What Do You Understand the Term ‘environmental History’ to Mean? Discuss How This Approach to the Past Differs from ‘ecological History’.

What do you understand the term ‘environmental history’ to mean? Discuss how this approach to the past differs from ‘ecological history’.

Introduction

Environmental history is a rather new discipline that came into being during the 1960’s and 1970’s; and it was understood to be a direct consequence of the growing awareness of worldwide environmental problems such as pollution of water and air by pesticides, depletion of the ozone layer and the enhanced greenhouse effect caused by human activity (Oosthoek, 2005). The term ‘environmental history’ can be further defined as “the study of human interaction with the natural world over time”, which - in contrast to other historical disciplines - emphasizes the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs (MacEachern & Turkel, 2009). In simpler terms, environmental historians are able to research and analyse how mankind shape the environment; and how humans are shaped by it - by using various forms of scientific methods. One historian who has changed the way the world interpreted environmental history is Donald Worster; a distinguished professor of American History at the University of Kansas (The University of Kansas, 2009). Worster is one of the founders of, and leading figures in, the field of environmental history; and is considered to be one of the most thoughtful and stimulating of American environmental historians to have ever lived (White, 1990).

However, the term ‘ecological history’ is one that may not be as common, but still remains as important; and historical ecology can be defined as “ a research program that focuses on the interactions between humans and their environment over long-term periods of time - typically over the course of centuries” (Crumley, 1987). Historical ecology differs from environmental history, as rather than focussing on one particular event, historical ecology aims to examine and determine the interaction across both time and space in order to gain a full understanding of its cumulative effects (Balée, 1998). The discipline of ecological history has various origins by many different researchers and scientists - all of which whom shared a common interest in the area surrounding both ecology and history - but utilised a variety of diverse approaches. A key researcher in this field of work, was Edward Smith Deevey Jr., a prominent American ecologist and paleolimnologist who stated the term ‘historical ecology’ in the 1960’s to describe a methodology that he had been working on, using radiocarbon dating to reconcile biologists’ successions of plants and animals with the sequences of material culture and sites discovered by archaeologists (Deevey, 1969). Deevey ideally wanted to combine the practices of ‘general ecology’ which was studied in an experimental laboratory, with a ‘historical ecology’ which relied on

...