Issue 15.2 - April 2010
THIS MONTH marks the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, so I am delighted that Adam Rome has given us an article titled "The Genius of Earth Day." The term "day," as he mentions in his introductory remarks, is in fact a well-entrenched inaccuracy: teach-ins, rallies, and demonstrations began in early March and continued into May, even if April 22, 1970, is the date that is commemorated in history. Not only was Earth Day not a single-day event, it had no single rallying cry or constituency. Millions of Americans took part, inside churches, on park lawns, and in front of government buildings, collectively involving at least as many Americans as the other great movements—civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, and women's rights—of the same era. As Rome notes, Earth Day accomplished what Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin (the most prominent progenitor) hoped it would: it educated many Americans for the first time in the need to protect and preserve the global environment and helped to launch the modern environmental movement.
Cemeteries might seem like an odd topic for an environmental historian, but as Aaron Sachs demonstrates in "American Arcadia: Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Nineteenth-Century Landscape Tradition," they are in fact an integral part of the built environment, much like public parks and open spaces. Mount Auburn was an innovation in early nineteenth-century America: it was the creation of Boston horticulturalists, who understood that a cemetery could be envisaged as a garden spot for plants and people, not just a dumping ground for corpses. "The ultimate magic of the cemetery lay in its ability to weave together seemingly opposing elements, to preserve wildness in the midst of the artificial city, to blend life and death, time and space, female emotiveness and male restraint," Sachs notes. "It celebrates commemoration, the humanization of nature, but it also celebrates the naturalization of the human body."
A concentration camp might also seem like an odd setting for environmental history, but as Connie Chiang shows in "Imprisoned Nature: Toward an Environmental History of the World War II Japanese American Incarceration," the power of nature is precisely what Japanese Americans encountered most visibly during their forced stay inside America's wartime "detention centers." Many of the camps were located in remote regions of the American West, far removed from the landscape and vegetation that the detainees knew from their lives on the Pacific coast. There they learned to cope with the heat and cold, the wind and dust, and the aridity; to hike, fish, and camp in sparse and barren landscapes; and to cultivate gardens that allowed them to enjoy some of their favorite herbs and vegetables. Victory gardens in particular, Chiang argues, resonated well on both sides of the fence. These gardens "allowed Japanese Americans to reject their exclusion from the American polity and join the ranks of nearly 20 million other Americans who alleviated pressure on the national food supply by growing their own produce." For the War Relocation Authority, "the gardens suggested that patriotism was thriving among the prisoners, despite their incarceration. Drawing upon a long tradition of using gardens and nature study to cultivate civic values, camp officials also incorporated victory gardens into the school curriculum, as was the case at Minidoka, to teach agriculture, geography, mathematics, and English while affirming the promotion of democratic ideals and assimilation among Japanese American children."
Karl Appuhn's "Ecologies of Beef: Eighteenth-Century Epizootics and the Environmental History of Early Modern Europe" takes us into the world of Venice and the all too frequent bovine epidemics that beset this city and its hinterlands. Venice was the economic center of a vast commercial empire and thus part of a larger "Eurasian exchange" of plants, animals, and diseases that encompassed the Mediterranean, the African coastline, and central Europe. As Appuhn notes, historians have long been aware of the agricultural revolution that impacted the heart of Europe, but have paid far too little attention to the disease exchanges that accompanied that revolution. In this essay, he traces the emergence of a large-scale beef industry from the Hungarian plains (with their abundant grazing grounds) to the Italian peninsula (with its abundant meat markets)—and also the upsurge in the cattle diseases that accompanied these trade routes. He argues that these outbreaks of bovine epizootics were symptomatic of a larger shift in European agricultural and nutritional habits; that this larger agricultural revolution had a profound (and largely ignored) impact on vast swathes of the European continent; and that this impact was nearly as profound within Europe as the earlier and more famous "Columbian exchange" with the New World.
In "Sustainability and the Western Civilization Curriculum: Reflections on Cross-pollinating the Humanities and Environmental History," Wending Boring looks at a group of standard Western civilization textbooks. She argues that authors have incorporated the research of postcolonial, feminist, and ethnic scholars into Western civilization curricula over the past decade or so, but have not yet engaged and incorporated the findings of environmental historians. Using her own experience teaching an undergraduate course on "Western Civilization and Sustainability: Beginnings to 1600" as her starting point, she argues in favor of a multilayered approach to teaching these large survey courses, highlighting the environmental dimension by putting the theme of "sustainability" at the center of the lectures and readings.
Finally, it was a great pleasure to interview Donald Hughes for this issue. He has few (if any!) peers when it comes to exploring the field of environmental history in its totality, from the ancient world to the present, from continent to continent, from topic to topic.
Mark Cioc
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