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Jorgensen 1 Megan Jorgensen Dr. Erika Lindgren Historiography 9 April 2015 Historical Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship In recent years, there has been an ever increasing amount of conflict between environmental history and environmental politics. The mounting discord is due to controversy surrounding the nature of the relationship between humans and the natural world. In order to gain a better understanding of this, it is helpful to examine the profound origins of environmental history. Since the investigation and analysis of the environment and its natural resources is a relatively new phenomenon, the span of interpretation of the physical world ranges from the mid-19 th century to the present. Throughout environmental history, it has consistently been believed that nature is cyclical, harmonious, and passive, while human history is linear, dynamic, and active. 1 As the 20 th century has advanced, biological evidence has revealed that nature may be dynamic, challenging individuals to perceive nature 1 Andrew C. Isenberg, “Historicizing Natural Environments: The Deep Roots of Environmental History,” in A Companion to Western Historical Thought, ed. Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 372.

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Jorgensen 1

Megan Jorgensen

Dr. Erika Lindgren

Historiography

9 April 2015

Historical Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship

In recent years, there has been an ever increasing amount of conflict between environmental

history and environmental politics. The mounting discord is due to controversy surrounding the

nature of the relationship between humans and the natural world. In order to gain a better

understanding of this, it is helpful to examine the profound origins of environmental history. Since

the investigation and analysis of the environment and its natural resources is a relatively new

phenomenon, the span of interpretation of the physical world ranges from the mid-19 th century to the

present. Throughout environmental history, it has consistently been believed that nature is cyclical,

harmonious, and passive, while human history is linear, dynamic, and active.1 As the 20th century has

advanced, biological evidence has revealed that nature may be dynamic, challenging individuals to

perceive nature as active, rather than passive. However, historical understanding of the relationship

between humanity and nature has evolved in multifaceted arrays that have both rejected and accepted

nature as dynamic. Further examination has revealed, that overtime, historians have come to interpret

the human relationship to the environment as one of immense interconnectivity.

Beginning in the 19th century until now, a persistent pattern of thought has maintained that

nature is “cyclic, harmonious, and passive, while human history is linear, dynamic and active.”2 This

view was articulated and widely popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von

Goethe, and Henry David Thoreau, esteemed writers of the romantic period. Not only does this

1 Andrew C. Isenberg, “Historicizing Natural Environments: The Deep Roots of Environmental History,” in A Companion to Western Historical Thought, ed. Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 372. 2 Isenberg, “Historicizing Natural Environments,” 373.

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acknowledgement of human society as dynamic coincide with the views of environmental historians

of the mid-19th century, it also finds concurrence with the views of environmental scientists

concerned with wilderness preservation and conservation. They felt human greed and short-

sightedness was responsible for disrupting the biological processes responsible for maintaining

natural order.3 As a result, environmental historians and biologists recognized and characterized their

perception of the relationship between humans and the natural world as polarized. In other words,

they identified the presence of dualism between the discernments of humans and nature.

Since the mid-19th century, environmental historians and other scholars have challenged the

dualism between linear, active humanity, and cyclic, passive nature. In particular, scholars of the

mid-19th and early 20th centuries have embodied the dualism in order to highlight the human

transformation of nature. According to environmental historian George Perkins Marsh, “man is

everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to

discords.”4 Contrarily, French scholars of the 1930s, who deeply influenced those of American

origin, accepted nature as static and orderly. Likewise, they held the view that nature was

transformed by a slowly evolving human society. Evidence suggests that it was during this time

period that scholars sought to emphasize the degree, minimal, majorly or at all, to which humanity

was involved in the transformation of nature. Thus, scholars began to interpret the relationship

between humanity and the natural world as one of interconnectivity.

With the continuation of the 20th century, however, biologists and ecologists have developed

a progressively dynamic view of nature, suggesting there is a certain level of disequilibrium and

disharmony within the natural world, despite an absence of human action.5 As a result, environmental

historians have been impelled to consider nature as a dynamic force of change in natural and human

history, rather than merely a passive object of human alteration or break on human historical

3 Isenberg, 373.4 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 36.5 Isenberg, 373.

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momentum. Nevertheless, the evolution of this comprehension of the human-nature relationship has

not been precise or homogenous. Rather, both environmental scientists and historians have

sporadically reaffirmed an understanding of nature as fundamentally systematically prevailing. In the

end, the understanding of the relationship between humans and the natural world has changed in a

complex manner, both rejecting and accepting nature as dynamic. In the end, regardless of whether

or not nature is viewed as dynamic, historians have come to interpret the human relationship to the

environment as one of immense interconnectivity.

