Multiple apologies for my igorance, and everyone else's!! didn't know
that ".au" means australia, realize that we Americans can be overbearing,
and so I GET IT already! No one else needs to tell me I, and others,
blew it, Okay?
So, maybe all of us should avoid unclear abbreviations, Aussies included,
huh? ;-)
Faith
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Apr 13 02:03:31 MDT 1995
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 1995 02:04:21 -0600 (MDT)
From: Catherine Lavender--H-AMSTDY Comoderator <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: The Environmental Historian's Problem (longish, X-ASEH-L)
This is a thread that is going on on ASEH-L, and I find it really
fascinating (read: terrifying/dismaying/etc.) that not one mention of
gender has come up. I just posted something to it tonight which contained
the word "ecofeminist," but it really seems that this is a debate in which
we should be taking part. So we can discuss it here, if people are
interested, or we can join in on ASEH-L.
Best,
Cathy
Cathy Lavender, Department of History, University of Colorado-Boulder
([EMAIL PROTECTED])
"If I can't dance, it's not my revolution"--Emma Goldman
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: The Environmental Historian's Problem (8 Posts, X-ASEH-L)
[Crossposted from the American Society for Environmental History's
Environmental History discussion list ASEH-L <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]
(1)
> Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 13:53:28 -0500 (CDT)
> From: Jay Antle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Greetings!
On May 5, 1995, Don Wolf, Adam Rome and myself (Jay Antle) will be hosting
a session of the Hall Center Colloquium on Nature, Culture, and Technology
at the University of Kansas. Our discussion is entitled "The
Environmental Historian's Problem: Interpreting Environmental Change." The
central issue for me here is: how do environmental historians find their
moral compass when writing about environmental change?
I believe this is an important issue for folks to think about and I
thought that an electronic component to our Hall Center discussion would
be useful. With that thought in mind, let me propose the following
questions for your consideration. We will consider the same questions in
our discussion here at KU. I am sending this message both to H-West as
well as the ASEH list given the interest among Western historians in
environmental history.
1. How do we judge environmental change? What is "good" and what is "bad"
and how do we tell the difference?
2. Do new ecological paradigms undermine the ability to make moral
judgments? (ie, the move away from climax theory and towards chaos theory)
3. How do we decide what is "natural" and what is "unnatural"? Why is
this question so important to us?
4. Does a resilient nature, which rebounds from disaster, change our
stories? How can we "postmortem" when the corpse is never completely
dead?
5. Often our critiques assume that one environmental condition is more
desirable than another. How do we choose a preferred condition? Who
chooses what is preferable?
6. Can science provide a sufficient standard for interpreting change? If
not, how do we weigh science against cultural, aesthetic, religious,
economic, ethical or other standards?
I hope we can have a spirited discussion of these issues. I will try to
summarize the results of both the electronic and in person discussions at
a later date. Let the fun begin!
Jay Antle
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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(2)
> Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 17:04:27 -0500
> From: Bill Lang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The questions posed are sufficient for a semester of sessions, but among
the 6 Antle listed the last one may be the most critical. In discussion
after discussion in my classes (which draw from science and humanities
students) the orientation often boils down to the students' confidence in
science. Not surprisingly they do not split along disciplinary lines on
the question; humanities students are no more likely to dispute sicence
than the science students.
The critical idea in these discussions is the definition of change, which
quickly poses a subsequent series of questions about the "progressive"
character of scientific discovery, increased knowledge, etc. Most times
the adoption of chaos theory is jusitifed on something bordering on an
empirical standard--that this is what scientists have discovered to be
true--even though the language used generally describes environmental
change as "balanced" and "self righting." All change (except ANYTHING
humans have done) is OK, so there is no "bad" or "good". By the end of
this, everyone feels like a pretzel.
Maybe this electronic discussion will "unbend" us a bit. It is well worth
the effort.
Bill Lang
Portland State Univ.
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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(3)
> Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 19:11:32 -0500
> From: "Derek R. Larson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Jay's questions are fascinating. Here are some thoughts:
> 1. How do we judge environmental change? What is "good" and what is
> "bad" and how do we tell the difference?
Using the standards I learned from a Russian bio-geographer, biodiversity
is marker of a healthy ecosystem, i.e. more niches = greater
specialization = greater evolution. By this measure environmental change
that *increases* biodiversity is good, even if it is anthropogenic in
origin. Bad changes decrease diversity, etc. But this is a
structuralist/functionalist approach that leaves no room for valuation
along other lines. My personal feelings tend toward anthropogenic = bad,
even though humans are a part of nature. > > 5. Often our critiques assume
that one environmental condition is more > desirable than another. How do
we choose a preferred condition? Who > chooses what is preferable?
Concensus? Majority? Many consider change on a structural/functional
level bad and base conditions good. But how do we determine a base? Is
wilderness superior to park, or just different? Lawn to concrete? Can we
choose a preferred condition without an ethical framework?
Many of these questions have been raised by folks in fields far from the
confines of history-- some of the more interesting and well thought
responses come from literature (Gary Snyder, Anne Dillard, Thoreau, etc.).
