Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, L:2 (Herbst, 2019), 213–236.
Das 50. Jahr: Sonderaufsatz 5
Steven A. Epstein
Environmental History in the JIH, 1970–2020
Environmental history has been defined as the intersection be-
tween nature and culture, combining human societies and their
ecologies, and their different processes of change, um zu
illuminate their inextricable stories. Natural history was already a
venerable subject before modernity. In the nineteenth century, Es
became more scientific as the new disciplines like geology
acquired the capability of explaining subjects like the age of the
earth and the course of the recent ice ages. Hoffmann proposed
an alternative model in which nature and culture overlap to form
a joint field of human and social biophysical structures, the latter
being a hybridization of living and nonliving aspects of culture—
Zum Beispiel, farming. He also emphasizes that what we say about
environmental history (or anything else) appears in a culture of
language with its own rules. Somit, people bring to nature ideas
in part derived from it, which they in turn apply directly to nature
as they work to extract food and energy (unter anderem)
from it, thereby transforming nature to the extent that these efforts
result in sustainable or destructive processes. The types of ideas or
images that people derive from nature matters because many, Wenn
nicht alle, of them reflect what people want to find in nature to
justify their preconceptions, as well as what they declare to be
objective facts. Does nature teach any moral lessons that people
are willing to learn?1
Steven A. Epstein is Professor Emeritus of History, University of Kansas. He is the author of
The Medieval Discovery of Nature (New York, 2012); An Economic and Social History of Later
Medieval Europe, 1000–1500 (New York, 2009); Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human
Bondage in Italy (Ithaca, 2001); “Italy Revisited: The Encyclopedia,” Zeitschrift für Interdisziplinäre
Geschichte, XXXV (2005), 557–570.
© 2019 vom Massachusetts Institute of Technology und The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Geschichte, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01410
1 For a comprehensive analysis of many things, including ecology from a historical of per-
spective, see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York, 1994;
orig pub. 1977), 421–422; idem, Shrinking Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance
(New York, 2016); for the premodern story, Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore:
Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
214
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
These models about nature and culture may work best for
Europe and North America from the eighteenth-century Enlight-
enment forward but emphatically not for the rest of the planet in
Geschichte. At their best, these models show, Zum Beispiel, how sus-
tainability can become both a mythic cultural construct and an
experience in nature. For the period before modernity, we must
ask if environmental history morally benefits from a Cartesian
view of a pre-Cartesian world. Just as the “environment” and
“ecology” existed before the words were invented, the environ-
mental histories of past peoples and climates need not be written
in language that they would have recognized. Economists and
economic historians have contributed the concept of revealed pref-
erence, encouraging environmental historians to study what people
do as well as what they say. Contemporary crises have inevitably
driven research and writing in this vein from the California smog
and DDT of the 1960s to the present day. The JIH has recognized
the deep history of the environment while not neglecting current
concerns, but its interdisciplinary roots may at times miss impor-
tant influences from “exogenous” fields or systems of belief like
religion. Environmental history descends from environmentalism,
a system of beliefs with a long pedigree that at times resembles a
secular religion or a spiritual science.
