Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning

Author(s): Richard White

Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Mar., 1990), pp. 1111-1116
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians
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 Environmental History, Ecology,
and Meaning

Richard White

Over the last fifteen years, Donald Worster has been the most thoughtful and
stimulating of American environmental historians. His concern with big problems,
the clarity of his thought and prose, and his grasp of the field make him the ideal
choice for explaining the fallacy of writing history as if human beings "have not been
and are not truly part of the planet." His emphasis on the material grounding of
human history is particularly timely given the current prominence of post-
structuralist analysis with its potential for moving historical analysis ever further
away from concern with the physical world in which human beings live.1
And yet in reading Professor Worster's article, at least some environmental
historians besides myself will get an odd feeling of displacement among familiar
surroundings. Reading the article is like viewing a television interview with a family
that presents itself as altogether too harmonious. If conflicts or problems are ad-
mitted, they are minor; basic disagreements are quashed. Wayward spouses, delin-
quent children, threatening illnesses, and mortgages in arrears are not for public
view.
Such public presentations are hardly simple falsehoods, for the family member
doing the speaking gets, in effect, to define the family as it ideally should be and
as he or she hopes it will be. Similarly, Worster's account of environmental history
is as much a prescription as a description. And while I share most of his ambitions
for the field, things are not as harmonious or simple as they seem. Rather than
quarrel with his prescriptions or present an alternate version, I'd like to examine
some of the underlying issues that prompt Worster's program.
Donald Worster is, first of all, attempting to define a new historical field in a way
that makes it central to the discipline as a whole. He places environmental history
at the point where the natural and the cultural intersect and interact with each
other. With the field defined this way, it is difficult (I hope) for most historians to
force it to the periphery of historical concerns.

Richard White is associate professor of history at the University of Utah.

I Post-structuralism refers to the work of those recent thinkers who have, in Hans Kellner's words, "challenged
the primacy and security of meaning of history, of narrative, and the idea of 'man' which is constructed by these
practices." At their most extreme, post-structuralists reduce history to a pure textuality in which it differs little from
any other form of narrative. Hans Kellner, "Narrativity in History: Post Structuralism and Since," History and
Theory, 26 (Dec. 1987), 2-29.

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1112 The Journal of American History

Having defined the field, Worster outlines what might be called its methods.
Here, however, under the guise of stating conventional wisdom, he is trying to create
it, or rather to impose a much older construct on the field. Environmental history
has a base (natural history), a structure (productive relations or modes of produc-
tion), and a superstructure (culture and ideology). In his hierarchical model, he
seeks to avoid reductionism and any simple material determinism. The "great chal-
lenge," as he states it, is identifying the reciprocal relationships between the levels.
Worster's final task, which takes up more than two-thirds of the article, is osten-
sibly to review "the broader themes" of environmental history, but it is really more
an attempt to set its agenda. He examines only one theme -agroecology- which
he deems primary, for in obtaining food humans "have been connected in the most
vital, constant, and concrete way to the natural world." Agroecology becomes a case
study showing how his methodology illuminates the most "basic and revealing" of
the concerns of environmental history the production of food. The discussion, as
would surprise no one familiar with Worster's work, ends with an examination of
the causes and consequences of the rise of capitalist agriculture.
Worster's procedures are analogous to those of our family host who shows the tele-
vision audience around the house and then describes a new addition the family is
constructing out back. He seems to hide nothing. He displays the blueprint (his
base/structure/superstructure), his scale model (agroecology); he even admits that
the building site (the science of ecology) has certain problems. What the camera
misses are the family arguments over the blueprint, the omission of certain critical
details in the model, and the slow sinking of the foundation of the house itself.
The uninitiated will misconstrue the argument if they think Worster's blueprint
has old-fashioned, even vulgar, Marxist lines. The inspiration is really Braudelian.
Worster is building for the longue duree, and his plan - and agroecological model -
are full of the long-term conjunctures, disequilibriums, and equilibriums that mark
Fernand Braudel's work. With the always notable exception of Alfred W. Crosby,
American environmental historians have usually operated on a much smaller tem-
poral and geographical scale than Worster sketches out here. While his colleagues
have thought of intellectual progress in terms of adding another bath, Don Worster
is ready to build Trump Towers in the backyard.2
His model for the field differs from much current work in scale, and also because
to construct it, Don Worster is urging scholars who have often written inductively
(or at least pretended to) to think deductively. His model for agroecology makes
sense only when we realize that we already know the critical structures, conjunctures,
and disequilibriums that demand study; the most important of them is the rise of
capitalism with its "radical simplification of the natural ecological order." The.crea-
tion of the capitalist mode of production becomes the key environmental process;
the most influential determinant of environmental change since the last Ice Age.

2 For an overview of Fernand Braudel's concerns that enables a reader to compare them with Donald Worster's,
see Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Baltimore, 1977), 3-35. See Alfred
W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York, 1986).

