The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

268 Pages·1994·15.6 MB·English

by  Donald Worster

THE WEALTH OF NATURE
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THE WEALTH
OF NATURE
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
AND THE
ECOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
Donald Worster
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1993 by Donald Worster
First published in 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1994
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Worster, Donald, 1941-
The wealth of nature: environmental history and the
ecological imagination / Donald Worster.
p. cm. Book of essays which previously appeared in
various journals or books or given as lectures.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-19-507624-9
ISBN 0-19-509264-3 (Pbk.)
1. Human ecology—United States—History.
2. Landscape assessment—United States—History.
I. Title. GF503.W68 1993
304.2'8'0973—- dc20 92-15360
987654321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper.
For Jeanne and Norvin Hein
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Preface
NEARLY three decades ago, while engaged in the postgraduate study of
American history, I began reading a book of nature writing by Joseph
Wood Krutch, The Twelve Seasons, and immediately saw what was miss-
ing from my seminars. There was no nature in their history—no sense of
the presence and influence of the land on past human experience, no soil,
no countryside, no smell of fungus, no sound of spring peepers trilling
from the marsh at dusk. Historians seemed to have forgotten completely
that, until very recently, almost all people lived as intimately with other
species and with the wind and weather as they did with their own kind.
To ignore that long intimacy was to distort history. Writing history is, to
be sure, always an act of distortion, imposing on the past the experience
and outlook of the present. We heard much in my seminars about the
need for objectivity, about letting the past speak for itself; but the most
"objective" scholars seemed unaware of how deep their own distortions
ran. They had forgotten, or perhaps had never known, the natural things
that mattered greatly to people of another era.
"Man's development," wrote Krutch, "takes him farther and farther
away from associations with his fellows, seems to condemn him more and
more to live with what is dead rather than with what is alive."1 Although
a well-known drama critic and professor at Columbia University, a man
with strong urban attachments, Krutch began in his middle years to dis-
cover the land. In 1930 he read Thoreau's Walden, then moved to rural
Connecticut, then in 1952, baffling many of his city associates, moved off
to the Sonoran desert, where he could be among white-winged doves and
viii Preface
lizards the rest of his life. Living myself in the state of Connecticut, I was
not yet ready to go that far (though the Southwest and Great Plains had
been my early home), but first wanted to see whether academic history
could become more alive than dead. This book of essays is one outcome
of that search; they represent my own intellectual turning to the land.
The first group of essays deals with the new academic field of environ-
mental history, which can be defined as the interdisciplinary study of the
relations of culture, technology, and nature through time. The essays pur-
sue the connections that the new history has made with such natural sci-
ences as ecology and with such fields as anthropology and geography. I
know that some of my colleagues in the new history will find a few of my
positions different from their own; after all, conflicting politics and values
must separate even this small group of scholars into rival positions on the
role or meaning of nature in human life. We disagree over whether the
natural world constitutes any kind of order or pattern that we can know
and, if it does, over whether that order can be apprehended by means of
science or not. We debate what is "natural" and what is not, what is "cul-
tural" in the landscape and what is not, whether Indians in the precontact
period "managed" the whole environment or only some small part of it,
how much was wilderness and how much was the white pioneer's mythol-
ogy or fetish. We have divergent opinions over the extent to which nature
influences human affairs, some taking up a position of limited environ-
mental determinism, others insisting that culture determines all. Read-
ers of these essays will not find such debates covered in depth here.
Instead, they will find the views of one man only, who is less interested in
correcting others' errors than in saying how history looks to him.
Other themes in these essays include agriculture, its present as well as
its past; agriculture considered ecologically more than economically. Cer-
tainly for me, the history of the land includes the history of people dwell-
ing on the land, though I do not mean to limit them to rural people. Every-
one, after all, in the city as much as in the country, must live from the
land; there is no place else to go. Other essays are on such subjects as
water, especially water development in the arid western states, the rise of
the public lands movement and of environmentalism in the United
States, the history of ecology, and the cultural roots of the modern envi-
ronmental crisis. Diverse though the subjects may be, they are held
together by a belief that history ought to be more than knowledge chasing
its own tail. Environmental history ought to have a few ideas to offer the
public, and those ideas ought to have a little conviction in them as well
as reason and evidence. The historian should let people know what he
cares about and encourage them to care about it too. He should not hide
Preface ix
all day in the archives or write only for a graduate seminar, but now and
then try to take part in the great public issues that animate our times: the
fate of rural communities, for example, the aspirations of developing
countries, the future of the earth.
Some of these essays appeared earlier in academic journals or books,
often scattered in places where readers might have trouble finding them
or even knowing of their existence. A few were given as public lectures,
which will explain their informality of style, and have never before been
in print. Inevitably, since they were written over a span of several years
and for various audiences, they overlap here and there in content, though
I have tried to eliminate any egregious repetition of data or argument.
More seriously, they may seem to readers to be filled with contradictory
ideas that the author has not quite reconciled. I realize, for instance, that
at times I express a strong sense of, and respect for, the order of nature
while at other times admitting that order is a troubled idea, one that even
scientists, our traditional guides in the matter, seem to be losing a grip
on. In this postmodernist, poststructuralist age, when all that has seemed
solid melts into the air, this is a familiar dilemma; however, it will not be
resolved by yielding to complete historical relativism. Historians,
impressed by the variability of human ideas over time, are wont to take
that way out, leading the public off into the deserts of relativism and leav-
ing them stranded there with no map, no waterhole, no sense of direction,
no way out. Environmental history is no exception; it too can seem about
as bewildering to readers as any other history, confusing their ideas about
what nature refers to. The temptations are great, but I believe historians
ought to struggle against that tendency. Although I am critical of some
aspects of science, I am nonetheless sure that because it is a changing,
imperfect, culturally bound guide does not mean that science should be
no guide at all. If these essays do not present fully coherent answers to all
the ultimate questions, if they leave some matters more tentative or mud-
dled than readers like, at least I hope they offer good, thoughtful reasons
for acknowledging a set offerees and lives beyond the merely human, the
merely cultural, and for learning to respect them.
My philosophical position as an environmental historian might be
described as "antimaterialistic materialism." I want to draw attention
back to the material reality of the natural world as it impinges on human
society, now shaping, now being shaped, by that society. My dissatisfac-
tion with non-environmental history is that it commonly ignores that
material reality, an ignorance that extends far beyond the cloisters of his-
tory into contemporary popular attitudes. Our politics, economics, high-
way engineering, music, newspapers, all could use a little more materi-