Building on precursors stretching back to the nineteenth century, environmental history emerged as an academic sub-discipline alongside environmentalist movements during the 1960s and 1970s. While this era of environmentalism was concerned primarily with chemical pollution and nuclear waste, there has emerged over the past few decades a powerful awareness of human-caused climate change and multifaceted planetary degradation. Against this backdrop, environmental history has boomed. Scholars (and substantial public audiences) seek out deeper understandings of the entanglements of society and nature, of dynamics between human and nonhuman life, and of past episodes of environmental crisis and critical awareness.

 

Environmental history now encompasses a wide range of methods and themes. It speaks to, and operates within, a broad multi-disciplinary field, engaging with environmental and earth sciences, human and physical geography, anthropology and philosophy, Science and Technology Studies, and a host of historical sub-disciplines. Among its key characteristics is a preparedness to work with a broad array of source types, extending far beyond written texts and into the realm of large data sets, plant and animal matter, and artistic and scientific images.

 

This week’s lecture and seminar discussions aim to make sense of this burgeoning and diverse field and its methodologies. We will focus not only (or primarily) on theoretical debates, but also on more practical aspects of how environmental historians go about their work. This includes not only how they bring together varied forms of source material, but also how studying a topic with clear contemporary relevance and resonance affects their analytical and communicative techniques.

 

Seminar readings

 

• Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). Prologue: The Migration North, pp. 1–11.
• Katie Holmes, Andrea Gaynor, and Ruth Morgan, ‘Doing environmental history in urgent times’, History Australia, 17, 2 (2020), pp. 230–51.
• R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Ch. 1: The Argument (and Its Limits) in Brief, pp. 1–11.

 

Seminar questions

 

1. How do environmental historians select, analyse, and synthesise sources?
2. How do environmental historians study large spatial and temporal scales?
3. What are the opportunities and challenges of including nonhumans in history?
4. Should environmental history drop academic neutrality and instead be politically engaged and speak directly to present-day concerns?

 

Truffle hunt

 

Sources for environmental history are varied and can be found across multiple sites—including locations beyond traditional archives and collections. A more extreme example is one recent article’s discussion of putting whale’s ear wax to use as a measure of cetacean experience of recent climate change (O’Gorman and Gaynor, 2020)! You needn’t go as far as this, though: instead, you might think about how scientific and geographical institutional archives and collections provide useful materials for documenting environmental practices, processes, and attitudes. Here are a couple of places to start:

• Royal Geographical Society, London: https://pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/record=e1001578~S1
• Science Museum Group collection: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/
• Kew Gardens archives: https://www.kew.org/science/collections-and-resources/collections/archive-collection

 

You might also consider how environmental history can make use of scientific data sets, such as records of climate change compiled by historical climatologists. Some good places to look are:

• The PAGES (Past Global Changes) project: https://pastglobalchanges.org/
• The publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: https://www.ipcc.ch/
• Data sets produced by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia: https://www.uea.ac.uk/groups-and-centres/climatic-research-unit/data

 

Last, but by no means least, take some time to think over how sources that you’ve encountered in your own work might be read through an environmental history lens. A personal favourite in this vein is the following image of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, conventionally titled ‘Emperor Jahangir triumphing over poverty’: https://collections.lacma.org/node/240917. This can easily be read as a display of imperial sovereign power; but look beneath Jahangir’s feet, and you see an array of animals, which act not only as allegorical representations of human politics but also give a window onto the more-than-human dimensions of Mughal culture.

 

Further readings

 

Sunil Amrith, The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years (London: Allen Lane, 2024)

Etienne S. Benson, Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020)

Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016)

Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

Alfred J. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood, 1972)

1. Donald Hughes, What Is Environmental History?, 2^nd ed (Cambridge: Polity, 2016)

Andrew C. Isenberg, ‘Introduction: A New Environmental History’, in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 1–20

1. R. McNeill, Something New Under The Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000)
2. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: an Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016)

Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2024)

Emily O’Gorman, William San Martin, Mark Carey, and Sandra Swart (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History (London: Routledge, 2023)

Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor, ‘More-than-human histories’, Environmental History, 25 (2020), pp. 711-35

Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Thomas Simpson, ‘Planetary pictures: Historicizing environmental and climate sciences in the Anthropocene’, BJHS Themes, 8 (online 2024)

Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, ‘The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-Reading of the Field’, Environmental History, 12, 1 (2007), pp. 107-30

Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, The Environment: A History of the Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)

Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995)