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US Environmental History Class at CSW
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#Post#: 34--------------------------------------------------
Re: Reading #2: Cronon and Merchant
DIR By: ccogswell
Date: January 8, 2019, 7:48 pm
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“Environmental historians… insist that we have got to go… down
to the earth itself as an agent and presence in history.” -
Worster
I intended to compare this with the idea that all human history
has a natural context in my first post, but forgot to add it!
Anyway, these ideas go hand in hand. We need to "get mud on our
walking shoes", and immerse ourselves within the past/present
environment to genuinely understand history. The study of the
environment is not something we can do from the indoors. Without
natural context, history is incomplete, and missing information
about our world is detrimental to our development, if not
dangerous. We must fully know nature to fully know ourselves.
#Post#: 35--------------------------------------------------
Re: Reading #2: Cronon and Merchant
DIR By: Shi Shi
Date: January 8, 2019, 7:51 pm
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Kind of going off of Kelly's post, I found it really interesting
to see how often both Cronon and Merchant stressed the idea of
interdependence between varying factors while trying to "define"
environmental history. Cronon wrote that "most environmental
historians would add that human beings are not the only actors
who make history. Other creatures do too, as do large natural
processes, and any history that ignores their effects is likely
to be woefully incomplete" (18). Here, I think Cronon is simply
trying to show the many influencing factors present both in the
natural environment as well as in society. Everything is
dependent on everything, so it would be unfair to claim that
history originates from one single thing.
Merchant chose to examine environmental history from a more
specific angle/lens, but still had a similar theme of
interdependence. She addressed issues of race, socioeconomic
class, gender, etc., providing an analysis of a sort which
demonstrated how the environment affected them, and how they
affected the environment. In particular, I was really interested
in the relationship she described between Native Americans and
the environment. Merchant briefly mentioned their origin stories
which included "tales of mother earth and father sky [...] Such
deities mediated between nature and humans, inspiring rituals
and behaviors that helped to regulate environmental use and
exploitation" (24). In the past, I had connected origin stories
with nature, but never before really have I interpreted these
stories as environmental "regulations". I believe that Cronon
also touched on this idea that environmental history was a way
of reflecting on the past rather than a way of trying to predict
the future.
I think that Roderick Nash's quote connects with the overall
theme of interdependence I'm seeing in these two essays:
"Environmental history...refers to the past contact of man with
his total habitat....The environmental historian like the
ecologists should think in terms of wholes, of communities, or
interrelationships, and of balances".
#Post#: 36--------------------------------------------------
Re: Reading #2: Cronon and Merchant
DIR By: Reed
Date: January 8, 2019, 8:07 pm
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I will write about a connection I noticed between a quote by
Worster and a quote by merchant, and about nature’s aesthetic
relationship with class.
Worster: “Down, down we must go, they maintained, down to the
hidden layers of class, gender, race, and caste… deeper yet,
down to the earth itself as an agent and presence in history.”
(1)
Merchant: “Working class people often interact most directly
with the land in extracting resources for the market...while
many middle and upper-class individuals become environmental
leaders and activists who help to spear conservation movements
and to develop environmentally friendly technologies…. Lower
class workers are usually too busy making a living to write
their stories or leave literary legacies.” (11)
This Worster quote might supposed to be a reference to earth
being something you stand on (‘we cannot avoid getting some mud
on them’) but it can also be interpreted as earth being under
complete control of everyone, a slave of slaves. It reminds me
of an article I read a long time ago about bees and why their
recent trend towards disappearance is worrisome for the economy.
The journalist had calculated that if each bee were paid a
minimum wage for its labor, an ounce of honey would cost over a
thousand dollars. Which is where it connects to Merchant’s
observation that rich people don’t tend to be the ones working
with land. To me, this reflects an inverse relationship in
society between socioeconomic status and production of actual
resources, with land as a kind of ultimate underclass, because
nature produces all of our necessary raw materials without any
explicit compensation. Nature doesn’t have labor rights, it just
produces stuff, by function and chance, and the work of people
is to harness that production.