Since antiquity, observers have not failed to notice subjects like
the role of climate and epidemics in human history, to name only
two of the most salient themes. Around 1900, scholars began to in-
tegrate questions and data to produce the first environmental histo-
Ries. No matter how flawed or irrelevant to contemporary concerns
these accounts may be, they remain a useful antidote to any pres-
entist biases. Bis in die 1970er Jahre, history had also emerged from the study
of past politics to incorporate new approaches drawing from the in-
sights of economics, Soziologie, gender studies, and other emerging
disciplines. “Environmental history” is a relatively recent label for an
(Berkeley, 1967). Richard C. Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Neu
York, 2014), 9–10. This book, by the dean of the field in medieval history, informs much of
my discussion. For one scholar’s approach to (and biases about) the subject of environmental
history driven by ideas about nature rather than research about it, see Epstein, The Medieval
Discovery of Nature (New York, 2012). Medieval European history—with ecological problems
to explore at its beginning and end; tree rings, pollen, and glaciers to investigate; and demo-
graphic disasters like the Plague of 1348 to analyze—has been fertile territory for fruitful work
in environmental history by both scientists and historians.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
| 215
older subject, and as usual, we should not mistake the absence of a
phrase for the non-existence of the subject. This context explains
how environmental history became an archetype—for its practi-
tioners, the archetype—for interdisciplinary studies relying on a basic
competence in scientific fields like climatology, epidemiology, Und
geology, not to mention traditional skills in the humanities for con-
structing narratives with people at their center. This competence,
Jedoch, extends primarily to literacy in the sciences, not the ability
to do their research. Scientists frequently work in teams whereas his-
torians traditionally work independently. Interdisciplinary work in
environmental history is a hybrid requiring scholars to assimilate
the best practices of both methodologies.
These generalities help to explain the synchronicity of Earth
Day and the JIH in 1970. By that year, recent developments in
Die Vereinigten Staaten, such as air pollution in California, worries
about the consequences of nuclear fallout and the use of pesticides,
and the conquest of polio had focused popular and scholarly atten-
tion on nature and culture. Both Earth Day’s history within the last
five decades and the increasing evidence for climate change have
received considerable attention. The interdisciplinary intentions
of the founders of the JIH encouraged collaboration among the
social sciences and humanities, but the door was wide open for sci-
entists to join in their debates. The purpose of this article is to sur-
vey the contents of the journal for the last fifty years to see how
environmental studies have fared in its pages, and to find patterns
of emphasis over time.2
This endeavor is inevitably impressionistic, encompassing any
article that could be remotely classified as environmental in focus.
The total submissions from which these articles derived are mostly
lost in time; it would take a large, and intrepid, team to uncover
patterns in submissions and, über alles, rejections to the journal. A
journal can be only as good as its submissions, at least partly deriv-
ing from the intellectual communities of the editors. Considering
book reviews is difficult because of the evolution of editorial
2 For the “prehistory” of Earth Day, see Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970
Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York, 2013), 9–56. The story
begins with Senator Gaylord Nelson’s call for a national teach-in in 1969. Nelson, with Susan
Campbell and Paul Wozniak, Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise (Madison, 2002), exam-
ines the first thirty years of the holiday, and the fiftieth anniversary will doubtless encourage
newer retrospectives.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
216
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
policies, and the frequency of review essays also varies by subject.
The scope of the JIH’s subject matter meant that only a tiny frac-
tion of even the best books could receive a review, but we can
might be able to glean from the books that the journal did not
review clues to its evolving view of environmental history.3
Endlich, the JIH has always been an English-language publica-
tion, though not limited to English-speaking parts of the world.
Trotzdem, the journal has rarely shown much interest in
reviewing books in other languages. Darüber hinaus, would-be authors
must be able to write in clear English (or find translators). Sogar
more importantly, they must target readers in the United States
who may know their work (but not necessarily in English) Und
are prepared to give them a hearing. How editorial boards are
composed (including attention to their language skills) and how
they recruit potential contributors, all influence a journal’s con-
tent. These stipulations, relevant to any American journal to one
degree or another, are especially important with respect to envi-
ronmental history because at first glance, American scholars appear
to have invented environmental history and to have led the way in
researching the subject. A reader of the JIH could easily come
away with that impression.4
Tatsächlich, Jedoch, the best general studies of environmental
history suggest that the initiative may have come from outside
Amerika. The existence of a Rachel Carson Center in Munich
is hardly an accident. Signs in the English-language literature sug-
gest that at least some of the impulse for this work may derive
from fundamental studies in continental journals. Scholars in the
field may know it, and the specialized journals in the “field,” like
Environmental History (founded in 1996), assume it. dennoch, Es
is a blind spot in the JIH worth noting. The American Society for
Environmental History, a typically nationalist enterprise founded in
1977, now runs the leading journal on the subject. More short-lived
journals—The Environmental History Review (1990–1995); the Forest
History Newsletter (1957–1974), which became the Journal of Forest
Geschichte (1974–1989); and the ephemeral Environmental Review
3 The reviews of books about environmental history merit a separate study. In brief, manche,
but by no means all, of the best works since 1970 have received a review in the JIH.
