Common ground: integrating social and environmental history.

Introduction

Environmental problems have pushed their way to the top of the global political agenda and pose an enormous challenge to humanity now, and for the future. The growing demands of consumer societies in both developed and developing nations are placing an unsustainable burden on natural resources such as fossil fuels, while at the same time filling natural "sinks"--the atmosphere, land, and oceans--with hazardous domestic and industrial wastes. Writing in the early 1990s, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, two of social history's most influential figures, both identified the risk of ecological catastrophe as perhaps the greatest danger facing humankind in the new millennium. Thompson in particular had a long-standing interest in environmental issues, which surfaced prominently in some of his later work. (1) To date, however, their concerns have not generally been shared by other social historians. Environmental topics, for example, were notable mainly by their absence in the recent Journal of Social History special issue on the field's current state and future prospects. (2)

Since the 1960s, one of the great strengths of social history has been its willingness to respond to contemporary concerns. So why have social historians been slow to meet this new challenge? This paper examines reasons for this reluctance and, more importantly, explores the opportunities for integrating social and environmental history. It is divided into three main parts. The first section deals with the failure of social history to strike up a dialogue with environmental history, which in recent years has produced some of the most exciting and innovative work around. The next part aims to show that social and environmental history are basically compatible and complementary fields, and argues for increased collaboration by making human-environment relations a key theme for future research. Drawing on studies--both rural and urban--that have begun to establish common ground between the two fields, section three outlines new areas for investigation, including: the interconnections between social inequality and environmental degradation; environments and identities; and consumption and the environment. However, before I proceed, one or two brief caveats about the paper are in order. Firstly, it is not my intention to chart the evolution of environmental history or to provide a comprehensive survey of the historiography: constraints of time and space will not allow it and, in any case, it is unnecessary. The vigorous growth of environmental history can be traced, and is attested to, by the numerous review essays concerning this relatively new field of study. (3) Secondly, nor is it my purpose here to offer a detailed model for creating hybrids of social and environmental history: that would be a more complex undertaking. Rather, the purpose of this paper is to encourage more social historians to play their part in explaining the human role in environmental change.

Challenges in integrating social and environmental history

In addressing the question of "What's next?" in social history, opening up a fruitful dialogue with environmental history is a project that cries out for attention. Environmental history emerged as a definable field of study in the 1970s, at the same time as the "new" social history was rapidly extending its thematic and theoretical boundaries. In part, both scholarly enterprises had sprung out of political movements that were gathering momentum worldwide during the sixties and seventies: environmental historians responded to the concerns of the ecology movement, while social historians drew inspiration from civil rights and feminist campaigns. More than three decades later, social and environmental history remain largely parallel endeavours, with very little cross-field communication. In a recent issue of the American Historical Review, Ted Steinberg argued a persuasive case for adopting a more "ecologically minded and socially sensitive approach" to the discipline of history, to "give us a fuller sense of the environmental and social costs that arise as a culture attempts to survive biologically on the planet." In his article, Steinberg charged that thus far social historians have contributed very little to discussions on the topic. Worryingly, his criticism echoed Alan Taylor's verdict, delivered almost a decade ago now, that "indifference ... best characterizes the response of social history to environmental history." (4) Given that countering the threat of ecological catastrophe is perhaps the major task facing the modern world, it is high time social historians became more vocal in debates about the historical roots of today's dilemmas. Indeed, social history--with its emphasis on questions of class, gender, race, and ethnicity--is well-placed to help broaden and deepen our understanding of the complex causes and consequences of environmental change. The foremost challenge for the coming generation of social historians, in my view, is to seek out common ground between social and environmental history.

Environmental history has been defined concisely by one of its leading proponents, Donald Worster, as the study of "the role and place of nature in human life." Its primary goal is to reveal how human action and environmental change are intertwined. Nature, instead of being merely the backdrop against which the affairs of humans are played out, is recognized as playing an active role in historical processes. To grasp fully the complexities of human-environment relationships, historical research is generally carried out at four levels: 1) understanding the dynamics of natural ecosystems in time; 2) examining the interactions between nature and the socioeconomic realm (including technology); 3) inquiry into environmental policy and planning; and 4) exploring changing cultural values and beliefs about nature. This interpretive framework, based on Worster's ambitious model for "doing" environmental history, prompts scholars to make connections between the different levels of analysis; although there are currently few works that link all parts effectively. Rather than constituting a rigid schema, research on all four levels is perhaps best viewed as a general programme for study. (5) Pragmatically, the vast majority of practitioners have chosen to focus on only one or two levels, particularly ecology and economy, and the history of environmental thought. But if social historians are to get to grips with environmental matters, some "intellectual retooling" is essential; especially when it comes to accounting for the role of nature. (6)

During the last thirty years, increasing cooperation between natural scientists and environmental historians has revealed myriad interconnections between the "two worlds" of nature and culture. Explorations of the various ways in which climate, soils, forests, mountains, rivers, and animals act as "co-creators of histories" incorporate both textual sources and scientific data, blurring disciplinary boundaries between the humanities and the sciences. Writing nature into historical narratives requires environmental historians to become conversant in the languages of the natural sciences. Acquiring just a modest competence can reap rich rewards, as Worster has emphasized:</p> <pre> ... with even a smattering of vocabulary, what treasures are here to be understood and taken back home! Concepts from geology, pushing our notions of history back into the Pleistocene, the Silurian, the Precambrian. Graphs from climatology, on which temperatures and precipitation oscillate up and down through the centuries, with no regard for the security of kings or empires. The chemistry of the soil with its cycles of carbon and nitrogen, its pH balances wavering with the presences of salts and acids, setting the terms of agriculture. Any one of these might add a powerful tool to the study of the rise of