The other interesting part of Worster’s quote is, for me, that
he describes leaving parliamentary chambers for a “ramble into
fields, woods, and the open air” in order to closely examine and
experience nature. Connecting this to Cronon’s point about
Romanticism being a great ancestor of Environmental History, it
seems like a lot of upper-class people fall in love with nature
as a sensual and aesthetic experience and pursue careers in
thinking about it and conserving it while primarily experiencing
it on vacations from their stuffy offices and homes. I know that
this is certainly true for me-- I do not ekk out a living from
my own hard labor outdoors; I do not think about lumber when I
see trees, I think about how pretty that branch is. And I’m
supposed to. It was planted on the quad to look nice. There’s
such an interesting dissonance between the different aesthetics
of nature as an indicator of wealth.
#Post#: 37--------------------------------------------------
Re: Reading #2: Cronon and Merchant
DIR By: juliab
Date: January 8, 2019, 8:14 pm
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The first part of Cronin’s list of “core lessons” really drew my
attention. It’s so obvious that it makes complete sense that
it’s the first thing on the list, but in historical documents,
it’s rarely where the focus goes. I think that as humans we tend
to forget about the ties that nature has to any historical
event.
The statement that “most environmental historians would add that
human beings are not the only actors who make history” also
caught my attention. An example that first comes to my mind is
Pompeii. If you were to ask me about the city, all I would be
able to talk about would be the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. This
is an example where I think people clearly recall the ties that
nature has to a historical event, but I couldn’t list many more.
The devastation of a city left wrote just as much history as the
people in it.
Something that added to my defintion of environmental history
was when Cronin said “the relationship between nature and
culture should always be viewed as a problem in comparative
dynamics, not statics.” (9) I’m not all too familiar with the
analytical terms, but I take this to mean that rather than being
static and staying relatively still, the relationship between
the two works together and changes based off of each other. I
think that people are quick to write our natural world as
something that will always be there (static), and that changing
certain processes in our culture won’t have a drastic effect on
it. However as the technologies we have access to begin to
develop faster, our planet begins to experience negative impacts
faster. Soon, our culture will most likely have to change
because resources will be depleted from this relationship, and I
wonder what that will look like.
#Post#: 38--------------------------------------------------
Re: Reading #2: Cronon and Merchant
DIR By: Tommy Is The Person Who I Am
Date: January 8, 2019, 8:30 pm
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Cronon’s essay went into greater detail regarding why
environmental history has only taken shape in recent decades,
which I found interesting. He explains that “environmental
determinism” (does this relate in any capacity to eugenics?) was
quite popular in fields of history prior to World War II, and in
turn “cultural determinism” gained popularity, but eventually
these “determinisms” were rejected partially because of their
connection to Marxism. He explains that environmental history
involves a combination of both cultural and environmental
determinism. It is surprising to consider how quickly our
perception of history and the influences acting on humankind can
change, particularly the fact that these changes appear to be
responses to earlier/conflicting systems of viewing the world.
In Merchant’s essay, I found a related situation in her
explanation of how peoples’ perception of nature was shifted by
then-contemporary scientific beliefs (i.e. “the conception that
nature was dead”). It is fascinating how our perception of
nature can change both in direct response to other perceptions
of nature as well as in response to scientific discoveries.
The shifting perception of the environment can be related to
John Richards’ quote, “The great task for environmental
historians is to record and analyze the effects of man’s
recently achieved control over the natural world. What is needed
is a longer-term global, comparative, historical perspective
that treats the environment as a meaningful variable.” The first
piece of this quote feels a bit incomplete to me. The scientists
who determined that “nature was dead” must have believed that
they were correct, but today that is not our perception of the
world around us. It then feels difficult to say with confidence
that man has recently achieved control over the natural world —
how can we truly control something that we might not fully
understand? The second half of the quote does acknowledge this
to an extent, as it presents that need to view the environment
as something much more than a constant, which must be considered
from a variety of perspectives.