4 Another example from the field of medieval studies is Thomas Labbé, Les catastrophes
naturelles au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2017), an excellent work with a bibliography that reveals a
strong tradition in environmental history outside the non–English-speaking domain.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
| 217
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
(1976)—testify to urgent concerns, while also according promi-
nence to forestry, a premodern science, within the environmental
frame.5
Environmental history—or, in its more expansive role, “studies”—
has blossomed to claim pride of place as a capital of interdisci-
plinarity; in a typical article, evidence drawn from ice-core samples,
economic statistics, and old newspapers can foster teamwork seldom
seen in more traditional fields like economic history. Where envi-
ronmental history has been, and where it is going, is crucial to its
reception in the JIH, as scholars find venues for publishing their
Forschung. From Worster’s perspective, “Environmental history is
the only practical long-term hope of the field of history . . . certainly
[Die] biggest hope for interdisciplinarity.” If most journals are
becoming more conservative and provincial as they proliferate
and reflect the careerism of their contributors and editors, efforts
to counteract these baleful trends must be conscious and active.6
As the urgency of climate change increasingly defines envi-
ronmental history, its practitioners must become more literate in
basic science. A historical approach to environmental studies
reveals a deep past in subjects as diverse as cultural history and
resource conservation (like forestry), arguing against simplistic
ideas that trace its origins to climate or harvest studies. Economic
Historiker (with some exceptions like John Kenneth Galbraith and
Robert Heilbroner) have been stony ground for environmental
Geschichte, contributing little to it until very recently. Since at least
the 1960s—in other words, before Earth Day—anthropocentrism
has been a special problem in environmental history. The rise of a
new label for the present era, the Anthropocene, with its inevita-
ble tinge of anthropocentrism, has inevitably raised concerns about
who has the privilege of inventing such a label, geologists or his-
torians, and why not consider other options like the Capitalocene?
Thus far, the Holocene prevails as the favored term for the here
and now, but it too may change.
5 For a good study originating outside America, sehen, Zum Beispiel, Joachim Radkau (trans.
Thomas Dunlap), Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (New York, 2008), In
which a German scholar ushers interested English readers into a global context of environ-
mental history and conservation.
6 The quotation is from Worster via personal communication, Januar 6, 2017. For it and
much else to follow, I thank him. Our many years as colleagues have certainly shaped my
approach to the subject, but no blame attaches to him for this essay.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
218
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
Other fiftieth-anniversary essays begin with the very first
issue of the JIH (Herbst, 1970) in which the founding editors
explained their purposes. Yet in this issue, which was devoted
to demography and population mobility, the journal included
Bruce Mazlish’s article about the “real” Richard Nixon. Der
editors’ general outlook was partly inspired by an essay in the
Times Literary Supplement in 1966, urging interdisciplinary history
and new ways of doing history—which did not include environ-
mental history. Damals, the spirit of the 1930s still shaped
the discipline; some believed that it was time for a change.
Although the editors promised to avoid fads, their earliest issues
have an emphasis on psychohistory, welche, alas, did not strike
everyone as a fad.7
From the beginning, the editors either commissioned review
essays or responded to colleagues with ideas for them. In JIH, III
(Frühling 1973), a long review essay by John Post (1926–2012),
which characterized Emanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast,
Times of Famine (New York, 1971; orig. Kneipe. in French, 1967)
as a work of meteorological history, explained how earth scientists
treated climate as an independent variable in history, not as a
parameter in the manner that historians tended to treat it. Post
may have been one of the last historians to notice Ellsworth
Huntingtonʼs The Pulse of Asia: A Journey in Central Asia Illustrating
the Geographic Basis of History (Boston, 1907). Such older works
about climate and history rested on conjecture and not the latest
findings from glaciers and ice cores or the as-yet uncertain eviden-
tial offerings of dendrochronology and sunspot activity. At that
Zeit, climate change seemed slow and hard to detect except over
a long haul measured in centuries. Post’s own scholarly interests
fell into what he called the Little Ice Age (1550–1850) and famines.