civilizations. (7) </pre> <p>In addition, the natural sciences provide valuable heuristic metaphors. For example, the concept of metabolism--adopted from biology--has been used profitably by urban environmental historians such as Joel Tarr in tracing the linkages between the city and the countryside. Drawing on the ideas of the ecologist Eugene Odum, Tarr has likened modern cities to "parasitic" living organisms, dependent for their survival on inputs of clean air and water, fresh food, fossil fuels, and construction materials, and the removal of harmful outputs of waste. The study of resource flows and waste emissions has begun to reveal the dramatic impacts of urban living on the wider environment, especially after the Industrial Revolution, tracking the "ecological footprints" of cities such as Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Manchester, England, deep into their own hinterlands and beyond. (8) Undertaking research in both rural and urban environmental history, then, entails a willingness to grapple with concepts from the natural sciences. This may seem a daunting prospect for many social historians, who generally expect to press into service ideas and insights from the social sciences.

Data sources pose another challenge. The multidisciplinary character of the field means that environmental historians must also engage with new source materials. Historical data fundamental to understanding long-term environmental and cultural changes are not derived solely from written records. Where documentary accounts are lacking--or unavailable--modern scientific techniques such as diatom analysis, tree-ring dating, and ice core studies can unlock important information stored in "nature's archives." (9) Diatom analysis of lake sediments has clearly shown that many of Britain's lakes started to acidify in the mid-nineteenth century due to an increase in urban-industrial air pollution. Dendrochronology, the study of tree-rings, has been used to examine the relationship between agriculture and climatic cycles over the centuries. Ice cores, collected at both poles, provide a record of global CO2 levels and temperature fluctuations extending back hundreds of thousands of years. (10) Combining ecological and historical data can also mean having to rethink systems of periodization, which are often defined by natural cycles rather than conventional political markers. For example, I.G. Simmons's pioneering work, An Environmental History of Great Britain (2001), begins its reconstruction of human-nature interactions with the retreat of the last glaciers from the British Isles some 10,000 years ago. (11)

Furthermore, despite Simmons and many others using the nation-state as their preferred unit of analysis, in environmental history "the borders of nature are more important than the borders created by humans." While research at the levels of policymaking and cultural values can be undertaken fairly comfortably within national boundaries, environmental problems do not always fit neatly within them. (12) Their study can pose a real dilemma, as the development of transnational and global perspectives is hampered by a reluctance to move beyond familiar national frameworks. However, a burgeoning literature on the ecological impacts of imperialism is linking European history with the histories of the Americas, Africa, Australia, South Asia, and the rest of the world in interesting and innovative ways. (13) And while to date few environmental historians have taken up the challenge of following "modern" phenomena such as air and water pollution across borders, there are notable exceptions. John Wirth's Smelter Smoke in North America (2000), a detailed examination of Canadian, United States and Mexican transborder pollution; Mark Cioc's The Rhine: An Eco-Biography (2002), which charts the degradation (and renewal) of one of Europe's major rivers; and John McNeill's Something New Under the Sun (2000), a global survey of environmental change in the twentieth century, spring readily to mind. (14)

In establishing a genuine and ongoing dialogue with the natural sciences, environmental history is also transcending traditional epistemological boundaries: "opening a door in the wall that separates nature from culture, science from history, matter from mind." (15) However, through its active promotion of interdisciplinary communication, this relatively youthful field has become increasingly institutionalized, raising somewhat contradictory concerns about the "enclosure" of environmental history. The American Society for Environmental History, founded in 1976, now has more than 1,000 members. Its counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic, the European Society for Environmental History, founded in 1999, today has around 425 members. The two organizations maintain close links, and together they coordinate H- Environment, a valuable online resource that includes a discussion forum to test new ideas. The field has also generated several successful book series and two specialized journals: Environmental History (established in 1976); and Environment and History (established in 1995). (16) It is clear that environmental history is an important growth area in historical studies, although it has struggled to influence the mainstream agenda. To use Alfred Crosby's phrase, in "founding their own sect" environmental historians have contributed to the compartmentalization of the discipline of history, tending to "write for and talk to each other exclusively." (17) Finding common ground between social and environmental history is going to require a determined effort from both sides.

Environmental history's orientation towards the ecological sciences certainly makes it a difficult field to enter, and helps to explain the continued neglect of human-nature relationships by social historians. However, disciplinary differences ought not to prove an insurmountable barrier to integration. As Adrian Wilson has noted, historians "routinely educate themselves in recondite technical matters" simply to interrogate the documents of the past. (18) Yet, looking over the other side of the fence, it is fair to say that many environmental historians have viewed social history--unapologetically and appropriately the most anthropocentric branch of the profession--with a considerable degree of suspicion. Worster, for example, has written of the various "risks" inherent in any hasty marriage between the two fields, including: a shift in emphasis toward the "cultural turn" that would devalue the agency of nature; the "downward spiral" of environmental history toward fragmentation and loss of identity; and, not least of all, its succumbing to social history's "paralyzing fear of all generalization." (19) All things considered, it is perhaps unsurprising that social and environmental historians have had little to say to each other. But this reticence represents a missed opportunity, as social history can make a significant contribution to environmental history--and vice versa.

