Context for environmental history
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Contents
A setting
I started writing this piece in a valley of the English Lake District, in the autumn. The region is held to be a place of considerable beauty and any action to change its landscapes or its environments is met with fierce opposition. Until the 18th century it was shunned as bleak and frightening like most other mountain ranges. But here in particular the poetry of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) helped along a change in heart and his name has become indissolubly intertwined with the place in all its aspects, to the point where the scene is immortal and 'apparelled in celestial light'. But in the 14,000 years of time encompassed in the view of this valley, much has changed. Nature has provided a skim of glacial debris as a result of a last kick of the ice at the end of the Pleistocene, between 13-11.5 thousand years ago. Since then climatic changes have waxed and waned, within a general regime of the cool and the very wet (Borrowdale gets 3300 mm/yr of rain) and the lakes themselves have altered shape as, inevitably, they have begun to fill in.
Boardale in the English Lake District, October 2007. Most of this landscape has been affected by human activity: the mountain slopes lost a lot of soil when they were deforested by Norse settlers; the wetland in the valley is subject to artificial drainage; the patch of trees on the far hillside owes much to ideas about amenity planting; the stone walls reflect periods of enclosure and the bracken is one consequence of high sheep densities, since they will not eat it. (Source: Author) Beyond these processes, the human hand has produced many metamorphoses. Norse cattle farmers cleared deciduous trees from the slopes, on which location they have never been replaced; common pastures were replaced by individual holdings demarcated by the characteristic stone walls of the region; the density of sheep determined the mix of species on the hillsides and in particular helped spread the ubiquitous bracken fern that is so beautifully colored in autumn but so useless as fodder. The amenity movement led to the planting of stands of trees, often dominated by non-native conifers. The air of a rural idyll given by the picture is interrupted by events like the Foot-and-Mouth Disease epidemic of 2001 which led to a great slaughter of livestock here on the northern fringes of the district, by sporadic incursions of very low-flying military jets and the almost constant ground bass (in clear weather) of transatlantic aircraft making for the polar route westwards.
So here we have encapsulated two of the main themes of environmental history:
- The story of the interactions of humans and nature through time. Sometimes one is dominant (there is not much to be done about slope angles in the Lake District), sometimes the other: the profitability of sheep farming hereabouts is tied into pan-European economics and politics. This category is dominated by 'facts'
- The search for underlying causes. All sorts of phenomena are possible, both natural and human-derived and all spatial scales, from the local through the [[region]al] to national and indeed international levels. There may even be local instances of universals, like world events, or the outworkings of 'human nature'. This category is dominated by thought-processes, including 'values'.
A story
A broader setting for environmental history needs a widely-applicable device for organizing our facts and thoughts. Here, I suggest that human access to energy resources and the ability to apply them through the media of technology provides a useful layout. Like all such classifications, the boundaries are not watertight and all sorts of exceptions are possible. Yet, the highly-abstract-but-quite-visibly-practical (there must be a single word somewhere in the language!) division adopted here gives us a comprehensible structure for something like 12,000 years of human and natural history.
Foraging societies: Also known as hunter-gatherers and once 100% of all humans; beginning to disappear with the rise of settled agriculture and pastoralism but slow to vanish altogether and a few groups are still extant though much modified. In the purest form, access only to solar energy, mostly as recently captured plant and animal tissue.
Agriculture: Cultivation of domesticates from about 10,000 years ago onwards involving much modification of local environments and different social structures from their predecessors. Solar energy still the basis, though capture of secondary forms as e.g., windmills and water-mills is added to photosynthesis.
Industry: After c AD 1750, the use of fossil fuels to subsidize all forms of production becomes common in a core of nations, with ripple effects to many others, including a peak of colonials. More goods, more consumption, more wastes and more people all increase the range and throughput of the earth’s materials.
Post-industrial societies: Using AD 1950 as a datum line, the shift to electricity and oil as the arteries of ‘western’ societies and the increasing efficiency of consumer-oriented production is paramount. The explosion of communication in digital and miniaturized form has social consequences whose eventual impact on now globalized planetary flows of energy and materials is still to be measured.