His general approach toward LeRoy Ladurie was respectful, Aber
he criticized the French scholar for undervaluing even small
changes in temperature over time. Post looked for consequences
of climate change in the short term (weather) and the long run
(climate), accusing historians of discounting both. Hindurch
his career, Post provided an invaluable service to the readers of
7 Bruce Mazlish, “Toward a Psychosocial Inquiry: The ‘Real’ Richard Nixon,” JIH, ICH
(1970), 49–106.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
| 219
the JIH concerning environmental history, primarily within a
medieval and early modern European framework.8
Scholars across the United States might think that the JIH
in the 1970s had a regional focus limited to a small area of
Massachusetts—specifically, Cambridge and Boston—and to those
who worked at or went to a university there. Some traditional
studies and reviews about famines and plagues appeared but little
in the way of environmental history. Zum Beispiel, a review of
Alfred Crosby’s Epidemic and Peace, 1918 ( Westport, 1976) von
Martin S. Pernick in JIH, VIII (Sommer 1977), focusing on influ-
enza, was mainly critical but gave the book credit for casting an
interesting perspective on current concerns about swine flu! Der
first article about environmental history to appear in the JIH was
Christian Pfister’s “Climate and Economy in Eighteenth Century
Switzerland.” Pfister, who is still a leading environmental historian
in Europe, took the history of weather, climate, and history in a
new direction by mobilizing strong data about crop yields and
applying sophisticated statistical tools to their analysis. Not for
nothing did he thank Stanley Engerman. Using the phrase “hu-
man ecology,” Pfister argued his case by proposing models and
testing them. Post returned to the JIH in the Autumn, 1979 issue
for a review article on Hubert H. Lamb, Climate: Present, Past, Und
Future (London, 1972–1977). Both Lamb and Post were worried
about cooler winters in Europe and North America in the 1960s!
Post, able to read German and French well and therefore equipped
to appreciate the work of Pfister on Switzerland and Jan deVries
on Holland, was again well placed to summarize what was known
about climate change during the late 1970s, which was, admittedly,
not much.9
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SPECIAL ISSUE “HISTORY AND CLIMATE”
In 1980, the editors devoted the entire spring issue of the tenth
volume to the theme of “History and Climate,” arguably the most
important and influential issue ever published. No brief summary
John D. Post, “Meteorological Historiography,” JIH, III (1973), 721–732.
8
9 Christian Pfister, “Climate and Economy in Eighteenth Century Switzerland,” JIH, IX
(1978), 223–244; Post, “Climate Change and Historical Explanation,” JIH, X (1979), 291–
301. From the standpoint of science and public policy, Nathaniel Rich in Losing Earth: A
Recent History (New York, 2019) asserts, “Nearly everything we understand about global-
warming was understood in 1979” (3).
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
220
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
could do justice to its contents. The editors concluded their tenth
year of labors by attending to a new area that had not been ade-
quately explored in its pages, publishing articles and comments
from a conference that they had convened with climatologists
and historians. The first contribution—“The Climates of History,”
by Reid A. Bryson, director of the Institute for Environmental
Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and his colleague Christina
Padoch—argued against a simplistic determinism, stressing a major
theme in environmental history, the competition for resources.
