Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
relatively small events. On the grandest scale, large meteors crashing into
the Earth, with the extinctions that followed, are examples of single events
that changed everything, but they are rare. Because contingency varies with
scale, and because larger structures tend to endure longer, attempts to plan
for and structure the future, while always difficult, do have efficacy.
History, with its emphasis on context and contingency, is not a crucial
component for those disciplines or political movements that believe they
know a set of universal rules that always apply. Contingency hardly matters
in a world of inviolable rules. For modern secular fundamentalists who
believe that the market knows best or that nature knows best, history mat-
ters largely as a set of just-so stories.
The problem with history for fundamentalists of any stripe is that it his-
toricizes the very entities that are supposedly generating the universal rules.
Because certain strains of environmentalism embrace a fundamentalist
assumption that nature knows best, environmental history has a very edgy
relationship with environmentalism. It historicizes not just environmental-
ism, but nature itself. For my generation of environmental historians, at
least, environmental history has been pretty much a one-trick horse.
Although we may have only one trick, it is a good trick and we will keep
on using it: Where others see culture we see nature, and where others see
nature, we see culture.
Many environmentalists want a purity in nature, but environmental history
constantly portrays human beings and the natural world (at least on the scale
at which we operate) as so entangled, so inseparable, that we do not produce
the kind of purity that nature/culture divisions demand. Much of what we
value as nature is partially the result of our own prior manipulations.
The landscapes that environmentalists see as natural, for example, many
of us see as historical: that is, as blends of the cultural and natural. For
Stephen Pyne, North America at contact was already shaped by human
beings who wielded fire.
2
This means that wilderness is not so much a thing
or even a place as an idea. But the opposite is also true. Where environ-
mentalists, or for that matter most academics, see only culture (as in the
city), environmental historians insist on nature. Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi
have been doing this for a long time.
3
A whole shelfload of environmen-
tal histories of cities are now in the dissertation stage. They point out the
obvious: Cities cannot function unless the natural systems that they have
shaped and modified continue to function.The built environment remains
entwined with the natural environment.