Opportunities for integrating social and environmental history

Having addressed the major challenges, what are the prospects for, and benefits of, integrating social and environmental history in the future? A useful starting point is Alan Taylor's article "Unnatural Inequalities" (1996), a path-breaking attempt by a social historian to bring these two diverse fields together. Taylor's analysis demonstrates that at bottom they are compatible and "mutually reinforcing" enterprises that share a number of important characteristics. Building out from the traits Taylor identified in his study, there are at least seven points of commonality: 1) an Annaliste inspired ambition to play a totalizing role in history; 2) an openness to interdisciplinary methods and techniques; 3) the imaginative and innovative use of source materials; 4) a preoccupation with the commonplace and previously neglected in history; 5) an emphasis on long-term processes rather than short-term events; 6) the use of place-specific case studies to examine big issues from the bottom up; and 7) a belief in the moral worth and political relevance of the work. Indeed, as Taylor has noted, the willingness of both social and environmental historians to speak forcefully to current issues has also attracted complaints about presentism from conservative opponents. (20) But just as the best social history seeks to reconstruct the lives of ordinary people in the light of their own experiences, good environmental history attempts to place ecological concerns in their socio-cultural and temporal contexts: illuminating rather than distorting the past. While there is no overarching theory or methodology to call into play, these shared attributes do provide a firm base for discussions about establishing common ground.

From the outset, a substantial amount of work in the field of environmental history was influenced by a radical approach pioneered in social history: the notion of exploring history from below. In 1972 Roderick Nash, one of the field's most distinguished figures, commented that: "In a real sense environmental history fitted into the framework of New Left history. This would indeed be history 'from the bottom up', except that here the exploited element would be the biota and the land itself." (21) Although it apparently escaped the notice of most social historians, the project of writing history from below--or grassroots history--had been given an apposite green twist. While left-wing scholars were working to uncover how ordinary people experienced the social upheavals of capitalism, environmental historians delved deeper still to reveal the impacts of human economies on the earth. However, generally speaking, environmental historians have been better at describing how capitalist and non-capitalist development of resources degraded ecosystems, rather than explaining how unsustainable human-nature relationships became accepted as a normal part of people's everyday lives.

Drawing on ecology's holistic principles, scholars in the field have sought to break down the stubbornly enduring nature-culture dichotomy by interweaving environmental, socio-economic, political, and perceptual issues in their analyses. However, in making humans and non-humans equal actors in what Timothy Weiskel has called the "global ecodrama", there has been a strong tendency among environmental historians to think about Homo sapiens in highly abstract terms of their being just one species among many. (22) While such a stance unquestionably provides us with a more humble view of the human role in historical processes, the downside is that an "oversimplified holism" that portrays cultures and communities as homogeneous in their outlook and actions can "wash out" the extraordinary diversity of people's experiences. As William Cronon has pointed out:</p> <pre> ... the greatest weakness of environmental history [is] ... its failure to probe below the level of the group to explore the implications of social divisions for environmental change ... in the face of social history's classic categories of gender, race, class, and ethnicity, environmental history stands much more silent than it should. (23) </pre> <p>Ordinary people, with their different interests, desires, and experiences, can disappear from view. We still have a good deal to learn about how conflict, difference, and power over access to nature and natural resources--as well as routinized day-to-day practices and consumption behaviours--have shaped human-environment relationships over time and space. On close inspection, environmental issues are often shot through with thorny questions relating to racial inequality, gender relations, class tensions, and ethnic differences. The terrain may be new to many social historians, but the task of mapping out these particular features in the historical landscape is a familiar one.

Historical studies exploring the complexities of human relationships with nature can be written at any scale, from the macro to the micro. At the global and transnational levels, the inequitable distribution of power is a major theme in imperial environmental history. Indeed, the expansion of European empires since the Columbian exchange of 1492 has become almost synonymous with human exploitation and environmental degradation. Members of what John MacKenzie calls the "apocalyptic school" of environmental history writing have catalogued the devastating ecological and social effects of imperial expansion, perhaps illustrated most dramatically by the interconnected systems of slavery and monocrop plantation agriculture. For example, Alfred Crosby's seminal book Ecological Imperialism (1986) deals with the establishment of plantations and slavery on Madeira and the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century; systems that later spread to the Caribbean, North and South America, and beyond. Crosby's overall thesis is that European imperial success throughout the world was largely the result of conscious and unconscious "teamwork" between materialistic humans and the aggressive "portmanteau biota"--plants, animals, and pathogens--they carried with them. Together they caused ecological catastrophe and demographic collapse: domesticated species such as wheat and cattle crowded out indigenous flora and fauna, while a variety of diseases, including influenza and smallpox, decimated indigenous populations as "Neo-Europes" were constructed out of suitable and unsuitable real estate. However, Crosby's radical rethinking of European expansion has attracted some criticism, not least of all because in ascribing "imperialist urges" to a host of nonhuman actors he risked diluting the responsibility of the human invaders for bringing death and colonialism to places such as the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. (24) Nonetheless, the idea of agency--the new social history's "master trope"--is being reinterpreted by environmental historians to take in the "ecological dimensions of the structures and processes" within which human action occurs. (25)

The broad sweep of macro-scale environmental histories, while effective in conveying a "sense of the whole", inevitably limits their ability to examine local distinctiveness--both cultural and ecological. More nuanced accounts of socio-environmental change, urgently needed to put 21st-century problems into fuller historical perspective, are best produced at the local and regional levels. Reducing the scale allows for more fine-grained work on the complexity of human-nature relations firmly embedding specific communities within a particular environment. A meso or micro-scale approach, centred on different types of rural and urban "ecosystems"--coastal, fenlands, forests, moorlands, riverine, market towns and industrial cities--can produce well-rounded and detailed case-studies that offer valuable insights into how societies and environments shape and reshape each other, as well as provide an important basis for comparative analysis. And smaller-scale inquiries can also direct attention to big questions of overlapping interest for social and environmental historians, such as: Was traditional resource use really more sustainable? How did different communities control access to nature and its resources? Who gained and who lost when relations between people and place changed? How did social divisions affect people's day-to-day environmental experiences and influence their attitudes and actions towards nature? Why did public concern about a specific environmental problem emerge at a particular time? And why were the public more tolerant of other environmental dangers? Like social history, in environmental history place-centred case studies have become the main testing ground for innovative research: and their modest scale and the relative manageability of source materials are certainly conducive to the development of hybrid socio-environmental history approaches.

