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ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY ; AN INTRODUCTION

Definition

Environmental History is the study of human interaction with the natural world
over time, focussing on their reciprocal impacts. In contrast to other historical disciplines,
it emphasizes the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs. Environmental
historians study how humans both shape their environment and are shaped by it.

Background

The most influential empirical and theoretical work in the subject has been done in
the United States where teaching programs first emerged and a generation of trained
environmental historians is now active. In the United States environmental history as an
independent field of study emerged in the general cultural reassessment and reform of the
1960s and 1970s along with environmentalism, "conservation history", and a gathering
awareness of the global scale of some environmental issues.

Leading figures like Barry Commoner, a biologist, socialist, a humanist, and one
of the central leaders of the anti-nuclear-testing movement in the U.S. in the 1950s and
early 1960s, founded Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University, among
the first initiatives aimed to adapt our science to the urgent need for understanding the
natural biology of the environment and so help to preserve the community of life from
extinction at the hand of man.

Few years later Rachel Carsons Silent Spring in 1962, heightened awareness,
speaking of discoveries of chemicals DDt and hybrid varieties of crop increasing the
growth of weed, affecting the soil fertility, water bodies , fishes and ultimately humans.
These became basis of environment policies of the government.

This was in large part a reaction to the way nature was represented in history at the
time, which portrayed the advance of culture and technology as releasing humans from
dependence on the natural world and providing them with the means to manage it [and]
celebrated human mastery over other forms of life and the natural environment, and
expected technological improvement and economic growth to accelerate.
Environmental historians intended to develop a post-colonial historiography that
was "more inclusive in its narratives".

Environmental history was first constituted in the United States as a distinct

discipline and planted its roots in the 1960s. In a climate strongly influenced by new left
history and political activism, young historians, Roderick Nash and Donald Worster in
particular, affirmed that a class of the oppressed is systematically forgotten: the earth,
the biotope.
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Precusors and Antecedents early 1970s. Environment history in this form, however
was readily housed with established approaches of political, administrative and
intellectual history.

1988 : Doing Environmental History

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The study of the rational conservation and use of resources, on the one hand,and
that of the preservation of natural spaces on the other have provided one of the first axes
for the development of environmental history. This research first emerged within US
historiography. These can be seen categorised in three phases

Interaction with Nature : Prominently and among first were Samuel P. Hayss
book Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959)the founding work on
conservationist policies. In it, Hays discusses the initiatives taken by the federal
government in this domain at the turn of the 19thand 20th centuries, particularly
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under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. He proposed a scientific way of looking

at conservation and the conservation movement in US in respect of irrigation, flood
control, forests, the western range and river development and control for rational use of
resources water, miner resources timber etc

The study of practices of conservation has also been developed, mostly in the
United States where the first natural parks were created (Yellowstone, 1872).

The seminal work on this question is Roderick Nashswork Wilderness and the
American Mind, published in 1967. As a historian of ideas he in addition to just
conservation embraces some kind of spirituality and ethics in environment. Nash
analyses the importance of the notion of wilderness in the construction of
Americasnational identity. This wilderness is that of the great spaces that God gave in
tribute to colonials off to conquer the West. Once the conquest was over, the preservation
of these parcels of wild nature in natural parks allows for the reservation of testimony
to this founding moment of the American nation.

1. Transformation Of Nature : Another Centre Of Innovation

(after cycles and environment) Annalists Laduries Time of Feast and Time of Famine
moved beyond livelihood of human entangled with nature and natures transformation is
studied, Donald Worster transformation in the flow of river due to human activities. He
said that all modes of production led to changes in nature.

2. Cultural Encounter With Nature New Way Of Writing Environment History

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Essence Of Environmental History

Donald Worster described the essence of environmental history as follows:-

Its essential purpose is to put nature back into historical studies, or, to explore
the ways in which the bio-physical world has influenced the course of human
history and the ways in which people have thought about and tried to transform
their surroundings.

Once a historian discovers the connection between nature and culture, a whole
field of new subjects opens up not just in history also becomes more interdisciplinary than
ever before. It is not only using other humanities and social sciences, but it also starts to
use the natural sciences. Among these are sciences such as geography, geophysics,
biology, demography, botany, and ecology. Working with concepts from other sciences is
very demanding for a historian and it demands not only training in history and social
sciences, but also in natural sciences.

