, and erasure? Unsurprisingly, defenders of the older ecological paradigm, particularly conservation biologists, tended to cast

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disturbance ecologists and postmodernists as apologists—witting or unwitting—for unrestrained capitalism and growth. Environmental activists, insofar as they paid any attention to this increasingly bitter dispute, tended to stick with the older ecological views derived from Odum and Carson. But the wall between activism and scholarship has always been porous, and it was only a matter of time before the epistemological disputes among academics began sowing unease in the broader environmental community. Seeking to tackle the debate head-on, a group of conservation biologists and humanities scholars led by Michael Soulé decided to take a stand against the postmodern critique of wilderness and the ecological theories that supported it. Donald Worster was the most prominent environmental historian who sympathized with their cause. One of the first historians to engage deeply the history of ecological ideas, Worster’s Yale dissertation and subsequent book on the subject, Nature’s Economy, is now a classic. Throughout his career, Worster has kept a close eye on trends in ecological theory and epistemology, leading him to publish in the late 1980s and early 1990s several works in which he historicized the rise of nonequilibrium ecology. As part of the generation whose environmental consciousness was formed during the 1970s, Worster remained sympathetic to Odum’s ecosystem ecology and to Leopold and Carson’s lyrical holism. He understood that his own worldview was the product of a particular time and place but was nevertheless resistant to the ecological and political implications of chaos theory and disturbance ecology and suspicious of the motives of some of its proponents, a few of whom evinced troubling social Darwinist tendencies.12 In Worster’s view, the new emphasis on chaos could partly be explained by the ideological predisposition among some ecologists toward free markets and minimal government, although he was reluctant to give this factor too much weight. More importantly, the increasing influence of population biology, with its propensity for crunching reams of data rather than interrogating the complex interconnectedness of species in ecosystems, helped explain the turn away from equilibrium ecology. “Outfitted with computers that can track the life histories of individual species [and] chart the rise and fall of populations,” Worster argued, population biologists “have brought a degree of mathematical precision to ecology that is awesome to contemplate. And what they see when they look at population histories for any patch of land is wildly swinging oscillations. Populations rise and populations fall, like stock market prices, auto sales, and hemlines. We live, they insist, in a non-equilibrium world.”13 A deeper explanation of the cultural shift toward nonequilibrium ecology lay in the changing temporal perceptions arising from what Fredric Jameson referred to as “the logic of late capitalism,” an era characterized by “ceaseless

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change, infinite possibilities and boundless creativity” that offered “no alternative promise of ever achieving a steady state in social, economic, or ecological terms.”14 Such “time-space compression,” as the Marxist geographer David Harvey called it, not only changed people’s perception of the flow of time, but also engendered a worldview in which constant change and disruption were perceived as normal, even desirable. In the world of business and management, for example, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen developed his highly influential theory of disruptive innovation, insisting that in order to be competitive and successful, institutions needed to internalize and mimic the boom-bust churn of capitalism by deliberately disrupting their management practices.15 Within such a culture, ecologists, like economists and historians, were primed to look for change and disruption. Clements and Odum, whose ideas were formed during an era predisposed to seeing and imposing order, also expected to see ecological change, but were inclined to assimilate it into a broader narrative of stability. Worster and others could draw comfort from such historicism: “So, in this manner, we historians can explain the modern tendency to turn nature into a mirror of our society, reflecting back the chaotic energies of capital and technology. And through making that kind of explanation we can free ourselves from mindless, uncritical allegiance to the new orthodoxy, as historical analysis has liberated us from previous orthodoxies and promoted critical thinking. Fortified by the principle of historicism, we can also approach recent ecological models that emphasize disturbance with a sense of freedom and independence. If they are not the mere reflection of global capitalism and its ideology, they are nonetheless highly compatible with that force dominating the earth.”16 Once historians understood the cultural forces that gave birth to nonequilibrium ecology, Worster argued, they were in a better position to critique its scientific claims and moral implications. Change and disruption were not the metaphysical principles of the planet any more than climax and balance. A more compelling candidate, Worster proposed, was interdependency. The metaphor of nature as a web that “binds together all living things, all people everywhere” cannot be invalidated by historical change. It therefore provides a better base from which to explore difficult moral questions about our species’ role in nature.17

The Anthropocene Arrives While historicizing nonequilibrium ecology may have helped free Worster and similarly minded scholars from the new orthodoxy, it did little to defuse the disputes among ecological theorists. Despite resistance among some historians, conservation biologists, and environmental activists, nonequilibrium

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ecology and postmodernism had by the turn of the millennium clearly gained the upper hand. It was at this time that Crutzen and Stoermer, neither of whom had much awareness of the debates described above, boldly proposed that the Holocene was well and truly over and that the planet had entered a new epoch of geological history best described as the Anthropocene. Like most sweeping scientific proclamations, the Anthropocene’s moral and political implications were multivalent. If one tended to view human beings as despoilers of a balanced nature, the Anthropocene was an appalling indicator of how widespread our baleful influence had become. To those who saw change and instability as the norm and for whom anthropogenic activity was merely the latest form of widespread disturbance, the Anthropocene appeared to offer both scientific and epistemological validation. Whatever moral lessons one might choose to draw from it, there is no doubt that the Anthropocene is more than just a descriptor of geological change. The contention that human influence pervades every planetary ecosystem and biome, from the deepest realms of the ocean to the upper levels of the stratosphere, contains within it an inherent call to action. While some interpret this call as a mandate to substantially reduce our human footprint, others interpret it as an invitation to still greater interventions. After all, if we had the power to anthropogenically remodel the planet in the first place, we also have the ability to do it better. For a number of environmental thinkers—Brand among them—Crutzen and Stoermer’s concept of the Anthropocene represents not so much an indictment of what humans have gotten wrong as an opportunity to get things right. The thrust of their critique is aimed less at capitalism, militarism, and other traditional targets of environmentalist ire but, rather, at environmentalism itself. Western environmentalists, they argue, remain stubbornly wedded to an outmoded ecological worldview in which nature is like a fragile teacup in a china shop and humans are an angry bull. By opposing—or failing to enthusiastically embrace—technologies such as nuclear power, GMOs, and geoengineering, environmentalists risk dooming the vast majority of the human population to poverty and climate catastrophe. Furthermore, their relentlessly critical and pessimistic tone alienates potential supporters and limits their political effectiveness. Ecosystem services, natural capital, and “conservation for people” are the mantras of the Anthropocene boosters. Fragility is out; resilience is in. And wilderness, always a figment of our collective cultural imagination, has been replaced by the rambunctious garden. Thus among a growing group of high-profile environmental scientists and writers, the Anthropocene gives us license—indeed, requires us—to further extend the metaphors, epistemologies, and practices inspired by the nonequilibrium ecology and postmodernist critique of wilderness preservation of the late twentieth century.

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The most prominent of what some have labeled the “Anthropocene boosters” can be found in one place, or at least on one website: that of the Breakthrough Institute. Started by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, whom Bill McKibben dubbed “the bad boys of environmentalism,” the institute’s mission is to “accelerate the transition to a future where all the world’s inhabitants can enjoy secure, free, prosperous, and fulfilling lives on an ecologically vibrant planet.” Hard to disagree with that. Twentieth-century environmentalism, however, will not get us there. What we need, they argue, is a post-environmental consensus, one which can only be achieved by a brand of politics marked by pragmatism, compromise, and an almost overweening sense of forced optimism. Global capitalism appears to be here to stay, and corporations are not going to get less powerful. Partnering with them, rather than consistently opposing them, represents the best hope of seeding them with a green sensibility. As Shellenberger and Nordhaus put it in their 2005 call to arms, if “environmentalists hope to become more than a special interest we must start framing our proposals around core American values and start seeing our own values as central to what motivates and guides our politics.”18 Trained in the world of public relations and polling, Shellenberger and Nordhaus have strikingly little to say about ecology or conservation. However, if one wishes to get a sense of where conservation is heading in the Anthropocene, one need look no further than their Breakthrough associate, the prolific and indefatigable Peter Kareiva. Kareiva is the Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist and a part-time professor of environmental science at Santa Clara University. With his Santa Clara and Breakthrough colleague, Michelle Marvier, he has published a popular textbook titled Conservation Science: Balancing the Needs of People and Nature, as well as cowriting articles with titles such as “Trade-offs in Making Ecosystem Services and Human Well-being Priorities” and “Climate Change’s Impact on Key Ecosystem Services and the Human Well-being They Support in the US.” One should not, however, create the impression that Kareiva is a maverick ecologist pushing an increasingly anthropocentric brand of conservation at the behest of the Breakthrough Institute. He is a prominent scientist who has coauthored articles with some of the most renowned conservation scientists of our time. In 2012, for example, Kareiva, Paul Ehrlich, and Gretchen Daily published “Securing Natural Capital and Expanding Equity to Rescale Civilization” in Nature. Kareiva, in other words, is at the leading edge of a broader anthropocentric turn in conservation science and ecological research.19 If Kareiva is the Eugene Odum of Anthropocene ecology, then Emma Marris is its Rachel Carson. Like Carson, Marris has a gift for synthesizing scientific research and presenting it in clear, elegant prose that is both a pleasure to read and gently but firmly polemical. Marris’s critique is primarily

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leveled at conservation biologists and restoration ecologists, many of whom, she insists, continue to cling to outmoded ecological worldviews. Instead of learning the lessons of the Anthropocene, too many conservation scientists continue to believe that their primary job is to protect remote ecosystems from human interference and restore their ecological integrity. But since all ecosystems are impermanent and unstable, restoration efforts are essentially curatorial works: ecologists, more or less arbitrarily, select their preferred ecological baseline and set about painstakingly cajoling an uncooperative ecosystem back to some imagined prelapsarian state. In Rambunctious Garden, Marris skewers example upon example of expensive and time-consuming restoration projects to show that the effort is eternally futile, the result always disappointing. Instead, she argues, we should accept that all of nature is a human coproduction, embrace our role as ecosystem managers, and get on with it. “In different places, in different chunks, we can manage nature for different ends—for historical restoration, for species preservation, for selfwilled wilderness, for ecosystem services, for food and fiber and fish and flame trees and frogs. We’ve forever altered the Earth, and so now we cannot abandon it to a random fate. It is our duty to manage it. Luckily, it can be a pleasant, even joyful task if we embrace it in the right spirit. Let the rambunctious gardening begin.”20 Among other prizes, Rambunctious Garden won the Breakthrough Institute’s 2013 Paradigm Award. Whatever one might think of Marris’s brand of anthropocentric environmentalism, it is modest compared to the grand visions of some other Breakthrough affiliates, including Stewart Brand. Mark Lynas, a former radical environmentalist who used to rip out genetically modified crops in his native England, has become an all-out Anthropocene warrior. Where Brand was content to compare humans to some vague, pre-Abrahamic deities, Lynas’s metaphor is full-on Judeo-Christian. We are not merely, in Brand’s formulation, “as gods”; we are “the God species.” Like Marris, Brand, and numerous others, Lynas invokes a history in which humans have been managing the planet for centuries, if not millennia. This being the case, it makes no sense to shirk this long-term duty; rather, it is time we started doing it in a more systematic, intelligent, and thoroughgoing way.21 The forces that have created a favorable cultural environment for such ideas are not difficult to discern. Worster’s account of how constant change became a normative expectation is even more relevant today than it was two decades ago. Economic and technological globalization and the process of time-space compression that Harvey described have intensified dramatically. The increasing speed and scope of the internet, combined with the ubiquity and power of portable computer devices, makes knowledge on just about any subject instantly available, fostering a sense—some might say an

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illusion—of greater control over one’s life and, by extension, one’s environment. The exponential increase in computer processing power has pushed us into the era of Big Data. With smart phone in hand, anyone can now possess everything from nanosecond-scale knowledge of stock market perturbations to long-range measurements of carbon cycles over millennia. Genomic technology likewise continues to intensify, promising everything from improved human health and fitness to microbes designed to clean up oil spills and devour plastic detritus before it ever reaches Kamilo Beach.22 Whether such developments will be realized or remain wishful thinking, their mere possibility is enough to inspire a sense of scientific optimism and mastery. No wonder governments and universities the world over have become obsessed with promoting the STEM disciplines, which promise not only to assure the survival of the human race, but to do so amidst a future of boundless scientific progress and environmentally sustainable economic growth. In tandem with the normalization of rapid temporal change, recent technological developments in satellite mapping, LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), and geographic information systems have facilitated an unprecedented degree of detailed spatial knowledge of the surface—and increasingly the subsurface—of the entire planet. The availability and affordability of Google Earth has democratized such technology: a teenager can use it to find the way to a friend’s house; an oil company can map out a pipeline; an archeologist can look for signs of ancient civilizations in the Amazon; and nations can bomb each other with astounding precision. In earlier times, as James Scott has influentially argued, the process of making landscapes “legible”—of mapping and ordering them to better serve the needs of the state— was a key process in state formation. The entire planet is now legible from a laptop or a smart phone, and the synoptic vision of Scott’s early modern state appears utterly benign and puny compared with twenty-first-century satellite surveillance’s eye of Sauron.23 Changing historical interpretations of humans’ impact on landscapes and ecosystems, as well as a willingness among scholars to write histories on a larger spatial and temporal scale, have also contributed significantly to the managerial worldview of the Anthropocene.24 Archeologists have successfully demonstrated that our ancestors used fire to manage ecosystems for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. Ancient irrigation schemes in Egypt and China likewise altered the hydrology of surrounding regions. The Amazon, long thought to be an impenetrable and inhospitable wilderness to all but a few hardy hunters and gatherers, is being reinterpreted via paleobotanical evidence as an anthropogenic landscape in which the forest was carefully managed to optimize food production. Ancient mounds and ditches—many visible on Google Earth—indicate the presence of significant

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towns and settlements in the pre-Columbian era. Even the soil appears to be a human coconstruction: numerous pockets of terra preta, a rich dark soil composed of charcoal, manure, and compost and studded with shards of pottery, are spread throughout the rainforest and savannah. The scale and impact of such efforts have led paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman to conclude that the Anthropocene began with the rise of wet-rice agriculture some four thousand years ago. These early agricultural endeavors, Ruddiman argues, released enough methane into the atmosphere to impact global climate. Traces of lead from Roman smelting, visible in ice cores and soils throughout the northern hemisphere, further demonstrate that humans were polluting the atmosphere long before the industrial era.25 In essence, the Anthropocene is the product of Big Science and Big History.26 The former has made possible planetary legibility while the latter has produced a compelling narrative of long-term human influence on the environment at multiple scales.27 For those who were already convinced of the truth of nonequilibrium ecology and the notion that wilderness was a cultural construction, the idea that humans have long been agents of ecological disturbance across much of the planet was an easy sell. In Brand’s formulation, we were gods all along without knowing it, and as a result, our efforts were clumsy at best. Fortunately, we now have the knowledge and scientific tools to hone our techniques, to plan, and to improve. Managing the global environment, for the good of humans and nature, is the only logical alternative to the continuation of the long-term trend of ignorant, haphazard, and destructive anthropogenic change. Brand and his cohort of self-described eco-pragmatists have successfully fashioned an environmental discourse that projects both a tough sense of ecological realism and an empowering rhetoric of techno-optimism. But is it pragmatism? Not according to the pragmatist philosopher Ben Minteer: “A faithful reading of American pragmatism,” Minteer writes, “suggests an ethic of careful adaptation and cautious adjustment, a philosophy of environmental prudence.” The eco-pragmatists “have seriously misread one of the tradition’s most important moral lessons.” Far from expressing a pragmatic view, they reflect a new form of Prometheanism: “John Dewey and William James didn’t place humans at the center of the universe. Rather, their philosophy was steeped in a reflective sense of human contingency and, in Dewey’s case, a respect for nature as part of responsible human agency on the planet. . . . It is an ethic that neither rationalizes the human domination of nature nor recklessly seeks to extend our technological prowess.”28 A Promethean worldview serves to emphasize a particular set of highly interventionist solutions to global environmental problems, in the process downplaying more modest and cautious proposals. The environmental philosopher Dale

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Jamieson argues that Breakthrough affiliates and like-minded environmentalists are aggressively promoting adaptation as the only rational response to climate change. “They have constructed a history in which there was supposed to have been a kind of taboo against talk of adaptation. To a great extent this narrative has been driven by an attempt to privilege adaptation over abatement and mitigation.”29 As Donald Worster has amply documented, factionalism, in-fighting, and schisms are nothing new in the history of environmental thought. The Anthropocene-inspired environmentalism of the early twenty-first century, for all its bombastic anthropocentrism, represents what its proponents feel is the only politically feasible approach to climate change and other global problems. And perhaps they’re right. In an era dominated by a turbocharged capitalist globalization in which both economic elites and the aspiring masses demand constant growth and progress, it could be that the only realistic brand of environmentalism is one that lauds human ingenuity and creativity; promotes technological and scientific advancement; and portrays nature as resilient in the face of constant human disturbance. Nevertheless, we would do well to consider what people such as Worster have learned over a lifetime of examining how we understand ourselves in relation to nature. Big brains and technological prowess have allowed us to dominate the natural world like no other species, but we must not forget that another of our distinguishing features is our capacity for moral reasoning and, in turn, the development of what Worster calls “the higher altruism, an intentional selflessness that may have an element of self-interest but expands to find moral purpose in the act of preservation.” This altruism “does not require us to follow an impossible standard of Edenic purity,” Worster notes. It does, however, “require us to care about any and all life that transcends our human boundaries and sympathies.”30 Moral values emphasizing caution, humility, and self-restraint flow far more easily from a worldview in which humans are part of an interdependent community of life than one in which we see ourselves as the God species. The new anthropocentric environmentalists are for the most part, it is safe to say, well-intentioned. However, their enthusiasm for planetary management—from the genome to the geosphere—promotes the kind of unbridled technological optimism and hubris that created our problematic new epoch in the first place. The Anthropocene, both as a heuristic device and a scientific concept, can help generate many interesting insights and useful lessons about our role on the planet. Promoting an ambitious and unapologetic anthropocentrism, however, is probably not one of them. Environmental historians are among those best equipped to historicize this development. In doing so, they can play a vital role in informing environmental activists and

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policy makers of the problematic tendencies that frequently arise from an unproblematic embrace of the Anthropocene.

Notes 1. Stewart Brand, “We Are as Gods,” Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968. Brand drew this formulation from the British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, who in his 1968 book, A Runaway World?, wrote: “Men have become like gods. Isn’t it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid.” Brand’s comments and the Leach quotation can be found at http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/195/we.are.as.gods. For scholarly treatments of the Catalog, see Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The “Whole Earth Catalog” and American Environmentalism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007); and Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 2. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (New York: Viking, 2009). In the 2010 Penguin edition the subtitle was changed to Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary. 3. Stoermer coined the term in the mid-1980s, although it did not gain much purchase. In his 1992 book on global warming, Andrew Revkin, a prominent environmental journalist at the New York Times, referred to the “Anthrocene,” a similarly ignored neologism. For more on the history of the term and the concept, see Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 842–67. 4. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18. Crutzen subsequently further developed the Anthropocene concept, most notably with the assistance of Will Steffen and John McNeill. See Paul J. Crutzen, Will Steffen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36 (December 2007): 614–21. 5. For the latter viewpoint, see John A. Vucetich, Michael Paul Nelson, and Chelsea K. Batavia, “The Anthropocene: Disturbing Name, Limited Insight,” in After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans, ed. Ben A. Minteer and Stephen J. Pyne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 66–73. Several other essays in the volume express a similar viewpoint. Also see George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, and Tom Butler, eds., Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014).

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6. Patricia L. Corcoran, Charles J. Moore, and Kelly Jazvac, “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record,” GSA Today 24 (June 2014): 4–8. 7. William Ruddiman argues that the Anthropocene began as early as 8,000 years ago with the advent of early agriculture. See William Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of the Climate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). British scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin argue that it began in 1610, which is when pollen from imported New World crops begins to show up in the European geological record (in marine sediment). Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (March 12, 2015): 171–80. More common are definitions dating the Anthropocene to the industrial or nuclear eras. 8. Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 58. 9. For a historical analysis of the shift from equilibrium to nonequilibrium ecology, see the final chapter of Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For an account by one of the leading proponents of the new ecology, see Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For more recent critiques of holistic ecology, see Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and John Kricher, The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 10. The postcolonial critique of Western environmentalism was launched by Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989): 71–83. Also see his The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). William Cronon elegantly and compassionately deconstructed wilderness in “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69–90. 11. William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992): 369–85. For an expanded treatment of this theme, see Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). 12. Donald Worster, “The Ecology of Order and Chaos,” Environmental History Review 14 (Spring/Summer 1989): 12.

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13. Worster, “Ecology of Order and Chaos,” 11. 14. Donald Worster, “Nature and the Disorder of History,” Environmental History Review 18 (Summer 1994): 10–11. This essay was reprinted in the Soulé volume mentioned above: Michael Soulé and Gary Lease, eds., Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995). See also the final chapter of Worster’s Nature’s Economy. 15. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). For an overview and critique of Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory, see Evan Goldstein, “The Undoing of Disruption,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2015, http:// chronicle.com/article/The-Undoing-of-Disruption/233101/?cid=cr&utm_ source=cr&utm_medium=en. 16. Worster, “Nature and the Disorder of History,” 10–11. 17. Worster, “Nature and the Disorder of History,” 12. 18. Bill McKibben, “Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Watcha Gonna Do?,” Alternet, January 26, 2005, http://www.alternet.org/story/21101/bad_boys,_bad_boys,_ whatcha_gonna_do. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World (San Francisco: Breakthrough Institute, 2005), 32. 19. Peter Kareiva and Michelle Marvier, Conservation Science: Balancing the Needs of People and Nature (Englewood, CO: Roberts, 2010). For a succinct summary of their position, see Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, and Robert Lalasz, “Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility,” Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2012, http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php /journal/past-issues/issue-2/conservation-in-the-anthropocene. 20. Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 171. 21. Mark Lynas, The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2011). An even more extreme version of this rhetoric is propounded by Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace leader who subsequently became Greenpeace’s leading critic. A self-described “sensible environmentalist,” Moore now finds that his ecological worldview meshes better with Monsanto than with Greenpeace. He has also taken a curious position on climate change, insisting that it is largely a natural phenomenon and actually good for the planet. “Earth would be a lot deader with no carbon dioxide, and more of it will be a very positive factor in feeding the world. Let’s celebrate carbon dioxide.” See Patrick Moore, “Why I am a Climate Change Skeptic,” Heartland, March 20, 2015, https://www.heartland.org/ news-opinion/news/why-i-am-a-climate-change-skeptic. Also see Moore’s Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (Vancouver, BC: Beatty Street, 2010).

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22. “Oil-Eating Bacteria Engineered,” National Geographic, April 5, 2011, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/04/110405-nsf-oilsomasundaran-video; “Plastic-Eating Microbes Help Marine Debris Sink,” Discovery, July 19, 2014; http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/plastic-eatingmicrobes-help-marine-debris-sink-140619.htm. 23. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). For a discussion of how computer simulations have shaped our images of global ecology, see Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 63–67. 24. David Christian, one of the chief exponents of history on a grand scale, offers a useful explanation of why “universal history” is making a comeback. See David Christian, “The Return of Universal History,” History and Theory 49 (December 2010): 6–27. 25. For more on terra preta and the anthropogenic Amazon, see Mann, 1491; and Clark L. Erickson, “Amazonia: The Historical Ecology of a Domesticated Landscape,” in Handbook of South American Archaeology, ed. Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell (New York: Springer, 2008), 157–84. David Keys, “How Rome Polluted the World,” Geographical, December 2003, 45–48. 26. Dipesh Chakrabarty was among the first nonenvironmental historians to seriously wrestle with the implications that the Anthropocene holds for his discipline. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and Climate Change,” New Literary History 43 (Winter 2012): 1–18. For a response, see Robert Emmett and Thomas Lekan, eds., “Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Four Theses,’ ” RCC Perspectives, no. 2 (2016). 27. David Christian began to conceptualize his universal historical narrative at least a decade before Stoermer and Crutzen proposed the Anthropocene. Nevertheless, it’s not surprising that the Anthropocene meshes very well with a story in which humans are the most compelling element in the 13-billion-year history of the universe. See David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Paul Dukes, “Big History, Deep History and the Anthropocene,” History Today 63 (November 2013), http://www.historytoday.com/paul-dukes/big-historydeep-history-and-anthropocene. 28. Ben A. Minteer, “When Extinction Is a Virtue,” in Minteer and Pyne, After Preservation, 101. 29. Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future (New York: Oxford

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University Press, 2014), 208. 30. Donald Worster, “The Higher Altruism,” in Minteer and Pyne, After Preservation, 59, 64. Originally published in Environmental History 19 (October 2014): 716–20.

4 The Locked Door Thomas Midgley Jr., Chlorofluorocarbons, and the Unintended Consequences of Technology Kevin C. Armitage

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f a single inventor embodies the unintended environmental consequences of technological innovation—and thus the necessity of studying environmental and technological change together—it is surely Thomas Midgley Jr. (May 18, 1889–November 2, 1944). A charismatic and brilliant chemical engineer who spent most of his career working for General Motors and its subsidiaries, Midgley’s technological innovations have been so environmentally consequential that it is no exaggeration to say that he singlehandedly changed the atmosphere of planet Earth.1 Indeed, he did so twice: first, in 1921 when he solved the problem of engine knock by adding lead to gasoline; and second, when he developed the “safe” refrigerant, the chlorofluorocarbon. Midgley’s first innovation—the mixture tetraethyl lead (TEL)—eliminated engine knock, but the health and environmental consequences were tremendous. Lead is a powerful neurotoxin, and the maladies suffered by people who breathe leaded engine exhaust include degraded brain development and function, especially in children, and increased heart and respiratory diseases in adults. The intertwined social and environmental effects of lead poisoning are similarly staggering: a growing body of empirical data suggests that exposure to lead helps account for the increase and eventual decrease (after leaded fuels were banned) in violent crime in the United States.2

Midgley fundamentally altered the atmosphere a second time when in 1929 when he put an end to existing hazardous chemical refrigerants—“All refrigerating agents previously used have been either inflammable, toxic or both” acknowledged Midgley—by inventing an ostensibly safe cooling agent, the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), that severely damaged the stratospheric ozone layer.3 The consequences of the widespread use of chlorofluorocarbons are so severe that scientists have concluded that had they not been phased out, by 2060 there would have been very little ozone layer left and hence very little protection against acute ultraviolet radiation.4 Without such protection, terrestrial life would be in grave danger. For humans, chronic exposure to ultraviolet radiation degrades the skin, eyes, and immune system, and causes epidermal

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cancer and cataracts. Midgley even anticipated that humans could profoundly shape the atmosphere when in 1935 he theorized that chemists could aide agriculture by controlling the ozone layer.5 By creating TEL and CFCs, Midgley became the world’s first geoengineer, albeit an inadvertent one. Even Midgley’s death abounded in irony. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), with whom he corresponded, he suffered from polio and lost the use of his legs.6 Unlike FDR, Midgley approached his disease as an engineer, constructing a harness and pulley system that granted him mobility from his bedroom to his bathroom and study, allowing him to live and work independently at home. But this ingenious arrangement backfired when he became entangled in the straps and strangled himself. Thus Midgley’s manner of death appeared to mimic his inventions: brilliant but ultimately deadly. Midgley’s inventions and end of life are oft-cited cautionary tales, concrete examples of the popular adage that technology is subject to the law of unintended consequences. Midgley’s reputation is so profound that his grandson publicly apologized “to the world at large for the environmental damage caused by many of [my grandfather’s] accomplishments in chemistry.”7 Environmentalists have long deployed this history as an instructive admonition against the idea that humans can fabricate and invent our way out of ecological crisis.8 Environmental thought generally asserts that technological progress holds no intrinsic value and instead can foster unintended effects that can be globally calamitous. And yet technology continues to proliferate, and environmentalists rightly champion many technologies as keys to a sustainable future. The task for the environmental historian, then, is not simply to record the unintended consequences of technological innovation but to understand the entwined nature of technological and environmental change and to offer an explanation for why that change can produce such astonishing unforeseen outcomes.9 Though many readers will be passingly familiar with Midgley’s story, its details reveal how the process of innovation ensures unintended outcomes even greater than those inherent to technological change. The best environmental histories have long explicated the tangled worlds of social, environmental, and technological change. Donald Worster’s environmental history classic Rivers of Empire, for example, interprets the social and environmental outcomes of large-scale irrigation in the American West. It offers specific lessons for understanding Midgley and his inventions. The scale of Western irrigation was (and is) simply colossal; among many transformations was its conversion of California’s arid Central Valley into the world’s most productive food-growing region. In telling that story, the book engages

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a crucial theme in histories of technology and environment: the role of expertise in shaping change. The great irrigation projects of the West concentrated land ownership and water rights into a small group of wealthy individuals and agribusinesses. For Worster, expertise in the hands of hydrologists despoiled the land—“We enjoy pushing rivers around” boasted one hydraulic engineer— and fomented social hierarchy: engineering the West enshrined “ ‘a sharply alienating, intensely managerial relationship with nature.” That relationship produced a “hydraulic society,” a sociotechnical order that is “increasingly a coercive, monolithic, and hierarchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise. Its face is reflected in every mile of the irrigation canal.”10 Technology in the service of capital and the domination of nature produced the domination of people. For Worster, the mode of thought that undergirded hydraulic society is what Frankfurt School scholars termed “instrumental reason”: the suitable means to an end goes wrong when the ends remain unexamined and thus give way to a narrow, unexamined expediency that becomes the primary value guiding action. In this manner reason becomes irrational. Instrumental reason helps clarify why technology so often produces unexpected results. As Worster explains, “In technology too, instrumentalism tells the inventor what is needed to make a machine function more effectively, leaving the ends of innovation unexamined.”11 When those ends remain unexamined the consequences of technology will remain unexamined—and thus likely produce surprising effects. There were alternatives. Worster lauds John Wesley Powell for proposing a watershed democracy in which “the watershed gives shape to the technology that conquers it, and the efficient functioning of that technology requires a society organized along watershed lines, so that the jurisdiction of laws and courts and community planning are coextensive with the resource base.”12 Such a technology would still allow people to exploit a resource, but it would keep social ends in line with nature’s limits. This of course was the path not taken, but it demonstrates how technology is a historical and social phenomenon that serves the ends to which it is put. The story of Midgley and his invention of the chlorofluorocarbon mimics in some key ways the creation of hydraulic society. First, Midgley, like many of the Pollyannaish boosters of Western development, viewed the natural world via instrumental means, assuming that the scientific domination of nature could only produce salutary results. Midgley, for example, made outrageous claims on behalf of technological intervention into the human life cycle: “The next century should see an extension in the conquest of science over the forces of nature so astounding that imagination is inadequate to conceive of the final result. Our knowledge of the vital chemical processes of living matter will be so enormously increased that it is not too much to say

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that the life cycle itself may be controlled to the end that old age shall have disappeared and that many then alive may live to ages rivaling that of Methuselah.”13 Grandiloquent pronouncements aside, Midgley assumed that the domination of nature was the key to human progress; he failed to consider the destructive possibilities of human activity. What Midgley did understand was the need for new, safe refrigerants; existing refrigerants were known hazards. Profound health problems arose from the gases used as refrigerants: ammonia (a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen with the formula NH3), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and methyl chloride (CH3Cl). Most early American manufactures of refrigeration equipment preferred ammonia as a refrigerant because of its high latent heat and great potential energy. Yet ammonia is an extremely volatile substance; even today it is used in the manufacture of explosives. Operators of industrial ice machines recognized the potential hazards associated with ammonia immediately. “It is not necessary to call the attention of the ice machine operator to the fact that ammonia will explode” observed the editors of Ice and Refrigeration News in 1894. “Explosions of this substance are now of not an infrequent occurrence; and as the number of ice-making and refrigeration plants increases from month to month, it is quite possible that the number of reported explosions may increase also.”14 The most spectacular accident involving ammonia occurred a year before the editors of Ice and Refrigeration News sounded their warning, on the highly visible occasion of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. The fair’s ice plant exploded that July 10 when a small fire in a smokestack suddenly ignited the entire building. The ensuing blaze took seventeen lives and left nineteen others seriously injured. This and many other less deadly but still fatal explosions confirmed to workers and firemen what chemists already knew or at least suspected: when ignited, gaseous ammonia can produce a deflagration, a powerful convulsion that resembles an explosion.15 However, as late as the 1910s some experts still doubted whether ammonia could explode, and only after sustained pressure from labor unions and local governments did refrigeration plants using ammonia begin to implement safety regulations. Ice and Refrigeration News counseled that workers (though not owners) engage in “eternal vigilance” to combat accidents.16 Yet widespread consciousness of the potential health effects of mechanical refrigerants did not occur until threats to individuals in their homes became widely known. The danger was very real. Consider a rash of fatalities that occurred in Chicago during a particularly deadly streak that lasted from the summer of 1928 through the summer of 1929. On the morning of August 8, 1928, a twenty-seven-year-old nurse, “Miss A.L.,” fought a bout of nausea and drowsiness. She managed to work that morning, but complained of

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weakness. The next morning at 2 a.m. she awoke with severe vomiting that lasted for the next thirty hours; diarrhea and convulsions followed. She was admitted to the hospital on the morning of August 10, diagnosed with acute food poisoning. She was in a comatose state. She died in convulsions that evening. Her final diagnosis read, “Gas poisoning, cause unknown.”17 That February, Miss W.H., an eighteen-year-old bookkeeper who shared an apartment with two other women, awoke feeling too ill to attend work. That same day all three roommates developed nausea, and again a physician assumed the problem to be food poisoning. Yet as the hours passed their condition worsened dramatically. A second physician visited them and found them to be “mentally confused, semicomatose and still suffering from uncontrolled vomiting.” All three women were taken to the hospital and initially diagnosed with botulism. One roommate slipped into a deep coma that lasted forty-eight hours; though she eventually recovered, her ataxia lasted for months. Dozens of similar cases hit the media during the summer of 1929. On July 1 a coroner’s jury of pathologists and chemists declared that the death of yet another Chicago resident, Mrs. Violet Clark, was attributable to “inhaling methyl chloride gas that emanated from the artificial refrigerator” in her apartment. The jury, headed by Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), concluded “at least fifteen and perhaps more persons died in recent months in Chicago from gases used in artificial refrigeration.”18 The jury recommended that both government and industry work to prevent future deaths.19 The public reaction was fierce. Headlines screamed of deaths due to methyl chloride, and many municipalities banned “death gas ice boxes.”20 Report after report noted that Chicago had dozens of cases of methyl chloride poisoning, many fatal, and most initially misdiagnosed as food poisoning.21 Government agencies investigated methyl chloride; the Treasury Department suggested “the addition of chemical warning agents” that would “give a greater sense perception” to unsuspecting citizens, thus preventing involuntary exposure to noxious refrigerants.22 Other government investigations examined the possibility that food and water cooled by methyl chloride could absorb the gas and poison those who ate from their refrigerators.23 Yet the primary reaction among government agencies was an attempt to allay fears. The United States Public Health Service, the Bureau of Standards, and the Bureau of Mines issued a joint statement meant to quell the “undue excitement.” Government agencies intended, as one headline put it, to “Prevent Ice Box Anxiety,” so that those citizens “possessing household refrigeration systems” might be “relieve[ed] of any undue anxiety.” Though the statement reported, “none of the three refrigerants . . . can be breathed

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with impunity” it emphasized that “none are violent poisons when breathed for a short time in low concentrations.”24 The problem with methyl chloride arose from its “slight and rather pleasant odor” that likely “would not awaken a sleeping person and might not be recognized by one who was awake.” Thus the odorizing of methyl chloride seemed to be one commonsense safety measure. “Studies are now underway,” reported the New York Times, to “accomplish safety . . . by adding some strong odor” to methyl chloride.25 Though it also advocated odorizing methyl chloride, the published research in JAMA did not minimize the poisoning that exposure to methyl chloride inflicted. The variety and severity of symptoms—from “mild intoxication to death”—along with their similarity to food poisoning enhanced the public health dilemma. The authors of the major research statement on the subject noted that Chicago alone boasted 75,000 domestic refrigerators using methyl chloride, a statistic that “indicates the magnitude of the problem.” Indeed, “[t]he detection of twenty nine cases of methyl chloride poisoning in one year probably represents only a part of the risk involved.”26 Because of the dangers associated with refrigerators, many hospitals refused to use them. Likewise, about 85 percent of families with electricity did not own a refrigerator, and many of those who did stored the appliance on an unenclosed back porch, a prudent distance from sleeping family members.27 Clearly industry could not continue with this state of affairs. The coroner’s jury in the Violet Clark death recommended that “proper public officials and the leaders in the artificial refrigeration industry get together to devise ways and means for the protection of the public against recurrence of such deaths.” The coroner’s jury further urged the refrigeration industry “to take steps to remove from the process the toxic properties which cause sickness and death.”28 The market for home refrigeration was already vast and was growing quickly, yet remained largely untapped; companies such as Frigidaire—the leading refrigeration company of the 1920s—desperately wanted a safe coolant for home use and for large public spaces such as movie theatres and railroad cars. Anxious to solve this problem, Frigidaire dispatched an employee to Dayton, Ohio, to discuss how to remove the “toxic properties” of refrigerants with one of the great inventors of the time: Thomas Midgley Jr. Frigidaire was working on the problem of safe refrigerants before events in Chicago and the subsequent investigations into refrigerants by medical reformers. If history worked in the linear fashion popularized by the tidy narrative or the singular, flat axis of the “time line,” then Frigidaire would have approached Midgley immediately after the well-publicized Chicago poisonings. But historical actors respond to many competing and conflicting pressures and impulses—pressures and impulses that are natural,

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cultural, social, and material—that almost inevitably muddle any representation of history as orderly progression. As is fitting the messy realities of actual life, Midgley was already at work on his refrigerant when the dramatic events in Chicago took place. As we shall see, the search for a safe refrigerant remained the driving force that prompted Midgley’s synthesis of the CFC. The need for safe refrigerants was understood by key figures in the refrigeration industry well before the stirring events in Chicago broadcast that need to the general public. Both Midgley and his bosses understood safety as the driving force behind their push for a new refrigerant. Midgley remembered the genesis of his work on refrigerants this way: “I was in the laboratory and called Kettering (Charles F. Kettering, renowned inventor and head of research at General Motors) in Detroit about something of minor importance. . . . After we had finished this discussion he said ‘Midge . . . the refrigeration industry needs a new refrigerant if they ever expect to get anywhere.’ . . . What was needed was obvious—a nontoxic, nonflammable refrigerant.”29 Kettering, in his clubby 1947 remembrance of Midgley, recalled the fateful work as beginning from the observation that “[t]he refrigeration industry was then in bad need of a new and better refrigerant, particularly one for use in air conditioning which would not take fire and which would be free of harmful effects upon people who might be exposed to it. . . . This is the compound which today is commonly known as Freon, and it proved to have just the properties required. It is highly stable, nonflammable, and altogether without harmful effects on man or animals.”30 Development of safe refrigerants was certainly desirable and likely necessary for the industry to expand the way it did. Amazingly, it took Midgley only three days to synthesize the new, ostensibly safe refrigerant. To find a new refrigerant, Midgley dismissed the painfully slow, hit-or-miss investigations of different chemicals that characterized his work to solve engine knock in favor of what he called the “fox hunt” approach. His method for invention began with a close examination of a relatively new arrangement of the periodic table of the elements pioneered by his friend Robert E. Wilson. Wilson based his table on Irving Langmuir’s concentric theory of atomic structure.31 It showed the number of electrons and empty spaces in the electron shells surrounding atoms. Midgley fox-hunted chemicals using Wilson’s periodic table that grouped elements based upon their known properties. Many elements were quickly eliminated because of their volatility or toxicity. Secondly, very few compounds fell within a usable boiling point range. Nothing left fit the bill, but Midgley hoped that he could mix toxic substances that were not flammable with nontoxic flammable substances to produce a safe refrigerant. The fluorine compounds seemed promising. Midgley described the process this way: “Plottings of boiling points, hunting for data,

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corrections, slide rules, log paper, eraser dirt, pencil shavings, and all the rest of the paraphernalia that takes the place of tea leaves and crystal spheres in the life of the scientific clairvoyant, were brought into play.”32 Concluding that dichlorofluoromethane seemed to be a promising starting point, Midgley purchased five one-ounce batches of antimony trifluoride; from this he made a few grams of what would become Freon. The compound was tested on a guinea pig; Midgley recalled that, “much to the surprise of the physician in charge [it] didn’t suddenly gasp and die.” But subsequent tests did prove fatal to the guinea pigs. Unbeknownst to Midgley, the remaining fluorine compounds were tainted by “a double salt containing water of crystallization” that reacted to produce highly toxic phosgene gas. Midgley and his team quickly rooted out the adulteration. But had he initially tested a contaminated sample, “I believe we would have given up what would then have seemed a ‘bum hunch.’ ”33 Once the substance proved safe, the flamboyant Midgley championed his innovation at the American Chemical Society. In a presentation before the 1930 national meeting, Midgley inhaled a great breath of CFC and used it to blow out a candle. Deep breathing methyl chloride would likely have made Midgley sick; blowing ammonia into a candle would have caused an explosion. It appeared that Midgley had indeed found a nontoxic, nonflammable refrigerant. Midgley’s CFC, marketed under the trade name Freon, was sold as the safe refrigerant. Safety was a tricky advertising approach in the 1930s, however. What would a new concern for safety mean for the several hundred thousand refrigerators already in use? Despite such qualms, Frigidaire’s advertising proclaimed its “Leadership” because “Pursuit of Health and Safety Led to Discovery of ‘Freon.’ ”34 DuPont stressed Freon’s safety in its advertising: “A fear consciousness for ammonia has been instilled in the refrigerating art,” wrote one DuPont engineer in 1936. “We find this consciousness aided and even abetted by some today who proclaim a new religion called Safety, in order to sell a substitute.”35 That substitute was Freon. By World War II (WWII), the safety of Freon was a commonplace advertising trope. A WWII era advertisement “Fresh Air at 40 Fathoms” described life on a submarine— life that was not so bad because it was air-conditioned. “It is only natural that a thoroughly safe refrigerant should be used for this job . . . one that will be harmless even if it accidentally escapes among the men living, working and fighting in a sealed-up shell.” What was safe for our fighting forces was good for everyone. Which brings us back to the key burden of this essay: Why do such unintended outcomes of technological innovation happen so frequently—and in this case, so dramatically? Why does technology so often bite back? One answer can be found in the instrumental reasoning described by Worster

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that supported the hydraulic development of the American West. The concept of instrumental reason can help elucidate what the scholars of technology Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch describe as a “technological frame.” Technological frames are an important concept in thinking about technology as socially constructed—by which I simply mean that it is socially and historically contingent and needs to be studied and understood as such. Similar to but larger than Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm, the technological frame refers to stability in “ways of thinking” and the “fixed patterns of interaction” with objects that “emerge around them.”36 Once someone understands a social phenomenon as technological, they tend to think of it only as technological. Crucially, the technological frame consists not only of ideas but also of the obdurate world of objects themselves. As Bijker explained, writing, like Worster, about dams: “All the things discussed in this essay once were innovations; now they are standing practice. They have grown hard and obdurate, difficult to change. They may even stand in the way of innovation. When things stabilize and grow obdurate, stable ways of thinking and fixed patterns of interaction do emerge around them—I have called these ‘technological frames.’ People with a high degree of inclusion in a technological frame will find it difficult to imagine other ways of dealing with the world, of using these things radically differently or even not using them at all.”37 Rather than determining outcomes, the technological frame impacts them; it “influences interaction and thus shapes specific cultures, but it also explains how a new technology is constructed by a combination of enabling and constraining interactions within relevant social groups.”38 Those constraining interactions mean that almost by definition the social and environmental consequences of innovation will not be taken into account by the inventor or user of a technology—unless they are purposely made to do so. Bijker and other scholars have been most concerned to explain how innovation occurs, why some inventors are able to creatively innovate while others cannot. The key for our purposes is the fixed ways of thinking and patterns of interaction that structure how people interact with things. Other scholars, especially environmental economists, have used a similar if blunter concept, the idea of “technological lock-in,” to describe the persistence of inferior technologies. Technological systems tend to follow specific institutional paths that are difficult and costly to escape. Consequently, they tend to persist even in the face of competition from potentially superior substitutes. Thus, lock-in is said to account for the continued use of a range of ostensibly inferior technologies, such as the QWERTY keyboard or the internal combustion engine. Lock-in and technological frames both describe a species of instrumental reasoning; ways of interacting with a technology swallow up the ends to which it is put.39

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Technological frames help explain Midgley’s alteration of the atmosphere through his invention of CFC. The entire interaction that Midgley had with refrigerants was constrained by the idea that refrigeration comes from an icebox, which, by the late 1920s, generally meant a refrigerator using a chemical coolant. When Charles Kettering told Midgley to work on refrigerants, he instructed Midgley to find a safe one. That is, he and Midgley assumed the technological frame of existing refrigerators; they only needed a tweak, a new chemical to make them work. Kettering did not instruct Midgley to, say, “think big about how we can cool buildings and preserve foods.” Such an instruction would destabilize existing ways of thinking about refrigeration. It would be by definition outside the frame, and it would allow for the possibility of thinking through the social and ecological impacts of an innovation. But Kettering and Midgley were locked into the existing frames of use and meaning when it came to refrigerators. They assumed the predominant, stable ways of thinking and fixed patterns of interaction with refrigerators and their meanings. They did not, in the shopworn idiom of corporate America, think outside the [ice]box. They did not think socially or ecologically. Existing technological frames structured their innovation. Refrigeration was achieved by chemical refrigerants; refrigerators were both means and ends. They considered no other possibilities. This is a constraining technological frame; this is instrumental rationality. Bijker refers to the fixed meanings that constrain the understanding of a technology as “closure.” Once closure occurs—the way Kettering and Midgley responded to the problem of refrigerants was clearly enclosed within a specific technological frame—the frame “cannot be changed easily, and it forms part of an enduring network of practices, theories, and social institutions. From this time on, it may indeed happen that, naively speaking, the technology ‘determines’ social development.”40 When the frame cannot be easily changed, it resists social and ecological thinking. Other scholars have described the persistence of a form of technology as its “momentum.”41 One reason Midgley did not think in larger terms about how to preserve foods is that hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of refrigerators were already in use. The very existence of this massive social and economic investment limits how one thinks about a technology—every interaction with a fixed object in effect tells someone “this is how we achieve this end.” Refrigerators everywhere reinforce the idea that refrigerators are simply a given, that they are the way to preserve foods and cool buildings. Thinking about the consequences of a new refrigerant would disrupt the stable frame that assumes refrigerators as part of the social-technical landscape. Moreover, if one were to engage in dramatically different thinking about how to achieve the ends of refrigeration, one would be immediately confronted by the problem

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of the size and scale and the social and financial investment of the existing technology. One reason petroleum-based fuels are so difficult to replace is that society has trillions of dollars invested in them—and that investment strengthens the momentum of existing technology. The same momentum was true of refrigerators in 1929; the same is true of refrigerators today. Capitalism, or more precisely, technological innovation within capitalist social conditions, reinforces exclusionary frames in significant ways. Technology is central to the ever-evolving capitalist social order. Most importantly, under capitalism technological innovation is driven by the requirements of capital rather than by social or ecological needs. Technological innovation thrives if it is tied to regular and incremental alterations of existing products. As we witnessed with the invention of the CFC, technological invention— often improvements to existing manufactured goods—is the chief source for new areas of accumulation. Technological frames are not inherent to capital—they likely exist in every society and culture—but might be thought to spur unintended consequences more often in a capitalist society in which innovation is driven by the demand for accumulation rather than social need. In capitalist society, accumulation is its own end; social well-being is secondary. The requirements of the capitalism are simply largely independent of social and ecological realties. Market pressures turn existing innovations into standing practices. Ways of thinking grow obdurate like objects themselves. The obduracy of objects intersects with their ongoing transformation. Refrigerators store foods, but their design is continuously transformed. As commentators have long noted, the speed and radical nature of technological change in capitalist society is simply awesome; all that is solid melts into air. But in the case of CFC, it was, in a manner of speaking, the air itself that melted. These outcomes are intertwined. Until ecological thinking becomes part of the process of innovation, unintended ecological effects will remain a widespread feature of technological change. Chemical refrigerants will leak and poison people. Their superficially safe replacement will turn out to destroy the ozone layer. Until we change the processes of innovation, we won’t even try to anticipate the consequences of new technologies. Innovation will always have unintended effects. Narrow technological frames ensure that those effects will be profound. Future scholarship should continue to combine the study of scientific, technological, and environmental change. In the age of climate disruption, it ought to be easy to grasp the inexorably intertwined nature of technological and environmental change. But this is true of the deep past as well. Human life is always an ongoing interaction between people, their fabrications, and the ecosphere. The fact that modern inventors like Thomas Midgley Jr. can alter the ecosphere at a planetary level merely builds upon what humans

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have always done: innovate, invent, produce, construct. Historians should detail the social and ecological contexts and results of those changes. Most importantly we need to emphasize that innovation is a thoroughly social phenomenon, not one that begins and ends within a laboratory that is somehow separated from the rest of society. Midgley was aware of this phenomenon. Though he was not writing about social and ecological understanding, Midgley nevertheless seemed to intuit how innovation might be studied. “When you lock the laboratory door,” he remarked, quoting his friend and supervisor Charles Kettering, “you lock out more than you lock in.”42 Both Kettering and Midgley were advocating the free flow of information among government and commercial researchers. They recognized that technology is not produced by lone geniuses in laboratories. It is a social process. Historians also know that technology is socially constructed and its impacts are social and ecological—and the lines of causality run in all directions. New scholarship will continue to elucidate the intertwined ecological and social effects that produce and shape technological and environmental change. It should not lock the laboratory door.

Notes 1. Midgley’s “brilliance” can be attested to by the fact that he was honored with the four principle American medals for achievement in chemistry: the Nichols Medal (1922), the Perkin Medal (1937), the Priestley Medal (1941), and the Willard Gibbs Medal (1942). He holds 117 patents and served as president of the American Chemical Society. 2. Rick Nevin, “How Lead Exposure Relates to Temporal Changes in IQ, Violent Crime, and Unwed Pregnancy,” Environmental Research 83 (May 2000): 1–22; Rick Nevin, “Understanding International Crime Trends: The Legacy of Preschool Lead Exposure,” Environmental Research 104 (2007): 315–36; Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, “Environmental Policy as Social Policy? The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime” (NBER Working Paper No. 13097, May 2007). For a popular overview of this research, see Kevin Drum, “Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element,” Mother Jones, February 11, 2016, http:// www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasolinecrime-increase-children-health/. 3. Thomas Midgley Jr. and Albert L. Henne, “Organic Fluorides as Refrigerants,” Industrial and Chemical Engineering 22 (May 1930): 542. 4. P. A. Newman et al., “What Would Have Happened to the Ozone Layer if Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) Had Not Been Regulated?,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 9 (March 2009): 2113–28. 5. Thomas Midgley Jr., “Chemistry in the Next Century,” Industrial and

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Engineering Chemistry 27 (May 1935): 496. 6. A draft of FDR’s letter to Midgley is reproduced in the hagiography by Thomas Midgley IV, From the Periodic Table to Production: The Life of Thomas Midgley, Jr. (Corona, CA: Stargazer, 2001), 70–71. 7. Stephen M. M. Midgley, letter to the editor, Nation, May 15, 2000. 8. See, for example, Peter Dauvergne, The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment (Cambridge MA: MIT Press), 2008. 9. Talented historians have long examined the unintended consequences of technological innovation. To begin, see Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). Both volumes beautifully illustrate many surprising unintended consequences of innovation due to the complex social embeddedness of things, but neither elaborates a theory as to how current forms of innovation enhance the unpredictability of technological innovation. 10. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 7. 11. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 55. 12. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 138. Worster wrote about Powell in several books; for his most extensive explication of Powell, see Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 13. Thomas Midgley Jr., quoted in Popular Mechanics Magazine, September 1934, 37A. 14. Ice and Refrigeration News 7 (October 1894): 243. 15. Jonathan Rees, “ ‘I Did Not Know . . . Any Danger Was Attached’: Safety Consciousness in the Early American Ice and Refrigeration Industries,” Technology and Culture 46 (July 2005): 541–60. 16. Rees, “ ‘I Did Not Know,’ ” 552. 17. Arnold H. Kegel, William D. McNally, and Alton S. Pope, “Methyl Chloride Poisoning from Domestic Refrigerators,” Journal of the American Medical Association 93, no. 5 (1929): 356. 18. “Ice Machine Gas Kills 15 in Chicago,” New York Times, July 2, 1929, 18. 19. “Ice Machine Gas Kills 15 in Chicago,” 18. 20. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 96. 21. Scientific Monthly informed its readers that methyl chloride leaked from automatic refrigerators caused a “number of deaths.” Monthly Labor Review noted twenty-one nonfatal cases of methyl chloride poisoning in a refrigerator

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factory in Indiana. 22. Physiological Response Attending Exposure to Vapors of Methyl Bromide, Methyl Chloride, Ethyl Bromide and Ethyl Chloride, Public Health Bulletin no. 185 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, March 1929), 35. 23. W. P. Yant, H. W. Shoaf, and J. Chornyak, “Observations on the Possibility of Methyl Chloride Poisoning by Ingestion with Food and Water,” Public Health Reports 45, no. 19 (May 9, 1930): 1057–65. 24. “Move to Prevent Ice-Box Anxiety,” New York Times, August 1, 1929, 17. 25. “Assure Householders as to Refrigerators,” New York Times, August 23, 1929, 2. 26. Kegel, McNally, and Pope, “Methyl Chloride Poisoning,” 358. 27. McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab, 96. 28. “Ice Machine Gas Kills 15 in Chicago,” 18. 29. Thomas Midgley Jr., “From the Periodic Table to Production,” Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 29 (February 1937): 242. 30. Charles F. Kettering, “Biographical Memoir of Thomas Midgley Jr., 1889–1944,” National Academy Biographical Memoirs 24, no. 11 (1947), 370. 31. Midgley, “Periodic Table to Production,” 243. 32. Midgley, “Periodic Table to Production,” 241. 33. Midgley, “Periodic Table to Production,” 241. 34. “Here’s How Frigidaire Know-How Maintains Leadership,” Frigidaire Collection, box 3, Richard P. Scharchburg Archives, Kettering University, Flint, MI. 35. Rees, “ ‘I Did Not Know,’ ” 18–19. 36. Trevor Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. Wiebe E. Bikker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Boston: MIT Press, 1989), 11–44. 37. Wiebe Bijker, “Dikes and Dams, Thick with Politics,” ISIS 98 (March 2007): 122. 38. Wiebe Bijker, “Understanding Technological Culture through a Constructivist View of Science, Technology, and Society,” in Visions of STS: Counterpoints in Science, Technology, and Society Studies, ed. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Carl Mitcham (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 27. 39. See, for example, R. Perkins, “Technological ‘Lock-In,’ ” in Internet Encyclopaedia of Ecological Economics, ed. E. Neumayer (The International Society for Ecological Economics, 2003), http://isecoeco.org/pdf/techlkin.pdf; and Timothy J. Foxon, “Technological Lock-In and the Role of Innovation,” in Handbook of Sustainable Development, ed. Giles Atkinson, Simon Dietz, and Eric Neumayer (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007), 304–16. 40. Bijker, “Understanding Technological Culture,” 28–29.

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41. Thomas P. Hughes, “Technological Momentum,” in Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Boston: MIT Press, 1994), 101–13. 42. Quoted by Louis N. Ridenour, “Secrecy in Science,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1, 1946, 3.

5 Malibu, California Edenic Illusions and Natural Disasters Christof Mauch

D

onald Worster’s America is the prairie, a wide-open land that defies the forest. Few settlers from Europe stayed in America’s heartland. Most of them moved westward and left the barren country behind. But those who remained often developed a very special love for the rough beauty of a land that was once full of bison, grasses, shrubs, and vines. A haven for small animals, a land of big skies. Worster’s parents left Kansas in the 1930s, the years of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, and Worster grew up in a little town in California, close to the Mojave Desert. He has always lived in a world where water was precious and scarce. Worster understands the environmental problems of the American West like few others. He knows about the challenges of arid lands and about the power of rivers. He has dedicated two of his books to champions of conservation: John Muir and John Wesley Powell. Worster was one of the first to criticize the manipulation of nature—the “imperial” control of water by a powerful elite—that has left us with a host of social, economic, and environmental problems.1 He keeps telling us that nature is, indeed, a powerful actor all across the American West, from the Mississippi to the Californian coast, while reminding us that the resources of nature are finite. The quixotic lance thrusts of those who attempt to control the fires and waves along the Californian coast resemble the battles with nature that Worster has focused on in many of his publications. But the story of this chapter teaches us other lessons as well: Malibu is a place for an elite that shuts itself off from the rest of society. It reflects the creed of the United States as the “land of unlimited possibilities.” Most recently in Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance, Worster has criticized the American dream and the underlying belief in a way of life based on abundant resources and happiness through wealth. Ideologies of abundance allowed us to develop a sense (and a philosophy to go with it) of a world without limits, and this has often blinded us to environmental vulnerabilities.2 Many of the “natural” catastrophes that have haunted the United States—the Dust Bowl as much as disasters along the Californian coast—are the result of human hubris and folly. This chapter echoes many of these themes. It discusses the beauty of America’s landscapes and also their fragility.

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Malibu is beautiful, perhaps even Edenic, but its beauty is deceptive. In fact, we might describe it (borrowing from a classic film title to describe this place of Hollywood fame) as “stranger than paradise,” for behind the glittering mirage are the contradictions of a landscape in which human efforts to master nature have failed because of human ignorance.

