Angela Gugliotta

Anniversary Forum

Environmental History and the Category of the Natural

I KNOW A historian who has written a wonderful book about the political deployment of nature ideologies and their centrality to national identity. She does not want to be known as an "environmental historian." She imagines, I think, that environmental history is too focused on environmental damage and activist struggle, not attuned enough to the way historically malleable appeals to nature—to a given cosmological order, to the soil, to what is pure or savage—can be used to shape culture.	1
Richard White's call for attention to knowledge of nature through labor, and William Cronon's focus on commodification and alienation, address fundamental questions and have set a research program for a generation. Both presuppose a slippery element—the "unmade"—which can problematically be commodified and from which one can be alienated. They argue against Bill McKibben's view that there is no nature once climate is marked by human influence. The unmade and the made are everywhere mixed, yet Cronon and White agree that unmade elements deserve reverence and protection, and still "in wildness is the preservation of the world."	2
In contemporary political, moral, and consumer discourse, we are constantly exhorted to choose the natural, or we are absolved from the consequences of choices already made by interpreting them as having been dictated by nature. Historians should easily recognize the cultural contingency of such appeals. What is "natural" or "unnatural" about agriculture, air travel, kingship, petroleum, AIDS, the family wage, nectarines, asbestos, monogamy, rape, low infant mortality, or eight-decade life spans? Yet, because the slippery category of the natural has long been central to human self-understanding, we also should try to uncover what is commensurable among changing concepts. Perhaps the best candidate for a timeless standard of the natural is Rachel Carson's, which compares the pace of biological and cultural evolution. That which is older on an evolutionary time-scale, to which everything around it has had a better chance to adapt, is the more natural. Apply Carson's approach to the list above: It raises many difficult questions.	3
Normative appeal to the natural is not an invariant historical pattern, but when it is absent, it is often replaced by its opposite, as in preferences for the civilized, the spiritual, or the ideal over the savage, the fleshly, or the material. Mary Douglas says that in choosing what to call pollution, we choose our form of life. In choosing how to understand the given order of the world, and whether to take it as normative, or to construct our norms in opposition to it, we determine the most fundamental parameters of culture. The moral and political role of the natural and related categories in the human past is enormous. We should more assiduously explore their history.	4
I am not advocating that environmental history become a history of ideas. An exclusive focus on elites and the literate and a preference for the intellectual over the material would betray the discipline's roots in "history from the bottom up" and in bringing the material environment "back in" to history. David Hackett Fischer has outlined the dangers of "tunnel history" in which historians carve the past into a series of parallel tunnels in which only ideas cause ideas and in which population and prices cannot interact with religious enthusiasm. Normative uses of nature and of its opposites can be embedded in non-elite and non-literate sources—in cave paintings, in trading patterns and limitations on the kinds of things that can be exchanged for one another, in religious ritual and myth, in labor discourse, and in reproductive practice. Often, when historians examine practices that do not seem centrally to concern normative conceptions of nature, they import such conceptions from their own time. This is not illegitimate, but it would be better done with more explicit attention to what is being imported and to actors' views (perhaps implicit) of the same matters.	5
The category of the natural has longstanding historical connections that hold the power to liberate environmental history from the problem alluded to at the beginning of this essay—that of having an agenda set by contemporary activism. The natural can represent, and has represented, what is given, stable, and conservative, or what is lost and must be recovered through radical action. Nature has been a gift of God, the realm of the amoral and the inculpable, and the product of sin marked by incessant suffering.	6
Historical understandings of the natural can differ markedly from our own (as varied as these may be). What looks to us like pollution can have looked, in the communities we study, like nature. In my own work, coal smoke in Pittsburgh in the 1790s was evidence of natural abundance, praised within the same sentences as lush vegetation and well-drained soil. In the 1920s, nature in Pittsburgh took the form of unexpected owls nesting in residential suburbs adjacent to industrial districts and, in fiction, of window-box flowers overgrowing skyscrapers and hastening Pittsburgh's eclipse as steelmaker by Gary and Birmingham. In the 1930s, nature offered the promise of stability and recovery—in part through the founding resources of the city, its rivers and its "belly rich with coal." But nature was also the character—the nature—of its laborers, on whom the city's return to industrial greatness depended as surely as it did on the natural laws that connect coal and rivers to human work. Nature's laws and nature's assurance were embodied, for one local poet in 1932, in "the hiss of a cigarette, dropped by a bum in the river."	7
While attention to the political and ideological deployment of the natural can help environmental history to escape from characterization as a branch of environmentalism, it also can help to make it more politically useful. It can, as Douglas says, help us to "recognise each environment as a mask and support for a certain kind of society" and to turn our political attention to "the value of th[e] social form which demands our scrutiny just as clearly as the purity of milk and air and water."	8
Angela Gugliotta is a lecturer and research associate in environmental studies and humanities at the University of Chicago. She recently completed her dissertation, "'Hell With the Lid Taken Off': A Cultural History of Air Pollution—Pittsburgh," under the direction of Christopher Hamlin. She has published articles in Environmental History, The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences and in collections edited by Joel Tarr and Melanie DuPuis.

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