Until the middle of the 19th century, environmental historians believed that nature’s order

surpassed historical change. Harmonious, self-regulating, and permanent, the natural world was

separate from the dynamic human history. However, several environmental historians began to

challenge this notion. Published between 1830 and 1833, Charles Lyell’s three-volume Principles

of Geology argued that human history was responsible for the slow, but massive alteration of

Earth’s natural landscapes.6 Lyell’s examination of the relationship between humans and the

natural world influenced the next generation of environmental scholars and historians. In particular,

Lyell’s interpretation influenced the work of Charles Darwin, an early 19 th century environmental

scientist whose studies on the Galapagos Islands of the Finch bird species, revealed the complexity of

the natural world. Darwin’s research suggested the occurrence of evolution, as well as the ideas of

natural selection and survival of the fittest. Darwin’s Origin of Species, a publication of his

scientific discovery, argued for a natural world in which historical change was standard.7

Darwin, among other scholars of the time period, unequivocally rejected the early 19th century

interpretation of nature as static. To Lyell, and Darwin, the evolution of species was intrinsic to

the processes of nature. In essence, they saw nature as an ancient object, subject to the forces of

6 Isenberg, 374.7 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (electronic resource) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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human-induced historical change; interpretation of the human-nature relationship transformed into

one of colossal interdependency.

Beginning in the 1860s to the end of the 19th century, environmental scholars George Perkins

Marsh, and Frederick Jackson Turner began to integrate human action as forces against a

changing natural environment. Both Marsh and Turner procured an interdisciplinary approach to

the relationship between humanity and nature. Having been influenced by the works of Lyell and

Darwin, both Marsh and Turner viewed the relationship between humans and the environment

was reciprocal. In other words, the impact of human action against nature resulted in an equally

influential response from the natural world. Despite having been influenced by similar

interpretations, Marsh and Turner had divergent views concerning the best approach to studying

the environment’s role in history.8 Marsh recognized the complex interconnections that define

the natural world, and thus took into consideration the environmental and social costs of

human manipulation and the alteration of nature. Within his research, Marsh chose to study

former interactions between humans and the environment. Ultimately, such scientific

experimentation exposed substantial degradation and fragmentation; Marsh interpreted them to be

human-caused.

Marsh’s text, Man and Nature (1864), represented the first distinguished synthesis

treating the various facets of man’s use of nature.9 Its publication was a seminal moment in the

evolution of American attitudes toward nature. The influence of his carefully constructed appeal

to enlightened self-interest eventually proved to be the decisive element in creating a politically

effective conservation movement.10 Marsh’s intent in writing Man and Nature was to identify the

effect of man’s actions on physical geography, to show the harm inflicted on the natural world

8 Isenberg, 374.9 Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Man and Nature in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 80. 10 Daniel Payne, Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996), 56.

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by these actions, and to suggest possible corrective measures. Marsh built his argument in Man

and Nature just as one would prepare a legal brief, resulting in a work that is unwieldy, but precise,

and well-documented as to be virtually irresistible in its conclusions.11

In it, Marsh argues through evidence, that “the ravages committed by man subvert the

relations and destroy the balance which nature had established between her organized and

inorganic creations; and she avenges herself upon the intruder, by letting loose upon her

defaced provinces destructive energies hitherto kept in check.”12 Similarly, Marsh declares,

“there are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece, and even of Alpine Europe, where the

operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as

complete as that of the moon…The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant.”13

Marsh argued that a certain measure of transformation of terrestrial surface, of suppression of

natural, and stimulation of artificially modified productivity was necessary in order for it to

reach human needs, all while remain balanced. However, this measure had been deplorably

exceeded by man.14 To Marsh, human mismanagement of the natural world would eventually

destabilize the environmental processes necessary for the survival of humanity. Significantly, Marsh

had begun to view the relationship between nature and humanity as one in which the actions of

man directly impacted nature and nature impacted man; they were connected.

