Michael Lewis

Anniversary Forum

Transformative Environmental History

IN THE LAST thirty years the first generations of scholars to call themselves "environmental historians" succeeded in transforming the larger historical discipline and in creating a research agenda that shows no signs of losing its steam. I have every confidence that the next thirty years will continue to see environmental historians working in the productive niches opened up by these pioneers. A new research agenda or focus for the field is not needed in order to maintain its viability. Environmental history has professionalized—we have a thriving journal, vibrant annual conferences (with a somewhat predictable range of panel themes), an ALCS-recognized professional society, and tenure-track positions devoted to environmental history at a growing number of universities. Careers can, have, and will be made by participating in this "normal" environmental history.	1
We should aspire to more than viability for environmental history, though. As we look ahead to the next thirty years, we might think about supplementing, not replacing, the productive lines of inquiry that all of us are familiar with and most of us have worked along. To that end, I can suggest three paths we might continue to explore—for none of these ideas are novel, but neither are they the dominant trend in our discipline at the moment: We must think more globally, embrace interdisciplinary work, and we must write more synthetic histories. If we succeed in doing so, I suspect that we will continue in the grandest tradition of our predecessors as transformative influences within the larger historical discipline, and we will minimize the risk of environmental history becoming an increasingly specialized and inward-looking sub-field with our own language, our own arguments, and our own (limited) audience.	2
Global: The basic knowledge of local case studies is essential to any grounded historical understanding. Further, our training predisposes us to conduct our research as scholars of particular nation-states or regions. Environmental historians, though, are aware of how interconnected histories of different parts of the globe can be. Ideas, people, birds, pollution—all these and more are flaunters of geopolitical boundaries. In a twenty-first-century world where people are increasingly attuned to global connections (and disconnections), histories that focus on our shared past will be relevant and needed. Even for scholars trained in U.S. history, it is not impossible, nor even that difficult, to choose to investigate connections between the United States and some other part of the world. Doing so will illuminate not just the history of the "other" place studied, but will also deepen our understanding of the United States. This is particularly relevant for environmental history, where so many of the processes and trends that we study have been exported throughout the globe in the twentieth century as development and modernization, and given that American individuals, corporations, and ideas have played key roles in transforming such a varied range of places in the world. All of us must become at least part-time world historians. To fail to do so will be to awkwardly shunt off our scholarship from its natural course.	3
Interdisciplinary: Environmental history is in many ways interdisciplinary, from its use of the insights of other disciplines such as ecology and geography to its links with American studies (a training ground for many practicing environmental historians, including myself). All signs indicate that the next thirty years will witness a boom in environmental-studies programs at universities across the United States, and as in the many existing programs, environmental historians will play a key role in this development. As of yet, though, most environmental history scholarship has been only lightly touched by the literature and insights of related disciplines (with the possible exception of ecology). We work well together on committees, but we do not cite each other's scholarship, go to each other's conferences, or publish in each other's journals. All of us who have worked in environmental studies believe that understanding environmental change requires the insights of multiple disciplines. Insofar as we aspire to write histories that recognize that same complexity in the past, we must begin to learn more biology, more economics, more sociology, more philosophy—in short we must learn environmental studies with our students.	4
Synthesize: Carefully focused studies are needed to finish PhDs, to publish first books, and to get tenure. But we need more mid-career environmental historians to take two steps back, pull together the several case studies related to a particular topic near to their heart, and write some daring syntheses—make some grand claims, inevitably make some mistakes, and stir debate. Environmental history is now mature enough as a field that we have dozens upon dozens of local case histories, as dissertations and monographs. Most will never find an audience outside of graduate schools. Syntheses will. I can think of recent examples that have succeeded brilliantly. There should be more, and risky attempts at syntheses should continue to be encouraged in our conferences and journal.	5
In addition to summarizing environmental history scholarship in synthetic works, we should take our insights and approaches to other historical topics. We should aspire to grand histories—environmental history, for instance, is uniquely positioned to tell the story (or several stories) of modernity, industrialization, and the growth of nation-states. But why stop there? Why must environmental historians always place subtitles after the colon, "The Environmental History of X?" Why aren't environmental historians aspiring to write "The History of X" itself?	6
As a graduate student I had the good fortune of conducting an interview with a senior environmental historian for a small local journal—he claimed that environmental history attempts to "see the world whole." If we truly attempt to do this, and to conceive of our scholarship in this fashion, environmental history looks increasingly less like a sub-field of history, and more like the field itself. Doing scholarship that is global, interdisciplinary, and synthetic is one way to move in that direction.	7
Michael Lewis is the director of the new Environmental Issues program at Salisbury University, and an assistant professor of history. He is the author of Inventing Global Ecology, released in the United States in June 2004 (Ohio).

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