In recent years, environmental historians have begun the process of integrating social history's "classic" categories and concerns into their inquiries. Unsurprisingly, given the wide range of possible intersections between the two fields, approaches, methods, and sources tend to be determined by the research topic. To illustrate the potentials of combining social and environmental history, I will briefly discuss some germane aspects of my own work on urban-industrial pollution problems. To re-invoke the grassroots motif, in The Chimney of the World (2001) I tell the story of smoke pollution in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Manchester, England--the "shock city" of the Industrial Revolution--from the viewpoint of the lower orders; clearly showing that society-nature interactions are indeed a two-way street. The primary source of energy for Manchester's mushrooming industries, and the main source of heat in its citizens' homes, was the abundant and inexpensive fossil fuel of the Lancashire coalfield. However, as Manchester's coal consumption increased, sunlight diminished, fogs became endemic, and a permanent smoke haze gradually enveloped the city. (26) By exploring unconventional historical sources, from past and present scientific data on pollution emissions to the vernacular literature of the Lancashire working classes, together with well-thumbed administrative records such as the annual reports of Manchester's Medical Officer of Health, I have begun to map out the complex pathways that link natural and cultural phenomena such as: increasing atmospheric pollution; topographical and climatic conditions; innovation in steam technology; fluctuations of the trade cycle; everyday household practices; high incidence of respiratory diseases; loss of biodiversity; growing class segregation; gender inequalities; and, not least of all, political and legal inaction.

An undoubted strength of social history inquiry is the way in which it can draw attention to patterns of environmental inequality. For example, as air quality declined, Manchester's most vulnerable inhabitants bore the brunt of associated health problems, suffering disproportionately from diseases such as bronchitis, pneumonia, and rickets. (27) The prosperous middle classes protected themselves by moving out of the city centre to enjoy the cleaner air and brighter skies of suburbs situated upwind of the smoke. While the health risks associated with coal smoke were distributed unequally between the classes, the labour

burdens imposed by this form of environmental pollution were divided unequally along gender lines. The all-pervasive smoke and soot filtered through the narrowest cracks and fissures to soil everything within the home. House cleaning and washing clothes were time-consuming and strenuous activities that locked legions of women, in their roles as housewives and domestic servants, into a never-ending round of drudgery. And Monday, the day on which women lit substantial fires to procure the hot water necessary to carry out the weekly wash, was--somewhat ironically--the smokiest day of the week. In Victorian and Edwardian Manchester, while coal smoke affected the daily lives of all its citizens, exposure to air pollution and experiences of the problems it caused varied considerably according to class and gender. (28)

Although its damaging effects were widely recognized, no popular mass movement against smoke developed in Manchester during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. A central concern of the analysis is to discover how it was that smoke pollution became accepted as a "natural" part of everyday urban life. Challenging the common view that the public was simply indifferent to coal smoke, I focus on how perceptions of air pollution were embodied in, and shaped by, competing discourses. To date, working-class voices have been too rarely heard in environmental history, as the majority of archive-based source materials derive from middle-class reformers. To reconstruct the public's understanding of the production of smoke from the bottom up, in The Chimney of the World the documentary evidence widens to include popular songs and poetry, dialect literature, cartoons and postcards, as well as working-class autobiographies. The interpretations townspeople placed on air pollution were in no way fixed, but depended on the circumstances in which smoke came to their attention.

Coal smoke had an enduring cultural as well as material presence; and Manchester's blackened physical environment was rationalized and naturalized--and criticized--by the stories contemporaries told about air pollution. On the one hand, Manchester's manufacturers, utilizing values and beliefs that reflected its citizens' definition of themselves as an urban-industrial workforce, correlated smoking factory and domestic chimneys with wealth creation and personal well-being; a narrative neatly encapsulated in a northern English expression that has survived to this day: "Where there's muck, there's brass [money]." On the other hand, anti-pollution activists (including working-class socialists such as Allen Clarke) represented the columns of black smoke as "barbarous" signs of waste and inefficiency, stressing the unnecessary loss of life and health, the extra costs in washing and cleaning, and the reckless misuse of finite natural resources. The latter constituted, as Dr Neil Arnott put it in 1854, "a serious crime committed against future generations." (29) Far from evincing indifference to smoke, the citizens of Manchester argued loud and long about it. However, despite attracting widespread public attention, the narrative of "waste" failed to overturn the dominant discourse that smoke equalled prosperity. Against a backdrop of recurring economic depressions, the straightforward "wealth" story-line had great influence and staying power. This was a view on which employers and employees generally saw eye-to-eye, requiring a sustained focus on class alliances as well as class tensions.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Furthermore, the smoky open coal fire was the hub around which British family life revolved. It performed many vital practical functions, providing heat, light, ventilation, hot meals and boiling water, while the "cheerful" glow of the hearth denoted warmth to contemporaries in every sense of the word. (30) There are innumerable popular images, both visual and literary, extolling the pleasures of hearth and home, such as the early-twentieth century drawing by the Lancashire dialect author and artist Sam Fitton of an old married couple seated in front of their "homely" coal fire shown in Illustration 1.