None of these periods is ‘watertight’. There are still some farmers little reached by the industrial transformations of the 19th century and some who are consciously abandoning it. The traits of the communications-rich nations like the USA and Japan are less well developed in Upper Volta or Niger, though the mobile phone is changing that. Similarly, the ways in which agriculture brings about environmental change in its locality may be the same in 8000 BC as in 1980 AD; nevertheless the context may now depend upon decisions now taken thousands of kilometers away by men (sic) in suits.
Foragers: The term 'foragers', reasonably describes people who 'collect' food from the wild rather than produce it from domesticated species. A basic lineament of foraging is that people move to where the resources are found and thus the environment in all its manifestations is important in their lives. Such movements are made easier if there are few material possessions to be transported and if only one baby has to be carried. All movement is an energy cost, however, unless food is encountered en route. This points up the core of gatherer-hunters' existence (as indeed at root our own), which is to maintain enough energy intake to survive and to reproduce.
The energy looked for is mostly this year's' solar energy in chemical form (seeds, nuts, fruit, animal tissue), though some previous years' capture such as older animals and the roots of perennial plants will also be sought out. The gathering of plant foods will likely give a net energy return of 10-20 times at the camp gateway but will be quite trustworthy. Providing that populations are low, so that resources are not over-used, there can be an energy surplus that leaves time for dancing, gambling and sleep. Some energy surpluses go into periods of rapid population growth, though these seem often to have been checked by disease outbreaks. Between 12-10 ky comes a significant symbol of altered human-environment relations: the domestication of the dog.
'The first great force employed by man' was the title of the discussion of fire by the anthropologist Omer Stewart in the seminal volume Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth in 1956. Its possession was essential for moving out of the tropics, to the point of occupying periglacial environments like those of the Late Pleistocene mammoth hunters. Even more important is the ability to use fire as a tool at landscape scale. This produces (a) one special property of fire: that it creates its own fuel supply as it progresses, by heating up otherwise non-flammable materials, and (b) one general property of resource exploitation: that once a regime is established then going back to an earlier stage often constitutes exceptional behavior. Given the first quality, it is scarcely surprising that most of the world's vegetation types can be set alight at one season or another. Given the second, some human groups came to depend upon fire, so knowledge about its management had to be preserved in the culture.
The role of fire goes even further. A regularly fired landscape acquires cultural significance since it is first of all claimed for a human group by being burned over: this is an act of possession-taking in the same way as later people might erect fencing. Spatially isolated fires might also mark out territorial bounds: we hunt here. Not surprisingly the landscape becomes symbolically valuable and the locus of myths, possibly dealing with the origins of the group or even of humankind. The potency of the material force is then interwoven with the authority of human custom and produces a predictable biota. The cultural relations of fire are well documented for Australia. For the aborigines land with vegetation 'litter' on it was dirty – even disgraceful – and needed to be cleared up. Fire made the world habitable since it was the subject of predictive knowledge, but it also rendered it understandable, via a corpus of legends and myths, including those of the foundational Dreamtime. The spiritual world of the aborigine would collapse without it.
Another example is found in the moist evergreen forests of tropical Latin America, including Amazonia. After many centuries of occupation by fire-using gatherer-hunters followed by horticulture and farming, the possibility exists that the Amazon of today's environmental concern is mostly a product of 300 years of depopulation since European incursions, for by 1650 the population had been reduced by 90 per cent and not many Europeans had penetrated by 1750. Alexander von Humboldt's early nineteenth-century warning that not every tropical forest was primeval vegetation has been fully borne out.
One material underpinning of the gatherer-hunters' tenure of the earth was a low population density. The estimated absolute number of people on the eve of agriculture was between 0.8–9.0 million. One consequence was a spotty overall degree of modification of the earth's surface through time and space: there are many regional differences and the hunter-gatherer stage was not necessarily one of taking the usufruct without altering the natural world at all. For a start, there was no reason not to alter the world since none of it was separate from the human members of it. However much the stability of the hybrid ecosystems was subject to regional variation, it seems likely that many of the foraging societies of the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene, up to about 8000 BC, would have qualified for the label of 'sustainable', using today's criteria.
