Environmental History Without Historians
WHAT IS the future of environmental history?
It will be what the next generation of practitioners make of it. It will emerge from their felt sense of nature, and it will arise out of the urgings, overt or implied, of their professional colleagues. I can’t speak for the first. I would disappointed if the same themes persisted, leading to a dreary scholasticism of thesis, counterthesis, and revisionisms, burdening future generations with the intellectual equivalent of debt peonage. But in the matter of professional settings, I can comment.
When ASEH members speak of “environmental history,” they mean history done by professional historians, typically in the Academy, but perhaps on detached duty as public historians. The environment, however, attracts a great many scholars, and increasingly they are conceiving the subject in historical terms. Anthropologists, geographers, archeologists, foresters-all are incorporating, or rediscovering, the valence between history and nature. Even ecology is becoming (if grudgingly) a historical science, rather like geology. Each group defines the topic in its own way, indifferent to the methodological sound and fury of the others. Collectively, they challenge environmental history; they complement it; and they offer opportunities for scholarly colonization.
Regarding our status within academic history, I won’t speak. My sense is that the tug of political and social issues will, like the ring of Sauron, pull powerfully against our fellowship. I know I couldn’t make it work. Instead, I transferred into what has become a School of Life Sciences (SoLS), specifically a Human Dimensions Faculty (the Lost SoLS).
What has my experience been? In recent decades, critics have dismissed C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” argument. All my experience suggests he was right; not on his quirky particulars, but in his broad appreciation that the sciences and the humanities operate very differently. They do. The growth of the sciences depends on research, that of the humanities on teaching. The fundamental unit of scientific inquiry is the funded project, of which a published article is but one product. The sciences are revenue sources, the humanities, revenue sinks. For every NSF grant someone in SoLS gets, ASU adds a 54 percent surcharge. For every NEH fellowship someone in the History Department gets, the university loses money. As even public universities become more privatized, the scramble for external funding wedges the two castes further apart.
But the difference is also one of style. By training and temperament, scientists are problem-solvers. Academic historians are problem-illuminators, although they seem to pride themselves recently on being simple problematizers. The sciences are moving rapidly toward multidisciplinary collaborations; they enthusiastically team-teach; they are willing to include within their congregation whoever might contribute. What they hope to get, especially, is help on data, policy, and ethics. How this contributes to history qua history, they care little, any more than historians might fret over the complexities of Bayesian statistics. For postmodern babble and the sneering ironist, they have only scorn.
Historians may look covetously at the Academy’s scientists. They see higher profiles, reduced teaching loads, the gravitational distortion of external monies. They don’t see the hard discipline of experimental research, the amount of collaborative work in lab and field with both graduates and undergraduates, or the ferocious competition to win grants and fund students. (When completed, the reorganized SoLS expects, on average, every member to bring in $300,000 a year in external funding.) Without preconditioning, most historians, I wager, would buckle under the strain. Last year I was awarded a Regents’ Professorship, the highest honor the university can bestow, yet barely scraped to an average ranking among my SoLS colleagues. What saves me is that I understand enough science to speak with our other faculties (save the molecular crowd, which lives in an alternative universe); that I have a credible background in the history of science; and that I came into SoLS already tenured.
IN THE SPRING of 1992, my wife and I decided to kill our TV. We thus cut ourselves off from vast swathes of American society. Evening news, sports, politics, popular culture-they all went. It was like pushing out to sea on a raft, watching the coast and then the headlands recede until only an occasional cloud might show on the horizon.
Transferring to SoLS has had a similar effect. I read less of history as history, and its intra-disciplinary concerns seem ever more insubstantial. When a colleague in environmental ethics suggested we team-teach a course on American conservation for the Conservation Biology program, we started out with a syllabus informed historically, and ended with a course on “themes.” When urged to identify a funded project, I turned to a biological theory of fire, and rounded up collaborators among ecologists interested in carbon cycling, insects and grasses, and infectious diseases, and an ecological economist, a crack mathematician I hope to recruit for modeling. Such is the power of social osmosis.
The environmental sciences need environmental historians. Recently at a fire workshop sponsored by the Canadian Forest Service, I listened to a conference call from the Associate Deputy Minister in Ottawa, an economist, deeply impressed by a simulation model that suggested that more water bombers would not improve the ability to control wildfire, but worried over the assumptions behind the model. I pointed out that there was no need for simulation. History provided plenty of empirical examples that illustrated precisely this message. For groups, however, that view history only as archival and bardic-concerned with preserving records and celebrating the great deeds of the clan-the thought that the past might hold useful evidence was epiphanal. They have little experience of history applied as an analytical instrument. They need our thick description of how things came to be as they are, and our capacity to evoke context and contingency.
Yet I think, equally, that environmental historians need the environmental sciences. We need their vigor, their ability to focus, their methodological skepticism-and their hiring. We should be training young scholars to serve in such capacities, as we have trained public historians. The trick will be, having dispatched them from the metropole, to maintain amongthose scattered colonials a continuing commonwealth of scholarship.
That, of course, is why we need the ASEH.
Flag Day, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1941.
A former North Rim Longshot, Steve Pyne is now a professor in the Human Dimensions Faculty, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, and the authorof sixteen books, most recently Smokechasing (Arizona, 2003) and Tending Fire (Shearwater Books, 2004). He is working on a fire history of Canada.
Copyright Environmental History Jan 2005