“An American Riviera” When one drives from LA to Malibu, the smog begins to clear, and the population becomes sparser. High rises, highways, and endless rows of houses make way for spectacular villas, exotic trees, and a rugged hinterland. “27 Miles of Scenic Beauty” is what the sign at the city limits of Malibu promises. Sandy beaches and great ocean waves for surfing are the hallmark of this legendary Southern California town. The coastline and the canyons of Malibu have attracted the rich and famous—Hollywood actors, producers, and directors—for almost a hundred years, and the ocean views from the hillsides are truly breathtaking. Malibu doesn’t maintain a bus station, and it does not have a railway line. Life seems laid-back in scenic Malibu. Thousands of postcards and posters depict a Malibu that often looks too good to be real: advertisements tend to feature exotic beaches with surfers, stunning sunsets, palm trees, and more often than not, female models in bikinis. Malibu aims and claims to be a paradise, an American Garden of Eden, a world of seclusion and seduction. In contrast to LA, which grew quickly following the discovery of oil and the rise of the film and aircraft industry, Malibu remained a small town that has never reached more than 13,000 inhabitants.3 Industrial development stopped at Malibu’s boundary. The place developed into an elongated garden refuge, a paradise for the rich stretching along the Pacific. However, it is not only milk and honey that flow in Malibu. The waves and winds wear away beaches and dunes year after year, land slides down the canyons, floods turn the streets into rivulets and streams, and wildfires brought by the strong and dry Santa Ana winds devour gardens and houses in unpredictable intervals. The unique combination of native plants and imported trees mean that Malibu is especially flammable. As is so often the case, all of these disasters and hazards reinforce each other. Almost half of Malibu’s mansions are built on steep plots prone to mudslides. Once a wildfire has stripped the hills of vegetation, the risk of erosion, flooding, and slides increases. Moreover, the creosote in the native shrubs—the very substance that makes them so prone to burning—leaves behind an oily deposit that further augments the flow of soil and water on the denuded slopes. Malibu is beautiful and terrible all at once. Nowhere else in the United States are paradise and apocalypse quite so close to one another.4

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The story of Malibu’s strange seclusion and the fight to keep an undesirable public out of this beautiful part of the world begins in the nineteenth century, when the vision of Malibu as a paradise was formulated for the first time. This story is closely connected to May Knight Rindge, a schoolteacher, and her husband, Frederick Rindge, an oil millionaire from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Frederick had made a fortune as vice president of the Union Oil Company in LA. When he purchased the huge Malibu Ranch in 1892 for ten dollars per acre—approximately 100 times more than the previous owner had paid thirty-five years earlier—his hope was to find oil. While no oil was to be found, Frederick fell in love with his new property. Like previous owners, he employed cowboys and raised cattle on his ranch. Ever since gold had been found in Northern California in 1849, the demand for meat rapidly increased and the prices for cattle rose dramatically. Large parts of California were overgrazed by the end of the nineteenth century as hooves destroyed the nutritious grasses that had once covered much of California, and “weeds [. . .] of different kinds” took their place.5 But Frederick was not interested in the ecology of the land. His fascination was with the beauty of the Malibu countryside. In fact, it reminded him of Italy: “A farm near the ocean, under the lee of the mountains, with a trout brook, wild trees, a lake, good soil, and excellent climate, one not too hot in summer.”6 Frederick’s “little Italy” served him as the perfect refuge from LA—a counterworld to the “stygian landscape” of America’s fastest-growing metropolis that was about to be “sacrificed on the altar of oil.”7 If LA reminded contemporaries of the underworld, Malibu and the view over its coast seemed “divine” to Frederick. He called it an “American Riviera”; and his friend John Harvard exclaimed upon a visit: “Ah Italy, thou hast a rival.”8 In his book Happy Days in Southern California, Frederick praised Malibu’s “holy hills” and called it a “calm and sweet retreat, protected from the wearing haste of city life.” “Here,” he remarked, “here time flies.”9 “The climate here is especially restful and strengthening,” and Frederick believed it would promote longevity. “Victorianno, a native chief, lived to be one hundred and thirty-six,” he wrote. “And since the head that wears the crown is supposed to be troubled with insomnia, is it not natural to believe his subjects lived to be two hundred, at least?”10 But the climate that was supposed to be mild and Mediterranean, and to contribute to a long life, soon showed its true color: Turbulent storms and violent winds would not be an exception but a recurring rule. In 1903 a devastating fire enveloped the Rindge’s little castle in its inferno. The family moved temporarily to a log cabin. Frederick died just two years after the disaster. On his deathbed he made his wife, May, who would be alone with three teenagers, promise that she would keep Malibu Ranch intact and secluded. Under

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no circumstances should a railway line or a highway go through their property. There would be no “machine in the garden” of Malibu. May, who became known as the “Queen of Malibu”—perhaps because of the size of the Rindge’s empire, because of the grandeur of the new castle, or simply because of May’s wealth and old-world views—vowed to keep the railroad out of Malibu. It was an uneven struggle between the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and May; a fight much like that of David and Goliath. But May succeeded in the end, not so much with endurance but with wit: Since the Interstate Commerce Commission had decreed that no more than one railroad company should operate in any one district, May simply established her own railway line with fifteen miles of tracks. As president of the Malibu and Port Los Angeles Railroad she became one of the first female railroad presidents in the world. Her second struggle—the one against a federal highway—was more challenging. In trying to keep the Pacific Coast Highway out of her ranch, the determined widow fenced in her land, put up barbed wire, and sent out cowboys to patrol the borders of her property. At the same time, she fought a long and hard legal battle that brought her all the way to the Supreme Court. In the end, however, May had to give in. The highway was built, and the foregoing struggle bankrupted the “Queen.”11 It was impossible for the Rindges to live from the revenues of the ranch, and a small ceramics factory that May established in 1926 did not yield enough either. In order to finance her own palace on Laudamus Hill, as well as various mansions and summer houses for other family members, the Queen of Malibu had no alternative but to sell part of her property.12 May decided to part with a small but gorgeous strip of land, referred to as La Costa, in order to pay the debts she owed to her lawyers. She got no less than six million dollars for the property in 1928—an absolutely spectacular amount at the time. Art Jones, the developer who bought La Costa, made the most of the land. He whipped a row of beach bungalows out of the sand and sold them exclusively to Hollywood stars—actors, producers, and directors. Hollywood was less than one and a half hours away by automobile from the Malibu Movie Colony, and the 30-foot-wide properties—leased for 30 dollars a month over a ten-year period—promised profits for Jones within about seven years. Among the first inhabitants of the La Costa hideaway were such illustrious Hollywood greats as Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers Studios, Delores del Rio, the “Princess of Mexico”; silent movie sex symbol Clara Bow; Western hero Gary Cooper; and Duke Kahanamou, the “father of surfing.”13

Paradise on the Screen East of the Rindge ranch, in the hilly hinterland of the Santa Monica Mountains, Hollywood’s presence made itself known as well. Shortly after World

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War I, two real estate investors decided to create an artificial lake at the confluence of the Medea and Triunfo creeks. For several years the dugout remained dry and the investors went bankrupt. But in April 1926, after a massive spring storm, millions of liters of water filled the hole up and created “Malibou Lake,” a 45-foot-deep idyllic mountain lake. Nature, for once, had cooperated in the human search for paradise. Film producers like Arthur Edeson and actors like Strother Martin and later Ronald Reagan settled in the neighborhood of the Lake. Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox purchased considerable parcels of land around the lake, and dozens of film directors used the lake and its surroundings for their productions. Paramount’s “Western Town” in the vicinity of the lake served as Dodge City, Laredo, and Salem in film productions. The mountains around the lake were to serve as a backdrop for a whole slew of Hollywood visions of both fantastic idylls and dreams gone wrong: they were transformed into Tom Sawyer’s Missouri, the Indonesian island of Java, the Ozark Mountains and (medieval) China. Charlie Chaplin strolled around Lake Malibou in the The Great Dictator, and the girl in James Whale’s horror movie Frankenstein was drowned in Lake Malibou. When Hollywood produced The Adventures of Marco Polo in 1938, starring Gary Cooper, over 2,000 dressed-up horses trampled through the Paramount landscape, and scenes of the postapocalyptic ape village in Planet of the Apes, interiors and exteriors, were filmed around Lake Malibou and on the Fox Ranch in Malibu Creek State Park. While Lake Malibou lost some of its attraction over time as a setting for Hollywood movies, the gated beach home communities at the coast of Malibu never ceased to be popular as a retreat for the film studio elite. They turned into what could be called the quiet garden of Hollywood.14

Restoring Eden? Interestingly, the colorful flora of Malibu’s paradisiacal “gardens” was anything but native. Long before the arrival of the Rindges, and before the arrival of Spanish missionaries and Mexican soldiers in the eighteenth century, the hills of Malibu had been covered with semiarid shrubs and plants—a unique form of vegetation known as chaparral. A four-acre strip of land on a bluff overlooking the ocean in Malibu’s Nicholas Canyon gives us an idea of what the vegetation might have looked like thousands of years ago. The area is home to a re-creation of a working Native American Chumash village—an undertaking that, in its own way, suggests an alternative vision of Eden: a distant past when the locals’ relationship with the land was very different, and nature’s destructive force was kept in check by an understanding of the cycles that governed the chaparral. Today, the site is home to a utopian and environmentalist dream of restoring this lost ecosystem.

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The village is managed by Mati Waiya of the Wishtoyo Foundation, in cooperation with the LA County Department of Beaches and Harbors. Mati Waiya, a man in his mid-fifties who had his black hair tied back severely and a bear bone through his nose when I visited him a couple of years ago, explained: “My forefathers lived over there” (he pointed to the ocean). “The land and the sea were their livelihood. They lived from fishing, hunting, and gathering. They had a good life. They feared nature but they also respected her.”15 Mati Waiya, one of the last remaining Chumash (in the 2010 census, only twenty individuals self-identified as Chumash), used to wear dark suits. He worked under a different name as a builder, and his business had many employees. But at one point in the 1990s, he said, he reflected on the values that his Chumash mother had taught him. His dogs ran around the Canyon as Mati Waiya showed me the “tomol,” a vessel “twice as long as a regular canoe,” that a local carpenter built out of redwood planks held together with pine resin and fiber ropes. Mati Waiya explained that “within half a mile of where we stand there once used to be eight Chumash villages.” He elaborated, describing how the Chumash dwellings, called “aps,” had been made out of bent willow branches using simple tools, and that one of them, an “apa’yik,” was a functioning sweat lodge. But Mati Waiya was especially proud of the Stream Habitat Restoration project at Nicholas Canyon Creek. Its goal was to clear debris from the creek and remove invasive plants such as iceplant, arundo, myporum and other exotic wildland species that had prevented the stream from flowing yearround. In their place were planted the seeds of rare plant species—alkali heath, juncus, atriplex—that had been documented as historically having grown on the site. Pine trees and palm trees were cut down and replaced by canopy trees, while environmental and hydrological engineers determined best practices for watershed, pollution runoff, and flood control.16 There are no colorful flowers or awe-inspiring trees in Nicholas Canyon Creek. The chaparral that once covered all of Malibu’s hillsides—the name of the brush comes from the Spanish word for scrub oak, chaparro—can best be described as a green thicket. “Nature knew her business when she developed the chaparral,” wrote Francis M. Fultz, an early Californian conservationist and member of the Sierra Club. “How defenseless mountains are without their coat of chaparral against the elements.”17 Once called “elfin wood,” chaparral used to cover most of Southern California’s hillsides and protected it from erosion. The Chumash apparently burned the chaparral in an effort to plant crops, increase the deer population, and drive out grizzlies. Chaparral is droughtresistant, full of natural fuel, and certainly one of the most flammable types of brush on the globe. As part of its own natural reproductive cycle, it tends to burn every fifteen to thirty years, and when the Chumash natives

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were around it never grew very old. The cycle of growth and burning that has ensured the recycling of nutrients and the sprouting of seeds has been largely beneficial for keeping the unique Californian ecosystem (with its coastal sage, chaparral, and oak) intact. Things changed slowly when the first Spanish cowboys moved to the Californian coast and more rapidly when the Rindges as well as Hollywood stars settled in Malibu and began to realize their utopian vision of a “Riviera transplanted.” The ideal of Malibu homeowners was, of course, not that of a hunting ground or of a wilderness that saw rhythmic cycles of burning. It was, instead, a lush and colorful garden, a paradise in which the risks and dangers of wildfires presumably did not apply. Much of the new flora these settlers brought with them came from the Mediterranean. And plants that are otherwise rare in the United States were transplanted from other continents as well, including for instance copa de oro flowers from South America, and coral or flame trees and Plumbago capensis hedges from South Africa.18 Over the course of the twentieth century the thicket and brush of Malibu’s hinterland was replaced by villas and mansions; pockets of camellias, azaleas, and roses; and of lawns and tree groves. To protect private homes and gardens, small fires in the brush were routinely extinguished; wildfires were seen as uncontrollable, and their role in the local ecology overlooked. As a result, the old, dry brush in the canyons kept accumulating, resulting in enormous quantities of ignitable material.

Paradise in Flames Fire always has the potential of being devastating, but the combination of strong winds, natural fuel, and high-end houses that are nestled into Malibu’s spectacular landscape have no equal in America, and probably nowhere else on the globe. Indeed, Malibu wildfires have spared no one. In 1929, just in time for the opening party of the Malibu Movie Colony (the property that May Rindge had sold), vast flames engulfed thirteen of the Hollywood bungalows. A year later, Decker Canyon in Malibu’s hinterland flared up, and more than 1,000 firemen could do nothing as they watched the spectacle brought to them by the Santa Ana winds. Six years after that, the clubhouse on Malibou Lake fell victim to a huge blaze. And so it continued. Between the mid-1950s and mid-1980s six major fires swept the community, tens of thousands of acres of land burned and hundreds of homes were destroyed as the fires blazed through the canyons and raced to the sea.19 In November 1993 the Great Malibu Fire, known also as the Old Topanga Incident, burned out of control. The fire fed on more than sixty years of dense brush growth and pre–fire code houses. It spread with astonishing rapidity, as the official report of the LA Fire Department makes clear. Within

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ten minutes it had already consumed 200 acres; after the first hour it had expanded to 1,000 acres of chaparral brush. High winds of up to seventy miles an hour, in part caused by the eddies of hot air rising from the fire itself, made the situation even worse.20 Three people lost their lives, 400 private homes and businesses were destroyed, and the insurance losses reached over 540 million dollars, making it—despite Malibu’s sparse population density—one of the top ten most expensive wildfires in US history. According to Munich Re, insurance losses were highest worldwide in October 2007, when numerous fires burned in Southern California and destroyed, among many other things, two Malibu landmarks: Castle Kashan and the Presbyterian Church.21 As more and more villas and mansions are built, the calls of Malibu residents for public “protection,” “defense,” and “relief” have grown ever louder. And they have been answered: millions of tax dollars are being spent on tax relief and insurance subsidies.22 Meanwhile, firefighting has taken on a whole new dimension. In an attempt to protect the homes of Malibu’s nouveaux riches, regional firefighters employ the largest civilian air fleet in the world. When big fires break out in Malibu, the coast and the hills turn into a battlefield between humans and the elemental forces of nature: Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters and Skycranes appear in the sky. Each of them takes thousands of gallons of water from the ocean and dumps it over the raging blaze. When things get really bad, they lease “Quebec SuperScoopers,” DC-10 airplanes, or even Boeing 747 aircrafts that can drop up to 20,000 gallons of flame retardants at a time. And yet, if nature does not “cooperate,” it does not matter how many firefighters and aircraft join the efforts: they are helpless. In the future, fireman Andrew Gosser predicts, wildfires may be less frequent but there will probably be exceptionally large and damaging fires because of the unprecedented accumulation of biomass in the chaparral of the canyons. But the fires “won’t wipe out Malibu,” he says, because “erosion is a much bigger problem.”23 Indeed, some of Malibu’s most precious homes were literally built on sand: on Carbon Beach, also known as “Billionaire’s Beach” and on Broad Beach where Frank Sinatra used to famously sit in his trilby, the “broad” beach is slowly being reduced to a narrow strip of sand. By some estimates more than fifty feet have been lost over the last decade alone. Despite vast expenses and great engineering efforts—steel and concrete, berms and retaining walls, anchors and caissons—the ocean is moving inland, and it is threatening seafront homes.24 And while the raging waves approach Malibu’s beach homes, they are also carrying off the content of Malibu’s septic tanks. Malibu’s waves have been polluted for more than a generation and the beach east of Malibu Pier was named “one of the nation’s most consistently polluted” in the list of “repeat

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offenders” of the National Research Defense Council in 2014. When the water table rises, surfers and swimmers who ignore official warnings at Malibu’s beaches are at risk of getting staphococcus infections from runoff and human feces.25 Malibu is of course not the only coastal town in the United States that is haunted by natural disasters. On the East Coast as well, from Nantucket to Tampa, the temperament of ocean waves and the beauty of shores keep attracting developers and residents, with celebrities leading the way. And despite the possibility of eventual catastrophe, unstable, and fragile coastal environments are the most sought-after areas. No wonder that the state with the highest hurricane risk—Florida—is also the state that has witnessed the largest population increase over the past few decades.26

A Haven of Sustainability? However, one might argue that what makes Malibu special among so many spectacular spots is its culture of environmentalism and the high number of self-proclaimed environmentalists. “I will tell you that 90 percent of the people living here are environmentally conscious,” explains Gil Segel, an actor known for The Last Supper who lives in Carbon Beach and happens to be the president of the Santa Monica BayKeeper environmental group.27 Many of the businesses in town promote virtuous green consumption—from fresh organic produce (at Pacific Coast Greens), to clothing made from earthfriendly materials (at Eco Malibu Clothing), to eco-friendly car services (at Auto Spa Malibu). There are few Hollywood stars who would not cite their love for nature if asked why they chose to reside in Malibu. And there can be little doubt that many of them have publicly proclaimed their commitment to environmental causes. Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, established a major family foundation that works toward a sustainable future for planet Earth. Pierce Brosnan, who was named “Best-Dressed Environmentalist” in 2004, has been actively engaged in marine mammal and wetland protection projects. Julia Roberts proudly uses energy-efficient appliances and recycled tile in her mansion while actively promoting the use of solar energy. Robert Redford has campaigned for Utah wilderness and presents programs on ecology and green living on his Sundance TV channel. Tom Hanks is known to be a big supporter of The Nature Conservancy. Brad Pitt established the Make It Right Foundation that constructed 150 “green homes” in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Entertainer Barbra Streisand donated her lavish 24-acre Malibu estate to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy for a conservation institute. And actress Charlize Theron, who has travelled in eco-style to the Academy Awards, has been active in promoting liquefied natural gas terminals

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off the coast of Malibu. The list of prominent Malibu residents who enjoy the charm and exclusivity of Malibu’s scenery while being active promoters of environmentalism is quite long.28 It would be neither difficult nor very original to be ironic about Hollywood’s eco-crusaders, whose air-conditioned Malibu mansions use up enormous amounts of energy, who own private planes, and who take vacations on gas-guzzling yachts. Their stories are just as odd and inspiring as the story of Malibu itself.

A Garden of Delusions and Promises Like the “American landscape” in Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 Stranger than Paradise—a film that its director called “a neo-realist black comedy”—Malibu and its landscape are not what they promise to be. In fact, nothing is what it seems. The exotic plants are not native; they are recent transplantations from all over the globe. The proverbial beauty and tranquility of Malibu reveals itself to be an illusion. A stream of more than 12 million cars per year drive through its streets and the risk of natural catastrophes haunt the paradisiacal city. The purity of the ocean is a mirage as well: after heavy rainfall the Pacific is filled with fecal indicator bacteria that can make swimmers sick. Hollywood’s environmentalists on Malibu’s shores are less green than they would have us believe: not least because armoring their houses against the waves accelerates beach erosion. The privacy of their homes is a delusion, too, as the public is gradually becoming better informed about their rights of beach access. Likewise, the costs of Malibu’s mansions are misleading. While the high property costs may seem a fair price to pay for the privilege of living in an exclusive garden idyll, in reality, insurance and reinsurance companies take up much of the multibillion dollar cleanup expenses that follow in the wake of Malibu’s disasters, and tax payers (most of them anything but wealthy) are shouldering the enormous costs of infrastructure and firefighting. Places like Malibu are full of smoke and mirrors that conceal social discrimination and environmental injustice. Moreover, Malibu reminds us that nature can be controlled to only a limited extent. We can regulate the temperature and humidity in our homes, and we can extinguish one fire after the other. But flames and ocean waves will keep coming back. The paradise of Malibu is not the biblical paradise of the Book of Genesis. There is no timelessness, no permanent harmony; there is not even the long-lasting happiness that Frederick Rindge had hoped to enjoy. Malibu’s gated exclusivity and idle segregation are mere illusion. The “refuge” is no segregated Eden with a tree of (special) knowledge. Instead, Malibu is deeply connected—with economies and cultures, local and global, and with its unruly natural environment. If we were to sustain Malibu’s exclusivity into the future, it would come at a high price—not least for those who will never enjoy it.

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Sustaining its charm and wildness, on the other hand, requires us to be open-minded and sensitive to the temperaments of nature. In the biblical paradise the first humans enjoyed innocence and idleness until they were morally tested and eventually expelled. Malibu can be seen as a test as well: a test of our willingness to share a divine, delicate place with one another, and to restrain ourselves from manipulating and loving its temperamental nature to death. If we pass this test in Malibu, we may well pass it elsewhere, and we may then deserve to keep our fragile planet for generations to come.

Notes 1. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 2. Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 3. Cp. “Malibu, California Population: Census 2010 and 2000 Interactive Map, Demographics, Statistics, Quick Facts,” CensusViewer, accessed August 27, 2015, http://censusviewer.com/city/CA/Malibu. 4. Cp. “Malibu Disasters and Hazards,” Malibu Complete, accessed August 27, 2015, http://www.malibucomplete.com/mc_hazards.php; Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). For a different and shorter version of this article, see Christof Mauch, “Unruly Paradise: Nature and Culture in Malibu,” in “Unruly Environments,” ed. Siddharta Krishnan, Chris Pastore, Sam Temple, RCC Perspectives, no. 3 (2015): 45–51. 5. Cp. the 1882 diary of cattleman Richard Gird, in Green versus Gold: Sources in California’s Environmental History, ed. Carolyn Merchant (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998), 192; Hazel Adele Pulling, “Range Forage and the California Range Cattle Industry,” Historian 7 (Spring 1945): 113–29; Thomas W. Doyle and Luanne Pfeifer, The Malibu Story: The Saga of an Old Spanish Land Grant—Its Authentic Legends and the Colorful People Who Shaped Its History (Malibu, CA: Malibu Lagoon Museum, 1985). 6. Frederick Hastings Rindge, Happy Days in Southern California (Los Angeles: Anderson, Ritchie, and Simon, 1972), 64. 7. Nancy Quam-Wickam, “ ‘Cities Sacrificed on the Altar of Oil’: Popular Opposition to Oil Development in 1920s Los Angeles,” Environment and History 3 (April 1998): 189–209, reprinted as “Oil and the Environment,” in Merchant, Green versus Gold, 339–44. 8. Rindge, Happy Days, 129. 9. Rindge, Happy Days, 66; Doyle et al., Malibu Story, 20.

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10. Rindge, Happy Days, 7–9. 11. Cf. Doyle et al., Malibu Story, 25–30; Davis, Ecology of Fear, 99–104. 12. Bill Dowey, A Brief History of Malibu and the Adamson House (Malibu, CA: Malibu Lagoon State Beach Interpretative Association, 1995), 27–36; The Malibu Story, 31–34; Ronald L. Rindge, Thomas W. Doyle, and Marcia Page, Ceramic Art of the Malibu Potteries 1926–1932 (Malibu, CA: Malibu Lagoon Museum, 1988). 13. Brian Rooney, Three Magical Miles: An Appreciation of the Past & Present of Malibou Lake & Vicinity, 2nd ed. (Malibu, CA: R7 Media / Cornell Preservation Organization, 2009), 7, 20–24, 41–43. 14. Ibid. 15. Interview with Mati Waiya, January 15, 2010. 16. Interview with Mati Waiya, January 15, 2010. Cp. also Nicholas Canyon Stream Restoration, Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation, © 2015, http://www. wishtoyo.org/df-nicholas/; Resolution of the LA County Board of Supervisors approving the application, in co-sponsorship with the Wishtoyo Foundation, for an urban streams restoration grant for the Nicholas Canyon Creek habitat restoration project, April 18, 2002, accessed on August 27, 2015, http://file. lacounty.gov/bc/q2_2002/cms1_002151.pdf. 17. Cp. Francis M. Fultz, The Elfin-Forest of California Publisher (Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Press 1923), 26. 18. Copa de oro flowers can be found in Ramirez Canyon on the estate and former home of Barbara Streisand. I found the South African plants blooming as early as January in the gardens of Adamson House, Malibu. 19. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear, 104–5; Brian Rooney, Three Magical Miles, 11; Cp. “Malibu Disasters and Hazards,” Malibu Complete, accessed June 14, 2017, http://www.malibucomplete.com/mc_hazards.php. 20. Los Angeles Fire Department Historical Archive, official report, Old Topanga Incident, November 2–11, 1993, accessed August 27, 2015, http://www.lafire.com/famous_fires/1993-1102_OldTopangaFire/1993-1102_ OfficialReport_OldTopangaIncident.htm. 21. Barbara Marquand, “The 10 Costliest Wildfires,” Insure.com, June 24, 2013, accessed August 27, 2015, http://www.insure.com/home-insurance /costliest-wildfires.html. 22. “Loss Events Worldwide 1980–2013: 20 Costliest Wildfires Ordered by Insured Losses,” Munich Re NatCatSERVICE, January 2014, https://www. munichre.com/site/wrap/get/documents_E-957461149/mram/assetpool. munichreamerica.wrap/PDF/2013/Wildfires_global_ins_1980_2013.pdf; “2007 Southern California Wildfires Web Archive,” California Digital Library, accessed August 27, 2015, http://webarchives.cdlib.org/a/calfires. 23. Interview with Andrew Gosser, January 10, 2010.

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24. Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Form Coast to Toast,” Vanity Fair, July 11, 2013. 25. Dan Glaister, “Why Septic Tanks Are a Washout in Malibu,” Guardian, September 26, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/ sep/26/septic-tanks-washout-malibu; Penny Arévalo, “Beach East of Malibu Pier Named One of the Nation’s Most Consistently Polluted,” Patch Malibu, June 25, 2014; Mark Dorfman and Angela Haren, Testing the Waters: Executive Summary, 24th ed. (Natural Resource Defense Council, June 2014), accessed August 27, 2015, https://assets.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ttw2014.pdf?_ ga=2.221100177.841595788.1525109117-794874972.1525109117. 26. Christof Mauch, “The Phoenix Syndrome: Natural Catastrophes in American History and Culture,” Jadavpur University Journal of History 30 (2014–2015): 19–38. 27. Segel is cited in Joe Mozingo, “Water Officials Link Malibu Septic Tanks to Beach Pollution,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2000, http://articles. latimes.com/2000/nov/13/local/me-51173. 28. There are multiple articles about Hollywood environmentalists, e.g., “15 Green Actors,” Grist, June 2, 2007, http://grist.org/article/celebs/; Frank Clifford, “Streisand Donates Estate to Mountains Conservancy,” LA Times, November 18, 1993. Less than 10 years after Streisand donated the ranch, the State of California put it on the market “to help balance the budget.”

6 Energizing Environmental History Brian C. Black

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onald Worster’s hard and inspired work has most acutely changed the lives of many individual scholars; however, any student of history also must admit the man’s impact on what they study and what they know. Worster altered the essential questions that we ask of history and, therefore, he influences each project that we pursue and each lecture that we deliver. For me, my intellectual journey with Worster began on Nantucket. Nantucket stuck with me after Worster extolled the tremendous economy that grew on the island after the late 1700s from the remarkable pursuit of whales. During one of his lectures in the introduction to North American Environmental History at the University of Kansas in the late 1990s, Worster spoke of the first Macy’s store that was founded on the island and how eventually it and other businesses expanded to the mainland. Although piqued by the idea of whaling, I wouldn’t for many years realize the larger significance of my intrigue. Even after I extended my knowledge of early whaling in order to discuss the 1860s petroleum boom in Pennsylvania in PETROLIA: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom, I hadn’t yet fully tapped the larger historical narrative to which I was being drawn—to which I had been enticed with Worster’s passing mention of Nantucket. Indeed, humans’ use and management of energy joined the harpoon to the derrick and now carries my inquiry in many new directions—some of which Worster foreshadowed in his own work.1 When Worster wrote his contribution to the Journal of American History (JAH) Roundtable on Environmental History decades ago, he provided a generation of practitioners with a template for organizing future inquiry. In “Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Worster provided three levels on which the new history should proceed. The second of these, he wrote, “is more fully the responsibility of the historian and other students of society, for it focuses on productive technology as it interacts with the environment.” Using the term “modes of production,” he continued: “[new historians are] emphasizing that those modes have been engaged not merely in organizing human labor and machinery but also in transforming nature. Here the focus is on understanding how technology has restructured human ecological relations, that is, with analyzing the various ways people have tried to make nature over into a system that produces resources for their consumption. In that process of transforming the earth, people have also restructured themselves and their social relations. . . . On this level of inquiry, one of the

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most interesting questions is who has gained and who has lost power as modes of productions have changed.” A corps of the now not-so-new history have used this as a signpost from which to study one of humans foundational relationships with nature—participation in cycles of energy.2 Today, the landscapes of energy studied by historians are often extreme: Bayou marshlands transected by oil and gas pipelines; bays befouled by spilled crude or toxic effluent; rainforests hacked away to clear a footprint for exploration; and rivers stopped in their tracks by grand, concrete feats of technological mastery. Nantucket’s cobble-stoned streets and small storefronts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England seemingly stand in juxtaposition against such monolithic, aggressive models of extraction. Or does it? When I traveled to research on Nantucket a decade after witnessing Worster’s lecture, I found a port from the age of sail largely intact. Built on the light generated from oil harvested by foolhardy sailors, this was one of the young nation’s first energy towns.3 From these stores, the oil drawn from long-pursued whales taught consumers of the great value of controlled, managed energy supplies. Similar to a painting by Winslow Homer, the picturesque Nantucket’s energy scene is frozen—almost unrecognizable until explained by historical inquiry. Part of its disguise is the small-batch nature of its undertaking: when supplies of whale oil swelled in the late 1700s, the Quaker entrepreneurs designed a new energy landscape—of larger scale and scope—in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The emperors of light—the energy entrepreneurs of the early 1800s—left Nantucket behind to become the fodder of yachtsmen and of environmental historians who study energy. From the days of the whalers, humans’ relationship with energy has grown only more complex as issues of environmental damage and resource supply become preeminent concerns in the twenty-first century.4

Claiming a Tradition of Energy Studies Unlike some other areas of environmental history, a literature existed on energy prior to Worster’s essay in JAH. Often carried out by business or economic historians, early volumes considered histories of specific companies (such as the work of Joseph Pratt), broad patterns of energy use (such as Vaclav Smil, John G. Clarke, Ted Steinberg, and Alfred Crosby), and the pollution implications of energy production and transportation (Joel Tarr, Martin Melosi, Hugh Gorman, and Craig Colten). More recently, other historians have specifically considered the science and technology of energy production (Duane Smith, Paul Lucier, Brian Frehner, Sara Pritchard, and Tyler Priest). From this broad base of literature on energy, the field has expanded in just a few decades to include cultural dynamics, including ethics.5 This expansion has drawn specifically on the parameters constructed by

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Worster and others. In particular, the “socioeconomic implications of tools and work” guided scholars including David Nye to use the history of technology to approach energy as a larger concept. In Consuming Power, he writes about the culture that supports our energy systems. He describes that such intellectual systems: “underlie personal expectations and assumptions about what is normal and possible. .  .  . Each person lives within an envelope of such ‘natural’ assumptions about how fast and far one can go in a day, about how much work one can do, about what tools are available, about how work fits into the community, [etc.] These assumptions together form the habitual perception of a sustaining environment that is taken for granted as already there.”6 Often, these scholars, just as Nye has done here, used this level of analysis to unearth new insights about how natural systems such as energy work and how humans interject themselves into these processes physically and intellectually. As one of the natural processes in which humans interact with nature, energy exchange presented a revealing and insightful peek into cultures across time and space. It is a simple connection to trace the conceptions of Worster and a few others to seminal works such as John McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun. In the remarkable sweep of McNeill’s history of the twentieth century, energy and the management of energy resources is put at the core of much of the human activity that has transpired. While not emphasizing the impact of capitalism as does Worster, McNeill describes the human condition in the twentieth century as becoming a regime of “perpetual disturbance.” At the core of this existence, he writes: “In environmental history, the twentieth century qualifies as a peculiar century because of the screeching acceleration of so many processes that bring ecological change. .  .  . In modern times we have generally done more of these things than ever before, and since 1945, in most cases, far more. Although there are a few kinds of environmental change that are genuinely new in the twentieth century . . . for the most part the ecological peculiarity of the twentieth century is a matter of scale and intensity. . . . We have probably deployed more energy since 1900 than in all of human history before 1900.”7 Of course, that was the macroconcept through which Worster guided me to my microstory of Pennsylvania oil that became PETROLIA. As a disciplined advisor, though, Worster never verbalized this larger idea to me. It is only as time passed that the seeds planted and rooted in the field of environmental history have grown into a large-scale consideration of petroleum and energy in my own work and also those of a younger group of environmental historians completing graduate study in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Many of these scholars are influenced by luminaries who broadened Worster’s conception of energy. For instance, Richard White used ecological

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ideas of energy to organize Organic Machine, his brief analysis of historical patterns along the Columbia River. With the river as the narrative’s primary actor, natural patterns of energy transfer stand in stark contrast to the human-initiated exchanges that occur in later years.8 As a possible centerpiece of human society, energy management patterns reveal cultural and ethical distinctions between users and eras. This connection is also relevant in William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, which uses larger ideas of energy to consider the development of cattle, forests, and railroads in the American West, particularly in relation to the major trade networks emanating from Chicago.9 In each example, however, basic concepts can be drawn back to Worster’s consideration of an “agroecological” interpretation of history and particularly to modes of production.

Revealing the Energy beneath Consumer Culture From these foundational works, environmental history about energy has more recently moved beyond production to also consider consumption. A bit later in his JAH article, Worster helped to plant the seed for such future scholarship when he wrote: “The great challenge in the new history does not lie in merely identifying such levels of inquiry, but in deciding how and where to make connections among them. Do the lines of historical causality run from the first, the level of nature, through technology and on to ideology, as a strict environmental determinist would insist?”10 The ideological and cultural roots of consumption that have fueled the general inquiry of environmental thought by scholars including Adam Rome, Thomas Jundt, and Paul Sabin. Recent and emerging work also specifically considers how these cultural shifts influence patterns of energy consumption in the twentieth century. Peter Shulman, Robert Lifset, Robert Johnson, Christopher Jones, Paul Hirt, and a host of other scholars have produced work that will press the literature of environmental history in this important direction.11 My own work centers on petroleum as the lifeblood behind twentieth-century American mass consumption. In its various forms, petroleum enabled humans to overcome limits, particularly those of time and space. In People of Plenty, David Potter discussed the historical tradition of American expansion and restlessness in this fashion: “The man best qualified for this role was the completely mobile man, moving freely from one locality to the next, from one economic position to another, or from one social level to levels above.”12 In addition to ensuring physical movement, Potter’s description also includes the economic and social mobility that petroleum helped to bring Americans through mass consumption. In short, my analysis reveals that Potter’s People of Plenty prioritized their ease and standard of living over almost every other concern.13 With

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advertisers whetting the public desire for more and for replacements, consumption required that products be able to be made in massive quantities and altered easily, whether to improve them with new technologies or adjustments or to compel further consumption. The ubiquity of these products lays plain the incredible influence of cheap petroleum in our consumptive lives. However, the greatest impact of all may not be tied to any specific product. Instead, the great bonus of synthetic replication and lowered prices was the ethic that infused American mass consumption. With the new society made possible by the innovations of cheap petroleum came wanton waste. A defining characteristic of American society in the late twentieth century, we made our ability and need to replace what we already had sound like an innovation by calling it “planned obsolescence.”14 Not only did we create inexpensive, easily replaced products from cheap petroleum, Americans made a society that wished—and, in fact, needed—to replace these items again and again and again. Cheap oil often helped us to make cheap things. At other times, cheap oil allowed chemists to derive cheap replication of costlier products, usually made from polymers—what we know as plastics. In each case, living with oil re-created American life during the twentieth century to the point where the United States came to exist in an ecology of oil. While this term was introduced by Myrna Santiago in her environmental history of Mexican oil development to discuss the multifaceted impacts of the industry on traditional culture and living patterns, the American “ecology of oil” achieves a scale and scope that allows crude to permeate our living condition after the twentieth century. More than any other example of our species, contemporary Americans rely on affordable energy from oil and our history needs to more clearly admit this dependence.15 Recognition of this unique energy reality became particularly acute in years of growing scarcity at the end of the twentieth century and in events such as the 2010 Macondo industrial accident that would eventually become known as the Gulf Spill. Americans’ unique relationship with this energy resource was used to organize a special issue of the Journal of American History (JAH) on “Petroleum in American Life” in 2012, which was undertaken because of the Gulf Spill. As Worster instructed each one of his students over the years, the historians duty is to contextualize such an episode in order to cast oil consumption and mass consumption as the primary culprit. The JAH issue that I edited with Tyler Priest and Karen Merrill used this important and observable moment to help reorganize American history with environmental history at its core.

Conclusion: There Will Be Spills Indeed, a proper understanding of energy resources requires environmental

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history. Oil in particular and energy production in general is a sloppy business. Environmental history is uniquely positioned to consider each prime mover’s process of development and use. In the case of oil, from its earliest days, petroleum brought us basic realities, including possible individual fortune and the haphazard development fueled by the “rule of capture.” There were no video cameras to document when the first commercial well of crude was struck in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. It was a sloppy, yet effective enterprise. Rapid expansion of productive tracts and abandonment of unprofitable wells organized the industry by an “ethic of extraction,” in which the oil industry’s primary concern was the next frontier and not the footprint it left behind. When John D. Rockefeller Sr. rationalized the petroleum industry, he focused on the infrastructure used for distribution and refinement. Of the oil fields that produced the raw material, which he disdainfully called “work camps,” Rockefeller and others demanded only that they provided the oil that they would mold into a global commodity. This business story is part of most surveys of American history; however, the proper context of labor strife and fortune-making from natural resource harvest is an ecological story. In short, is a story ripe for the reinterpretation of environmental history. Unfettered and unregulated, the production of crude was a unique industry from the start. Built on a few gushers and a wake of dusters and empty towns, the industry always focused ahead. In the fields of Pennsylvania that ushered in our relationship with oil we learned that if oil is mined, spills happen. It is a basic reality of the industry. It would be wonderful as historians to assure our students and readers that Titusville, Prince William Sound, Santa Barbara, and Macondo in the Gulf were exceptional occurrences; in fact, our responsibility is to demonstrate that Nantucket is the true exception of energy extraction—hidden under scenic, crashing waves and concealed in a hunter-prey relationship. In this litany of loosed crude, the 4.9 million barrels (210 million US gallons) of oil released by the BP-Macondo Oil Spill of 2010 stands as the largest accidental spill in history.16 Following the drilling rig accident that killed eleven workers, the response often complicated this reality. Dispersants, intended to break up the crude, were released deep in the ocean and are now feared to have further polluted the Gulf. The region’s fishing industry, the nation’s largest, was entirely shut down for months. A moratorium was placed on further deepwater oil drilling. For nearly three months, hapless corporate and political leaders poised themselves for a quick end to the leak and spill; instead, the oil and gas continued to gush into the Gulf for eightyseven days. In a remarkable historical moment, the technology that brings us consistent energy from petroleum also conveyed live video images of the hemorrhaging Deepwater Horizon petroleum well to the public during the summer

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of 2010. With neither narrative nor drama, the “live video feed,” never deviating from its constricted focus on the wellhead, suggested some of the basic implications of our life with crude. A life that, without a doubt, has benefited the human standard of living—particularly in the United States. Measured in terms of quadrillion BTUs, which is the basis for charting energy consumption, US consumption of petroleum rose after 1945 from less than ten to twenty in 1960, forty in 1975, and over forty after 2000. It was approximately 1950 when petroleum overtook coal as the nation’s leading energy producer, and today, the rate of petroleum consumption ranks approximately double its nearest competitors: coal and natural gas. Although the nation passed through different eras in the commodity’s centrality, petroleum’s ongoing predominance in American life after 1945 demands new terminology.17 We live with oil, no doubt; however, we are often able to take for granted its continued supply and the effort to acquire it. The 2010 spill (and, specifically, its live video feed) pulled back this curtain for consumers to reveal the ecology of oil in which we reside. The context provided by this moment was quite straightforward: From easy oil to tough oil, the live video feed also represents a challenging new era in our use of crude. After a twentieth century in which the American standard of living took shape on a secure foundation of cheap, “easy” oil, the twenty-first century is defined by development of the “tough” oil that remains. Whether using additional technology and energy input to convert tar sands or shale or, as in the case of Macondo, to reach deeper into the ocean than ever before, our current glut of North American oil is at least partly based on a new aggression that is traced most specifically to desperation. A technological marvel, the Macondo Well was developed nearly 3 miles beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. A clear lesson, of course, was that the industry’s emergency response to such challenging situations had been left for another day. However, it was just such remarkable technology that provided the live images to viewers’ television or computer screens through the use of a series of complex undersea tools. Just as undersea robotic devices carried out much of the repair work on the wellhead, each device also contained cameras. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), normally owned by one of the large technical supply companies and leased by BP or another oil giant, carried out operational and maintenance duties by providing a visual link to the undersea activities that have come to dominate current oil exploration. ROVs and the infrastructure used to harvest petroleum from deep in the ocean are an indication of great technological advancement; however, they also indicate the growing scarcity of petroleum.18 In an era of “reality TV,” these same cameras brought images of an ongoing saga reminiscent of the 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a massive, rapt television audience watches the unknowing main character live a “normal”

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life. For many of us, the summer of 2010 dissolved into the first real-time environmental disaster on record. Initially, the primary role for the live video feed was to satisfy the public’s demand for transparency. In truth, it was a check to assuage the public’s incendiary suspicion of “Big Oil.” Proof was needed to demonstrate the significance of the accident, and frankly, an oil company was the last voice we were willing to trust. When BP initially estimated minor leakage rates and very little impact on the Gulf, the footage from the live feed became the “smoking gun”—the pluming wellhead—that allowed the American public to bypass corporate or even government misinformation. There could be no denying the veracity of the image streaming from BP’s own ROV. It was a moment of live environmental theater that might have immortalized any number of previous disasters that were instead left unrecorded and uncorroborated. Thanks to the live video feed, the Gulf spill could be different, publicly revealing an indisputable vision of negligence that could be easily connected to environmental problems on the surface.19 Without the live, unfiltered images, many industry observers believe that BP would have been able to control the image of the spill while denying its reality. Since the days of Rockefeller over a century ago, information control has defined the emergence of “Big Oil” as Americans simply expected the gasoline to magically appear in highly stylized gas stations.20 Instead of understanding the complex infrastructure of extraction, processing, and transporting crude, we merely wanted it to be in our tanks for as little cost as possible.21 The live video feed presented a crack in the veneer of this illusion—in fact, mining for petroleum was a complex, risky undertaking and similar industrial accidents could occur at any time. In a sense, this is the same goal pursued by Worster and other environmental historians—identifying the systems of use and exchange that underlay our management of energy. Naturalist John Muir famously wrote of the natural connections that surround us when he mused: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” As we move forward, Americans’ memory of the oil and gas plumes flowing across the live feed video might serve as the touchstone of the more complex causes of this accident. The crude reality is that despite the capping of this well in the Gulf, other spills occur or are ongoing in the Niger Delta, the jungles of Venezuela, or the frozen tundra of Alaska. Our goal must be to keep alive the lessons of the 2010 spill long after it has been capped. For instance, historians have only begun to connect the ethics of extraction that allowed energy companies to reach into the deep ocean. Nor have we effectively itemized the cultural and ecological costs of such spills. These events need to be properly construed as an ordinary outcome of industrial development that possesses extraordinary implications best told by environmental historians.

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The historians who tell these stories would be wise to follow Worster in keeping an eye toward the past and another to the present. Environmental history is uniquely positioned to tell the story of humans’ ongoing relationship with petroleum as well as each source of energy. From modes of production to the culture of consumption, environmental history, in essence, might serve as the equivalent of the live video feed for the human story—revealing the context and practices behind each moment of power and work that we generate from a resource. Although it is an essential portion of human life, any energy development possesses ecological costs and impacts.

Notes 1. I was particularly fortunate that during my time at KU Don’s close academic colleague was the late John Clark, who had a very specific interest in energy. Together, these two advisors supported my microscopic research into the earliest oil boom. Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 2. Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1087–1106. 3. There is now a fair amount of superb writing on whaling, including Margaret Creighton’s Rites and Passages (1985). With my students, I still find that the single best source for understanding the industry remains Moby-Dick—particularly the interior, overly descriptive chapters that many literature faculty leave out of their assigned readings. For an environmental historian’s analysis of later policy issues related to whaling, see Kurkpatrick Dorsey’s Whales and Nations (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016). 4. Recently published titles on energy in environmental history, include Chad Montrie, To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Paul Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Brian Frehner, Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Brian C. Black, Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012); Tom Wilber, Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Joseph Pratt, Martin Melosi, and Kathleen Brosnan. eds., Energy Capitals: Local Impact, Global Influence (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014); Jonathan Wlasiuk, “A Company Town on Common Waters: Standard

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Oil in the Calumet,” Environmental History 19 (2014): 687–713. 5. Of course, much of this earlier scholarship is now included as a product of environmental history and contributes mightily to the overall literature in energy history/studies. Sources include John G. Clarke, Political Economy of World Energy: A Twentieth-Century Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Craig Colten, Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun (New York: Norton, 2006); Hugh S. Gorman, Redefining Efficiency: Pollution Concerns, Regulatory Mechanisms, and Technological Change in the U.S. Petroleum Industry (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001); Martin Melosi, Coping with Abundance (New York: Knopf, 1985); Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); Duane Smith, Mining America: The Industry and the Environment, 1800–1980 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987); Ted Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Water of New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996); Joel Tarr, ed., Devastation and Renewal (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). 6. David Nye, Consuming Power (Boston: MIT Press), 5–7. 7. John R. McNeil, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: Norton, 2001), 39. 8. Richard White, The Organic Machine: Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). 9. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). 10. Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1091. 11. Paul Hirt, Wired Northwest (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012); Bob Johnson, Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014); Robert Lifset, Power on the Hudson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (New York: Verso, 2016); Ian Morris, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Peter Shulman, Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). 12. David Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 96. 13. Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 159–60. 14. Slade, Made to Break, 3–4. “Planned obsolescence is the catch-all phrase used to describe the assortment of techniques used to artificially limit the

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durability of a manufactured good in order to stimulate repetitive consumption” (ibid., 5). 15. Myrna Santiago, The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 16. Readers may wish to consult Allan Silverleib, “The Gulf Spill: America’s Worst Environmental Disaster?,” CNN, August 10, 2010, http://www.cnn. com/2010/US/08/05/gulf.worst.disaster/index.html, for which the author was interviewed. 17. See, for instance, Robert Rydell, Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). This data is found in the US EIA publication Annual Energy Review 2009, p. xx, fig. 5, “Primary Energy Consumption by Source, 1775–2009.” In her work about Mexico, The Ecology of Oil, Myrna Santiago uses the term “ecology of oil” to describe the wholesale changes that developing crude meant to the lives of Native inhabitants. 18. Helen Campbell, “Discoveries of the Deep,” BP Magazine, no. 3, 2007, 46–54. 19. The White House joined Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, to demand that the Deepwater Horizon leak be shown to Americans live, as it happens. “This may be BP’s footage, but it’s America’s ocean,” Markey said in a statement. “Now anyone will be able to see the realtime effects the BP spill is having on our ocean. This footage will aid analysis by independent scientists blocked by BP from coming to see the spill.” Almost immediately, private scientists joined with NOAA and other federal experts to protest BP’s low estimate of flow rates. BP initially put the figure at 1,000 to 5,000 barrels per day (bpd)—or no more than 210,000 gallons. By July 2010, most experts agreed that all along the flow rate had been between 25,000 and 80,000 bpd. Analysis of the size and dimensions of the plume in the live video feed offered a primary source of external evaluation. 20. There are a variety of sources that readers might wish to consult on this general topic, including Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: The Free Press, 1991); Ron Chernow’s Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (New York: Vintage, 1998); and Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien, Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 21. An interesting source for understanding infrastructural details of our contemporary petroleum industry is Lisa Margonelli’s Oil on the Brain (New York: Broadway Books, 2008).

II

WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS Environmental history is not an exclusively American invention; it has emerged, under different names and sometimes well in advance of our own efforts, in other countries too. The principal items on our research agenda then must be to bring the tribe together and to achieve a cosmopolitan synthesis of method and substance, one that can help re-direct the larger discipline toward a postnationalist history. The outcome of that research agenda would be, I believe, a revival of the local and regional in historical inquiry along with an awakened global imagination. —Donald Worster, “World without Borders” (1982) Never pay too much attention to what is established dogma in the academic world. This is a lesson I learned long ago in graduate school, and have been trying to remember ever since. —Donald Worster, “Why We Need Environmental History” (2004)

The essays in this section draw their inspiration from Donald Worster’s repeated calls for historical studies that move easily across borders. The borders of most immediate concern to historians, of course, have long been those of nations. It hardly comes as a revelation that ecosystems, natural resources, environmental science, conservation policy, and environmental issues are seldom constrained by political boundaries. This awareness notwithstanding, most environmental histories continue to remain rooted in specific nation-states. The essays written by Sterling Evans, Mikko Saikku, Shen Hou, and Marco Armiero offer models for writing histories of commodities, ideas, and even ostensibly natural systems that readily flow across national boundaries. Evans turns his attention to the Pacific, looking at the ways in which commodity trading—especially of abaca fiber—has bound the region together since the time of the Manila Galleon in the sixteenth century. The historic flow of people and commodities renders environmental history especially useful in the case of the Pacific, he argues, given that commodity flows often proved more important than the national identities they sometimes outlasted. Environmental historians, it follows, would be wise to take more seriously commodities like abaca that link nations, following them as they move around the globe. Saikku similarly takes up Worster’s call for a transnational environmental history, albeit in a more deliberately comparative context than Evans. Using the unlikely meeting of the Finnish landscape painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela and former American president Theodore Roosevelt in Africa as an entry point, Saikku juxtaposes Finnish and North American ideas about nature, landscape, and masculinity to highlight the ways in which a comparative

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study yields unexpected insights into both cultures that prove invisible when studied in isolation. In her call for more comparative work between China and the United States, Hou likewise finds that surprising commonalities and differences emerge when the environmental histories of nations are studied comparatively. Both Hou and Saikku suggest that environmental historians might productively pursue transnational projects not merely because they fill a yawning historiographical gap, but because doing so promises to challenge some of the field’s long-standing assumptions and narratives. Marco Armiero encourages environmental historians to pay attention to one of the most obvious, yet neglected, facets of such border crossings: the people themselves. As Armiero points out, little attention has been paid to the environmental aspects of migration. To be sure, the Columbian Exchange has attracted a great deal of attention, but the consequences of immigration largely disappear from conventional narratives by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, precisely as the number of immigrants increased exponentially. Indeed, Armiero argues, immigrants’ ideas about the natural world, their interactions with it, and their very bodies make migrations an enormously promising subject for environmental historians. While Worster advocated for a transnational history long before the subject became trendy, his calls for environmental histories that crossed borders were hardly limited to national boundaries. His work as a founder of environmental history led him to challenge long-standing disciplinary boundaries, and from the very beginning he proved eager to test the confines set by canonical tenets of the academy. Most obviously this meant challenging historians to integrate the natural world, which they had previously taken for granted or dismissed as irrelevant, into their analyses. It is in the spirit of this willingness to challenge the profession to rethink some of its fundamental assumptions that Robert Campbell contends that environmental historians ought to reconsider their focus on land. In an era marked by climate change and air pollution, skyscrapers and everyday air travel, it would be prudent, he suggests, for environmental historians to lift their gaze skyward. Of course, environmental historians need not look skyward or abroad to cross significant boundaries. Karl Brooks’s essay transcends disciplinary boundaries by charting the role of law in Worster’s work. Drawing on his own experience as a lawyer, a legislator, and a senior administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, Brooks examines the ways in which environmental history might shape not only legal history, but also environmental law. Harking back to the political roots of the field, he suggests that there is room for environmental historians to practice “lawmaking” by serving as

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unofficial “expert witnesses” who bring clarity to the ways in which environmental legislation has been rooted in American culture and embodied in the nation’s aspirations.

