Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

At the 1993 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), William Cronon delivered a presidential address that explored the tensions between environmental history and environmental politics. The address came at a pivotal moment: many books published in the 1970s and early 1980s had applauded the past deeds of nature advocates, but by the 1990s, few environmental historians told tidy stories of ecological villains versus ecological saints. Rather, many de-emphasized environmentalists to explain changes to natural environments as complex stories of interaction between people and nature, in which nature was as likely as humanity to contribute to change. The resulting tensions between historians and activists were particularly poignant, Cronon argued, because “like the several other ‘new’ histories born or reenergized in the wake of the 1960s – women's history, African-American history, Chicano history, gay and lesbian history, and the new social history generally – environmental history has always had an undeniable relation to the political movement that helped spawn it.” While Cronon powerfully asserted the novelty of environmental history, he was careful to allow that the field may not have been born of the political tumult of the 1960s so much as “reenergized” by it. Cronon's qualification was necessary, if for no better reason than moments before he stepped ... log in or subscribe to read full text