Susan D. Jones

Anniversary Forum

Body and Place

ENVISIONING FUTURE directions for environmental history presents little difficulty; rather, the challenge lies in elucidating the details of the routes it will travel and the setbacks it might encounter. Environmental history will become increasingly interconnected with other disciplines. What follows is a brief examination of some of the field's strengths, one example of a future path, and some obstacles to its continuing journey.

Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-91166.
By tradition, young men and women gathered to perform both agricultural and social tasks: husking and courting. Finding the red ear entitled a man to kiss any of the women present. This image suggests the ways in which gender, courtship, family, community, and celebration were tied to agricultural cycles and through them to agro-ecosystems. Corn, as nature and as culture, had meanings historians might yet explore.

"Husking the Corn in New England," 1858.

Environmental history offers much to other historical sub-disciplines, to the broader study of the past, and to other fields of inquiry. Scholars have plumbed the ecological sciences for theory, using ideas about climax and succession and material flows, for example. From Frederick Jackson Turner to Cold War rhetoric, these theories have found social and political purchase, yet they represent only the tip of the iceberg. Indigenous or "street level" knowledge of the environment and the cycles of living things has long informed the social practices and cultural beliefs of peoples throughout time and around the world, and these theories deserve the attention that more formalized "scientific" theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have drawn. Methodologically, environmental history reminds historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and others that nonhuman actors have played important roles in "making history," influencing cultural practices and determining the shape of social institutions. These theoretical and methodological contributions have been particularly useful to the increasing number of scholars engaged in transnational and interdisciplinary studies.

One such interdisciplinary study lies at the intersection between health, disease, and environment. Historical events and ideas associated with health typically have been the province of historians of medicine and public health, who have focused on human bodies and populations. Recently, some historians have departed from this approach by "ecologizing" their examinations of health and disease in humans and animals (although this idea is hardly new). Recent scholarship (the 2004 issue of the research journal Osiris, for example) focuses on occupational health, colonial diseases, zoonotic diseases, and resultant public health policies. By including places as well as bodies in their work, these historians seek to understand health and disease as notions embedded in the lived experience of the sufferers in their daily environments. These analyses also often depend on non-human actors (such as microbes, tsetse flies, and cattle) that have altered our understanding of the role played by disease throughout social, cultural, and political history. The importance of environmental notions of health does not end with disease outbreaks; as scholars such as Conevery Bolton Valencius have shown, the very identities of historical actors were comprised in part by their linked perceptions of their health and the landscape in which they lived. Metaphors of environment and disease—weeds "spreading like cancer" or ill urbanites living in "miasmatic" conditions—remind us of the power of these linkages. Methodologically and theoretically, environmental history and the history of health and disease have a great deal to offer one another. This example represents but one path for historians to extend the reach of environmental history.¹

Along the way, environmental history's theoretical and methodological components will continue to be critically examined. For example, the "reality question" that has dogged social studies of science (e.g. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope) may present an obstacle for environmental history as well. The old solipsistic question of the tree falling in the forest has been joined by the challenges of competing cosmologies, critiques of "actor-network theory," and questions about ontological diversity. How do we know what we know? What if material objects or material flows have divergent meanings to different observers, even while everyone can agree that they have "real" effects? Methods are potentially just as contentious as theory: Will historians be willing to accord the status of "actor" to non-human things such as plants, animals, bacteria, and the weather? Is human history devoid of any attention to these issues deficient, as some environmental historians would argue, or is environmental history as a methodology limited in its utility to other historians? Finally, those of us arguing for the extension of environmental history into new areas could get what we asked for and more: a field so widely incorporated into other disciplines, so cavalier about boundaries, that it may cease to exist as an independent entity. Besides being a victim of its own success, environmental history also could also lose some of its distinctive identity as its practitioners incorporate anthropological, sociological, and other sources of new theories and methodologies.²

Despite these potential pitfalls, I remain optimistic about the future of environmental history. Although the environment has not yet become, in Adam Rome's words, "a basic category of historical analysis," I believe that environmental history's methodological and theoretical offerings will increasingly be used by historians and other scholars. It is difficult for me to envision it losing its identity even as it becomes more conversant with other disciplines. An examination of the interrelationships between humans and the natural world—ever dynamic, and relevant to each generation—will continue to be its keystone and its unique contribution.³

Susan D. Jones is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she teaches environmental history, history of science and medicine, and history of human-animal relationships. She is also a part-time practicing veterinarian. She is the author of Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) and currently is working on histories of anthrax and bovine tuberculosis.

Notes

^1. Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers, "Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments," Osiris 19 (2004); Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

^2. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

^3. Adam Rome, "What Really Matters in History? Environmental Perspectives on Modern America," Environmental History 7 (April 2002): 303–18.

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