7 The Force of Fiber Reconnecting the Philippines with Latin America and the American West via Transnational Environmental History Sterling Evans

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hat could the following possibly have in common: (1) the Manila Galleon; (2) British and American naval strength; (3) the Crimean War; (4) wheat harvests on the Grain Plains; (5) the construction of Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge; (6) the United Fruit Company in Central America; (7) oil drilling in the American West; (8) coffee filters, tea bags, and cigarette paper; and (9) the DaimlerChrysler Corporation. There is only one thing that ties together so many disparate historic and economic connections across nations and time: abaca. Abaca fiber, from plantations in the Philippines and later introduced into Central and South America, became the fiber of choice for ship sails and maritime rope in Britain and the United States for hundreds of years, especially due to its ability to withstand saltwater. It later became a competitive cordage material used for twines, transmission and drilling cables, and specialty papers, and as an organic material to replace fiberglass in the construction of automobiles. Today, abaca fiber has dozens of commercial uses and remains an important economic commodity for the Philippines. Its history is inherently transnational and environmental. From when Europeans first “discovered” abaca on their voyages plying the oceans for Spain and added the Philippines archipelago to the Spanish Empire, to its transport across the Pacific on the Manila Galleon that first connected the Philippines to Mexico and Spain, to the variety of cordage and other commercial uses it has had since, abaca has reconnected the Philippines to the rest of the world, and especially to Latin America and the American West, in unique ways. The fiber, coming from thousands of acres of cleared tropical forests to make way for abaca plantations, helped accelerate empire building, naval and agricultural development, and manufacturing across oceans and continents. Thus it fits well into the evolving field of transnational environmental history. It has now been over thirty years since Donald Worster prophetically wrote in his essay “World without Borders” that environmental history would go beyond the confines of the nation-state and be “found in research that moves easily across national boundaries.”1 More recently, the field has taken

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a transnational turn, with scholars asking questions about ecological connections between countries, about ecosystems that cross international borders, and about the environmental impact of transnational industries, export commodities, and international trade.2 Historians should also consider studies of the Pacific Rim, in those “overlapping worlds” of Pacific history.3 It connects the Philippines with trade and commerce in the Americas and beyond, adding to the literature on transnational themes of the Pacific World, made more vital with recent works by Matt Matsuda, Nicholas Thomas, David Armitage and Alison Bradford, Stuart Banner, David Igler, and Gregory Cushman.4 Matsuda notes that the region was bound in the “geopolitics of the Pacific” and of “locally connected histories.” Hardly “an empty expanse,” this oceanic region was a “crowded world of transitions, intersections, and transformed cultures.” He argues that specific histories here only “take on full meaning when linked with other stories and places,” representing the “interconnectedness of other worlds.” In a similar vein, Igler notes that there are no “fixed borders” in this vast Pacific world, but that we should imagine “the ways that oceanic space connects people and politics, rather than separates them.”5 This is precisely the way in which we should view both the history of the Manila Galleon and in more modern times of Philippine abaca. So, despite the Pacific being the “world’s largest physical feature” or “the globe’s largest basin,” covering a full third of planet Earth, there has been a “connective force that the ocean itself has projected on humans over long distances,” as David Armitage and Alison Bashford have proclaimed.6 In this essay I argue that there has been a very strong, connective force of fiber. But the production and commerce of abaca, and the manufacture of cordage and other products from its fiber have caused both ecological changes and environmental benefits that are important parts of its history. Environmental history has been key to some newer works on the Pacific World, especially those by Igler and Cushman who discuss ecological change in the region via the California gold rush and guano production, respectively.7 And there are calls for more of this kind of transnational environmental analysis of the region. Matsuda envisions how “perspectives from Latin America and Southeast Asia will be even more strongly integrated .  .  . via transnational maritime network . . . moving towards environmental and biosystem awareness approaches to historical thinking . . . [and] are very much in line with important developments in the field of environmental history.”8 Those approaches start here with a review of the history of the Manila Galleon—the fleet of trade ships that connected the Philippines and goods from China and Southeast Asia to Mexico and Spain from 1565 to 1815. From the first galleon—the San Pablo that carried a small cargo of cinnamon from

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Mindanao—and for the next 250 years, two ships running at all times, the galleon crossed the Pacific from Manila to Acapulco and back, creating the first consistent link between East Asia and Spanish America. The Spaniards helped to supply the European demand for spices from the East Indies and for Chinese silk, and traders in East Asia, especially China, were in need of the silver from Mexican mines.9 Much of the lore of the galleon was filled with excitement, drama, the thrills of the high seas, and savage competition from Dutch and British pirates, that along with Mexican independence and the growth of British and American trading networks, caused the eventual demise of the galleon trade.10 Storytellers and novelists have continued the lore with accounts of adventure and sunken ships.11 Certainly not as adventurous as fictional accounts have portrayed, especially with sailors enduring torturous months at sea with scant provisions, scurvy, frequent storms, and shipwrecks, the Manila Galleon should serve as an emblem for other important aspects of colonial, transnational, and environmental history, for which it has not received the attention it deserves.12 Research and analysis should be centered on how the merchant fleet system was part of a larger network in the Spanish colonial empire, how it was indeed a tool of empire, and how it formed “the world’s first transpacific trade link.”13 James Belich suggests that the galleon inaugurated “a second Pacific world” when the Spanish created linkages with Asians, Pacific islanders, and Indians of the Americas.14 The galleons expanded an already active trade system around Southeast Asia, with native Filipinos having traded for centuries with Borneo, the Moluccas, Siam (Thailand), Cambodia, and China. And Portuguese merchants for several decades prior had traded between Maçau and Manila, a commerce that served as an important basis for acquisition of Asian goods.15 Economically, the Manila Galleon helped launch Spain into the capitalist world system of the Early Modern period. Spanish colonial institutions— such as the Casa de Contratación in Seville (from which the Spaniards governed their far-flung empire’s finances), trading houses and shipping ventures from Cadiz (the main port for the Spanish fleet), the Roman Catholic Church (which remains the predominant religion of the Philippines), and the Spanish administrative system of viceroyalties and audiencias (provinces)— all were expanded to incorporate the Islas Filipinas, named after Spanish crown Prince Felipe (later King Philip II) in 1543, into the Spanish colonial empire. The Philippines as a Spanish colony (1521–1898) were actually part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (governed from Mexico until that country’s independence, when administration then switched directly to Madrid), and Manila—a port city with a deep harbor that the Spanish established in 1571 to accommodate the growing galleon trade—became Spain’s most distant

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port. These combined forces of trade created a “transnational Manila,” or as Igler has explained, that “Spanish lake” transected with “cross-Pacific commodity exchanges.” Indeed, these “global forces” converged in the region by the mid-eighteenth century when, along with silk, other Asian commodities like furs, opium, spices, and sandalwood flowed east to Acapulco, during the same time that Mexico, whose mines in Zacatecas were the world’s leading silver producers, sent specie to China on the westward return trips. The collapse of the Chinese paper money system by the 1450s, caused in part due to its uselessness for trade beyond China, created a robust market for Latin American silver, with the Chinese paying a higher price for the mineral than did buyers in Europe or Japan.16 The trade was transregional: the galleon carried cotton from India and Luzon, ivory from Cambodia, spices from the Molluccas, abaca from the Philippines, and continued the trade in silks from China and Japan. On the other end, while Spain sponsored the merchant fleet, it was German banks and lending houses that funded the fleet. Further south, silver shipments expanded to the Andes shipped out of Peru to Mexico and then on to Asia. Mexico also exported agricultural commodities. All of this trade created new markets on both sides of the world, and yielded fantastic profits for the Spanish, especially as the crown charged high taxes on incoming merchandise.17 The galleon also represented the movement of people. Never much of a destination for Spanish settlers, the Philippines nonetheless attracted traders from Andalusia, Galicia, and the Basque Country. As they did in other parts of the Spanish Empire, most preferred to make money and return to Iberia. As historian Shirley Fish has written, “The Philippines were nothing more to Spaniards than a kind of floating dock upon which to trans-ship bales of China silk from junk to galleon.” Thus, Spain maintained only a small military force there, never numbering more than 400 troops. It was instead the Chinese who moved in droves to the Philippines to work as laborers in the islands’ growing trade, ship-building, and agricultural industries. By the mid-1700s some 30,000 Chinese immigrants were living in the Philippines and other laborers came from Mexico and various islands around the South Pacific.18 Surprisingly, the galleons did not regularly make landfall at many islands on their round-trip voyages. They avoided Hawaii, Tahiti, and other mid-Pacific stopping points used by other fleets, but did usually restock in Guam (a Spanish territory until 1898) on return runs to the Philippines.19 This routing of the Manila Galleon had much to do with ocean currents and weather, especially as the Spanish came to understand how the Pacific worked. Their evolving knowledge adds a scientific dimension to the galleon trade, an incipient oceanography, as Matsuda has argued, when the Pacific’s waters, currents, and winds became “actors in the exploration, trade,

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marriages, alliances—and warfare—that have marked the peoples and civilizations of the Pacific.”20 In fact, without these understandings, the trade would have remained a one-way phenomenon from Mexico to the Philippines using the southern Pacific trade winds to travel westward, and voyages to Europe via the Indian Ocean and going around South Africa to the Atlantic. It was not until October 1565 when the San Pablo sailed north from Manila with monsoon winds to Japan where it picked up the Kuroshio Current and then used strong westerlies to sail to the North Pacific Current all the way to California. The ship then followed the West Coast down to Baja California and to Acapulco with plenty of Spanish safe havens and restocking ports along the way.21 Thus, the galleon cycle evolved based on the Pacific’s natural conditions: the southerly westward route taking two and a half months, and the northern return usually a four-month journey. This evolving understanding of the nature of the Pacific is but one way environmental historians should evaluate the history of the Manila Galleon. They should also consider how trade played a role in the development of commodity industries that forever changed tropical environments in the Philippines. The most transformative there was the introduction of sugar cane, a native plant of Asia but not grown in the Philippines on large-scale plantations until the Spanish colonial period. One study notes how natural forest covered nearly 90 percent of one island at the time of the Spanish conquest, but that with sugar cane production deforestation evolved quickly to supply land for plantations and fuel for the sugar mills. By the end of the nineteenth century about one fifth of the forests there had been destroyed. On the other side of the Pacific, silver mines in Mexico and the Andes accelerated production for Asian markets. Mining is inherently one of the most environmentally transformative of all industries, and ecological changes from the construction of mines, to the timber needed to support their shafts, to the agricultural goods needed to feed miners, all contributed to extensive changes in those regions.22 The galleon was also a vessel for the Columbian Exchange, particularly with the introduction of crops from Spanish America into Asia. Sweet potatoes and peanuts especially became important crops to Filipinos, with corn and other fruits and vegetables from the Americas evolving into the Philippine diet. Sweet potatoes in fact became the third-most important food crop in the Philippines (after sugar and rice) and contributed significantly to the islands’ rapid population growth, including that of supporting the increase of Chinese immigrants who worked in the galleon shipyards.23 The ships, the largest in the world at the time—140 to 160 feet in length and weighing up to 2,000 tons—were constructed from Philippine hardwoods, which also caused significant impact on the islands’ forests. And the ships were dependent on

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Figure 7.1. Map of the Pacific Ocean with the Manila Galleon trade routes from Acapulco to Manila, by R. W. Seale, 1748. Photograph courtesy of Geographicus Rare Antique Maps via Wikimedia Commons.

sails, rigging, and cables made from abaca. Abaca growers had been trading with Chinese merchants for generations, but under the Spanish, who exacted forced labor from Filipino workers, production of the fiber greatly expanded for the galleon.24 Abaca (Musa textilis), a tree-like herb in the genus of plantains, is closely related to and resembles banana plants (Musa sapientus) in appearance and growth habits, but whose fruit is nearly inedible and not economically viable. Its “trunk” (actually a “pseudostem”) produces the abaca fiber, whereas fiber produced by banana plants lacks tensile strength and is basically useless. Abaca, the longest natural strands produced by any plant, derives from the bundle of huge leaf stems wrapped around a central core in the main stem that emerge as shoots and become leaf sheaths around the core. Often called “manila” or “manila hemp” in the cordage industry (although it is unrelated to true hemp [Cannabis sativa]), abaca is extracted from the outer layers of these sheaths by a stripping and retting process. Yields vary greatly, but a good crop would be 1,000 pounds of abaca per acre.25 Fourteen varieties of abaca are native and unique to the Philippines, and as an introduced plant it has been raised in Borneo, India, the East Indies, Central America, and Ecuador—anywhere tropical where bananas thrive, so too can abaca. Filipinos are quick to call abaca their “natural monopoly,” due to the country’s soil—mellow loams caused by the disintegration of volcanic rocks that allow for good drainage—and its ideal climate, with just the right amount of rainfall (heavy and evenly distributed throughout the year), high humidity, low winds, and consistent temperatures that combine to create the perfect conditions for healthy abaca production. One newspaper article proudly described this “monopoly” from the country’s “unique soil and climate” as “what has always been regarded as one of the world’s choicest natural fibers”—with its “great tensile strength combined with extraordinary flexibility.”26

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What made abaca even more unique and important was its strategic utility. A 1953 botanical study called abaca “the world’s foremost cordage fiber” especially for marine use as its resistance to salt water made it the perfect fiber for rigging, naval rope, and fishing nets, as well as for many textiles, especially as fabric that native Filipinos used for clothing.27 British and American cordage manufacturers took note and began to import it to their factories in the early nineteenth century. Scholars point to 1818 as the first year abaca began being imported to the United States when the Philippines shipped fourteen tons of raw abaca to Plymouth Cordage in Salem, Massachusetts. Plymouth and other firms appreciated abaca’s cleanliness and durability that made it superior to Russian or American hemp, which required tarring to resist salt water. Without the tar, abaca made lighter rope and thus less weight for ships, helping to speed them along more quickly. And while it made an 18 percent more expensive rope, primarily due to the distance to import it from the Philippines, consumers thought the price was worth it as abaca rope could last up to 25 percent longer than hemp cordage. Demand for the fiber climbed exponentially throughout the century, with exports rising from 50,000 tons in 1837 to 500,000 tons by 1892. Abaca exports increased during the Mexican-American War, the Russo-Turkish War, the Crimean War, and the US Civil War when wartime ships necessitated vast amounts of rope. War also meant changes in worldwide fiber supply, as during the Crimean War the Russians shut down hemp exports through the Bosporus Strait for two years, and the Civil War helped to bring an end to Kentucky and Missouri hemp production—all of which stimulated demand for abaca. Likewise, the California gold rush and the Australian gold strike of the mid-nineteenth century were boons to the abaca industry, as mines required huge amounts of rope, and a growing merchant shipping industry to supply miners and haul minerals to market that developed required rope for rigging.28 In the Great Plains abaca became a useful fiber for binder twine—an essential component for wheat and other grain harvesting, as a farm implement called the binder cut and tied wheat into sheaves to await threshing (before the affordability of combine harvesters), from 1870 to 1950. Abaca produced the best twine for harvesting (it was especially popular with Canadian farmers in the Prairie Provinces), although due to its expense from being imported from so far away, cheaper fibers like henequen and sisal from Mexico dominated the market. Cordage manufacturers often blended abaca fiber into their twines to produce a quality product. So in demand was it that International Harvester, the leading firm for the manufacture of binders and binder twine, established abaca plantations in the Philippines to supply the company with fiber.29 Further across the American West in the 1920s and 1930s, abaca rope became the choice for oil drilling and water well digging

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companies, for contractors constructing the Hoover Dam (especially for the ropes needed for scaling canyon walls for drilling and dynamiting), for the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco (whose safety nets were made of abaca), and for many other general hoisting services in the construction and mining industries. With so much demand for so many uses, abaca was the Philippines’ greatest export product until the 1920s when exports of sugar and coconuts overtook fiber.30 The political context is important as well. The US Era of Philippines history began in 1898 when the Treaty of Paris ended the Spanish-American-Cuban War and granted the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. The Filipinos now turned their rebellion against colonial Spain to oppose US occupation.31 The price of abaca skyrocketed when ships full of fiber could not sail due to a naval blockade of Manila and by the Americans capturing the “hemp port” of Legazpi in 1900. In that same year US military forces engineered the “Hemp Expedition”—a plan to secure the abaca provinces and the ports for export of the fiber so needed by the US Navy and American cordage manufacturers. Part of the plan also was to divert abaca money from rebel groups, especially in Luzon.32 By the end of the war, the abaca industry stabilized with heavy capital input by Japanese investors who worked to re-establish the plantations and control them for the next few decades. World War I stimulated demand for abaca, once again for naval rope, with sixty different Japanese firms controlling Philippine fiber production. But as Japan became an imperial power by the 1930s, and with the outbreak of World War II and Japan invading the Philippines, the abaca industry was in jeopardy, and the cordage industry was denied fiber. This hit the United States hard, as in 1940 the US government had imported 60,000 metric tons of abaca, but after 1941 was faced with blockaded Philippine ports. The Japanese bombed US ships in Davao, in the region that produced 85 percent of Philippine abaca, and seized some 440,000 bales of fiber that were ready for shipment.33 To ensure a more stable supply of fiber and to produce it closer to home, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) worked with the United Fruit Company of Boston (UFC) and the Cordage Institute to introduce abaca into Central America. Earlier attempts at raising abaca in the early 1900s in Jamaica, Florida, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Trinidad, and Hawaii had failed for a variety of reasons (primarily environmental, as in wrong soil types and climate). In 1927 USDA established experiment stations in Honduras, on an island off of Panama, and in the US Canal Zone to determine which varieties of Philippine abaca would grow best in the American tropics. The results were satisfactory but did not result in any large-scale plantation development. But with Japanese control of the Philippine plantations by the mid-1930s the need

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was greater. Starting in 1936 and using abandoned banana lands in Panama that had fallen out of use due to plant diseases, the consortium planted 1,000 acres of abaca shipped from the Philippines—a project that measured only moderate success, as labor problems, lack of machinery, and the general economic malaise of the Great Depression hindered development.34 Meanwhile in the Philippines, the government made great efforts to expand production of abaca, with the organization of unions, grower cooperatives, presidential decrees to encourage diversification and to maximize land use for fiber, and presidential visits to plantations. There was understandable concern about competition from Mexico, so the Filipinos wanted to continue showing why abaca was the best cordage fiber.35 However, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the USDA and UFC rapidly increased the importation of abaca stock (rhizomes) to Central America, and by the end of the war 29,000 acres of abaca were growing in Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala, producing 60 million pounds of fiber a year.36 These plantations eventually fizzled out after the war, but in the 1950s cordage interests introduced the plant to Ecuador and Brazil as newer uses for abaca became known. More commercial development of Ecuadorian plantations evolved by the mid-1960s—efforts that finally broke the Philippine monopoly on the commodity.37 More recent development of abaca in Costa Rica and its continued growth in Ecuador in recent years shows how the industry is responding to demand and using lands where Musa crops (bananas and abaca) grow best. But like the Manila Galleon days of old, abaca development in Latin America illustrates the continued links, although competitive, between the two regions—reaching across the Pacific and creating strong transnational economic and environmental connections in the Pacific Rim. In the last few decades the diversification of abaca has saved the industry, something that failed to happen with Yucatecan henequen that practically died at the end of the binder twine years, especially with the rise of synthetic fibers and harvesting technology changes. In the Philippines a rising fear of synthetic materials was grounded in what plastics (especially polypropylene and polyethylene) were doing in the cordage industry, but served to intensify diversification measures.38 Such efforts had started many years before when industrialists discovered that abaca waste could be produced into paper. Going back to the mid-nineteenth century, abaca was pulped into brownish paper and tagboard, the origins of what became known as “manila envelopes” and “manila folders” (as the story goes, that during the US Civil War northern manufacturers recycled old manila rope into the brown paper).39 In addition to the standard ropes and twines, other uses include fish nets, textiles (especially coarse cloth), packing material, bags, mats, rugs, carpets, curtains, hammocks, baskets, home decorations, tabletop accessories such as

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coasters, garments (the Philippine government required for years that military and prison uniforms be made using a high percentage of abaca), slippers, skin-care products (from oils extracted from abaca seeds), upholstery fabric, furniture, patio ware, and even building materials. The Japanese use abaca for their famous movable “paper” walls in homes and buildings.40 More recently, the specialty paper industry learned that abaca fiber makes excellent tea bags, coffee filters, and cigarette paper, declaring that there really is “no substitute” for abaca. A German company in 2012 contracted to have all of its coffee filters made with the fiber, and tea enthusiasts swear to it having the finest flow-through values for a proper cup of tea.41 And we should consider the transnational connections between these commodities. Philippine abaca makes the best paper for cigarettes made from tobacco that originated in the Americas. It makes the best filters for the best coffee that is produced in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, completing once again this Pacific World cycle that connects the Philippines with Latin America. Even more innovative is how abaca is now a material for automobile bodies, as a “fiber”-glass replacing more traditional fiberglass. The DaimlerChrysler Corporation in Germany discovered its utility as a “high performance fiber”—nearly as strong as fiberglass, especially when blended with other materials to make an abaca composite. The company’s chief environmental officer, Dr. Herbert Kohler, has pointed out abaca’s economic and environmental benefits, arguing that the fiber is less expensive than fiberglass and consumes 40 percent less energy to manufacture, generates 20 percent fewer greenhouse gasses, and is totally recyclable. This proved a boon for the United Kingdom, where a law required that by 2015 all new cars had to be 95 percent recyclable. More recently, automobile manufacturers have discovered that abaca is also the best material for dashboards and car interiors.42 There are other environmentally friendly aspects about abaca. While abaca plantations have replaced forests in the Philippines, they require no chemical fertilizers. The decay of the displaced forest renders the ground fertile enough for the abaca to thrive, and the organic matter and waste produced by the plants, since only a small portion is used for fiber, keeps the ground fertile for years. Without soil exhaustion, plantations can produce for up to seventy years, and there is evidence that some fields have been producing since the Spanish colonial period. Likewise, in clearing land for plantations, not all of the trees are removed. Some are left to provide shade and shelter for the abaca plants, and growers practice intercropping with coconut palms, which aids in preserving biodiversity. All of this creates a stable soil structure (as abaca spreads by underground shoots, called sucker propagation), preventing erosion from floods and landslides and preserving soil nutrients and water. Abaca waste is organic; it leaves no chemical residues, and abaca paper can

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be recycled several times more than paper from wood pulp.43 Thus abaca is rightfully a source of great pride for Filipinos. The Philippine Secretary of Agriculture Arthur Yap boasted that by 2007 the country was supplying 85 percent of the world’s abaca fiber, making it one of the Philippines’ greatest contributions to world trade worth nearly $80 million in annual exports a year, an economic boon that has continued on until 2015. And that means employment. According to Yap, the abaca industry provides work to 1.5 million Filipino farmers, fiber strippers and classifiers, processors, and traders. Newspapers have repeated praise for this employment source since the 1960s, and botanical and trade studies always point to the advantage, as well. And that the industry has diversified so well in recent years to sustain and increase this employment has been an economic benefit to the Philippines, especially as its unemployment is high, with about 11 percent of the population (n = 2.4 million est.) now working abroad and sending remittances home.44 From the Spanish Empire days coursing the Pacific Ocean with the Manila Galleon, to the present with the diversification of the abaca industry, there has been a force of fiber at work across the world. This force has connected the Philippines to Europe, and even more to North and Latin America, in a variety of ways that are worthy of our attention, and represented environmental change in both detrimental and beneficial ways. It offers a provocative example of what might be gained by turning our attention as environmental historians to transnational projects especially on how scholars can add environmental history to the transnational analysis of the Pacific World. Similarly rich opportunities abound for scholars willing to take up Donald Worster’s call to push beyond the artificial boundaries imposed by nation-states, and study these kinds of histories elsewhere around the globe that move across countries, continents, and oceans.

Notes 1. Donald Worster, “World without Borders: The Internationalizing of Environmental History,” in Environmental History: Critical Issues in Comparative Perspective, ed. Kendall Bailes (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 661. 2. For Worster’s thoughts on the trend, see David Kinkela and Neil Maher, “Revisiting a ‘World without Borders’: An Interview with Donald Worster,” Radical History Review 107 (Spring 2010): 101–9. 3. David Armitage and Alison Bashford, introduction to Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, ed. Armitage and Bashford (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 6. 4. Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

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(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Armitage and Bashford, Pacific Histories; Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous Peoples from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Gregory Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See also John R. McNeill, ed., Environmental History in the Pacific World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001). 5. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, 4, 2–3, 5–6; Igler, Great Ocean, 8. 6. Armitage and Bashford, introduction to Pacific Histories, 8, 1, 3. 7. Igler, Great Ocean; Cushman, Guano. For case studies, see McNeill, Environmental History. 8. Matt Matsuda, “Afterword: Pacific Cross-Currents,” in Armitage and Bashford, Pacific Histories, 332. See also Ryan Tucker Jones, “The Environment,” in Armitage and Bashford, Pacific Histories, 123–24. 9. William Lytle Shurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939); Shirley Fish, The Manila-Acapulco Galleons: The Treasure Ships of the Pacific (Central Milton Keynes, UK: AuthorHouse, 2011); and Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and James Sobredo, eds., European Entry into the Pacific: Spain and the Acapulco-Manila Galleons (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001). See also Benito Legarda Jr., After the Galleons: Foreign Trade, Economic Change, and Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Philippines (Madison: Center for Southeast Asia Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1999). On the San Pablo, see Fish, Manila-Acapulco Galleons, 64. 10. Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo, introduction to European Entry, xxxvii. 11. See, for example, F. Van Wyck Mason, The Manila Galleon (New York: Little Brown, 1961); Bernard Rees, The Manila Galleon (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2003); Jason Schoonover, The Manila Galleon (Raleigh, NC: Lulu Press, 2006); and Robert Marx, In the Wake of the Galleons (North Palm Beach, FL: Best Publishing, 2001). Rees exemplifies this genre by dealing with how on board a galleon ship was a “Dutch heretic, being carried in chains to Mexico, to face torture and death at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. . . . To his youngest son, who had run away to sea, he left nothing but a curious gold ring and an oilcloth containing a soiled chart of the Spanish Philippine Islands” (Manila Galleon, 11). 12. Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo, introduction to European Entry, xxxiii. 13. Fish, Manila-Acapulco Galleons, ix; Adam McKeown, “Movement,” in Armitage and Bashford, Pacific Histories, 147. 14. James Belich, “Race,” in Armitage and Bashfords, Pacific Histories, 263.

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15. Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo, introduction to European Entry, xv, xxxi. 16. Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo, introduction to European Entry, xxviii; Igler, Great Ocean, 22, 9, 11. On Chinese demand for silver, see Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo, introduction to European Entry, xxvii, xxxi; and Carlos Marichal, “The Spanish-American Silver Peso: Export Commodity and Global Money of the Ancien Regime, 1550–1800,” in From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500– 2000, ed. Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 26–27. 17. Benito Legarda Jr., “Two and a Half Centuries of the Galleon Trade,” in Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo, European Entry, 343–44; Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo, introduction to European Entry, xiii, xxx, xxxii–xxxiii. 18. Fish, Manila-Acapulco Galleons, 76; Legarda, “Two and a Half Centuries,” 343; Matsuda, “Afterword,” 331. 19. Thomas, Islanders, 24; Armitage and Bashford, introduction to Pacific Histories, 16. 20. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, 6. 21. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 129–30; Fish, Manila-Acapulco Galleons, 63–64. 22. Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 256. For silver, see Marichal, “Spanish-American Silver Peso.” 23. Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo, introduction to European Entry, xxxiii. 24. Fish, Manila-Acapulco Galleons, 83–84; Legarda, After the Galleons, 294; Elizabeth Potter Sievert, The Story of Abaca: Manila Hemp’s Transformation from Textile to Marine Cordage to Specialty Paper (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009), 16; J. E. Spencer, “The Abacá Plant and Its Fiber, Manila Hemp,” Economic Botany 7 (July–September 1953): 210–11. 25. Spencer, “Abacá Plant,” 195; Sievert, Story of Abaca, 1; George Sterling Lee, “Abaca (Manila Hemp): The Fiber Monopoly of the Philippine Islands,” Scientific Monthly 11 (August 1920): 163. 26. Spencer, “Abacá Plant,” 195, 209; Lee, “Abaca,” 159, 161. Quoted article is from Manila Times, n.d. [mid-1960s], n.p., clippings files, subject “Abaca,” file 36, National Archives of the Philippines. See clippings file 82 for article on the one and only monopoly (also from the Manila Times, n.d.). 27. Spencer, “Abacá Plant,” 209; Sievert, Story of Abaca, 2. 28. Legarda, After the Galleons, 293–98; Norman Owen, Prosperity without Progress: Manila Hemp and the Material Life in the Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 4, 42; Sievert, Story of Abaca, 20, 24, 33. On the Crimean War, see Alfred Crosby, America, Russia, Hemp, and

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Napoleon: American Trade with Russia and the Baltic, 1783–1812 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965). 29. Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007); Spencer, “Abacá Plant,” 207. 30. Sievert, Story of Abaca, 33, 30; Karl Pelzer, “The Philippine Abaca Industry,” Far Eastern Survey 17 (March 1948): 71. 31. On US colonialism, see Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Alfred McCoy and Francisco Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 32. Sievert, Story of Abaca, 28; Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 174–79, 325–26. 33. Pelzer, “Abaca Industry,” 72; Shinzo Hayase, “American Colonial Policy and the Japanese Abaca Industry in Davao, 1898–1941,” Philippine Studies 33, no. 4 (1985): 505–17; Sievert, Story of Abaca, 31–32; H. T. Edwards, “The Introduction of Abacá (Manila Hemp) into the Western Hemisphere,” in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1945), 336; Evans, Bound in Twine. 34. Spencer, “Abacá Plant,” 202, 204; Pelzer, “Abaca Industry,” 73; Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1927, 5; Edwards, “Introduction of Abacá,” 346–47. 35. From presidential decrees and letters in the Manuel Quezon papers, series 7, box 120 “Fibers,” National Archives of the Philippines. 36. Edwards, “Introduction of Abacá,” 348–49. 37. Spencer, “Abacá Plant,” 204; Seivert, Story of Abaca, 88. 38. Evans, Bound in Twine, chap. 7, regarding the decline of the Mexican fiber industry. For Filipinos’ fear of synthetics, see articles from mid-1960s, Manila Times, clippings files, National Archives of the Philippines. 39. Spencer, “Abacá Plant,” 210; Sievert, Story of Abaca, 45. 40. Sievert, Story of Abaca, 45; Lee, “Abaca,” 165. 41. Sievert, Story of Abaca, 1, 260, 278; Manila Times articles, clippings file, National Archives of the Philippines. 42. Kohler, in Sievert, Story of Abaca, 179–80; S&T Media Service, “Improved Abaca Varieties to Nail PH as Top Exporting Country; Abaca: Weaving More Opportunities into Farmers’ Lives,” Republic of the Philippines, Department of Science and Technology (DOST), June 29, 2015, http:// www.dost.gov.ph/knowledge-resources/news/44-2015-news/746-improvedabaca-varieties-to-nail-ph-as-top-exporting-country-abaca-weaving-moreopportunities-into-farmers-lives. 43. Edwards, “Introduction of Abacá,” 327; Lee, “Abaca,” 162; Norman,

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Progress without Prosperity, 112, 74; Sievert, Story of Abaca, 179. 44. Arthur Yap, foreword to Sievert, Story of Abaca, xi. See Manila Times articles regarding employment, clippings files, National Archives of the Philippines; Edwards, “Introduction of Abacá,” 334, 339; Pelzer, “Abaca Industry,” 71; S&T Media Service, “Improved Abaca Varieties.” Information on Filipino workers abroad is from “Overseas Filipinos,” Republic of the Philippines, Philippine Statistics Authority, 2015, accessed April 30, 2018, https://psa.gov.ph/ tags/overseas-filipinos.

8 Hunting and Wilderness in the Creation of National Identities Mikko Saikku

I

n the fall of 1909, two nationally celebrated figures from the spatial extremes of “Western Civilization” met for lunch for the first (and last) time. Of all places, the location for their short and somewhat uneasy meeting was a rustic villa in the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital of British East Africa. At the time, Theodore Roosevelt, the former president of the United States, and Akseli Gallen-Kallela (né Axel Gallén), the foremost painter of the National Romantic School in Finland, were both conducting an African safari.1 Roosevelt and Gallen-Kallela arrived in British East Africa with hopes of being rejuvenated by “the strenuous life” amidst the continent’s supposedly unspoiled nature and native peoples. A crucial aspect of their African journey was big game hunting, partly as recreational pastime but also to amass zoological specimens for their respective national museums. Furthermore, both men were accompanied by their teenage sons, Kermit and Jorma, and perceived the wilderness hunt as a perfect tool to develop manliness and physical courage in their offspring. Challenging encounters with African nature enabled Gallen-Kallela and Roosevelt to test their male strength and endurance in entirely new surroundings and provided them with a new outlook on the perceived core values of Finnish and American cultures. Both the artist and the politician exhibited primitivist tendencies, expressing genuine admiration for pristine landscapes, the continent’s magnificent wildlife, and even certain features of native African life while still remaining deeply entrenched in their own cultural values and prejudices. In their published travel journals, both men wrote glowingly about the “manly” and warrior-like African tribes, such as the Nandi and Maasai, and both celebrated the beauty of the male body in violent action.2 But how did it happen that these two men, an American ex-president and a leading Finnish artist, found themselves in the wilds of Africa in the first place? Safaris were still uncommon in 1909; they became truly fashionable for noncolonial sportsmen only after Roosevelt’s much-publicized feat.3 I argue that the reason has much to do with the special emphasis both “young” nations, the United States and Finland, placed on pristine landscapes and the image of the wilderness hunter when developing ideas about the national character. These in turn were deeply related to ideals of manliness.

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“Wilderness,” “Frontier,” and “Nation” In his important but lesser-known essay comparing American and Canadian attitudes toward the natural world, Donald Worster rightly noted that “[c]omparative history always runs the danger of ignoring complex internal differences, the full spectrum of possibilities that lie within any society, in its tendency to locate what is different [or in this essay, similar] between nations.” Nevertheless, he continued, “national cultures do exist—cultures that are bounded and shaped by the nation—and they do differ in their emphases, their structure of values, their myths and fantasies.”4 Juxtaposing late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North American and Nordic ideas about nature, landscape, and masculinity can therefore shed new light on the notions of nationalism and manliness—some shared, some distinct—between the two regions. While the importance of landscape painting for the evolving national identities in both North America and the Nordic countries has been extensively studied and generally accepted, the role of recreational hunting and fishing in the creation of “national” cultures remains largely neglected.5 The very distinctive Finnish and American experiences are especially illustrative in this context. There are clearly obvious differences, but a closer examination shows that the two cultures share many previously unrecognized similarities with broad repercussions. While nineteenth-century Finns and Americans generally saw themselves as industrious farmers, landscapes untouched by humans and the images of wilderness hunters greatly contributed to the construction of a national identity and ideals of manliness in both young nations. It could be further argued that the North American experience with its imagined unrestricted access to the wilderness is not as exceptional as scholarly and popular literature would have it. From the seventeenth up to the twentieth century, the Nordic peripheries shared certain natural, cultural, and even legal features with the famous North American frontier. Intriguingly, some scholars have even traced the roots of the American frontier culture to the mid-seventeenth-century colony of New Sweden on the Delaware.6 Obviously, significant differences exist between the two regions in relation to the construction of national myths. These become clearly evident when the Nordic concepts of “wilderness” and “frontier” are compared with the traditional Anglo-American ideas about untamed lands and Frederick Jackson Turner’s iconic narrative of the progress of civilization in North America.7 The established translation and closest term to “wilderness” in Finnish is erämaa, while the Swedish language has applied the term ödemark. It could be argued that erämaa is a central concept for understanding the traditional

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Finnish relationship with nature and use of natural resources.8 The uses of erämaa as a linguistic term and physical space have changed over the centuries, but this medieval concept has typically denoted a vast area of boreal forest with plentiful fish and game, visited only seasonally by humans. In the Finnish language, there has not historically been a clear dichotomy between “wild” and “civilized” lands. While the seemingly wild erämaa is not permanently inhabited, it does not lie outside civilization like its North American counterpart. It is rather an area that one periodically enters in order to obtain his/her share of the bounty of nature, i.e., erä. This wilderness may be harsh and unforgiving, and dangerous creatures—human and nonhuman alike—may dwell there, but it is a second home to a person who has mastered its ways. Until early modern times, the Finnish erämaa referred to a specified area that was seasonally utilized by a certain village for fishing and hunting purposes. Villagers in the south of Finland typically possessed their communal areas of erämaa in the north. These could be situated hundreds of kilometers from the permanent site of settlement. Typical uses of the Finnish wilderness included fishing in the spring and early summer and hunting for both food and furs during the fall and winter. (During medieval times, pelts of the pine marten, beaver, red fox, stoat, and lynx were the Finns’ most important export articles.) Finns also levied taxes on the Lapp (typically ethnic Sámi) people they encountered in the northern wilderness. Prolonged use of a certain area could result in permanent settlement and introduction of (slash-and-burn) agriculture, after which the area was deemed outside the commons and ceased to be wilderness in the Finnish sense. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Swedish King Gustav Vasa declared all areas of the eastern (i.e., Finnish) erämaa to be the crown’s property and strongly encouraged their permanent settlement. During the next three centuries, much of the wilderness was settled, and the Lapp people either assimilated or were pushed northward in a process that in some ways resembled the North American frontier experience. However, vast areas remained uninhabited, especially in the north of Finland, and their traditional use as hunting and fishing grounds continued. During the nineteenth century, erämaa became a powerful symbol for rising Finnish nationalism. In the spirit of National Romanticism, painters, authors, and even composers such as Jean Sibelius championed wilderness as a cornerstone for Finnish identity, or more precisely, Finnish male identity. A not-so-distant cousin of the North American “mountain man,” eränkävijä (“wilderness hunter/fisher”) became an epitome of idealized Finnish masculinity and, to a certain degree, has remained so to this day. The concept of erä survives to this day in the Finnish language with

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common words and phrases such as erämökki (hunting/fishing cabin), and erätaidot (survival skills). The vast everyman’s rights (or “freedom to roam”) in present-day Finland and other Nordic countries can similarly be traced back to the ancient culture of erä. Even the wilderness areas maintained by the Finnish Forest Service (Metsähallitus) in Lapland subscribe to this tradition, having been established “to conserve their rugged wild nature, to preserve Sámi culture and livelihoods, and to develop the diverse use of nature and its potential.”9

Hunting and National Cultures The history of hunting provides an important but in many ways neglected viewpoint to the core of national cultures and history of class relations, especially in comparative and transnational contexts. In the feudal societies of Western and Central Europe, hunting rights were gradually severed from land ownership. Typically only the royalty and nobility were allowed to hunt big game, and smaller landowners and peasants were forced to become assistants in the hunt, which turned into an elaborate display of aristocratic power and a potent symbol of social inequality. Beginning with Frederick Jackson Turner, American scholars have convincingly argued that the more “democratic” access to nature’s bounty—such as hunting for big (and smaller) game—in part made the mythic “America” so appealing to European immigrants. To be sure, there were certain exceptions. The history of hunting in the American South, for instance, resembles in certain ways the continental narrative, with black slaves and sharecroppers substituting for European peasants.10 But if there were exceptions to the American rule, so too were there in Europe. Indeed, the Nordic experience proved to be quite different from the rest of the continent. During the seventeenth century, the Swedish nobility temporarily succeeded in introducing European-style hunting regulations to the densely populated core regions of the kingdom, but in the northern peripheries the folk hunting tradition was not seriously challenged and continued practically unabated until the commoners’ hunting rights were completely restored under the law with the famous Union and Security Act of 1792.11 Thus it is no wonder that the eighteenth-century Finnish bear hunter and widely publicized folk hero Martti Kitunen has much more in common with the fictional and reallife hunter heroes of North America, such as Natty Bumpo, Daniel Boone, and Davy Crockett, than with his European counterparts. Of course, big-game hunting commoners could turn into folk heroes also in Great Britain and on the Continent. However, from Robin Hood to Matthias Klostermayr, “Der Bayerische Hiesel,” they all fall into Eric Hobsbawm’s category of “social bandits” whereas their North American and Nordic counterparts were typically endorsed by the authorities. Accordingly,

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the history of hunting in Finland and in northern parts of Sweden in many important ways resembles the iconic North American narrative. The great national importance attributed to wild landscapes, hunters, and pioneer settlers in both North America and the Nordic countries seems to share common roots, especially when contrasted with the general European experience. Not surprisingly, this mythical idea of a democratic wilderness past—an idea celebrated by the national elites—was eventually reproduced by the dominant classes in a new, novel form.12

Manly Nations through Nature Numerous scholars have demonstrated that upper- and middle-class American men at the turn of the twentieth century were fearful of losing their physical vigor and, consequently, intrigued by ideas about manhood. Emphasizing the historic wilderness experience, Theodore Roosevelt and his followers created a new, “de-evolutionary” masculinity, balancing “civilized” urban life with atavistic outdoors physicality. Seasonal immersion in the wilderness with primitive camping and big game hunting was to provide the ideal outlet for this purpose.13 The writings of many contemporary Nordic authors echo Roosevelt in their archetypal representations of a national masculinity, combined with the idea of strenuous life as a safeguard for the survival of a potent “race.” While Roosevelt himself described this new manhood as inherently American and rising from a unique frontier experience, the Nordic discourse at the time often utilized exactly the same arguments, emphasizing the importance of the domestic “frontier” and “wilderness” for the national character and lamenting the urbanites’ loss of woodcraft and survival skills. It is no coincidence that boy scouting in North America and the Nordic countries from the beginning emphasized woodcraft and the historical frontier experience in comparison with the more militaristic British approach to scouting. Of course, proponents of the rediscovered masculinity on both sides of the Atlantic well understood that middle-class outdoorsmen could easily be turned into military officers during wartime.14 The socio-cultural history of wilderness hunting by upper and middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic is a subject worthy of serious scholarly study. By the turn of the twentieth century, many Americans, Canadians, Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns of the upper and educated classes embraced the new pastime. A part of the evolving larger sportsmanship movement, elite hunting in North America and the Nordic countries showed certain conservationist tendencies from the beginning. Like their hunting brethren, sport fishermen and their organizations were typically in the forefront of conservation efforts for their game and its

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environment. On both sides of the Atlantic, hunters and fishermen conceived their sport and its cultural surround in terms of masculine renewal. Resembling their counterparts in the British Isles, North American and Nordic elite hunters and anglers of the late nineteenth century began to construct a distinct group identity. According to John Reiger, this new fraternity required its members to “practice proper etiquette in the field, give game a sporting chance, and possess an aesthetic appreciation of the whole environmental context of sport that included a commitment to its perpetuation.”15 Early studies on elite sportsmen and conservation could easily turn into something resembling hagiography, while more recent treatises on the subject often overemphasize the not-so-pleasant (by today’s standards) class and ethnic dimensions of the elite white “sport” while ignoring the actual effects of the sportsmen’s conservation efforts on fish and wildlife populations.

Wild Lands in National Cultures In his carefully argued 2002 article comparing American and Canadian attitudes toward nature, Donald Worster came to the conclusion that “dwarfed by a huge land mass” and “heavily dependent on natural resource extraction,” “Canadians—whether Anglophone or Francophone, old or new immigrant— have not felt about the wilderness quite the same way Americans have.”16 This is undoubtedly true, but it could also be argued that those differences become minor, even negligible, when placed in the larger context of wilderness experience in “Western” culture. Many nations in the temperate zones of the globe with a history of recent colonization by Europeans and/or their culture show striking similarities in their utilization of wild lands. Originally peripheral in the greater European economy, these nations typically displayed lower population densities, less governmental control, and more egalitarian systems of land use (at least for a significant portion of the common people) than the core regions of Europe. Today, these nations often possess vast swaths of public land and protected wilderness areas (often reflecting the movement of the “frontier” in question), with great cultural significance— and aboriginal land ownership questions—attached to them. It seems that nations with a history of more equal access to nature and its bounty tend to support its protection also on other than purely economic terms. Indeed, national concepts of frontier and wilderness, not only in North America and the Nordic countries, but also around the globe remain a relevant topic for comparative and transnational environmental history. Nuanced studies embracing such an approach can illustrate not only the uneasy and unequal relationship between socioeconomic class and access to wilderness resources, but also the construction of gender in national contexts, the roles and motivations of recreational hunters and fishers in the evolving national

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conservation movements, and the importance of wild lands for national identities, adding fresh insights to the undying “wilderness debate,” sparked by William Cronon’s controversial 1995 article.17 Comparative studies can conceivably provide some local, regional, and national reactions to Worster’s thoughtful reflections regarding the fate of the world’s remaining wild lands: “If that greater wild earth is to be preserved, or any significant part of it, the world may need other reasons that we in the United States have given. It may need words other than freedom.”18 In certain cultures, words such as “frontier” and “wilderness” or their equivalents—however contested they may be—can still wield power for the purposes of nature protection. It would behoove environmental historians to help understand why.

Notes This short essay is based upon my current book project, Manly Nations through Nature. It traces the evolving image of the Nordic and the North American hunter in national literatures, landscape painting, mass media, and popular culture. The book examines how and why the model of a manly hunter and fisherman was first developed by the national elites and then adopted by the new middle classes. The importance and continuity of the outdoorsman image in the creation of national identities and ideal masculinities are its central themes. Parts of this essay have appeared in a slightly different form in my “Erämaa—Finnish,” in Wilderness Babel, ed. Marcus Hall, Virtual Exhibitions 2013, no. 1, Environment and Society Portal, accessed July 15, 2015, http://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/ wilderness/eraemaa-finnish; and “Hunting, Fishing, and Wilderness in the Creation of National Identities: A Neglected Topic in Transnational North American Studies,” in North American Studies Crossroads: An Anthology of Finnish Perspectives, ed. Rani-Henrik Andersson and Saara Kekki, Renvall Institute Publications, no. 32 (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, Area and Cultural Studies, 2014), 282–95. 1. On the Nairobi meeting, see Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Afrikka-kirja: Kallela-kirja II (Porvoo, Finland: WSOY, 1931), 56–62. Gallen-Kallela did not appreciate Roosevelt’s forays into the realm of art criticism. 2. Gallen-Kallela, Afrikka-kirja, 153–55; Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924), 342–46. 3. Edward I. Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 113–14. 4. Donald Worster, “Wild, Tame, and Free: Comparing Canadian and U.S. Views of Nature,” in Parallel Destinies: Canadian-American Relations West of the

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Rockies, ed. John M. Findlay and Ken S. Coates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 265. 5. Daniel Justin Herman’s Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001) provides an excellent introduction on the evolution of upper- and middle-class hunting in the United States. For other recent studies on hunting and hunter representations, see Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006); Heikki Lehikoinen, Tuo hiisi hirviäsi: Metsästyksen kulttuurihistoria Suomessa (Helsinki: Teos, 2007); and Jon T. Coleman, Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). The constraints of space prevent any discussion in this essay of other temperate regions colonized by Europeans, such as Siberia, South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand. 6. Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). See also John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 7. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office and American Historical Association, 1894), 199–227. On the concept of wilderness, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Max Oelschlager, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69–90; Yrjö Haila, “ ‘Wilderness’ and the Multiple Layers of Environmental Thought,” Environment and History 3 (June 1997): 129–47; and Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000), chap. 4. 8. On the Finnish concept of erämaa, see the classic Väinö Voionmaa, Hämäläinen eräkausi (Porvoo, Finland: WSOY, 1947). In contemporary usage, erämaa typically refers to a remote and roadless area that supports old-growth forest, nondrained bogs, and unchained rapids. Examples of surviving erämaa can be found in Finland’s national parks and other protected areas, including the so-called erämaa-alueet (wilderness areas) that have been established in Lapland to preserve not only nature but also traditional Sámi culture and

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opportunities for outdoor activities by nonlocals. 9. In some respects, the closest equivalent in Finland to the American wilderness in the sense of the 1964 Wilderness Act would not be a “wilderness area” (erämaa-alue), but a “strict nature reserve” (luonnonpuisto, literal translation, “nature park”). These are “conserved in their natural state so that researchers would be able to compare these with other areas and determine how many of nature’s changes are natural instead of having been caused directly by man.” Unlike American wilderness areas, these truly wild areas are not typically open to the public. Metsähallitus, “Strict Nature Reserves,” accessed July 15, 2015, http://www.metsa.fi/web/en/strict-nature-reserves. Cf. the discussion on the Wilderness Act Forum of Environmental History, April 2014, accessed July 1, 2015, http://environmentalhistory.net/wilderness-actforum/. 10. For the British experience, see, e.g., E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975); and Emma Griffin, Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). For classic American appraisals of the hunter image, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 51–120; and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 466–516. For the southern hunting tradition, see Nicolas W. Proctor, Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); and Scott E. Giltner, Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure after the Civil War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 11. Ulf Nyrén, Rätt till jakt: En studie av den svenska jakträtten ca 1600–1789 (Gothenburg: Institutionen för historiska studier, 2012). 12. On Martti Kitunen, see Zacharias Topelius, Maamme kirja: Lukukirja alimmaisille oppilaitoksille Suomessa (Porvoo: WSOY, 1982), 162–63; and Heikki Korhonen, Martti Kitunen: Muistelmia Suomen kuuluisimmasta karhunampujasta ja kuvauksia hänen seikkailuistaan (Porvoo: WSOY, 1935). Two classic texts in the canon of Finnish literature, Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Elgskyttarne: Nio sånger (Helsinki: Frenckell, 1832); and Aleksis Kivi, Seitsemän veljestä (Helsinki: [Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura], 1870), contain lengthy depictions of commoners hunting for big game. On social banditry, see Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Praeger, 1963); and Eric J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York: Delacorte, 1969). 13. For example, see Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, eds., American Big-Game Hunting (New York: Forest and Stream, 1893), 14–15.

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See also Richard Slotkin, “Nostalgia and Progress: Theodore Roosevelt’s Myth of the Frontier,” American Quarterly 33 (Winter 1981): 608–37; and Tina Loo, “Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (August 2001): 296–319. Michael Egan’s “Wrestling Teddy Bears: Wilderness Masculinity as Invented Tradition in the Pacific Northwest,” Gender Forum, no. 15 (2006), was especially helpful. On the Canadian experience, see, e.g., Gillian Poulter, Becoming Native in a Foreign Land: Sport, Visual Culture, and Identity in Montreal, 1840–1885 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009); and Gerry Parker, Men of the Autumn Woods: Non-Resident Big-Game Hunting in New Brunswick, the Golden Years, 1885–1935 (self-pub., 2004). On more general studies on the turn-of the-century “masculinity crisis” in the United States, see, e.g., Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Social Text 11 (Winter 1984–1985): 19–64; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001); John Pettigrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Evan Thomas, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 (New York: Little, Brown, 2010). 14. In Finland, the purest examples of such philosophy can be found in the popular short stories written by General K. M. Wallenius. See Wallenius, Ihmismetsästäjiä ja erämiehiä (Porvoo: WSOY, 1933); Vanhat kalajumalat (Helsinki: Otava, 1951); and Miesten meri (Helsinki: Otava, 1952); the last was published in the United States as Men from the Sea, trans. Alan Blair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955). On Wallenius, see Veli-Pekka Lehtola, Wallenius: Kirjailijakenraali Kurt Martti Walleniuksen elämä ja tuotanto (Oulu: Pohjoinen, 1994). On the controversy surrounding the aims and methods of the Boy Scouts of America at the time of its founding, see, e.g., Betty Keller, Black Wolf: The Life of Ernest Thompson Seton (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 1984), 161–79. 15. John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, 3rd ed. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001), 3. 16. Worster, “Wild, Tame, and Free,” 256–57, 252. 17. Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness.” Cf., for example, the comments by Samuel P. Hays, Michael P. Cohen, and Thomas R. Dunlap, and the response by Cronon in Environmental History 1 (January 1996): 29–55. 18. Worster, “Wild, Tame, and Free,” 266.

9 Why We Need Comparative History The Case of China and the United States Shen Hou

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t is not generally remembered that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution depended importantly on comparing the plant life of China and the United States. On May 2, 1856, he asked the help of his friend and colleague Harvard professor Asa Gray to supply data comparing the flora of the two countries, comparing their similarities and differences in order to support his still nascent theory on the origin of species. Similarities in plant geography suggested a common ancestry of many Chinese and American plants.1 Gray did not disappoint him. However, due to foreigners’ limited access to the Chinese interior, before foreign powers forced China to open up to outsiders, Gray had to rely mainly on specimens collected in Japan to support what was later called the Asa Gray Disjunction, which refers to the surprising morphological similarities between many eastern Asian and eastern North American plants. The improbable similarities were vital to evolutionary biology. Gray was not the first scientist who noticed the significance of common geographical origins, but undoubtedly he was the most influential. Inspired by him, later botanists traveled often between China and America, in person and intellectually. Through comparative analysis they searched for a deeper perspective into the geological and evolutionary past—the ancient historical connections between places that suggest a chain of causality and diffusion. And Darwin incorporated those discoveries into his own thinking, the theory of natural selection, which laid the foundations of modern biology.2 On various occasions, Donald Worster has claimed that if there were an election for the greatest historian of all time, he would vote for Charles Darwin, for Darwin set an example of recording and interpreting the history of the whole earth, humans included. But note that Darwin used the comparative method in that history. Through collecting comparative data, he was able to understand biological differences and similarities, and from seeing those differences and similarities he was able to arrive at a more precise and persuasive set of generalizations about the origins of life. Compared with Darwin, most human-centered historians have not been so ambitious. They have been restrained by many boundaries, geographical, political, cultural, and chronological, and their research has been confined to a much more limited time and space. But human-centered historians could use a little more

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Darwinian depth and method and a little more comparative analysis in writing about the past. As one of the fundamental methods for perfecting knowledge, comparison is widely practiced in the natural sciences, particularly the historically minded sciences, where the comparative method is perhaps the most important theoretical foundation. Given a similar absence of laboratory experiments to test their hypotheses, human-centered historians should also find the method useful and necessary to adopt. It would bring a more rigorous analysis of cause and effect, focus their minds more carefully on logical analysis, and when done right would get them beyond mere impressionistic claims. To be sure, some historical-minded scholars have long discussed the methods, ideas, feasibility, contributions, and drawbacks of comparative history, and they have generated some good work in this field. But it was not until 1928 that a more theoretical and systematical discussion of this approach appeared with the French historian Marc Bloch’s famous article “Pour une histoire comparée des societés européennes.” Thirty years later, Cambridge University Press published the first issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History, a quarterly journal devoted to comparative history. Later, in the 1960s and ’70s, comparative history was still struggling to be born but once again stirred up a bit of discussion among historians, prompted by Raymond Grew’s “The Case for Comparing Histories,” which argued that all historical studies may at some intuitive level be comparative but it was time for historians to make that method more systematic and self-conscious.3 This paper does not intend to trace the entire course of comparative history, its ups and downs, its persistent failure to get a purchase. Instead, it aims to focus on this question: why do we need comparative environmental history, and particularly why do we need a comparative environmental history of China and the United States?4 Quite successfully, environmental history has brought nature back into the purview of historians, reminding them of the existence of noncultural, material forces shaping the human past. We now can see that by investigating the role of nature in human history, one gains a more comprehensive understanding of the past than by studying human affairs alone. The point here is that an environmental perspective could make the same contribution to comparative history—it would add breadth and depth, and would tie the very idea of human civilization to the entire web of life. Most important perhaps, a comparative environmental history would lead us to transcend species-ism, as well as ethnocentrism. All of the many cultures and civilizations, including that of China and the United States (which is of course a subset of Western civilization), have grown up and taken their character to an important extent from their

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environmental settings. Like Darwin’s plant communities, they evolve in one place and then in some cases spread from there across oceans and plains. Wherever they go, civilizations bear the marks of their original habitats, whether they were forests, grasslands, alluvial floodplains, mountains, islands, or deserts. To study the development of any culture or civilization, in other words, a historian needs to begin with a specific set of climates, soils, waters, vegetation, animals, and microbes. This is not the old specter of simplistic environmental determinism, but rather the acknowledgement of complexity of nature-culture relationships over time. As historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has written, civilization is “a type of relationship . . . to the natural environment, recrafted by the civilizing impulse, to meet human demands. . . . All history is, therefore, in a sense, historical ecology. This does not mean that it has to be materialist, because many of our interactions with the environment start in our minds.”5 So far, however, the majority of world and comparative historians have tended to ignore the role of nature in the development of human civilization. Their explanations have, therefore, been flawed and incomplete. Take one of the most fundamental comparative questions that modern historians have tried to answer: Why has the West ruled the globe during the last three or four hundred years? Although Western-centrism has come to be criticized among the most enlightened historians, at the same time they often try to explain the “rise of the West” as due to some intrinsic cultural or regional trait that gave Westerners superiority. Comparative environmental history would bring more humility into that misinterpretation of development, making people’s environmental circumstances an important reason why some cultures became more powerful or rich than others. The best example of this objective approach to cultural difference and cultural power is Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, which offers a comparative environmental perspective on a broad East-West scale.6 By taking an environmental perspective, Pomeranz puts Western supremacy in a new light. He points out that in the eighteenth century China’s Yangtze Delta was at least on the same, if not on a higher, level in terms of its social development with the most wealthy parts of Europe. The delta offered a rich ecological foundation for agriculture and urban life, as rich as any in Europe, and the Chinese had taken full advantage of that abundance. But after 1800 CE, the impact of the European discovery and possession of the New World’s fabulous ecological treasure house gave Europeans and their civilization an enormous boost forward. Not all historians, especially economic historians, have agreed with Pomeranz, but thanks to an environmental perspective, this book has become one of the most influential works on East Asia published over the

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past quarter century and a model of comparative environmental history. Such comparative work through deep time has been done by various scientists as well as historians. Among the most widely read of them is Jared Diamond, whose book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies tries to explain why it was Eurasia, not the western hemisphere, that first developed intensive agricultural civilizations and on that base created great empires.7 Diamond argues that it was nature—geographic, climatic, and ecological characteristics—instead of superior intellectual endowment, which laid the foundation for power and conquest. Unfortunately, Diamond’s discussion of Chinese ecology and culture is rather superficial compared with his analysis of Europe and the Mideast. For obvious reasons, China’s uninterrupted, rich historical written records covering 3,000 years would certainly make this connection between natural conditions and the precocious accumulation of human power more complete and convincing. A deeper comparative history that focused on two case studies like China and the United States could test and refine Diamond’s broad-brush approach. Beyond helping us understand the contours of the modern world, as Pomeranz has done, or the deeper inequalities rooted in different ecologies, as Diamond has done, comparative environmental history can provide valuable insights into current environmental problems and solutions. Policymakers and environmental activists need to know, through comparison, the full range of human relationships with nature and to be aware of the choices and strategies pursued in different societies and places. Comparative environmental history can shed light on an important political question that all nations and the world community as a whole have to face: which religious, political, and economic system would be better for managing our ecological relationships in the future—capitalism, communism, Buddhism, Islam, or something yet untried?8 As a historian trained in both the ancient history of China and the modern history of the United States, I have been asking myself what that training might help me do that no one else is doing. In China, I am regarded as an American or world historian; in the United States, I am assumed to be an expert on the history of China. This might be an intolerable problem of identity, but actually it inspires me to see the past more comparatively. Increasingly, I understand that comparing those two nations, which are also two great civilizations, is not only a solution for me personally but also a valuable contribution to environmental studies. Today, whatever their past differences in power and influence, China and the United States are the most wealthy and powerful countries in the world. Despite much tension and misunderstanding, they know that they must try to work together to solve environmental problems on a global scale, most

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notably the challenge of global climate change. Therefore, it is vital that they try to understand each other’s historical ecology better, and to help the rest of the world understand too.9 These two civilization’s environmental behaviors and policies are having a major impact on the modern world, as both compete to possess the natural resources of the rest of the planet as well as exploit more fully those at home. That impact has similarities and differences. On the side of difference, it must be allowed that China and the United States hold different notions of the state, social norms, moral traditions, fertility and population, and ideal landscapes, and these notions will have different outcomes. When in 1982 Worster asked for an environmental history “without borders,” very few of his fellow historians were ready to go beyond the national borders of the United States. Today, many more are writing about non-US subjects. Some of our best scholars have devoted themselves to international and transnational history. Yet the gap between China’s civilization and that of the West and the United States seems still insuperable.10 Historians (and not just environmental historians) either refuse to cross this gap or show indifference to the possibility of making comparison between these two dominant countries in the world. Undoubtedly, there are many practical reasons why this is so. Such a comparative history requires fluency in both English and Mandarin, and it needs plenty of money to support long research trips. But in this age of the internet and of rising interest in studying English and Chinese respectively in both countries, these practical difficulties will become increasingly minor if historians are determined to step out of their national and cultural zones of safety and familiarity. Which model of comparative history should we follow? If we followed the lead of Marc Bloch, we would not try to jump over oceans as Darwin and Gray did, or as Pomeranz has done. Bloch insisted that comparison should be made among two or more countries that are for the most part similar in culture and time, not widely different. This view was based on two premises. The first is that the regions (or countries) being compared should be geographically or culturally alike in most respects so that their few differences would be easy to isolate and examine. So one should choose France and Germany, the United States and Canada, or China and Japan. Otherwise, one would have too much difference to investigate. The second premise was that the two objects being compared should belong to the same time period, so even if one did transcend oceans, the comparison should at least be severely confined in time. The geographical distance and the chronological differences separating Chinese and American development apparently put them outside both premises, halting most historians from making a comparison of them. There

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have, however, been exceptions.11 The founding father of American Chinese studies, John King Fairbank, won his early public reputation with a book titled The United States and China (first published in 1948, with a fourth edition appearing in 1983).12 Although this book is mainly a survey of Chinese history from the age of Confucius to the present and although it concentrates on communication, especially diplomatic and political, between China and the United States, it starts with a comparison of the two countries in terms of their landscapes, populations, amount of arable land, and different attitudes toward nature. But like other historians, Fairbank treated the environment only as a backdrop and did not use it in his core analysis. And, when he looked for a region to compare to China, he turned to Europe because it was where he could find more commonality with China in terms of a long history of agriculture and monarchy. Fairly speaking, environmental historians more or less have had a sense of comparison between China and the US in the back of their minds when they are writing the history of the two countries respectively. We might call such comparison “informal” or “shadow” comparison. The award-winning book on the Yellow River from the eleventh to the twelfth century by Ling Zhang could not have been written without her exposure to American water and river histories, perhaps especially Rivers of Empire.13 Earlier, Peter Perdue’s monumental work China Marches West was apparently inspired by Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier theory and American western history in general.14 On more contemporary issues such as waste disposal and infrastructure construction, environmental movements and organizations, and industrialization and urbanization, this shadow comparison is even more frequently practiced. One good example is an article: “The Value of Citizen Science: The Controversy Over Municipal Solid Waste Incineration and Dioxin Pollution in Contemporary China,” which appears in the most recent issue of Global Environment. The author Da Mao was partly trained by Martin Melosi and published his dissertation (in Chinese) on garbage dumping in the Boston harbor of the nineteenth century. His research on Chinese waste disposal shows clear influence of his earlier interest in American waste management.15 But besides those shadow comparisons, we need more bold and explicit comparative studies between the two countries. Comparing “like” to “like” is still a good principle in comparative history, as Bloch said, although we should not follow it too narrowly in a geographical or chronological sense. But China and the United States have much in common. As the research done by Darwin, Gray, and many others reveals, the two have shown many surprising similarities in terms of biological evolution and ecology. For environmental historians, those similarities in the two countries’ natural environment have had

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profound consequences for society too, and such ecological commonality and people’s interaction with it opens an unlimited space for comparative research. When the map of China is imposed on that of the United States, the commonality between the two is stunning. These two countries are almost the same size: China covers roughly 3.7 million square miles, while the United States covers 3.8 million. Although located in separate hemispheres, they are almost on the same latitudes and include similar types of climate, ranging from frigid to subtropical zones, with prevailing temperate climates. In the United States, the 100th meridian is the dividing line separating the humid east from the arid and semiarid west. In China, there is a similar dividing line, but it goes from the northeast to the southwest—a 400mm precipitation line defining China’s water supply, population density, and agricultural and grazing cultures. Furthermore, both countries are alike in terms of biodiversity, each being the home of large numbers of plant and animal species and of a greater range of ecosystems than most other countries. Besides this biological similarity, what is even more interesting for environmental historians to study are the shortages, abundances, and transformations of nature that these two countries have alike encountered over time. Neither has a monopoly on floods, droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes, desertification, climate change, and many other major or minor, gradual or abrupt, changes. When nature is recognized as a formative and significant force in human history, such parallelism in natural settings offers a solid foundation for comparative scholars. No other countries in the world incorporate so much of the world’s landscapes and climates within their national borders and under such unified governmental control. Consequently, they both have had to face more diverse environmental challenges than other countries. How have these challenges from ecological complexity and powerful natural forces shaped people’s daily lives, these two nations’ political economies, and their respective ideas of nature? And equally important, to what extent, have these challenges been enhanced or caused by humans? What has been people’s reaction to them intellectually and practically? What impacts have those challenges coming from nature had on government policy and laws? These questions are commonly asked by environmental historians, but when they are set in a comparative context between China and the US, they might lead to some very different interpretations of past human interactions with nature. A comparative environmental history of China and the US could help us discern commonality and continuity in our environmental experience and challenge some old shallow stereotypes in our understanding of these two countries’ history. Exceptionalism is a mindset haunting both nations’ political discourse and intellectuals’ perception of their cultures. Among historians, exceptionalism for a long time was an unquestioned assumption as

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they tried to build a sense of national and cultural identity for their fellow countrymen’s collective memory. Even though historians have begun to undermine such an assumption, history done without a comparative intention could easily fall back into the old exceptionalist discourse unconsciously. Historians have often said something like the following: “China is the only surviving ancient civilization with unique culture and a harmonious relationship with nature.” Or “America is a God blessed nation, a paradise rediscovered, and the land of liberty and nature.” These are exceptionalist images painted by scholars who travel and question little. At the same time historians and other scholars, no matter how sophisticated, may have created selective, shallow images of the Other Nation, which is often unfavorably opposed to their homeland. “China,” American historians have asserted, “is a despotic hydraulic society.” Chinese historians, in contrast, conclude that in contrast to their country, “the US has applied the most destructive attitude towards nature.” Put baldly, then, Chinese and American scholars have often (perhaps even generally) proven remarkably ignorant of the other nation’s cultures and history, and whether by design or accident have demonstrated a scholarly provincialism, indeed a certain ethnocentrism. To emphasize commonality between China and the United States is not to reduce the complexity and diversity of their ecological and cultural systems to a monolithic sameness. Neither does it require us to deny any uniqueness in each nation’s economy, politics, society, and values. On the contrary, a search for commonality will reveal a more complete and layered historical world. What it can reveal is that any seemingly unique cultural behaviors or experiences may have older and even more universal historical roots. A good example of how a more balanced history of commonalities and distinctions can work lies in the concept of “wilderness.” The love of wilderness is often identified as a distinctly American idea reflecting a special American landscape. Other nations are often said to be puzzled or repelled by Americans’ push for preserving wilderness at home and abroad. China, which undoubtedly has been a highly tamed country for thousands of years, is generally characterized as a civilization rejecting wilderness, finding no value in it. There might have been one or two heretical poets who embraced wildness and wilderness in their poems, but in general, the Chinese appreciation of nature supposedly either addresses a rather abstract harmony with nature or focuses on idyllic landscapes. At first blush, such characterization makes intuitive sense. But when we compare the history of wilderness in both countries and define this concept in a wider sense, we might draw a very different conclusion. We might see that both China and America have a capacity for loving wilderness, just as both have a capacity of rejecting wilderness for a more civilized or humanized landscape.