Like Marsh, Turner focused on the reciprocal relationship between people and nature.

However, Turner interpreted nature as an entity meant to be conquered by humans; he was

triumphalist rather than declensionist. Triumphalism is the belief that humans are superior to and

should triumph over others. Having been influenced by political scholars, such as John Locke, rather

than environmental scholars, Turner felt that the ongoing transformation of the wilderness into a

11 Payne, Voices in the Wilderness, 58. 12 Marsh, Man and Nature, 42.13 Ibid.14 Marsh, Man and Nature, 38.

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civilized and independent America was a cause for celebration. In particular, human alteration

and exploitation of the natural world was responsible for American progress. Turner, in his renowned

and influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893),” says,

“American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This

perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new

opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces

dominating American character.”15 Turner felt the conquering of an untamed environment was

necessary for the creation of an American identity separate from England and all its travesties.

Likewise, Turner interpreted the natural world as an agent that, once conquered by people,

would produce the ideal American characteristics of fortitude, ingenuity, and independence.

Most significantly, Turner saw nature as a promoter of the foundation of a composite nationality for

the American people, just as the advance of the frontier decreased America’s dependence on

England. Turner asserted further that, “the growth of nationalism and the evolution of American

political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier.”16 Nonetheless, Turner

recognized the physical limit of the frontier and the reality that resources are finite. He closed

his esteemed essay by saying,

“Never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rosa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.”17

Turner’s essay tremendously impacted American citizens’ perceptions concerning the natural world.

More importantly, Turner’s interpretation of the natural world incalculably paved the way for

future interpretations of the natural world. Marsh and Turner, although recognizing the

15 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), 200.16 Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 217.17 Ibid., 227.

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importance of the environment, regarded it as passive. In the end, historians had begun to interpret

the human relationship to the environment as one in which anthropocentric actions directly impacted

the environment.

Having been inspired by Turner’s field of western American history, the 1930s and

subsequent decades brought re-conceptions concerning the relationship between humans and

the natural world. However, the new interpretations varied from Turner’s idea of human dominance

over nature. Historian Walter Prescott Webb, influenced by a series of environmental and

economic catastrophes which plagued the Midwestern plains, wrote the persuasive narrative

The Great Plains (1931). While Marsh, Turner, and those who had influenced them, had remained

focused on humanity’s transformation of nature, Webb was the first to deeply examine the

limitations that nature placed on human endeavors.18 Central to Webb’s concentration, was his

study of geography in the Midwest. To Webb, comprehension of the historical influence of the Great

Plains and the natural world on American civilization could only be achieved through an

understanding of the physical forces that have worked and continue to work, in that region and any

subsequent landscape.19 Thus, The Great Plains chronicled the geography of the region and

offered an explanation as to why human populations were compelled to modify the natural

world. In essence, he interpreted nature as the cause for human modification and subsequent misuse

of finite natural resources; nature was active.

Correspondingly, Webb became a proponent of environmental determinism. According to

definition, environmental determinism, or geographical determinism, is the belief that physical

environment predisposes human social development towards particular trajectories.20 In

particular, Webb’s environmental determinism gained collaboration from supporters of the “New

18 Isenberg, 375.19 Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1931), 10.20 “Determinism,” Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, last modified 2015, accessed March 4, 2015, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/determinism.

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Western History” movement sparked by Turner. Recently, his work has been found useful when

studying the historical significance of the natural world in the lives of those inhabiting Africa, Asia,

and Australia.21 Webb’s interpretation of nature represented the widespread recognition by the

1930s of the importance of geographical perspectives in history and the social sciences. Like

Turner and Marsh, Webb acknowledged the reciprocity of nature; the actions of both nature and

humanity impact each other. In the end, his ideas were characteristic of the gradual transformation

that occurred among scholars, as they began to recognize the connectedness of humanity’s

relationship with nature.

