The Promise of Global Environmental History
Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: This article offers a brief overview of the field of environmental history with special attention to its potential for global research projects.Section I offers a definition of environmental history and describes how historians first began to reimagine the relationship between nature and society following the -cultural turn‖ of the 1970s and 1980s.Section II outlines some of the intersections between environmental history and the developing field of Big History, and suggests ways in which the two fields may differ.Section III suggests some of the ways in which social, cultural, and economic historians might benefit from the inclusion of an environmental perspective in their work.Finally, section IV explains how the broader temporal and geographical framework necessary to understand the nonhuman world can be particularly useful to world historians. key wordsEnvironmental history, Big History nvironmental history, defined broadly as the story of the relationships between humans and their nonhuman surroundings, finds a place in almost every narrative of the past.The material world, specifically those nonhuman things generally categorized as -the environment‖ (land, plants, animals, weather, etc.), plays a crucial and often-overlooked role in historical outcomes.Unraveling the interactions between humans and nonhumans can illuminate connections between widely varied scales of analysis, linking local, regional, and global trends and events in surprising ways.The environment can thus serve as a tool for making other kinds of history better, enriching networks of connections in space and time by revealing new factors in causal chains and previously ignored repercussions of human actions.At times, it can offer entirely new interpretations of historical events and trends.As such, attention to the environment is not simply an additional lens through which a historical moment may be viewed; rather, it is in many cases a crucial component that can alter the historian's overall conclusions.
Author: Sarah R. Hamilton
Institution: University of Michigan
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2154055607