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As for China’s supposed rejection of wilderness, or its limitation to a tiny minority, we can find evidence of a more complicated reality. While saving large areas of wilderness as a rigidly defined term cannot find its equivalent in China, it doesn’t follow that there has been no interest in or passion for experiencing a wild natural existence. The most explicit example is the Kunlun Mountains located in the remote west of China, separating Xinjiang from Tibet.16 Because of its elevation and extreme climates, the mountain range of Kunlun has remained almost pristine, completely free of any agricultural reclamation for thousands of years. The only human activities over that long period have been some small-scale grazing. Although politically out of the reach of China’s control most of the time, that mountain range has long excited both the elite and popular imagination, which was not fettered by political boundaries. Rather than demeaning the mountains as a repulsive waste land or seeing it only as resources destined to be exploited, Chinese traditional literature on both highbrow and lowbrow levels has almost unanimously portrayed the range as “the dean of all mountains,” the habitat for immortals, the place of lonely hermits looking for personal freedom, and a grand expanse of nature offering spectacular beauty. This pro-wilderness imagination traces its origin back to Zhuangzi’s Free Wandering written around 2,500 years ago and from that point on has been repeated in poems, novels, fairy tales, Daoist scripts, and geographical books throughout traditional Chinese history. The image of wild mountains is undoubtedly a cultural construction, but under its cultural surface, the mountains themselves have been truly wild and have stimulated people’s minds. The Kunlun Mountains aroused what we might call, to borrow a Western idea, a “romantic fantasy” that not only extolled the wild beauty and glory, but also celebrated the scarcity and toughness of nature as a necessary condition for human life. The wilderness ideal, after all, is only one side of the American vision of nature. On the other side, there has been a long-rooted appreciation of pastoral landscapes in that nation’s environmental traditions. In his classic The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Leo Marx argued that a pastoral yearning had been strongly influential in both public and elite cultural landscapes. It has been reflected in Jeffersonian agrarianism, Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York City, and homesteaders’ rushes into the Great Plains. This pastoral ideal depends on a rejection of wilderness, on an embrace of a “middle landscape” where humans are in control but not a modern urban and technological control.17 In China, a similar pastoralism has been a lasting theme of this ancient agricultural civilization in its political discourse, intellectual ideals, and daily experience. Agriculture has long been regarded as the most harmonious way to exploit nature, and

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going back to a rural setting for those mandarin intellectuals suggested the liberation from political restraints and materialist alienation. From a more thorough comparative research free of stereotypes, we arrive at a big transnational questions: Is wilderness loving a unique product of a modern urban society, or is it a common theme appearing in different cultures and in different historical times? Is it an American “disease,” or is it found in people all over the world, including in far-off China? By recognizing similar feelings toward wilderness in China and the United States, we can arrive at a more sophisticated understanding. Both nations have shared an enthusiasm for wilderness, but there may be important differences that we don’t fully understand yet. And if there are such differences, smaller and more subtle than we have realized, but still important to understand, what are the reasons behind those differences, and what impacts have they had on the landscape and on human society? Through challenging the exceptionalist stereotype, comparative history finds the unsuspected connections and commonalities, and in so doing facilitates efforts to identify what is truly unique in both local and national cultures. Comparative environmental history between China and the United States could also help us understand the tangled trajectory of all human societies. One of the greatest conceptual innovations aroused by environmental history is to question the conventional interpretation of the scale of time, defined by political terms or artificial calendars. The time scales of environmental history are not only much longer and multiple layered, but also more biological and organic.18 China, “the old,” versus the United States, “the new,” is one hackneyed evolutionary story, but it is far too simple. It divides human evolution too rigidly into old and new, when in fact both China and the United States represent different ways of being old and being new. China to be sure is much older in its sense of self—the oldest continuously functioning civilization in the world—while the US is self-consciously new, founded in the late eighteenth century when the last monarchy in Chinese history, the grand Qing Empire, was beginning to fade. While the US was turning into a world power in the late nineteenth century, China was being forced to open itself to the outside world and forced to reshape its culture. Then the US became the most influential country—the “old” model that the “new” industrial and urban China sought to emulate. Today, compared to the United States, China can seem like a young revolutionary country, full of fresh energy and rising expectations, while across the Pacific Ocean the United States may seem like a country cut out of tattered and aging eighteenth-century cloth. Its governing structure is old—it is in fact the oldest democracy—and it is worried losing its continuity with a glorious past and drifting into an unfamiliar future, divided internally by

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many long festering conflicts. Comparing more critically the two countries can lead us to discover a much more entangled meaning of what is old and what is new, demonstrating that the evolution of civilizations is not a simple linear process. On the land where the United States was founded in 1776, there had long unfolded an indigenous history, as the Indians (who came from Asia) learned to adjust to the land and find a living in nature. The Indians represented one type of ancient culture, but very different from the one developed on the land of China. Including that Indian life as part of America and comparing and contrasting it with the Chinese evolution, especially in a similar setting—i.e., the arid parts of both countries—has not yet been done adequately. If Chinese historians explored that comparison more fully, they would not take the emergence of agriculture and a centralized regime for granted.19 Another subject with great potential in reexamining the course of time in the two countries’ past is to choose a specific ecosystem—i.e., rivers and their networks, and make comparison of the ecology, societies, ideas, economies, and politics founded on it. For example, Yangtze and the Mississippi, the two most prominent river systems in China and the United States have been studied intensively by historians in their own respect. But if we put them in comparison from an environmental history perspective, rather than following the old dynastic periodization or presidential terms that would become a barrier for any further comparison, we would locate them in a different time context more emphasizing the rivers’ natural rhythm and the human thinking and actions accordingly. Another possibility could be the comparison between the two countries’ wide grasslands. Guorong Gao, a researcher in the Academy for Chinese Social Sciences, has carried on a project comparing the desertification of the Great Plains and the Mongolian grasslands in the twentieth century. It would shed new light on our understanding of the history of the grassland system if we stretch the time scale much longer.20 More specifically, this contrasting of old and new can find a difficult and intriguing example in the comparative history of water control in China and the United States. Worster, once again has been pointing the way to this subject for a long while. He is well known as a historian of the United States, but in his provocative classic Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, published in 1985, he already recognized the significance of such comparison.21 The research of the Chinese hydraulic society done by Karl Wittfogel became the source of inspiration through which Worster made China’s long history of water control part of a broader context of modern efforts to dominate American western rivers. By doing so, he found continuity and commonality in two seemingly unrelated civilizations in their ways of dealing with nature and illuminated the uniqueness of the “capitalist

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state model” of river control that reshaped the arid west of the United States. He further developed this comparison twenty years later in his Rachel Carson Center Perspectives article “The Flow of Empire: Comparing Water Control in China and the United States.” Here, Worster pointed out, “No one, to my knowledge, has ever placed the model of Chinese water control alongside that of the United States for comparison, but doing so would throw a revealing light on the North American experience.”22 It would do no less for the Chinese experience. Home to ancient irrigation systems, the new China of the twentieth century has been learning from American experience and expertise how to reshape its waterscape and social ecology. Yet China’s way of being “new” here, as in other cases, may have distinctive features. What does modernity mean to the Chinese in reshaping their environment? Is American technocracy the same thing as the rule by expertise found in ancient or modern China? How did the Little Ice Age, exploding population, abrupt changes in the course of the Yellow River, the expansion of settlement to the west and north, and the shrinking of arable land, affect China’s decision to adopt the US model of using modern state power and technology to exploit its rivers? At the same time we can ask how and why China did become modern in methods of water control. And then in turn we may find a new way to write the history of the American West and to appreciate more fully why the United States has grown to be an empire with expanding power over the rest of the world. Comparing China’s and America’s environmental history can also help us see what was unique about capitalism in dealing with nature. China, as historians Kenneth Pomeranz and Mark Elvin argue, “developed” appeared first in a precapitalist mode and then went through a communist redefinition, before it abruptly changed course and, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1978–1989), set out on the “capitalist road.”23 But even while embracing many features of Western capitalism, China does so in ways colored by its past. What is unique about the Western capitalist political economy in its relationship with nature? What does it share with China’s precapitalist and communist economies? Stereotypically again, China and the US stand for rival ideological systems in the world. But the reality is more complex, in environmental as well as social terms. When China is said to be emulating the American model of capitalism, is it altogether true? Or is China making use of modern technology and market relations, without becoming capitalistic in a Western or American sense? Merely studying either country in isolation, without comparing it to the other, would not lead us toward satisfactory answers. One possible starting point for this comparison could be the investigation

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of the two countries’ hunger for natural resources. As an ancient empire, China undoubtedly appropriated foreign natural resources through various means: wars, trade, or territorial expansion. But China’s need and fight for natural resources has never been more urgent and wide ranging than today when it has been deeply involved in the global capitalist economy and culture, nor has its tentacles ever extended so far as they do today. The United States, on the other hand, has been the No. 1 resource appropriator for over a century. In many ways, their motives and behaviors of grabbing natural resources resemble each other a lot. China’s long tributary tradition and socialist sovereignty, however, encourage historians to explore the more profound differences and commonalities in this seemingly homogeneous hunger for natural resources. One and a half centuries ago, when Darwin encouraged Asa Gray to study the floristic and geographic connections between China and the United States, he was looking for answers to a much more fundamental question— why are there so many species on earth and why are they distributed as they are? He knew that to answer such a question we must go beyond national borders, geographical differences, and disciplinary narrowness. Similarly, we need that Darwinian spirit of thinking comparatively in environmental history. We need to apply such thinking to China and the United States to help us transcend our nationalism and ethnocentrism and to open up broader questions. Comparative history need not lead us to seek a single, grand narrative that tries to explain everything in simple, rigid terms. But it would require us to do more traveling outside our national boundaries and to learn more about other places and peoples. The result should be, not a return to a world of immutable differences or to a world fixed on one common trajectory. On the contrary, comparative environmental history should make our understanding of the past more complex, more intellectually challenging, and more precise in generalizations. We will gain a more complete understanding of the commonality but also the distinctiveness, of the continuity but also the disruption of our long, varied experience of living in nature.

Notes 1. Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, May 2, 1856, Darwin Correspondence Project, accessed August 31, 2015, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-1863. 2. For more discussion of the East Asian and North American florist connection and the history of botanists’ discovery, see D. E. Boufford and S. A. Spongberg, “Eastern Asian—Eastern North American Phytogeographical Relationship: A History from the Time of Linnaeus to the Twentieth Century,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 70, no. 3 (1983): 423–39. 3. Raymond Grew, “The Case for Comparing Histories,” American Historical

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Review 85 (October 1980): 763–78. More recently, Michael Adas has discussed the connection and differences between comparative history and world history, arguing that a comparative strategy would make the latter more manageable and specific. Michael Adas, “Comparative History and the Challenge of the Grand Narrative,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 229–43. Much of what is called “world history” has tended to be comparative in perspective. Besides Arnold Toynbee’s multivolume work, representative titles in this category would include Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, ed. Arthur Helps and Helmut Werner, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963; repr., with a retrospective essay, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1976); William H. McNeill and John McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of Human History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); Robert Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). In addition, it is worth mentioning that Joseph Needham also applied a comparative perspective in his monumental work Science and Civilization in China (1954–2015). Needham was driven by a comparative question: Why was it not China, instead of the West, that created the modern natural sciences? 4. For recent contributions to global and comparative environmental history, see J. Donald Hughes, “Global Dimensions of Environmental History,” Pacific Historical Review 70 (February 2001): 91–101; I. G. Simmons, “The World Scale,” Environment and History 10 (November 2004): 531–36; and Alf Hornborg, “Toward a Truly Global Environmental History,” Fernand Braudel Center 33, no. 4 (2010): 295–323. 5. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature (New York: Free Press, 2001), 16. 6. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 7. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 8. Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 224. 9. In its January 2005 issue, Environmental History published a round table discussion exploring the future of the field. Robert Marks contributed an essay entitled “Why China” (56–58), in which he analyzed the necessity and significance of studying Chinese environmental history. In the same forum, Thomas Lekan asked for the globalization of American environmental history

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(50–52). These are important challenges to conventional American-centered environmental history, but neither essay discusses the possibility of making comparisons between China and the United States. 10. Donald Worster, “World without Borders: The Internationalizing of Environmental History,” Environmental Review 6 (Fall 1982): 8–13. Many global environmental history works have adopted a transnational, if not explicitly comparative, approach: see Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: Penguin Books, 1991); John McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking Press, 2005); and Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Besides them, environmental historians have also produced some wonderful case studies comparing various regions or societies, such as Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller, eds., Rivers in History: Perspective on Waterways in Europe and North America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); Frank Uekoetter, The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); K. Sivaramakrishnan, “Science, Environment and Empire History: Comparative Perspectives from Forests in Colonial India,” Environment and History 14 (February 2008): 41–65; and Peter Coates et al., “Defending Nation, Defending Nature? Militarized Landscapes and Military Environmentalism in Britain, France, and the United States,” Environmental History 16 (July 2011): 456–91. 11. For example, anthropologist and psychologist Francis Hsu insisted on applying a comparative approach to the civilizational commonalities and differences of China and the United States. Although cultural anthropological in intention, his book Americans and Chinese: Passage to Differences (London: Cresset Press, 1955) is also inspiring for its historical aspects. 12. John King Fairbank, United States and China, 4th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 13. Ling Zhang, The River, the Plains, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 14. Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). Other environmental historians of China have also brought the US into their analysis of Chinese environmental history and made a comparison between their differences. See Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); and Robert Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt:

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Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 15. Da Mao, “The Value of Citizen Science: The Controversy over Municipal Solid Waste Incineration and Dioxin Pollution in Contemporary China,” in “Manufacturing Landscape: Nature and Technology in Environmental History,” ed. Helmuth Trischler, special issue, Global Environment 10, no. 1 (April 2017): 253–75. 16. The Kunlun Mountains at first only existed in people’s imagination with vague location. It took several dynasties to put it on the map and to have it materialized. 17. Leo Max, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 18. Donald Worster, “The Innovative Spirit of Environmental History” (keynote speech at the conference “Environmental History and Its Innovation to Historiography,” Beijing, June 16, 2017). 19. Diamond touches on this issue in Guns, Germs, and Steel, but rather briefly. 20. Guorong Gao, “The Comparative Studies of the Causes of Desertification between China and the US,” a project funded by the Ford Foundation, 2009–2011. 21. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). The Chinese translation, by Shen Hou, is going to be published in 2018. 22. Donald Worster, “The Flow of Empire: Comparing Water Control in China and the United States,” RCC Perspectives, no. 5 (2011). 23. See Pomeranz, Great Divergence; and Elvin, Retreat of the Elephants.

10 The World in a Tin Can Migrants in Environmental History Marco Armiero

Thinking as an Immigrant, or The Personal Is Academic

O

n her deathbed in 1999, my aunt Maria showed me a collection of pictures taken in Brazil in the 1960s that she had stored in a tin container. I’m not entirely sure why she did so. Perhaps she figured that my obsession with the past made me the natural recipient of her private treasure of memories and affections. Perhaps she believed no one else in the family would be interested. Whatever the reason, the photos and the stories proved to be a remarkable repository about migration and the environment. I discovered that in the family there were tales about Maria’s adventures in Mato Grosso with her partner, Alberto—of sleeping in a bathtub filled with cold water to deal with the hot weather, of encountering snakes inside their house, of their lives in the middle of what everybody called the jungle. Apparently the white-haired, extremely skinny woman with a passion for Neapolitan poetry had been a pioneer, not so different from those I had read about in US Western literature. Like many pioneers, Maria and Alberto had not been fortunate, returning to Italy with little more than a few pictures and some improbable stories. But as an environmental historian I began to see in those unusual pioneers’ stories the blend of human and the environmental memories. We think of memory as something that people preserve from their experiences. The places we visit or settle in leave their traces in our memory, sometimes even in our bodies. But those places also keep the memories of humans, certainly the memories of generations of migrants who have tried to adjust themselves to the new environment. Migrants’ and places’ memories all tangled together; this is what the world looks like canned in a tin can full of pictures and stories. The accidental meeting with Aunt Maria’s stories blended with a desire to go back to the United States, where I had had the privilege of spending a year as a postdoctoral research fellow working with Donald Worster, and as it did I started sketching out a research project on the environmental history of modern migrations. The experience of twenty-seven million Italian immigrants seemed to offer a significant opportunity to take a serious look at what an environmental history of migration might look like.

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It Is Easier for a Mosquito to Enter an Environmental History Book than for a Migrant to Be Noted by an Environmental Historian When I started thinking of migrations in environmental history, the idea looked rather eccentric. In the middle of the 2000s, environmental historians were not particularly attentive to the issue. Judging by the dearth of articles in Environmental History and Environment and History and by the conference programs of the European and American Societies for Environmental History, there was at best meager interest in the topic.1 John McNeill noted this in his 2003 comprehensive review of the field where he wrote that the environmental effects of human migrations still deserved “more scrutiny.”2 Since then things have changed somewhat. In the last few years we have seen panels and roundtables on migrants and the environment at our conferences, and a number of publications on the subject have appeared.3 Nevertheless, migration remains on the margins of the field, seldom, for instance, attracting any attention in works of synthesis, even in those dedicated to the environmental history of countries as the United States dramatically shaped by this phenomenon. This disciplinary blind spot is surprising given the relevance of the cultural turn in environmental history, and even more surprising considering the importance of the movement of people in some familiar ecological explanations of world history. In his now canonical The Columbian Exchange (1973), Alfred Crosby argued that the ecological history of European colonialism was connected to the movement of people, to be more precise, to the biological invasion of new environments by Europeans and their “portmanteau biota.” Others, including Jared Diamond, have since joined Crosby in emphasizing the significance of people’s migrations in world environmental history.4 Both Crosby and Diamond have focused primarily on the Age of Discoveries, that is, on the first phase of the meeting between Europeans and non-European places and people. Such a focus has allowed them to highlight the ways in which the success of human migrations hinged on the complex biota—the animals, plants, and germs—that various ethnic groups brought with them. It has likewise allowed them to examine the ways in which the intensity of the ecological transformations that accompanied European migrations depended on a number of factors, most especially on how distant the two worlds were before they met. The fact that it seems obvious today that the expansion of Europe set in motion dramatic ecological consequences that in turn facilitated European colonial endeavors offers testimony to their influence. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine now a narrative of the European conquest of the Americas and Australia without horses, smallpox, and potatoes.5 But if the Conquistadores and her Majesty’s subjects wrought environmental

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transformations, what about the millions of people moving to Americas and Australia searching for a better life? Surely, there is a story to be told. As Alfred Crosby once put it, the advent of mass migration initiated the largest and quickest movement of biomass across the ocean in the planet’s history.6 To be sure, speaking of migrants in terms of “biomass” did little to attract the interest of historians of migration, who tend to focus on issues like identity, politics, class, and gender. Nevertheless, the passage of that special biomass, the mass migration, implied the movement of both nature and culture. Human migrants crossed the oceans carrying with them cultures and hopes, bodies and skills, techniques and crops. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of course, migrants did not bring with them an entire biota, with its plants, animals and germs, never before seen in the places of arrival—perhaps with a few exceptions. They did not travel escorted by armies of soldiers, engineers, and bureaucrats, as it occurred with the imperial expansion of Europe. Instead, those immigrants moved around the world with their ideas about nature, with their knowledge about ways of using natural resources. Sometimes they transplanted some of their home crops, adapting old practices to new environments. They brought with them their bodies, their resistance or weakness to the pathogenic agents encountered in the New Worlds.7 Working in the mines or on the malarial plantations of the US South or of Brazil, building railroads in the US frontier or in Siberia, and living in overcrowded urban ghettos was not without consequences for the migrants. The experience of migration often left indelible traces in the bodies of those who were exposed to unfamiliar threats and hazards. The hierarchies among social and ethnic groups, together with the imposition of a capitalistic discipline of labor that exploited both people and nature, exposed immigrants to industrial and urban hazards. The experience of migrants thus asks for greater attention from environmental historians. To be sure, the risk of naturalizing the migrations-ecologies nexus is rather high, especially today with growing concerns—even fear—of the next possible hordes of climate change refugees. Donald Worster’s work, however, can provide the right perspective to navigate between the complete obliteration of the natural and the deterministic naturalization of the social. Having dragged him once—and not without resistance—to a workshop on migrations and climate change, I know that Worster has never considered his work relevant to the environmental history of migrations. Nonetheless, it is. He dedicated, for instance, an entire chapter of Dust Bowl to the migrants who were forced to move from their lands during the 1930s.8 And that chapter offers an instructive model for an environmental history approach to the study of migrations. The Okies, as the poor immigrants from the Great Plains were pejoratively labeled, fled the dust storms, an ostensibly natural phenomenon not unlike

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the one facing today’s climate refugees. At first blush, nature in the form of drought, dust, and wind appeared to be the cause of that migration. But Worster probed deeper, proposing a more sophisticated explanation, that neither obliterated the natural (wind, drought, soil, and grass) nor naturalized the social (ways of production, property regimes, capital accumulation, and cultural values). For Worster: “Between Black Thursday on Wall Street and the many black days of the Dust Bowl there was no great difference. In each situation die-hard optimists were sure that it could not happen, then were equally sure that it would not last long. And in each there were people who failed to survive. [. . .] Linking the two disasters was a shared cause—a common economic culture, in factories and on farms, based on unregulated private capital seeking its own unlimited increase.”9 Worster thus lucidly connected the economic crisis on Wall Street and the ecological crisis in the Great Plains, providing a unified narrative of the capitalistic culture of exploiting people and nature. We could say that the ecology of the capitalistic agriculture produced not only the Dust Bowl, that is, a blend of climate, economy, and society, but also the Okies, that is, an ecology of migrations and dispossession. The strength of Worster’s approach was the rejection of any kind of compartmentalization, separating the environmental, the economic, the social, and the cultural. This interpretation is crucial in regard to the current debate over climate refugees, because it reveals clearly the impossibility to isolate the ecological causes from the social, economic, or cultural one. Worster explained how different the interpretations of that migration were. For some, the Okies were inferior individuals and their migration was the result of their personal failure. Others blamed nature, while only a few recognized the socio-ecological complex, which was sweeping away both the soil and the people. Indeed, in Worster’s Dust Bowl, migrants were visible. The environmental history of the ecological and economic crisis of the 1930s included the ecology of people’s movements.

A Nature of Nations: Seeing Migrants in the American Landscape An Italian immigrant recalling his memories of the California landscape from his youth at the dawn of the twentieth century did not invoke the wildness that so captivated John Muir. He recalled instead its agroecosystems: “California, there is no question about it, was a paradise then. [. . .] Sonoma County was pretty because of agriculture, vineyards were all over; there was nothing but vineyards and plums. The plums were in very minor quantity, but the vineyards were all over. On top of the mountains, every place that you could look at, you saw vineyards.”10 He was apparently not alone. There are few indications that wilderness and its beauty drew much attention from immigrants. Several sources claimed migrant hostility toward nature.

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Environmental historians Louis Warren and Peter Coates have analyzed the discourses of protectionists against the foreigners, accused to be poachers and destroyers of the local fauna.11 Adam Rome pointed in the same direction in one of the seminal essays connecting migrations and environmental history.12 In 1917 a local newspaper accused the Mexican community of Corona, California, of having ruined two parks in its area. According to the columnist, the only way to make Mexicans care about the park would have been to plant it with potatoes.13 That vision of migrants’ relationships with nature was not only racist; it also revealed the idea of nature that white America had, and, apparently, potatoes did not fit in it. To be sure, there was a great deal of xenophobic bias wrapped up in such characterization. Clearly, passenger pigeons were not driven to extinction by insensitive and hungry Mexicans or Italians. And many of the later immigrants arrived in a different age when a certain idea of conservation already existed that proposed a sharp separation between spaces of work and spaces of nature. For immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the frontier between those two spaces appeared porous. Most often, nature was the space of work for them, as was the case of railroad builders or miners lost in the middle of the American “wilderness.” In his diary as a railroad worker in Colorado, Adolfo Rossi remembered hunting for deer and squirrels to economize for food.14 Squirrel stew became a sort of staple in the Italian camps; hence, it has been included in several fictional accounts of the migrants’ life.15 In the radio drama L’emigrante (The Immigrant), broadcasted by the Petri Cigar Company Radio Station in San Francisco, one of the characters survived by hunting deer while he was working in the Shasta County forest.16 Yet the porosity was not just where nature’s presence seemed to be stronger, as in the laborers’ camps in the middle of nowhere. The otherness of Italian backyards, full of vegetables, rabbits, and chickens proved a different appreciation of land and a different geography of space, one which did not separate work and leisure, daily dwelling and nature. Traveling through the country in the 1920s, an Italian military officer expressed the common opinion on this subject: “Instead of the characteristic green backyard, [the Italians have] legumes and livestock. While they are undeniably an important thrift for the family, they also ruin the posh and clean aspect that is typical of the American neighborhoods.”17 According to this observer, Italian immigrants’ nonconventional use of the backyard did not help their integration in the American society; evidently, that homely little corner of nature had to be used in a different way.18 Moreover, there was more at stake than an aesthetic principle. On several occasions, their skills in truck farming and grazing small animals—that is, their other ways of seeing and using nature, were the shock absorbers which

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enabled migrants to endure hard times and be partially autonomous from market and salaries.19 The fact that they were largely cut off from the possibility of self provisioning in several US cities, contributed to the vulnerability of working class immigrants; proletarization and Americanization went handin-hand and depended in no small measure on the reorganization of human relationships to the natural world. Predictably, this was not uncontested. Immigrants’ diverse visions of nature included their ability to recognize and activate urban commons or, at least, to survive in the metropolitan space, employing it as a mine for gathering valuable resources. At the beginning of the twentieth century, immigrants could see things practically invisible to others, as, for instance, the carpet of leaves on the streets useful to breed their animals.20 Evidently, the leaves were well visible to everybody, but for the Italians they became a free source of forage for their animals. This ability to see and mobilize resources in the urban space is a significant aspect of the environmental history of migration. In a novel penned by the Italian American writer Tony Ardizzone, a hungry Italian immigrant looking for food in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood sees a field of wild artichokes as a gold mine while the wealthy Anglo owner of the lot sees only a field covered by weeds.21 Garbage proved to be among the most used resources of these urban commons. According to Ted Steinberg, garbage piled up on the streets was a strategic resource for the immigrant communities that used it as an urban common. Their animals, especially their pigs, roamed through it, transforming rubbish into cheap protein, at least until the policies of sanitization ended this practice.22 Indeed the rag collector has been one of the “classic” images of immigrants, reinforcing the perception of their poverty. But this sort of reductionist equivalency misses a great deal. We should start to rethink this activity in ecological terms as an example of these urban commons where nature and immigrants met. In San Francisco, as scavengers and gardeners, Italians exploited the opportunities of both identities. While as farmers they had the right skills to cope with scarce water supply (digging wells), as scavengers they had access to garbage as a free resource for shaping the soil, both on the surface (leveling it) and in its internal chemistry composition (fertilizing it).23 So, it was not by chance that the San Francisco sanitation policy following the 1907 plague targeted specifically the Italians and their double business in the truck farming and manure collection.24

Migrants and the Unequal Distribution of Environmental Hazards Immigrants’ landscape is not a “natural” landscape in a Turnerian sense. Thereby, the environmental history of migrations cannot aim merely to

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enlarge the usual plot of pioneers shaping wild frontiers by including unusual characters, as Sicilian fishermen, Cantonese farmers, and Serbian miners. Rather, I see that landscape as a socioecological formation. As the Okies in Worster’s Dust Bowl were moving through a landscape made of drought and tractors, loans and wind, the immigrants I wish to make visible in the environmental history narratives are entangled in landscapes where social inequalities and power relations are intertwined. Immigrants’ position in the American landscape was not dictated by their cultures or by some ancestral relationship with nature. The capitalistic discipline of labor and the organization of space—that is, the unequal distribution of hazards among communities and groups—determined the position occupied by immigrants in the landscape, constructing a dialectic relationship between internal and external nature, bodies and environments. As historians Conevery Valenčius and Linda Nash have argued, immigrants understood the environment through the categories of healthy or sick. Some hidden features of the new landscapes were central in the immigrants’ understanding of them. Yellow fever or malaria were often the skeleton of those invisible landscapes. However, while the ecologies of mosquitoes and climate determined the presence and strength of some diseases in specific environments, exposure to those diseases among various ethnic groups was a social rather than a natural phenomenon. The organization of agricultural labor, poverty and peonage, and the racial arrangement of the dwelling space imposed an ecology of diseases on the social and biological body of immigrants. Several scholars have pointed out the degree to which the organization of labor in California’s agricultural economy was based on the physical exploitation of migrant laborers.25 The very history of the United Farm Workers (UFW) confirms the connection between migrants’ experience of the environment and the capitalistic ecology of production.26 In her fresco on the environmental justice movement in the Southwest, Laura Pulido has addressed the controversies related to the UFW’s anti-pesticide campaign.27 In contrast with those who accused the workers to have employed the pesticide theme only to attract attention on their economic and social demands, Pulido argues that the UFW’s experience demonstrates the interlocking of race, class, and environmental harms. As she writes, the UFW addressed the pesticide problem with an unusual broad perspective, experiencing environmental damage through their social, economic, and racial subalternity. While the UFW’s engagement with environmental injustice has been at least partially explored, the histories of unequal exposure and social mobilization of other immigrants’ groups remain invisible. The Italian immigration in the US South can provide a powerful case study. In the aftermath of the Civil War, facing the end of enslavement, public officials and big landowners

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began to plan the importation of workers from the Italian South, arguing that they were the best replacements for the African Americans because of their docility towards power and resistance to the endemic malaria. Placed at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, at the ecological frontier of the farming industry, those Italian immigrants were exposed to hostile environments through hostile power relationships. The results became visible in the sick bodies of the Italians struggling to survive in the Mississippi Delta in the 1890s and 1900s.28 Exploited in the factories, mines, and farms, immigrants paid with their own health the unequal exposition to hazards imposed upon them by the capitalistic organization of labor. In this respect the environmental history of migrations should not focus only on cases where people can see “nature” more easily, that is, in the fields or in the mines, but also in the factories and in the tenements where migrants blended their bodies with new environments through work and social relationships. The early nineteenth-century literature on social reforms and workers’ conditions has plenty of proves of this, if only one is willing to look for them. As an example, one of the first workers interviewed by Alice Hamilton in her inquiry on occupational health was V. O., an Italian immigrant. The fact that he was an Italian was central to his experience of factory hazards, performing the worst job, incapable of understanding the risks due to the language barrier.29 Many sources confirmed the unequal exposition to risks of migrant workers. Morris Kavitsky, a Polish Jew arriving in New York in 1914, expressed his disconcert for the bodily transformations occurring among his people once they settled in the United States: “Most of the Jews seemed to have lost their health here while working the sweatshops. I had never seen so many people with false teeth and eyeglasses. Was this part of the process of becoming Americanized? How about tuberculosis and appendicitis? I was shocked at the physical condition of my people in this country. It seemed to me that hardly any one of them escaped the surgical knife. The air was damp [. . .] and people worked harder here.”30

Conclusions The current immigrations’ crisis, particularly strong in Europe, proves clearly the urgency to address that issue from a plurality of approaches, including environmental history. As I have argued in this chapter, the aim is not to have a separate narrative concerning the ecology of migrations, rather to see it as a part of a wider socioecological system. For environmental historians dealing with migrations implies to restate the relevance of the discipline in facing current global societal challenges. In an interview, Worster recollects that he came to environmental history

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because of the social movements occurring in the 1960s, pushed by a desire to contribute in changing the world.31 Working on migration and the environment means staying committed with that initial ethos. We need a narrative of migration and the environment that counteracts the mainstream discourse of migrants as destroyers of environments and dangers to security. We also need a denaturalized understanding of migrations in terms of both causes and experiences. Indeed, an environmental history of migrations is by default uncomfortable with frontiers, of any kind. This also seems another return to the very roots of the discipline. Ultimately, transcending traditional borders has been one of the main missions of the discipline. Twenty years ago Donald Worster called for a history without borders.32 He has challenged historians to think beyond national borders, arguing that ecologies do not stay contained within the political frontiers in which our planet has been divided into. Looking at the works produced in the field, one may say that this promise has not been met yet. Environmental history is still deeply national. Nonetheless, there is an increasing number of global histories of the environment, with a few experiments in transnational history. I argue that an environmental history of migrations goes precisely toward a postnational scale of analysis, nevertheless, opting for a rather unusual point of view. Seeing migrants in environmental history allow us to overcome both the shortcomings of global narratives, which tend to prove rather blind toward the nuances of social and cultural diversities, and the historical obsession with the nation. Migrants are also excellent trespassers of scales, moving between transnational experiences and place-based belongings. Little Italies, for instance, were at the same time a nationalistic reinvention of people and places and the production of new hybrid spaces, neither Italian nor American. Welcoming migrants in environmental history will contribute to enrich our understanding of global/ local environmental changes and their relationship to social, economic, and cultural processes, demonstrating, once more, that the space of environmental history is larger than people usually think. The result will be neither a global history of technological innovations and scientific expertise, nor a transnational history of environmental treaties and international organizations—both rather common in environmental history already. It would instead look like a transnational, global history from below.

Notes 1. Among the few exceptions were Douglas C. Sackman, “ ‘Nature’s Workshop’: The Work Environment and Workers’ Bodies in California’s Citrus Industry, 1900–1940,” Environmental History 5 (January 2000): 27–53; Conevery Bolton Valenčius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers

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Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Carl Zimring, “Dirty Work: How Hygiene and Xenophobia Marginalized the American Waste Trades, 1870–1930,” Environmental History 9 (January 2004): 80–101; Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Thomas J. Straka, “Tom Straka on Chris Kreider’s ‘Ward Charcoal Ovens’ and Nevada’s Carbonari,” Environmental History 11 (April 2006): 344–49. 2. John McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (December 2003): 41–42. 3. The list of relatively recent publications related to migration includes Adam Rome, “Nature Wars, Culture Wars: Immigration and Environmental Reform in the Progressive Era,” Environmental History 13 (July 2008): 432–53; Connie Y. Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009); Gregory Rosenthal, “Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857–70,” Environmental History 17 (October 2012): 744–82. 4. Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973); Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 5. Scholars have explored the environmental effects of colonization also in Africa and Asia; see, for instance, Gregg Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997); Roderick P. Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 6. Alfred Crosby, “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” American Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1178. 7. Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Nash, Inescapable Ecologies; Valenčius, Health of the Country. 8. See Donald Worster, “Okies and Exodusters,” chap. 3 in Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 9. Worster, Dust Bowl, 44. 10. Antonio Perelli-Minetti and Ruth Teiser, A Life in Wine Making: An Interview (Berkeley: Bancroft Library, University of California, 1975), 82. 11. Louis Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in

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Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Peter Coates, American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 12. Rome, “Nature Wars, Culture Wars.” 13. Jose Alamillo, Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 48. 14. Adolfo Rossi, Un Italiano in America (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1894), 265. 15. Melania Mazzucco, Vita (New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 263–64. 16. A. Della Maggiorana, L’Emigrante: Compendio di XXVII episodi del racconto drammatizzato l’Emigrante radiodiffuso alla stazione KROW nel programma della Petri Cigar Company di San Francisco, Italian American Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California. 17. Domenico Siciliani, Fra gli Italiani degli Stati Uniti d’America: Luglio Settembre 1921 (Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico per l’Amministrazione della Guerra, 1922), 30. 18. Ted Steinberg, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 19. Paul V. Canonici, The Delta Italians: Their Pursuit of “the Better Life” and Their Struggle against Mosquitos, Floods, and Prejudice (Madison, MS: P. V. Canonici, 2003), 49; David A. Taylor and John A. Williams, Old Ties, New Attachments: Italian American Folklife in the West (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1992), 87; June D. Holmquist, Joseph Stipanovich, and Kenneth Moss, The South Slavs: Bulgarians, Croatians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1981), 389. 20. Emily Fogg Meade, “Gli Italiani nell’Agricoltura,” in Gl’Italiani negli Stati Uniti, ed. Frank J. Sheridan, Napoleone Colajanni, and Emily Fogg Meade (Rome: Biblioteca della Rivista popolare, 1909), 56–57. 21. Tony Ardizzone, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu (New York: Picador 1999), 168–70. 22. Ted Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” American Historical Review 107 (June 2002): 798–820. 23. Francesco Nicosia, Italian Pioneers in California (San Francisco: Italian American Chamber of Commerce of the Pacific Coast, 1960), n.p. 24. Joanna L. Dyl, “The War on Rats vs. the Right to Keep Chickens: Plague and the Paving of San Francisco, 1907–1908,” in The Nature of Cities, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 50. 25. Carrey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Santa Barbara, CA: Peregrine Smith, 1978) (first published

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1935); Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Angus Wright has illuminated the embodiment of capitalistic agriculture into the migrants’ body in his The Death of Ramón González. The Modern Agricultural Dilemma (Austin: University of Texas, 1990). 26. Among the others, see Robert Gordon, “Poisons in the Fields: The United Farm Workers, Pesticides, and Environmental Politics,” Pacific Historical Review 68 (February 1999): 51–77; Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009); and Susan Ferriss, Ricardo Sandoval, and Diana Hembree, The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997). 27. Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 58–59. 28. “Gli Italiani nel Distretto Consolare di Nuova Orleans. Relazione del Regio Console Cavalier Fara Forni,” Bollettino dell’Emigrazione Italiana 17 (1905): 11; Amoreno Martellini, Fra Sunny Side e la Nueva Marca: Materiali e modelli per una nuova storia dell’emigrazione marchigiana fino alla Grande Guerra (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1999); Edmondo Mayor des Planches, Attraverso gli Stati Uniti: Per l’Emigrazione Italiana (Turin: Unione tip editrice torinese, 1913); Jeannie M. Whayne, ed., Shadow over Sunnyside: An Arkansas Plantation in Transition, 1830–1945 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993). 29. Quoted in Kraut, Silent Travelers, 176. 30. Bruce M. Stave and John F. Sutherland, From the Old Country: An Oral History of European Migration to America, with Aldo Salerno (New York: Twayne, 1994), 49. 31. Donald Worster and Marco Armiero, “Quando il capitalismo andò in polvere, ovvero le Grandi Pianure con vista sul mondo. Intervista a Donald Worster,” I frutti di Demetra: Bollettino di storia e ambiente 10 (2006): 59–70. 32. Donald Worster, “World without Borders: The Internationalizing of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 6 (Fall 1982): 8–13.

11 Down in the Sky The Promise of Aerial Environmental History Robert Wellman Campbell

W

hat distinguished the work of the first generation of environmental historians, and Donald Worster in particular, was perhaps above all a willingness to challenge fundamental assumptions of the historical profession. In doing so, they followed research agendas that their fellow historians didn’t see so much as opposing the scholarly currents of the time, but rather as bafflingly irrelevant and unattached to them. While Worster and others eagerly utilized the historical scholarship available to them, they took their new directions not from dialectic debates within the field, but from the realities outside of scholarship, porting those issues into their field. As often happens, this shift occurred not by discovering new issues, but by taking seriously issues that had previously been taken for granted as marginal. In fact anyone patiently observing Donald Worster in his native habitat of debate will be rewarded with a demonstration of this strategy, and of the surprising analytical power that comes in taking something literally. So it stands with environmental history today and its operating assumption that in studying human societies it is studying a terrestrial species. This field studies land, with aquatic and aerial issues brought in as supplements to that core. To be sure, most environmental scholars proceed, like Aldo Leopold’s famous essay, from a concept of an ecological community integrating all of its components as critical. But the many rigorous studies on freshwater bodies and oceans, air pollution, the history of meteorology and so forth notwithstanding, even the most cursory glance though an environmental history database reveals how far out of balance the terms of this discussion still are. This is all the more regrettable given the physical and biological fact that humans are an aerial species.1 Like many of us I started this career with Changes in the Land, but perhaps it is the sky historians who should receive the lion’s share, before us land historians and the water historians as well. For seeing humans as creatures of the sky cannot but change our historical view of interactions with solid earth, which is in many ways a territory far more foreign to us than the sky. That such a claim seems striking highlights the degree to which environmental historians have taken the sky for granted. It also underscores the fact that before the historiographical implications of seeing humans as an aerial

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species might be even tentatively probed, it’s necessary to move briefly away from history proper to examine their basis, the material realities undergirding the claim that humans are principally an aerial species.

A Part of the Sky: Human Aeriality on the Physical Level I began to think about those realities while researching the history of an airplane flown into thunderstorms for the purpose of taking in situ data on cloud physics and weather modification. On the lowest and broadest level of environmental history—the physical level—this research yielded two lessons about the sky. The first was its boundaries. Just as people often perceive nature as existing somewhere distant from them, they too perceive the sky as beginning above them at some indeterminate altitude. In fact there is no such boundary; the sky begins at the ground. This fact is immediately suggested by the word skyline, which refers to a line on the ground, but people tend to associate even that with a horizon distant from them.2 The lower boundary of the sky is even acknowledged in sky, a word from old Norse meaning cloud, and long used with that meaning in English. Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, wrote of “a certeyn wynde . . . That blewe so hydously and hye, That hyt ne lefte not a skye In alle the welkene.” The word sky eventually took over the meaning of welkin, although people still refer to “the skies.” So the sky is literally the place of the clouds, and of course clouds appear all the way down to ground level, not just on mountaintops but even at sea level, however people may then consider them fog and not clouds.3 On the upper end, there is no particular point where the sky ends. The density of its air decreases with altitude from ground level and into outer space, so all boundaries are arbitrary. The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics offers various alternatives: “Evidence of extent: twilight, 63 km .  .  . meteors, 200 km . . . aurora, 44–360 km.” In this range falls the often-used Kármán Line, 100 kilometers above the Earth, which in addition to being a round figure is approximately the beginning of the thermosphere and the practical end of viable aviation. Using this figure to calculate the volume of the sky yields a figure of about 52 billion cubic kilometers, or about forty times the volume of the world’s oceans.4 So on a physical level, the first lesson is that the sky extends from the ground to an indefinite point above, and thus humans are aerial in their physical location. They clearly live in the sky. Comparing the oceans to the sky is a valuable entrée to the second physical lesson, which is what is in the sky. Because humans are a very visual species and because the sky is mostly transparent, humans tend to think of it as an empty void. But the sky is not empty; it is full. To begin with, the sky is of course full of air, which like water is a fluid with many of the same qualities as other fluids such as mass, viscosity, density and pressure. Schoolchildren

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are taught that air is about 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, one percent argon and an assortment of trace gasses led by carbon dioxide, which is currently at 0.41% and rising. This list is a simplification, omitting water vapor, which varies widely from about zero to four percent.5 But there is more than air in the sky; just as soil has more than mineral dirt, the sky has more than just nitrogen, oxygen, and trace gases. The remainder crosses categories: pheromones, genes, dirt, liquid water, plants, aerosols, pollution, garbage, radioactivity, vibration, poisons, microbes, constant motion, volcanic ash, electricity, acidity, human signals of many different kinds, airplanes, balloons, satellites, rockets and other machines, insects, parachutes, legal borders, tree emissions such as isoprenes, temperature and pressure gradients, birds, colors (i.e., energy in the visible range, often acting as photobiological signal), cloud patterns such as Kármán vortex streets, and humans.6 Humans being located in the sky is more than a mundane fact; it is essential to the next level of analysis: their biology.

A Carbon-Based Lifeform: Human Aeriality on the Biological Level One way for scholars to further interrogate the interface between sky and terra firma is to examine its biological aspect, because this border correlates closely with the Earth’s biosphere. In geometrical terms the biosphere is of course neither a true sphere with a thin surface, nor a ball filled with life all the way through. It is a hollow sphere, a thick spherical layer where most biological processes occur. Its spatial limits are somewhat indeterminate, and admittedly extend below the atmosphere to at least the oceans’ floors, though soils (sometimes termed the pedosphere) might be considered both earth and sky. But on a planetary scale the correlation is indeed striking; living things are where the air is, especially in the denser, lower levels of the atmosphere. This could even be considered the largest scale of edge habitat. So humans are hardly alone in their aerial nature, sharing that niche with most living things, but if they are not alone they are nevertheless profoundly aerial, in several significant ways. First of course, humans require oxygen, and in continuous, unbroken supply. Even for individuals or communities struggling with poverty, hunger and disease, this need for air trumps all others on even the most basic physiological level. The only requirement more fundamental is to maintain bodily integrity, such as an intact skeleton and adequate blood supply.7 Second, humans need air to maintain normal thermoregulation. The largest human organ is skin, which performs a range of functions that increase and decrease temperature, such as perspiration, blanching, and piloerection (goose flesh). Third, people require the atmosphere for mobility. Unlike the true terrestrial

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organisms such as earthworms, and unlike aquatic animals except for some limited swimming, humans are only motile while moving through the air. Indeed one of the most-repeated points in environmental history classes, that of the frequency of human-induced fire in wooded landscapes, stems largely from this need.8 Fourth, people need the sky as the conduit for solar energy. Not just for the small amounts taken in by their eyes, ears, and skin, but for the much larger amounts they need to run their bodies, and indeed to run their entire ecosystems. A fifth significant way that people are aerial—the fact that humans need the sky for sensation—has been largely overlooked even by the growing field of sensory history. Under normal circumstances, three of our five classic senses—sight, hearing, and smell—are remote sensing operating through the air. Taste and touch are the in situ ones, though even in these cases taste is wrapped up with smell, and human skin is aerially quite sensitive, whether to moving air or to distant heat radiation. Humans receive the great majority of information about their environment through the air and especially through their eyes, which give more information than all other senses combined, and which are our ultimate sky sense, even for objects far away.9 Finally, humans are dependent on the atmosphere for their mass itself. They are not only living their lives in the sky, but they are made out of the sky. This assertion receives more resistance than the others, due to well-established traditions within Western culture about people being made of earth. Even in a more secular age, the phrase, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” is a familiar one. That phrase is not from the Bible, but from the burial service in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer from the 1500s: “earthe to earthe, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” It echoes, however, the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, God’s curse on Adam and Eve as part of their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In the same Elizabethan language: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” This in turn hearkens back to the second chapter of Genesis, in which God created Adam out of “the dust of the ground,” to “work and take care of” the garden.10 What is often forgotten from this story is the context of God’s long and angry curse, in which he also curses the ground itself, and curses the serpent to eat dust all its life. This is insult, not description; God is emphasizing the dusty component of Adam’s origin, and omitting the mist that arose to water that dust, and critically the breath of life that God breathed into that wet earth. It was only at the addition of the atmosphere that Adam became alive. So this genesis story actually says that humans come from earth, water, and air.

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Modern science is more specific about these proportions. A count of the atoms in a scientifically stereotypical “reference man” yields approximately 63 percent hydrogen, 24 percent oxygen, 12 percent carbon, 0.58 percent nitrogen, 0.24 percent calcium, and 0.14 percent phosphorus, in addition to trace amounts of lead, gold, silicon and other elements. So hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, the classic trio of organic chemistry, constitute about 99 percent of the atoms in our bodies.11 This, in less specific terms, is consistent with several bits of common knowledge. One is that our bodies are mostly water, or in other words a great deal of hydrogen and oxygen. And the critical fact here is that this water must be fresh water, and hence water from the sky, not from the oceans. Thus it is only when water becomes air through evaporation that it becomes biologically useful to humans. Another piece of common knowledge, accurate though usually from science fiction, is that humans are carbon-based lifeforms. As noted above, carbon is only 12 percent of the atoms in our bodies, but they serve a critical role as the hubs for many necessary molecules. And the point here is that this carbon also comes from the air—to be sure, not passing into humans directly, but rather through plants in photosynthesis and from there into the food chain. So in being carbon-based lifeforms, humans are air-based lifeforms.12 So interestingly there is broad consensus that people come from air, even across a wide range of cultural politics from Biblical creationism to empirical science. In fact it is from the air that humans largely come and to dust they largely go; the point of those burials is to put a body underground where even inside a modern steel casket it will indeed become earth. It is an ancient form of carbon sequestration.13 But of course that somber note is only the end, not the whole life cycle. Before then an impressive amount of mass passes through human bodies, and it is illuminating to look at those dynamic flows. A person “returns” to the earth not once but about every five days. Humans eat about two kilograms of food per day, and process water on about the same scale. Over a lifetime these amount to about 1,500 times a typical body’s mass. But the mass of air inhaled is well over twice that. And that is assuming only quiet rest; physical activity can raise the respiration rate by thirty times.14 Of course that air is not retained in the body long-term, but neither is the food or water. And it is interesting to note how the water leaves: largely by air. Even at normal or minimal operation, the human body loses around thirty to fifty percent of its water through sweating and “insensible” evaporation through the lungs and skin. Physical labor raises that proportion close to a hundred percent, as the kidneys slow down to balance the dramatic rise in water loss through breathing and sweating. In all, a person’s typical input

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Figure 11.1. Evangelists depicted in the Book of Kells, ca. 800. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

and output of matter is probably seventy-five to ninety-some percent aerial. So, to sum up the biology, human lives are not only carried out in the atmosphere, but constructed out of it and sustained because of it. In the “ocean of air” coined by Renaissance scholar Evangelista Torricelli, humans are the lobsters, who like humans spend their days walking around on the earth, but which are nevertheless considered to be aquatic; in much the same way and for many of the same reasons, humans should be considered aerial.15

An Internal Migration: Human Aeriality on the Cultural Level There is a third subset or level to be considered, culture. In a sense, all cultures are functionally aerial because people get their culture mostly via the air. But a far more interesting phenomenon is culture being aerial in

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Figure 11.2. Great Seal of the United States. Image extracted from Our Flag (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2003), 42, and made available via Wikimedia Commons.

its content. This entails complexity vastly beyond the physics and biology, with an impossible number of cultures over space and time to consider. A short essay of this sort can hardly adequately trace the myriad ways in which human conceptions about the sky have evolved over time, let alone how that evolution in thought that has been informed by technological, political, religious, and economic shifts. Still, a small handful of examples from contemporary American and Western culture, intended only to be suggestive, serve to illumine two simple points about it. The first point is simply that Western culture’s occupation with the sky is deep, and has been for a very long time. For the first example of this we need look no further than birds, which are all around us. Depictions of the Christian God are often birds. In addition to generally associating each person of the Trinity with the sky or heavens, the Bible specifically and prominently depicts, among other depictions of deity, the Holy Spirit as a dove, the Creator as hovering over the waters, and Jesus ascending onto temples, mounts, boats, crosses, and finally into the sky.16 Birdlike qualities were affixed to even subdeities, such as the host of angels—and even to the quite ordinary evangelists; see figure 11.1 for a traditional representation of them. In a more modern and secular

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example, the Great Seal of the United States displays not a human but a bird. And, on the broader theme of aeriality, she is flying, not standing, and with the ambiguous exception of the shield, is surrounded by purely aerial elements: arrows, leaves, banners, stars, sunbeams, and clouds (fig. 11.2). Even far outside of religion, this culture maintains something like reverence for birds, in particular for flying birds from whom we get little contact or practical benefit. We don’t tend to think much of chickens and turkeys. But the mascots, the bird watchers (no annual turtler outings at the ASEH), the Icarus story, the NBC peacock, the feathers and birds on Victorian hats— it’s hard to locate such admiration for (or perhaps identification with) another class of species so distantly related to us.17 A second example of the depth of aerial culture is however an exception to that. Trees, as a structural class, are even more distant from humans than birds, and yet arguably people identify with them even more. There are some shared traits: like humans, trees stand; they move, though they do not move from place to place; they fall in humans’ order of magnitude for lifespan and size. Their bark and sap correlate to skin and blood, and their structure relates easily to human feet, torsos, arms, and fingers, and many are bushlike on top. The English language uses arboreal terms such as trunk, crotch, stump, and limb in its ordinary terminology for human physiology. People walk among them, and are sometime said to hug them. They identify with trees in a way it would be hard to do with bushes, forbs, grass, or fungi. The story examined above had an example of this arboreal preoccupation. The climax of Adam and Eve’s short tale was eating something, after which they took just two actions in the garden: making clothes of something, and hiding somewhere. All trees, and then God expelled them to protect another tree, which had to be the case because a little-noticed feature of the garden was that it had no plants except trees. The culture has a host of familiar trees related to memory and ceremony, many of them staples of history lectures: the real Liberty Tree; the mythologized tree under which Washington took command of the Continental Army; the almost certainly wholly fictional cherry tree that he cut down. Much of this culture has admittedly faded in recent times: along with the Christmas trees there used to be crucifixes, Maypoles, and nonmagnetic yellow ribbons that needed no words. The best proof of the desire to load meaning onto trees may be the charts in the form of trees, whether the data warrant that form or not; trunks and branches do not accurately reflect the form of genealogy, and certainly not of national history (fig. 11.3).18 A human example of aerophilia lies at the intersection of these cultural preoccupations of birds and trees: tree-swingers. This has been surprisingly common for such a peculiar and impractical activity. In Herman Melville’s

Figure 11.3. A chart of the battles, leaders, and congresses during the Revolutionary War, George Washington Bicentennial Commission, 1931–1932, National Archives and Records Administration, rec. no. 532885.