Might we do well to pursue these questions outside the community of env.
historians or scientists? Most of the root questions I deal with fall
back on ethical precepts. Must we be practicing ethicists as well as
chroniclers of change?
regards-
________________________________________________________________________
Derek R. Larson Indiana University Dept. of History
"Nothing interesting occurred today..."
-Meriwether Lewis at Ft. Clatsop, Oregon, Jan.4th, 1806
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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(4)
> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 1995 08:27:57 -0500
> From: Alan Blaustein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi! Well Prof. Antle, your questions have certainly piqued my interest
and they are serendipitous in that I hae just had the pleasure of
witnessing a talk given by William Cronon on the cultural construction of
the idea of wilderness. Our current notion of wilderness is reified as
the last place that civilization has not touched. Moreover, it can be
seen as the best refuge to our human selves. However, he goes on to say
that "wilderness" is as much a human creation as "civilization." In other
words, the idea of "wilderness" is in fact a cultural construction. Okay,
that's fine as far as it goes, and the first response by some of you might
be "No Kidding!" :-) But what we must realize is that the transformation
of this cultural construction, from a "waste" to someplace that is edenic
is what is hindering our present environmental movement. Let me stop here
and say that everything that informs this current message comes directly
from Professor Cronon that I have borrowed liberally from his discussion.
This is not to say that I dsiagree, but only to give the credit where that
credit is do. I do not pretend to be half the genius that Prof. Cronon
is. Be that as it may... If our current environemtal bent is to see
widerness that is something outside of ourselves, that is to say other
than human, and that wilderness can only exist in the absence of humanity,
than the only option is suicide. (Cronon April, 11) Disconcerting even to
the staunchest of environmentalists and not a viable option. However,
what may be a viable option is finding, to use Richard White's term, a
"middle ground" when dealing with the environment. We need to realize
that humanity is both of nature as well as in nature. Nature exists in
the inner city as well as our national park. It can be said, in fact,
that our national parks are more man-made than the "nature" we might find
in NYC. So it would seem that the only "savior" for nature and the
wilderness would be our own culture. That is to say that only by
modifying our culture so that we see ourselves as in and of nature can
nature be saved and so too our planet.
Now to some criticisms of this arguement, it is as cultrually constructed
as our notion of wilderness. try to say to the heavy equipment operator
in Brazil whose livelihood depends on the razing of the rain forest that
he has to chenge his culture to see himself as in and of nature. He woudl
laugh at you and say "hey I gotta eat." So it would seem, at least to me,
that what informs this arguement is the same chauvenism and arrogance that
tells us that we can in fact control nature, or even save it. I do not
mean to say that we have no responsibility to the environment by any
stretch of the imagination. Ifeel very strongly that something needs to
be done and I think that Cronon's proposal goes a long way to that end.
However, it is not just the U.S. that we're talking about here. We need
to come up with something that is cross-cultural and speaks to all classes
as well. We cannot sit from our affluent perch to the north and
pontificate to peasants in El Slavador that they shouldn't deforest their
country. Our arguements must resonate with them as well as us, so that
there is no dichotomy, there is only a "we" working together to save, or
better co-exist, with our "natural" planet. Sorry for the rambling and
perhaps simplistic nature of this argument. it is 9:00 AM EST. I think I
am a little tired. :-)
Alan Blaustein
Rutgers University Newark Campus
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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(5)
> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 1995 10:30:26 -0500
> From: CURTIS KENT ALEXANDER <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I'll participate in the Hall Center Colloquium, so I'm kind of cheating by
jumping into this electronic discussion. But I can't help myself...
Jay, Don, and Adam have come up with some very provocative questions. All
of them, I think, can be boiled down to this: How do we establish ethical
standards? This is an important question, and one which needs frequent
revisiting, but their framing of it comes loaded with assumptions that
makes one who formed an ecological ethic long before deciding to plug it
into academic history very wary. Thus I would like to be even more
provocative and suggest some problems with their construction of the
environmental historian's problem as well as pose questions that address
the issue as I see it.
First assumption: our environmental crisis is open to debate. All six
questions suggest that there is a possibility we might be overreacting.
What if we can't distinguish between "good" and "bad" environmental
change? Or chaos tells us that Nature always changes? Or life is the
rule not the exception? Or I want the Bob Marshall Wilderness area, while
my neighbor finds bliss in Central Park? Or science is both arrogant and
flawed? Do we throw up our hands and return to political history? Our
present ecological reality is not an academic question. Science has
helped to clarify what our gut has told us for more than a century: Hubris
toward Nature is destructive. Thus, a more important question for
environmental historians to answer is: What are the dimensions of our
present ecological crisis? and how did we get here?