But not only historians have to broaden their horizons. Scientists must include
human history in their work and it seems that they have started to look at historical
processes. That is not to say that time has not been a factor in their research because ever
since Darwin scientists have recognised that the natural world, even the whole planet, is
the product of a long historical process. However, they did not include human culture as
an influence in these processes. Although humans are newcomers in the history of our
planet, they have had a profound impact on the planet for at least two million years. That
means that what we regard as nature is, to some extent, a product of human history. A
good example is the use of fire by prehistoric hunters. We know now that the prairies of
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North America are the product of deliberate burning by Native Americans for thousands
of years. This type of management produced a unique ecosystem that European settlers
found in the 18th and 19th centuries. For These reasons scientists must take serious the
impact of human action, in particularly during the modern period, the past 300 years,
when human impact has become deeper and more far reaching than ever before.

Time Scale And Spatial Divisions

Environmental history ventures into all human activities ranging from economics
to social organisation, politics, science, philosophy, and religion. Its timescale is not
limited to centuries, one thousand, two thousand or even 40 thousand years and it goes all
the way back to the origins of humanity and even beyond. It takes into account both the
grand planetary processes over long periods of time and the small scale of a locality in a
limited time span. Environmental history is global and local at the same time and includes
short term and long term processes.

Although environmental history is hardly limited in time and space, most research is
focused on the period in which humanity made an increasing impact on the natural world.
This period is the most recent geological epoch, the Holocene, which began at the end of
the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago and still continues today.7 It is during this short period
of time that humanity developed the civilisations agriculture and technologies that had
such a profound impact on the environment of our planet. If we go further back in time
environmental history becomes less detailed and is covers larger geographic areas and
longer time-scales.

Some Science Tools Important In Environment History

A whole range of tools are available to the environmental historian, the traditional
sources of documentary evidence. The problem is that these records are very limited in
time and space. For large areas of the world there is no documentary evidence until the
modern period. To reconstruct past environments we have to rely on indirect evidence,
the so-called proxy records. The term proxy record refers to any evidence that provides an
indirect measure of former climates or environments.

Biological evidence is an important tool for reconstructing past climates and

environments. One of the most widely used and successful techniques is that of pollen
analysis. It is used to reconstruct the vegetation in the past. Pollen can also be used to
determine human impact on environments such as deforestation or the extent of
agriculture by counting the number of tree or cereal pollen in a sample.

Paleocological reconstruction also uses information provided by the extraction,

recording and analysis of the fossil record. This provides us with a time framework and
an idea of the flora and fauna during a certain epoch. The problem of fossils for dating
and reconstructing past environments is that it is not very useful for the last ten to
hundred thousand years.
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Radiometric methods In addition to dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) and

paleomagnetism are used to get a more accurate environmental reconstruction.

Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the method of scientific dating based on

the analysis of tree ring growth patterns. Since tree growth is influenced by climatic
conditions, such as temperature and precipitation, patterns in tree-ring widths, density,
and isotopic composition reflect annual variations in climate. Trees can grow to be
hundreds of years old and so contain annual records of climate conditions.

Landscape reconstruction is the work of geologists and geomorphologists. The

geologists provide information on the structure beneath the land, past changes in this
structure, sedimentation and the time framework. The geomorphologist looks at the shape
of the landscape and combines the information of endogenic processes (processes from
within the earth), provided by the geologist, with the erosive power of water, wind and
other exogenic influences.

The understanding of the influence and development of human impact on the

landscape is the domain of archaeology. Archaeologists reconstruct the development of
field systems, occupation patterns and technology available in the past.

They concluded that the combined range of techniques from the different
disciplines have the potential to move beyond providing a 'background' to human
settlement, and to explore the complex 'feedback' linkages between anthropogenic and
natural processes, and to generate a more holistic understanding of ... landscape
evolution.12

Environmental History: A Case Study

Easter Island is a Chilean Island in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean, at the

south-eastern most point of the Polynesian Triangle. Easter Island is famous for its
887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapa Nui people. In
1995, UNESCO named Easter Island a World Heritage Site, with much of the island
protected within Rapa Nui National Park.
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Archaeologists have proposed that

Polynesian who settled in Easter, 800 years ago
or more, laid the statues (called moai ) prone
and rolled them along on logs.That idea supports
the theory that the settlers known as rapa nui
became so obsessed with statue-building that
they denuded the island of its forests. In addition
it is generally accepted that islanders lands, dry, cool,
and remote, poorly fertilized by wind-blown dust or
volcanic ash, clearing of forests for firewood and
farming, led to wood becoming scarce and the
islanders could no longer build sea-going canoes for fishing, they ate the birds. Soil
erosion decreased their crop yields. However, human activity, the introduction of
the Polynesian rat and over population led to gradual deforestation and extinction of
natural resources which severely weakened the Rapa Nui civilization. By the time of
European arrival in 1722, the island's population had dropped to 2,0003,000 from an
estimated high of approximately 15,000 just a century earlier. European diseases and
Peruvian slave-raiding in the 1860s further reduced the Rapa Nui population, to a low
of only 111 inhabitants in 1877. Diseases such as small pox left few survivors and
Tuberculosis, introduced by whalers in the mid-19th century, in which a quarter of
the islanders succumbed. In the following years, the managers of the sheep ranch and
missionaries from Chile annexed Easter Island in 1888, but until 1953 it allowed a
Scottish company to manage the island as a giant sheep ranch. In 1964 they revolted,
later obtaining Chilean citizenship and the right to elect their own mayor and now
maintains an economy based on tourism.