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Figure 11.4. Population growth of states by altitude. Author’s collection.

aquatic novel Moby-Dick, the lasting image of the protagonist Ishmael was not in the water but far aloft on a mast, ordered to watch for whales but more often enjoying “the drowsy trade winds blow.” Melville certainly learned of this from three tours on whaling ships. The nature writer John Muir swung on a living tree, by his own account, riding out a Sierra storm on a fir, “like a bobolink on a reed.” Robert Frost, according to his official biographer, really was a “swinger of birches” as a boy in the country, as he was in his famous poem. Julia Butterfly Hill, who staged a two-year protest by living in a California Redwood, wrote about her swaying and buffeting in almost opposite terms from Frost: not as a short-term riding by human on tree, but as a longterm cohabitation based on learning from the tree: “as I was getting chunked all over by the wind, tossed left and right, I just let it go. I let my muscles go. I let my jaw unlock. I let the wind blow and the craziness flow. I bent and flailed with it, just like the trees, which flail in the wind.”19 Perhaps the most compelling story of a swinger, though not literary and not famous, was Edwin Howard Armstrong, who invented many of the technologies still used in radio today. At a young age Armstrong was also swinging on wooden masts, but they were old-fashioned radio towers. The

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best-known images of Armstrong were photographs he staged on top of the RCA radio tower in Manhattan, some 400 feet above street level, not only standing but balancing on one leg. Armstrong committed suicide after legal losses, by ironically or not throwing himself out a thirteenth-story window of his apartment building.20 So culturally, Americans and Westerners are generally quite aerial. And the second point is that they are growing even more aerial. They are moving, not at an evolutionary rate but at a cultural rate, higher into the sky. This happens to be the geographical pattern of Americans’ migration. The “settlement” of the United States by Europeans and European Americans was only nominally “Westward Migration;” more descriptively it was Upward Migration, moving in from three coasts and closing in on the high Mountain West since the mid-1800s. This continues in our current age of exurbs, as figure 11.4 suggests; low-elevation states are a mixture of population growth and decline, but the high-elevation states are all growing.21 Americans’ burgeoning aeriality involves altitude as well as elevation; they have been living higher above the ground by use of industrial technology. This has also been occurring since the middle of the 1800s, and involves a vast array of technologies and institutions, from skyscrapers to commercial airlines to radio telescopes and parasails. In fact at its core the Industrial Revolution consisted of humans relocating vast amounts of underground energy into the atmosphere. All of this represents humans moving further into what was already their own native habitat, the sky. One example of this industrial Upward Migration has had obviously harmful impacts on populations around the world: industrial warfare. War has always been largely aerial, with missiles projected and hilltops taken from Agincourt to Little Round Top. But with the maturity of aviation around the 1930s came an obvious shift in scale; key battles such as Guernica, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Britain, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki now originated in the air in a way they had not before. To be sure, there has been a steady stream of claims from boosters promoting air power, but these overstatements only exaggerate and distort an already impressive reality. Despite its many failures, to “liberate” Vietnam or to rescue the American hostages, this is how warfare is now conducted. The attacks of September 11, 2001, were strikingly aerial in nature, including airliners attacking skyscrapers and hand-to-hand combat inside a commercial jet in flight. War has even moved into outer space, as nuclear war via intercontinental missiles continues to hang over humanity. Another example of the Upward Migration is less obvious, more ideological, and certainly more hopeful, and that is ecology. Ecology came from multiple sources, but perhaps one underappreciated one was aviation. Urban planner

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Erwin Gutkind made this argument in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, a 1956 volume with characteristically postwar themes of both anxiety and confidence. In its introduction Gutkind made a hopeful claim: that “the conquest of air” offered intellectual opportunities. “Today we can look at the world with a God’s-eye view,” he wrote, “take in at a glance the infinite variety of environmental patterns spread over the earth, and appreciate their dynamic relationships.” “The airplane,” he summed up, “has given us the synoptic view.” Gutkind considered this world-historic, reducing the bias of science toward analysis over synthesis, and he called for a new discipline of “social ecology” to further this perspective. Reading it today one is struck by how much he extracted from black and white photos of small areas shot from airplane windows: “Today the whole world is our unit of thinking and acting. Nothing can develop in isolation, and the transformation in one country produces direct reactions on the physical and social structure of all the others.” Gutkind’s reaction sounds more like the reaction to the famous “Blue Marble” photograph of the Earth taken almost two decades later, from Apollo 17 in 1972. At this altitude the Earth’s inhabitants could now see the whole of it, not just one piece at a time, and at this time human culture was making a shift toward a holistic, ecological view. But Gutkind was reflecting this view two decades earlier. And two decades before Gutkind’s essay the federal government was moving into the “air view” in a major way by starting to photograph the United States in a systematic way, eventually covering about 80 percent of the lower forty-eight states before the Second World War. And this federal campaign was largely a culmination of Sherman Fairchild’s efforts two decades before that to take useable aerial photographs, and to mosaic them together for large synoptic views. So chronologically, at the very least, this upward shift to the “air view” correlates with the gradual development of ecology, first as a scientific field and more importantly as a mass philosophy peaking in the early 1970s.22

Conclusions This article has argued that humans are physically in the sky, biologically primarily aerial, and in the case of American culture deeply aerial as well. To narrow the focus one last time, what might be the implications for the subset of culture known as environmental history? To deal first in examples: the obvious one is of course climate change. It is obvious that this is the fundamental environmental issue of our era, that it is driving others like extinction and justice, and that it is an aerial one, a shift in the balance between humans and the sun. It is also obvious that humans are therefore well into the business of managing the atmosphere, that we are now here in large part “to work and take care of” the sky. This

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Figure 11.5. Curtiss-Wright Corporation, “Sacred Place,” Time, December 17, 1945. Courtesy of Curtiss-Wright and of E. Y. Berry Library, Black Hills State University. The advertisement’s footnote reads, “This is a tribute to every member of the armed forces of the United States from the men and women of Curtiss-Wright.”

immediately makes one think of James Fleming, the sky manager turned historian, who has been critical of efforts in sky management. But should also make one think of Paul Shepard, the land manager turned human ecologist, who might remind us that over a long timescale this sky management has returned us to being more like our hunting-and-gathering forebears: less agricultural, more concerned with affairs above ground than the many generations in between who worked the soil. In my case, studying those scientists flying their plane into the thunderstorms, in large part to study sky control, I realized that I carried an anticipation of them crashing like Icarus, as payment for their hubris in crossing some line. And when I found myself

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unable to locate any such line—when I came to see them as creatures of the sky, in the sky, I found myself moving slowly uphill against my inclination of suspicion toward weather modification. Seeing oneself as a creature of the sky is a subversive and potentially dangerous notion. But there is no surprise in this aerial notion affecting histories of the atmosphere; the test is whether it shapes apparently nonaerial narratives. In my own study of roads, I had concluded that roads were deserts, that rather than being horizontal features, they were vertical ones; it is the grade that makes them dry, and it is this aridity that makes them Good Roads.23 What I had failed to recognize was the verticality above that grade, that the real road is the channel of air through which we ride. This is easy to see in a downtown street walled with buildings, but just as true on a section road through prairie, or a deerpath through the woods. Every road is a holloway, a hollow way, because a road is a ride and where you ride is in the air; the air is the actual road. And of course they often do have tops as well: tunnels, overpasses, streetlight gantries, tree branches, and most importantly the multitude of overhead lines: cable, phone, guywire, power supply, power transmission, and “static.” While I hadn’t thought of roads in terms of airspace, I am glad that the linemen had, grading the voltage away from me from low-power phone up to high-voltage lightning. Roads, in fact, are engineered corridors, packed in three dimensions with utilities, and thinking in all three dimensions helps us see the fragile contrivances we rely upon. This reorganizes the taxonomy. So of course the Wright brothers went straight from bicycles to airplanes, and of course as they did they employed the rail, a common stratagem to minimize ground contact that ran all the way from railroads to the Wright Flyer’s runway to John Stapp’s rocket sleds preparing for space flight. And failing rails we substitute air itself, the pneumatic tires running from the safety bicycle to airliners and automobiles still today, air even placed between the rubber and the road. And of course the highways look like runways, the vindicating germ of truth in the popular myth of the interstates. One last example of another different sort, the concept of landscape. This is a term frequently used by environmental historians, but to little meaning beyond the way that luncheon is a formal sounding term indistinguishable from lunch. In so doing historians not only talk themselves into a corner away from the broader culture, but deny themselves an analytical tool. The world recognizes landscape correctly as a visual term (it is the visible form of land), but environmental historians stray into definitions of landscapes being places that are not too cultural but not too natural. This may be because intersections of nature and culture are the essence of environmental history,

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but also perhaps because the field harbors a suspicion of things “merely esthetic,” as not being sufficiently material. But the photons streaming into people’s heads, while energy and not literally matter, are just as physical an input as pheromones or radiation. Indeed, aeriality may draw the field into grappling more deeply with esthetics, the information economy, and affluence in general. Some human uses for air, such as mobility and especially sensation or aesthetics, have a more airy, even frivolous, sense about them, and that is not always comfortable with environmental historians. Societies have to keep themselves alive, after all, avoiding famine, toxins, disasters, and disease. But while subsistence and poverty are very real, so are affluence and the desires that it stokes and fulfills. The poor live in the sky and enjoy beauty and spectacle too—and they are keenly interested in skyscrapers (where in urban areas they often live already), and even in airliners. Striking out certain of these very real activities as invalid is a dicey business. There may be no better way to honor the Donald Worsters of the field than to wrestle with the uncomfortable, the unconnected, or even the baffling. Historians of the late Sixties tended to look at the environment around them as a passive though preferably picturesque backdrop. Half a century later, historians of 2017 should not look at the sky all around them and see only an inert though preferably unpolluted transparency.

Notes 1. Of course Leopold passed over the sky: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Paul Sutter, summarizing the state of environmental history two-thirds of a century later, outdid Leopold by not even ignoring it: “My work here also has a terrestrial bias and largely ignores a growing body of exciting marine and oceanic environmental history.” See Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 204; and Paul Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History 100 (June 2013): 99. Examples of studies that place water at the center include classic works like Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); and W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 2. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 69–90; Jennifer Price, Flight Maps:

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Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xvii. 3. Chaucer, quoted in Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “sky.” 4. Robert Weast, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 67th ed. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1987), F-140, F-148. 5. CRC Handbook, 67th ed., F-148; Frederick Lutgens, The Atmosphere (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), 7. 6. “Pure” air, like pure water, is blue, and it is blue right here on the ground, not just overhead somewhere, which is why the farther of two mountains is bluer. Charles L. Braun and Sergei N. Smirnov, “Why Is Water Blue?” Journal of Chemical Education 70 (August 1993): 612–14; Götz Hoeppe, Why the Sky Is Blue: Discovering the Color of Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 212–15. For Kármán vortex streets, see Robert Wellman Campbell, “Selkirk Island, Chile: 1999, 2000,” in Earthshots: Satellite Images of Environmental Change (Sioux Falls, SD: USGS EROS, 2001), earthshots.usgs.gov/Selkirk/ Selkirk. 7. A. H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1954), 80–91. 8. Stephen Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). 9. Mark Smith, Sensory History (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). Smith edits a series in sensory history for the University of Illinois Press. 10. This is from the 1559 edition. Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (London: Oxford University Press, 2011), 172. 11. Robert A. Freitas Jr., Nanomedicine, table 3.1, accessed June 22, 2010, http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/Ch03_1.html. 12. Likewise of course with the nitrogen, which we exhale unaltered, unable to break it down as the plants and their microbes can. 13. It may rub us odd that our bodies’ origin story is gas-to-solid (however wet midway). But this a blind spot more generally; ask someone (including me) for the six phase changes of H2O and the one you’ll likely get last, if ever, is deposition. (Which is not freezer burn; that’s sublimation.) And “acquisition by deposition, disposition by sequestration” is far less poetic than “ashes to ashes.” 14. Food statistics are mushy; few report mass and fewer specify wet versus dry. Most of these calculations are conservative (e.g., assuming dryness) and assume a “reference person” of 70 kg living 70 years. Water: John E. Hall, Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology (Philadelphia: Elsevier, 2016), 306; Elaine N. Marieb, Anatomy and Physiology, 6th ed. (San Francisco: Pearson, 2017), 869; Indu Khurana, Medical Physiology for Undergraduate Students [electronic book] (Noida, India: Elsevier Health Sciences, 2014), 414; Kerry Brandis, Fluid Physiology—an On-Line Text, v. 3.1.2, anaesthesiamcq.com/FluidBook.

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Air: Marieb, Anatomy and Physiology, 726–27. Food: National Geographic, “What the World Eats,” online chart, 2011, nationalgeographic.com/what-the-worldeats; Allison Aubrey, “The Average American Ate (Literally) a Ton This Year,” December 31, 2011, npr.org, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/ 2011/12/31/144478009/the-average-american-ate-literally-a-ton-this-year. 15. It’s actually their nights they spend walking around and their days resting in shelters under rocks, or occasionally dug into mud. Before then, lobsters (specifically, Homarus americanus) spend the first ten to thirty days of their lives floating, quite helpless. The “ocean of air” language dates from Evangelista Torricelli in the 1640s. Hoeppe, Why the Sky Is Blue, 99. 16. Matthew 3:16, Genesis 1:2, Luke 4:9, Matthew 5–7, Matthew 14:25, Luke 24:51. 17. Price, Flight Maps, 57–59. 18. The Tenement House in Glasgow, Scotland, also has a nice historical tree chart hanging on the wall in the living room. 55.8682 N, 4.2683 W. 19. Or so said Frost’s official biographer. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1966), 60. Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 226; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Boston: C. H. Simonds, 1922), 149; Tyrus Hillway, Herman Melville (New York: Twayne, 1963), 34–37; Julia Butterfly Hill, The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 114. 20. Lawrence Lessing, Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1956), 34, 153–54. 21. Elevation data from US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2009), PDF version, table 353, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2009/compendia/ statab/129ed/geography-environment.html. Population data from US Census Bureau, Population Division, Release Date: December 2009, table 3, “Estimates of Resident Population Change for the United States, Regions, States, and Puerto Rico and Region and State Rankings: July 1, 2008 to July 1, 2009 (NST EST2009-03).” 22. Which aerial photographs (with remote sensing in general) are sources still, now threescore and ten years on, underused by historians with their bias toward the verbal and ideological. Environmental historians should be particularly outraged at the failure to preserve the AAA photographs. E. A. Gutkind, “Our World from the Air: Conflict and Adaptation,” in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. William L. Thomas Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 1, 44. US Geological Survey, Looking for an Old Aerial

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Photograph, USGS Fact Sheet 127–96 (Reston, VA: USGS, 1997). 23. Robert Wellman Campbell, “Animal Tracking,” in Earth Systems Connections, ed. Lee A. Vierling (Washington, DC: NASA Earth Science Enterprise, 2004), CD-ROM.

12 Rivers of Dust An Environmental Historian Appraises the American Legal System Karl Boyd Brooks

I

first had the pleasure of joining Donald Worster’s doctoral cohort (1996– 2000), and then the honor of becoming his University of Kansas faculty colleague (2000–2010). Fifteen exhilarating years as Worster’s Wescoe Hall neighbor ended when, pride mixing with apprehension, I told him that President Obama had approved my appointment to direct US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) operations in the American heartland. Leaving the ivory tower, I descended Lawrence’s contemplative Mount Oread to climb bustling Strawberry Hill, where railroads, freeways, factories, and grain elevators ringed EPA Region 7 headquarters in the old heart of Kansas City, Kansas. Three years later, I formally resigned from KU’s faculty to stay with EPA’s leadership team during the president’s second term. After trading environmental history for environmental protection, I always recalled and tried thoughtfully to apply lessons learned as Worster’s student, colleague, and friend.1 As our paths diverged, we patrolled different beats through the heartland. As EPA’s Region 7 Administrator, I led over 500 civil service colleagues responsible for explaining, implementing, and enforcing our nation’s environmental protection laws. Region 7 both assisted and superintended other governments discharging parallel responsibilities. The ten EPA regions work as partners protecting shared geographic swathes of the American environment because Congress has, in most instances, directed the agency to execute its complex mission through federal-state cooperation.2 Though the US Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause” makes EPA’s interpretation of the laws assigned to its execution ultimately preeminent, state environmental agencies often expressed a very different, usually more limited, view of EPA’s duties.3 Regional administrators spend a lot of time as diplomats and negotiators, searching for outcomes to prevent garden-variety state-federal disagreements from blossoming into federal court battles or careening unpredictably into tense congressional hearings. My agency colleagues and I made environmental history by “making” environmental law, using the broad definition of “lawmaking” first advanced systematically in J. Willard Hurst’s foundational legal histories of the 1950s and 1960s.4 Always a vigorous citizen-participant in debates about our American

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system of environmental law, Worster also worked as a kind of “lawmaker.” His writing and teaching offered testimony from environmental history’s premier expert witness. Although never, to my knowledge, formally qualified as an expert witness to testify in a court or agency, Worster has long discharged that professional duty by sharing reasoned opinions, founded on close study of the evidence, to explain how environmental laws have expressed American policy, reflected American culture, and embodied American aspirations.5 Daunting as my Region 7 duties sometimes felt, he himself has ranged over a vast jurisdiction. Worster’s sweeping judgments about American law’s effects on, and reflections of, the natural world have established enduring precedents. They have also signaled the need for, and offered some ideas about how to construct, environmental histories of environmental law. Trained originally as a lawyer, I learned the law primarily from printed books. In those long-ago days of the early 1980s, we found and read the law on printed pages typically bound into large books. These books rested on library shelves, when not splayed across our coffee-stained desks. Every law school had its library; and every law office traditionally assigned its newest attorneys to the library, where we read and wrote. In even the most compact law library, legal books on the highest and lowest shelves, those least used— perhaps because least useful or current—literally gathered dust. Lawyers’ relentless search for precedents to clinch arguments required consulting these older volumes. Ask lawyers of a certain age: they will instantly recall the sight, smell, feel, even taste of legal dust. Digging into legal history, then, compelled one to navigate rivers of dust. In that, lawyers resemble historians who, even in today’s screen-shot Boolean world, often must wipe, blow, or shake dust from their archival sources in search of evidentiary origins. To trace movement in law through place and time requires critical, imaginative travel up and down dusty rivers. These flowing rivers of dust also bear historians upstream—toward origins—and down, through the changes over time and across space that define our professional duties. Along law’s dusty rivers, then, environmental historians should voyage to seek better understanding of human efforts to govern both ourselves and the natural world.6 Too few legal historians have given the environment its due as a lawmaker. Those who have tried owe Don Worster much. By doing legal history as environmental history he has opened promising new directions. We should emulate his example by devoting more attention to explaining, and spend more time understanding and critiquing, the many methods by which environmental law and policy are made and implemented. Four major works spanning three decades—Dust Bowl (1979), Rivers of Empire (1985), River Running West (2001), and Passion for Nature (2008)— advanced appraisals of American law as distinctive as they are unsettling,

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particularly to those who subscribe to the view that Don Worster never changed his mind. Read together, they chart his historiographical journey down law’s rivers of dust. Both banks of the American legal experience bound these dusty rivers: on one side loom high, principled ideals—democracy, community, justice for all—and on the other continuous, grubby, sordid struggles for mastery over both places and people. Worster’s own “Voyage of Discovery” mapped an increasingly nuanced appraisal of law’s influence on the disposition of the public domain, the appropriation of Western water, and the reordering of the landscape by people. Americans at work—building homes on the range, irrigating fields in a watershed, spending public money for private projects both as noble and base as any in the national experience—impelled him, over time, to reconsider the environmental and political implications of law’s encounter with nature.7 EPA’s Region 7 always made me think hard about Worster as a legal historian. Its half-million square miles stretch from the gates of the Mississippi Delta in southeast Missouri’s Bootheel to the flanks of the Rockies in Nebraska’s Panhandle, and from the windswept High Plains of southwest Kansas to the chilly glaciated hills of northeast Iowa.8 Fourteen million Americans, citizens of four states and nine Indian reservations, inhabit the world’s agricultural engine house. They live mostly in metropolitan centers humming with global commerce and industry: St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, Wichita, Cedar Rapids / Waterloo. Some, though, occupy tiny villages now largely erased in the backwash of rural depopulation. My parents’ families emigrated from heartland pinpoints Norden, Nebraska, and Green City, Missouri, in the first third of the twentieth century to what would become my home state of Idaho. Heartland history forged by Euro-American conquest reaches as far back as the mid-eighteenth century, when the French Empire established Dubuque to safeguard its vital lead mines among the Ioway. It comes as near as our grandparents’ schooldays, when the Santa Fe Railroad founded Moscow, Kansas, in the year Woodrow Wilson became president.9 Region 7 composes a mosaic largely dedicated to and defined by what Worster has long identified as the seminal historical problem faced and handled— well and sustainably, or poorly and disastrously—by every human community: the growing, shipping, production, and storage of food.10 East of the Missouri River, where it escapes its last Corps of Engineers shackle at Gavins Point Dam and curves toward confluence with the Mississippi at St. Louis, verdant croplands support the word’s insatiable appetite for corn, pork, and soybeans.11 Enough rain falls there during growing seasons to keep John Wesley Powell’s bearded specter well westward. Across the wide Missouri, though, the landscape created by Americans, in our own time, tightens the hydraulic mainspring that Worster’s early histories wrapped around the West.12

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Up the Platte Basin of Nebraska and across the gently undulating, always rising sweep of central and western Kansas, beneath the Rocky Mountains rain shadow, once semiarid grasslands that tied the Sandhills and Flint Hills to the High Plains now glisten with aluminum webs. The webs carry water from wells to self-propelled pivot and lateral sprinkler systems. Of course, the wind still howls and sighs almost constantly, plant stalks rustling ceaselessly, but days and nights now hum all summer long to the steady pulse of pump engines. The engines haul water up from beneath the ground and spread it through those webs across corn circles, alfalfa squares, and feedlot complexes big as urban zip codes. Politicians and their constituents, rural and urban, can and should debate the policies under which this water rises to the earth’s surface, but the historic reality is unarguable: Nebraskans and Kansans have, with irrigation, transformed the agro-ecology of the Great Plains in barely five decades.13 Once the western Great Plains grew mostly wheat. Today, although wheat remains a king-size crop in central Kansas, the western third of Region 7 supports a corn-cattle complex, its environmental umbilical cords those aluminum pipes and steel well casings, its placenta the Ogallala Aquifer, and its heart those thousands of pump engines chuffing away.14 Drive across the Nebraska or Kansas hydraulic landscape on a summer night: stars twinkling above mirror their humble counterparts speckled all around. Hundreds of pulsing lights atop the pivots and pumps signal the manager, or owner, or regulator at a glance that the irrigation system is powered up and producing fodder. Capital and technology have muscled Powell’s specter across the Rockies, for now. As for John Muir, Worster’s other bearded Gilded Age avatar of environmental activism, Region 7 in the twenty-first century reflects little of his influence, nurtured as it was by the public lands in the far West.15 By the 1930s, when the map tracing heartland ownership allocations largely ceased its century-long transformation, Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness had routed Muir’s passion for nature. In the four states of Region 7—Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas—the American people legally possess a smaller fraction of the landscape than anywhere else in the nation. Jefferson’s dream, made visible from overhead by section-line roads that cross-hatch the heartland, checkmated both Muir’s and Powell’s caution. Even after counting as “public lands” the tiny reservations occupied by Indian tribes, the handful of mid-sized military facilities dedicated to national defense, the dots of green maintained as urban parks by local governments, and the thin necklace of state parks, scarcely 2 percent of the heartland remains the inheritance of the American people.16 All the rest is privately owned. In no other American region do individuals—though many exercise their sovereignty as families— carry such a weight of ownership and management responsibilities.

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How well they have done, at whatever tasks we allot them under the rubric of “conservation” or “productivity” or “profitability” or “sustainability,” will remain, as it should, the topic of fierce but neighborly debate.17 John Wesley Powell had a lot to say about this topic. Aldo Leopold, a native of Region 7, had even more. His intense gaze on the Western public lands stereoptically shared scientific and political space with his hopeful, often exasperated, occasionally infuriated assessment of the private landowners whose ancestors had turned prairie into corn ground and forest into woodlot. About this agricultural engine house of the world Muir has much less to offer the twenty-first-century.18 Working our distinctive jobs—environmental historian and environmental regulator—in this remarkable place, so different from the bland clichés assigned the heartland by observers clustered on the coasts, Worster and I traded stories about the contested landscape.19 I might have just driven home to Lawrence from an EPA hearing about rural air quality in Des Moines or a Jefferson City wastewater-treatment plant tour for ambitious African American teenagers. He may have recently deplaned from a lecture series at the Rachel Carson Institute in Munich, Germany. Mighty different ways to “do” environmental history, but these distinctive commitments to interpreting the American experience in nature enriched our conversations. EPA’s work maintained what I termed, when bidding farewell to my Region 7 colleagues in February 2015, the “thin green line” securing our nation’s environmental quality. Worster would reassure me that fierce criticism the agency often provoked actually demonstrated my colleagues’ contribution to advancing our American quest to enjoy security and opportunity amid a measure of ordered freedom. After I left the heartland to join EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s national leadership team, my encounters with Worster became fewer. I had hoped to see him again when the 2015 American Society for Environmental History convened in Washington, DC, but as the annual Jayhawker reunion hoisted glasses to our mentor, I was in EPA Region 9’s San Francisco headquarters to meet my new team with the agency’s Office of Administration and Resources Management (OARM). Roughly two dozen senior civil servants, based in the nation’s capital as well as ten regional offices and two massive laboratory complexes, directed OARM’s 1,000 career professionals who hire, train, equip, office, and secure our 14,000 colleagues working the front lines of environmental protection from Alaska to Puerto Rico.20 Schooled as a Harvard lawyer and KU historian, seasoned in rough-and-tumble Idaho politics and courtrooms, I had become responsible to EPA Administrator McCarthy, President Obama, and the Congress for what one agency colleague wryly termed “mops, cops, and door stops.”

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Another EPA headquarters duty daily reminded me how Worster’s environmental-legal histories should inform both those in government who apply law to govern the dynamic, intimate relationship between Americans and the places we inhabit, and those who study the lawmakers’ results on the land. Our OARM annually distributed nearly five billion dollars—two-thirds of EPA’s annual budget—in grants to state and tribal environmental-protection agencies, local governments, academic research programs, and nonprofit citizen associations.21 OARM grants help fuel the engine powering what my first EPA boss, Deputy Administrator Bob Perciasepe, termed “the environmental protection enterprise.”22 Collected as taxes from every American and appropriated to EPA by acts of Congress, OARM’s grants enable state, tribal, and local partners to do the hard, indispensable work that keeps our air healthy, our waters clean, and our lands productive.23 My own work on the origins of American environmental law contends that one of the postwar environmental movement’s enduring legacies has been the professional corps of environmental-protection specialists now working in every state capital, for many tribal governments, and for most sizeable municipalities. Before 1970, only a handful of the largest states funded anything like comprehensive environmental agencies. Idaho, by no means an outlier, defined the pre-1970 norm: fewer than ten public officials were empowered to regulate water pollution and none made rules to manage air quality, solid waste disposal, or chemical pollutants.24 Today, by contrast, American environmental law is preeminently made, interpreted, and enforced by states, tribes, and local governments.25 Of course, landmark federal statutes—the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, Superfund, and their counterparts enacted in the 1970s and 1980s—do establish national norms that must be observed from Alaska’s North Slope to the Atlantic littoral.26 Compelling federal court decisions announce legal standards that bind other subordinate governments.27 EPA’s environmental scientists and engineers lead the world in discovering the principles and devising the tools that we apply to manage and mitigate our human interventions into the natural world.28 Yet Americans depend daily on the legal, technical, and financial efforts of state, tribal, and local governments to realize our national aspirations and to defend our national commitments. Worster’s close studies of American lawmaking about the natural world highlighted the humble. Rightly read, they enable us to understand why so much of the federal environmental-protection budget goes straight to humdrum activities beyond the Beltway. The Lawrence, Kansas, sewage-treatment plant quietly humming along the Kaw, the Nebraska legislative committee politely quizzing the new state environmental-agency director, a Prairie Band Pottawatomi tribal solid-waste collection drive: arguments made, facts

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marshalled, natural systems altered by these obscure lawmakers deserve our more careful reckoning. What we do in these quiet places, who “we” are outside the nation’s capital, deserve as much historical scrutiny as the Supreme Court’s latest 5-to-4 tug-of-war over the environmental implications of the Interstate Commerce Clause.29 Worster appreciated how environmental law has emerged from the ground up, and from the river’s edge out. His insights and evidence help explain how my EPA grant-making colleagues’ arcane, painstaking effort to allocate our share of the public purse sustained the environmental partnership on which our citizens depend. “Federalism” as a legal, constitutional concept rarely figured directly into Worster’s studies of Western water management, land disposition, and resource conservation. Likewise, “interstate commerce” and “administrative discretion,” professional principles beloved by the law teachers, posed problems too pedestrian for a historian of his profound depth and ambitious reach. Yet environmental lawyers and law teachers who burrow nose-down only into their preferred sources—treatises, rules, statutes, and the like— can confuse doctrinal exegesis with deeper, broader understanding of the ways in which human and nonhuman sovereigns shape the law, and reshape each other in making that law. Worster’s work has mapped a new course for environmental historians. Our field should extend his “Voyage of Discovery” along law’s rivers of dust by writing more truly environmental histories of environmental law and policy. By following his pioneering efforts, we will deepen our knowledge and broaden our understanding of the churning interplay between American politics, American law, and the natural world which bears the impress of both. A lawyer/politician/activist/historian who turned environmental bureaucrat, I came slowly to appreciate Worster’s critical interrogation of American law as a system that establishes both relationships between people and the land, and between different sorts of people. He understood, as perhaps the nonlawyer does best, how political economy penetrates and shapes the structure of rules that govern American life, binding the dustiest irrigation district on Idaho’s Snake River Plain to Washington, DC’s marbled corridors, two distinct but characteristic workshops for environmental lawmaking in which I have worked. Nearly four decades ago, Worster implicitly suggested how our then-new field of environmental history should apply a principle first proposed in the 1950s by J. Willard Hurst. Later environmental-legal historical scholarship, including my own, has mostly elaborated Worster’s insight, demonstrating its power while qualifying and assessing its application in particular places and times. Stated simply, the principle is this: Americans have made environmental law as they have environmental history, by conducting such

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fundamental human relationships as politics, economics, and law amid perpetual interactions with nonhuman features, forces, and inhabitants. These nonhuman lawmakers exert their own distinctive forms of sovereignty in the public assembly, on the marketplace, and throughout the welter of courts, agencies, and instrumentalities composing the American legal system.30 The EPA, a creature of law, must interpret, apply, and reconsider some of our country’s most innovative, complicated, and powerful legal rules. While using law to accomplish the EPA’s mission of protecting public health and the environment, I daily encountered a second basic principle that Worster developed in his histories of the national experience with land, water, and their inhabitants, both human and nonhuman: American law should aspire to order and to secure what is best about the American people’s evolving experience with individual freedom, community prosperity, and political democracy even as it must invariably reflect the price that principle pays to practice in pursuit of concrete objectives.31 As Worster was starting his historical career in the 1970s, Hurst, another Midwestern state university scholar, was culminating four decades as our preeminent legal historian. Hurst’s keystone work posed a question about Great Lakes forests as deceptively simple as that which Worster was beginning to ask about Southern Plains grasslands. Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry asked why, in the span of barely a half-century between 1860 and 1910, had the North Woods been logged over into abandoned stump fields? Dust Bowl, in turn, asked how, in about the same brief period (1885–1935), had the Southern Plains become a blasted natural and human landscape?32 Hurst, a lawyer, fingered the law as the tool with which lumber capitalists mined the forests. His principal insight into the historical process of deforestation came from realizing that law in America is made to be used, usually by people with no professional Bar membership. It is an instrument fashioned to solve particular problems by the people confronting those problems. Of course, judges in courts and legislators in assemblies followed old precedents and made new laws, but Hurst showed that sawyers, engineers, investors, and wholesalers operated the lawmaking machinery, too. Law, a system for ordering relationships between people, owed less to established principles internal to its system than to external influences operating on that system. A contract or tax deed had precursors in legal instruments dating back to the royal courts of England, but North Woods people who needed to buy merchantable timber and to assess property taxes hammered those precedents into new, protean forms.33 This “external” mode of legal historiography that Hurst pioneered helps assess how Worster developed his own brand of environmental-legal history.

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He launched his rundown law’s rivers of dust in the highlands of philosophical criticism, rafting above post-Marxian sociological depths, propelled along by Frankfurt School techniques drawn from Immanuel Wallerstein and Karl Wittfogel. He then charged directly into rapids roiling with his contempt for American lawmakers too cowardly or self-interested to challenge capitalism with democracy’s promise. He emerged into calmer reaches, more grounded in and respectful of prosaic lawmaking realities. Dust Bowl held law complicit in devastating Southern Plains soils, simply another tool driven by production agriculture, like a combine or tractor. Rivers of Empire indicted a rule system that empowered small capitalist cadres and technical elites to manacle both Western waters and Western people, subjugating them into semivassals of a hydraulic society dedicated to expanding empire and unequal wealth. A quarter century’s run farther along those same imperial rivers, pouring off forested mountains into the arid West, qualified his historical judgment. River Running West and Passion for Nature, biographies of Powell and Muir, respectively, unlikely to be replaced in our lifetimes, expressed Worster’s maturing, qualified, broader view of American law. Increasingly contingent and complicated, both less judgmental and more nuanced, his recent assessment of American law reflects a careful expert witness applying Willard Hurst’s advice to study law as a system built for action rather than a doctrine dedicated to principles. Worster came to express cautious confidence in Americans’ capacity to use the law to preserve individual rights while extending democratic control over community decisions about living in the natural world. In 1979, Dust Bowl had doubted whether any plains community could ever avoid the market’s command to subdue and to commodify the natural world. In 1987, Worster was encouraging historians to help their fellow citizens frame “an alternative vision [that] ought to suggest how we might live free and live well for the longest period of time—all of us.”34 By 2008, though, his Powell and Muir biographies portrayed American law, translated through American politics, contending with the natural world’s own expressions of sovereignty. Compromise lubricates democratic politics. Contract bids the present ponder the future. Law reflects, albeit imperfectly, what I have elsewhere called a form of “natural sovereignty.” Hope therefore endures that freedom’s dream need not become security’s nightmare.35 Nearly three decades ago—using companion essays and lectures to develop insights that had quickly made Rivers of Empire a canonical study of water, land, and law—Worster posed what he deemed the American West’s central paradox: the vibrant, transformative, often destructive clash between “freedom and want.” The “vision of liberation” that drove Euro-Americans across the Missouri came encased in “a strongly developed sense of selfhood, of

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individuality.” By attaching “an intensely private meaning to freedom,” westering people “conceiv[ed] of themselves as more solitary than collective.”36 Once out on the broad dry spaces, though, ancient fears of scarcity and poverty generated a new, but radically divergent because inherently corporate, Western dream. Western people imagined their future to be one of “unlimited abundance . . . delivered through the benevolent agency of science and technology.” Their “spirit of conquest” mobilized traditional legal rights—to own property, to exclude others, and to transform common resources into private wealth. For his proposition that law deserved environmental historians’ attention, Worster entered into evidence the North American Review‘s spread-eagle 1906 proclamation that fifty million Westerners “living under American Common and Statute law” would someday “occupy the arid region of the continent, where the word ‘desert’ is unknown.”37 The historian has proven prescient, the publicist too timid: 70 million Westerners today busily inhabit the trans-Missouri landscape (excluding Texas and Oklahoma) while recent environmental histories of American law have followed Worster by exploring the ways in which contest, conquest, and conciliation—the workshops employing legions of lawyers—have reshaped our common home.38 Worster saw that rights under law, driven by the desire to dominate land and people, were capable of subverting rights to make law, the legacy of American political democracy. “You cannot maximize abundance,” he warned, “without setting up powerful government agencies, corporations, and other chains of command, other hierarchies of authority [that] endanger democracy and independence as they grow.”39 His 1987 essay, “Freedom and Want: The Western Paradox,” urged historians as well as citizens to think hard, “with all the wisdom and intelligence we can muster,” about reconciling dreams of freedom with demands for security. “Achieving a greater degree of personal freedom is a noble dream,” he conceded—four centuries of American history attest to its staying power—“but only if it includes a sense of responsibility and discipline.”40 In challenging Westerners, and implicitly all Americans, to “live harmoniously with the land, as collectivities, over periods of time that far exceed any individual’s lifetime,” Worster outlined a problem in legal history.41 Over the next two decades, especially in his biographies of Powell and Muir, he suggested how his successors should handle the problem of writing an environmental history of American law. The later works also carefully, even grudgingly, recalibrated his earlier conviction that law and lawmakers invariably, even inevitably, became mere servants of capital’s radically destructive, ruthlessly consolidating powers. By learning and thinking more about Powell, the consummate environmental administrator, and Muir, the prototypical environmental activist, Worster seemed to grow more sympathetic to

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bureaucracy, science, and politics than Dust Bowl and Rivers of Empire had earlier indicated. Perhaps preparing fully developed character studies, in which his subjects often behaved heroically and left useful legacies in their wake, nurtured his enduring hope and qualified optimism. Powell’s and Muir’s careers testify to the hope that the rule of law can restrain politicians’ excesses and corporations’ appetites when scientific principles, founded on ecology and other natural sciences, better inform lawmakers.42 My own lawmaking experiences—in courts, legislatures, and agencies— made me a grateful passenger on Worster’s journey along the rivers of dust. His Voyage of Discovery showed the way toward understanding environmental law by doing environmental history. Due in large part to the work of the EPA and its many partners in states, tribes, and localities, our American natural environment stands a better chance of supporting our descendants’ dreams of freedom, opportunity, and security. Thanks in some measure to Donald Worster’s expert opinions about law and American nature over the past four decades, our most fundamental environmental-protection rules now incorporate more citizen participation and have evolved to reflect better scientific understanding of the world we did not make. In a time when EPA administrators have begun to dismantle the EPA’s capacity to enforce these laws, and the president has contemptuously demeaned the science on which those laws are founded, all who care for the natural world and the democratic experience will draw inspiration from Worster’s example and legacy.

Notes 1. EPA Region 7’s headquarters was at 5th and Minnesota in Kansas City, Kansas, until we relocated to 112th and Renner Boulevard in Lenexa, Kansas, in fall 2011. 2. Keith H. Hirokawa and Leonard M. Gryskewicz Jr., “Federalism: Conflicts and Cooperation among Local, State, and Federal Objectives (1780s–Present),” in Guide to U.S. Environmental Policy, ed. Sally K. Fairfax and Edmund Russell (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press / Sage Publications, 2014), 175–88. 3. Karl Brooks, “Environmental Law,” in Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, ed. Kathleen A. Brosnan (New York: Facts on File, 2011), 2:493–96; James Salzman and Barton H. Thompson Jr., Environmental Law and Policy, 2nd ed. (New York: Foundation Press, 2007), 65–68. 4. J. Willard Hurst, The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950); Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836–1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 5. Federal Rule of Evidence 702 provides: “A witness who is qualified as an

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expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education may testify in the form of an opinion or otherwise if: (a) the expert’s scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue; (b) the testimony is based on sufficient facts or data; (c) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods; and (d) the expert has reliably applied the principles and methods to the facts of the case.” 6. Richard N. L. Andrews, Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), explores how law, in regulating human relations, also expresses relationships between people and the natural world. 7. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Among the many studies of Lewis and Clark’s “Corps of Discovery” that mapped the Missouri, Snake, and Columbia Basins, the most accessible general account remains Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 8. “EPA Region 7 (Midwest),” epa.gov, accessed July 20, 2015, http://www2. epa.gov/aboutepa/epa-region-7-midwest. 9. Wikipedia, s.v. “Dubuque, Iowa,” accessed July 20, 2015, https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubuque,_Iowa; and Wikipedia, s.v. “Moscow, Kansas,” accessed July 20, 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow,_Kansas. 10. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), offers his characteristic treatment of the problem. 11. Jon Lauck, American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly: The Political Economy of Grain Belt Farming, 1953–1980 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 12. Worster, Rivers of Empire; and Worster, River Running West. 13. John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1998), iii–v, 355–66. 14. John Opie, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 15. Worster, Passion for Nature. 16. Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, written for the Public Land Law Review Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968).

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17. John Opie, The Law of the Land: 200 Years of American Farmland Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 18. Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 19. Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). 20. “About the Office of Administration and Resources (OARM),” epa.gov, accessed July 20, 2015, https://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/about-officeadministration-and-resources-management-oarm. 21. “EPA Grants,” epa.gov, accessed April 10, 2016, http://www.epa.gov/ grants. 22. Wikipedia, s.v. “Bob Perciasepe,” accessed April 10, 2016, https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Perciasepe. 23. Grants.gov, accessed April 10, 2016, http://www.grants.gov. 24. Karl Boyd Brooks, Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). 25. Karl Boyd Brooks, “The Shift from Resource Management to Environmental Management (1950s–Present),” in Fairfax and Russell, Guide to U.S. Environmental Policy, 393–408. 26. Michael E. Kraft, “The Environmental Protection Agency and Its Precursors: History, Responsibilities, and Policies (1970–Present),” in Fairfax and Russell, U.S. Environmental Policy, 269–81. 27. American Farm Bureau Federation v. EPA, 792 F.3d 281 (3d Cir., 2015); cert. denied, 136 S.Ct. 1246 (2016); Karl Brooks, “Judiciary,” in Brosnan, Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, 3:798–800. 28. National Research Council, Strengthening Science at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000). 29. Michigan v. EPA, 135 S.Ct. 2699, 576 U.S. ___ (2015). 30. Karl Boyd Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 31. J. Willard Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the NineteenthCentury United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956); Brooks, “Environmental Law,” 2:493–94. 32. Worster, Dust Bowl. 33. James Willard Hurst, Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836–1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 34. Donald Worster, “Freedom and Want: The Western Paradox,” in Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 90–91. 35. Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams; Brooks, Before Earth Day.

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36. Worster, “Freedom and Want,” 85. 37. Worster, “Freedom and Want,” 88. 38. US Census Bureau, “State Population Totals and Components of Change: 2010–2017,” accessed April 10, 2016, https://www.census.gov/data /tables/2017/demo/popest/state-total.html; Adam Sowards, Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009), discusses some of the best recent studies of law and the environment, including Andrews, Managing the Environment; Scott Hamilton Dewey, Don’t Breathe the Air: Air Pollution and Environmental Politics, 1945–1970 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000); Eric Freyfogle, The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good (Washington, DC: Island Press / Shearwater Books, 2003); Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Arthur McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Paul Charles Milazzo, Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945–1972 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Ted Steinberg, Slide Mountain, or The Folly of Owning Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 39. Worster, “Freedom and Want,” 89–90. 40. Worster, “Freedom and Want,” 90. 41. Worster, “Freedom and Want,” 91. 42. For historians seeking a basic grounding in legal academics’ exposition of American environmental law’s basic principles, good starting points include George Cameron Coggins, Charles F. Wilkinson, and John D. Leshy, Federal Public Lands and Resources Law, 3rd ed. (Mineola, NY: Foundation Press, 1993); Robert V. Percival, Environmental Regulation: Law, Science, and Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992); and John-Mark Stensvaag, ed., Materials on Environmental Law (St. Paul, MN: West Group, 1999).

III

DOING ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY This blooming, buzzing, howling world of nature that surrounds us has always been a force in human life. It is so today, despite all our efforts to free ourselves from that dependency, and despite our frequent unwillingness to acknowledge our dependency until it is too late and a crisis is upon us. Environmental history aims to bring back into our awareness that significance of nature and, with the aid of modern science, to discover some fresh truths about ourselves and our past. —Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth” (1990) Environmental history ought to have a few ideas to offer the public, and those ideas ought to have a little conviction in them as well as reason and evidence. The historian should let people know what he cares about and encourage them to care about it too. —Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature (1993)

While his reputation was built on prizewinning monographs, Worster proved equally talented as an essayist. Over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, he wrote a number of influential essays that provided a theoretical and methodological framework for the budding field. Some of the most important of those essays—including the frequently cited “Appendix: Doing Environmental History” in The Ends of the Earth (1988)—centered on the practice of environmental history, offering what amounted to how-to guides for would-be environmental historians. The five essays in this section draw their inspiration from Worster’s efforts to this end. Neil Maher centers his essay on the iconic Whole Earth photograph, which activists and scholars alike have often credited with sparking the modern environmental movement. In teasing out its complicated history, Maher calls attention to the ways in which environmental historians might employ visual culture to complicate familiar narratives. Most environmental historians, he argues, employ images merely as window dressing for arguments drawn from conventional sources. Taking images seriously as one of humanity’s oldest methods of forging connections to the natural world, he suggests, opens up an entirely new set of source material that will help us probe the historical interplay between people and the rest of nature. In tracing the promise of historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) as an analytical tool, Sara Gregg, too, offers a methodological prescription for environmental history. Taking up recent studies that have employed new quantitative and spatial methods to revisit some of the foundational texts in environmental history, Gregg explores how HGIS might reshape some of our ideas about historical contingency and the use of evidence. In the process, she draws attention to issues of scale often neglected

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by environmental historians. The remaining essays urge environmental historians to take up understudied and promising lines of research. Edmund Russell’s essay does so by encouraging historians to turn their attention to the still fraught intersection of the history of science and environmental history. Rather than focus on the usual suspects, however, Russell asks historians to think more broadly. Chemistry and astronomy, microbiology and neuroscience, physics and statistics should matter as much to environmental historians, he maintains, as ecology and evolutionary biology. Such subjects merely await the attention of environmental historians willing to engage the sciences and ask big questions of them. Brian Drake and Lisa Brady follow Worster’s lead by pointing to ways in which an environmental lens sheds new light on ostensibly familiar subjects. By calling attention to the ways in which environmental history might enrich our understanding of the Civil War, Drake asks environmental historians to speak more clearly to the prevailing historiographical currents of American history writ large. In doing so, he suggests some ways in which environmental history might reshape the way in which we frame the war by calling attention to the fact that it revolutionized Americans’ interactions with the natural world on a number of fronts, with far-reaching consequences that endured long after Appomattox. Brady, too, turns to military conflict as an example of the ways in which environmental historians can better engage their peers in other historical subdisciplines. Taking examples from twentieth-century conflicts—World War I and the Korean War—Brady seeks to enrich our understanding of warfare by undercutting a purely anthropocentric understanding of the past. Approaching war through the lens environmental history, she argues, brings to light previously neglected forces, reshapes our understanding of the peace that follows conflicts, and shows how the autonomous world of nature continues to surprise us.

13 Whole Earth without Borders Earth Photographs, Space Data, and the Importance of Visual Culture within Environmental History Neil M. Maher

B

ack in 2010 I was fortunate enough to interview Donald Worster for a special issue of the Radical History Review on transnational environments. While our discussion, like Worster’s interests, ranged far and wide, the interview focused on many of the important issues he raised in his seminal 1982 essay “World without Borders,” which encouraged environmental historians to question our reliance on the nation state and national boundaries. In both the essay and our 2010 interview, Worster lauded efforts to cultivate a more global environmental history, one that followed nature across political borders, but he nevertheless raised important concerns about such an approach. “Take that picture of Mother Earth hanging on the wall,” he explained in the interview. “It, too, can become a way of simplifying the earth.” Worster then went on to imagine an astronaut floating in outer space who believes his or her view can encompass the entire planet. “But when you get down to the level of the individual, the world may look different—more complicated than you ever imagined.”1 What follows is an attempt to bring Worster’s astronaut back down to Earth. Or, to put it another way, to “take that picture of Mother Earth hanging on the wall” and analyze its global dimensions without simplifying it. Doing so entails first examining the early history of the Whole Earth image, which many environmental historians will be surprised to learn, did not immediately appeal to environmentalists. I then trace how Whole Earth became the poster child for the environmental movement, paying particular attention to the role played by both global nature as well as technology in space and back down on Earth. The essay concludes by arguing that Whole Earth’s more complicated history illustrates the benefits not only of following nature beyond national borders, as Worster argued decades ago, but also of integrating visual culture more fully into the methodological future of our field.

22727 before Whole Earth Whole Earth’s origin story begins in late February 1966, when twenty-eightyear-old Stewart Brand placed one hundred micrograms of LSD on his tongue, climbed onto the rooftop of his San Francisco apartment, and took

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Figure 13.1. Earth photograph, taken from ATS 3, 1967. Courtesy of NASA.

in the view. “The buildings were not parallel,” Brand remembered later. They diverged from one another slightly “because the earth curved under them, under me, and all of us; it closed on itself.” From his high state he could see for the very first time that the world was not flat and endless, but rather round and finite. Before descending, from both the roof and his trip, Brand decided that a color photograph of the planet from space could provide others with a similar perspective. “The Earth complete, tiny, adrift,” he thought, “and no one would ever perceive things the same way.”2 To encourage this view, the next day Brand printed up several hundred buttons with the simple question “Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?,” and began hawking them for a quarter apiece to college students at Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. He also mailed them to members of Congress, United States and Russian scientists, and to Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. Soon Brand’s buttons began appearing on shirt collars and lapels around Washington, DC, and, most importantly, at NASA. Six years later Apollo 17 astronauts snapped 22727, a photograph of the entire Earth free from solar shadow. “And that,” Brand argued years later, “helped spawn the environmental movement.”3

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Figure 13.2. Earth photograph, taken from Apollo 8, 1968. Courtesy of NASA.

Many environmental historians have agreed with Brand.4 So, too, have environmentalists. David Brower, for instance, also credited the photograph that became known as Whole Earth for giving birth to environmentalism because it symbolically depicted an imperiled planet in dire need of ecological stewardship. For nearly a decade the first executive director of the Sierra Club travelled the country giving what he called “The Sermon,” a public talk at colleges, local community centers, and once in an actual cathedral, that outlined what he called his environmentalist “religion.” After recounting the six days of genesis and evolution, Brower focused his homily on the recent birth of environmentalism by holding up NASA’s Whole Earth photograph. “This is the sudden insight from Apollo,” he told his audiences throughout the 1970s. “We see through the eyes of the astronauts how fragile our life is.”5 Brand, at least, should have known better than to credit Whole Earth with jumpstarting the modern environmental movement. He knew only too well that photographic images of the entire planet already existed, and back in 1968 had even published one such image on the front and back covers of the inaugural edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, his publication for the counterculture that listed and reviewed small-scale and alternative

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Figure 13.3. Earth photograph, taken from Apollo 17, 1972. Courtesy of NASA.

technologies. As Brand explained to his readers, that earlier photo was the “first full-Earth picture,” originating from a high-resolution color television film shot in November 1967 from NASA’s Advanced Technology Satellite (ATS).6 Photographs of portions of the Earth from space had an even longer history, beginning in 1962 when John Glenn purchased a Minolta 35 mm camera off the shelf of a Cocoa Beach, Florida, drugstore and used it to take pictures of our planet through the small window of his Mercury spaceship.7 Every astronaut crew since has brought along a camera and snapped photographs of Earth from space. These early Earth photographs did not sit on a dusty shelf in a dark corner of the space agency’s Washington, DC, headquarters. Rather, the public relations team at NASA immediately circulated these global selfies during the late 1960s to local and national newspapers and magazines, to television networks, and even sold them at a dollar a piece to the public in eleven-by-fourteen-inch lithographs.8 Corporations also capitalized on the images. “We gaze downward through the lens and from the vehicles of technology seeing our planet from the perspectives provided by science,”

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explained an Ashland Oil & Refining Company advertisement titled “The View from Outer Space.” The ad, which appeared in Fortune magazine in 1969 and reproduced NASA’s ATS Earth photograph taken two years prior, concluded with the self-congratulatory tagline “we count ourselves in this effort.”9 NASA even provided photographs of Earth from space for the reels of the popular View-Master 3-D stereoscope.10 During the late 1960s, then, it was nearly impossible for most Americans to avoid encountering photographs of the entire Earth from space, and quite difficult for them to distinguish these earlier images from the nearly identical Whole Earth photograph captured by Apollo 17 in 1972 (see figs. 13.1, 13.2, and 13.3). These early incarnations of Whole Earth rarely sparked concern for a polluted planet from within the blossoming environmental movement.11 Instead, a different idea infused early public discussions of these images of Earth from space. On Christmas Day in 1968, for example, just hours after Apollo 8 astronauts beamed back live images of the Earth onto television sets worldwide, the New York Times published a short essay titled “Riders on the Earth” written by the Pulitzer prizewinning poet Archibald MacLeish. “Men’s conception of themselves and of each other has always depended on their notion of the earth,” MacLeish began. He then argued that gazing back at the Earth during Apollo 8’s mission had altered this conception once more. “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats,” he explained, “is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”12 Readers throughout the world connected deeply with the essay, and the images of Earth that sparked it, and the American press quickly responded in the days, weeks, and months that followed by reproducing it often, almost always accompanied by a photograph of Earth from space.13 Soon MacLeish’s idea of worldwide harmony dominated the cultural meaning of Apollo 8’s Earth images and those that followed.14 Looking back at Earth from space in the late 1960s meant global unity, not planetary environmental concern. This cultural disconnect between early photographs of Earth from space and environmentalism continued for the next two decades, and is quite evident in the movement’s visual culture. Earth Day promotional materials are a prime example. To promote the first Earth Day held on April 22, 1970, organizers drew on a handful of visual symbols that they emblazoned on posters, flyers, pamphlets, and T-shirts. Withering trees, traffic congestion under polluted skies, and a garbage-strewn landscape all appeared prominently.15 Yet it was the gas mask, worn by mothers pushing baby carriages in parks, by young men trying desperately to sniff spring flowers, and by an Earth depicted by a schoolroom globe, that emerged as the undisputed poster-child

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Figure 13.4. Earth Day 1990 logo. Author’s collection.

for Earth Day 1970.16 That the gas-masked Earth was represented by a classroom globe is important; in only a small portion of these promotional materials and photographic coverage of the first Earth Day did an image of the Earth appear, and none included a photograph of the planet from space. This scarcity of Earth photographs adorning Earth Day promotional materials continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s. During the celebration’s tenth anniversary, which drew far less participants than its 1970 counterpart, images referencing the OPEC oil crisis, the Three Miles Island nuclear accident, and endangered species such as whales dominated Earth Day’s visual imagery.17 It was not until the 1990 Earth Day celebration, almost twenty years after Apollo 17 captured 22727, that the Earth photographed from space became a popular Earth Day symbol, appearing on enormous flags unfurled at rallies in Washington, DC, on smaller posters advertising the celebration in small towns across Middle America, and even as the official logo of Earth Day 1990 (see fig. 13.4).18 As the early history of NASA’s Earth photographs illustrates, Brand’s belief that Whole Earth launched the environmental movement is more flashback fiction than history. While such photographs from beyond Earth orbit did eventually become important icons for the movement, even late into the

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1980s environmentalists had yet to embrace Whole Earth and similar photographs from space as powerful political weapons in their battle for a cleaner planet. How, then, did 22727 become Whole Earth?

Making Whole Earth Although environmentalists were slow to accept NASA’s photographs of the whole Earth, environmental scientists had been trying to study the whole Earth since the early post–World War II period. Such efforts began back in 1957, when thousands of earth scientists from 65 nations joined together for the International Geophysical Year (IGY), a United Nations–sponsored program of cooperative experiments aimed at studying the Earth as a “single physical system.” To accomplish this, IGY scientists collected data from more than 4,000 research stations worldwide as well as from the world’s first two orbiting satellites, Sputnik and Explorer 1, the latter of which the United States developed specifically for the IGY program. Although the IGY was unable to obtain a truly worldwide data set—the southern hemisphere was sporadically covered by the program’s collection efforts—its unprecedented gathering of regional scientific information illustrated to researchers worldwide the necessity of both orbiting satellites to collect, and computer models to process, global data.19 During the 1970s NASA was the key agency in developing both of these technologies. Although the space agency had begun collecting regional meteorological data through its Earth-orbiting satellites, including NASA’s ATS program initiated in 1967 and its Television-Infrared Observance Satellite (TIROS) launched in 1969, such efforts took a decidedly global turn in August 1971 when NASA’s Langley Research Center convened fifty Earth scientists from both within and beyond the space agency for a workshop on the possibilities of using satellite sensing technologies to detect gaseous, liquid, and particulate contaminants in the Earth’s air and water.20 The conference’s final report, titled Remote Measurements of Pollution, concluded that Earth-orbiting satellites could provide global data regarding pollution “that can not be obtained by any other means.”21 Administrators at NASA responded by developing the final satellite in their Nimbus series of orbiting weather forecasters as a so-called “pollution patrol” satellite.22 Launched in 1978, Nimbus 7 transported eight highly complex sensors, four of which measured atmospheric pollution, around the entire Earth every six days.23 While the Stratospheric and Mesospheric Sounder (SAMS) monitored concentrations of water, methane, carbon monoxide, and nitric oxide in the atmosphere, the Stratospheric Aerosol Measurement (SAMS-II) sensor determined the distribution of stratospheric particulates. Complementing this pair of air pollution technologies were two instruments developed

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Figure 13.5. Cover from Remote Measurement of Pollution, SP-285 (Washington, DC: NASA, 1971).

specifically to measure atmospheric ozone. Engineers and scientists at NASA designed the Limb Irradiance Monitor of the Stratosphere (LIMS) to calculate vertical gas concentrations of water vapor, ozone, nitric acid, and nitrogen dioxide in an attempt to determine if the latter two caused ozone depletion, while the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) measured the amount of ozone in a 30-by-125-mile-wide column of air projecting from the Earth’s surface to the top of the atmosphere.24 As NASA later explained, Nimbus 7 was “the single most significant source of experimental data from Earth’s orbit” relating to atmospheric processes.25 Although global in scope, the data collected by Nimbus 7, like all satellite data, was problematic; it was overwhelmingly large, sometimes inaccurate, poorly calibrated, and often incomplete when clouds made it difficult to “see” through to the Earth’s atmosphere. To make this data function as global, during the late 1960s the space agency also began developing computer models to “smooth out” these inconsistencies.26 At the vanguard of such efforts was NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which since its creation in 1961 served as the space agency’s theoretical modeling and

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Figure 13.6. BAS ozone depletion graph. Figure 2 in J. C. Faran, B. G. Gardiner, and J. D. Shanklin, “Large Losses of Total Ozone in Antarctica Reveal Seasonal CIO x/NOx Interaction,” Nature 315 (May 16, 1985). Courtesy of Nature Publishing Group.

data analysis center. Beginning in the late 1960s and lasting through the early 1970s, Goddard took a leading role in the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP), an international research effort to create global data sets that could be used by scientists to assess pollution of the Earth’s atmosphere. While NASA’s Nimbus satellites gathered such data, Goddard computer scientists working on GARP-generated mathematical models to assess this data’s accuracy and to determine if and how it could be smoothed into global data sets. In early 1979 NASA tested such models through GARP’s Global Weather Experiment, which involved more than a half dozen satellites gathering data continuously for two sixty-day periods. The result, explained one space historian, was the world’s first “global, quality-controlled, extensive meteorological dataset.”27 During the mid to late 1980s earth scientists joined NASA’s satellite data with computer models to transform two local scientific discoveries into the most important global environmental issues of the post–World War II era.