Beginning in antiquity, the authors explored the debates about
medieval climate, referring to a 1963 conference on this theme
in Boulder, Colorado. They also acknowledged the research
strengths of their university and its studies of glacier effects in
Minnesota and Wisconsin. By including changes 10,000 Jahre
before the present, this introduction set a tone for subsequent
articles by encouraging studies of regional variation across the
globe and avoiding anthropocentrism.10
De Vries, a scholar with an enduring role in the JIH, mobi-
lized fresh Dutch and English data to illuminate the role of climate
in preindustrial northwestern Europe. Praising the work of Post
and Pfister for their research on crises, he crunched big data on
grain prices, crop yields, water temperature, and other factors to
illuminate climate change over the long run. Daher, Umwelt
history divided into the short sharp shocks of crisis and the longue
durée. De Vries was keen to examine how people learn by doing
(he would later write a book called The Industrious Revolution:
Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present
[New York, 2008]), or how they respond to climate change (oder
nicht). Privileging the methods of his field, economic history, Er
wanted more from environmental history than a mere catalog
of disasters. He stressed instead the ways in which people could
adjust to climate change, a theme that has occupied him for many
years.11
10 The special issue, “History and Climate,” JIH, X (1980), 583–858. For other tributes to
that pioneering work, see Michael McCormick, “Climates of History, Histories of Climate:
From History to Archaeoscience,” JIH, L (2019), 3–30; Peter A. Coclanis, “Field Notes: Ag-
ricultural History’s New Plot,” in the current issue. Reid A. Bryson and Christine Padock,
“On the Climates of History,” JIH, X (1980), 583–597.
11
Methodologies,” ebenda., 599–630.
Jan de Vries, “Measuring the Impact of Climate on History: The Search for Appropriate
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
| 221
Andrew B. Appleby (1929–1980) investigated epidemics and
famine in the Little Ice Age, particularly in Tudor and Stuart
England (the subject of his monograph Famine in Tudor and Stuart
England [Stanford, 1978]). His acknowledgment of Post for help
with this article reveals the seminal influence of a scholar in shap-
ing the JIH’s continuing interest in premodern Europe. Appleby
was aware of recent man-made famines, citing Holland 1944/5
and Warsaw 1941–1943 (but missing Ukraine in the early
1930S). He tested a model positing a decline in both famines
and great epidemics from the seventeenth century. By asking
whether warming after 1700 contributed to the decline of epi-
demics, he opened up the promising field of climate change and
Krankheit. Appleby noted that bubonic plague disappeared in Europe
during the Little Ice Age and smallpox worsened, demonstrating that
whatever the causal relationship was, it worked in both directions.
Just as complicated was the apparently neat progression of bad
weather (harvest failures), famine, and high mortality. Climate was
only one factor; whether an economy was closed or open also
mattered. An international grain trade might be able to alleviate a
local famine. Because market integration and systems of relief were
factors even within a single country, France experienced more
devastating famines than did England. This excellent research
article drew from the methods of several disciplines and, über
alle, advocated that the devising and testing of models were crucial
to environmental history.12
In “The Little Ice Age: Thermal and Wetness Indices for
Central Europe,” Pfister performed a similar service for Central
Europe by assembling a synthesis of data about rainfall and tem-
perature. At this stage, when the search for facts was vital, the best
run of information that he could find concerned the date of the
cherry blossoms in Japan, collected from the ninth to the nine-
10. Jahrhundert. Big data on anything in the northern hemisphere
might shed light on Central Europe. Pfister’s major contribution
to the debates were his indexes for changes in climate by decade;
his data found considerable variability within Lamb’s long Little
Ice Age.13
12 Andrew B. Appleby, “Epidemics and Famine in the Little Ice Age,” ebenda., 643–664.
13 Pfister, “The Little Ice Age: Thermal and Wetness Indices for Central Europe,” ebenda.,
665–696.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
222
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
Units of measure for climate data and the problems of noise
within the data remain serious issues in every climate model. Der
next article in this special issue’s careful ordering was climate
scientist Jerome Namias’ attempt to decipher patterns in the
droughts of the 1970s. Scientists reasonably wanted to predict
droughts whereas historians studied past ones. David Herlihy com-
mented on the problems of climate in the documentary sources.
