Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Timeline of Events
- 1 An Early History: From Settlement to Colonization
- 2 The American War of Independence
- 3 The Formative Period: The Era of Solidarity and Expansion
- 4 ‘Two Americas’: Regional Differences and Sectional Conflicts
- 5 Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions
- 6 Resisting Voices
- 7 American Foreign Policy: Post-Monroe Doctrine to World War I
- 8 The Great Crisis and Its Recovery
- 9 The Rise of America: WWII and After
- 10 The Quest for Equality
- 11 American Environmentalism and Environmental History
- Epilogue: Perceiving American History Beyond the ‘Exceptionalist’ Framework
- Index
11 - American Environmentalism and Environmental History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Timeline of Events
- 1 An Early History: From Settlement to Colonization
- 2 The American War of Independence
- 3 The Formative Period: The Era of Solidarity and Expansion
- 4 ‘Two Americas’: Regional Differences and Sectional Conflicts
- 5 Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions
- 6 Resisting Voices
- 7 American Foreign Policy: Post-Monroe Doctrine to World War I
- 8 The Great Crisis and Its Recovery
- 9 The Rise of America: WWII and After
- 10 The Quest for Equality
- 11 American Environmentalism and Environmental History
- Epilogue: Perceiving American History Beyond the ‘Exceptionalist’ Framework
- Index
Summary
This chapter provides a historical account of the emergence of American environmental history mainly from American environmentalism in the 1960s, traces the transformation of the field to a mature subject asserting how America became the pioneer and trend-setter in the birth of environmental history as a separate discipline within history. The works of environmental historians from early thinkers like Walter Prescott Webb to recent scholars like Donald Worster have been incorporated with an analytical treatment. It captures the South-Asian perspective of looking into and understanding American environmental history bringing out the sharp lines of bifurcation between ‘ecology of affluence’ and ‘environmentalism of the poor’. The chapter finally ends with theorizing what it calls the ‘World Environment History’.
Environmental history as a separate sub-set or sub-discipline of history actually emerged out of the growing environmental crisis due to massive industrialization and urbanization that paved the way towards preservationist, conservationist approaches, and environmental movement or environmentalism in the United States. Concern for nature reflected much earlier in the writings of scholars like Thucydides and Herodotus and also in the narratives of Fernand Braudel (Braudel was perhaps the first historian of the Annales school who wrote the history of the Mediterranean world beginning it with a chapter on ‘The Role of Environment’ in 1939), Le Roy Ladurie, Bodin, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, More and Bacon, but there is a need to understand the bifurcatory line between environmental consciousness and environmental history as a discipline. The US was the pioneer and trend-setter in the birth of environmental history as a separate discipline of history with its well-sketched out methodological canon.
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- An Introduction to the History of America , pp. 248 - 260Publisher: Foundation BooksPrint publication year: 2014