Second assumption: we are troubled by questions about the nature of
Nature. If we are having difficulty figuring out whether or not, a)
Nature should be part of our narrative, or b) there is hard evidence out
there that we have gone too far, then I suggest that we quit environmental
history and go into public relations. The question that really troubles
us (or at least should) is our own complicity. We can sit around all day
and argue about where precisely first nature ends and second nature
begins, create specific categories of "good" change and "bad" change, or
evaluate the scientific versus the cultural (if there's even a
difference), but most of us will still get in our fossil-fueled cars when
we are through, drive to the supermarket to purchase chemically produced
food stuffs, turn on a mass-produced television set to catch the evening
"news," and finish our reading assignments by electric lights. (Some, I'd
be willing to bet, will even argue that these are comforts they do not
want to concede.) So another important question on my revised list would
be: How do we construct a critique of a socio-economic structure within
which we are firmly enmeshed? And where do we turn for alternatives?
Third assumption: environmental historians have to perform some kind of
new morality hoop-jumping exercise to justify their pursuit. That we live
on this earth and that we depend upon its systems to provide for our
survival is not a moral stance. It is a fact. That we have simplified,
abused, polluted, eroded, overpopulated and otherwise misused those
systems is again not a moral stance. It is a fact. The moral stance
comes in when we say stop. When we argue that it is unethical to destroy
these systems and immoral to make the planet uninhabitable for our own
species. But the last time I checked, most people were comfortable with a
morality that called for human survival. So the third important question
becomes: What is it about our present culture that makes us feel a need to
justify a love and respect for Nature?
Finally, the question I've been dying to ask (and am afriad of the answers
I'm going to get): What is the relationship between the social/economic
culture in which we live and human nature?
I apologize for babbling well beyond my quota. I look forward to your
responses.
Kent "Kip" Curtis
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
University ofKansas
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(6)
> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 1995 13:33:32 -0500
> From: Samuel P Hays <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Jay Antle's questions are welcome; they could produce some lively
discussion. I tried to do the same with a paper at the AHA in l994,
"Charting a Course for Environmental History" but with only mixed success.
In response to Antle, some points:
l. Describing environmental change is quite different from judging it.
Keep the two separate.
2. Describing environmental change involves both natural changes and human
changes. Sort them out, but work out their interaction.
3. Describing environmental change in history is a relatively new task for
historians. We take it up because we think the resulting knowledge has
value. It is quite another thing for us to make value judgments, "good"
or "bad" about pieces of that history. Keep the two separate.
4. Describing environmental change involves describing the values and
judgments of people in the past who engaged the environmental world. That
task is quite different from making our own value judgments about the
past. Best to lay off the second. Keep the two separate.
5. We are tempted to apply what a few writers say about the environment to
the public at large. The two are quite different. What Thoreau, Muir,
Nash et all say abouat wilderness is quite different from what those who
have done the work to protect wilderness have in mind. Find out what
people think by following their actions and statements, not what others
have written. I takes more tme but it is closer to the values of the
wilderness public. Remember, what is "natural" to most people is an
experience within their lifetime, not generations ago.
6. Human values are not inherent in nature, but come from our own
engagement with the environment. They combine the real world "out there"
plus our choices in engaging that real world. Ecocentrism is a human
idea; so is clearcutting. They compete as human values.
7. By keeping historical description and our own values separate we have a
far firmer basis for what we believe and we will rely on ourselves rather
than "nature" to bring about what we want to bring about.
Enuf for now; more later.
Sam Hays
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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(7)
> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 1995 16:19:18 -0500
> From: Bill Cooter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Why try to give moralistic sermons? Why not just try to describe what
happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen and all that)? This is frequently
VERY hard to do for specific regions. If I want sermons -- I can go
listen to clergymen.
Always remember who endowed Cronon's chair up at UW.
Bill Cooter
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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(8)
> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 1995 21:42:41 -0500
> From: Wockner Gary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I'm enjoying this debate. It's quite relevant to a curent paper topic and
dissertation topic I'm working on. Title: "Is you want more wilderness,
you better embrace deconstruction."
The basic argument is that everything is deconstructable, including
wilderness and arguments for it -- especially scientific arguments based
in ecosystems theory and conservation biology. Such thinking leaves us in
a state of radical relativism in which our positions are purely political
rather than moral, scientific, or economic. I embrace a position
forwarded by David Demeritt of "postmodern environmentalism" in which we
end up making purely political decisions about "... the nature we have
made and the one we hope to make."
Four current public debates are informing my thinking:
1. Between Demeritt and Cronon 1994: Journal of Historical Geography, 20,1.
2. Between Dear and Symanski 1994: Annals of the Association of American
Geographers.
3. Between Martin Lewis (who reviewed the book in the Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 1994:) and Bennett and Chaloupka
(eds) 1994. Book title: In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and
the Environment.
4. Between Soule, Lease and anyone who would listen including some of
the contributors to their edited book:1995:
Book title: Reinventing Nature: Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction.
I would be interested if anyone knows of other published material that
deals with environmental thought and postmodernism/deconstruction. I
think it is cutting edge stuff and it ties directly into the Hall
Symposium issues as they are discussed here.
There's a very real need to move beyond "facts" and the diatribes they
inspire and move into critical debates informed by social constructionism,
postmodernity, and the "politics of nature and wilderness." Of course,
this is all highly contested... Any takers?
Gary Wockner
University of Colorado - Boulder
Geography Department