One of the most influential individuals of the “New Western History” intellectual movement

was Carl Ortwin Sauer, a renowned geographer. As is apparent in his writings, the well-regarded

being “The Agency of Man on the Earth (1956),” and “The Morphology of Landscape (1925),”

Sauer was concerned with humanity’s role in changing, intentionally or unintentionally, the

face of the earth in directions determined by their immediate needs. To Sauer, said changes were

most noticeable when individuals migrated into new landscapes.22 Likewise, Sauer focused on the

cumulative effects of the physical and biological processes that humanity set in motion,

inhibited, or deflected.23 However, the most influential of these three works was “The Morphology

of Nature,” as it had a substantial impact on the American perception of the human-nature

relationship, and upon American academic geography. The essay was an attempt by Sauer to

define for geography and environmental scholars a stance within the field of study. Furthermore,

Sauer’s prevailing works powerfully eliminated the doctrine of environmental determinism that

21 Isenberg, 376.22 Carl Sauer, Land and Life: a Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, ed. by John Leighly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 4. 23 Sauer, Carl, Marston Bates, Lewis Mumford, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. by William L. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 49.

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had dominated American geography since the turn of the century.24 Over time, Sauer’s

interpretation of nature lead to the determination that,

“there is such thing as a humane use of the earth; the simpler cultures are less destructive of the terrestrial basis of man’s existence than our present technology; and the possessors of modern technology may find in the past experiences of man on the earth guidance toward a balance of the capacities of the land with the requirements of life that gives some promise of permanence.”25

Sauer’s interpretation of nature influenced others to re-evaluate their perceptions of the human-nature

relationship; interconnectivity between humanity and the environment existed.

Most notably, rather than define the landscape simply as a geographical location, Sauer

created and established the “cultural landscape”, a concept which united geography and culture.

According to Sauer, “the cultural landscape is fashioned out of a natural area by a cultural

group…culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the

result.”26 Furthermore, Sauer asserted that regional environments provided opportunities for

individuals that were either seized, missed, or misused by cultural groups to create precise

landscapes. Sauer proclaimed in “The Morphology of Nature,” that humanity had acted naively

towards nature. Instead of considering the implications of human action on the environment, they had

remained narrowly focused on the ability of nature to sanction or inhibit human endeavors, just as

environmental scholars such as Turner, Marsh, and Webb had done. Sauer indicated that focus must

be on the importance of the landscape to humanity and its sudden transformation. Furthermore,

interrelation between cultures and landscapes had occurred.27 Sauer’s interpretation of the human-

environmental relationship, as articulated in his dominant works, was representative of the ongoing

alteration that occurred as scholars began to interpret the human relationship to the environment as

one of vast interconnectivity; he saw nature as active, rather than passive.

24 Sauer, Land and Life, 6.25 Ibid., 7.26 Sauer, Land and Life, 51. 27 Ibid., 349.

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More influential than Webb and Sauer in the amalgamation of geography and history was

the work of a number of several French historians. Most especially, Lucien Febvre and Marc

Bloch, who founded the journal Annales d’histoire economique et sociale, argued for the study

of history within geography and other theoretically-grounded disciplines, just as Marsh,

Turner, Sauer had.28 Both Febvre and Bloch were inspired by another French intellectual, Vidal de

la Blache, whose experimentation and research stressed the interaction of people and nature in the

transformation and settlement of landscapes. Similar to Sauer, Febvre and Bloch rejected

environmental determinism. According to Febvre, “geography was the key to understanding human

history, but I did not explain everything. There is some geography in a wheat field, but a wheat field

is not a geographical fact.”29 In other words, a field of wheat was also the product of a farmer, seeds,

and the implements and techniques of cultivation, forces exerted by cultural history. The aim of

Febvre and Bloch was to retreat from the action of politics to a history in which all change is

slow, repetitive, and an ever-recurring cycle.30 Thus, like Sauer, Febvre and Bloch recognized the

interconnectivity of humanity and the natural world.

Webb, Sauer, Febvre and Bloch, having been influenced by environmental historians and

scholars of the past, embedded human history into the context of the natural world. However, their

work examined deeper this interpretation of an active nature, interconnected to humanity, than the

esteemed Marsh and Turner. This profound concentration on geography enabled their

examination of the environment much more complex and profound than the studies and

interpretations of their predecessors. Although nature was not the only agent in human history,

as demography and climate were also active agents, it afforded the circumstances necessary to

facilitate certain human possibilities and impede others. In the end, Febvre and Bloch were

considered two environmental scholars who, among others, have come to interpret the human

28 Isenberg, 376.29 Lucien Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History (New York: Knopf, 1925), 46.30 Isenberg, 376.

