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Notes Lectures Environmental History (LET-GESB2108-CEH)
Notes on all lectures of the course environmental history at Radboud University .
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Lectures Environmental HistoryWeek 1a: Introduction – What is environmental history? Why is it important? What can you
expect from the course?
What is environmental history?
The study of the environment has an interdisciplinary nature
Different issues, questions, perspectives and approaches. Historians are just one group of
scholars among many that study environmental studies.
What they add: historians historicize environmental issues: the role of time and the historical context,
& a historical long-term perspective. Because it’s not the case that all changes etc. are new/modern.
The relationship between people and nature/the climate has been important all throughout history.
For example: temperatures have been rising systematically since the industrial revolution
Working definition:
- Donald Hughes: ‘Environmental history studies the mutual relationship between humans and
nature through time’, ‘it is a kind of history that seeks understanding of human beings as they
have lived, worked, and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through changes brought
by time’
Key topics:
1) Nature and how it has changed over time, including the impact on humans;
2) How humans use and change the environment;
3) How people think about environment/nature.
Environmental history as such is a relatively young, but growing discipline, that first came up in the
1960’s. The discipline is evolving: students take courses, there are specialized professors, a society of
European environmental history, journals, etc.
‘’consists of many sub-fields: the impact of nature on mankind throughout history and vice
versa, animal studies (animals as historical actors), the history of climate activism and
government intervention, environmental concepts such as biodiversity, sustainability, the
Anthropocene, etc.
The idea of what nature and the environment is, is no longer the 19th-century Romantic idea that
there is nature and then there is artificial creations by human-beings, like they are two completely
separate things.
Do we even still have real wild nature? The impact of humans on nature is omnipresent:
The type of animals on this planet have been highly impacted by mankind. For example: the
German shepherd.
Nature conservation vs. managing nature vs. rewilding/maybe even back-breeding and de-
extinction.
The idea of turning back the clock is unrealistic: some of the impact is irreversible, for
example: Chernobyl, where there are wolves that are immune to the radiation.
The history of environmentalism
,There have been several stages of activism to preserve, restore, and improve the natural environment:
Green environmentalism – product of 19th-century Romanticism, as a reaction to the
negative consequences of modernization. This has also manifested itself in the form of local
pollution activism since the 1940s, focused mainly on preserving/defending human health;
Grey environmentalism – starting in the 1970s, activism to change the human way of living.
Mostly manifests itself in reaction to catastrophes such as Chernobyl, rethinking the effect of
the human lifestyle (of mass-consumption and production) on nature and environment;
Blue environmentalism – climate activism since the 1990s, with the realization that the entire
planet is at risk. Activists are more and more thinking in terms of anticipation (for example
Extinction rebellion), instead of the earlier reactionary activism.
environmental history writing has always been entangled with environmental activism.
Why is it important?
The environmental challenges today are huge: climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution,
deforestation, water scarcity and desertification, land degradation and resource depletion, etc.
The biggest drivers of environmental change have to do with human activity: the population
growth, paired with gigantic levels of production and consumption
And the risks are enormous: the melting of ice caps and glaciers cause oceans levels to rise, food and
water insecurity, health problems, economic costs and disruption, massive migration, the collapse of
entire ecosystems, extinction of animals, plants, and humans.
the need of intervention: at multiple levels, from economic growth to green economies. The need for
policy interventions at international and national level is a problem: a lot of countries aren’t willing to
change, and the power of big polluting companies is great.
Why a historical approach?
What environmental reports often lack is historical understanding: climate migration will definitely
increase in the nearby future, but has also been going on for at least a century.
the historical approach teaches you things about how you should deal with the
consequences of environmental changes, because it helps you understand how we’ve gotten to
this point, and what specific things/policies have caused it. And hopefully: to not make the
same mistakes again.
Week 1b: Humans and their environment since the Paleolithic
Dominant ideologies on humanity <> natural environment
Modern historiography came of age in the 19th century in a world that still strongly adhered to
Christian ideas of nature and God’s creation, the context in which the study of history comes to
university:
man is ruler over nature, and man’s natural environment is there to be exploited. God made
nature for humans to thrive in. With the story of Adam and Eve nature becomes hostile, and so
nature must be conquered. – inherent patriarchal view on the world: nature is either
specifically made for men, or made to be conquered by men for humankind to be successful.
To study history thus means to study men, and not to study nature.
, Modern ideologies, even if they seem much more secularized, often tell the same story (Bacon,
Descartes, Smith, Positivists, Marxists):
View nature and man’s natural environment as something to be exploited for mankind to
flourish and create progress/economic growth. Nature = natural resource for people to use.
history automatically looks at the history of man. Insofar natural environment does appear in
traditional historical accounts, it is depicted as:
- an obstacle to overcome;
- something that sometimes lashes out catastrophically;
- fed into national myths of communal human endeavor (for example: how the Dutch conquered
the water);
- used in shaping ideologies of racial superiority.
Recent transformation in (historical) approaches
Much more recently historians have realized that human-beings are not free agents/actors in regards to
their natural environment. A lot of the time societies were at the mercy of their natural environment,
often in consequence of their own manipulation of nature.
the Annales-movement (1920s-1930s) was the first to include nature in their historical writings.
Braudel, who studied the role of the Mediterranean in history. Ladurie, attempted a history of
the environment.
The Holocenic Climatological Niche: human utter dependence on natural environment
The development of human civilization from neolithic times onward took place in a very peculiar
climatological niche known as the ‘Holocene’ (the last 13000 years). In this period average global
temperatures have not fluctuated very much, but have stayed within a particular bandwidth. In this
bandwidth the whole human civilization as we know it has developed.
Even small variations in temperature have had a huge impact on human societies/civilizations:
i.e. The small ice age, which influenced the demographic transformations of Europe and the
late medieval famines, plague epidemics, etc. (crisis mentality) Interesting side effect:
quickening of technological innovations.
The consequences of human interventions on natural environment since paleontological times
Human interventions in nature have had a peculiar, often devastating, effect. Humans can be held
responsible for the ‘quaternary megafauna extinction’: a lot of big animals have become extinct as
an effect of human migration and hunting (not just climate change), such as mammoths.
These extinctions have had huge climatological impact. The big animals cut the earth open,
which is helpful for hunter-gatherer societies. When the animals disappear, forests grow much
faster and closer.
the necessity for humans to adapt their lifestyle.
The neolithic agricultural revolution (started c. 10.000 bc) has also transformed the climate: new
cultivated land on almost every continent, and the migration of all sorts of animals to places in which
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