Agriculture
The transfer from dependence upon food collection to food production, from the usufruct of the wild to the reproduction of the tamed, has misty beginnings with no sense of only one place nor any one time, for we know of early agriculture only when it becomes archaeologically visible. By about 8000 BC there were some areas of the world that had shifted irrevocably to the new life: the hill lands of south-west Asia, moving downwards to the great river valleys of that region, together with south and east Asia where much land now below sea-level had added to the space for human colonization. In 10,000 BC. the world population was perhaps 4 million but in AD 1750 (an arbitrary but not unrealistic date for the onset of industrialization) it may have been 720 million and solar-based agriculture was the economic foundation for that growth. If there are more people in less space then we have the ingredients of a more intensive land cover system, where 'intensive' means a higher ratio of human directed energy compared with natural flows; overall there was much more human food in the world under agriculture than with hunters and gatherers It follows that the likelihood of environmental manipulation is greater. This apparent ecological simplicity is bound up with immense changes in culture, reaching into depths of human cognition of the world with very far-reaching consequences. The first generalization of environmental significance is that humans create new genotypes. The key to genetic modification is the replacement of natural selection by cultural selection, and the reproduction of the chosen species must be controllable. In addition, farming creates new ecosystems. A permanent field in which a crop or crops are grown year on year (or more frequently) with or without a fallow period alters most of the characteristics of the soil and water regime of the field and adjacent area and in turn may require further selection among the genes of the selected crop plant. If fertility levels were maintained in agrarian systems with permanent fields then it was often possible to produce a surplus. This freed people from growing their own food and so made possible many other kinds of land uses, as well as having consequences for social stratification. Thus societies had gardens for pleasure, hunting parks, managed woodland, and land devoted to high-status but inessential crops, (e.g., for dyes, exotic fruits and drugs) and, above all, cities. Though most obvious in e.g., 18th century Europe, the antecedents can be found in most of the ancient riverine civilizations of Egypt, China and India.
The list of new ways of altering the natural world is very long but more interesting than mere chronologies of inventions and their dissemination is the effect of technology on attitudes to the natural world. Writing, for example, is more than a set of graphic techniques, for it always enforced a separation of one entity from another in a way not necessary in oral communication; this led to the analytic thinking encouraged by the list, the formula and the table. This activity, it has been argued, is a great way of separating the objects of the world into those which belong to humans and those which are definitely ‘other’. Technology as both a social force and a social product can be seen in the example of the mechanical clock which made possible the tighter co-ordination of more complex communities; it could also be a mechanical representation of the universe or an automaton for entertainment but especially a celebration of human mastery over nature. In Europe, formulations of a religious nature (which in effect desacralized the non-human world) gave way to the individualism of the Enlightenment which inevitably put the thinking animal at the head of any hierarchy. More recently, the Euro-American ideas have put more emphasis on aesthetic considerations which can bring together landscape change (as in gardening on a large scale), poetry and painting. Out of this cames the human tendency to make dualisms and so the notion of the environment being part of (if indeed not all of) ‘the other’ allows it to be changed whenever a human demand is discerned, a process fraught with consequences for the whole world once industrialization drew all places the more together.
Agriculture was by and large a material success. The energetic underpinning was that hunter-gatherers could maintain densities of 0.01–1.0 people/km2, whereas with shifting cultivation 10–80 people/km2 was possible and sedentary farming garnered enough solar power to underpin 100–1000 people/km2. Given a long reach of time and some intensively local inputs, the impact on many systems was profound and irreversible. The outcomes of the agricultural era are therefore both physical (and were emphasized by those many millennia that it has occupied) and mental, disseminated above all by the spread of writing in its various forms.
Industry
Any treatment of industrialization must give prominence to the development of fossil fuels as an energy source. But energy for human use has always to be channeled, whether via plant and animal tissue, or inside a vast concrete and steel sphere or, putatively, within a magnetic field that is independent of temperature. In the cases of coal, oil and natural gas the critical material which formed the conduit depended upon iron, increasingly in the form of steel. In worldwide terms, the period 1750-1950 saw the possibilities of exploiting fossil hydrocarbons expanding first into the ‘western’ world and thereafter taken to almost everywhere else. The key stage in the utility of an energy source like coal was steam: the knowledge of how to control water vapor under pressure was a central piece of science and technology for the whole planet. The ecology of the first waves of industrialism clusters around the processes of extraction (of mineral ores, coal and oil), of processing in factories, and in applying the goods in social and environmental fields. Each stage may need transport and each will have secondary effects: early coalfields not immediately near iron ore evoked canals to transport the coal, for example; the wastes from alkali plants poisoned fish in [[river]s] many kilometers downstream; coal mines had a strong impact on forestry practices because of the demand for timber underground; every trend combined to foster the growth of towns and cities.