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Figure 13.7. NASA ozone hole, 1985. Courtesy of Pawan Bhartia. Bhartia’s image appeared in black and white in the New York Times on November 7, 1985, and in Chemical Education in May 1987.

The detection of both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming each began on the local level with regional data. Whereas scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) used ozone data gathered in the early 1980s from two research stations within the Antarctic region, Charles Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography relied on atmospheric readings of carbon dioxide taken between 1957 and 1971 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.28 When both teams of researchers published their findings in the late 1970s and early 1980s, few beyond the scientific community noticed.29 Earth scientists within NASA, however, were not only alarmed by such findings but took immediate steps to deepen the space agency’s involvement in this important scientific research.30 Six months after the BAS team published its ozone research in Nature magazine, for example, NASA used data collected by sensors on Nimbus 7 to corroborate such research. “Satellite observations have confirmed a progressive deterioration in the earth’s protective ozone layer above Antarctica,” explained the New York Times to its readers on November 7, 1985.31 Goddard’s director, Jim Hansen, took similar steps regarding

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global warming by directing his team to develop highly sophisticated computer models that not only confirmed Keeling’s observations in Hawaii but also broadened such research to cover the entire planet. The global warming projected for the next one hundred years, Hansen warned in several papers published during the mid-1980s, “is of almost unprecedented magnitude.”32 Researchers at NASA not only verified these local scientific discoveries through the collection and modeling of worldwide data, but also helped scientists transform these data sets into signifiers of global environmental crises. Earth scientists accomplished this by embracing the very visual culture that environmentalists had been overlooking since the late 1960s. Beginning in the early 1970s, for example, scientists within NASA and beyond began by “covering” their data detailing worldwide environmental degradation with images of the Earth from space. The space agency began this practice on the cover of Remote Measurement of Pollution, the report from its groundbreaking 1971 conference on the uses of satellites for environmental monitoring, which depicted an image of the full Earth encircled by several orbiting satellites (see fig. 13.5). Other scientists followed suit. The important 1971 Study of Man’s Impact on Climate, a report written by more than thirty scientists in preparation for the 1972 United Nations’ Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the Club of Rome’s 1972 classic The Limits to Growth, and numerous articles and books written during the 1970s and early 1980s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis on their Gaia hypothesis, all sported photographs of the Earth from space on their covers.33 During the mid-1980s scientists not only covered their global data with images of Earth from space, but also began covering images reminiscent of Whole Earth with global data. Such efforts were most obvious with respect to the ozone crisis. The BAS team that initially published its findings in a 1985 issue of Nature depicted their data in a graph revealing a local decline in Antarctic ozone (see fig. 13.6). When later that year NASA scientists at Goddard confirmed such findings with the aid of Nimbus satellites and computer models, they instead illustrated their global data with Whole Earth in mind. First, Goddard’s computer modelers “smoothed” the widespread variation in ozone satellite data by assigning several false colors to particular value ranges within the data set. NASA’s scientists further simplified this data by connecting points of equal value with contour lines to give the illusion of continuous measurement across geographic space. When NASA combined these false colors and contours in computers, the result was a Whole Earth–like image layered with global data that was more readable, understandable, and alarming for the lay public (see fig. 13.7).34 The result was also a very different environmental crisis. Whereas only a few media sources covered the BAS team’s findings regarding local ozone “depletion” in the Antarctic, six months later the New

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Figure 13.8. Global temperature anomalies from January 2016. This image was developed by the NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio and posted on its website in March 2016. It is available in color online at https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4438. Courtesy of NASA.

York Times immediately ran a story on NASA’s research that for the first time reframed the issue as a global crisis involving an ozone “hole.”35 Scientists at NASA took similar action regarding global warming. While Keeling’s upward sloping graph tracked rising temperatures at Mauna Loa throughout the 1970s without public alarm, from the mid-1980s on NASA began confirming such findings by publishing Whole Earth–like images created from satellite data and computer modeling that caused an environmental firestorm. Once again NASA smoothed its incomplete and inconsistent global data by assigning false colors to particular value ranges within its data set. The cultural impact of such images was obvious to climate scientists as well as the public. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for instance, in a September 2013 press conference in Stockholm, Sweden, presented to the gathered press an image that could have been mistaken for Whole Earth, except that the “big blue marble” appeared to be burning. “This is the face of the surface of our planet if you look at the atmosphere,” argued the panel’s lead scientist. “It is red. The world has been warming.” Scientists at NASA have created similar images since (see fig. 13.8).36

Whole Earth without Borders and Visual Culture within Environmental History When it came to looking back down at Earth from space, Worster thus knew better than Brand. The history of “that picture of Mother Earth hanging on

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the wall” was, in Brand’s telling, not only a simplification of the Earth but also of the movement that eventually embraced it. For Brand, and for many environmental historians who followed, Whole Earth must have become an environmental icon for no other reason than it appeared around the same time as the burgeoning environmental movement.37 But when you “get down” to a deeper level, as Worster suggested back in 2010, the world does “look different—more complicated than you ever imagined.”38 So does Whole Earth, which rose to environmental prominence not only due to the cultural power of this particular photograph, but also because of the scientific legitimacy of satellite data and theoretical computer models. Whole Earth, in other words, was constructed over time by grassroots environmentalists as well as NASA engineers, environmental scientists, and the global environment itself. The result is a more complex icon for what one might call Whole Earth environmentalism. The history of this particular photograph also suggests a more fundamental role for visual culture within environmental history. Images have always been central to communicating people’s connection to nature. From the Lascaux cave drawings of horses produced more than 17,000 years ago to recent tourist postcards of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, visual culture offers a perspective into the human-nature relationship not found in written sources. Societies throughout time have used images to explain natural processes, to communicate ideas about the environment, and quite often to mark divisions between nature and culture. Yet images do not simply reflect historical reality; they also influence how people think about, and interact with, the natural world. The great majority of environmental historians have unfortunately failed to see visual culture in this light, and instead use it as window dressing for arguments made through more traditional source materials. This history of Whole Earth, I hope, will push practitioners in our field to think more analytically about the way paintings, photographs, advertisements, and even computer-generated social media dramatically shape our relationship to the natural environment.

Notes 1. David Kinkela and Neil M. Maher, “Revisiting a ‘World without Borders’: An Interview with Donald Worster,” Radical History Review 107 (Spring 2010), 104. 2. My description of this event is based on two of Stewart Brand’s own personal accounts. See Stewart Brand, “Why Haven’t We Seen the Whole Earth?,” in The Sixties: The Decade Remembered Now, by the People Who Lived It Then, ed. Lynda Rosen Obst (New York: Random House / Rolling Stone Press Book, 1977), 168–70; and Stewart Brand, “The First Whole Earth Photograph,” in

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Earth’s Answer: Explorations of Planetary Culture at the Lindisfarne Conferences, ed. Michael Katz, William P. Marsh, and Gail Gordon Thompson (New York: Harper & Row / Lindisfarne Books, 1977), 184–89. NASA distributed the Whole Earth photograph to the national and international press just twelve hours after Apollo 17’s splashdown on December 19, 1972. 3. Claudia Dreifus, “Voices: 7/20/69,” New York Times, July 14, 2009, D2. An astronaut supposedly told Brand that the buttons were being worn at NASA headquarters. For a reference to this, see Vicki Goldberg, Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993), 54. 4. The historical literature on the importance of NASA’s Whole Earth photograph, as well as its earlier counterpart titled Earthrise, on ecological thought and environmental politics is extensive. See especially Denis Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84 (June 1994): 270–94; Goldberg, Power of Photography, 52–57; Wolfgang Sachs, “An Ambiguous Modern Icon,” Ecologist 24 (September/October 1994): 170–75; Yaakov Jerome Garb, “Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings on Contemporary Earth Imagery,” in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), 264–78; Holly Henry and Amanda Taylor, “Re-thinking Apollo: Envisioning Environmentalism in Space,” supplement, Sociological Review 57, no. S1 (May 2009): 190–203; Sheila Jasanoff, “Image and Imagination: The Formation of Global Environmental Consciousness,” in Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, ed. Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996): 309–36; Nina Edwards Anker and Peder Anker, “Viewing the Earth from Without or from Within,” in “Scales of the Earth,” ed. El Hadi Jazairy, New Geographies, no. 4 (2011): 89–94; and Robin Kelsey, “Reverse Shot: Earthrise and Blue Marble in the American Imagination,” in “Scales of the Earth,” ed. El Hadi Jazairy, New Geographies, no. 4 (2011): 10–16. On the environmental history of the Earthrise photograph in particular, see also Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 5. David Brower, quoted in John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 80. 6. As editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue, Brand discusses this image in Stewart Brand, ed., The Last Whole Earth Catalogue (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1971), 1. For another description of this 1967 ATS photograph, see Goldberg, Power of Photography, 54. 7. On Glenn’s camera purchase, see Ron Schick and Julia Van Haaften, The View From Space: American Astronaut Photography, 1962–1972 (New York: C. N. Potter, 1988), 8 and 11.

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8. NASA released to the public numerous examples of photographs of Earth from space that predated Whole Earth in 1972. For examples from the Mercury mission, see Manned Spacecraft Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Results of the First United States Manned Orbital Space Flight, February 20, 1962 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1962), 126–30; and “Sunset on Earth Seen from Space, Photographed by Scott Carpenter,” Life, June 8, 1962, 24–28. For examples from the Lunar Orbiter, see “Lunar View of a Socked-In Earth,” Life, September 9, 1966, 347. For examples from Apollo 8, see John Noble Wilford, “Astronauts Give Television Show on Way to Moon,” New York Times, December 23, 1968, 1; John Noble Wilford, “Apollo 8 Crew Prepares to Land in Pacific Today; Sends Pictures of Earth,” New York Times, December 27, 1968, 1; and the cover of “The Moon Age,” a special issue of Newsweek, July 7, 1969. The Washington Post’s front-page coverage of Apollo 8 included a photograph of a partially shaded Earth that closely resembled the Whole Earth shot taken during Apollo 17. See “View from 240,000 Miles out in Space,” Washington Post, December 31, 1968, A1. For similar photographs from Apollo 10, see Walter Sullivan, “NASA Releases Additional Photos Taken by Astronauts,” New York Times, May 30, 1969, 1. For examples of local newspapers printing NASA photographs of the Earth from space, see “Apollo 8 Photograph Shows Both Sides of Atlantic,” Rome (GA) News-Tribune, December 30. 1968, 5; “We Look Brilliant and Splendid,” Spartanburg (NC) Herald, December 24, 1968, 1; “Half-Earth Blue Delight to Apollo 8,” St. Petersburg Times, December 31, 1968, 1; and “Apollo Astronaut’s View of Earth,” Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), December 30, 1968, 16. 9. “The View from Outer Space,” Ashland Oil & Refining Company advertisement, Fortune, August 1, 1969, back cover. For examples of companies using Earthrise to promote their role in developing space technology, see “Peace on Earth Seems So Simple from 251,000 Miles Away,” McDonnell Douglas advertisement, New York Times, October 10, 1973, 43; “Leading in Communications towards a Bright Tomorrow,” AT&T advertisement, Fortune, May 15, 1969, 271; “The Programming Skills Man Used to Conquer Space Now Also Help Control His Roadways in the Sky,” IMB advertisement, Aviation Week, November 13, 1972, 43; “Congratulations, Apollo 17: The Mission’s Accomplished, but It’s Only the Beginning,” Garrett Corporation advertisement, Aviation Week, January 1, 1973, 6; “Growth through Change,” Bliss & Laughlin Industries advertisement, Fortune, May 15, 1969, 340; “We Have Our Own Idea of How Far Away This Really Is,” Mannesmann AG advertisement, Fortune, August 15, 1969, back cover; “What Made Neil Armstrong Sure He’d Come Back Home?” Knight Newspapers Inc. advertisement, Fortune, October 15, 1970, 38–39; and “Welcome Back, Astronauts. We Were Proud to Give You a Lift,” Pillsbury ad for “Space Food Sticks,” Milwaukee Journal, July 25, 1969,

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13. For similar examples of company ads depicting Whole Earth for similar purposes, see “What The World Needs Now . . . ,” American Cyanamid advertisement, Forbes , October 15, 1973, 7; and “We’d Like to Make One Thing Perfectly Clear,” Combustion Engineering Inc. advertisement, Personal Business, April 7, 1972, 7. 10. On the sale of these Earth photographs to the general public, see NASA, “Lunar Surface Photos Available,” news release no. 69:83Ja, August 18, 1969, folder OA-250416-01, Apollo Project, NASA Releases, 1969, Space History Series, Technical Reference Files, Archives Division, National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC. I personally own a View-Master reel that depicts the Earth from space. See “NASA’s Apollo Project Moon Landing 1969,” View-Master reel no. B 6632, Sawyer’s Inc., Portland, Oregon. I would like to thank Emily Greenwald for giving me this View-Master reel as a gift. 11. Few newspapers initially linked these images of Earth from space to the environmental crisis of the late 1960s. For exceptions, see “Another Giant Step,” Christian Science Monitor, December 28–30, 1968, 14; and “Beneficent Nature,” letter to the editor, New York Times, January 7, 1969, 40. 12. Archibald MacLeish, “A Reflection: Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold,” New York Times, December 25, 1968, 1. 13. For instance, in May 1969 National Geographic quoted MacLeish’s essay accompanied by a color centerfold reproduction of Earthrise. See “A Most Fantastic Voyage,” National Geographic, May 1969, 593–631. For examples of local newspapers reproducing the essay, see “To See the Earth as It Truly Is . . . ,” Morning Record (Meriden, CT), December 31, 1968, 6; “Now, Men May Be Brothers Riding Earth,” Miami News, December 26, 1968, 1; “Man Has New Idea of Earth,” Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), December 24, 1968, 11. 14. Denis Cosgrove argues similarly that Earthrise and MacLeish’s essay both represent the idea of a unified world. See Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions,” 283. That Earthrise promoted the idea of a shared Earth was also evident in media coverage of MacLeish’s essay. For examples, see “Apollo 8 Gives Man a New Idea of Himself,” Kansas City Star, December 26, 1968; and “Seeing Earth as a Whole,” Sunday Denver Post, December 29, 1968. 15. The organizers of the first Earth Day, a nonprofit group called Environmental Action, never archived promotional materials for the first Earth Day, and the Earth Day Network, which currently organizes the annual event, is also unaware of any archived promotional material from the first Earth Day in 1970. To trace Earth Day’s visual culture, I therefore relied on historical photo galleries documenting the events of Earth Day 1970 collected by several organizations, including National Geographic, Boston public radio station WGBH and its American Experience history series, the archive at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, WWLP (an NBC-affiliated television station

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in western Massachusetts), and the Wall Street Journal. I also conducted an extensive online image search of posters, flyers, and pamphlets from Earth Day 1970, as well as of media photographs capturing the events of the day, in an effort to further identify visual trends in the event’s iconography. This search resulted in more than 100 images, only 6 of which depicted the Earth in any form. For access to these Earth Day 1970 photo galleries, see “PHOTOS: The First Earth Day—Bell-Bottoms and Gas Masks,” National Geographic Daily News, accessed July 10, 2014, http://news.nationalgeographic.com /news/2009/04/photogalleries/first-earth-day-1970-pictures/; “Photo Gallery: Earth Day across America,” WGBH Boston Public Radio, accessed July 10, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/photo-gallery /earthdays/; “Earth Day Memories: A Photo Gallery of 1970s Activism at Eco U,” University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, accessed July 10, 2014, http://news. uwgb.edu/multimedia/photos/04/03/earth-day-memories/; “First Earth Day in 1970,” WWLP public television, accessed July 10, 2014, http://interactives.wwlp. com/photomojo/gallery/11922/225372/first-earth-day-in-1970/gas-masksmagnolia-blossums/; and “Earth Day over the Years,” Wall Street Journal, accessed September 14, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405270230 3425504577351472739743222. 16. On the prominence of gas mask iconography during Earth Day 1970, see Finis Dunaway, “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism,” American Quarterly 60 (March 2008): 67–99. On the photograph of a masked man trying to sniff flowers, see Timothy Dumas, “An Earth Day Icon, Unmasked,” Smithsonian.com, accessed July 10, 2014, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/40th-anniversary /an-earth-day-icon-unmasked-607188/. 17. To access the visual culture of Earth Day 1980, I undertook similar research as explained above in note 15. The only Earth Day 1980 materials depicting the planet that I could locate included a poster from the city of Denver with a drawing of several hands holding up a globe, a poster from New York City depicting a drawn heart-shaped globe, and an Earth Day poster that depicted several individuals stretching out a net to catch a falling Earth. I was also able to find a photograph of an individual wearing a paper-mache Earth for a head. 18. For examples of Whole Earth appearing on Earth Day 1990 flags, see the iconic photograph of the celebration on the mall in Washington, DC, at http://www.pollutionissues.com/Co-Ea/Earth-Day.html (accessed September 14, 2015). For examples of Whole Earth–like images appearing on Earth Day 1990 posters, see http://monsantoblog.com/2011/04/22/thinking-about-dirt/ (accessed September 14, 2015). Adam Rome discusses this logo, but not its deeper history associated with Whole Earth, in his book on Earth Day. See

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Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day (New York: Hill & Wang, 2014), 277. The image even appeared in Jim Henson’s public service announcement with Kermit the Frog singing “Bein’ Green” from within a Whole Earth–like set, see http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Earth_Day_1990 (accessed September 14, 2015). 19. On the IGY’s impact on scientific collection of global data through orbiting satellites and computer modeling, see Paul N. Edwards, “Representing the Global Atmosphere: Computer Models, Data, and Knowledge about Climate Change,” in Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, ed. Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 31–65; Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 202–7; Erik Conway, Atmospheric Science at NASA: A History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 16–26; and Roger Launius, “Toward the Poles: A Historiography of Scientific Exploration during the International Polar Years and the International Geophysical Year,” in Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years, ed. Roger Launius, James Rodger Fleming, and David H. Devorkin (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 47–81. 20. NASA originally developed weather satellites for Earth from technology used to assess the chemical and atmospheric composition of nearby planets. On this history, see Conway, Atmospheric Science at NASA, 94–122. On NASA retooling such technology to assess weather back on Earth, see Conway, Atmospheric Science at NASA, 5, 27–49. 21. This report was published as National Aeronautic and Space Administration, Remote Measurement of Pollution, SP-285 (Washington, DC: NASA, 1971), 1 and 5. For a description of this conference, see Ellis E. Remsberg, “Remote Measurement of Pollution—A 40-Year Langley Retrospective: Part II—Aerosols and Clouds” (NASA/TM-2012-217578, NASA, Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia, 2012). 22. Conway, Atmospheric Science at NASA, 141. 23. On NIMBUS 7 being the technological lynchpin to NASA’s ability to produce data that could be used to construct, through computer modeling, a global data set, see Conway, Atmospheric Science at NASA, 63. 24. On the pollution instruments designed into Nimbus 7, see “Nimbus-7,” Earth Observing Portal, accessed June 10, 2014, https://directory.eoportal.org /web/eoportal/satellite-missions/n/nimbus-7; “Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer-Earth Probe (TOMS-EP),” NASA, accessed June 10, 2014, http:// eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/missions/total-ozone-mapping-spectrometer-earth-probe; and Conway, Atmospheric Science at NASA, 142–44. 25. On Nimbus 7, see “Nimbus-7.”

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26. For an explanation of the incompleteness of global satellite data sets, see Edwards, “Representing the Global Atmosphere.” 27. On NASA’s role in GARP, see Conway, Atmospheric Science at NASA, 65–93. 28. On the local nature of early ozone research, see Sebastian Vincent Grevsmühl, “The Creation of Global Imaginaries: The Antarctic Ozone Hole and the Isoline Tradition in the Atmospheric Sciences,” in Image Politics of Climate Change: Visualizations, Imaginations, Documentations, ed. Brigit Schneider and Thomas Nocke (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 36. On the local context of early global warming research, see Joshua Howe, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 41. 29. The BAS team published their findings in J. C. Faran, B. G. Gardiner, and J. D. Shanklin, “Large Losses of Total Ozone in Antarctica Reveal Seasonal CIOx/NOx Interaction,” Nature 315 (May 16, 1985): 207–10. Charles Keeling promoted his research regarding rising levels of CO2 around the Manoa Loa Observatory in numerous publications during this period. See especially, C. D. Keeling, “The Concentration and Isotopic Abundances of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere,” Tellus 12 (May 1960): 200–203; and Charles D. Keeling, “The Influence of Mauna Loa Observatory on the Development of Atmospheric CO2 Research,” in Mauna Loa Observatory: A 20th Anniversary Report, ed. John Miller (Washington, DC: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 1978), 35–54. 30. NASA scientists were understandably alarmed because their own satellites, which had not been calibrated finely enough to identify the slight increases recorded by the BAS team, missed the ozone hole. On this embarrassing situation within NASA, see Grevsmühl, “Creation of Global Imaginaries,” 34. 31. Walter Sullivan, “Low Ozone Level Found Above Antarctica,” New York Times, November 7, 1985, B21. 32. On James Hansen’s efforts at GISS to model climate change, see Conway, Atmospheric Science at NASA, 199–206. J. Hansen et al., “Climate Impact on Increasing Carbon Dioxide,” Science, August 28, 1981, 957–66; and J. Hansen et al., “Climate Sensitivity: Analysis of Feedback Mechanisms,” in Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity, ed. James E. Hansen and Taro Takahashi, Geophysical Monograph 29 (Washington, DC: American Geophysical Union, 1984), 130–63. 33. See National Aeronautic and Space Administration, Remote Measurement of Pollution, 1 and 5. For a description of this conference, see Remsberg, “Remote Measurement of Pollution,” cover; Inadvertent Climate Modification: Report of the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate (SMIC) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), cover; and James Lovelock, “More on Gaia and the End of Gaia,”

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Coevolution Quarterly 31 (Fall 1981): 36; and James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (London: Oxford University Press, 1987), cover. 34. On this approach by NASA, see Grevsmühl, “Creation of Global Imaginaries,” 37–47. 35. Sullivan, “Low Ozone.” 36. For a description of this press conference, see Birgit Schneider and Thomas Nocke, introduction to Schneider and Nocke, Image Politics of Climate Change, 1. 37. One exception is Sheila Jasanoff’s essay “Image and Imagination.” While Jasanoff also argues that Whole Earth and similar images of the planet from space became culturally powerful gradually, she argues that it was a variety of past cultural contexts—especially the emergence of a global environmental consciousness—that gave these images their power. In this essay I have tried to push past Jasonoff’s reliance on her rather fuzzy category of “culture” to pinpoint exactly what types of cultures caused this shift toward global environmental concern. Rather, it was specifically the material culture of space technology and earth science that transformed the visual culture of Earth from space into symbols of an imperiled planet, which in turn helped foster an environmentalism that embraced the whole Earth. 38. Kinkela and Maher, “Revisiting a ‘World without Borders,’ ” 104.

14 Beyond Stories Geospatial Influences on the Practice of Environmental History Sara M. Gregg

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onald Worster’s Dust Bowl exemplifies the work of the first generation of self-consciously environmental historians in its quest to fundamentally reinterpret familiar events by asking new questions about historical causality. Since the 1970s US historians have increasingly narrated environmental change by interrogating ideas about nature, examining the operations of agricultural and industrial ecosystems, and by seeking to understand the patterns in nature itself.1 Environmental history has forced the consideration of ecological factors within the discipline, challenging the once-dominant assumption that environmental conditions exercised only a marginal influence on political, social, and economic events. The effort to add a new category of analysis to the interpretation of historical events initially left little room for quantification, and narrative innovations drove the first forty years of scholarship. Recently, however, technological advances in geospatial analysis and big data capabilities have introduced new opportunities for studying environmental change at a range of temporal and geographical scales, promising to expand the interpretative potential of the field even further. This essay traces the evolution of the spatial humanities and distills its methods, signaling the paths that beckon as scholars build upon these foundations.2 This spatial turn in environmental history promises to use geospatial analysis to quantify and visualize environmental change over time, complementing the natural and social science methods that have driven methodological innovations in environmental history since the 1970s and 1980s.3 A cohort of researchers investigating the spatial dimensions of historical change provides models for returning to the material origins of environmental history and demonstrates the potential to historicize ecological problems by mapping the temporal and spatial aspect of landscape change.4 Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS) expand both the scope and scale of historical research, even as the method’s visibility within the field contrasts with its limited penetration in historical scholarship. Why is this the case? The start-up costs, technical literacy, and data management required for even a dissertation-sized HGIS project are daunting under the best of circumstances. With that in mind, it is worth investigating the primary benefits—and potential drawbacks—of developing this new research

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“language,”5 and historians confront several obstacles as they consider integrating spatial analysis into their research. This method requires the acquisition of new research skills, cultivating new collaborations, securing funding, and developing a data management protocol to support the investment of time and resources needed to sustain spatial inquiries. However, HGIS has the capacity to synthesize “archival work, cultural analysis, and historical interpretation with ecological inventories and GIS-based analyses,” offering both explicative force and analytical innovations.6

“Indispensable Aids”: Integrating Methods from the Spatial Humanities Environmental history emerged out of an interest in ecological change that by necessity was grounded in interdisciplinary methods,7 and many of the influential books in the field have borrowed theoretical frameworks from other disciplines.8 Much as the first environmental historians launched into a new area of inquiry with inspiration from elsewhere in the humanities and natural sciences, the new generation of spatial research represents the cutting edge of interdisciplinary thinking. Spatial methods are reshaping historical research, and environmental history will increasingly be influenced by a renewed attention to scale, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the use of digital techniques, including visualizations, that will complement narrative structure.9 First, while the choice of scale is an important framing device for all scholars, historians too rarely foreground it in their articulation of research problems. Geographical, temporal, and thematic framing often happens early in a project, prejudicing causal analysis even as scholars overlook the impact of these arbitrary boundaries. Scalar questions lay large in the framing of the early works of environmental history, as William Cronon’s New England, Alfred Crosby’s Neo-Europes, Carolyn Merchant’s Scientific Revolution, Richard White’s Island County, and Donald Worster’s Southern Plains each established a discrete landscape that privileged some categories of analysis while restricting others. “Each scale reveals some things while masking others,” White reminded readers of the Journal of American History as he reprised Henri Lefebvre in encouraging historians to think more critically about the production of space.10 The overt interrogation of the significance of scale will materially impact historical analysis, and contribute to an increasingly critical approach to both natural and political boundaries. HGIS is inherently collaborative work. No individual scholar can manage the archival research, database management, and mapping of even a small project without technical input and support. Research teams consist of historians, geographers, ecologists, and, importantly, programmers and technicians who converge, each contributing questions and ideas derived from

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diverse methodological frameworks. Much of the leading work in the spatial humanities has come out of research centers founded under the leadership of a researcher driven by a question that required investing in a new set of resources.11 Research groups often span campuses, if not the globe, so spatial projects have also come to rely on methodological transparency paired with detailed accountability and management processes. Project contributors must ensure the integrity of their relational databases and metadata while simultaneously maintaining open access to the research. Disadvantages revolve around the expense of developing and running a research project with multiple contributors, complex project hardware and software, and the oversight of data collection and analysis. A third key contribution of the spatial humanities lies in its focus on new forms of visualization to represent the movement of goods, ideas, and living things across space and time. Visualization offers not simply to map the patterns of historical change but also to illustrate movements of people and materials that are not easily narrated. The resulting product is often a means to a larger end, as Lynne Heasley explained, a method for detecting and making visible patterns across space and time, as well as a “rigorous mapping tool for visualizing alternative historical narratives” using a new a mode of analysis.12 Visualizations enable the researcher to conceptualize historical change and often illustrate patterns not otherwise visible using other methods. These visualizations are based upon the collection and analysis of historical data equivalent to a journal article or monograph, yet rarely fit into disciplinary expectations for research products.13 As a result, graduate students and untenured scholars—those most likely to experiment with new research methods—are often dissuaded from spatial analysis because of the challenges of developing the skills, the illegibility of the research process, and the difficulty of disseminating work products.14 Ultimately, however, significant interpretative advantages are gained through data visualization and mapping historical information. Early adopters of these methods within environmental history have illustrated the benefits of mapping historical information, and the following sections trace the burst of scholarship employing HGIS.

“The Time Has Come to Brush Away the Obscuring Mythologies”: Mapping Environmental Change through Geographic Information Systems The merger of visual and quantitative information emerged out of a fortuitous collaboration between innovators in the nascent computing industry and government officials seeking better mechanisms for cataloging natural resources during the early 1960s, when resource managers and software engineers came together to conceptualize the Canada Land Inventory (CLI).15

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The CLI merged existing aerial and satellite photographs into a format suited to aggregation and analysis, which became the Canada Geographic Information System—the first spatially referenced database.16 This “digital sandwich,” containing multiple levels of data, had breathtaking potential applications, and governments, businesses, and scholars soon adapted this technology to locate, merge, and analyze vast quantities of spatial data for a variety of purposes.17 Over the past half century, GIS has evolved hand in hand with other technological improvements in computing. Today, it is possible to synthesize elevation data and features of interest in order to replicate a three-dimensional “viewshed”; to manipulate tens of thousands of shipping or flight records and visualize the movement of products and people across the globe; or to dissect historical maps and merge them with other types of landscape data in order to generate new insights into historical events.18 A GIS converts discrete landscape features into “vectors”: points, lines, or area polygons that delineate cities, roads, or population in a format that mimics traditional maps. These can be combined with “raster” data represented on a continuous pixelated surface in which each pixel has assigned values, including temperature, elevation, vegetation, or soil type.”19 Various dimensions of data are then housed in a spatially referenced database, or geodatabase, which Stanford researcher Evgenia Shnayder described as serving “as a container that helps us organize, access, and analyze primary source data.” By creating a consistent system of categories, the geodatabase “bridges spatial and nonspatial temporal data to allow for analyses of discrete and seemingly unrelated primary sources,” and maintains control over project metadata, thus regulating “how researchers and the general public access our data and to maintain quality control in the project’s core.”20 The database provides a management system that not only converts polygons to data points, and links them to other polygons, but offers combinations of information “contain[ing] infinite dimensions of information.”21 One GIS practitioner explained that “[b]eyond the academy, GIS opened questions of vertigo-inspiring scale,” but this vertigo is magnified in historical analysis in accounting for the static temporal nature of maps, because “[a]s a visual representation, a GIS is like a palimpsest, which, instead of erasing the past to transcribe a new one merely absorbs all moments of the past into an image of the present.” When representing the transformation of place over time, historians struggle to situate temporal change alongside the other geographical information, seeking to capitalize on the opportunity to account for the fact that “in a map, the primary narrative device becomes not time, but space,” which explains the importance of visualizations for building a temporal dimension to geographical information.22 Historical maps can be

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georeferenced to align with the coordinates of an accurate modern map layer, with relevant features converted to vector or raster form, and then combined with data from other sources to interrogate features in spatial layers covering vast territories and time scales.23 Historians have been some of the academy’s late adopters of GIS, which is explained in part by the challenge of employing GIS to examine temporal change. Integrating the passage of time into the analysis of already complex geographies adds an additional complication, especially when boundaries or landscape features have been modified. A small cohort of historians joined historical geographers in adapting historical GIS in the late twentieth century. In 1995, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan initiated the Great Plains Population and Environment Project, exploring the relationship between demography and environment during the period from 1870 to 2000. This project brought together an interdisciplinary team to assess the transformations of land and communities at the regional level of the expansive Great Plains.24 Shortly thereafter, the Social Science History Association featured sessions on GIS at its 1998 and 1999 annual meetings, and Social Science History published a special issue, “Historical GIS: The Spatial Turn in Social Science History,” in autumn 2000. Articles from historical demography, migration studies, urban history, economics, and print culture studies demonstrated the many ways in which historical GIS was influencing scholarship in history and related disciplines.25 Other research projects and publications soon followed. The first, and to date, only, article featuring historical GIS published in the American Historical Review appeared only a few years later. William Thomas III and Edward Ayers’s “An Overview: The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” suggests how the comparative use of GIS offered new opportunities for resolving historical questions.26 The authors explained how researchers at the Virginia Center for Digital History’s Valley of the Shadow Project revisited the long-standing debate over the role of slavery in precipitating the Civil War. The team merged economic, demographic, and community data from the Shenandoah Valley, using Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia, to investigate trade relations and political decision-making. HGIS facilitated the systematic analysis of economic patterns, transportation networks, and the exchange of information, and demonstrated that the question of slavery proved more significant than any other in the years leading up to the war.27 Ayers and Thomas had founded the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) in 1998 with the goal of using mapping and data visualization as a means of revisiting long-standing historical questions and engaging the public.28 One of the VCDH’s teaching tools, the Salem Witch Trial Archive,

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Figure 14.1. Department of the Interior, State of Montana: Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts, compiled and drawn by Daniel O’Hare, edition of July 1, 1916, engraved and printed by the US Geological Survey. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries. Figures 14.1 and 14.2 come from my own work on the Enlarged Homestead Act, and demonstrate the visual force of geographic information within the early twentieth-century land agencies as well as the potential value of adapting historical maps to Historical Geographic Information Systems. Converting paper maps to a digital format and rectifying for use in spatial analysis illustrates the stages of converting historical materials to spatial representation. See also figure 14.3.

hosts an open-access teaching database including court documents from the 1692 trials alongside maps placing the residences of important figures in the affected towns. This project combined the efforts of archivists, database designers, GIS technicians, and graphic designers, who concluded that witchcraft accusations in Salem spread along “disease-like vectors,” reinforcing the argument that interpersonal relationships and property, rather than class or religion, precipitated this crisis. The spatial component of the archive reshaped the historical understanding of the causal forces at play in Salem and the surrounding towns.29 In most cases the scale of research began at a local level, and urban historians were among the first to employ HGIS, taking advantage of the early digitization of census tract data. During the late 1990s urban studies researcher Amy Hillier revisited historian Kenneth Jackson’s assertion in Crabgrass Frontier (1985) that the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) had classified mortgage security according to perceived risk. Jackson had concluded that HOLC’s residential maps, with their green, blue, yellow, and red zones, exercised a significant influence on federal and private mortgage lending patterns, thus dooming certain mixed-race areas to decline. Hillier narrowed

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Figure 14.2. US Geological Survey map series, georeferenced and clipped using ArcGIS 10.2. Map created by Sara Gregg using 1916 state-level maps and overlaid on a topographic map of the United States. Maps used with permission of the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries; and Esri. See figure 14.1 caption for additional commentary. See also figure 14.3.

her focus to racial distribution in Philadelphia, combining census tract and lending data in a GIS and discovering that while “redlining” did alter the ways in which lenders approached urban real estate, other forms of disinvestment were occurring simultaneously and independently, demonstrating that federal valuations represented only one part of a complex lending landscape.30 By taking a township-, county-, or census-tract-scale approach to sweeping historical questions, most of these first-generation GIS studies offered finely tuned quantitative evidence that engaged with dominant historical interpretations. Local and temporally discrete studies provided a model for the more expansive projects that came later.

“A Reason, and an Opportunity, for Substantial Reform”: HGIS and Revising Environmental History Among the earliest adopters of GIS among environmental historians were those seeking to quantify the sweeping interpretations offered by the first generation of canonical books.31 Donald Worster had asserted in Dust Bowl:

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The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979), “Out on the high table land of the plains occurred one of the most tragic, revealing, and paradigmatic chapters in our environmental history.” Worster based this argument on evidence of ecological disruption: The deep roots of prairie plants supported a rich ecosystem that endured for millennia, but during the 1910s the replacement of shortgrass prairie with wheat contributed to the unraveling of this system, exacerbating the effects of cyclical drought. Worster blamed the “ecological values taught by the capitalist ethos” for the Great Plains Plow-Up and the Dust Bowl that ensued, but historian Geoff Cunfer contested this argument in On the Great Plains: Environment and History (2005).32 Cunfer examined data from all 450 counties of the Great Plains, using HGIS to survey more than a century of land-cover and land-use data that had been gathered within the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Great Plains Population and Environment Data Series, integrating roughly 150 years of agricultural records alongside wind erosion, weather, and landcover data.33 Cunfer sought to moderate the narrative emphasizing decline on the Great Plains, instead stressing continuity and adaptation. Arguing that rainfall and high temperatures, rather than land-use practices, were the primary contributors to these famous dust storms, Cunfer sought patterns not evident in Worster’s local and temporally specific approach. Cunfer classified seventy percent of the Great Plains as remaining in grazing land, and argued that this acreage included the land most severely affected by the piercing drought and dust storms of the 1930s.34 By analyzing the data on land-cover change Cunfer concluded that Worster’s study lacked both the temporal and geographical scale necessary to contextualize the Dust Bowl within the larger history of the Great Plains.35 This research evokes the promise of large data sets to re-envision patterns of historical change, and it raises questions about how quantitative data are interpreted.36 On the Great Plains stresses adaptation, and several methodological questions emerge as a result: How might we classify stability or sustainability accurately and consistently across land-use regimes? What is the best method for differentiating among types of land use? Cunfer classified counties by land-cover type and grouped all unplowed land, even that which was heavily grazed, alongside areas remaining in native grasses. Analyzing grasslands separately from cropland permitted Cunfer to critique Worster’s assertion that plowed land was the primary culprit in the dust storms of the 1930s. Unplowed land is also subject to disturbance, and the loamy and friable soils of large parts of the Great Plains are eroded by grazing almost as readily as by the plow. Cunfer’s conclusions demonstrate how distinctions within the classification of data, no less than the choice of scale, demand attention from

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scholars who embrace empirical methods of analysis.37 Spatial historians open up new avenues of interpretation, but they too run up against the limits of evidence and analysis. The transformation of the Great Plains through agriculture has received sustained scholarly attention, yet it pales in comparison with the literature on colonial New England. Another foundational book in US environmental history to have been revisited using HGIS is William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), which influenced generations of scholarship on land use in colonial New England. Cronon emphasized that the arrival of the first Europeans in North America reshaped the New England landscape, spurring a transition away from indigenous patterns of adaptive land use. Cronon’s book revolutionized scholars’ thinking about the ecological impacts of European colonization and inspired an effort to map and assess land-use practices in New England, Brian Donahue’s The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (2004). Donahue examined land records for the township of Concord, Massachusetts, from the first plats of the 1650s through the early nineteenth century, interrogating the assumption that radical changes accompanied the first Europeans in colonial New England. Donahue digitized land records and located a diverse assortment of land holdings within each family. This research revealed that traditional practices of shifting resource gathering and land uses endured in Concord until the early nineteenth century. Township-level analysis elucidated a key finding: Concord families adapted to the varied landscapes of their new home, mimicking Native American uses alongside European mixed husbandry. Town proprietors recognized the diversity of resource needs among the first freeholders, granting tiny plots of cedar forest alongside alluvial meadowland, pasture, arable land, and house lots, which families managed as a diverse patchwork.38 The farm-level evidence— scaled temporally over centuries—led Donahue to conclude that Cronon’s “world of field and fences,” however transformative, did not fully explain the remarkable continuity in land practices during the colonial period and the Early Republic, and especially the early settlers’ continued reliance on ecologically varied land holdings through the nineteenth century.39 These results demand further examination of the patterns that emerged elsewhere in the American colonies. Donahue’s township-level survey suggests the challenge of scalability of this sort of tract-level analysis. This project was the product of over two decades of work with students, archivists, and National Park Service staffers to map the Concord plats, and while other research teams could replicate Donahue’s work in different areas, we are left with questions about what this study can tell us about the larger region.40 Might we identify patterns

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Figure 14.3. Snapshot of a visualization of “A View of the World from Houston,” by Cameron Blevins. Using copy of the Houston Daily Post made available using OCR (optical character recognition) courtesy of the University of North Texas Libraries, Blevins compiled a database, which he analyzed to assess the relative importance of rail networks and other urban centers in Houston’s imagined geography. Image from Cameron Blevins, “Mining and Mapping the Production of Space,” Spatial History Project, http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory /cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=93#swf11. Used with permission of Cameron Blevins. This figure provides another example of HGIS in historical research illustrating the opportunities spatial analysis offers to environmental historians. This particular case demonstrates how database-derived maps and visualizations enable the quantitative analysis of otherwise overlooked historical information. See also figures 14.1 and 14.2.

that extend to the rest of New England? If so, what does that tell us about Euro-American understandings of resource ecology? What can it teach about the importance of adaptation to local landscapes during the early decades of settlement? If not, how might we analyze land use patterns for larger areas using seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources? Is there a way to adjust this township-level research to a broader region without losing the nuance and specificity of The Great Meadow? These questions have led to energetic discussions among historians eager to apply new spatial technologies to environmental change, and clarify how the choice of scale impacts on the findings of historical research. Local and regional studies have driven much of the richness of environmental history. HGIS has the potential to scale it up to the regional, national, or global level.41

“Discover Some Fresh Truths”: Recent Developments in the Spatial Humanities Over the past several years the spatial humanities have gained wide

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public appreciation.42 For example, Donahue’s work on Concord informed the National Park Service’s efforts to interpret the Concord battlefield and manage the Minute Man National Historical Park.43 The New York Times featured spatial humanities projects in a 2011 article entitled “Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land” integrating the work of several influential scholars.44 In 2014 Smithsonian Magazine published “The Unlikely History of the Origins of Modern Maps,” both synthesizing for a broad public audience the technological and interpretative innovations that launched the first geographic information systems and highlighting the types of work being done using these systems and other articles in a variety of national newspapers and magazines have similarly celebrated the cross-pollination of historical research and GIS methods.45 Academic publishers have devoted less attention to research employing HGIS than the popular press. In 2006 Environmental History published a four-page reflection, “Positioning the Past With the Present: The Use of Fire Insurance Plans and GIS for Urban Environmental History,” by Jason A. Gilliland and Mathew Novak on studying urban development using GIS methods. The journal published its first full-length article in 2012, Kenneth Sylvester and Eric Rupley’s, “Revising the Dust Bowl: High Above the Kansas Grasslands,” which surveyed agricultural development using the Great Plains Population and Environment Data Series. By honing back in on local cases within this regional project these researchers sampled representative townships in order to explore patterns in agricultural practice and land-use change over the past century.46 Other US history journals are working to adapt to the challenge of publishing HGIS research and its visualizations by integrating digital supplements to supplement traditional articles.47 Agricultural History hosted an expansive digital portfolio to accompany Geoff Cunfer’s article “The Southern Great Plains Wind Erosion Maps of 1936–1937” in its fall 2011 issue.48 The Journal of American History (JAH) published Cameron Blevins’s “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” in the June 2014 number; the first article published in the journal of record in US history to have been based upon a digital history method.49 In March 2017, the journal published a second article, “Accounting for Conquest: The Price of the Louisiana Purchase of Indian Country” by Robert Lee, analyzing the cost of land transfers in the trans-Mississippi West by merging digital maps of land cessions with a forensic accounting of federal payments to tribes.50 These publications, in addition to the 2003 American Historical Review piece featuring the Valley of the Shadows project, represent only a half dozen articles among the dozens published each year in major US history journals—overall a rather small contribution given the amount of funding

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and general interest devoted to historical GIS. This figure is also striking given the range of scholarship in the field, and it hints at the difficulty of translating data visualization into print format—the two JAH authors have arranged for their own online visualizations to supplement the print journal. As methodologies continue to evolve and as models for alternative forms of research dissemination gain a wider audience, the publishing landscape will need to integrate more scholarship employing spatial methods. Early adopters of spatial methods in history continue to drive new uses of HGIS. Anne Kelly Knowles, an historical geographer who led the way in promoting historical GIS, spearheaded What Could Lee See at Gettysburg?, a mapping project that re-creates what was visible to General Robert E. Lee during the Battle of Gettysburg.51 Knowles’s research team used orthophotos, surveyor’s notes, and battlefield reports to generate raster and vector layers within a digital terrain model, which can be examined using viewshed and visibility analysis.52 The visualization explains the logic behind Lee’s fatal miscalculations during the second day of battle, and highlights the limitations presented by topography and knowledge. Knowles has now turned her attention to mapping the geographies of the Holocaust. In recent years spatial collaborations have broadened to include multinational teams of scholars using HGIS to analyze ecological systems as they function in a range of environments; perhaps most notable is Sustainable Farm Systems: Long-Term Socio-Ecological Metabolism in Western Agriculture, 1700–2000. This initiative merges the work of five research teams from six nations studying what they term socioecological metabolism, analyzing across time and space “how farmers managed soil nutrients, landscape processes, and energy flows to sustain communities and produce food for themselves and society.”53 Cunfer, whose lab at the University of Saskatchewan now hosts the Sustainable Farm Systems project, also collaborates with the multi-institutional research surveys of agricultural change on the Great Plains of North America.54 Similarly, White, after identifying the centrality of spatial questions to his research, designed Shaping the West, which provided a prototype for the Spatial History Project, now part of Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), which also fosters collaborations with scholars from around the world.55 The institutions that facilitated the first efforts in historical GIS continue to drive projects that push the uses of spatial data into new geographical and thematic areas; and universities, government agencies, and Esri, the leader in GIS software design, all continue to add new resources to their online collections.56

“The Dream of a Land Unspoiled and Fertile with Possibilities”: The Spatial Future of Environmental History

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Historians and other practitioners who employ HGIS are keenly aware of the potential of digital research to reshape the distribution of research findings to the widest scholarly and popular audience. Their work, and the methodological lessons that may be drawn from it, holds great promise for revitalizing enthusiasm for historical thinking both within the academy and beyond—as well as an opportunity to reach the broad audiences once attracted to books such as Dust Bowl and Changes in the Land.57 With the proliferation of the digital humanities and the market demand for multiple skill sets, spatial methods offer scholars interrogating environmental change an opportunity to develop their facility with interdisciplinary inquiries and diversify their methodological practices. HGIS offers a mechanism for exploring the vast quantities of data related to environmental topics and enables the quantitative analysis of causality. Environmental historians have an opportunity to adapt their analytical repertoire, integrating spatial questions, if not historical GIS itself, more consistently into their scholarship. Through a renewed attention to scale, an openness to collaboration across disciplinary and national boundaries, and a commitment to employing visual, as well as analytical methods, environmental history can broaden both its reach and its impact. A closer attention to the work being done elsewhere in the spatial humanities will help frame new research questions and situate historical conclusions with more nuance surrounding framing and scale. These new avenues will ensure that environmental history continues to engage at the forefront of interdisciplinary and socially useful research practices—something the founders of the field would embrace as consistent with its origins.

Notes 1. The author focuses almost exclusively on the North American context of HGIS research, as it is beyond the reach of this brief essay to capture the complex development of HGIS elsewhere in the world—a topic that merits its own work in each area of environmental research. 2. Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Geoff Cunfer, On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005); Lynne Heasley, A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); Anne Kelly Knowles, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800–1868 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2012). 3. Jo Guldi, “What Is the Spatial Turn?,” Spatial Humanities, Scholars’ Lab,

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accessed August 13, 2015, http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/whatis-the-spatial-turn/. 4. Esri, the manufacturer of the dominant GIS software platform, ArcGIS, defines “spatial analysis”: “The process of examining the locations, attributes, and relationships of features in spatial data through overlay and other analytical techniques in order to address a question or gain useful knowledge. Spatial analysis extracts or creates new information from spatial data.” “Spatial Analysis,” GIS Dictionary, Esri, accessed March 3, 2016, http://support.esri.com /en/knowledgebase/GISDictionary/term/spatial%20analysis. 5. Donald Worster, “Appendix: Doing Environmental History,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Worster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 294. 6. Lynne Heasley, “Shifting Boundaries on a Wisconsin Landscape: Can GIS Help Historians Tell a Complicated Story?” Human Ecology 31 (June 2013): 210. 7. The subhead for this section draws its title from Donald Worster’s call for environmental historians to employ models from the natural sciences as “indispensable aids” to the practice of history. Worster, “Appendix,” 294, 306.” 8. These include Immanuel Wallerstein’s conceptualization of the binary of core and periphery, Lucien Febvre and other Annalistes’ theorization of space and total history, and the importance of bioregion rather than nation as the defining boundary for historical study. 9. Richard White described the importance of spatial analysis for historical research by explaining that HGIS “allows us to merge things created at dramatically different times to create what are in effect new modern images which potentially reveal things about the past that the original artifacts did not. It also allows us to visualize space in ways that go far beyond mapping.” Richard White, “What Is Spatial History,” newsletter of the Spatial History Lab, February 1, 2010, 4. 10. Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 976, 978. 11. At the vanguard of historical GIS initiatives in North America are the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Nebraska, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University, the Spatial History Project at Stanford University, the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, the HGIS Lab at the University of Saskatchewan, the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, and the GIS Lab at the University of Western Ontario. 12. “Shaping the West,” Spatial History Project, Stanford University, accessed August 17, 2015, http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/ site/project.php?id=997; White, “What Is Spatial History?,” 6; Heasley, “Shifting Boundaries,” 187, 192.

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13. Even the major GIS labs have not disseminated a clear set of standards for analyzing research based upon spatial analysis. In part, this reflects the relative novelty of the practice and the pace of work in these labs, which have developed their own protocols but rarely codified expectations. Cameron Blevins, “The Perpetual Sunrise of Methodology,” Cameron Blevins (blog), January 5, 2015, http:// www.cameronblevins.org/posts/perpetual-sunrise-methodology/; “Committee on Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians,” AHA Today (blog), January 27, 2014, http://blog.historians.org/2014/01/committeeprofessional-evaluation-digital-scholarship-historians/. 14. Even when other scholars examine historical visualizations, they too often get distracted by the novelty of the technology, “infatuated with the power of digital tools and techniques to do things that humans cannot,” or, alternately, get bogged down in questioning the details of the study while interrogating only superficially the researcher’s choice of scale, categorizations, and interpretative conclusions. Blevins, “Perpetual Sunrise of Methodology.” 15. “The time has come to brush away the obscuring mythologies” is from Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. 16. Jessica Camille Aguirre, “The Unlikely History of the Origins of Modern Maps,” Smithsonian, June 2, 2014, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history /unlikely-history-origins-modern-maps-180951617/?no-ist; Guldi, “What Is the Spatial Turn?” 17. Aguirre, “Unlikely History.” 18. Ben Schmidt, “Data Narratives and Structural Histories: Melville, Maury, and American Whaling,” Sapping Attention (blog), October 30, 2012, http:// sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/10/data-narratives-and-structural.html. 19. Anne Kelly Knowles, “Introducing Historical GIS,” in Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, ed. Knowles (Redlands, CA: Esri Press, 2002), xiv–xv. 20. Evgenia Shnayder, “A Data Model for Spatial History: The Shaping the West Geodatabase,” Spatial History Project, Stanford University, November 15, 2010, https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub. php?id=23. 21. Aguirre, “Unlikely History.” 22. Aguirre, “Unlikely History.” 23. David Rumsey and Meredith Williams, “Historical Maps in GIS,” in Knowles, Past Time, Past Place, 4–8. 24. “Great Plains Population and Environment Data Series,” ICPSR, accessed March 10, 2016, https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR /series/207; Cunfer, On the Great Plains, 12. 25. Table of contents and Anne Kelly Knowles’s introduction to “Historical GIS: The Spatial Turn in Social Science History,” ed. Knowles, special issue,

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Social Science History 24 (Fall 2000): 451–52. 26. William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers, “An Overview,” The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/. 27. Aaron Sheehan-Dean, “Similarity and Difference in the Antebellum North and South,” in Knowles, Past Time, Past Place, 35–50; William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers, “An Overview: The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” American Historical Review 108 (December 2003): 1299–1307; Anne Kelly Knowles, “GIS and History,” in Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles (Redlands, CA: Esri Press, 2008), 5–6. 28. “About the Virginia Center for Digital History,” VCDH, accessed May 28, 2017, http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/index.php?page=About. 29. Benjamin Ray, “Teaching the Salem Witch Trials,” in Knowles, Past Time, Past Place, 30–32. 30. Amy Hillier, “Redlining in Philadelphia,” in Knowles, Past Time, Past Place, 88. 31. “A reason, and an opportunity, for substantial reform” is from Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 5. 32. Worster, Dust Bowl, 4. 33. “Great Plains Population and Environment Data Series.” 34. Cunfer, On the Great Plains, 37, 152–68. 35. Geoff Cunfer, “Scaling the Dust Bowl,” in Knowles, Placing History, 101–2. 36. Cunfer, On the Great Plains, 10. 37. Cunfer, “Scaling the Dust Bowl,” 105–6; Cunfer, On the Great Plains; Karen Merrill, “Whose Home on the Range?” Western Historical Quarterly 27 (Winter 1996): 433–51; Karen Merrill, “In Search of the ‘Federal Presence’ in the West,” Western Historical Quarterly 30 (Winter 1999): 449–73; Matthew Pearce, “Bringing History into Range Management,” Rangeland Ecology and Management 66 (July 2013): 387–400. 38. Donahue, Great Meadow, 78–86. 39. “In the long run it was this latter conception of land—as private commodity rather than public commons—that came to typify New England towns. Initial divisions of town lands, with their functional classifications of woodlot and meadow and cornfield, bore a superficial resemblance to Indian usufruct rights, since they seemed to define land in terms of how it was to be used. Once transferred into private hands, however, most such lands became abstract parcels whose legal definition bore no inherent relation to their use: a

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person owned everything on them, not just specific activities which could be conducted within their boundaries. . . . The uses to which land could be put vanished from such descriptions, and later land divisions increasingly ignored actual topography. What was on the land became largely irrelevant to its legal identity.” William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 74–75. 40. Donahue, Great Meadow, xx. 41. Richard White, foreword to Knowles, Placing History, x. 42. “Discover some fresh truths” is from Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1106. 43. Brian Donahue, “Mapping Husbandry in Concord: GIS as a Tool for Environmental History,” in Knowles, Placing History, 174. 44. Patricia Cohen, “Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land,” New York Times, July 26, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/ arts/geographic-information-systems-help-scholars-see-history.html. 45. Aguirre, “Unlikely History.” 46. Jason Gilliland and Mathew Novak, “Positioning the Past with the Present: The Use of Fire Insurance Plans and GIS for Urban Environmental History,” Environmental History 11 (January 2006): 136–39; Kenneth Sylvester and Eric Rupley, “Revising the Dust Bowl: High above the Kansas Grasslands,” Environmental History 17 (July 2012): 603–33. 47. Environment and History has also published a few articles that employed GIS in order to interrogate historical maps and orthophotos (georeferenced aerial images). S. D. Smith, “Storm Hazard and Slavery: The Impact of the 1831 Great Caribbean Hurricane on St Vincent,” Environment and History 18 (February 2012): 97–123; Annika Dahlberg and Piers Blaikie, “Changes in Landscape or in Interpretation? Reflections Based on the Environmental and Socio-economic History of a Village in NE Botswana,” Environment and History 5 (June 1999): 127–74; and Anna Dahlström, Sara Cousins, and Ove Eriksson, “The History (1620–2003) of Land Use, People and Livestock, and the Relationship to Present Plant Species Diversity in a Rural Landscape in Sweden,” Environment and History 12 (May 2006): 191–212. 48. Geoff Cunfer, “The Southern Great Plains Wind Erosion Maps of 1936– 1937,” Agricultural History 85 (Fall 2011): 540–59. 49. Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” Journal of American History 101 (June 2014): 122–247, and accompanying digital supplement (hosted by the Stanford University Spatial History Lab), “Mining and Mapping the Production of Space,” http://spatialhistory.stanford.edu/viewoftheworld; Blevins, “Perpetual Sunrise of Methodology.”

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50. This article won the 2016 Louis Pelzer Memorial Award from the Organization of American Historians. Robert Lee, “Accounting for Conquest: The Price of the Louisiana Purchase of Indian Country,” Journal of American History 103 (March 2017): 921–42. 51. Anne Kelly Knowles, “A Cutting-Edge Second Look at the Battle of Gettysburg,” Smithsonian, June 27, 2013, http://www.smithsonianmag.com /history/A-Cutting-Edge-Second-Look-at-the-Battle-of-Gettyburg-1-180947921/. 52. Smithsonian Magazine bestowed its American Ingenuity Award for Historical Scholarship upon geographer Knowles in 2012. Anne Kelly Knowles, “What Could Lee See at Gettysburg,” in Knowles, Placing History, 239–58. 53. “Sustainable Farm Systems: Long-Term Socio-ecological Metabolism in Western Agriculture, 1700–2000,” HGIS Lab, University of Saskatchewan, accessed July 24, 2015, https://hgis.usask.ca/projects/sustainable-farmsystems.php. 54. HGIS Lab, University of Saskatchewan, accessed August 1, 2015, http:// www.HGIS.usask.ca. 55. “Shaping the West”; “The Broken Paths of Freedom,” Spatial History Project, Stanford University, accessed August 5, 2015, http://web.stanford.edu/ group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/project.php?id=1069. 56. Spatial resources are proliferating everywhere, and a few places to start are as follows: The Library of Congress is building a digital collection of georeferenced Sanborn Maps, https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps /about-this-collection/; Stanford University’s collection of historical GIS links, https://library.stanford.edu/rumsey/map-research/historical-gis-data; the United States Geological Survey’s Historical Topographical Map Explorer, http://historicalmaps.arcgis.com/usgs/; and the University of Richmond’s georeferenced Historical Atlas of the United States, http://dsl.richmond.edu /historicalatlas/1/a/. 57. “The dream of a land unspoiled and fertile with possibilities” is from Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 4.