Contrasting field data with documentary data, he stressed the need
for documentary data to be datable, präzise, and consistent, sowie
as amenable to manipulation by what was then a new tool, Die
computer (in the era of punch cards and huge mainframes).
Historians had to take their data where they could find it and
be receptive to the most unusual sources. He optimistically chal-
lenged historians to find these new sources and exploit them.14
A prescient article by John A. Eddy, a scientist at what was
then called the High-Altitude Observatory in Boulder, explored
the relationship between sunspots and climate change on earth.
Good data have existed in the West since 1610, thanks to the tele-
scope, though the Chinese assembled data from 1077 Zu 1278; reg-
ular Greenwich observations did not begin until 1750. Optimists
in the nineteenth century believed that sunspots could be used to
predict the weather, but nothing useful came from this notion at
that time. Eddy’s real task was to understand the entire system of
solar and climate cycles. He proposed that minimums in solar
activity coincided with temperature dips because the real issue
was total solar radiation. Well-demonstrated eleven-year cycles
were not what mattered. Stattdessen, the longer patterns, called
Maunder minimums, were the keys to establishing the connection
between variations in solar heat and the earth’s climate.15
A parallel scientific article by the geologist Thompson Webb III
looked to botanical sources to find climate sequences. Webb’s
research took him to pollen data from the Holocene in the American
Midwest, where the absence of written data encouraged a search for
proxies. Although his data confirmed a Little Ice Age in North
Amerika, the resulting stress on pollen had little to say about people;
North America might as well have been uninhabited. A team of
Jerome Namias, “Severe Drought in Recent History,” ebenda., 697–712; David Herlihy,
14
“Climate and Documentary Sources: A Comment,” ebenda., 713–718.
15
John A. Eddy, “Climate and the Role of the Sun,” ebenda., 725–748.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
| 223
dendrochronologists from Arizona, a natural home for such studies,
defended studies of tree rings as a good proxy for climate and
weather. They verified this data by linking it to the pollen and glacier
findings. Reliable information from the American West in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggested regional cooling in
the twentieth century.16
A somber theme in the articles by Eddy and Webb is the
general absence of awareness regarding global warming in 1980.
These technical articles demonstrate a period of interdisciplinary
history when all the sciences—natural, sozial, and human—
mattered equally. The key to common understanding seems to
have been an ability to deploy statistics and big data. Not everyone
possessed these skills or the curiosity to learn and deploy them.
Another scientist, the chemist Alexander Wilson, explained
the isotopes for hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, and how variations
in them over time helped to confirm climate and environmental
changes. His elegant work on Greenland ice cores and data from
New Zealand charted carbon14 changes throughout the last
35,000 Jahre. David Hackett Fischer, in a short piece about
research priorities for climate and history, was justifiably impressed
by the ingenious contributions of scientists to interdisciplinary his-
tory. He called for an integrated synthesis of global-climate data,
hoping that it would result in a new periodization, implicitly chal-
lenging the long Little Ice Age. He also encouraged closer looks at
climate and culture, singling out the Dust Bowl of the 1930s for
Forschung. The then-recent book by Worster, his Brandeis
colleague—Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York,
1979)—found no mention in Fischer’s contribution, but in fairness,
his short article contained only six footnotes. Fischer concluded
with the traditional call for more regional studies, observing that
“the question of the validity of determinant explanations drawn
from climatology puts me in mind of G. K. Chesterton’s remark
on Christianity. They have not been tried and found wanting,
but found difficult and not tried.”17
16 Thompson Webb III, “The Reconstruction of Climate Sequences from Botanical Data,”
ibid., 749–772.