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 Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning 1113

In selecting the transformative capacity of capitalism as his centr

ster isolates a process of undeniable importance and power, but the t
to simplify environmental analysis much as capitalist agriculture
farmers' fields. Writing from within a capitalist economy with its s
talist focus, historians can easily make people in noncapitalist economies - the
majority of the human race over time -similarly instrumentalist in their logic.
Professor Worster writes, for example, that the "conscious purposes" of human
beings in restructuring nature are "the feeding and prospering of a group of
humans," and that "sheer necessity . .. has been the mother of ecological innovation
in preindustrial conditions." But is this so? And are not feeding and prospering
more problematic terms than they here appear to be? Human beings do not eat
all that it is possible to eat, and they do not regard all that they eat simply as food.
As Maurice Godelier has written, "the social perception of an environment consists
not only of more or less exact representations of the constraints upon the func-
tioning of technical and economic systems, but also of value judgments . . . and
phantasmic beliefs.... Livestock is not simply meat, milk or leather, and trees are
not just wood or fruit." The creation of a precapitalist agroecosystem is as much a
result of those value judgments as of the instrumental logic Worster emphasizes.3
The failure to recognize the role of value judgments and beliefs causes problems
on two levels. It first of all distorts European expansion and the spread of capitalist
agriculture by portraying the success of those developments as simply the triumph
of more efficient instrumental logics over less efficient and more primitive in-
strumental logics. On a more theoretical level, it calls into question how much
reciprocal influence there actually is within the complex of base/structure/super-
structure. If culture is significant largely as beliefs about how best to keep stomachs
full -or, under capitalism, how to keep pockets full -then culture is in danger of
becoming superstructure in the old vulgar Marxist sense. It is a product of more fun-
damental forces.4
As significant as Karl Polanyi's work is, it tends to obscure as much as it reveals
about the results of market economies' spread. It can overestimate their ability to
obliterate local understandings and adjustments. In an intriguing book, Economics
as Culture, Stephen Gudeman has emphasized the continued importance of local
constructions - a people's model is their life and history, their historical conscious-
ness, their social construction"; such models are essential in understanding the
course of environmental, social, and economic change even under capitalism.5
The cane and bluegrass example that Don Worster uses as a parable of agroeco-
logical change depends for its significance not just on the material facts of the inva-
sion but also on the different cultural meanings domestic livestock held for Indians
and for the Anglo-Americans who settled the Ohio Valley. The Algonquian peoples

3 Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material: Thought, Economy, and Society (Bristol, 1986), 35.
4 See Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976), esp. 126-65.
5 Stephen Gudeman, Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors ofLivelihood (London, 1986), 26. See also
Stephen Gudeman, The Demise of a Rural Economy: From Subsistence to Capitalism in a Latin American Village
(London, 1978).

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 1114 The Journal of American History

of the region readily adopted horses, pigs, and, to a lesser

allies" of the Europeans were thus potential allies of the Indians, too. It was not
so much livestock or the ability to profit from ecological change that distinguished
whites from Indians as the understanding of both the nature of a proper economy
and the place of "wild" and "tame" animals within it. The Indian understanding
was not "traditional," instead it developed in conjunction with the arrival of whites
and the changing environment. That understanding inhibited the ability of Indians
to exploit livestock as whites did. Many Indians came to identify the fate of "tame"
Indians with the fate of tame livestock: Whites exploited both. That made the
Shawnee Prophet's demand that the Indians kill their domestic livestock in order
to save themselves comprehensible in ideological, if not economic, terms.6
Worster tries to avoid the simple determinisms that lurk within the base/struc-
ture/superstructure model, but such determinisms may be inevitable as long as such
hierarchical models persist. They set up analytical distinctions that may be inap-
propriate to environmental history. Marshall Sahlins, in a different context, has
written that "material aspects are not usefully separated from the social, as if the
first were referable to the satisfaction of needs by the exploitation of nature, the
second to problems of the relations between men." Worster would, I think, sym-
pathize with the sentiment here, but his model perpetuates the distinctions.7
Environmental historians do face grave difficulties in trying to incorporate natural
history, social relations, technology, and culture into unified explanations of social
change. Their assertions of the reciprocal effects between social and environmental
change can evoke the same kind of incredulous doubt as do statements by adminis-
trators at my university about cold fusion. Environmental historians assert amazing
interactions, but there is a certain sketchiness of detail as to how they all work. There
is not much reason for a skeptic to believe the larger claims. Environmental history
has been vague as to how historical change and causation proceed.
The problem of causation is particularly worrisome to environmental historians
because of the origins of the field. Environmental history was, as Professor Worster
notes, born of a strong moral concern, and that moral concern presumed a certain
kind of causality. It presumed that nature was vulnerable to human actions, and
it presumed that, in time, human beings would pay the price for their own ar-
rogance and thoughtlessness. This moral emphasis, which frankly I share, carries
with it real dangers. The field has a tendency to produce cautionary tales. But
without a clear demonstration of causality, a teller's cautionary tale becomes a
listener's just so story.
Environmental historians once thought that they had a firm basis for their
morality and causality. Historians read the science of ecology as both detailing basic
natural processes and yielding certain moral verities: complexity is good, simplicity
is bad; natural systems seek equilibrium and battle disruption; there is an ideal bal-

6 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Europeans, Indians, and Empires in the Pays den Haut, 1650-1815 (New
York, forthcoming).
7 Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason, 205. See also Pierre Clastres, Society against the State (New York, 1987),
189-218.