15 Low-Hanging Fruit Science and Environmental History Edmund Russell

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h, those were the days. I wish such obvious topics were lying around today.” That was the reaction of a graduate student upon hearing that, when I began my research on the environmental history of war, few scholars had studied the topic. His words stuck with me because it was not an obvious topic twenty-five years ago. I knew no one who was studying the environmental history of war. I was researching a different topic (I thought): pesticides. I expected to find, like other historians, that civilian science and economics drove the development of pesticides, which turned out to be true. Thomas Dunlap and John Perkins pointed out that war stimulated the growth of pesticides, and I ran with that theme.1 The environmental history of war turned out to be a rich vein, and historians have mined enough ore to make the subject look obvious now.2 We do not lack for big, understudied topics. We never will. We lack the ability to see them. The world is a big, complex place. At any time, scholars are studying small pieces of the whole. Almost as many big topics are lying around today as when I entered environmental history. Somebody, I hope, is starting to research one of them today, even though the rest of us have overlooked the topic. Twenty-five years from now, graduate students will look at his or her work and say, “Wow, I wish I entered the field twenty-five years ago, when such obvious topics were lying around.” Donald Worster and other founders of environmental history had keen eyes. They saw that nature’s role in history was a big, understudied topic. Nature looks like an obvious topic to study today, but most historians had overlooked it or considered it unimportant. Worster and company also saw that other disciplines had been studying nature for a long time, and historians could learn from them. In an important essay, “History as Natural History,” Worster called on scholars to synthesize history and biology.3 Environmental historians heeded his call and turned to ecology for inspiration— so much so that “ecological history” vied with “environmental history” as an early name for the field.4 We can extend the spirit of Worster’s research by continuing, as he did, to push the boundaries of history. It is easier to see big, unstudied topics at the boundaries of a field than in the center of it. One of the easiest ways to

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work the boundary is to pick another discipline and look at our field from its perspective. Scientific disciplines are strong candidates.5 I am not suggesting that historians become scientists. I am suggesting that historians can think about science in the same way we have thought about languages. History departments used to require that all PhD students develop reading competence in two world languages. The goal was not fluency but rather the ability to read the literature. English’s surge to the fore as the world’s lingua franca has lessened the need for other languages, and some departments have reduced language requirements. Today, learning a scientific language could be just as useful for an environmental historian as learning German was to historians in the past. One need not achieve fluency. Being able to get the gist of an article can open the door to large, untapped literatures.6 In this essay, I turn from the obvious candidates for inspiration—ecology, evolution, and public health—to sciences that have appeared less often in environmental history publications and conferences.7 Astronomy is one understudied topic for environmental historians. For most of history, people saw themselves closely connected to the movement of celestial bodies—the sun, moon, planets, stars, and meteors. People looked to the heavens to tell them where they were in the year (which gave rise to calendars), where they were in space (important for mariners), and where they were in relation to gods (cosmology). The summer solstice was so important for understanding the change of seasons that people built structures to identify it not just at the most famous site, Stonehenge in present day England, but also at Newgrange (present day Ireland), Cahokia (a pre-Columbian city in present day Illinois), Angkor Wat (in present day Cambodia), Chichen Itza (a Mayan site), and Nabta (in Egypt), among other sites.8 Ancient observatories tracked the moon as well as the sun. One of the most consistent patterns in government funding of science (under whatever name), throughout history, has been a willingness to fund astronomy before many other sciences.9 Our habit of living indoors is the reason, I would guess, that environmental historians have paid little attention to the heavens as an integral part of the environment. We could enrich environmental history by looking up for inspiration. We need not become professional astronomers, but we can capitalize on astronomy in at least three ways. First, we can study the role of night skies in history. This study would include, but not be limited to, the history of astronomical science. Plenty of ordinary people also developed a keen understanding of the night sky and what it meant for their lives. Second, we can capitalize on current understandings of astronomy to interpret astronomical events, such as comets, recorded by our ancestors. Third, we can conduct more history in the dark. Historians do almost all our research in the light,

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mostly under electric light and some in sunlight. It would behoove us to stare at starlight, moonlight, meteor light, and planet light at night to re-create, as much as possible, the experiences of our ancestors. Chemistry could teach us a lot. Chemical reactions govern the world across all scales, from the global (climate change is the product of chemical reactions) to the individual (chemical reactions power our brains and muscles). Chemistry in plants is responsible for capturing and storing solar energy, which powers our bodies and those of other animals. Chemistry governs the rate at which pollutants degrade in waterways, fuels release heat to cook food and warm buildings, atmospheric vapors acidify, and streams buffer acid rain. Life owes its existence to carbon, an element with an unusual ability to create chains of molecules, giving us the building blocks of life (fats, carbohydrates, and proteins). Everything historians study is a byproduct of chemical reactions. We have some environmental histories that emphasize chemistry.10 We could benefit from a closer look at the knowledge that comes from beakers and Bunsen burners. Geology is a good candidate for more attention. It is obvious that geologic forces have shaped our environment. Mountains, rivers, lakes, plains, oceans, minerals, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, soils, earthquakes, and volcanoes— all owe their locations to geology. How have these features shaped human experience? How have they encouraged people to live in some places (along waterways and seacoasts) and avoid others (arid regions)? How much similarity and difference do we see around the globe in the way people respond to geologic regions? How have landforms affected people? How, for example, have rain shadows (areas of light rainfall downwind from mountains) led people to live in similar ways around the world? How have their lives differed, and why? Why are minerals unevenly distributed around the globe, and how has their distribution shaped history? Brandon Luedtke has suggested that national parks offer an excellent opportunity to study the role of geology in history.11 He points out that historians have discussed the biology of national parks, but geology often gave landscapes the features that drew preservationists. Think of the thermal wonders of Yellowstone, the erosion that created the Grand Canyon, the valley floor of Yosemite with Half Dome looming above, the jutting rocks of Zion, the spectacular peaks of the Tetons, and the glaciers of Glacier. Conservationists created parks to protect scenery, and mountains created scenery by providing elevation from which to view landscapes. It was easier to create parks from land of little use for other economic purposes, and here, too, geology helped. By creating steep slopes, geology robbed mountains of the fertile soil that would have made the land attractive to farmers. Geology shaped visitor experience as well as the willingness of politicians to incorporate land

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into the park system. We have a lot to learn about the ways in which rocks shaped, and were shaped by, park managers and visitors. Meteorology deserves more attention. We have some studies of weather, especially disastrous events (such as hurricanes and floods) and climate change.12 Other weather disasters, such as tornadoes, merit more study. Even more important would be to study “normal” weather because it shapes “normal” life. (The idea of normality, too, is an understudied topic in environmental history.) Historians of the American West have long stressed the importance of aridity west of the hundredth meridian. Historians of the eastern United States would do well to look at the impact of humidity (here, meaning generous rainfall) on history. Microbiology is ripe for analysis. Recent studies have revealed that ninety percent of the cells in our bodies are not human.13 We are mainly bacteria, but we also are fungi, protozoa, and yeasts. Each of us is not an individual so much as an ecosystem. We depend on our tiny companions to keep us alive. Endosymbionts do much of the work of digesting our food. It is high time for an environmental history of gastrointestinal (GI) tracts. We often think of throats, stomachs, and intestines as inside our bodies, but it would be more accurate to see our bodies as topological donuts and GI tracts as donut holes, albeit dramatically elongated and twisted holes. The contents of GI tracts are in the holes, so they are outside our bodies (as well as inside, in the sense of lying inside the space defined by epidermis). Microbiomes (microscopic creatures that live in and on people) vary among individuals and among groups of people. Choices of food, medication, and hygiene affected the makeup of microbiomes. GI ecosystems constantly exchange members with other ecosystems. We have a lot to learn from the people who peer into our internal environments. Neuroscience might reveal a great deal to environmental historians. Brains have always been part of history. Can we understand the past better if we understand how brains work? A few historians have tried to do so under the banner of neurohistory.14 I was curious enough to join a psychology lab to do experiments on neural processing. I wanted to know how brains responded to environments, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) offered a way to watch brains in action. FMRI indirectly measures blood flow, which is an indirect measure of brain activity. We had subjects imagine four environments: beautiful, not-beautiful, pleasant, and not-pleasant. We found that imagining not-beautiful and not-pleasant environments caused people to use brain regions involved in self-control more than imagining beautiful and pleasant environments. If simply imagining unpleasant environments demands more neural effort than imagining pleasant environments, we would predict people in unpleasant environments are devoting more effort to

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processing their surroundings than people in pleasant environments.15 This may help explain why patients with a view of nature from hospital rooms recover faster than people who see only walls.16 Physics could help us understand the past by deepening our understanding of mechanics (how things move), thermodynamics, and light. Much of history has depended on moving things around, including by throwing or propelling them. We have some environmental histories of transportation, especially by automobiles, but we could use more work on walking, animal transport, railroads, trucks, and airplanes. We could learn more about the environmental history of propelling objects, including bullets and bombs.17 Physics can help us understand what options and limits people faced given their technology, which in turn affected the way and degree to which they shaped their environments. Heat and cold deserve much more study. Environmental histories of heating and cooling of homes and businesses, and their environmental consequences, would be good topics. Light and colors need their historians. How did people understand their world through color? The change in a fruit’s peel color from green to red or yellow signaled ripening, which flagged edibility. The green color of a valley indicated water and, perhaps the ability to grow crops. The brown color of another valley could discourage settlement. One of the aspects of chemistry that modern people found most exciting was the ability to synthesize colorful dyes. How has the introduction of synthetic dyes shaped our understanding of the environment? Statistics offers powerful, underused tools for understanding environmental history. The single most useful course I took in graduate school was statistics. With just one semester under my belt, I understand the statistics in 95 percent of the scientific publications I read. Historians will always want to understand the qualitative side of the past, but environmental historians also care about material world. Statistics can help us get a handle on quantities of things, how quantities compare, trends in quantities, and how to reach (or not reach) conclusions about cause and effect. Whether we are trying to understand the numbers of people or the things they use (grain, lumber, gasoline, asbestos), statistics can help. Historians who draw on science for inspiration can expect two critiques.18 First, some historians say that scientific ideas have changed over time, so we have no way of knowing if today’s scientific ideas are true, so we should not use science in our work. This critique has grown louder as historians of science migrated into environmental history. They are right that scientific ideas have changed, and surely will change in the future. But science is typical, not unique, in this regard. Knowledge in all disciplines, including history, is provisional and changing. So, if we disqualify science, we should disqualify

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ideas from all disciplines, including history. That would bring scholarship to a halt. I am unwilling to do this. I became a scholar to understand the world, and I welcome good ideas wherever I can find them—while recognizing that they are provisional and changing. Second, some historians argue that scientists have supported malign policies in the past (e.g., eugenic sterilization), so embracing science today opens the door to similar harms. They are right that some scientists embraced bad ideas, but some historians promoted racism and imperialism with vigor. So, if we disqualify all scientific ideas because some were bad, we should disqualify all historical ideas, too. I refuse to do so. I think all scholars, historians as well as scientists, have the obligation to learn from past mistakes and do better in the future. My impression is that biologists have done a more thorough job of analyzing, and rejecting in print, the malign ideas of their predecessors than historians have.19 It would be good for us, as historians, to reckon with the ugly sides of our past. Historians need not master science to bring scientific ideas into their work. Collaborating with scientists offers another route to the same goal. In my experience, scientists welcome the chance to get to know humanists who find their work interesting. It might take some discussion to find a topic on which to collaborate, but people who want to make something work usually find a way. The interdisciplinary spirit with which Donald Worster approached environmental history remains just as useful today as it was in the 1970s. He opened his eyes to nature and his arms to the sciences, which helped to spur a young field to prominence.20

Notes 1. Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to “Silent Spring” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Edmund Russell, “ ‘Speaking of Annihilation’: Mobilizing for War against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914–1945,” Journal of American History 82 (1996): 1505–29. Thomas Dunlap and John Perkins helped guide my attention to the role of war in the history of pesticides. Thomas R. Dunlap, DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); John H. Perkins, “Reshaping Technology in Wartime: The Effect of Military Goals on Entomological Research and Insect-Control Practices,” Technology and Culture 19 (1978): 169–86. 2. David Andrew Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Lisa M. Brady, War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Charles E. Closmann, War and the Environment: Military Destruction in the

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Modern Age (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009); Brian Allen Drake, The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); John R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Edwin A. Martini, Proving Grounds: Militarized Landscapes, Weapons Testing, and the Environmental Impact of U.S. Bases (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); Micah S. Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Chris Pearson, Peter A. Coates, and Tim Cole, eds., Militarized Landscapes: From Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain (London: Continuum, 2010); Peter Thorsheim, Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell, Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of Warfare (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004). 3. Donald Worster, “History as Natural History: An Essay on Theory and Method,” Pacific Historical Review 53 (February 1984): 1–19. 4. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980); Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850– 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 5. Edmund Russell, “Science and Environmental History,” Environmental History 10 (January 2005): 80–82. 6. Sam White worded this point nicely in introducing a session at an American Historical Association conference. The scientific literature, he suggested, resembles a vast, largely untapped archive for historians. 7. Edmund Russell, “Introduction: The Garden in the Machine: Toward an Evolutionary History of Technology,” in Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History, ed. Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip Scranton (New York:

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Routledge, 2004), 1–16; Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field,” Environmental History 8 (April 2003): 204–28; Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Edmund Russell, “Coevolutionary History,” American Historical Review 119 (December 2014): 1514–28. 8. NASA, “Ancient Observatories,” accessed August 14, 2015, http:// sunearthday.nasa.gov/2005/locations. 9. James E. McClellan and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 10. Benjamin R. Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); John H. Perkins, Insects, Experts, and the Insecticide Crisis: The Quest for New Pest Management Strategies (New York: Plenum Press, 1982); Dunlap, DDT; Ellen Griffith Spears, Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Russell, War and Nature; Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Brett L. Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010); Pete Daniel, Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post–World War II South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). 11. Personal communication. Luedtke is a PhD candidate at the University of Kansas. 12. Neville Brown, History and Climate Change: An Eurocentric Perspective, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 2001); Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); César Caviedes, El Niño in History: Storming through the Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001); Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Jean M. Grove, The Little Ice Age (London: Methuen, 1988); John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 13. Marie-Claire Arrieta et al., “The Intestinal Microbiome in Early Life: Health and Disease,” Frontiers in Immunology 5 (September 2014): 427; Manimozhiyan Arumugam et al., “Enterotypes of the Human Gut Microbiome,” Nature 473 (May 12, 2011): 174–80; Amber Benezra, Joseph DeStefano, and Jeffrey I. Gordon, “Anthropology of Microbes,” Proceedings of the National

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Academy of Sciences 109, no. 17 (2012): 6378–81; Y. E. Borre et al., “The Impact of Microbiota on Brain and Behavior: Mechanisms & Therapeutic Potential,” Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology 817 (2014): 373–403; H. Chung et al., “Gut Immune Maturation Depends on Colonization with a Host-Specific Microbiota,” Cell 149, no. 7 (2012): 1578–93; M. C. Collado et al., “Gut Microbiota: Source of Novel Tools to Reduce the Risk of Human Disease?,” Pediatric Research 77 (January 2015): 182–88; A. Hsiao et al., “Members of the Human Gut Microbiota Involved in Recovery from Vibrio Cholerae Infection,” Nature 515 (November 20, 2014): 423–26; Human Microbiome Project Consortium, “Structure, Function and Diversity of the Healthy Human Microbiome,” Nature 486 (June 14, 2012): 207–14; Simon Lax et al., “Longitudinal Analysis of Microbial Interaction between Humans and the Indoor Environment,” Science 345 (August 29, 2014): 1048–52; Kieran C. O’Doherty et al., “Opinion: Conservation and Stewardship of the Human Microbiome,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 40 (2014): 14312–13; Matthew R. Redinbo, “The Microbiota, Chemical Symbiosis, and Human Disease,” Journal of Molecular Biology 426, no. 23 (2014): 3877–91; Tanya Yatsunenko et al., “Human Gut Microbiome Viewed across Age and Geography,” Nature 486 (June 14, 2012): 222–27; Julia Adeney Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value,” American Historical Review 119 (December 1, 2014): 1587–1607. 14. Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); J. T. Burman, “History from Within? Contextualizing the New Neurohistory and Seeking Its Methods,” History of Psychology 15 (February 2012): 84–99; A. A. Reyes, “Neurohistoria: Racionalidad y emoción en la historia,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie II, Historia Antigua, 22 (2009): 179–85; Edmund Russell, ed., Environment, Culture, and the Brain: New Explorations in Neurohistory (Munich: Rachel Carson Center, 2012). Leif Fredrickson is doing a dissertation on neurohistory, using Baltimore as a case study, at the University of Virginia. 15. Aline Vedder et al., “Neurofunctional Correlates of Environmental Cognition: An fMRI Study with Images from Episodic Memory,” PLoS ONE 10, no. 4 (2015): e0122470. 16. R. S. Ulrich, “View through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery,” Science 224 (April 27, 1984): 420–21; J. J. Alvarsson, S. Wiens, and M. E. Nilsson, “Stress Recovery during Exposure to Nature Sound and Environmental Noise,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 7 (March 2010): 1036–46; Roger S. Ulrich, “Natural versus Urban Scenes: Some Psychological Effects,” Environment and Behavior 13 (September 1981): 523–56. 17. Alfred W. Crosby, Throwing Fire: A History of Projectile Technology (New

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York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 18. Michael D. Gordin, “Evidence and the Instability of Biology,” American Historical Review 119 (December 2014): 1621–29. 19. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996); Richard C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). Historical societies continue to offer prizes honoring historians who promoted racism and imperialism. 20. Interdisciplinary work helped make early work in environmental history exciting. Use of palynology helped re-create past environments in Cronon, Changes in the Land. Alfred Crosby’s restless imagination led him to bring ideas from public health and energetics into history. Crosby, Throwing Fire; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism; Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973). William McNeill drew on public health ideas in William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976). Worster drew on ecology in Worster, Dust Bowl.

16 The Watershed of War Environmental History and the “Big Civil War” Brian Allen Drake

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n A River Running West, Donald Worster surveyed John Wesley Powell’s personal topography and showed a man carved deeply by the swirling historical currents of his day. The legendary explorer of the Grand Canyon was also, Worster revealed, an abolitionist from a reformist background, a sensitive ethnographer of Native American culture, and a critic of Gilded Age labor exploitation despite an abiding faith in economic growth. Powell’s lifelong passion for geography was part of a larger national expansion of scientific interest and secular worldviews. As founder of the US Geological Survey, he was an ardent believer in science as a guide to national development, pushing a community-centered, democratically inclined, and environmentally tempered approach to settling the arid West, to the consternation of more than one regional politician.1 The American Civil War also left its mark on Powell, beginning with his famous one-armed profile and his martial moniker, “Major,” both deriving from his time as a Union artillery officer. Worster details Powell’s wartime experiences, yet curiously they never really emerge as relevant to his later history. They did prove useful in organizing and executing the Colorado expedition (Powell even compared the trip to Shiloh, where he lost his arm), but in Worster’s larger narrative the war seems to have had little effect on Powell beyond the physical. This is surprising because, after all, the Civil War was among the most powerful currents in the stream of nineteenth-century American history, and the defining national event of the age. How much of Powell’s postwar vision of the nation, and of nature’s place in it, emerged from the crucible of that epic conflict? For all Worster’s contextual thoroughness, the answer isn’t clear.2 We might ask a similar question of American environmental history more broadly. While a rich and provocative body of environmental analyses of the Civil War has begun to emerge, the overarching environmental narrative of the era still centers on broad economic and cultural trends. Capitalism, industrialism, and commodification have taken center stage, and not without good reason, for they were not only powerful but decisive forces. One might even argue that they suggest the war has been emphasized too much and that environmental history reorients and reconfigures the traditional narrative arc of

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sectional crisis, war, and Reconstruction. But such an argument, I would respond, risks abandoning some fundamental insights. The Civil War was the signal event in nineteenth-century America. It killed up to three-quarters of a million people, injured several hundred thousand more, freed four million from bondage, and affected, to a greater or lesser extent, the lives of everyone in the nation and many outside of it. Its historical impacts rippled outward like a blast wave to shape race relations, economics, and electoral politics for a century or more. Indeed, the economic forces that environmental historians so often posit as the era’s primary agents of environmental changes cannot easily be separated from the conflict itself. In many ways, the war was an argument about nature’s place and role in American economic life, about proper land use and the appropriateness of commodifying human beings via slavery. It seems unlikely to me that the nation’s larger environmental history somehow survived the Civil War without a significant scratch. This is not to say that nature per se has been absent without leave from Civil War studies. It has, in fact, been common. Rain and mud and bad weather are constants in the literature, for example, even if they have appeared mainly as set dressing for battle narratives. And some early studies addressed topics that appear today as distinctly environmental ones. In 1933, for example, Ella Lonn explored the Confederacy’s problems with salt supplies as a major factor in its defeat. In the early 1940s William Chandler Bagley cited soil exhaustion as a key driving force in slavery’s hotly contested antebellum westward expansion, an argument picked up later by scholars such as Eugene Genovese. We could cite other studies, both prior and subsequent to these. But only a few modern historians have set picket lines for a deliberate, self-consciously environmental approach to the war. Jack Temple Kirby led the way in 2001 with “The American Civil War: An Environmental View,” an online essay in which he offered a “preliminary environmental impact statement” about the war’s effects on “soldiers, animals, cities, farmlands, and forests.” Several years later, Mark Fiege and Ted Steinberg offered important chapters amid broader environmental histories of the United States, while Lisa Brady’s article “The Wilderness of War” and book War Upon the Land focused on Vicksburg, the 1864 Shenandoah campaign, and Sherman’s March. Recently, Kirby et al have been joined by Megan Kate Nelson, Kathryn Shively Meier, Jim Downs, Andrew Bell, Matthew Stith, and Adam Dean. In 2015, I tossed my own hat into the ring, along with several other first-time Civil War environmentalists, with The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War, an essay collection of which I was the editor. But while the number of volunteers grows, the ranks of Civil War environmentalists remain thin, gaps in the line are large, and plans for the postwar period are unclear.3

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In this chapter, I muse on the present status and future of Civil War environmental history. For all its strengths, current scholarship has often been limited in scope, sticking largely to the battlefield, the soldiering experience, and the years between 1861 and 1865. I will survey some of that scholarship, noting its strengths and suggesting how it might be expanded. But I will also contend that “big” Civil War environmental histories—ones that move beyond the battle and its tactical immediacies to logistics, mobilization, and the home front, and beyond the war years and Reconstruction into the Gilded Age, Progressive era, and farther—are equally rich with possibility. Worster’s influence is everywhere in this argument. As a graduate student of his, I learned to appreciate the larger picture and the longer term, to understand that big ideas, big concepts, and big contexts shape historical experience in profound ways—lessons on impressive display in books like A River Running West. Even if his own work does not consider the Civil War as a watershed moment for later American environmental history, he has certainly inspired me to do so. Environmental historians believe that nonhuman factors are vital agents in human history. With that in mind, let us begin, a là U. B. Phillips, with the weather. In his legendary memoir, Co. Aytch, rebel soldier Sam Watkins told of suffering through a spectacular thunderstorm followed by a blizzard (and then an enemy assault), calling them “the grandest picture that has ever made any impression on my memory,” quite an acknowledgement from a man witness to many battles. Watkins reminds us vividly that rain, wind, heat, and cold were significant and even dominant factors in Civil War troop movements, battles, and bivouacs. Indeed, weather seems almost too obvious to mention; as Kenneth Noe joked in his essay “Fateful Lightning: the Significance of Weather and Climate to Civil War History,” it is well known that the war “was largely fought outdoors.” Yet there was no systematic inquiry into the precise role of weather on the battlefield before Noe’s recent work. In “Fateful Lightning” he ranks eighty-two battles in terms of the impact weather had on their outcome, revealing a “maximum effect” on thirteen of them and a “significant effect” on an additional thirty-three.4 Meanwhile, back in 1965 Paul W. Gates touched on the effects of drought, flood, and frost on both Union and Confederate agriculture, but otherwise few scholars have given the weather beyond the battlefield much serious consideration. Amy Murrell Taylor is one exception, showing how images of “contrabands” freezing to death in a Kentucky cold snap inspired calls for emancipation. Noe is another. What was weather’s role, he asks, in the South’s notorious inability to feed itself during the war? How deeply did it affect the home front? Did it, in fact, contribute to defeat? “The food shortages, inflation,

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and other hardships the Confederate plain folk suffered,” he writes, “as well as a goodly part of the disillusionment, anger, and loss of will that grew out of those issues—the entire litany of the ‘internalist’ interpretation of Confederate defeat—can in fact be traced back at least in part” to severe droughts, floods, and frost in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi. “The newborn Confederacy, in other words, found itself grappling for life at one of the worst moments in the nineteenth century to launch an agricultural republic in the American Southeast.” This is a provocative idea, and some fascinating (if counterfactual) questions arise from it. With better weather, would the rebellion have extended beyond April 1865? Had Northern civilians suffered from similar weather-related stresses, would advocates for a negotiated peace have gained the upper hand? What was the relationship between the North’s material superiority in food production and elsewhere, its willingness to keep fighting, and good weather during the war?5 Along these lines, we might branch out to consider the idea of Northern “ecological advantages” beyond good weather. That Union troops and civilians generally ate more and better than their enemies is well known, but the North’s staggering agricultural productivity awaits deeper environmental analysis. The Confederacy could and did bring in impressive harvests; at times, they rivaled or even surpassed Northern farmers in the production of certain foodstuffs, and many rebels were convinced in the war’s early days that Southern agriculture was their greatest strength. Shortages were often a result of organizational and transportation weaknesses, or losses of manpower, draft animals, and territory rather than of weather. But persistent rebel hunger was particularly crucial in the face of overwhelming Union bounty, as Andrew Smith has argued provocatively in Starving the South, and even if starvation was not the ultimate factor in bringing the Confederacy to heel, we might examine the ecological underpinnings of such formidable Federal plenty. John Majewski has argued that the South’s acidic and nutrient-poor ultisols inhibited its antebellum economic modernization, whereas the North was blessed with astonishingly productive alfisols that enabled continuous cropping, produced excellent livestock fodder, and provided a stout ecological base for a stable and diverse larger economy. Taking that argument as inspiration, did that same fertility contribute to Northern victory? Did its enormous harvests—the Union was able to feed itself and its armies and still export food to Europe during the war—reveal a kind of ecological supremacy? One of the most consistent images in Lenette Taylor’s biography of Union quartermaster Simon Perkins is of an endless stream of fodder pouring into Pittsburg Landing from the Midwest, destined for the livestock of Don Carlos Buell’s army. And the bounty extended beyond hay and oats to cattle and pigs, mules and horses, wool and leather and iron, most

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of it originating from abundant Northern natural resources. Material dominance does not always equal victory (see Vietnam, Iraq), but it surely helps (see World War II), and simple things like good soil might have been some of the Union’s most potent weapons, and among its least appreciated.6 Disease is the handmaiden of bad weather and malnutrition, and although there has much more discussion of it than of weather or climate, as the war’s number-one killer it calls out for even further attention. In 1968, medical historian Paul Steiner published the first in-depth treatment of Civil War diseases, tracing their origins and manifestations and arguing that they shaped the outcome of several major campaigns and prevented others from even occurring at all. Recent environmental history has begun to build on Steiner’s prescient book. Andrew Bell’s Mosquito Soldiers, for instance, explores the specific consequences of yellow fever and malaria. The two illnesses delayed or cancelled many battles and campaigns, he contends, and ravaged sailors far out to sea in the Union blockade. Southerners hoped that yellow fever would devastate epidemiologically inexperienced Union occupiers and clear the way to recapturing lost posts such as Galveston; some went so far as to mail the clothes of yellow fever victims to the North in an attempt to trigger civilian epidemics. For soldiers on both sides, meanwhile, trying to stay healthy and dealing with disease were constants. Kathryn Shively Meier argues that much of what appears to be standard-issue desertion was actually “self care,” as soldiers with no intention to light for home slipped briefly from the ranks to find clean water, wash their clothes, sleep warm and dry, and shake off their illnesses without the “help” of dangerously ineffective field hospitals. Echoing Steiner, Meier and Timothy Silver have both suggested that George McClellan’s Peninsula campaign was hit so hard by illness that its failure owes as much to disease as to the Young Napoleon’s tactical cold feet. Meanwhile, animals suffered, too. Hog cholera and glanders, the latter aided by massive corrals like the Union depot at Giesboro, carved through their ranks. In the Confederacy, glanders left Grant at Appomattox with more horses than Lee had men, and low livestock numbers after the war, made worse by lack of knowledge about germ theory and augmented by agricultural pests, hampered agricultural recovery in places like Virginia for years.7 Broad analysis of disease (perhaps excepting Steiner’s and that of Jim Downs, discussed below) has been largely absent, however, and a breakdown of battles affected by illness along the lines of Noe’s work on weather would be welcome. Disease and the home front, too, await an environmental analysis. Silver has investigated the role of physical isolation in rendering soldiers from mountainous regions vulnerable to density-dependent ailments after enlistment and, along with Terry Sharrer, has speculated on the long-term

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negative effects of hog cholera and glanders on the South’s postwar recovery. But some fascinating questions remain. Did disease among civilians, especially those near camps and hospitals or otherwise associated with the armed forces, increase because the war? If so, did the effects expand beyond the local? Did it affect mobilization and logistics, or morale? In the South, particularly, how did food shortages worsen the disease environment? Nature’s influence on humans isn’t merely physical, of course, and the unprecedented destruction of the war ensured that the era’s cultural ideas about the natural world would also be touched with fire. Megan Kate Nelson’s Ruin Nation is perhaps the preeminent study on the topic, teasing out multifaceted and shifting meanings that Americans derived from the destruction of their cities and homes, their forests, and themselves. Similarly, Aaron Sachs has written on the metaphorical meanings of stumps both arboreal and bodily, and John Inscoe has explored Northern images of Appalachia as a metaphorical and literal moral high ground of escaped slaves, abolitionists and unionists. Much of Lisa Brady’s seminal War Upon the Land emphasizes the engagement of culture with nature. Union engineers recruited ideas of human mastery over nature in their attempts to reroute the mighty Mississippi around Vicksburg, and in marching to the sea Sherman and his troops sought to sever the links between the Confederacy and its agricultural environment and turn Georgia to a howling wilderness, a concept heavy with moral as well as tactical and strategic implications. For Adam Dean, supporters of the new Yosemite national park saw redemption in the landscape; nature preserved could heal the wounds of war and showcase the continuing vitality of republican government even as it warred with itself.8 The works discussed so far include many of the major self-defined environmental analyses of the war. Others were not intended as overt “environmental” works by their authors, but can be reassessed and reemployed in light of current historiographic trends (as Jack Temple Kirby put it, “environmentally-minded readers may deduce from conventional texts ecological aspects of warfare.”). Indeed, perhaps the biggest mission for future Civil War environmental scholars will be to comb through the conflict’s vast historiography with an ecological eye, giving renewed life to proto-environmental interpretations and creating fresh ones with the help of older insights and evidence. With the end of the war, most self-defined environmental analyses also end, or touch only briefly on the postwar period. The same is also largely true of the antebellum years. This is unfortunate, because two of the most promising arenas for Civil War environmental history are the run-up and the aftermath. Mark Fiege has suggested that the Civil War had its roots in disagreements over the use of nature, “over the manner in which each [side] made a living . . . from the land.” This is a simple but profound insight, and here environmental

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historians might contribute significantly to our understanding of the sectional crisis and the motivations of both slavery’s opponents and defenders. An excellent model is Dean’s Agrarian Republic. Dean argues that antislavery Northerners’ criticisms of slavery emerged from their particular understanding of what constituted proper use of land. Small farming, they said, produced wealth without harming the soil, and combined with free labor it enabled stable communities and strong citizenship. On the other hand, plantations literally destroyed the soil, they claimed, relying heavily and not coincidentally on enslaved labor in the process (Carville Earle and, more recently, Paul Sutter have discussed the problems with such claims, but the important thing is antislavery Northerners’ faith in them). Opposing slavery and using land wisely were thus two sides of the same coin, and “free soil” a logical and powerful pairing of terms. After the war, those same Northerners would argue for a southern Homestead Act to bring stability and prosperity to the freedmen, a project eventually supplanted by sharecropping.9 Along those lines, Timothy Johnson has shown how mandatory use of organic fertilizer and the “guano note” was a major component of sharecropper liens, and also foreshadowed the rise of the fertilizer-dependent industrial South in the twentieth century. The most thorough environmental take on Reconstruction, though, is Jim Downs’s Sick from Freedom. Downs shows how, for former slaves, one of the most important consequences the war’s end was exposure to and death from disease. Far from an unmitigated good, freedom precipitated first a health disaster and then a social, economic, and political one. Ravaged by illnesses, freedmen struggled to take advantage of emancipation, and pleas for medical treatment ran up against deep racism, tangled bureaucracy, and efforts to mold them into a cheap and docile wage-labor force.10 While Reconstruction has received at least a bit of environmental analysis, very little exists for the years after it. Here, in the so-called “long Civil War,” is another golden opportunity for environmental historians to tease out the conflict’s enduring effects, twenty or thirty or fifty years after Appomattox. What role did the Civil War play in Progressive-era conservation, preservation, or urban sanitation? The legendary “prophet of conservation,” George Perkins Marsh, published Man and Nature in 1864 after seeing the consequences of centuries of environmental degradation in the Mediterranean; he was there as an envoy to Italy, cultivating support for the Union cause. This in itself is mostly coincidence, but it raises important questions. Are there stronger links between the war and environmental protection in later decades? Given the sheer immensity of the conflict and its long-term impacts in so many other areas, it would be shocking if there were not any.11 Take wilderness preservation and the concomitant idea of national parks.

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Traditional explanations of their origins are heavy on reactions against industrialism, the influence of Romanticism and Transcendentalism, the threat of roads and automobiles, restored-frontier and reborn-Eden fantasies, the attractions of tourism, and so on, all nonmilitary in origin. But in 2007 the western environmental historian William Deverell asked if we might also “re-examine the inauguration of the national park movement in light of the Civil War.” The conflict so badly traumatized the nation, he argued, that many Americans looked desperately to western nature for a place of recovery and renewal. The desire for national parks, he notes, was “perfectly coincident with the rise of the nation’s war-induced medical and psychological needs.” Adam Dean is among the very few to explore this idea further, arguing (as referenced earlier) that a major motivation for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Yosemite park proposal was the spiritual and psychological balm it offered to a war-torn Republic. Aaron Sachs, meanwhile, has suggested that “the war helped spur” the wilderness preservation movement’s rise both by reinforcing older ideas of nature as healer and by infusing forest destruction with gloomier metaphorical casts; terms like “stumps” and “the wilderness” took on dark new meanings amid war wounds and briar-tangled Virginia battlefields. “After the Civil War,” Sachs writes, “the American relationship to the landscape could never be the same,” and in this observation is a potential trove of fresh and nuanced understandings of the history of the wilderness idea, a topic of much debate in the last two decades.12 Progressive-era green initiatives weren’t limited to wilderness and national parks, of course. The conservation ethic—the “wise use” of natural resources, led by scientifically trained government experts—dominated environmental thinking of the period, and Sachs has wondered if “the war helped move Americans” toward “more efficient and careful use.” Some government officials (besides John Wesley Powell) with conservationist leanings, such as Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, were also Civil War veterans. But little work has been done to confirm or deny Sach’s speculations, at least in terms of land management. It is easy to imagine that wartime resource mobilization caused significant ecological degradation, or at least ecological change, via deforestation, expansion of agricultural land, increased mining and grazing, and the like, though little if any analysis has been done on the subject. Indeed, mobilization may well have been a very powerful agent of large-scale ecological transformation in both the North and South, and it is worth asking if those environmental effects (assuming they were significant) informed the growth of the later conservation ethic.13 Similarly, initial if somewhat casual links between the Progressive-era urban sanitation movement and the war are easily found. For example, the “apostle of cleanliness,” George E. Waring, served as a Union colonel in New

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York and Missouri regiments before his career as an advocate and designer of urban sewer and garbage disposal systems. During Colonel Waring’s stint as New York City’s street-cleaning commissioner in the 1890s, he infused his previously graft-riddled and ineffective municipal organization with military pomp, discipline, and esprit de corps (including daily roll calls and snazzy white uniforms for street sweepers). Several years earlier, he oversaw construction of Memphis, Tennessee’s sewer system in the wake of an epic yellow fever outbreak. In this, he had a predecessor in Union General Benjamin Butler, famous for cleaning up the streets of occupied New Orleans and eliminating yellow fever there during the war. Meanwhile, more direct links between the US Sanitary Commissions and urban sanitation have been suggested by scholars such as Suellen Hoy. In the end, how much impact did the war have on the Progressive era’s own war on urban filth and contagion? Did some unknown Federal soldier under Butler’s command take his experiences into the world of Gilded Age sewerage?14 Finally, there is the region that Worster calls home and that has been at the heart of his work: the American West. The war between North and South had its origin in the West, of course, and in the future (or lack thereof) of slavery there. But recently historians have begun to dig in earnest into the connections, to analyze western history in the context of and in deep conversation with the war and Reconstruction. Adam Arenson and Andrew Graybill’s edited volume Civil War Wests is the most recent example, alongside Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre, an account of competing efforts to memorialize the 1864 Sand Creek massacre. Kelman argues that the Indian wars of the era must be understood as both part and consequence of Union efforts to preserve and spread “free soil.” William Deverell, Jim Downs, Adam Dean and Lisa Brady have also touched on the idea. Deverell, as noted above, has argued for seeing the scenic West as a healing landscape, and Downs and Dean have both linked Reconstruction to Indian policy, reservations, assimilation, and so on. Brady has commented on how the Union’ methods of “environmental warfare” were taken westward and directed against Plains natives via destruction of buffalo and crucial riparian wintering grounds. Much remains to be done, however; environmental histories of freedmen in the West as exodusters, cowboys, farmers, and farm laborers, for instance, have yet to be written.15 The Civil War’s influence on western land use may prove to be the field’s most significant contribution to the region’s environmental history. If the war originated in a struggle over competing visions of the proper use of nature, the removal of Southern political opposition in 1861 cleared the way for western settlement along Northern lines. Among those lines were railroads; the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 linked the east and west coasts while

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delivering nearly a tenth of the nation’s land area into the hands of railroad corporations in compensation for their construction efforts. The Homestead Act, passed that same year, was perhaps the most important piece of land-use legislation in American history, with its famous 160-acre quarter sections crosshatching the countryside from the Upper Midwest to California. The contemporaneous Morrill Act facilitated the creation of land-grant colleges and scientific agriculture. These three acts together set in motion some of the most far-reaching environmental consequences of the war. Paired with more traditional legislative studies, environmental histories of these Acts have the potential to make plain the linkage between the eastern wartime politics and western ecologies. In the end, here in the West we come full circle and find an encouraging intersection of Civil War studies with Donald Worster’s own interests and work. He may not have emphasized the Civil War in his treatments of John Wesley Powell in particular or the West in general, but Civil War scholars are now coming to him, as it were, with inspiring results. One of the most promising new frontiers for Civil War environmental history is the history of the older frontier, in all its positive and negative manifestations. Surveying that topography will help us fill in the blank spots on the historiographic map in good Powellian fashion.

Notes 1. Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2. Worster, River Running West, 193. 3. Ella Lonn, Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy (New York: Walter Neale, 1933); William Chandler Bagley, Soil Exhaustion and the Civil War (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942); Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon, 1965); Jack Temple Kirby, “The American Civil War: An Environmental View,” National Humanities Center, accessed October 5, 2015, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nattrans/ntuseland /essays/amcwar.htm; Mark Fiege, “The Nature of Gettysburg,” in The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press 2012), 199–227; Ted Steinberg, “The Great Food Fight,” in Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 89–98; Lisa Brady, “The Wilderness of War: Nature and Strategy in the American Civil War,” Environmental History 7 (July 2005): 421–47; Lisa Brady, War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction

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and the American Civil War (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Andrew McElwaine Bell, Mosquito Soldiers: Yellow Fever and the Course of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Matthew M. Stith, “The Deplorable Condition of the Country: Nature, Society, and War on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier,” Civil War History 58 (September 2012): 322–47; Matthew M. Stith, Extreme Civil War: Guerilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016); Adam Wesley Dean, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Brian Allen Drake, ed., The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015). 4. Sam R. Watkins, Co. Aytch (Chattanooga, TN: Chattanooga Times, 1900; Project Gutenberg, 2004), accessed October 14, 2015, http://www.gutenberg. org/cache/epub/13202/pg13202-images.html; Kenneth W. Noe, “Fateful Lightning: The Significance of Weather and Climate to Civil War History,” in Drake, The Blue, the Gray, and the Green, 28–29, 20–21. Noe will pursue the subject further in a forthcoming book from Louisiana State University Press; for a preview, see “The Heat of Battle: Climate, Weather, and the First Battle of Manassas,” Civil War Monitor 5 (Fall 2015): 54–62, 76. 5. Paul Wallace Gates, Agriculture and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); Amy Murrell Taylor, “How a Cold Snap in Kentucky Led to Freedom for Thousands: An Environmental Story of Emancipation,” in Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges, ed. Stephen W. Berry II (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 191–214; Noe, “Fateful Lightning,” 21. 6. On Confederate agriculture, see R. Douglas Hirt, Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), especially 213–38. For Southern starvation, see also Joan E. Cashin, “Hungry People in the Wartime South: Civilians, Armies, and the Food Supply,” in Berry, Weirding the War, 160–75; Andrew F. Smith, Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011): John Majewski; Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 23–52; Lenette S. Taylor, “The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail”: The Civil War of Captain Simon

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Perkins Jr., a Union Quartermaster (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004). Mark Fiege touches briefly on the idea of Union “ecological superiority” in The Republic of Nature. “The South,” he writes, “was ill, hungry, and dying” around the time of Gettysburg, while “the North had become an awesome superorganism with the capacity to produce—and consume—virtually unlimited quantities of wool, meat, leather, flour, lead, iron horses, and, ultimately, human life” (225). Meanwhile, the diverse outcomes of World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq suggest that a comparison to the Civil War might yield some important insights into the role of ecological advantages in modern global wars. 7. Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–1865 (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1968); Bell, Mosquito Soldiers. See also Jeffrey Sartin, “Infectious Diseases during the Civil War: The Triumph of the ‘Third Army,’ ” Clinical Infectious Diseases 16 (April 1993): 580–84; Meier, Nature’s Civil War, passim; Timothy Silver, “Yancey County Goes to War: A Case Study of People and Nature on Home Front and Battlefield, 1861– 1865,” in Drake, The Blue, the Gray, and the Green, 52–66; G. Terry Sharrer, “The Great Glanders Epizootic, 1861–1866: A Civil War Legacy,” Agricultural History 69 (Winter 1995): 79–97; G. Terry Sharrer, A Kind of Fate: Agricultural Change in Virginia, 1861–1920 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000); Anne Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 119–63; Hirt, Agriculture and the Confederacy, 279–81. 8. Nelson, Ruin Nation; Aaron Sachs, “Stumps in the Wilderness,” in Drake, The Blue, The Gray, and the Green, 95–112; John C. Inscoe, “The Strength of the Hills: Representations of Appalachian Wilderness as Civil War Refuge,” in Drake, The Blue, The Gray, and the Green, 113–43; Brady, War upon the Land, 24–71, 93–126. See also Brady, “Wilderness of War,” 435–39; Dean, Agrarian Republic, 108–34. 9. Fiege, Republic of Nature, 201; Dean, Agrarian Republic, passim; Carville Earle, “The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner: Macrohistory, Agricultural Innovation, and Environmental Change,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 175–210; Paul S. Sutter, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 158–84. 10. Timothy Johnson, “Reconstructing the Soil: Emancipation and the Roots of Chemical-Dependent Agriculture in America,” in Drake, The Blue, The Gray, and the Green, 191–208; Downs, Sick from Freedom. 11. George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, ed. David Lowenthal (Seattle: University of Washington

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Press, 2003). On Marsh, see David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). 12. William Deverell, “Redemptive California? Re-thinking the Post–Civil War,” Rethinking History 11 (March 2007): 70, 67; Dean, Agrarian Republic, 108–19. See also Adam W. Dean, “Nature Glory in the Midst of War: The Establishment of Yosemite State Park,” Civil War History 56 (December 2010): 386–419; Sachs, “Stumps in the Wilderness,” 103, 108. 13. Sachs, “Stumps in the Wilderness,” 103. 14. On Waring, see Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse Reform and the Environment, rev. ed. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 42–65; Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29–62. 15. Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Downs, Sick From Freedom, 171–78; Dean, Agrarian Republic, 135–81; Brady, “Wilderness of War,” 440–41.

17 War from the Ground Up Integrating Military and Environmental Histories Lisa M. Brady War! Huh! Yeah! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. —Edwin Starr (1969)

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hese lyrics, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong and made famous by Edwin Starr, captured the sentiment of the anti–Vietnam War movement and remain salient for many who question the efficacy of military action for solving problems. It is an understandable reaction, especially in light of the tragedy and suffering war inevitably brings, but war can result in better lives, more inclusive political systems, and greater access and opportunities for individuals and groups who suffered the indignities and pain of discrimination and oppression. This paradox holds true when we turn our attention to war’s effects on nature. Armed conflict has the capacity to devastate entire ecosystems and threaten the viability and even survival of individual species, yet history reveals that out of war’s chaos—and sometimes because of it—some aspects of the natural world not only survive, but also thrive. And yet, we know relatively little about the environmental history of war. To their credit, military historians often integrate discussions of environmental factors—particularly weather and terrain—into their analyses of armed conflict.1 Regrettably, however, the natural world retains a relatively static quality in such studies, presenting a series of challenges or a collection of resources for which human actors must account, but with which they must only rarely actively engage.2 Environmental historians, on the other hand, have largely ignored warfare—despite Albert Cowdrey’s call in 1983 to take war seriously—focusing instead on questions of resource conservation, environmental degradation, and the ways ideas about nature have shifted over time.3 If our goal as historians, and as an educated citizenry, is to study the past so that we can better understand ourselves and so that we can make better, more informed decisions today and tomorrow, then we need to be more inclusive in how we undertake historical research. Combining military and environmental history presents a compelling opportunity to generate a more complete comprehension of the past, merging one of the oldest forms of history with one of the newest.

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Happily, a number of scholars over the past two decades or so have begun this important work.4 Edmund Russell helped pioneer the field; his 2001 book War and Nature revealed the uncomfortably close connections between the use of chemicals as weapons in war and their use in commercial and residential pest control efforts during the first half of the twentieth century. Russell teamed up in 2004 with Richard Tucker, another founder of the field (and its greatest proponent), to oversee the creation of the now-classic collection Natural Enemy, Natural Ally. That volume introduced a variety of perspectives on the environmental history of war, ranging from Mark Fiege’s piece on the ecological conditions leading to Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in July 1863 to William Tsutsui’s essay on the surprising resilience of nature after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Such collections have become a mainstay in the field, often providing previews to larger studies published by those same scholars.5 Since publication of Natural Enemy, Natural Ally, the field has broadened significantly. It now incorporates analyses of resource use and logistics during the American War for Independence, manipulations of the Yellow River in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (World War II), and developments in ecological science and environmentalism as a result of American use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.6 Several specific wars have garnered dedicated volumes, including the American Civil War in The Blue, the Gray, and the Green edited by Brian Allen Drake and The Long Shadows, a global history of World War II (WWII) edited by Simo Laakonen, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo.7 Furthermore, the field has evolved to encompass discussion of changes related to military activity beyond the battlefield. An example of this is the collection Militarised Landscapes, edited by Chris Pearson, Peter Coates, and Tim Cole, which covers topics as diverse as the British Armed Forces’ duty to protect fairy shrimp on their training grounds; US Civil War soldiers’ reactions to combat in Virginia’s devastated landscapes; and the militarized geography visible in Israel’s West Bank.8 I have attempted in my own work to address not only the material effects of strategic planning and tactical operations on both natural and cultivated environments (or agroecologies as Donald Worster has called them), but also to explore communities’ responses to such changes in the ways they work with and think about nature in the midst of war.9 Environmental historians of WWII have been particularly adept at widening the scope of war to include the home front. Matthew Evenden’s Allied Power, for example, is a masterful treatment of the mobilization of rivers for military purposes in Canada. Tim Cole’s article “ ‘Nature Was Helping Us’ ” is a provocative foray into the environmental history of the Holocaust, and Connie Chiang’s path-breaking piece “Imprisoned Nature” provides environmental analysis of Japanese American incarceration.10

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Despite growing interest in the environmental history of war, there remains significant ground to cover. Richard Tucker has cultivated interest around the world for such scholarship, organizing conference panels and workshops and encouraging research by graduate students and established scholars alike on conflicts such as the Spanish Civil War and World War I (WWI). Tucker has also been sowing seeds for environmental analyses of conflict-driven migration and post-war reconstruction, two issues that, as of this writing, have yet to take root and blossom.11 Beyond adding to our knowledge about specific periods of time and particular conflicts, environmental histories of war can challenge us to move away from a purely anthropocentric understanding of the past. Indeed, the crucible of war is a prime opportunity to rediscover humanity’s dependence upon and subjectivity to nature. It also provides crucial insight into nature’s own agency. Humans have yet to control wind, water, and microbes (among a host of other natural entities) to the degree of absolute mastery. Even in circumstances where there is an illusion of power, nature continues to evolve, adapt, and assert itself, often in unexpected ways. By turning our attention to nature, we achieve new insights and can draw novel conclusions about human conflict. Studying war through the lens of environmental history allows us to better understand nature’s roles in human lives, to appreciate its fragility as well as its resiliency, and to revisit our values, assumptions, and decisions. What follows are two case studies that are intended to be suggestive, rather than conclusive, with regard to the benefits of placing nature at the center of war studies. In both, I tilt the historical prism away from war’s destructive narrative, shining light on the less-examined generative power of war to reveal a more nuanced story of environmental change. I begin on the Western Front of WWI where both sides cut deep gashes into the soils of France and Belgium, and where modern war revealed its capacity to benefit certain aspects of nature even as it obliterated others. Next I move to the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), that strange relic of the Korean War that serves simultaneously as national boundary, battlefront, and nature preserve. There, continued tensions between the two Koreas benefit a variety of species that have found safe haven in the most heavily armed strip of land on the planet. Both examples explore the capability of modern warfare to change ecosystems, landscapes, and even our relationships with nonhuman nature. They furthermore illustrate that war can be good for something, and that war may have value in ways we have not yet acknowledged.

A View from the Trenches: World War I In June 1916, American aviator James McConnell wrote a letter to a friend

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in Paris describing the war-torn landscape around Verdun. “There is a broad brown band North of Verdun which marks the territory where the fighting has taken place. It does not seem of this earth. .  .  . What trees there were have all gone, and if villages were there, there is no sign of them left. Even the broad white roads have vanished as if erased from a blackboard.”12 McConnell elaborated on this scene in his book Flying for France, where he noted that the band of destruction ran west from the Woevre Plains to the Meuse and into the Argonne forest. “Peaceful fields and farms and villages adorned that landscape a few months ago,” he wrote. “Now there is only that sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature.”13 McConnell illustrated the clear association between war and nature. The trenches that became synonymous with WWI scarred the European landscape for over three hundred miles, from the North Sea south to the Swiss border. In between the trenches was “no man’s land”—the brown belt McConnell described—where it seemed nothing could survive. It is important to remember, however, that McConnell escaped the fighting on the ground, witnessing Verdun only from the sky. He described this perspective as “a weird combination of stillness and havoc.”14 McConnell’s view of the war, mediated by technology, was similar to that of the historian’s, mediated by time: engaged yet removed. From his plane, McConnell had a broad perspective and could see devastation on a large scale. From the distance of a century or more, historians can also take the broad view, but understanding the environmental consequences of trench warfare requires us to also look at the war through the eyes of those troops on the ground. When we dive into the twelve thousand miles of trenches along the Western Front, we find a somewhat different outlook on the war. Rather than haunting vistas of splintered, broken trees and oceans of churned-up soil, we observe an entirely new ecosystem, which evolved in response to modern war. This subterranean ecology was characterized by muddy labyrinths, inhabited by filthy bodies, and dominated by less charismatic elements of nature. Lice, for example, proliferated in the trenches and, as common vectors for disease, became major obstacles to effective military operations. Lice carried not only typhus, but also trench fever, a febrile disease contracted when louse feces infects an open sore. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers developed trench fever, unable to keep themselves free from infestation due to crowded, unsanitary conditions. Other diseases also plagued the sodden bunkers, dugouts, and underground passages. Trench foot, a disease caused by immersion of the feet in water for long periods of time and compounded by poor diet and other infections, affected tens of thousands of troops throughout the course of the war, rendering them unfit for duty. The course of the war—defined by static lines of battle drawn along the

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scars of opposing trenches from which millions of troops deployed machine guns and poison gas—meant that troops rarely escaped the novel environments they helped to create. There, in the trenches that came to symbolize the “war to end all wars,” humans suffered, but rats, lice, and diseases thrived. This new ecosystem—an artifact of military strategy—reveals the dynamic role of nature in shaping the outcome of war. Humans had to adapt to new environmental conditions just as nonhuman species adapted to war and changes in human activity. In this way, the trenches of World War I clearly reveal a need to integrate environmental history into our understanding of war and to incorporate military history into our explorations of nature. But the trenches are not the only symbol of WWI and they are not the only means by which we can understand the environmental history of that conflict.15 In contrast to the terror of the trenches, the delicate Papaver rhoeas inspired some of the most beautiful imagery in war-related literature. In 1915 Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae penned what became the war’s most famous poem: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow,/ Between the crosses, row on row,/ That mark our place; and in the sky,/ The larks, still bravely singing, fly,/ Scarce heard amid the guns below./ We are the dead; short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/ Loved, and were loved. And now we lie/ In Flanders fields./ Take up our quarrel with the foe!/ To you from falling hands we throw/ The torch; Be yours to hold it high!/ If you break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders Fields.”16 Not long after the war’s protracted battles, and sometimes in the midst of them, red poppies, also known as field poppies, emerged on the battle-worn ground, vivid signals of the paradoxical relationship between war and nature. The delicate plants flourished because the conflict generated massive soil disturbance. Endemic to northwestern Europe, field-poppies require loosened soil to propagate. Before the war, they most commonly took root during spring tilling and spread and bloomed in summer; indeed, farmers considered the poppies to be weeds because they crowded out crops and were almost impossible to eliminate from the soil (their seeds, according to one study, can remain dormant for up to eighty years, blooming only when soil conditions are right).17 Far from embodying mere antiquarian interest, the red poppies of Flanders Fields are a powerful symbol—one that has endured for nearly a century—of human sacrifice. The material changes wrought by war created optimal conditions for the red field poppies to proliferate and their beauty amidst the carnage provided solace and a means for remembering the fallen. The poppies, lice, and diseases of WWI should give us pause when we think about that conflict as well as the environmental histories of war more generally. Such nonhuman species are not unique in benefitting from human

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conflict, nor is their history inconsequential. These elements of nature had real impact on the soldiers fighting in the trenches and, therefore, for the outcome of the war as a whole. Acknowledging their importance and accepting that war benefitted them does not mean that we should ignore the physical and ecological devastation war can inflict and it certainly does not mean that we should diminish the element of human tragedy that all wars encompass. But it does mean that simple characterizations about the relationships between war and environment must be discarded in favor of more complex analysis. By incorporating aspects such as these into our understanding of military history, we gain deeper insight into how armed conflict affects not just human communities, but natural ones as well, and how nonhuman nature shapes and influences the conduct of war.