But lately the moai have been drawn into a larger debate, one that opposes two
distinct visions of Easter Islands pastand of humanity in general. The first,
eloquently expounded by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, presents the island as a
cautionary parable: the most extreme case of a society wantonly destroying itself by
wrecking its environment. Can the whole planet, Diamond asks, avoid the same fate? In
the other view, by archaeologist Carl Lipo and Engineer Terry Hunt about the ancient
Rapa nui, are uplifting emblems of human resilience and ingenuityone example being
their ability to walk giant statues upright across miles of uneven terrain.

Early European visitors and later researchers have assumed moai

carving and transport required a large labour force, a correspondingly large
population, and a substantial expenditure of natural resources such as
agricultural surplus and trees for rollers or other transport devices. The
notion of an irrational statue cult fuelled by over population and
overexploitation of resources has formed foundations of arguments
forecocide and seemed to provide a coherent model for Easters prehistory
(Diamond). The collapse of their isolated civilization, Diamond writes, is the
clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources
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and a worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead of us in our own future. the
people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to
extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism.

However, recent research and new evidence calls into question the longstanding
notions of ecocide and population collapse before European contact. Moai patterns of
breakage and wear, positions on roads relative to slope and their transportation are
also explained by a hypothesis of vertical walking transport (Carl Lipo, Terry Hunt
2011).As research and experiments illustrate, these observations explain through
archaeological record allowed researchers to deduce a falsifiable hypothesis for how
the statues were moved.

In contrast to popular notions of sledges, rollers or sliders of trees, moai were

specifically engineered to walk in an upright position achieved using only ropes,
human labour , and simple cleared pathways Lipo and Hunt suggested. A relatively
small number of people are capable of moving a statue; The statue evidence does not
imply that a large population once existed on Easter, contrary to earlier notions (e.g.,
Brown 1924; Diamond 2005, 2007). The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would
have kept the population from growing much larger. Apart from labour and
engineering expertise, statue transport required only ropes; few if any trees were
required in statue transport.

According to Diamond, large stands of palm trees were all cut down, the result
was starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism. Contrasting view
put fwd is that, the primary vegetation on the island was the now extinct palm,
Jubaeachilensis or a close relative, may not have been suitable for use in building
contraptions or making rollers that could support a great amount of weight. Material
for ropes, however, was abundant on the island as they were made from a woody shrub.
Consequently, statue making and transport cannot be linked to deforestation, nor forest
clearance for extensive cultivation of agricultural surplus to feed thousands of statue
workers, as some have supposed (see Diamond 2005, 2007; Van Tilburg and Ralston
2005:299).
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The evidence for moai carving and transport points to activities by small-scale
social groups rather than the product of labourers unified under a powerful centralized
chiefdom. Here monumentality does not imply large scale social organization as
assumed for many cases worldwide. Instead, we see moai carving and walking as vivid
expressions of costly signalling and evolutionary bet hedging in a competitive
environment.

Take-away From this Case Study

Newly introduced diseases, conflict with European invaders and enslavement

followed over the next century and a half, and these were the chief causes of the
collapse.. In the 1930s, French ethnographer Alfred Metraux visited the island.
described the demise of Rapa Nui as one of the most hideous atrocities committedby
white men in the South Seas. It was a probable genocide according to recent
researches, not genocide, that caused the demise of the Rapa nui. An ecological
catastrophe did occur on Rapa Nui, but it was the result of a number of factors.

Recent researchers believe that the world faces today an unprecedented global
environmental crisis, and see the usefulness of historical examples of the pitfalls of
environmental destruction. It can be concluded that Rapa Nui does not provide such a
model. There have been Mistakes and exaggerations in arguments for the cause
environmentalism according to scholars and scientists. Ecosystems are complex, and
there is an urgent need to understand them better. There is a need also to explore what
happened on Rapa Nui, and to learn other lessons this remote outpost has to teach us.

Conclusion