The natural world was still there: the largest-scale disequilibrium was a global downturn in climate that is usually labeled the ‘Little Ice Age’ (LIA). This had been in effect since about 1550 but its worst phase was the first half of the 19th century, with harshest winters recorded in the northern hemisphere. The onset was not sudden and there were anomalies (positive and negative) in both time and space but it was probably the coldest interval since the last glacial period. Its end was however relatively abrupt, for soon after 1900 [[temperature]s] started the rise into today’s values. By contrast, climatic cooling was certainly a result of the eruption of Tambora, Indonesia, in 1815.
The relations of science, technology, culture and environment are complicated. But nobody can deny the transformations in all of them that came with the industrialization of the 19th and 20th centuries. In some ways, the new energy sources presented a crisis of abundance which echoed Charles Darwin’s contemplation in 1859 of the progress of life-forms from ‘famine and death’ to the production of the higher animals: “There is grandeur in this view of life”. In keeping with this expansive attitude there came about an acceleration of speed and accessibility that rippled out to very far corners of the world. The connections to environment are at one level obvious: ‘whatever we want, we want it now’ might have been chanted in the streets had that been the customary cry of demonstrators. It was more subtle as well: in 1834 the Statistical Society of London averred that the ‘first indispensable body of information’ was ‘physical geography’ and, of course, ‘the means of its modification’. This outlook was applied to many of the colonies, which supplied not only vast new territories for economic exploitation but new mental vistas as well.
This world is still here. Many people in the world have yet to experience the abundance of goods and services (and hence have access to the levels of energy throughput) that industrialization has brought to the richer [[region]s]. It is here too in the habits of thought engendered by two hundred years of expansion of production and consumption: there is an expectation that there can be more of everything, that any limits are only temporary and also that solutions to problems are most likely to be found in science and technology.
Post-industrial time
This category is normally used of societies in which the actual manufacture of goods carries less monetary value than that of services and dates from 1950 onwards. The goods are still used but they are made in low and middle income places. The ingredients of post-industrial lifeways seem to be (a) the transition from coal to oil as the main fossil fuel in use, with natural gas increasing rapidly in popularity and the addition of substantial nuclear power in a few countries; (b) an economy in which services (financial, educational, medical) generate more income and provide more employment than manufacturing; (c) movement is ever more possible, including cheap air travel and also access to private means of transport, and (d) more leisure time, coupled with higher disposable incomes and better health. All of them lead to yet another set of environmental interactions.
The numbers of humans are more than ever a fundamental element in environmental relations. In 1950, the annual growth rate was 1.5 per cent and between 1962-72 rose to just above 2.0 per cent before dropping back after 2000 to about 1.2 per cent, a doubling time of 61 years. This worldwide figure conceals the kind of variation that shows some African countries to have rates of 3 per cent, meaning a doubling time of 20 years. However, two-fifths of the world’s population now lives in countries with a replacement level of population growth. One element in this growth has been increased life expectancy: worldwide in 1950 this was 56 years but this had become 66 years by 2000, and over 60 even in Low Income Economies. Again, this hides substantial differences since expectation is falling in countries like Botswana and Zimbabwe. The reason is of course the incidence of HIV/AIDS: worldwide, two million people died of it in 1998, with 90 per cent of the deaths in sub-Saharan Africa; in Botswana and Zimbabwe, about one quarter of the adults were infected.
