Geoscience Reference
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botanical) perspectives, has focused on the degree to which humans have been
responsible for the creation of the distinctive heather moorland landscapes of the
Scottish Highlands. Such investigations highlight how interdisciplinary approaches
might well serve to advance our knowledge of the environmental history of hitherto
little understood yet culturally important places and the role of different agents of
change in their creation.
Changing Directions in Environmental History
The plurality of intellectual routes through which environmental history is thought
to have evolved has resulted in some interesting trends in the geographical and
spatial focus of research within the discipline. American environmental history, for
example, was for a long time focused primarily on the history of the American
West and the idea of the frontier. Preoccupation with these themes is thought to
have stemmed originally from a number of benchmark and often cited publications,
Turner's (1893)
The Signifi cance of the Frontier in American History,
Walter
Prescott Webb's (1931)
The Great Plains
and Malin's (1967)
The Grassland of
North America
, among them. Interpretations of the history of the Great Plains and
the American West generally, the idea of the frontier and the concept of wilderness
have remained pervasive themes in American environmental history in the last few
decades (Nash, 1967; Cronon, 1992a). There was, however, something of a shift
from a focus on 'wilderness' to the idea of 'ordinary nature' in the late 1980s and
1990s. These ideas were coupled with the much more of a 'constructivist' spirit in
the study of human-environmental relations. Cronon (1991, p. 69) noted, for
example, that wilderness was in fact a 'product of civilisation', a social construction
in itself.
Cronon's work was also instrumental in shifting the geographical focus of envi-
ronmental history research more fundamentally. Research on landscape and the
urban environment is long established in urban history, historical geography, and
archaeology, but environmental history per se has traditionally been very rural in
orientation (Grove, 2001, p. 264). Cronon's (1992b)
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago
and the Great West
, however, explored the environmental implications of the urban
centre (Baker, 2003, p. 81), and heralded a new wave of urban environmental his-
tories, typifi ed by Mike Davis's (1998)
The Ecology of Fear,
in which he tackles
the geographical specifi cities of vulnerability to extreme weather events and natural
hazards in the city and explores a variety of different narratives of the way Los
Angeles has been understood and conceptualised. A number of specifi cally urban
environmental histories have followed, addressing critical problems such as public
water supply, waste disposal and links and interactions between social and physical
ecologies in variety of urban contexts (see, e.g., Tarr, 1996; Melosi, 2000; Rome,
2001; Schott et al., 2005).
There has also been an increasing internationalisation in environmental history.
There are now thriving Chinese, Australian, New Zealand, Latin American and
Indian schools of Environmental History. It is worth highlighting the coincident
emergence of a very strong 'southern' research agenda incorporating African, Latin
American, Asian and Australasian environmental histories (Baker, 2003, p. 80).
There are now many examples of place or country specifi c environmental histories
of the 'global south', including Elvin (2004) for China, Arnold and Guha (1995) or
Grove et al. (1998) for Southeast Asia and McCann (1999) and Dovers et al., (2003)
