J. Donald Hughes answers his book's title question thus: environmental history 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 the changes brought by time’. It is the most comprehensive approach to history, since all human events occur in relationship with the natural environment. Hughes sees it as an interpretive tool for every other form of history.
Environmental historians work within three broad areas. They examine the influence of environmental factors on human history; the ways in which human attitudes to nature motivate behaviour affecting the environment, and the ways in which human impact on the environment rebounds on the society making that impact. Hughes shows that the themes of environmental history can be identified as far back as Herodotus, and he surveys, with necessary but tantalising brevity, more than two millennia of forerunners of today's environmental historians. However, the notes are impressively detailed, making this compact book an essential reference source.
By its very nature, environmental history is inter-disciplinary. Geographers have written on the relationship between culture and environment; ecologists have shown how humanity depends for survival on a stable biotic community; anthropologists have studied how societies survive or collapse according to their use of natural resources; philosophers can illuminate the effects of religious beliefs on a civilisation's treatment of nature.
Since the environment consists of every inter-related aspect of the physical world, some brave spirits, including the author himself, have tackled global history. Their works are often ‘declensionist’ narratives, charting environmental despoliation under the impact of population growth and urbanisation. Other writers have taken a global perspective on specific topics such as forests or imperialism.
Hughes is explicit about one central aspect of environmental history: it is an academic discipline and first flourished in the United States of America, whose scholars still dominate the field. (United Kingdom readers will note that the British contribution to environmental history is dealt with in one page and that there is no reference to such major works as Edward Hyams's Soil and Civilization or The Rape of the Earth by G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte). The book concludes with a chapter of guidance for new practitioners, recommending examples to follow, resources to use and fresh themes worth investigating, these last including biodiversity and exhaustion of energy resources.
Having field experience in conservation with the United States National Park and Forest Services, Hughes makes his own environmental concerns evident, particularly in a passage on economic development. He rejects the idea that commitment to ecology need conflict with scholarly integrity, and argues that environmental history offers a perspective on humanity's relationship to nature essential for effective policy-making. Given that there is ‘exponential growth’ in the study of environmental history, one fears that the subject's practical implications risk being lost in a welter of learned papers produced for the sake of career advancement. For Hughes's readable and informative introduction to assist such a process would be a regrettable piece of irony.
