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graphical work that now could be classed as environmental history. By raising
'environmental consciousness' and highlighting the degree to which human forces
were capable of shaping the natural world, for example, George Perkins Marsh's
(1864)
Man and Nature
represents one fundamental text to which both geographers
and historians lay claim as an important infl uence in their understanding of envi-
ronmental history. Such themes were developed in the 1956 multidisciplinary volume
Man's role in changing the face of the earth
, edited by W. L. Thomas.
Perhaps the most important individual in this vein, however, has been that of
Carl Sauer, founder of the Berkeley School of Geography and who contributed a
decisive chapter on 'The agency of man on the earth' to Thomas's edited volume.
Sauer's particular interests lay in the fashioning and transformation of landscapes
by human culture, or the production of 'cultured landscapes', ideas which were to
be and are still being developed by later geographers. The edited volume entitled
The Earth Transformed
(Turner
et al., 1990), for example, is regarded as the direct
successor to Thomas's 1956 publication (Williams, 1994), while various authors
have explored the way in which societies have impacted upon their landscapes at
different points in time (see for example, Matthewson, 1993; Nicholson and
O'Connor, 2000).
But the environment is of course itself an active player in human affairs. In recent
decades, a number of American environmental historians have highlighted the 'earth
as an agent' (Worster, 1988, p. 289) and 'nature as a historical actor' (Merchant,
1989, p. 7). Such notions, however, are far from new (McNeill, 2003, p. 13), and
this is again a subject to which geographers have long devoted their attention.
Climate in particular has featured prominently as a molding force throughout
history. During the period of colonial expansion, for instance, issues of acclimatisa-
tion or the ability with which societies could adapt to different environments became
a key political, scientifi c and economic dilemma. Geographical discussions of climate
then also focused on centring patterns of variation in levels of human civilisation
within a regional climatic framework (Livingstone, 1991, p. 2002). When com-
bined, these themes provided an enduring moral and ethno-climatological frame of
reference that would permeate geographical debates and indeed colonial policy into
the 1900s, and would help fuel the development of damaging racial ideologies in
the fi rst half of the century.
After the Second World War, in a context of anti-colonialism, a drive towards
quantifi cation in geography and as a backlash against the naïve precepts of such
climatic determinism, there was a shift from 'reductionist' thinking towards
complex socio-economic explanations of cultural variation, development and
change. More recent decades have witnessed the emergence of approaches to
environmental history, which posit ecological or environmental change as the
consequence of cultural choice and human action rather than environmental cir-
cumstance. Moreover, much of the environmental literature of the 1990s began
to situate human values as central to environmental transformation (Rothman,
2002, p. 491).
Other agencies have also featured as central characters in environmental history
texts. In Alfred Crosby's now classic global scale environmental history,
Ecological
imperialism
, biological vectors, disease pathogens, weeds and domestic animals, or
the 'portmanteau biota', are charged with facilitating the process of conquest and
change in the new world. Crosby argues that the 'unconscious teamwork' of these
biota facilitated European imperial success, though his thesis has since been criti-
