Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The Future of Environmental History: Prospects for Progress?
Much of the work conducted within environmental history has tended to focus on
environmental problems that pose a challenge to humanity, or which require some
kind of action to ensure social well-being, be it management, recovery or restora-
tion. Having purchase on real and often pressing environmental problems, concerns
and threats has undoubtedly served the development of the discipline well and par-
ticularly in recent years, when the sensitivity of the relationship between humans
and their environment has become increasingly and often tragically clear. Certainly,
the new raft of studies exploring the environmental histories of city, water and
waste, disease, hygiene and climate change, some of the themes which have been
referred to in this chapter, may have been stimulated in part by the contemporary
environmental zeitgeist. Perhaps for this reason, however, most environmental
history research to date has been very much declensionist (McNeill, 2003), at once
grounded in and justifi ed by fears of environmental crisis and the need for
intervention.
But in as much as environmental historians can and indeed should be focusing
on research that is both topical and policy relevant, and though some aspects of
environmental history may also have been born of, and have helped to promote
environmental consciousness, a case might be made for studying more optimistic
(or in McNeill's (2003) terms, 'ascensionist') environmental histories. Work that
focuses on technological adaptation through time, or the dynamics of human resil-
ience to and ability to cope with environmental transformations are arguably just
as important as developments in environmental awareness and indeed protection.
Pessimistic climate prediction, to take one example has tended to obscure the history
of human adaptation and resilience and the exploration of the institutions and cul-
tural coping strategies that help people adapt to climate changes in the past (Fraser
et al., 2003).
Moreover, as Cronon (1993) suggested, to have real relevance for the future,
environmental histories must reach beyond rhetoric and affect the views of policy-
makers in real and tangible ways. This is perhaps where the greatest challenge for
practitioners lies. Deriving policy relevant insights about the contemporary and
future world from past interpretations of human-environmental interaction is prob-
lematic (McNeill, 2005, p. 178). The fact that past societies differ markedly from
those in the modern world makes simple analogies or parallels with the historical
past unrealistic (Meyer et al., 1998). Knowledge of successes and failures in adapta-
tion to past environmental challenges, however, can increase the ability to respond
to the threats of long-term future changes.
Obtaining this knowledge requires us to undertake empirical reconstruction of
environmental change over more recent time-scales, that is to say, material environ-
mental histories, and a willingness to relate these changes to the cultural record.
Moreover, it is essential to try to obtain a better understanding of how societies
have conceptualised these changes and endeavoured to make themselves effectively
more resilient to them. As Butzer (2005) has recently illustrated, human perception
and, in particular, ecological behaviour are absolutely pivotal to understanding
cause and effect. Such 'pluri-disciplinary' or at least multi-dimensional investiga-
tions should be seen and indeed are regularly discussed as constituting the very
essence of environmental history, but clearly there is still scope for much more
cross-disciplinary collaboration (Butzer, 2005). Thus as a self-conscious area of