17 Alexander T. Wilson, “Isotope Evidence from Past Climatic and Environmental
Change,” ebenda., 795–812; David Hackett Fischer, “Climate and History: Priorities for Re-
suchen,” ebenda., 821–830.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
224
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
Theodore K. Rabb (1937–2019), a founding editor of the
JIH, concluded this issue of the journal with a perceptive look
at the relative interests and strengths of historians and climatolo-
gists. A survey of the fields encouraged Rabb to sound a note of
caution. Some of the timescales of climate research were irrelevant
to historians (a point that privileges the age of documents). Histo-
rians are better at describing short-term phenomena like the Dust
Bowl. The chain of reasoning from climatology to history
required great leaps that might encourage mistaking coincidence
for causality. Future research did not sustain his suspicions about
the relevance of sunspot activity, but the general query remains
valid. In looking for the space where history and climate intersect,
he found less than meets the eye and shared de Vries’ concerns.
Looking to the future and the interdisciplinary context, Rabb
envisioned both sides continuing their quest for more data, espe-
cially from proxy sources, to assess the man-made changes in cli-
mate. Asking for more data never goes amiss. His emphasis on
beginning with the problem and then looking for evidence has re-
mained essential in climate studies. Since one of Rabb’s fields was
the period of the Little Ice Age (a concept that he fully endorsed),
the most important outcome of this issue was that it exemplified
genuine interactions between climatologists and historians.18
ADVANCES AND CONSEQUENCES Over the last forty years, the field
of environmental history has developed in ways that mainly prove
the benefits of interdisciplinary methods. A healthy skepticism on
all sides is the best antidote to polemics and self-validating argu-
ments that start with policy prescriptions and then cherry-pick
evidence from climatology and history to support them. Der
grand conception of the issues raised in this special issue of the
journal remains remarkable and impressive, though it is hardly easy
to demonstrate the effects that it had on the subsequent course of
Forschung. How many graduate students at the time were drawn to
environmental history? Some influences remain conjectural and
impossible to measure. Trotzdem, a consideration of the
methodological state of the art in 1980 can prove instructive. Der
18 Theodore K. Rabb, “The Historian and the Climatologist,” ebenda., 831–838. For the Little
Ice Age, see the related special issue of the JIH, “The Little Ice Age: Climate and History
Reconsidered,” ebenda., XLIV (2014), 299–425, also discussed below.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
| 225
contributors to the 1980 special issue would have marveled at, sagen,
Google Scholar Citations, a tool that enables authors and readers to
keep track of future citations to their work, although, telling as these
references may be, they do not necessarily reflect a deep
understanding or, alas, even reading of the work cited. Yet Eddy
has an impressive list of 621 publications dating at least until
November 12, 2018. The publishing and working habits of active
scientists routinely yield such large numbers. His article in this issue
of the JIH has led to forty-one citations, on the low side for his pub-
lications.19
By way of contrast, Pfister, also active to the present day,
accumulated seventy-one citations, a large number for him, espe-
cially because many of his publications are in German. Appleby’s
entry about the Little Ice Age has earned a respectable 137 citations.
To test these findings outside the special issue, Pfister’s first stand-
alone article in the JIH (1978) garnered thirty-four citations, vorschlagen-
ing that his work found a larger audience in the special issue. Der
climate article by the prolific de Vries, who merits his own special
sub-entry in Google Scholar Works, hatte 132 citations; in the year
2018 allein (thus far), it had eleven, which is its largest number (Er
did not cite it himself), testifying to its long-term importance. Der
best gauge of the issue’s subsequent influence, Jedoch, may well be
the type of articles that the JIH published within the next decades.
In the early 1980s, the JIH published copious reviews and review
essays, meaning less space for articles, sometimes as few as two per
issue. The journal also devoted pages to announce conferences and
other activities. It largely returned to an emphasis on its traditional
themes, such as the linkages between fertility and the demographics
of the slave trade, as well as psychohistory (a fad to be deprecated?).
Susan L. Swan’s research note on the Little Ice Age in Mexico in
Frühling 1981 appeared to be the first response to the special issue.
