Introduction

Introduction The Encyclopedia of World Environmental History offers since 1960, is a regional affair, involving and affecting a dynamic view of human interaction with the environ- what are now several countries and populations in ment from the deep past to the present, encompassing Central Asia. The poisoning of Minamata Bay, in the entire globe. Its three volumes comprise concise Japan, with methyl mercury in the 1950s was a local overviews of hundreds of topics, events, people, natu- matter at first, but became a national affair through ral resources, and aspects of human culture and natu- lawsuits and political wrangling. Ultimately rather few ral history, together with wide-ranging lists for further subjects in environmental history are truly local, be- reading and hundreds of sidebars, photographs, and cause as the naturalist John Muir noted, in nature maps. This unique work is the product of a global com- everything is always hitched to everything else. The munity of scholars who include founders of the field Encyclopedia of World Environmental History tries to take of environmental history as well as prominent scholars into account the fact that the arenas in which the events in related fields. of environmental history have been played out are of various sizes and are often overlapping. A Global Endeavor In seeking to take into account the range of environ- ments on Earth, the Encyclopedia also aims to put The logic of pursuing environmental history on the human history into its broadest context. This is one global scale is straightforward. Many processes of en- of the signal contributions environmental history can vironmental change unfold without reference to bor- make. Human struggles have always occurred within ders or to our usual mental maps. In the centuries after the framework of the natural world, and that frame- Columbus, the prickly pear cactus spread from its work has, always and everywhere, been in flux—some- Mexican home to South Africa, Morocco, Spain, Aus- times rapid, sometimes slow. Wildlife, soils, climate, tralia, and dozens of other lands. The European rabbit and disease are just some of the hundreds of factors was another global conquistador, colonizing parts of in the natural world that have always constrained and every continent except Antarctica. The ongoing accu- conditioned the human experience. For its part, human mulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, sulfur action has increasingly affected the natural world and dioxide moving with the winds to fall as acid rain far its evolution. Human society coevolves with nature; from its point of origin, the overharvesting of the sea’s human history unfolds within a broad natural context richest fishing grounds, salt accumulation in irrigated even as it helps shape that context. lands, the late-nineteenth-century establishment of na- The emergence of environmental history as field tional parks, and the late-twentieth-century emergence of scholarship is part of a broad shift in the way we of popular environmentalism—these and many pro- understand our environment. Centuries ago, at least cesses like them were global, or nearly global, in scale. in most cultures, the stars and the planets were thought At the same time, of course, some aspects of envi- to be immutable fixtures of the heavens. The Earth too ronmental history are national or regional in scope. was generally understood as everlasting, and life on When the United States created its Environmental Pro- Earth, even if in some versions created all of a piece, tection Agency in 1970, its jurisdiction was explicitly consisted of a fixed number of species which had been national. The desiccation of the Aral Sea, under way there from the start and would remain until the finish. ix 5625$$FM01 07-14-03 12:35:33 Introduction But since the 1830s geologists have offered a picture tory, on every scale from local to global. In a few en- of Earth’s history that is truly historical. Biologists tries, it even ventures into space. since the 1860s have increasingly agreed that life on Earth is always in flux, that species come and go. More Chronicling Scholarship in Environmental recently astronomers and cosmologists have con- History cluded that the universe itself is not timeless but in- stead historical: It is perhaps 13 to 14 billion years old, The formation of the American Society for Environ- still expanding, and the stars, galaxies, and planets mental History in 1977 marked the birth of environ- within it come and go. Increasingly, static or even equi- mental history as a formal discipline, but its roots reach librium models of how everything works have given back to Plato in ancient Greece and Laozi in ancient way to dynamic, historical models. The field of envi- China. In nineteenth-century North America, George ronmental history chronicles and analyses the dynam- Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) documented ics of life on Earth. the destructive effects of human action on the land World environmental history not only considers from the days of the ancient civilizations of the Medi- the whole world, it is also a worldwide undertaking. terranean world. Marsh called for the restoration of Although it was in the United States that historians forests, soils, and rivers through human cooperation first began to refer to themselves as environmental his- with nature. Almost a century later, Man’s Role in torians and first formed an organization explicitly de- Changing the Face of the Earth (1956), edited by the geog- voted to environmental history, scholars elsewhere rapher William L. Thomas, again offered a comprehen- had long been interested in the same sorts of questions, sive history of environmental change from prehistory historical geographers foremost among them. Indeed, to the present. Samuel P. Hays showed how the conser- drawing a distinction between the interests and meth- vation movement of the early twentieth century at- ods of historical geographers and those of environmen- tempted reforestation and rangeland restoration in his book Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959), tal historians is difficult. Nevertheless, from roughly while Roderick Nash wrote on the evolution of atti- the 1980s scholars choosing to call themselves environ- tudes toward wilderness in his Wilderness and the Amer- mental historians have set to work around the world. ican Mind, first published in 1967. That same year, Clar- In Europe the most active communities developed in ence Glacken published a monumental account of the Germany, Sweden, Finland, Spain, and Britain. In Af- history of human attitudes toward nature from ancient rica, where political and economic instability are huge times to the eighteenth century in Traces on the Rhodean obstacles to scholarly work, environmental historians Shore. William McNeill added to the discussion with have emerged since the mid-1980s, especially in South Plagues and Peoples (1976), an analysis of the role of Africa, but in East Africa too. India has had a particu- microbes and human disease in shaping history. larly active group of environmental historians since Since the 1970s an explosion of scholarship on about 1985, as has Australia, and, more recently, New United States environmental history has taken place. Zealand. Since 1990 or so a small but determined group Historians of the U.S. West and Middle West have been of environmental historians has emerged in Latin especially active, and a considerable literature has de- America, mainly in Brazil and Mexico. By and large, veloped, with the scholars William Cronon, Patricia environmental history has few practitioners in Russia, Limerick, Vera Norwood, Donald Pisani, Stephen J. China, Japan, or the Arab world, although foreigners Pyne, Richard White, and Donald Worster being have explored environmental-history themes quite among the most widely read. Building on the early successfully for China and Japan. There are signs, work of Avery O. Craven and Lewis Cecil Gray, schol- moreover, that these pioneering efforts are attracting arship on slavery and agriculture in the South has been followers and inspiring new research. carried out by Albert Cowdrey, Jack Temple Kirby, If it comes to pass that environmental historians Timothy Silver, Mart A. Stewart, and most recently by in those areas catch up to their colleagues in India, Dianne D. Glave and Elizabeth Blum. Foundational Germany, or the United States, then one day we shall work on the environment of the Northeast includes have a richer, deeper command of the world’s environ- that of William Cronon, John T. Cumbler, Calvin Mar- mental history. That day is some way off. In the mean- tin, Carolyn Merchant, Theodore Steinberg, and Alan time, this Encyclopedia offers a comprehensive, up-to- S. Taylor, while the urban environment and its prob- date, in-depth, worldwide vision of environmental his- lems has been the focus of study by Robert Gottlieb, x 5625$$FM01 07-14-03 12:35:33 Introduction Suellen Hoy, Andrew Hurley, Martin Melosi, Adam human realm, economic systems, population sizes, Rome, and Joel Tarr. New directions in the field in- consumption patterns, political institutions, attitudes clude the roles of women in environmental and conser- toward race and gender, and ideas about nature affect vation history, the history of environmental justice, our interaction with natural systems. and the responses of minorities to environmental Cultural perspectives on nature vary widely change. around the globe. Indigenous peoples, Eastern philoso- In Europe, historians

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