Just as governments today are unwilling to cause resentment among the electorate by declaring war on the car, Victorian and Edwardian governments similarly feared the repercussions of passing legislation that interfered with a citizen's freedom to enjoy this hugely popular British institution. It is important to note that Manchester's working classes were not simply the helpless victims of smoke: they actively participated in its production for well over a century. By looking at grassroots ideas about air pollution, as well as those of the middle-classes, we can enrich our insights into how people thought, and made choices about, the local environmental conditions in which they lived.

Finding Common Ground

My study of Manchester's "smoke nuisance" is one of a growing number of studies that have sought to fuse social and environmental history approaches. Over the course of the last decade and a half, environmental historians have increasingly applied the basic social history tools of class, gender, race, and ethnic analyses--as well as sociological and anthropological methods of investigation--to broaden and deepen their understanding of human-nature relations. However, the cross-border traffic between the two disciplines has been slow-moving and largely one-way. Thus far, very few social historians have made the effort to reciprocate by recognizing the environment as "a critical factor affecting human agency." (31) To encourage better communications, what I would like to do now is to signpost recent research that has begun to create common ground between social and environmental history. While my choice is of necessity highly selective, it should become clear that both fields not only share common characteristics, but also an interest in a wide range of overlapping themes.

Environments and identities

Identity, currently a key concept for social historians, provides a highly productive framework within which to explore and interpret human-nature relationships. A growing number of studies have begun to emphasize the importance of environment, together with social interactions, in forging local, regional, and national identities. How humans have shaped their environments, and have been shaped by them, can play a leading role in the formation of cultural identities. Such identities are, of course, as diverse as the surroundings in which they were formed. At the macro scale, Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory (1995), also broadcast as a five-part television series by the BBC, focused on different landscape traditions as "the primary bedrock" of European and American nationalisms. (32) He represents forests, rivers, and mountains as active agents in the formation of Western identities (often fashioned in opposition to harsh environmental conditions). For example, Schama demonstrates convincingly how nationalism in Germany was inseparable from its extensive "wild" forest areas, from the sixteenth-century paintings of the landscape artist Albrecht Altdorfer to the twentieth-century mythology of the Nazis. However, his broad treatment of the subject--drawing heavily on the art and literature produced by the intelligentsia of Europe and the United States--tends to gloss over how connections between people and places at the local and regional levels can also create powerful, crosscutting identities.

In the last few years, new historical perspectives that root smaller group identities in particular locations have begun to trace different regional and local "senses of belonging." (33) Several chapters in William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor's edited book Social History and African Environments (2003) reveal the importance of place-situated designations--"river people", "plains people", "mountain people"--in forging distinctive ethnic identities, especially within nation states from which they feel marginalized. (34) The authors use oral and documentary evidence to explore the role that such environments played in African social, political, economic and religious life; underlining their centrality to the identities of those who inhabited them (in some cases long after they were displaced). Oral testimony, nothing new in African and social history, is now proving to be a valuable tool in the hands of environmental historians more generally. A number of the contributors to Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths's edited book Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia (2002), use oral history to better understand people's relationships with places. In collecting and interpreting the folklore, myths, and stories that "grow out of or take root in" particular environmental settings, they too show that identity is closely bound up with a "sense of belonging." (35) But perhaps the most striking aspect of this attempt to reconstruct the vernacular landscapes of both black and white Australians is the close attention it pays to the concept of place naming. Rejuvenating something of an historical backwater, several of the chapters in this volume demonstrate that naming (and renaming) is a fiercely contested political activity for communities struggling to retain or regain rights over the land in question: Tim Bonyhady's study of Fraser's Cave / Kutikina Cave on Tasmania's Franklin River being a fine example. (36) The dual emphasis on naming and belonging continually reminds us that place matters in the process of constructing human identities.

Environmental justice

Taking inspiration from the American environmental justice movement of the 1980s and 1990s, there has been growing historical interest in the origins of grassroots protest against urban-industrial pollution. (37) Until recently, the historical literature on environmental reform movements was overwhelmingly concerned with the efforts of white male elites to protect wilderness areas and conserve natural resources. (38) However, the rise of contemporary opposition to waste dumping, landfills, and incineration--especially African American resistance to hazardous pollution where they worked, lived, and played--has focused attention on the city rather than the country, and stimulated debate about the interrelationships between race, class, gender, and the uneven distribution of environmental risks. Although more work still needs to be done, new studies are beginning to overturn the traditional notion that African American and other nonwhite communities lacked interest in urban environmental problems before the 1980s. Dolores Greenberg, using inner-city New York as her case study, has unearthed numerous instances of African Americans speaking out against environmental injustices in the nineteenth century, revealing a previously neglected continuity of activism right up to the present. (39) But the most substantial body of research has been concerned with environmental justice struggles in the twentieth-century, as poor minority communities in the United States appeared to come under "deliberate toxic siege" from industrial polluters. In the workplace, African Americans suffered higher levels of exposure to dangerous fumes and chemicals than white operatives, while their families lacked safe outdoor recreational spaces and endured excessive pollution in homes packed close to centres of heavy industry. As Carolyn Merchant has pointed out, "Black neighborhoods became toxic dumps and black bodies became toxic sites." (40)