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relationship to the environment as one of immense interconnectivity; no longer was nature viewed as

passive.

Following the scholars who had been influenced by geography, came a group of scholars

who began to focus on the ecology of the natural world; the central insight of ecology was that

everything is connected. One prominent scholar of this period was Aldo Leopold, a one-time

forest ranger and a professor of game at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was

considered the father of environmental ethics for his “land ethic” which proscribed actions that

harmed the beauty of ecological integrity of the environment.31 Much of Leopold’s career was

spent in the desert southwest, and it was there that he began to develop the principles that made him

the founder of wildlife management in the United States. Emphasizing interconnections in a

dynamic nature, rather than the static, enduring influences of landscape or climate that

scholars before them had argued for, Leopold and his followers conceived of nature as a

process rather than strictly a place; nature was no longer perceived as passive. However,

Leopold ultimately argued for an inherent order in nature that humans altered at their own peril.32

Leopold, and other scholars who shared similar perceptions regarding the human-nature

relationship, were influenced heavily by earlier scholars who had focused on pre-colonial land usage.

In the 1920s, anthropologist Frank Speck, for example, argued that Indians’ hunting techniques

functioned to conserve game supplies. Subsequently, the Depression-era scholarly search for

alternative economic models fueled this interpretation of pre-colonial land uses as sustainable

alternatives to capitalist resource exploitation.33 As a result, “functionalism” emerged as a

school of anthropology that conceived of the relationships between cultural groups and nature

as interconnected. In other words, they presumed the purpose of cultural proscriptions on land use

was the sustainability of the human relationship to nature. In 1935, British ecologist A. G. Tansley

31 Isenberg, 377.32 Ibid., 377.33 Frank Speck, “Mistassini Hunting Territories in the Labrador Peninsula,” American Anthropologist 25 (1923): 452.

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devised the term “ecosystem” to indicate the complex interconnections that functioned to

maintain natural stability.34 Other ecologists and wildlife biologists came to perceive the

necessitation of human management as superfluous; nature could take care of itself.

By the 1940s, Leopold, influenced by Tansley and another British ecologist Charles Elton,

articulated that nature was a self-regulating system. In his essay “Thinking Like a Mountain

(1949),” he accounts the disastrous effects of the elimination of wolves in the west. If wolves

were eradicated completely, as hunters and authorities in the United States were determined to

achieve by the 1950s, populations of grazing and browsing species would expand beyond the

ability of the environment to sustain them. Specifically, Leopold witnessed such travesty with the

overpopulation of deer in the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona and in the forests of Wisconsin. In

order to restore functional integrity to these landscapes, Leopold argued, the restoration of wolves

must occur.35 Like Speck’s Indians, the wolves functioned to conserve resources and maintain

environmental stability. Leopold argued that overstocking a landscape with cattle maximized the

productivity of the land, but at the risk of overgrazing and the disruption of natural regulating

processes. Wolves that preyed on the cattle were doing their “job of trimming the herd to fit the

range.” In other words, they maintained natural order inhibited by human endeavors.36

Leopold’s powerful words in his narrative, A Sand County Almanac (1949) have provided

his highest legacy. A unique book and classic work of conservation, A Sand County Almanac

contained outspoken arguments with a highly ethical regard for America’s relationship to the

land. Leopold explicitly recognized that the human community needed to extend its boundaries to

include “soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”37 The first part of the book

34 Isenberg, 378.35 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 129. 36 Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 132.37 Bill McKibben, ed. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2008), 265.

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traces the transformation that occurred in the Wisconsin countryside during a year. The second

section is a gathering of informal pieces that Leopold wrote over a 40-year period as he traveled

around the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere. In

the last section, Leopold addressed the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation,

including the nature of “sportsmanship” in American and the ethical call to love and respect the

land.38 In the end, Leopold was representative of the transformation that occurred as scholars began

to interpret the human relationship to the environment as one in which human action had a

detrimental impact on nature.