Against the background of the Little Ice Age (LIA) and its end in about 1900, the 20th century was a very warm period: as the IPCC puts it, “An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system.” A brief summary might focus on an increase in global average surface temperature by about 0.6°±0.2°C over the 20th century. with a particular upward kick in 1995-2000. So 1990 becomes the warmest year and the 1990s the warmest decade since 1861, i.e., during the period of reliable instrumental records. Therefore the increase in temperature in the northern hemisphere in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century in the last 1000 years. Snow cover and ice extent have decreased, with snow cover having fallen by about 10 per cent since the late 1960s, mountain glaciers have retreated and the sea-ice of the Arctic has shrunk in extent by about 10-15 per cent since the 1950s and by 40 per cent in thickness. Warming and melting has led to an average worldwide sea-level rise of 0.1-0.2 meters in the 20th century and the heat content of the oceans has also risen. Extreme high precipitation and temperature events have gone up in frequency and droughts have been worse and more frequent in parts of Asia and Africa. El Niño events become more frequent, persistent and intense since the mid-1970s. There have also been poleward and altitudinal shifts in the ranges of some plants and animals, declines in the populations of some biota and the earlier flowering of plants, emergence of insects and egg-laying in birds. ‘Global dimming’ has recently been added to the list of atmospheric changes caused by emissions of soot, ash and dust.
It is easy to purvey a sense of doom. There is no doubt that technology is a boon to many and could well be so to many more. Yet there is a widespread feeling that it is now self-fueling and that no amount of social control will keep any check on what is feasible, and that what is feasible will in fact be used: the first cloning of cats in 2000 was a very minor step. That is to assent to technological determinism and would be a big step in the whole history of human-nature relationships.
Learning and understanding
Is there anything more to environmental history than 'one damn thing after another'? Apart from the instrumental progress of access to energy applied through technology, what long-term trends can be drawn out? I suggest that there are two processes which are visible in both the ecological and the cultural realms. The first is fragmentation. The moves towards individualism started in the Enlightenment are now a feature of every post-industrial society where the private is privileged over the public; the town meeting is superseded by the podcast. In the natural world, human actions break up ecosystems, leaving remnants here and there often protected by actual or legislative fences. So nature becomes one among many pieces of mosaics and not a felt flow through the humans who still depend upon it. The second is, of course, the opposite: coalescence. Ever since one group of foragers started trading with another, ideas, genes and materials have been shifted around. Now, there is instantaneous electronic transmission of capital, easy air travel and the tailoring of species to grow in many places away from their centers of origin. Beyond all, the gaseous composition of the atmosphere (Atmospheric composition and structure) is homogeneous: it averages the inputs globally rather than relating them to the producers. The human footprint at a particular place represents an outcome of the tension between those two trends, put into context by the most significant factor of all: human population growth.
Behind the cultural basis of fragmentation and coalescence there must lie deeper causes, many of which are beyond the knowledge-frame of most historians. The desire for possessions, the wish to control and the tendency to form hierarchies of value and power, can all be seen in the last 12,000 or so years. Their expression is variable and has been mediated through cultural forces like economics, migration, slavery and religion, to name but a few. The obvious link with the rest of this essay is via technology: the more energy a society can control, the more it can exercise hegemony over both fellow humans and nature..
Another window
I am finishing this in my workroom in Durham. The view is of the River Wear and from time to time I see the evanescent flash of a kingfisher's wing, in a momentary 'still point of the turning world' as T. S. Eliot phrased it. Its contrast with so much change makes a crux of the whole matter of the history of environmental modification. It is now seen as a problem for many parts of the world: human-driven climatic change occupies top billing but many other aspects of the levels of population and technology are also subject to intense scrutiny. The central question is usually, ‘is it sustainable’, though that concept is rarely defined in anything like instrumental terms. The light thrown by long-term inspections such as that presented here is not very bright but one observation can perhaps be made. In 8000 BC the hunters of the world would have been regarded by UNEP (had it existed) as a sustainable group; the same would have been said of solar-based agriculturalists in 1750 AD. Yet both are more or less gone: replaced by technological developments introduced in culturally submissive societies. Given the diversity and ubiquity of technologies in the present time, it seems likely that there will be a repetition of the same process. But history will, as before, be a poor guide to the actual outcome.
Though legislation may try, as in the designation of the Lake District as a National Park, to put a brake on change, there is rarely any intellectual justification for trying to halt a landscape or an environment at one moment in time. The range of knowledges (from the coldly scientific to the rawly emotional) is too great to make it acceptable. Likewise, the construction of an environmental history may reach for a span of material that daunts the scholar. The work becomes as much art as science and we hear an echo of that other great figure of the Lakeland landscape, the social and art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) that, 'fine art is that in which the hand, the head and the heart of man go together'.
