Nature's Fortunes: New Directions in the Writing of European Environmental History
Author(s)
Ford, Caroline
Abstract
The field of “environmental history” emerged as a separately defined area of scholarship in the 1970s. In the United States, where many of its practitioners believe it to be most deeply rooted, historians quickly created a number of new professional associations and journals. In Europe, the field of environmental history also emerged as a distinct field in the context of the rise of ecological issues in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is frequently associated with the “green” political activism of those years. The ecological ideology that arose in that period may be expressed in two distinct strands of thought: “nature centered environmentalism” and “social environmentalism.” The first stressed the deleterious consequences of unbridled industrialism in terms of pollution, contamination, and global overpopulation, and it advocated specific measures to protect the environment. The second focused on the link between nature protection and social problems such as poverty, inequality, and violence. The latter aimed toward a broad transformation of the entire economy and culture.
