A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of Environmental History
Author(s)
Weiner, Douglas R.
Abstract
Because of the diffuse nature of its original suite of concerns, Environmental History has become over the past thirty years a very big tent. That is attractive. But that has also created an institutional “boundary problem” of cetacean proportions. There are no ways to license “environmental historians,” no collectively accepted criteria to distinguish “true” environmental historians from “impostors.” Anyone who can claim to be an environmental historian and get away with it becomes one. This is exactly what stimulated Powell’s “collective imagination” quip, which opens up onto a much more serious question, first raised a few years ago by James Secord – namely: “Who should be credentialed to interpret the world and our place in it?” These two questions – what is environmental history and who can interpret the world – must be resolved in tandem. While there is of course plenty of room for all kinds of research under the big tent of Environmental History, I would propose that the most important work that we can do and the work that can unite all of our various efforts is to bring to the light of day the unexamined metonymic “shadows” of environmental figurations and practices. Every figuration of the “environment” – by distributing different opportunities for environmental access and decision-making power to different “types” and groups – potentially encodes exclusion, dispossession, or even genocide. We must persist with investigations in order to uncover how, at the end of the day, actors and Others in our stories were left with deficient choices. Why were they asked to choose between, or among, dispossessions? It is the history of the narrowing of choices that ultimately will be the most useful for us if we are to turn around our nihilistic, fatalistic century and begin to build a world of increasingly rich choices. One clarification must be made. This should not be read to mean that only the history of power and conflicts may be written. That would be silly as well as exclusivist. What I have tried to underscore, simply, is that all of our histories must reflect an awareness that their subjects, and our writing of them, are inflected by power.