Research on the topic not only seeks to understand why it was that low-income and minority communities came to bear disproportionate pollution burdens, but also to explain how ordinary people experienced and challenged emerging environmental threats. As with the related theme of identity, a notable aspect of historical inquiry into the environmental justice movement is its utilization of oral interviews as a major source, allowing voices from the grassroots to be heard. In his seminal book Environmental Inequalities (1995), Andrew Hurley effectively combines social, environmental, and oral history methods to examine opposition to pollution hazards among three different groups--African Americans, working-class whites, and middle-class whites--in the "Steel City" of Gary, Indiana, after the Second World War. Despite some evidence of cross-class and multiracial cooperation, Hurley found that social conflicts and divergent goals prevented the formation of a strong environmental coalition in the city against dirty air, contaminated water, and toxic waste dumping. A "socially fragmented landscape", he argues, rather than unalloyed racism, provided Gary's steel companies with the opportunity to "divide and conquer", and dump wastes in poor neighbourhoods (both black and white) where political resistance was weakest. (41) David Pellow in Garbage Wars (2002), builds on this model of analysis by paying more attention to how women, as protectors of the home and family, were "leading the battle for environmental justice" in many localities. Significantly, Pellow also provides case studies showing that some minority groups and organizations were "deeply implicated" in the creation of environmental inequalities. In the 1970s, for example, the African American governed community of Robbins, Illinois, mired deep in economic depression, worked hard to attract "any sort of waste management facilities" to the town. (42) Although historical studies examining the issue of environmental justice can be remarkably complex, they clearly illustrate that social inequality and environmental degradation go hand in hand.

Environment and consumption

This many-faceted theme places particular emphasis on exploring how the growing needs and desires of consumer societies--"what we put into our bodies, our homes, and our imaginations every day"--affect ecosystems and social relations. (43) Environmental historians are now beginning to engage in earnest with the notion that patterns of mass consumption (both material and cultural), as well as modes of production, can play a significant part in driving ecological and societal changes. Richard Tucker, in his recent book Insatiable Appetite (2000), examines how consumer habits in the United States contributed to the reshaping of natural and social systems in the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and West Africa over the last two hundred years. Concentrating on the histories of six "crops", namely sugar, bananas, coffee, rubber, beef, and timber, Tucker demonstrates convincingly that U.S. companies, in partnership with local landed elites, replaced a rich diversity of indigenous mixed-species cultivation with damaging monocrop export plantations. Linking environmental and social history, he is concerned not only with declining biodiversity, but also with the displacement of tribal and peasant landholders. (44) Nor have environmental histories of consumption neglected the prominent role of marketing and advertising in "accounting for taste." For example, John Soluri has discussed how in the 1940s the American company United Fruit created the exotic cartoon character of Miss Chiquita, inspired by the iconic Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda, to increase public demand for its branded "premium" tropical bananas on both sides of the Atlantic. "Consumption," as Matthew Klingle neatly puts it, "makes us all citizens of the world." (45)

The disruptive process of bringing the natural wealth of the earth under corporate and colonial control has also been viewed from the "bottom up" as well as the "top down." In South Asia, a number of recent studies have begun to examine popular struggles against the introduction of plantation crops by the British, most notably grassroots opposition to commercial forestry in India. Perhaps the most important of these is Ramachandra Guha's The Unquiet Woods (1989, 2000), a study of Himalayan peasant protest against colonial and Indian state forest policy from its origins in the early 1880s through to the influential Chipko Andolan movement of the 1970s. (46) The history of popular protest, a fundamental theme in social history, has been revitalized in the light of current nature-based conflicts in India over lack of access to forest produce, "biopiracy" by transnational corporations, and the socio-ecological impacts of state-sponsored big dam projects. In addition, challenging the conventional "post-materialist" thesis that environmentalism is a largely middle-class, Western concern, and that poverty is a major cause of environmental degradation, authors such as Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier have argued strongly for distinctive "environmentalisms of the poor" in so-called developing countries. (47) Simply put, their position is that rural communities at the "bottom of the heap"--hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, nomadic herdsmen, and traditional fisherfolk--rely so directly on limited natural resources for their livelihoods and survival that using them both prudently and sustainably has always been in their best interests. This may be "too neat an inversion" of old assumptions about environmentalism and the consumption of resources, but it has opened up an important new avenue for research. And Guha notes that while the Subaltern Studies project has "unquestionably gone into a steep decline," the field of environmental history is now "booming" in India. (48)

Another exciting growth area of research that connects social and environmental history focuses on the rise of consumer culture and the birth of a "throwaway society." Up until the early years of the twentieth century, as Susan Strasser has demonstrated in Waste and Want (1999), most household garbage was perceived by contemporaries as a potentially valuable commodity: as something to be reused, repaired, or recycled. Indeed, recycling was a routine part of day-to-day family life: old clothes became quilts and rugs; food scraps were boiled into soup; broken items were fixed by "somebody handy"; and things that were beyond repair were burned, heating rooms and cooking dinners. However, growing affluence eroded the old home virtues of frugality and economy, and collective knowledge of how to repair and reuse things was gradually lost as modern markets thrived on products that were designed to be "used briefly and then discarded." Using an ecological analogy, Strasser argues that over the last hundred years "households and cities have become open systems rather than closed ones," breaking the "virtuous circle" whereby waste materials were reclaimed for reuse--sustaining rather than stressing the system--at enormous cost to the environment. (49) The interrelationships among consumer behaviour, the environment, and energy systems are at the heart of David E. Nye's innovative book Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (1998). Nye looks at how ordinary people incorporated new technologies into their everyday lives, and why their choices led to the United States becoming the world's biggest energy consumer by the end of the twentieth century. (50) From energy system choices to the "environmentalisms of the poor", work on consumption and environmental change can bring some much-needed historical insight and context to current discussions about sustainability in both the developed and developing nations of the world.

Conclusion

It is understandable, given the challenges involved in linking the two areas of study, that since the 1970s social and environmental history should have developed in the main along parallel lines. However, as this article demonstrates, they are fundamentally compatible and complementary fields, and more effort should be made to find common ground and further dialogue between them. As Raymond Williams reminds us, society and nature are inextricable: "We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out." (51) There is a compelling case for bringing social and environmental history into closer communication, to their mutual benefit. Explicitly incorporating an environmental perspective into social history's agenda will provide fresh angles of vision on old staples (such as protest, family, and the working classes) as well as some newer topics (including identities, migration, and consumption). It should also be clear that social history has much to contribute to environmental debates, particularly on the ways in which power, resources, and risks have been inequitably distributed across rural and urban landscapes. (52)

Global warming, loss of biodiversity, polluted air, land, and water, deforestation, and the numerous other problems that make up the present environmental crisis, all have their origins to a greater or lesser extent in how we have lived and worked. Historical studies exploring the complex interplay between people's day-to-day activities and ecological change, especially the environmental experiences, values and beliefs of ordinary men and women, can help us better understand our relationships with nature and make more informed planning and policy choices. (53) If we are to create a usable past that might help us to move towards a more sustainable future, then greater attention must be paid to how people's lives connected to their environments. Although the challenges of integration remain, it is vital that social history now includes the important theme of human-environment relations among its research priorities.

School of Cultural Studies

Leeds LS1 3HE

United Kingdom

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank Matt Osborn and John Walton for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also to the participants in the conference on The Future of Social History held at George Mason University in October, 2004.

1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 (London, 1994), pp.568-70; E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1993), pp.14-15.

2. Journal of Social History, Special Issue on "The Futures of Social History," 37, 2003. Mark M. Smith's essay on sensory history, however, does briefly discuss the issue of noise pollution.

3. The best starting point is: John R. McNeill, "Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History," History and Theory, 42 (2003), pp.5-43. The thematic literature includes: Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers, (eds.), "Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments," Osiris, 19 (2004); Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr, "At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment," Technology and Culture, 39 (1998), pp.601-40; and Michael Williams, "The Relations of Environmental History and Historical Geography," Journal of Historical Geography, 20 (1994), pp.3-21. Evolving national "styles" can be traced through: Jane Carruthers, "Africa: Histories, Ecologies, and Societies," Environment and History, 10 (2004), pp.379-406; Peter Coates, "Emerging from the Wilderness (or, from Redwoods to Bananas): Recent Environmental History in the United States and the Rest of the Americas," Environment and History, 10 (2004), pp.407-38; Libby Robin and Tom Griffiths, "Environmental History in Australasia," Environment and History, 10 (2004), pp.439-74; Mark Cioc, Bjorn-Ola Linner, and Matt Osborn, "Environmental History Writing in Northern Europe," Environmental History, 5 (2000), pp.396-406; Michael Bess, Mark Cioc, and James Sievert, "Environmental History Writing in Southern Europe," Environmental History, 5 (2000), pp.545-56; Ramachandra Guha, "Appendix: Indian Environmental History (1989-1999)" in idem, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Expanded Edition, (Berkeley, 2000) (First published Oxford, 1989).

4. Ted Steinberg, "Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History," American Historical Review, 107 (2002), pp.798-820: p.820 and p.805; Alan Taylor, "Unnatural Inequalities: Social and Environmental Histories," Environmental History, 1 (1996), pp.6-19: p.6.

5. Donald Worster, "Appendix: Doing Environmental History" in idem, (ed.), The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (New York, 1988). See also: Timo Myllyntaus, "Environment in Explaining History: Restoring Humans as Part of Nature" in Timo Myllyntaus and Mikko Saikku, (eds.), Encountering the Past in Nature: Essays in Environmental History, (Athens, 1999). For an urban view try: Christine M. Rosen and Joel A. Tarr, "The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History," Journal of Urban History, 20 (1994), pp.299-310.

6. Myllyntaus and Saikku, Encountering the Past, p.xi.

7. Worster, "Doing Environmental History," p.296.

8. Joel A. Tarr, "The Metabolism of the Industrial City: The Case of Pittsburgh," Journal of Urban History, 28 (2002), pp.511-45; William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); Ian Douglas, Robert Hodgson, and Nigel Lawson, "Industry, Environment, and Health through 200 Years in Manchester," Ecological Economics, 41 (2002), pp.235-55. See also: John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (London, 2000), Chapter 9.

9. Myllyntaus, "Environment in Explaining History," p.147.

10. Stephen Mosley, The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (Cambridge, 2001); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine (London, 1972); Gale E. Christianson, Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming (Harmondsworth, 1999).

11. I.G. Simmons, An Environmental History of Great Britain: From 10,000 Years Ago to the Present (Edinburgh, 2001).

12. Myllyntaus, "Environment in Explaining History," p. 146; Worster, "Doing Environmental History," p.290.

13. For a stimulating overview see: John M. MacKenzie, Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires (East Linton, 1997). On the development of world environmental history more generally, see: I.G.Simmons, "The World Scale," Environment and History, 10 (2004), pp.531-6.

14. John D. Wirth, Smelter Smoke in North America: The Politics of Transborder Pollution (Lawrence, 2000); Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000 (Seattle, 2002); John R. McNeill, Something New.

15. Donald Worster, "The Two Cultures Revisited: Environmental History and the Environmental Sciences," Environment and History, 2 (1996), pp.3-14: p.13.

16. ASEH membership figures are taken from McNeill, "Observations," p.11; ESEH membership figures are taken from the society's website: www.eseh.org/ (01 Feb. 05); H-Environment can be accessed at: www.h-net.org/~environ/

17. Alfred W. Crosby, "The Past and Present of Environmental History," American Historical Review, 100, 1995, pp.1177-89: p.1188.

18. Adrian Wilson, "A Critical Portrait of Social History" in idem (ed.) Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and its Interpretation (Manchester, 1993), p.30.