#Post#: 39--------------------------------------------------
Re: Reading #2: Cronon and Merchant
DIR By: Casey A
Date: January 8, 2019, 8:33 pm
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I would like to start off by discussing a quote that I found to
be interesting: “There is little history in the study of nature,
and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to
show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new
perspective on the historian’s enterprise, one that will make us
Darwinians at last.” What stood out to me about this is the
idea that it is common to assume statements as definitive such
as the comparison between nature and history that Worster points
out. In my post for the previous reading, I discussed how I
interpreted Worster’s writing to be saying that us humans like
definitiveness and clearly being able to understand that, but
with environmental history we must be willing to leave that
desire of definitive organization behind us. I also see a lot
of this in tonight’s reading, when Cronon says that if our
manner of thinking is static, then we will have trouble
understanding Environmental History. He then goes to describe
that, Environmental Historians do not like to predict the
future. I connected this by thinking that Environmental
Historians like to have aspects of uncertainty that we are all
so unaccustomed to, and making a prediction (like we all
commonly do) would create a feeling of certainty.
#Post#: 40--------------------------------------------------
Re: Reading #2: Cronon and Merchant
DIR By: mayafb
Date: January 8, 2019, 8:33 pm
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If you graph a circle and continuously zoom into one area, the
once curved side will appear to be a line. As Cronon proclaims,
“natural time is cyclical time, while the time of modern
humanity is linear” (pg. 8). Although I understand that he
perceives the natural time as the way in which the earth can
sustainably regenerate itself, I cannot help but think of this
mathematical graph. Natural cycles may be short like the life
cycle of a common house fly, but others, such as the rock cycle,
take place on the larger geologic time scale. However, human
life is short, not like a fly, and the inhabitance of this earth
as a species has been nothing longer than a blip in the geologic
time scale. Currently, from my own understanding, the movement
of renewable energy and sustainability is to tap into these
natural cycles of time and use them for the linear needs of the
human. For instance, the current and past usage and disposal of
waste has been linear. Use something, throw it away, and then it
disappears from your house forever. Now, with the large spread
concerns about climate change, food waste, and the destruction
of the planet, humans are trying to utilize the earth’s
cyclical systems to prolong the own linear path we seem to have
strolled down. Cronon claims that “humanities arrow is the
fall, while nature’s cycle is salvation” (pg 8).
This implies that there needs to be further zoomed out view of
the world rather than the close view of the line. John Richards
states that the job of an environmental historian “is to
record and analyze the effects of man’s recently achieved
control over the natural world. What is needed is a longer-term
global, comparative, historical perspective that treats the
environment as a meaningful variable.” In this argument,
Richards is agreeing with Cronon’s perception of how the
humans have had a short control over the natural earth and how
there needs to be an understanding of the cyclical nature of the
world to avoid a crisis. The environmental historian looks at
the interaction of the linear human and the cyclical nature to
understand the intersections of both to improve upon existence
on human earth (?).
the smiley faces are page 8 (pg 8)
#Post#: 41--------------------------------------------------
Re: Reading #2: Cronon and Merchant
DIR By: mayafb
Date: January 8, 2019, 8:36 pm
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--- Quote from: ccogswell link ---
>
> I think many people are “depressed” by environmentalism in
general not because it is “hopeless”, but because it suggests
imminent and massive change. It’s not news that the threat of an
enormous change to our lives as humans on this planet,
regardless of who we are and where we are geographically, is
frightening to most people. I think this idea is especially
unsettling because environmental change topples all the little
social structures we’ve created, all the laws and rules we’ve
made… nature doesn’t care how much money you make, or what job
you have, or what you believe you, as a hardworking American,
are entitled to in life. Not to be a cynic, but I think when
people learn just how much is at stake when it comes to things
like climate change, their fear and sadness is not out of love
for nature or care for the Earth, but out of fear of someday
soon living in a world completely unlike what they (and all of
humanity) have ever known or imagined, a world where they can’t,
say, eat seafood or something because fish literally don’t exist
anymore.
