of catastrophic events and their counterpoint,
the notion of order in nature. pm
environmental history Environmental his-
tories reflect a basic desire to understand the
relations between people andnaturethrough
time. Over the years, scholars have approached
this broad and important topic from several
disciplines. Anthropologists conductedethno-
graphicstudies of the ways in which particular
peoples conceived of, utilized and interacted
with the natural (and supernatural) world.
Archaeologistsseekingtheoriginsofdomestica-
tion explored the earliest relations among
people,plantsandanimals.Ecologistsandother
scientists sought to understand how human
actions affected natural systems. Students of
mythology,religion,andlawtraced expres-
sions of human attitudes towards and concern
fornatureinmedievalandMesopotamiantimes.
And after generations of philosophers had
pondered the ways in which individuals living in
different epochs conceived of the natural world,
some among them came, late in the twentieth
century, to argue against the very idea that
‘nature’ and ‘society’ are separate, distinct
entities. In general, however, historians and
geographers have led scholarship in this area.
Inamannerreflectedepigrammaticallyinthe
title of Marjorie Nicolson’s book,Mountain
gloom and mountain glory(1959), historians
such as Keith Thomas (1996 [1983]) and
Roderick Nash (1967) traced changes in the
ways that individuals and societies regarded
nature orwildernessthrough the centuries.
Others, including William Cronon (1983),
Timothy Silver (1990) and Richard White
(1980), considered whatlandscapesreflected
of human endeavours, or found, with Mart
Stewart (1996) and Harold Innis (1927), fruit-
ful topics for enquiry in the ways in which eco-
nomicdevelopmentrested, in considerable
degree, upon the natural endowments (that
people thought of asresources) of particular
territories. Geographers long held the study
of human–environment relations to be one of
the central ‘traditions’’ of their field, and many
of those with ecological and historical inclin-
ations wrote at some length about the
mutual shaping of lands and lives over time. In
France, Paul Vidal de la Blache (1926), Albert
Demangeon (1942) and Jean Brunhes (1952)
all pursued investigations along these lines,
and were among the giants ofhuman geog-
raphyearly in the twentieth century. In the
UK,someoftheleadingexponentsofthedevel-
oping subject, including Emrys Jones (1951–2,
1956), Estyn Evans (1960) and Harold
J. Fleure (1951), were primarily interested in
the relations between human societies and the
natural environment (see also Langton, 1988).
And in the USA, Clarence Glacken produced a
classic work,Traces on the Rhodian shore: nature
and culture in Western thought from ancient times to
the end of the eighteenth century(1967), while
Carl Ortwin Sauer, one of the convenors of the
1955 symposium on ‘Man’s Role in Changing
the Face of the Earth’, led the study of human-
induced landscape changes (Sauer, 1963a
[1925]; Thomas, 1996 [1983]; Kenzer, 1986:
seeberkeley school).
Still,thecharacterizationofaparticularfieldof
enquiry as ‘environmental history’ is relatively
new. By common North American assessments,
it dates back to the rise of theenvironmental
movementin the 1960s. There is merit in this
view.Aspopularinterestinenvironmentalques-
tions climbed, the spate of historical scholarship
on the relations between people and nature
throughtime–particularlyintheUSA–reached
newheights.Inaddition,theparallelismbetween
the coinage ‘environmental history’ and public
anxieties about ‘environmental issues’ – which
waxedandwaned,butoftenseemedtoberooted
in past practices (even if these were relatively
recent) – served, brilliantly, to draw attention to
thefield.Quickly,thephrase‘environmentalhis-
tory’ was adopted as a euphonious and readily
understoodlabel for a widelydiverse and rapidly
expanding body of work, even as it served to veil
regional, national and disciplinary differences in
emphases,originsandapproachestothestudyof
human–environment relations. The field is now
too large and varied to be encompassed in any
single assessment, although a number of
scholars have attempted to limn its developing
dimensions (see, e.g., White, 1985; McNeill,
2003; Evenden and Wynn, 2009).
From the mid-1970s onwards, there were
challenges to the dominant (American-centred)
construction of the field. Three among these
warrant brief notice. English-educated Richard
Grove took issue with the common tendency,
given particular substance by David Lowenthal,
to identify the ‘Versatile Vermonter’ George
Perkins Marsh as the fountainhead of the
conservation movement, arguing in Green
imperialism(1995) that awareness of human-
induced environmental changes long predated
Marsh’sworkandwassharpenedbyobservation
of the effects of colonial expansion on ‘tropical
island Edens’ (Lowenthal, 1958, 2000; Marsh,
1965 [1864]; Grove, 1995). In 1989, the Indian
scholar Ramachandra Guha offered an import-
ant ‘Third world critique’ of American envi-
ronmentalists’ fascination with wildernessGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 199 1.4.2009 3:17pmENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY