The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History

In a now-classic round table discussion among a group of noted historians in 1990, the Journal of American History introduced its readers to the then-new discipline of environmental history. The field had its roots in several venerable scholarly enterprises—including the historiography of the American frontier, traditional American studies, the Annales school, historical geography, cultural ecology, and the political history of conservation— but it coalesced with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, catalyzed by a growing sense that solving national and global environmental problems required a historical perspective. The logic of social history had an equally important formative influence on the rise of environmental history; where social historians argued for extending historical consideration to the less powerful and those whose voices were difficult to find in archives, environmental historians suggested that scholars jump the humanistic divide to account for what Donald Worster, in his lead essay, called “the role and place of nature in human life.” Like social historians, environmental historians argued for bringing new sources and methods into the practice of history, usually drawing from ecology and other environmental sciences. And as social historians had done with their subjects of study, environmental historians sought to extend moral consideration to the natural world. The 1990 Journal of American History round table functioned as the culmination of the first generation of environmental history scholarship and a springboard for a second generation of scholars. Worster explained that environmental history sought to give voice to a set of “autonomous, independent energies that do not derive from the drives and intentions of any culture,” and he urged environmental historians to utilize the “wisdom of