Thinking About Progress: Teaching a High School Environmental History Seminar

“A lot of human activity happens without human choice or understanding.” “Early on, agriculture was a leap of faith.” “In Europe, people were forced to innovate.” “The innovation comes from desperation, not prosperity.” “The Basques’ advantages were not of their doing. They were due to the vagaries of the Catholic church.” “What luck—America had resources.” These observations came from students in my environmental history course this past winter at Phillips Exeter Academy, a private high school in Exeter, New Hampshire. These students are tech-savvy, ambitious, and smart. They’re socially networked multi-taskers, formidably capable even when distracted and sleep-deprived. They study Mandarin and Arabic, macroeconomics and algorithmic thinking, in order to lay the foundation for their future success in a global economy. But precisely because they have experienced a high degree of social and academic success as young people, many are unaware of the degree to which forces outside their control will shape their lives. If they think much at all about the influence of luck and chance on their futures—and the college application process no doubt encourages this—they probably assume they are playing a good hand. So it's intriguing to watch them grapple with stories of similarly well-equipped humans who were upended and surprised by natural catastrophes, the sudden arrival of far-flung markets, or the fruition of nearly imperceptible demographic trends. After all, environmental history is a profoundly humbling subject. One has only to expand the lens on any human story to witness the contingencies, the vagaries of weather and climate and timing, the sheer luck or the changing circumstances lurking just beyond humans’ collective peripheral vision. These factors shape historical outcomes far more powerfully than we are usually willing to admit. As my students confronted stories of human interaction with the natural world over time, they reexamined their own assumptions about human control, rational choice, and progress (Figure 1). Teaching environmental history to high school students has brought home to me both the challenges and rewards of this rich subject.