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 Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning 1115

ance in nature that, once achieved, will maintain itself. Those verities gave historians
standards against which to measure and evaluate the repercussions of human action.
As Professor Worster points out, the science of ecology no longer bestows such
verities. Historians thought ecology was the rock upon which they could build en-
vironmental history; it turned out to be a swamp. Ecology provides the land upon
which Worster's agroecology, and the other wings and additions attached to environ-
mental history, must sit. For although in popular speech (as in my own metaphor)
ecology has been reified into nature, ecology is, in fact, only an academic discipline.
The questioning of ecological verities within the science has consequences graver
than Worster admits. In modern ecology the idea of a natural climax- a community
of plants and animals ideally adjusted to a given environment - has largely van-
ished. Along with climax, the idea of successional communities has come into
doubt. A picture of constant flux replaced succession with "only different kinds
degrees of vegetational stability and instability, different kinds and rates of pop
tion change." Nature, in the words of one ecologist, is only a "veritable shimmer
of populations in space and time."8
One of the ironies of environmental history is that historians have themselves
helped erode ecological verities even as they used them to evaluate history.
Historians revealed to ecologists how far back human manipulations of the envi
ment went and how extensive they were. It became harder for scientists to thin
that the communities they were describing and studying were the results of na
processes alone. Ecologists themselves turned to historians to help reconstitute t
science to study human social and economic processes as well as biological proces
Historians, who had relied on the scientists to provide their basic guidelines, a
scientists, who saw historians helping transform their object of study, met in
of mutual bewilderment. Things will certainly progress beyond this - and a new
exciting scholarly hybrid may result -but so far there has been little progress
The erosion of ecology has certainly not eliminated historians' conviction that en-
vironmental and social change are interlinked, but it has tended to focus attention
largely on the grossest examples of that linkage. Those gross examples are uniformly
disasters: dust bowls, the pandemics that devastated the Western Hemisphere, the
devastation of the Sahel by human use and by drought. Unable to trace the everyday
consequences of environmental change induced by humans with the precision they
would like, historians gravitate to disasters where the human impact is clear.10
Such efforts are useful and revealing, but they can attain the larger goals that Don
Worster outlines only in part. To read much environmental history is to become con-
vinced that only a miracle has preserved life on this planet, and that all environ-

8 R. H. Whittaker cited in Edward Goldsmith, "Ecological Succession Rehabilitated," Ecologist, 15 (1985), 106,
which contains a defense of old-fashioned ecology, reproducing the attacks on it.
9 This meeting quite literally took place at a National Science Foundation conference on Landscape History
and Ecological Succession, at Duke University, Jan. 28-31, 1988.
10 Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979); Alfred W. Crosby,
The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, 1972); Richard W. Franke
and Barbara H. Chasin, Seeds of Famine: Ecological Destruction and the Development Dilemma in the West
African Sahel (Montclair, 1980).

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 1116 The Journal of American History

mental change has been for the worse. Presumably more

history than miracles and luck, and evaluating change as for the worse implies some
uniform standard of measurement. Environmental history needs a broader account
of the processess that have maintained life and culture, and a clearer description
of the standards by which we should evaluate change. It needs to insist on the
grounding of human life and history in the larger life of the planet, without, how-
ever, losing sight of the role of meaning in human actions and ignoring the real
challenges that post-structuralist theory presents.
Rather than hierarchical models with their implicit emphasis on a structure that
somehow channels and determines transient events, we perhaps need something
closer to Anthony Giddens's concept of structuration. As a sociologist, Giddens is
concerned with the complex "reproduction of social practices," and his stress on the
patterning of social systems in time and space (a concern he shares with Braudel)
has a historical and geographical bent missing from most social theory. A focus on
the problems of change and replication would create a historical approach more in
tune with current trends in ecology. By examining replication and change in histor-
ical environments - rather than departures from some stable environmental ideal -
historians would parallel ecologists' attempts to discover "different kinds and
degrees of vegetational stability and instability, different kinds and rates of popula-
tion change." By drawing historians' attention to the interplay of ideational and ma-
terial elements, analysis of such replication would uncover the material conse-
quences of social and economic practices while rejecting the functionalism and
materialism that seem always to lie latent in the concerns of environmental history.
Historians would still lack the overarching standards by which we should judge
change, but it is a pipe dream that we will find such standards in either nature or
history."1

11 Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Anal-
ysis (Berkeley, 1979); Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley, 1981).

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