Following Leopold and his followers, environmental historian David Worster emerged. The

chief intellectual proponent of Leopold’s interpretation of the human-nature relationship, Worster

has helped bring humanity’s interaction with nature to the forefront of historical thinking. He

argued, in The Wealth of Nature (1993), that “nature constitutes a different and greater kind of

order than anything that we, acting as one species alone, can create.”39 According to this view, a

natural disaster such as the southern plains dust bowl of the 1930s was not a climate abnormality but

a reminder, like Leopold’s Kaibab deer eruption, of the “imperative of recognizing and

accommodating to the order of nature.”40 In Worster’s writings, the western past emerged not as

a march of Manifest Destiny, but as an unfolding relationship between man and nature, and

the forging of a multicultural society. In Under Western Skies (1992), Worster compellingly

wrote of the changing relationship between the land, Native Americans, and the descendants of

Europe through the use of fascinating case studies, stating that often times, nature wins the

struggle. He wrote, “Human domination over nature is quite simply an illusion, a passing dream by a

38 Leopold, Sand County Almanac, xvi.39 David Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 183. 40 Isenberg, 379.

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naïve species. It is an illusion that has cost us so much, ensnared us in our own designs…”41 To

Worster, the interconnectivity of the human-nature relationship must be considered in relation to the

maintenance of natural order.

Worster, having also been influenced by Karl Marx, argued in his book Dust Bowl (1979),

that the root of the ecological catastrophe in the southern plains was the capitalist view that

“nature must be seen as capital. A business culture attaches no other value to nature than this;

the nonhuman world is de-sanctified and de-mystified as a consequence.”42 Influenced by

Leopold’s “land ethic,” Worster called for a spiritual regard for nature, in conjunction to a

communitarian social organization, to restore the natural order that existed prior to capitalist

degradation. In the end, Worster, having been influenced by Leopold and the “functionalists” who

recognized the interconnectedness of the human-nature relationship, stands as an ecologist and

environmental historian representative of the transformation that occurred over time as scholars

began to interpret the human relationship to the environment as one of immense interconnectivity.

Like ecologists who had come before him, Worster interpreted the environment as an active, rather

than passive natural world.

By the 1950s, ecologists and environmental historians began to focus on the influence of

human and natural populations on the world; concern for global population growth occurred. Unlike

Leopold and scholars of the like, they emphasized the unpredictability and uncontrollability of

nature through the study of population fluctuations among plant and animal species. One of the

first scholars of this interpretation of nature was Hans Zinsser, whose Rats, Lice, and History

(1935) argued that the determinant of human history was the non-human carriers of infectious

diseases; nature.43 Another popular scholar was William McNeill, who’s Plagues and Peoples

41 David Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 42 Isenberg, 379.43 Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (Boston,1935).

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(1976) also professed that disease, rather than humans, impacted history. He equated the decline

of ancient empires in the Mediterranean, India, and China, the Black Death, and the depopulation of

the Americas after Columbus to nature-induced disease. According to McNeill, “we all want human

experience to make sense, and historians cater to this universal demand by emphasizing elements in

the past that are calculable, definable, and, often, controllable as well.”44 Although both Zinsser and

McNeill took a variable approach to that of Leopold and scholars of the like, they too, recognized the

interconnectivity of the human-nature relationship.

In order to comprehend disease, McNeill and other scholars utilized models from

environmental scientists. During this time, the concept of biological “niche” became relevant.

According to Elton, an influencer of Leopold, “an animal population tended to expand until it

reached the limit of its environment to sustain it.” As Leopold argued conservation of predators

would keep populations in check, McNeill and others believed certain kinds of diseases aided in

keeping the human population in check. By second half of the 20th century, scholars determined

that industrialization and medical advancement had eliminated the poverty and disease that

inhibited human population growth. Scholars feared that vaccines had rendered the concept of

biological “niche” irrelevant, or had transformed the entire planet into the human niche.45 In other

words, there was concern among environmental scholars, that nature had been neglected. With this

concern, came the realization that the relationship between humans and the natural world was

interrelated.

Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University population biologist, argued in The Population

Bomb (1968) that human population growth would inevitably result in the exhaustion of

natural resources. Thus, people needed to manage and control the populations of both themselves

and wildlife.46 As a result, historians and ecologists began to integrate the study of niches and

44 William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1976), 4.45 Isenberg, 380.46 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968), 15.

