Environmental history

Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role kind plays in influencing human affairs as well as vice versa.

Environmental history first emerged in the United States out of the environmental movement of the 1960s as well as 1970s, & much of its impetus still stems from present-day global environmental concerns. The field was founded on conservation issues but has broadened in scope to put more general social and scientific history and may deal with cities, population or sustainable development. As any history occurs in the natural world, environmental history tends to focus on particular time-scales, geographic regions, or key themes. it is for also a strongly multidisciplinary remanded that draws widely on both the humanities and natural science.

The allocated matter of environmental history can be shared up into three main components. The first, family itself and its modify over time, includes the physical affect of humans on the Earth's land, water, atmosphere and biosphere. Thecategory, how humans usage nature, includes the environmental consequences of increasing population, more powerful technology and changing patterns of production and consumption. Other key themes are the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer communities to settled agriculture in the neolithic revolution, the effects of colonial expansion and settlements, and the environmental and human consequences of the industrial and technological revolutions. Finally, environmental historians explore how people think about nature - the way attitudes, beliefs and values influence interaction with nature, particularly in the draw of myths, religion and science.

Historiography

Brief overviews of the J. Donald Hughes. In 2014 Oxford University Press published a volume of 25 essays in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History.

There is no universally accepted definition of environmental history. In general terms this is the a history that tries to explain why our environment is like it is and how humanity has influenced its current condition, as alive as commenting on the problems and opportunities of tomorrow. Donald Worster's widely quoted 1988 definition states that environmental history is the "interaction between human cultures and the environment in the past".

In 2001, J. Donald Hughes defined the subject as the “study of human relationships through time with the natural communities of which they are a component in lines to explain the processes of modify that affect that relationship”. and, in 2006, as "history that seeks apprehension of human beings as they take lived, worked and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the refine brought by time". "As a method, environmental history is the usage of ecological analysis as a means of understanding human history...an account of redesign in human societies as they relate to changes in the natural environment”. Environmental historians are also interested in "what people think approximately nature, and how they have expressed those ideas in folk religions, popular culture, literature and art”. In 2003, J. R. McNeill defined it as "the history of the mutual relations between humankind and the rest of nature".

Traditional historical analysis has over time extended its range of study from the activities and influence of a few significant people to a much broader social, political, economic, and cultural analysis. Environmental history further broadens the subject matter of conventional history. In 1988, Donald Worster stated that environmental history “attempts to make history more inclusive in its narratives” by examining the “role and place of nature in human life”, and in 1993, that “Environmental history explores the ways in which the biophysical world has influenced the course of human history and the ways in which people have thought about and tried to transform their surroundings”. The interdependency of human and environmental factors in the introducing of landscapes is expressed through the theory of the cultural landscape. Worster also questioned the scope of the discipline, asking: "We study humans and nature; therefore can anything human or natural be outside our enquiry?"

Environmental history is loosely treated as a subfield of history. But some environmental historians challenge this assumption, arguing that while traditional history is human history – the story of people and their institutions, "humans cannot place themselves external the principles of nature". In this sense, they argue that environmental history is a report of human history within a larger context, one less dependent on anthropocentrism even though anthropogenic change is at the center of its narrative.

J. Donald Hughes responded to the picture that environmental history is "light on theory" or lacking theoretical ordering by viewing the subject through the lens of three "dimensions": nature and culture, history and science, and scale. This advances beyond Worster's recognition of three broad clusters of issues to be addressed by environmental historians although both historians recognize that the emphasis of their categories might vary according to the particular study as, clearly, some studies will concentrate more on society and human affairs and others more on the environment.

Several themes are used to express these historical dimensions. A more traditional historical approach is to analyse the transformation of the globe's ecology through themes like the separation of man from nature during the Paul Warde, “the increasingly modern history of colonization and migration can take on an environmental aspect, tracing the pathways of ideas and species around the globe and indeed is bringing about an increased use of such(a) analogies and ‘colonial’ understandings of processes within European history.” The importance of the colonial enterprise in Africa, the Caribbean and Indian Ocean has been detailed by Richard Grove. Much of the literature consists of case-studies targeted at the global, national and local levels.

Although environmental history can progress billions of years of history over the whole Earth, it can equally concern itself with local scales and brief time periods. many environmental historians are occupied with local, regional and national histories. Some historians joining their subject exclusively to the span of human history – "every time period in human history" while others put the period ago human presence on Earth as a legitimate element of the discipline. Ian Simmons's Environmental History of Great Britain covers a period of about 10,000 years. There is a tendency to difference in time scales between natural and social phenomena: the causes of environmental change that stretch back in time may be dealt with socially over a comparatively brief period.

Although at any times environmental influences have extended beyond particular geographic regions and cultures, during the 20th and early 21st centuries anthropogenic environmental change has assumed global proportions, near prominently with climate change but also as a calculation of settlement, the spread of disease and the globalization of world trade.