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I think it’s fair to say that no field of history has grown more swiftly—in quantity or sophistication—in the 21st century than environmental history. The reason is, I suspect, self-evident: it’s in part a scholarly response to global warming, biodiversity loss, volatile and extreme weather events, and climate change–related diseases.
The range of recent histories of the environment is stunning. We now have some remarkable global histories, like Joachim Radkau’s 2008 Power and Nature, Frank Uekötter’s 2000 (and 2023) The Vortex, and Peter Frankopan’s 2023 The Earth Transformed. There are a host of journals, like Environmental History and the Environmental History Review, as well as dictionaries, guidebooks and handbooks, such as Andrew C. Isenberg’s Oxford Handbook of Environmental History; J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin’s Companion to Global Environmental History; Emily O’Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey and Sandra Swart’s forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Environmental History; and Ian D. White’s Dictionary of Environmental History.
This expansive literature includes studies of various chronological eras (for example, John Aberth’s Environmental History of the Middle Ages, Richard C. Hoffmann’s Environmental History of Medieval Europe, John F. Richards’s Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World and John R. McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World), myriad empires (such as Onur İnal and Yavuz Köse’s Seeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History), and diverse regions (like Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran and Satpal Sangwan’s Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia; Adrian Howkins’s The Polar Regions: An Environmental History; and Helge Kjekshus’s Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History).
There are studies of individual countries. For the United States, good starting points are Mark Fiege’s Republic of Nature, Carolyn Merchant’s Columbia Guide to American Environmental History and Douglas Cazaux Sackman’s Companion to American Environmental History. We also have intensive studies of local environments and highly specific settings (like Ben Daley’s The Great Barrier Reef: An Environmental History and Ruth Mostern’s The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History).
Of course, there is a wealth of highly specialized studies, including Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver’s Environmental History of the Civil War and Kenneth W. Noe’s study of the impact of weather and climate on the conflict, The Howling Storm, and Selena Daly, Martina Salvante and Vanda Wilcox’s Landscapes of the First World War.
Indeed, the way war transformed the natural environment has been the subject of a great deal of interest. As examples, see Richard Tucker’s Natural Enemy, Natural Ally and Timo Vuorisalo, Simo Laakkonen and Richard P. Tucker’s The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War.
Environmental history takes diverse forms. There are intellectual and cultural histories—such as Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature and Paul Warde, Libby Robin and Sverker Sörlin’s The Environment: The History of an Idea—that trace the evolution of environmental thought and ethics, showing how attitudes toward nature have changed over time and informing the philosophy of today’s environmentalists. A key theme is how various cultures “justified the exploitation and subjugation of nature and other cultures in the name of ‘improvement.’” There are studies of natural disasters and how societies have responded to such calamities, like Andrew Robinson’s Earth-Shattering Events and Laurent Testot’s Cataclysms.
Then, too, there are many histories of environmental movements, including Samuel P. Hays’s 2000 History of Environmental Politics Since 1945 and Etienne S. Benson’s Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalism, published the same year. Alongside A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles by Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry, there’s even a study of taxidermy, Mary Anne Andrei’s Nature’s Mirror, which shows how natural history museums displayed animal life and ultimately contributed to saving endangered species.
If you’d like a sense of the breadth of current research, take a look at the University of Chicago Press’s list of recently published books or consult the 200 pages of notes in The Earth Transformed.
Environmental history isn’t new. Fernand Braudel’s 1949 masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, a pioneering attempt to produce a histoire totale focused on the interplay between structure and conjunctures, underscored the significance of climate, regional geographies, terrain, wind currents and weather patterns upon trade, crop production and politics, diplomacy, and interstate conflicts. When I was in graduate school, a 1967 book by Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, and a series of studies by Donald Worster revealed the emerging field’s vast potential. Barbara Tuckman’s 1978 best seller, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, certainly had a big impact.
Some books in environmental history, perhaps most notably Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land and Nature’s Metropolis, became instant classics. Others, like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, have succeeded in demonstrating, to a broad popular audience, the impact of environmental factors on economic development.
It is, of course, risky to speak of themes that run through such a massive and diverse literature, but several leitmotifs do stand out.
The first is consequentiality, the significant impact of the environment on historical events, including the rise and fall of states and empires. From the fall of the Akkadian Empire four millennia ago to the deforestation of Easter Island, drought and the decline of Maya civilization and the dust bowl of the 1930s, environmental change has had significant consequences. Ditto for rat- or mosquito-delivered diseases, the global distribution of natural resources, cross-continental contact, and the expansion of markets.
It wasn’t a coincidence that Buddhism spread “in Korea and Japan precisely when a dust veil created by volcanic eruptions was at its most impenetrable” or that the antisemitic pogroms “were most likely to happen following an average drop in temperature of one-third of a degree Celsius or more during the growing season.” The Little Ice Age likely contributed to a terrible famine in China and to the expansion of the Sahara Desert.
Rejecting any form of environmental determinism, The Earth Transformed argues that societies’ existing problems “were affected and exacerbated rather than caused by shifting climatic conditions.”
A second overarching theme involves change: ecological, environmental and climatic transformation. As Uekötter observes,
Five hundred “years ago, the eucalyptus was a tree native to Australia, the dodo lived peacefully on an island in the Indian Ocean and wood was the most important fuel. Today, there are eucalyptus plantations around the globe, the dodo is extinct and the world consumes 95 million barrels of oil every day.”
A third key theme centers on interconnections, environmental interactions among seeming disparate and distinct regions. Seemingly local environmental changes, like the salinization of the soil in Mesopotamia, the flooding of China’s Yellow River, the Little Ice Age in Europe between the 14th and 19th centuries, the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in 1815, and the Great Potato Famine all carried societal, regional and, in some instances, global implications.