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population with the history of human colonization and expansion. Historian Alfred Crosby

made the most compelling argument regarding the role of ecological invasions in history in his

two majorly significant works The Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism: the

Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986). Both works asserted that “Europeans possessed

irresistible ecological advantages when they colonized temperate regions of the world: Australia,

New Zealand, North America, and the southern cone of South America.” Europeans’ “portmanteau

biota” of diseases, animals, and plants overwhelmed indigenous human, animal, and plant species

which had not previously been exposed to them. Consequently, they had no means to resist human

populations.47

Nature, according to McNeill, Crosby, and other scholars of the like, was unpredictable and

unquestionably in control. According to Crosby, “Europeans were seldom masters of the biological

changes they triggered. They benefited from the great majority of these changes, but benefit or not,

their role was less often a matter of judgment and choice than of being downstream of a bursting

dam.”48 Crosby’s use of metaphorical thinking illustrated both the possibilities and the drawbacks of

the use of biological “niche,” population, and ecological invasion in order to understand the human-

nature relationship. Scholars of this school of thought interpreted nature to be dynamic, but

deterministic, similar to Webb’s views. To them, human existence was deeply biological; human

judgment and choice did not matter. In the end, scholars of this period were representative of the

transformation that occurred as historians began to view the relationship between humans and nature

as one of immense interconnectivity.

Most influential in the wilderness interpretation of nature was environmental historian

Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, a work that sought to define “wilderness”

and its relationship to the American mind. According to Nash, “there is no specific material

47 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).48 Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 192.

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object that is wilderness. The term designates a quality that produces a certain mood or feeling

in a given individual and, as a consequence, may be assigned by that person to a specific place.”

As a result, a universally acceptable definition of wilderness is elusive.49 Significantly, Nash argued

that a basic fear of wilderness, a legacy of the Dark Ages and Puritanism, enlivened Americans to

raze forests and destroy wildlife in the struggle to substitute them with farms and domesticated

animals. Like Turner, Nash was influenced by observations of the near-exhaustion of wilderness by

the end of the 19th century. Likewise, Nash maintained that Americans’ fears of wilderness were

quickly replaced by an anxiety that they had become overly “mechanized, industrialized, and

urbanized.”50 Subsequently, preservation was initiated with the establishment of the National Park

Service and with the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, which Nash triumphed over, as for the

first time “wilderness” was concretely defined. In the end, Nash understood the vast interconnectivity

between humans and the environment.

Environmental historians working in the last two decades, having been heavily influenced by

scholars of the past, made explicit the interaction between humanity and the non-human natural

environment. However, most ascribe to neither environmental nor cultural determinism.

Similarly, modern scholars do not regard environments or cultures as static. Rather, environments,

absent from human influence, are liable to change. Likewise, cultures, in relation to nature, are

equally dynamic. Furthermore, environmental scholars today have chosen to integrate

considerations of class, ethnicity, and gender into their work, particularly as it relates to

America’s capitalistic society, into their study and interpretation of the human-nature

relationship. Ultimately, modern environmental historians, while deeply examining the

interpretations of scholars before them, must determine whether environmental change is the

consequence of human action, natural origin, both. As a result, reconsideration of many

49 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 1.50 Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4.

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assumptions concerning the relationship between humanity and the natural world has

occurred. Ultimately, scholars, despite having completely equivalent perceptions, they have

come to interpret the human relationship to the environment as one of immense

interconnectivity.

To conclude, there has been considerable controversy concerning the relationship between

humans and the natural world. It is helpful to deeply explore the deep origins of environmental

history in order to fully comprehend this debate. Because environmental history is a particularly new

field of study, research is limited. Nonetheless, throughout environmental history, it has firmly been

perceived that nature is cyclical, harmonious, and passive, while human history is linear, dynamic,

and active. In other words, it has been believed that nature is something to be conquered by

humanity. As time has progressed, scientific evidence has revealed that nature may be dynamic,

demanding individuals to recognize nature as active, rather than passive. Nature acted in response to

human action, but also impacted humanity. However, historical understanding of the relationship

between humanity and nature has evolved in multidimensional approaches that have both precluded

and recognized nature as dynamic. Further examination has revealed, that overtime, historians have

come to interpret the human relationship to the environment as one of immense interconnectivity.

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