The Thin Green Line: Korea’s War and the DMZ In July 1945, Korea was still a united nation, albeit one under occupation. After Japan’s surrender to the United Nations (UN) the following month, two American colonels identified the thirty-eighth parallel as an appropriate division between Soviet and American zones of jurisdiction for the repatriation of Japanese civilians and prisoners of war.18 Provisional governments were set up in each zone, with the aim of establishing a single state when the appropriate time arrived.19 The administrative line crossed nearly one hundred waterways—a dozen of them major rivers—as well as several mountain ridges, hundreds of roads of various sizes and degrees of improvement, and six railway lines. It was selected without regard for settlement patterns, political boundaries, or topographical features, but instead because it bisected the peninsula into roughly equal portions.20 Immediately there was disagreement over which provisional government would become the nation’s legitimate authority. Fighting broke out between those who saw Korea’s future aligned with liberal capitalism, led by Western-educated Syngman Rhee based in Seoul, and those who followed the charismatic Kim Il-sung, whose government administered the territory north of the line and who yearned for a communist utopia. For several years, factions across the peninsula sought to bolster their political candidates and ideological goals through vitriol and targeted violence. Then, on June 25, 1950, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea sent armed forces across the demarcation line into territory claimed by the Republic of Korea, capturing Seoul and ushering in four years of war.21 It began as civil conflict (albeit deeply influenced by external powers) but became an international war with troops and supplies coming from seventeen nations. Captain John W. Thornton, a US Army helicopter pilot, was among those who fought on behalf of the United Nations (UN) and South

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Korea. He was captured early on when his helicopter was shot down over North Korean–held territory. On April 19, 1951, UN forces staged a nighttime attack near where Thornton was being held captive. He described what he saw of this offensive from his makeshift prison camp nearby: “Suddenly, as if on someone’s cue, the nearby hills were brilliantly illuminated by flares dropped from U.N. night bombers. . . . Tumbling napalm canisters fell from the planes like loose parts. Splattering across the ground in searing flame, they lit up the hills with an even greater intensity. .  .  . As the dying flares descended on their miniature parachutes and flickered out, they allowed the beleaguered mountains to retreat momentarily into the safety of darkness, their existence revealed only by the open wounds burning on their slopes.”22 Throughout four years of intensive conflict, barrages similar to that described by Thornton occurred all across the peninsula, scarring the mountains, fouling the rivers, and littering the plains with carnage, human and environmental. In a further complication, stalemate set in by October 1951 and trench warfare emerged. Both sides carved into Korea’s mountains and ridges extensive series of trenches and tunnels reminiscent of those on the Western Front. In contrast to the early stages of the conflict, in which hundreds of miles of territory might change hands in the course of a single operation, the last two years of the war saw battles myopically focused on capturing and recapturing individual hills. This effectively localized the devastation along what would become known as the Main Line of Resistance (MLR), spanning the peninsula at about the 38th parallel. By March 1953, after nearly two years of terrible stalemate, one American soldier recalled that along his part of the MLR, “all the trees in the area had been cut down or blasted away by shell fire.”23 Private First Class James “Red” Davis, part of the UN defense force at Outpost Harry at the center of the line, characterized the landscape as being dominated by “ugly, treeless hills and mountains.”24 Another American soldier deployed along the line sixty miles north of Seoul wrote that his hill “was called Old Baldy because the tremendous amount of artillery they’d dropped on the area when they were taking the hill had shaved the entire ridgeline bald. There wasn’t a tree or shrub left standing.”25 When the war ended, little remained along the MLR. The eroded slopes and mangled trees mirrored and memorialized the human costs. Hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides and an estimated 2.5 million civilians were dead; at least a million more were wounded, both inside and outside the ranks of the armed forces. The MLR ultimately became the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, when the ceasefire took effect on July 27, 1953. Since its inception, the DMZ has held deep social and political significance for Koreans, north and south of the line; more recently, it has taken on new symbolic importance. To understand the

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added meaning, we must look beyond human history and turn to the region’s environmental history. The DMZ began as an expediency, a line drawn hastily on a map with no consideration for human or environmental conditions. Then it became physically manifest—carved into the forests and mountains with the technologies of modern warfare. Finally it has taken on a life of its own: it is still a line drawn on a map, but it is also more permanently drawn on the landscape as a 2.5-mile-wide band of fenced-off, land-mined territory stretching across the entire width of the peninsula. It has become a both a symbol and a material artifact denoting the continued political conflict and cultural separation that plagues the Korean people. The DMZ has become the physical representation of division and divergence, not only on the esoteric planes of geopolitics and historical evolution, but also very personal level of families and villages. Its materiality has additional significance, however: the DMZ has become a place where threatened ecosystems and endangered species enjoy some degree of protection. It is in the DMZ that elements of Korean nature exist like they can nowhere else on the peninsula. North of the line, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea continues to cut down its forests and overexploit its fragile soils to demonstrate the superiority of Kim Il-sung’s Juche philosophy. In the south, the Republic of Korea is fully integrated into the capitalist world economy, engaging in consumerism with gusto, with all the environmental problems that entails. Both sides have created national parks and nature preserves, but these are isolated islands of protection that, at least in South Korea, occasionally must be closed to the public because they are “loved too much.”26 Thus, species like the Amur goral (Naemorhedus caudatus raddeanus), the redcrowned crane (Grus japonensis), and perhaps even the Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) have little recourse but to take up residence in the DMZ and the buffer zones on either side of it. The DMZ has transcended its political meaning and militarized character to also embody Koreans’ hope for peace through shared devotion to nature protection. Organizations north and south of the line have been working together to preserve the DMZ as a shared cultural and natural park, either through a bilateral agreement or through recognition as a UN World Heritage Site.27 The DMZ—in its manifestation as an inadvertent ecological preserve and despite (or perhaps because of) its grisly history—has inspired people in both Koreas and across the globe to rethink their relationship with that particular landscape and to nature in general, looking to it as a muse for social and environmental reconciliation. Like the trenches of World War I, Korea’s DMZ presents a more complicated view into the environmental history of war. The DMZ exists because of continued tensions between the DPRK and the ROK; because it exists,

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a variety of plants and animals have a protected space where habitat loss, encroachment by industrial and agricultural development, and urbanization do not pose immediate threats. Because the two Koreas remain at war, nature—in one small but crucially important area—thrives.

War! What Is It Good For? The answer to Edwin Starr’s question, as it turns out, is that war is good for some things—things that we abhor, such as lice and viruses, but also things we may value, such as poppies and red-crowned cranes. Accepting this doesn’t mean that we should advocate for war, nor does it mean that the good that may come from armed conflict offsets the very real dangers and costs. What it does mean is that our current assumptions about war and its effects on nature may be too simple and incomplete. Undertaking analyses of war from the perspective of environmental history, which requires us to think about human experience within the context of the material world and acknowledges that nature has a power of its own, challenges us to rethink our categories of “good” and “bad” and encourages us to be more inclusive in our evaluations of the past. Modern war—defined here as large-scale armed conflict in which the combatants have access to and deploy industrial-age technologies—is particularly useful in this regard.28 Twentieth-century wars such as WWI and Korea ushered in a type of combat that has left its mark clearly inscribed on the earth’s surface and embedded in its hydrosphere and atmosphere. In the twentieth century, wars became associated, even equated, with specific technologies: WWI gained infamy for its machine guns and toxic miasmas, the latter created by chemical weapons that killed indiscriminately and persisted in soil and water; WWII witnessed large-scale tank battles and the first use of atomic weapons, which subsequently ushered in the Cold War and its legacy of radiation poisoning, cancer, and fallout from widespread testing of nuclear devices; helicopters and Agent Orange have come to define the Vietnam War, just as depleted uranium distinguishes the first and second Gulf Wars from conflicts past. But technology is only part of the equation in the calculus of war, especially if we factor in nature. Weapons and military technologies have obvious environmental consequences, both in terms of accessing and harvesting the resources from which they are made and with regard to their destructive capacity when manufactured and deployed. But beyond weapons, beyond technology, humans at war develop strategies, execute operational plans, deploy tactics, and make supply decisions, all of which have their basis in and implications for natural conditions and resources. The success of Allied operations on D-Day, for example, depended as much on weather and tides as on

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the training and bravery of the military forces involved. Indeed, Eisenhower postponed the operation several times until acceptable weather and low tides coincided on June 6, 1944, providing appropriate conditions for the plan to proceed. In Vietnam, US Armed Forces used Rome Plows to destroy dikes that supported rice production as well as incendiary bombs and so-called “daisy cutter” munitions to clear forests for both security reasons (that is, in order to deny enemy forces cover from the trees) and to create large open areas suitable for helicopter landing zones.29 Here, rather than waiting for the optimal conditions, military forces created them by transforming terrain and eliminating ground cover. In both WWII and Vietnam, as in all wars, nature was a critical component to developing and implementing decisions from the strategic and operational to the tactical and logistical levels. In the end, if we wish to understand war in its totality—its causes and consequences, the myriad factors influencing a fighting force’s efficacy, and the specific experiences of those embroiled in the fighting, among other issues—then we need to account for the full context of military conflict, including the natural forces, large and small, that play upon war’s stage. We must explore the ways humans create and react to changing environmental conditions during war, and how natural systems adapt to new pressures or opportunities associated with armed conflict. Such research not only broadens our knowledge about war, but it can also help us to make better-informed decisions in future, not only for ourselves, but also for the thousands of species with which we share this planet.

Notes I would like to thank Mark Hersey, Ted Steinberg, and the two anonymous readers for their thoughtful feedback. Research for this chapter was supported in part by fellowships from the American Society for Environmental History and the US Army Heritage and Education Center. Regarding the epigraph, Motown artist Edwin Starr recorded “War” in 1969. Released in 1970, it became a #1 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100. Bruce Springsteen recorded a version in 1986. It remains a popular antiwar protest song. Wikipedia, s.v. “War (The Temptations song),” accessed February 29, 2016, https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/War_(Edwin_Starr_song). 1. For an excellent example that covers a variety of conflicts from this perspective, see Harold A. Winters, Battling the Elements: Weather and Terrain in the Conduct of War, with Gerald E. Galloway Jr., William J. Reynolds, and David W. Rhyne (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 2. Notable exceptions to this are Joseph Hupy, “The Environmental Footprint of War,” Environment and History 14 (August 2008): 405–21; Geoffrey

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Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); and Kenneth W. Noe, “Fateful Lightning: The Significance of Weather and Climate to Civil War History,” in The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War, ed. Brian Allen Drake (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 16–33. 3. Albert E. Cowdrey, “Environments of War,” Environmental History Review 7 (April 1983): 155–64. 4. What follows is a selective accounting of major books on war by environmental historians, not cited elsewhere in this chapter, in order of publication: Chris Pearson, Scarred Landscapes: War and Nature in Vichy France (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008); John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Katherine Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). In addition, there are myriad articles that cover a wide range of military and war-related topics that are too numerous to identify individually here. 5. Edmund P. Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to “Silent Spring” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Richard P. Tucker and Edmund P. Russell, eds., Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004). Among the collected volumes are Charles Closmann, ed., War and the Environment: Military Destruction in the Modern Age (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009); and John R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 6. David Hsiung, “Food, Fuel, and the New England Environment in the War for Independence, 1775–1776,” New England Quarterly 80 (December 2007): 614–54; Micah Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); David Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think about the Environment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). 7. Drake, The Blue, the Gray, and the Green; Simo Laakonen, Richard P. Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo, eds., The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017). 8. Chris Pearson, Peter Coates, and Tim Cole, eds., Militarized Landscapes:

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From Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain (London: Continuum, 2010). 9. Donald Worster, “Transformations in the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76 (October 1990): 1087–1106; Lisa M. Brady, War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 10. Matthew Evenden, Allied Power: Mobilizing Hydro-electricity during Canada’s Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Tim Cole, “ ‘Nature Was Helping Us’: Forests, Trees, and Environmental Histories of the Holocaust,” Environmental History 19 (October 2014): 665–86; Connie Y. Chiang, “Imprisoned Nature: Toward an Environmental History of the World War II Japanese American Incarceration,” Environmental History 15 (April 2010): 236–67. 11. My own work on the Korean War has begun to address these issues for one conflict in one place. See Lisa M. Brady, “Life in the DMZ: Turning a Diplomatic Failure into an Environmental Success,” Diplomatic History 32 (September 2008): 585–611; and Lisa M. Brady, “Sowing War, Reaping Peace: UN Resource Development Programs in South Korea, 1950–1953,” Journal of Asian Studies (forthcoming). 12. James Rogers McConnell to Marcelle Guérin, June 13, 1916, James Rogers McConnell Memorial Collection (accession no. 2104), University of Virginia Library. McConnell served as a pilot with the American Ambulance Service and as part of the Lafayette Escadrille until his death in 1917. 13. James R. McConnell, Flying for France: With the American Escadrille at Verdun (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1917), 53–54. 14. McConnell, Flying for France, 55. 15. For an excellent environmental assessment of World War I, see William Kelleher Story, World War I: A Concise Global History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). 16. John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields” (1915), accessed November 13, 2015, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/flanders-fields. 17. Nina-Coralie Hautekèete, Léa Frachon, Christophe Luczak, Benoît Toussaint, Wouter Van Landuyt, Fabienne Van Rossum, Yves Piquot, “Habitat Type Shapes Long-term Plant Biodiversity Budgets in Two Densely Populated Regions in Northwestern Europe,” Diversity and Distributions 21 (May 2015): 631–42. 18. For a brief overview of this process, see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 2005), 186–87. 19. The timing for this was to be determined by the United States and the Soviet Union in consultation with the United Nations. 20. William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 12.

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21. For different analyses of the war, see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011); and William Stueck, ed., The Korean War in World History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004). 22. John W. Thornton, Believed to Be Alive (Middlebury, VT: Paul S. Ericksson, 1981), 129. 23. Richard Peters, “First Combat,” in Voices from the Korean War: Personal Stories of American, Korean, and Chinese Soldiers, ed. Richard Peters and Xiaobing Li (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 145. 24. James Davis, “Outpost Harry,” in Voices from the Korean War, 151. 25. Tom Clawson, “Digging In,” in No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War, ed. Rudi Tomedi (New York: Wiley, 1994), 148. 26. Personal communication with Hong Song-ran, May 15, 2010. 27. The organization with the longest history of such action is the DMZ Forum, founded by K. C. Kim and Seung-ho Lee in 1994. See DMZForum.org (accessed February 29, 2016). 28. There appears to be no widely accepted definition for what makes wars “modern.” The best known and perhaps most consulted volume is Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret, Gordon E. Craig, and Felix Gilbert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 29. Hupy, “Environmental Footprint.”

Afterword The Distinctiveness of Environmental History Daniel T. Rodgers

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istories used to come in many fewer varieties than they do now. The modern house of history is a megamart of subjects and approaches, with aisles for every subdiscipline, the shelves bursting with energy and creativity. In this crowded array, what sets environmental history apart? What, besides the talents of so many of its practitioners, distinguishes it from all the other important historical projects that clamor so hard for history readers’ attention? At this date, this question may seem misplaced, like a straggler arriving, decades late, to someone else’s party. Modern environmental history is approaching its half-century mark. It has been the subject of constant, searching self-examination. It has a subject: nature, the earth and its ecosystems, the extra-human world within which humans live, breathe, think, and eat. Still, every field of history has its subject. Does environmental history have more than that: a method, a set of assumptions, a voice or approach or theory, a way of going about its tasks and inquiries, distinctive from other kinds of histories? There will be as many answers to that question as there are historians or history-minded readers. Like all living fields of history, environmental history exists in constant motion, open at every pore to new ideas, emphases, and contentions. But if we look at the career of one of its grand masters, Donald Worster, as emblematic we might pull out four aspects for emphasis. Environmental history pays terrifically close attention to ideas: to the scientific, the aspirational, the mythic, and the conceptual efforts to catch the natural world-out-there within the approximations of the words and images within human heads. Environmental history is, secondly, a history of power: an inquiry into the systems of social, economic, and political force through which societies have tried to bring nature under their command, to sustain it, to wring human utility from it, and, in modern times, reshape every piece of it from its simplest genomes to its great seas and atmosphere. Third, environmental history plays across an immense range of scales, more so than any other history I know. Last, environmental history is a moral endeavor; it compels our attention by the ethical seriousness that runs so hard through it. Except insofar as it incorporates some combination of these themes, styles of inquiry, and moral passion it would be no more special than any of the other histories blossoming around it.

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In the beginning, in the late 1960s, environmental history was all about ideas. Ideas reigned not only in the Yale American Studies program, where Worster was a graduate student and I a fellow traveler in History, but in the bibliographies one could then put together in environmental history. The field had sprung organically out of the work of the great nature writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Wallace Stegner, Joseph Wood Krutch, Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey. Theirs were the books crammed into one’s bookshelves and the prose that echoed in one’s head. You could count a handful of important scholarly environmental histories that had put place or region or the commodities of nature at their center. There were histories of land uses and resource extraction and biological exchange. But most of the key monographs that initially defined the field were studies of ideas of nature: Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, Samuel Hays’s Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden.1 Although Worster would later write dismissively of environmental history’s threatened diminishment into merely another branch of intellectual history, his own first work was a brilliant example of that craft. He never threw in his lot with the Perry Miller tradition, still alive at Yale then, in which the history of “the life of the mind” was the only thing that mattered. There was too much Kansas dust and Maine mud on his boots for that. But his first book was an immensely ambitious, powerfully written and conceptualized history of the “penumbra of ecological thought” as it had developed from Gilbert White and Thoreau through the scientific ecology of A. G. Tansley, William Morton Wheeler, and others in the mid-twentieth century. Nature’s Economy was the history of the development of a science, approached, Worster wrote, “as an intellectual historian” by “intention as well as training” might approach it—too big in scale and ambition to fit the conventional expectations for a doctoral thesis or a history of science monograph and all the better for that.2 His early course syllabi were crowded with intellectual history classics: Alfred North Whitehead, B. F. Skinner, H. G. Wells, Thorstein Veblen, David Riesman, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan. There was more to experience at Yale between 1966 and 1971 than ideas, of course. There were hikes in the New England mountains, tramps through the Connecticut woods where Don and Bev Worster found a rented home, sailing expeditions on the Maine Coast. In an early class assignment, he and his undergraduates set out to find the original New Haven shoreline buried under fill, sewage, and concrete and to return unsuccessful but the wiser for the effort. There was Bev Worster’s cooking and boundless generosity. There were demonstrations against the massive folly of the war in Vietnam. It was in events like the last that the politics of ideas and the new left politics of

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consciousness met. Minds mattered. To change the public’s mind about a war—or about the massive, enduring scar of racial slavery in the American past, or about the denied equality of women, or about modern societies’ vast inequalities in wealth, influence, and welfare—this seemed then the heart of political action. The first stirrings of the environmental movement worked in the same key, through mind-changing books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle.3 Worster was fully launched as an environmental historian before the first Earth Day in 1970. But the politics of consciousness embodied in the Earth Day organizers’ iconic image of a fragile blue earth and the politics of consciousness embedded in Nature’s Economy were one and the same. The turn to more tangible, material forms of power occurred later. In part this came through the influence of Worster’s undergraduate and graduate students at Brandeis University and the University of Hawaii. In part it came through the general hardening of the political landscape in the 1970s. In part it came from a decision to shelve an early book on the idea of limits and to dig his heels into a place and economy he knew so well: the dry plains of his own Kansas. I can still feel the excitement as the first pages of Don Worster’s Dust Bowl came boiling off the typewriter in the basement of his rented house in Lawrence, Kansas, to Madison, Wisconsin. They had the materiality of the Kansas grasslands etched into them: its deep-rooted native species, its massive disruption by the steel-tipped plow, its erosion, its dust-saturated air. But equally present now was the force of capitalist agriculture: the awesome capacities for commodification and control that tore apart the Great Plains in the 1930s. Those same forces stood, cloaked and deliberately obscured, behind most so-called “natural” disasters. Marx had not finished the work he set out to do, Worster argued, in the immensely influential, Bancroft Prize-winning Dust Bowl that he wrote in a furious burst of creativity in the spring and summer of 1978.4 Marx had not understood the necessity of putting nature into his scheme of the social modes of production and exploitation. Power needed to be brought out from behind its curtains. It needed to be placed at the center of any serious agro-economic understanding of humans’ part in nature. The now-famous forum in which Worster and others argued out that point in the pages of the Journal of American History (JAH) in 1990 exaggerated the tensions that now ran through the larger and more diverse environmental history field. Some thought that Worster was trying to lay out too narrow a program for a discipline just beginning to find its full range of possibilities. Others chastised him for falling into the quick sands of materialism without an acute enough awareness that all of human relations were culturally

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mediated and that every piece of the conceptual vocabulary that environmental historians were required to use, starting with nature itself, quivered with ambiguity. Some thought Worster had somehow muddled his way from Thoreau’s Maine woods into Marxism.5 In fact, Marx’s scheme of systems of production was not nearly as important to him as recognition of the presence of power itself. In his next book, the still more massive and critical Rivers of Empire, Worster ditched Marx for Carey McWilliams and, still more, the theorist of ancient hydraulic societies and power systems, Karl Wittfogel.6 The colossal reengineering of water in California that had sluiced the Sierra’s rainfall into dams and spillways, down the new concrete-rivers of the Central Valley to serve its endlessly thirsty agrobusiness clients, was not the work of markets and wage-labor exploitation alone. It brought together the powers of the state, the commercial claims of agriculture, visions of improvement and progress, and visions of a gleaming technological sublime into a conjuncture that overwhelmed the arid West. Power in these histories wore a multitude of faces. Power instantiated itself in the insatiable demands of markets. It instantiated itself in state fantasies of natural resource control and hydraulic hubris. But power also lay in nature itself. Nature had its limits. Pressed past its limit point, it refused to do its human managers’ bidding. Crisis lay always just over the horizon of human illusion—whether the breaking point be the population-carrying capacity of the earth, the capacity of soils to renew themselves, or the finiteness of the water cycle. Although the labels “materialist” and “culturalist” would hang in the air long after the JAH forum, as if they flew over irreconcilably divided camps, none of the forum protagonists in fact doubted the presence of power both over nature and within it. William Cronon was just about to publish one of the most compelling accounts of the commodification of nature though market capitalism that the literature contains. Richard White’s Middle Ground, published in that same epic year, was an extraordinarily influential history of intercultural boundaries and exchange in which power and empire set the very stage on which the play proceeded.7 As post-modernist challenges to materialism of every sort accelerated in the 1990s, Worster did not disguise his unhappiness. If nature were nothing other than an infinitely malleable, shape-shifting array of figments in human imaginations, if no line whatsoever could be drawn between humans and the nonhuman natural world, then environmental history, he feared, would truly dissolve into a purely self-referential history of ideas. No more need to pull on one’s hiking boots; environmental history might as well be done in a closet. But in truth he did not stop writing intellectual history either. His

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most recent book, Shrinking the Earth, is full of acutely realized examples of the craft. The intellectual history of the Limits to Growth project is carefully sketched there. Jay Gatsby’s insatiable longings open the book. In the first chapter, when the younger Mercator publishes his first map of the old and new worlds as hemispheres hinged at the equator—as if a wholly unknown “second earth” had floated in from space to kiss the finite earth one knew and suddenly make the horizons of possibility seem limitless—the power of culture could not be clearer.8 Power and limits, economies and political regimes, culture and conceptions—all good history writing strains to hold these in relation, but environmental history, at its best, carries them and the tensions between them with a distinctive clarity. The term “play of scales” is not yet part of every historian’s lexicon, though it soon will be. “Historical scale” was the theme for the American Historical Association (AHA) convention for 2017, sited in Denver not far from the point, the AHA website took pains to announce, where a calamitous surge of toxin-ladened water had spewed out of the Gold King mine into the state’s waterways two years before; not far from Sand Creek where Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples, taking their stand on a piece of the earth they thought was their own, were massacred by the Colorado cavalry; directly at a collision point between the competing ambitions of hydraulic fracking interests and suburban developers.9 In some contemporary uses, scale has become something of a shorthand for what is now called “big history,” in which the globe itself forms the stage. But at its best, as in the AHA announcement, the play of scales stands for historians’ capacity to see the micro- and the mega-story, the particular and the emblematic, the local, regional, and transnational all in a play of interdependent relationships. Most history writing is still pegged to one particular scale or another. Environmental history is an exception. By its nature, from its deeply attentive connection to place and particularity up the scale to the fragile globe itself, it invites, more than most historical fields, an infinitely creative play of scales. A precise sense of place matters in most environmental history. “A boat leaves the pine-and-oak forested shores of Massachusetts and sails into the blue, until the mainland falls out of sight and the world becomes a seamless blend of sky and sea,” Worster opens his description of a “field trip” to Nantucket Island in Shrinking the Earth. Faintly at first the swell of an island appears, no hills or valleys, only “a pygmy forest and swales of spartina grass, and a soil so poor that even a New England farmer would scorn to plant.” Barren to the core except for its placement in what was one of the most

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abundant corners of the North Atlantic Ocean—until relentless commercial hunting exhausted its whale population and the seas ran thin. Take a walk in the boreal woods of Canada and “everywhere the ground heaves up and down with shallow tree roots, hummocks of moss, and granite ledges where only lichen can get a hold, while dead branches are like treacherous knives that can put out an eye or lacerate arms and legs.” Or you trip headfirst into a bog of the petroleum-saturated sands that the fuel conglomerates are lobbying furiously for license to mine.10 The trick of writing like this is not simply to set you firmly in a place but to make you suddenly aware of the linkages of that place with forces and locales far away, so that one travels down extended lines of causality and connection that were as obscure, at first, as the tangled gloom of the boreal forest. The trope is a very old one in nature writing. Why travel the world, Thoreau wrote, when all of nature could be seen in Walden Pond? If he were an economist, Leopold wrote of the sand prairie’s smallest, most modest flower, “I should do all my economic pondering lying prone on the sand, with Draba at nose-length.”11 The whole is in the part, the part in the whole. Decades before Thomas Bender’s paradigm-changing LaPietra report put transnational history on modern historians’ agenda, environmental historians were practicing international history, following what Worster called nature’s “world without borders.”12 The play of scales moves on analytical as well as geographic axes. Take a tramp with Worster on a Rocky Mountain trail, or a Bavarian forest, or the Pacific coast sands, and the conversation zooms up and down the registers. Our most recent ramble had started out as a hunt for the museum that is said to overlook one of the largest garbage dumps in America, acres of muck and plastic and paper and construction debris that is one of New Jersey’s gifts to the nation. Perhaps on that account Don Worster started musing about a book someone should write. Not a history of garbage but a history of shit. A history of excrement pouring out of roaming pigs in China and cattle feedlots in central California, spreading filth and disease, plaguing myths and imaginations; human excrement piled up in alleyways and pit toilets, or carted out to the fields by night soil vendors, or sluiced daintily down Swedish-modern toilet bowls, coursing its way through labyrinths of sewage pipes, cesspool lines, and tax-financed mega-sewage plants, or spewing directly into rivers and the sea; pellets, patties, lumps and globs of manure, carefully gathered up to bring life to peasant fields or fishponds, to be baked in industrial furnaces, commodified, sold in markets, cursed when you slip on it. Every analytical scale would be present in it. The promise of environmental history is that whatever starting point one chooses, one finds connections and interlinkages radiating as far afield as the imagination goes. Up and down the

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spatial and analytical scales it can run. The historian sifting through boxes in a musty archive, hunting for missing scraps of connection, can’t resist a certain envy. Finally, environmental history is a moral project. The same could be said, of course, of all histories. Historians write to get a deeper sense of the ways and possibilities of humankind. They write to bring back to life persons whom others, more powerful than they, had shunted out of the story. They write to explore the behavior of men and women under the most trying circumstances or, to the contrary, the most ordinary of them. They write to understand moments of decision and social change. They write to reconstruct the elaborate edifices of ideas and convictions that human beings have erected and lived by. They write to make their readers better aware of the worlds they have inherited. They write to remind their readers of how parochial their experiences are. Different historians play out these emphases differently. But like all humanistic endeavors, history writing can never be wholly severed from some moral thread. The alternative is a bare jumble-box of facts. But environmental history carries its sense of moral obligation more explicitly and openly than most. Taking shape within the ferment of the environmental action movements of the 1970s, the discipline, for all its internal debates over the issue, has never fully left its origin point. Of all its practitioners, however, none have written or spoken more eloquently about environmental history as a moral endeavor than Worster. The deep affection with which Worster shaped his splendid biographies of the great American environmentalists, John Muir and John Wesley Powell, speak powerfully to the point.13 So does Worster’s seemingly inexhaustible energy as an essayist, speaking to audiences far beyond the reach of the specialized, peer-review journals. So, above all, does the very power of his writing itself. He writes to persuade: to persuade not only with the facts, arguments, and hard-won archival findings that run as sinews through his work but with words that resonate, that reverberate against each other in some of the most deeply musical prose in the historical discipline. It is the sound of a really good chorus. It is the sound, of course, of a really good sermon. As the folk saying goes, you can take the boy preacher out of central Kansas but, when he sets out to write, you can’t take the preacher entirely out of the boy. And that is a good thing. The earth has limits. It needs our humility, our recognition that it is there not only for us. It needs our willingness to admit that our irresponsible and thoughtless behavior, our headlong pursuit of human self-interests, can do it enormous damage. It needs a more “self-effacing ethic,” Worster wrote in his very first book. It needs less rapacious, exploitative, careless treatment from those who tread so hard on it. “The

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ecological ethic of interdependence” is not only an objective descriptor of nature; it constitutes, he wrote, “a moral truth.” There came a moment when this faith was tested, not by the growing pains of environmental history but by developments in ecological science itself. When Worster and modern environmental history began, the organic “balance” of nature could be taken as a given. Humans disturbed, sometime with frightful effectiveness. They could radically simplify their environments. But left to its own, the natural world was keyed to a dynamic of balance. Natural systems moved through ascending stages to more complex forms of stability and higher levels of integration. The notion of symbiotic “communities” was not simply a metaphor; the term mirrored one of ecological science’s core facts. And then, accelerating in the 1980s, that consensus within the science of ecology began to fall apart. Notions of “maturity” and “climax” disappeared. Patchworks, incongruously and raggedly stitched together, Worster reported in 1990, were said more accurately to reflect the essence of natural landscapes than “communities.” “Disturbances” were endemic even where no human hands were present. Instability was as natural to natural systems as order. A butterfly flapping its wings in China could set off a thunderstorm in the city of New York.14 If the earth was never in balance, what was an environmentalist or an environmental historian to do? In a classically outlined sermon, the closing part is called the peratorio. It sums up the principled core before the benediction sends listeners on their way. You can find a peratorio at the close of virtually every book and essay Worster has written. There is deeply eloquent music in them all. But my favorite, because it may be hardest won, are the words with which he closed “The Ecology of Order and Chaos” in 1990. The lesson of nature for John Muir, Worster wrote there, had been its complex order; its ethical upshot was that humans ought to love and preserve nature just as it is. But in a universe of chaos, did affection still carry serious meaning? Was “damage” to the land or the ecosystem just another word? In a cosmos of natural imbalances, was there any reason not to bore relentlessly ahead with whatever self-striving ambitions caught hold of our private or collective egos? “It may be that we moderns, after absorbing the lessons of today’s science, find we cannot love nature quite so easily as Muir did. But it may also be that we have discovered more reason than ever to respect it—to respect its baffling complexity, its inherent unpredictability, its daily turbulence. And to flap our own wings in it a little more gently.” Amen.

Notes 1. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950); Samuel P. Hays,

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Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 2. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), viii. 3. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968); Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). 4. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 5. Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” with responses by Alfred W. Crosby, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, William Cronon, and Stephen J. Pyne, Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1087–1141; Donald Worster, “Seeing beyond Culture,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1142–47. 6. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 7. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 8. Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 9. Patty Limerick, “Why Denver? A Habitat for History,” Perspectives on History, September 2016. 10. Worster, Shrinking the Earth, 57, 203–4. 11. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 103. 12. Thomas Bender, The La Pietra Report (Bloomington, IN: Organization of American Historians, 2000); Donald Worster, “World without Borders: The Internationalizing of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 6 (Fall 1982): 8–13. 13. Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 14. Donald Worster, “The Ecology of Order and Chaos,” Environmental History Review 14 (Spring/Summer 1990): 16.

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CONTRIBUTORS Marco Armiero is the director of the Environmental Humanities Lab at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where he is also an associate professor of environmental history. He is the author of several books, both in Italian and English, including A Rugged Nation: Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (2011). In addition to his monographs and numerous articles, he has also edited or coedited several collections, including, most recently, Environmental History of Modern Migrations (2017), with Richard Tucker, and Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (2018), with Gregg Mitman and Robert Emmett. Armiero is a senior editor for Capitalism Nature Socialism and Environmental Humanities. Kevin C. Armitage is the author of The Nature Study Movement: The Forgotten Popularizer of America’s Conservation Ethic (2009) and a history of environmentalism, This Green and Growing Land (2017). Brian C. Black is a professor of history and environmental studies at Penn State Altoona. He has authored or edited a dozen books. Among those are Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (2000), Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History (2012), and Gettysburg Contested: 150 Years of Preserving America’s Cherished Landscape (2013). Among his edited volumes of note are Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Science and History (4 volumes), for which he served as general editor, and Nature’s Entrepôt: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds (2012), with Michael Chiarappa. Lisa M. Brady is a professor of history at Boise State University. She is the author of War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (2012) and served as the editor of the journal Environmental History from 2013 to 2018. Karl Boyd Brooks is a clinical professor of public leadership at the University of Texas’s LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin. Before taking that position in 2016, he served as acting assistant administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, in Washington, DC, having served as regional administrator of EPA Region 7 from 2010 to 2015. Prior to that, he was an associate professor of history and environmental studies, as well as a courtesy professor of law, at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (2006) and Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law (2009), as well as the editor of The Environmental Legacy of Harry S. Truman (2009). Robert Wellman Campbell is a historian living in Northfield, Minnesota. For ten years he taught at Black Hills State University. He has also worked with and published for the US Geological Survey’s Earth Resources Observation and Science Center, the United Nations’ Environment Programme, the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and the Trust for Public Land. Brian Allen Drake is a senior lecturer at the University of Georgia. He is

306

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the author of Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics before Reagan (2013) and the editor of The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War (2015). Sterling Evans is retired from the University of Oklahoma where he was the Louise Welch Professor of History. He is the author of The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica (1999) and Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains (2007). The latter won the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award from the Agricultural History Society as well as the Caroline Bancroft History Prize. He has also edited three collections. Sara M. Gregg is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. She is currently working on a manuscript titled Free Land: Homesteading the US West, which examines the environmental and political impacts of the several homestead acts between 1862 and the present. She is the author of Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (2010), which won the 2011 Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award from the Forest History Society. She also coedited American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (2011), with Edwin C. Hagenstein and Brian Donahue. Mark D. Hersey is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, where he directs the Center for the History of Agriculture, Science, and the Environment of the South. Shen Hou is an associate professor of history at Renmin University, Beijing, China, where she serves as the associate director of the Center for Ecological History. She is the author of The City Natural: “Garden and Forest” Magazine and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2013). Neil M. Maher is a professor of history in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University–Newark, where he teaches environmental and political history. He has published articles in academic journals including Social History, Environmental History, and, most recently, Modern American History. His first book, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (2008), received the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for the best monograph in conservation history. Maher has recently published his second book, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (2017), which examines the interrelationship between the space race and the grassroots political struggles of the 1960s, including those involving the civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, environmental, feminist, counterculture, and conservative movements. Christof Mauch is director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, chair in American Cultural History at LMU Munich, and an honorary professor at Renmin University in China. He has published or edited more than 40 books in German history, US history, and international environmental history, including, most recently, Visions of Australia: Environments in History (2017), with Ruth Morgan and Emily O’Gorman, and Molding the

CONTRIBUTORS

307

Planet: Human Niche Construction at Work (2016), with Maurits W. Ertsen and Edmund Russell. Daniel T. Rodgers arrived at graduate school at Yale University in 1966, the same year as Donald Worster. He went on to teach at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Princeton University, where he now is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus. His most recent book, Age of Fracture, won the Bancroft Prize in 2012. Adam Rome is professor of history at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2001) and The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (2013). Among other distinctions, he has won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Award. From 2002 to 2005, he served as the editor of the journal Environmental History. Edmund Russell is a professor of history at Boston University. He is the author of War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to “Silent Spring” (2001) and Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (2011). He also coedited Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (2004). He currently serves as an editor for the Cambridge University Press Studies in Environment and History series. Mikko Saikku is the McDonnell Douglas Professor of American Studies at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain (2005), along with numerous articles and book chapters. He also coedited Encountering the Past in Nature (2001), with Timo Myllyntaus. A past president of the Finnish American Studies Association, he is currently the president of the Nordic Association for American Studies. Ted Steinberg is the Adeline Barry Davee Distinguished Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University. Frank Zelko is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Make It a Green Peace! The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism (2013) and the history editor for Solutions (http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/).

INDEX abaca, 97, 102–11 Abbey, Edward, 264 Acapulco, 104–5 Advanced Technology Satellite (NASA), 192 Africa, 97 Age of Discoveries, 143 agroecology, 145, 175, 251, 265 Alaska, 176–77 Alcoa, 31 alfalfa, 175 American Chemical Society, 64 American exceptionalism, 132–33, 135 American Society for Environmental History, 1, 5, 21, 161, 176 American South, 119, 144 American War for Independence, 151 American West, 101, 164, 174–82 ammonia, 60 Anderson, Benedict, 21 Anderson, Ray, 32, 35 Andes Mountains, 104 Antarctica, 197–98; and ozone hole, 198, 207nn28–31 Apollo missions (NASA), 190–94 Ardizzone, Tony, 147 Arenson, Adam, 245 Armitage, David, 102 Armstrong, Edwin Howard, 163–64 Army Corp of Engineers, United States, 174 Asheville, North Carolina, 33 astronomy, 228–29 Atlantic Ocean, 105, 177 atmosphere, 165–67 Australia, 143–44 automobile, 110 Ayers, Edward, 213 Bagley, William Chandler, 238 Baja, California, 104 Banner, Stuart, 102 Becker, Carl, 7 Belich, James, 103 Bell, Andrew, 238, 241 Bender, Thomas, 268 Bess, Michael, 42 big data, 49, 209 Bijker, Wiebe, 65–66

biological sciences, 126, 158. See also ecological science biosphere, 156 Blevins, Cameron, 219 Bloch, Marc, 127, 130 Book of Common Prayer, 157 Boone, Daniel, 119 Borneo, 103, 106 Bosporus Strait, 107 Boston, Massachusetts, 31 botany, 126 Botkin, Daniel, 43 Bow, Clara, 75 BP-Macondo Oil Spill of 2010, 89–92 Bradford, Alison, 102 Brady, Lisa, 238, 242 Brand, Stewart, 40, 48, 50, 189–92, 200–201; and Whole Earth Catalog, 191 Brazil, 110, 142, 144 Breakthrough Institute, 47–48, 51 Britain, Battle of, 164 British Antarctic Survey, 197, 198, 199, 207nn28–30 Brosnan, Pierce, 80 Brower, David, 191, 202n5 Cambodia, 103–4 Cambridge, Massachusetts, 21, 74 Canada Geographic Information System, 212 Canada Land Inventory, 211–12 Cannabis sativa. See hemp capitalism, 29–32, 129, 136–38, 255, 266; environmental destructiveness of, 32, 36, 36n4, 237; and environmentalism, 29–30, 33, 43–46; and labor, 144, 148; and radical politics, 17; and technological lock-in, 67; in Worster’s work, 3, 13–14, 18, 20–23, 28–29, 35–36, 103, 129, 180, 216. See also Dust Bowl; Rivers of Empire; Worster, Donald Carson, Rachel, 19, 24, 42, 44, 265 Casa de Contratación, 103 Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 174 Center for Ecological History (Renmin University), 7 Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (Stanford University), 220 Center for Sustainable Enterprise

310

INDEX

(University of North Carolina), 30 Central America, 100–109 Central Park (New York City), 134 Chaplin, Charlie, 76 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 155 chemistry, 229. See also Midgley, Thomas, Jr. Chicago, Illinois, 60–62, 88 China, 98, 102–4, 126–38 chlorofluorocarbon, 57–58, 63–64, 67 Christensen, Clayton, 45 Christianity. See religion Chumash people, 76–77 cinnamon, 102 Civil War (United States), 107, 109, 237–49, 251, 260n4; and agriculture, 239–41, 243; and the American West, 245–46; and antebellum period, 242–43; and cultural conception of nature, 242–44; and disease, 241–43; and Gilded Age, 239, 245; and Progressive Era, 239, 244–45; and Reconstruction, 239, 243–44. See also slavery Clark, John G., 86 Clean Air Act (United States), 177 Clean Water Act (United States), 177 Clements, Frederic, 42–43, 45 climate change, 31, 40, 130, 165; climate refugees, 144; skepticism of, 54n21 Coates, Peter, 251 coffee, 110 Cold War, 233n2, 258, 260n5 Cole, Tim, 251 Colombia, 110 Colten, Craig, 86 Columbian Exchange, 98, 105 Commoner, Barry, 265 communism, 129 Comparative Studies in Society and History, 127 Congress, United States, 172, 176 Cooper, Gary, 75–76 Cordage Institute, 108 corn, 105, 174–75 Costa Rica, 109–10 cotton, 104 CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 155 Crimean War, 101, 107 Crockett, Davy, 119 Cronon, William, 88; and capitalism, 17; as compared to Worster, 3; and foundations of environmental history,

2, 154, 217; on wilderness, 122, 217; on Worster’s influence, 8. See also Journal of American History Crosby, Alfred, 86, 143–44, 210 Crowdrey, Albert, 250 Crutzen, Paul, 40 Cuba, 108 Cunfer, Geoff, 216, 219, 220 Cushman, Gregory, 102 Daily, Gretchen, 47 DaimlerChrysler Corporation, 101, 110 Darwin, Charles, 1, 126–27, 130–31, 138 Dean, Adam, 238, 242–44 Del Rio, Delores, 75 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, 255, 257 Department of Agriculture, United States, 108–9 Des Moines, Iowa, 176 Deverell, William, 244 Diamond, Jared, 128, 143 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 80 digital humanities, 220–21 disease, 148–49 Donahue, Brain, 217–19 Downs, Jim, 238, 243 Drake, Brian Allen, 188, 233, 251 Dubuque, Iowa, 174 Dust Bowl, 145, 179–80 Dust Bowl (Worster), 2, 148, 182, 209; capitalism in, 3, 13, 20, 28, 35–36, 144–45, 173, 179–80, 265; as foundational work of environmental history, 28, 209, 215, 221, 265 Earle, Carville, 243 Earth Day, 17, 30, 193–94, 204–6nn15–18 East Indies, 103, 106 eco-efficiency, 31–35 ecological science, 3–4, 19, 24, 42–45, 164–65, 270 Ecuador, 106, 109 Edeson, Arthur, 76 Ehrlich, Paul, 47, 265 Elvin, Mark, 137 environmental injustice, 81 environmental law, 172–82 environmental movement, 40, 177; and business, 32–33, 192–93; and ecological science, 42–43, 46–47; and environmental history, 17 environmental preservation, 229–30,

INDEX

243–44; and the DMZ, 257 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), United States, 98, 172, 176–79 evolution, theory of, 1, 9n2, 126, 228. See also Darwin, Charles; Wallace, Alfred Russel Fairbank, John King, 131 Fairchild, Sherman, 165 federalism, 178 Federal Rule of Evidence 702, 182n5 Fernandez-Amresto, Felipe, 128 fiberglass, 110 Fiege, Mark, 238, 242, 251 Finland, 97, 116–22; forest service of, 119 Fish, Shirley, 104 Fishbein, Morris, 61 Fleming, James, 166 Flint Hills, Kansas, 175 Frankfurt School, 18, 59, 180 Frehner, Brian, 86 French Empire, 174 Frigidaire, 62, 64 frontier ideology, 117, 120–22. See also Turner, Frederick Jackson Frost, Robert, 163 Fuller, Buckminster, 190 Fultz, Francis M., 77 functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), 230 fur trade, 104, 117 Gaia hypothesis, 199, 208n33. See also Lovelock, James; Margulis, Lynn Gallen-Kallela, Akseli, 97, 116 Gao, Guorong, 136 Gates, Paul W., 239 Gavins Point Dam, 174 General Motors, 57, 63 Genovese, Eugene, 238 geology, 229–30 Gilded Age, 175 Gilliland, Jason A., 219 Glenn, John, 192 Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP), 197 global warming, 198–200. See also climate change Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 196–200. See also Hansen, James gold: Australian gold strike, 107; California gold rush, 102, 107 Golden Gate Bridge, 101, 108

311

Gorman, Hugh, 33, 86 Gray, Asa, 126, 130–31, 138 Graybill, Andrew, 245 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Great Depression, 109, 145 Great Lakes region, 179 Great Plains, 134, 136, 144–45; and agriculture, 101, 107, 175. See also Dust Bowl Green City, Missouri, 174 greenhouse gasses, 110 Grew, Raymond, 127 Guam, 104, 108 guano, 102 Guatemala, 110 Guernica, 164 Gulf Oil Spill (2010). See BP-Macondo Oil Spill of 2010 Gulf War: First, 258; Second, 258 Gutkind, Edwin, 165 Hanks, Tom, 80 Hansen, James, 23, 198–99 Harvard, John, 74 Harvard University, 176 Harvey, David, 45, 48 Hawaii, 104, 108. See also Kamilo Beach, Hawaii; Mauna Loa Observatory Hawken, Paul, 30 Hayes, Denis, 17 hemp, 106–7 Hill, Julia Butterfly, 163 Hiroshima, Japan, 164 Hirt, Paul, 88 Hobsbawn, Eric, 119 Hoffman, Andrew, 30 Holocaust, 220, 251 Homer, Winslow, 86 Homestead Act (1862), 243, 246 Honduras, 108 Hoover Dam, 101, 108 Horkheimer, Max, 22–23 horses, 143 Hurst, J. Willard, 172, 177, 179–80 Icarus, 161, 166 Ice and Refrigeration News, 60 Idaho, 174, 176–77 Igler, David, 102 immigration: Chinese, 105; Italian, 146; as an object of historical analysis, 142–50, 164 India, 104, 106 Indian Ocean, 105

312

INDEX

industrial husbandry, 175 Industrial Revolution, in America, 164 Institute for Global Environmental Leadership (University of Pennsylvania), 30 instrumental reason, 22–23, 59, 65 intellectual history, 19–20, 264–65 interdisciplinary research, 5–6, 210–11, 213, 220, 228–32; and critiques of, 231–32 Interface (modular carpet company), 31 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 200 International Geophysical Year (IGY), 195 International Harvester, 107 International Union of Geological Sciences, 42 Interstate Commerce Clause, United States, 178 Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 213, 216 irrigation, 133, 136–37, 174–75, 178 Israel, 251 Italy, 74, 142. See also immigration ivory, 104 Jackson, Wes, 28 Jamaica, 108 Jameson, Frederic, 44 Jamieson, Dale, 51 Japan, 104, 108, 126 Japanese American internment, 251 Jarmusch, Jim, 81 Jefferson, Thomas, 20, 175 Jefferson City, Missouri, 176 Jeffersonian agrarianism, 134 Johnson, Robert, 88 Johnson, Timothy, 243 Jones, Christopher, 88 Journal of American History, 2, 6–7, 85–86, 88–89 Journal of the American Medical Association, 61 Kahanamou, Duke, 75 Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, 41, 49 Kansas City, Kansas, 172 Kareiva, Peter, 47 Keeling, Charles, 198–99, 200, 207n29. See also Scripps Institution of Oceanography Kelman, Ari, 245 Kettering, Charles F., 63, 65–66, 68 Kirby, Jack Temple, 238, 242

Kitunen, Martti, 119 Klostermayr, Matthias, 119 Knowles, Anne Kelly, 220 Kohler, Herbert, 110 Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), 252, 255–58 Korean War, 252, 255–56 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 264 Kunlun Mountains, 134 Kuroshio Current, 105 Laakonen, Simo, 251 Lake Malibou, 76 landscape, as object of historical analysis, 167 Langley Research Center, 195 Langmuir, Irving, 63 Lapland, 118–19 Latin America, 101 Lawrence, Kansas, 172, 176–77. See also University of Kansas Lee, Robert, 219 Lee, Robert E., 220, 241, 251 Lefebvre, Henri, 210 Lemisch, Jesse, 21 Leopold, Aldo, 19, 176, 264, 268; and ecological science, 42, 44, 154 Lifset, Robert, 88 Limbaugh, Rush, 29 Limits to Growth, The (Club of Rome), 199, 267 Little Ice Age, 137 Lonn, Ella, 238 Los Angeles, California, 73 Lovelock, James, 199 Lucier, Paul, 86 Luedthe, Brandon, 229 Lynas, Mark, 48 Lynd, Staughton, 20 Lytle, Mark, 19 Maasai people, 116 Maçau, 103 MacLeish, Archibald, 193, 204nn12–14 Majewski, John, 240 malaria, 148–49 Malibu Movie Colony, 75, 78 Manhattan, New York, 164 Manila, 103–4 Manila Galleon, 97, 101–4 Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. See Gutkind, Edwin Mao, Da, 131

INDEX

Margulis, Lynn, 199 Marris, Emma, 47–48 Marsh, George Perkins, 243 Martin, Strother, 76 Marvier, Michelle, 47 Marx, Karl, 20 Marx, Leo, 134, 264 masculinity, 116–22 Matsuda, Matt, 102, 104 Mauna Loa Observatory, 198–99, 200, 207n29 McCarthy, Gina, 176 McClellan, George, 241 McConnell, James, 252–53 McKibben, Bill, 47 McLuhan, Marshall, 190, 264 McNeill, John, 6, 87, 143 McWilliams, Carey, 266 Meier, Kathryn Shively, 238, 241 Melosi, Martin, 86, 131 Melville, Herman, 163 Merchant, Carolyn, 17, 210 Merrill, Karen, 89 meteorology, 230 Mexican-American War, 107 Mexico, 102–5, 109 microbiology, 230 Midgley, Thomas, Jr., 15, 57–60, 62–64, 66–68 Miller, Perry, 264 mining, 105 Minteer, Ben, 50 Minute Man National Historical Park (Massachusetts), 219 Mississippi Delta, 149, 174 Mississippi River, 136, 174 Missouri, 175, 181 Moby-Dick, 163 Moluccas, 103–4 moral reason, 20 Morrill Act (1862), 246 Moscow, Kansas, 174 Muir, John, 92, 145, 163, 264; and American environmental tradition, 24, 175– 76; Worster’s studies of, 18, 72, 180–82, 269–70. See also River Running West, A Mumford, Lewis, 264 Munich, Germany, 176 Naess, Arne, 42 Nagasaki, Japan, 164 Nairobi, East Africa, 116 Nandi people, 116

313

Nantucket, Massachusetts, 80, 85–86, 90, 267 Nash, Linda, 6 Nash, Roderick, 17, 25, 264 National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 161 National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), United States, 80 Native Americans, 103, 245; land of, 174–75. See also Chumash people Natty Bumpo, 119 Nature (magazine), 197, 198, 199, 207n29 Nature’s Economy (Worster), 4, 19, 20, 264–65 Needles, California, 18 Nelson, Megan Kate, 238, 242 neuroscience, 230–31 New Left, 17–18, 20 New Spain, 103 New Sweden, 117 Nimbus satellites, 195–99 Noe, Kenneth, 239, 241 Norden, Nebraska, 175 Nordhaus, Ted, 47 North American Review, 181 Novak, Mathew, 219 Novick, Peter, 24 nuclear power, 151 nuclear war, 258 Nye, David, 87 Obama, Barrack, 172, 176 Odum, Eugene, 24, 42–45, 47 Office of Administration and Resources Management (OARM), United States, 176 Ogallala Aquifer, 175 Oklahoma, 181 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 134, 244 Omaha, Nebraska, 174 opium, 104 Pacific Ocean, 97, 102, 109–11; North Pacific Current, 105; Pacific Rim; 102, 109 Pacific Railroad Act (1862), 245–46 Paine, Tom, 20, 22 Panama, 108–9 Paris, Treaty of (1898), 108 Passion for Nature, A (Worster), 13, 173, 180 pastoral ideal, 134 peanuts, 105 Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 109, 164

314

INDEX

Pearson, Chris, 251 Perdue, Peter, 131 Peru, 104 Philippines, 101–11 Phillip II (king of Spain), 103 Phillips, U. B., 239 physics, 231 Pinch, Trevor, 65 Pinchot, Gifford, 41 Pitt, Brad, 80 plastiglomerate, 41 Platte River Basin, 175 Plymouth Cordage, 107 Polanyi, Karl, 23 polyethylene, 109 polypropylene, 109 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 128, 130, 137 pork, 174 Port Los Angeles Railroad Company, 75 Portugal, 103 potatoes, 143 Pottawatomi people, 177 Potter, David, 88 Powell, John Wesley, 59, 72, 174–76, 180–82, 237, 244, 246, 269 Priest, Tyler, 86, 89 Pritchard, Sara, 86 Puerto Rico, 108, 176 Rachel Carson Institute, 176 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 164 Reagan, Ronald, 29, 76 Reiger, John, 121 religion: Buddhism, 128; Christianity, 103, 157, 159–61; and Islam, 128 Remote Measurements of Pollution (NASA report), 195, 199 Renaissance, 159 Republic of Korea, 255, 257 Riesman, David, 264 Rindge, Frederick, 74–75 Rindge, May Knight, 74–75, 78 River Running West, A (Worster), 13, 237, 239 Rivers of Empire (Worster), 58, 131, 136, 173, 182; capitalism in, 3, 13, 180, 266; reviews of, 24; as value-laden history, 22–23 Roberts, Julia, 80 Robin Hood, 119 Rockefeller, John D., 90 Rocky Mountains, 174–75 Rome, Adam, 88

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 58 Roosevelt, Theodore, 97, 116, 120 Rosen, Christine, 30 Ruddiman, William, 50 Rupley, Eric, 219 Russell, Edmund, 251 Russo-Turkish War, 107 Sabin, Paul, 88 Sachs, Aaron, 242, 244 Salem, Massachusetts, 107 Salem Witch Trial Archive (website), 213–14 Sámi people, 118, 119 sandalwood, 104 Sandhills, 175 San Francisco, California, 176 Santa Ana winds, 73 Santa Fe Railroad, 174 Santiago, Myrna, 89 scale, as analytical tool, 210, 267–69 Schurz, Carl, 244 Scott, James, 49 Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 198 Sears, Paul, 17, 24 Segel, Gil, 80 sensory history, 157 September 11 attacks, 164 Shaffer, Terry, 241–42 sharecropping, 119 Shelford, Victor, 42 Shellenberger, Michael, 47 Shepherd, Paul, 166 Shnayder, Evgenia, 212 Shrinking the Earth (Worster), 13, 72, 266–67 Sibelius, Jean, 118 Sierra Club, 30, 77, 191. See also Brower, David; environmental movement silk, 103–4 silver, 103–4 Silver, Timothy, 241 Sinatra, Frank, 79 Skinner, B. F., 264 slavery, in America, 119, 213, 265; and American Civil War, 238, 243, 245–46 smallpox, 143 Smith, Adam, 23 Smith, Andrew, 240 Smith, Duane, 86 Smith, Henry Nash, 264 Snake River Plain, 178 Snyder, Gary, 264

INDEX

social ecology, 165 soil exhaustion, 238 Soulé, Michael, 44 South Africa, 105 South America, 101 Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 75 soybeans, 174 Spain, 101–4, 108 Spanish-American War, 108 Spanish Civil War, 252 Spanish Empire, 101–6, 143–44 spice trade, 103–4 Starr, Edwin, 250, 258–59 statistics, 231 Stegner, Wallace, 21, 264 Steinberg, Ted, 28, 32, 86, 147, 238 Steiner, Paul, 241 Stith, Matthew, 238 St. Louis, Missouri, 174 Stoermer, Eugene, 40 Streisand, Barbra, 80 Study of Man’s Impact on Climate (1971), 199 sugar, 105, 108 Superfund Act, United States, 177 Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution, 172 Supreme Court, United States, 75, 178 sustainable business, 30–32, 34–36 Sutter, Paul, 2, 6–7, 243 Sweden, 120 sweet potatoes, 105 Sylvester, Kenneth, 219 Tahiti, 104 Tansley, A. G., 264 Tarr, Joel, 86 Taylor, Amy Murrell, 239 tea, 110 technological lock-in, 65–68 Television-Infrared Observance Satellite (NASA), 195 tetraethyl lead, 57–58 Texas, 181 Thailand, 103 Thatcher, Margaret, 20 Theron, Charlize, 80 Thomas, Nicholas, 102 Thomas, William, III, 213 Thompson, E. P., 1 Thoreau, Henry David, 19–20, 264, 268 Titusville, Pennsylvania, 90 tobacco, 110

315

Torricelli, Evangelista, 159 Trinidad, 108 Tsutsui, William, 251 Tucker, Richard, 251–52 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 117, 119, 131, 148 Union and Security Act (1792), 119 Union Oil Company, 74 United Farm Workers, 148 United Fruit Company, 101, 108–9 United Kingdom, 101, 110 United Nations, 195, 199, 255, 261n19 University of Kansas, 18, 85, 172, 176 University of Maine, 18 Upward Migration, 164–65 Vaclav, Smil, 86 Vasa, Gustav (king of Sweden), 118 Veblen, Thorstein, 264 Vietnam War, 17, 164, 241, 259; and Agent Orange, 251, 258; protests of, 250, 264 Virginia Center for Digital History, 213–14 Volcker, Paul, 20–21 Vuorisalo, Timo, 251 Waiya, Mati, 77 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 1 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 17, 180 Walmart, 32 Waring, George E., 244–45 Warner, Jack, 75 Washington, DC, 176–77 Waterloo, Iowa, 174 Watkins, Sam, 239 Weiner, Douglas, 6 Wells, H. G., 264 Werbach, Adam, 30 wheat, 101, 175 Wheeler, William Morton, 264 White, Gilbert, 264 White, Richard, 3–4, 17, 87–88, 210, 266 Whitehead, Alfred North, 264 Whole Earth Catalog. See Brand, Stewart Wichita, Kansas, 174 wilderness: critique of, 43, 50, 53n10; idea of, 117, 120–22, 133–34, 145–46 Wilderness Act (1964), 124n9 Wilson, Robert E., 63 Wilson, Woodrow, 174 Wishtoyo Foundation, 77 Wittfogel, Karl, 22, 136, 180, 266 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 60

316

INDEX

World War I, 108, 252–55, 258 World War II, 108, 165, 251, 258–59 Worster, Donald: early life, 18–19, 72; and poststructuralism, 3–5, 22, 44–45, 266; and sustainability, 32–36, 39n24; and theoretical foundations of environmental history, 3–6, 9n2, 28–29, 85–86, 126, 227, 232, 265; and transnational history, 21–22, 97–98, 101–2, 111, 117, 121–22, 130, 268; and value-laden history, 22–25, 51, 72, 265, 269–70. See also Dust Bowl; Journal of American History; Nature’s Economy; Passion for Nature, A; River Running West, A; Rivers of Empire; Shrinking the Earth Wright brothers, 167 Xiaoping, Deng, 137 Yale University, 19 Yangtze Delta, 128 Yangtze River, 136 Yap, Arthur, 111 yellow fever, 148 Zhang, Ling, 131 Zhuangzi, Free Wandering, 134 Zinn, Howard, 21–22