>
> As far as all human history (so just history…) having a
natural context, this more or less sums up what we’ve discussed
and synthesized in class. The idea of comparative dynamics over
statistics I think is a bit more new. It’s super interesting,
though - I never before gave much thought to the idea that
nature and culture, mostly when combined, are capable of
“destructive” or “inappropriate” behaviour by, well, nature.
>
> A question: If nature was thought to be masculine as opposed
to feminine (Father Earth?), would this change gender roles in
relation to the environment? Why/why not?
>
> Another question: A specific group of people within a culture
can alter an environment, but if they are doing so in accordance
with what the culture demands they do, are they still
responsible?
>
--- End Quote ---
I always assumed the "mother earth" part because of the
fertility of the female body (although like sperm....?) To me,
and maybe just me, there seems to be a greater sense of
fertility in shaping and creating and carrying life in the form
of pregnancy.
#Post#: 42--------------------------------------------------
Re: Reading #2: Cronon and Merchant
DIR By: Tommy Is The Person Who I Am
Date: January 8, 2019, 8:47 pm
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--- Quote from: Shi Shi link ---
>
> Merchant briefly mentioned their origin stories which included
"tales of mother earth and father sky [...] Such deities
mediated between nature and humans, inspiring rituals and
behaviors that helped to regulate environmental use and
exploitation" (24). In the past, I had connected origin stories
with nature, but never before really have I interpreted these
stories as environmental "regulations".
>
--- End Quote ---
It is interesting that these origin stories, which acted as
"environmental 'regulations,'" convey quite a different message
from that of the Western belief outlined in yesterday's reading
that humans are meant to conquer nature. Perhaps this disparity
in beliefs is closely linked to the reasons why Europeans were
able to conquer Native Americans — one broad reason being that
Europeans could more easily "dominate" their land through
practices such as domestication. This once again demonstrates
that human beliefs are molded by their environment, which in
turn leads to humans molding their environment. Perhaps this
also connects to our discussion in class today of "advanced"
cultures, and whether "advanced" implies "better." The Western
belief of humanity's power over nature may connect to its early
complexity, but I would argue that that belief is not any better
than the Native Americans' belief in respecting the environment.
#Post#: 43--------------------------------------------------
Re: Reading #2: Cronon and Merchant
DIR By: alaina.h
Date: January 8, 2019, 8:49 pm
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The Cronon reading caught my attention, mainly the 3rd topic he
brought up which was, “all environmental knowledge is culturally
constructed and historically contingent —including our own.”
This idea stood out because I think it is something that I never
really thought about. As humans, we change many things to fit
our needs and our environment is no exception. This particular
quote from this section really summed it all up for me:
“recognizing the historical contingency of all knowledge helps
us guard against the dangers of absolute, decontextualized
“laws” or “truths” which can all too easily obscure the
diversity and subtlety of environments and cultures alike.” To
me, this quote seems to say that humans can create false
assumptions about certain environments or cultures, and this can
strongly affect people in the future that are trying to learn
from our past with this wrong information. Things are subject to
change and I think that it is interesting how Cronon explains
that the field of environmental history is changing to fit the
notion that nothing is static.
Adding on to Cale’s point about the separation of the science
(environmentalism) and history is something important to think
about. The fact that there is much dispute about the amount of
science that is embedded within environmental history confuses
me. To me, environmental history equally encompasses both and
similarly from science to history. Both should reference the
other in some way, though the two have separate focuses,
environmentalism and enviro history are so obviously linked. As
Cale said, our future is dependant on noticing the environment
of the past to figure out what needs to be done or changed.
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