Then there’s contention and conflict. Environmental stressors have repeatedly contributed to societal conflict, including the coming of the French Revolution.
Next is a focus on the impact of various forms of capitalism, from merchant capitalism (with its focus on the extraction of and trade in commodities) to industrial capitalism, finance capitalism and consumer capitalism. Much of the scholarship on environmental history considers the elaboration of capitalism as central to the process of environmental change since the 16th century.
Thus, the pursuit of profit has driven individuals to prioritize short-term gains over long-term environmental sustainability; adopt exploitative practices that have contributed to soil depletion, deforestation and overfishing; and disregard the interests of those who lack market or political power. Also, this system has tended to focus on short-term results and to neglect long-term environmental sustainability while externalizing environmental costs, since firms haven’t borne the full costs of the environmental damage they inflict and the pollution they produce.
In addition, capitalism was associated with the emergence of consumerism, where consumption and material acquisition are encouraged and valued, resulting in the overconsumption of resources and excessive waste production and disposal, which stress the environment. They have also contributed to the significant inequalities in wealth and power that influenced environmental policies and impose environmental costs on the poor or the marginalized.
Of course, deforestation, overgrazing, soil erosion and exhaustion, salt accumulation, waterway acidification, lead and mercury pollution, wildlife extinction, fire, floods, the overexploitation of natural resources, and pollution, such as dangerous emissions from furnaces and the spread of animal- and vector-borne pathogens, predate anything that resembles modern capitalism.
In addition, over the long term, capitalist systems can also be beneficial to the environment and sustainability insofar as these drive technological innovation and efficiency, respond to market pressures to develop eco-friendly products and practices, and provide the resources needed for environmental protection and conservation efforts. Hillary Angelo’s How Green Became Good describes the somewhat ironic role of city dwellers in popularizing ideas about the preservation of nature.
Much recent scholarship focuses on colonial conquest and Western expansion into frontier regions, leading to far-reaching ecological changes. Although the nature and impact varied across different regions and eras, several general effects appear: the displacement of Indigenous practices; the imposition of new forms of agriculture, including monoculture and cash crops, reducing biodiversity and altering hydrological cycles; the alteration of natural landscapes and water systems; the introduction of nonnative species, threatening native flora and fauna; and, in many cases, habitat destruction, including deforestation.
To this laundry list, let me add another: complexity. In his discussion of Frank Uekötter’s Vortex, the Dutch “inquisitive” biologist Leon Vlieger lays bare the complications societies face in addressing environmental challenges. Is a ban on the use of DDT appropriate when it could save lives lost to malaria and yellow fever? Could Britain have successfully tackled the Great Smog of 1952 in the absence of prior work by engineers and antismoke activists? Do calls to end oil production now downplay the role of fossil fuels in “agriculture and the fabrication of materials such as plastic, steel and cement”? To what extent can factory farming be made more humane?
Perhaps the most significant theme that grows out of this scholarship is an argument underscored in The Earth Transformed: the importance of choice—agency, adaptation and resilience. The courses of actions that societies take in molding the environment and responding to environmental change carry enormous consequences. So, too, does human error. Many supposedly natural disasters or acts of God are in fact products of human actions and public policy, whether one is thinking of the dust bowl, the famine that killed some three million people in pre-independence India or the 1,836 lives lost in New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
The scholarship on environmental history has many takeaways. Ecological injustice is not new. Nor are natural disasters. Nor is it the case that environmental consciousness only recently arose. Some technological advances have helped people adapt to changing conditions, but others created a host of unanticipated, novel challenges. Environmental history provides a much-needed reminder that ours is not the first epoch to confront climatic and environmental challenges. As the late, great Princeton historian Lawrence Stone once wrote in a different context,
“Today, although things seem to be drifting out of control, we know that we possess the technical knowledge, administrative skills and financial resources to put most of them right. What we lack is the will and the wisdom to mobilize ourselves without becoming slaves to our technology or bureaucracy.”
At a time when “degrowthers” call for the replacement of growth-oriented economic systems with one that seeks to scale back resource use, we’d do well to pay close attention to Stone’s sage insight: that many of the solutions to today’s challenges lie in collective action, evidence-guided public policies and the purposeful use of technology. Our technology and resources, intellectual as well as material, give us opportunities denied earlier generations. “The case of the cautious optimists,” he writes, “is thus at least worth a hearing, despite the jeremiads of our fashionable Cassandras.”
Environmental history underscores the virtues of presentism: the past may be a foreign country, but it is also our only guide we have to how people, similar to us, addressed comparable challenges. It gains relevance not by extracting complex lessons from the past in a nuanced and sensitive manner.
Environmental history not only enriches our understanding of the past but also provides essential insights as we struggle to create a more sustainable and equitable future. We learn about historic patterns of environmental injustice, the consequences of unsustainable resource exploitation, the importance of environmental stewardship, the importance of adaptation and resilience, and policy making’s consequences for good and ill. We also discover the ongoing tension between resource management in the interests of development and human uses and the preservation of the natural environment for its own sake.
The rise of environmental history is part of a broader shift away from anthropocentric narratives to a more holistic view that recognizes that the inanimate—weather, climate, geography, animal and plant life—too, has a say in human history, with a profound influence on economic development, migration and war. Nature’s impact is clearly evident in retrospect and, in the pandemic’s wake, the environment’s power remains obvious today, despite our pretensions to humanity, science and technology’s omnipotence.