19. Donald Worster, "Seeing Beyond Culture," Journal of American History, 76 (1990), pp.1140-47: p.1144.

20. Taylor, "Unnatural Inequalities," p.9. However, there has been a trend towards a more "neutral tone" in recent years. See: McNeill, "Observations," p.34.

21. Roderick Nash, "American Environmental History: A New Teaching Frontier," Pacific History Review, 41 (1972), pp.362-72: p.363.

22. Timothy Weiskel quoted in: Carolyn Merchant, "Gender and Environmental History," Journal of American History, 76 (1990), pp.1117-21: p.1121; Elizabeth Blackmar, "Contemplating the Force of Nature," Radical Historians Newsletter, no.70 (1994), p.4; McNeill, "Observations," p.36.

23. William Cronon, "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History," Journal of American History, 76 (1990), pp.1122-31: p.1129; Taylor, "Unnatural Inequalities," p.7.

24. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York, 1986); McNeill, "Observations," p.33; John M. MacKenzie, "Empire and the Ecological Apocalypse: The Historiography of the Imperial Environment" in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, (eds.), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Edinburgh, 1997); and idem, Empires of Nature, p.14.

25. Walter Johnson, "On Agency," Journal of Social History, 37 (2003), pp.113-25; William H. Sewell, "Nature, Agency, and Anthropocentrism," American Historical Review online discussion forum, available at: www.historycooperative.org/phorum/list.php?f=13 (27 July 04); Steinberg, "Down to Earth." See also: Kristin Asdal, "The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-Constructivist Challenge to Environmental History," History and Theory, 42 (2003), pp.60-74; William Cronon, (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1995).

26. Mosley, Chimney of the World, pp.14-19. See also: Bill Luckin, "'The Heart and Home of Horror': The Great London Fogs of the Late Nineteenth Century," Social History, 28 (2003), pp.31-48; Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times (London, 1988).

27. Mosley, Chimney of the World, p.62 and p.184.

28. For a US comparison, see: Angela Gugliotta, "Class, Gender, and Coal Smoke: Gender Ideology and Environmental Injustice in Pittsburgh, 1868-1914," Environmental History, 5 (2000), pp.165-93.

29. Mosley, Chimney of the World, p.94.

30. Stephen Mosley, "Fresh Air and Foul: The Role of the Open Fireplace in Ventilating the British Home, 1837-1910," Planning Perspectives, 18 (2003), pp.1-21.

31. "Bringing the Natural World into History," American Historical Review, 107 (2002), p 797.

32. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995), p.17.

33. The phrase is taken from Charles Phythian-Adams, "Environments and Identities: Landscape as Cultural Projection in the English Provincial Past" in Paul Slack, (ed.), Environments and Historical Change (Oxford, 1999), p.134. See also: Oral History, Special Issues on "Landscapes of Memory" and "Memory and Place," 28, 1 and 2, 2000.

34. For example, see: JoAnn McGregor, "Living with the River: Landscape and Memory in the Zambezi Valley, Northwest Zimbabwe" in William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor, (eds.), Social History and African Environments (Oxford, 2003).

35. Tim Bonyhady, and Tom Griffiths, "Landscape and Language" in idem (eds.), Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia (Sydney, 2002), p.1.

36. Tim Bonyhady, "So Much for a Name" in ibid.

37. For an overview, see: Michael Egan, "Subaltern Environmentalism in the United States: A Historiographic Review," Environment and History, 8 (2002), pp.21-41.

38. For example, see: Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, 1982); Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (San Francisco, 1988); Stephen Holmes, The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography (Madison, 1999); David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle, 2000).

39. Dolores Greenberg, "Reconstructing Race and Protest: Environmental Justice in New York," Environmental History, 5 (2000), pp.223-50. See also: Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 (Philadelphia, 1995).

40. Christopher H. Foreman and Martin V. Melosi, "Environmental Justice: Policy Challenges and Public History" in Martin V. Melosi and Philip Scarpino, (eds.), Public History and the Environment (Malabar, 2004), p.240; Carolyn Merchant, "Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History," Environmental History, 8 (2003), pp.380-394: p.381.

41. Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill, 1995), p.181.

42. David N. Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), p.67 and p.91. The literature on environmental justice is now expanding beyond U.S. borders. For example, see: Nancy J. Jacobs, Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History (Cambridge, 2003).

43. Matthew Klingle, "Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History," History and Theory, 42 (2003), pp.94-110: p.96.

44. Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley, 2000).

45. John Soluri, "Accounting for Taste: Export Bananas, Mass Markets, and Panama Disease," Environmental History, 7 (2003), pp.386-410; Klingle, "Spaces of Consumption," p.96.

46. Guha, Unquiet Woods.

47. Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London, 1997); Vandana Shiva, Tomorrow's Biodiversity (London, 2000); Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (Harlow, 2000).

48. William Beinart, African History, Environmental History and Race Relations (Oxford, 1999), p.11; Guha, "Indian Environmental History," p.222.

49. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, 1999), p.16 and p.14. See also: John Scanlan, On Garbage (London, 2004).

50. David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). See also: David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Bill Luckin, Questions of Power: Electricity and Environment in Inter-war Britain (Manchester, 1990).

51. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London, 1980), p.83. For an extended discussion of how work links people to nature, see: Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995).

52. Steinberg, "Down to Earth;" Blackmar, "Contemplating." See also: Bill Luckin, Pollution and Control: A Social History of the Thames in the Nineteenth Century (Bristol, 1986).

53. Stephen R. Dovers, "On the Contribution of Environmental History to Current Debate and Policy," Environment and History, 6 (2000), pp.131-50.

By Stephen Mosley

Leeds Metropolitan University