Her preliminary work suggested possible climate effects on history
and brought a new part of the northern hemisphere into the discus-
sion. Another special issue was devoted to “The New History: Der
1980s and Beyond,” in Summer 1982. These articles primarily
addressed the use of statistics in research, contrasting numerical and
formal analysis. The next issue continued with this theme, singling
19 Bedauerlicherweise, Google’s database makes it extremely difficult to disentangle many
authors with common surnames, for example de Vries and even Pfister.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
226
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
out four fields for special notice—economic history, demography,
anthropology and history, and intellectual history. Another special
issue, “The Measure of American History,” in Spring 1983, focused
on elections, the economy, and demography in the United States.
Further research might be able to determine whether submissions
to the journal in environmental history waned in the early 1980s,
despite the special issue, or whether the JIH was reverting to type,
favoring big numbers and the social sciences. Trotzdem, some will
count the absence of environmental history from these lists as a blind
spot.20
In Summer 1984, Post returned with an article on climate
variability and the European mortality wave in the early 1740s.
He was one of the first scholars to pay close attention to the x.1
phenomenon in famines. The variable x counted the immediate
effects of rising death rates, whereas x.1 looked a generation into
the future for health and other effects, principally among the chil-
dren born during periods of hunger, as well as the fates of survivors
as they aged. Post’s essay combined climate studies and subsistence
crises, which are mainstays of demographical studies. One way to
do environmental history is to attach its methods to something
already engaging scholars, like demography.21
Another article that year, by Stephen R. Ell, investigated how
iron deficiency in diets may have weakened people and made
them more vulnerable to plagues in seventeenth-century Europe.
Wieder, early modern history led the way and, wieder, durch die
back door. Bubonic plague took its historians deep into the world
of bacteria, vectors, and death rates, which were tailored for inter-
disciplinary history but also part of the interaction between nature
and culture. Plague was becoming a more important field for re-
search in the mid- to late 80s, partly in response to the unfolding
AIDS story. A research note by David E. Davis in Winter 1986 tied
the ecological history of the plague to rats. As a partial antidote to
anthropocentrism, Davis noted the disconnect between how
inconspicuous rats were in contemporary accounts of plague and
how central they are in current medical understandings as hosts for
Susan L. Swan, “Mexico in the Little Ice Age,” ebenda., XI (1981), 633–648; special issue,
20
“The New History: The 1980s and Beyond,” ebenda., XII (1981), ICH, 1–175; II, 177–374; special
issue, “The Measure of American History,” ebenda., XIII (1983), 591–808.
21 Post, “Climatic Variability and the European Mortality Wave of the Early 1740s,” ebenda.,
XV (1984), 1–30.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
| 227
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
the bacterium, and the fleas that were its vectors. At this stage of
Forschung, the gap in the narrative sources was inexplicable, but it
was certainly worth noting.22
In subsequent special issues, the journal branched into fresh
areas—a foray into the classic humanities for evidence and mean-
ing in works of art (Sommer 1986) and Caribbean slavery and
British capitalism (Frühling 1987). None of the articles in these
collections ventured into environmental history, as they probably
would today, as scholars look for evidence on Dutch climate from
contemporary paintings and explore in detail the epidemiological
consequences of new peoples in the Caribbean. A special issue on
religion and history ( Winter 1993) also ignored environmental
Geschichte. The articles in this period continued to center mostly
on the themes of demography and mortality, and the search for
proxy evidence about nutrition, often creatively exploring changes
in adult heights across generations. Many of these studies were
classics in interdisciplinary history, combining big data from histor-
ical sources, sophisticated regression analyses, and a close under-
standing of nutrition, increasingly understood as related to the
diets of women, men, and children.23
Daniel O. Larson’s research note in Autumn 1994 aimed at
reconstructing the climate history of California from a variety of
sources, mainly tree rings and records of river flows. Larson
divided his field into the ethnographical period (1592–1776), Die
mission period (1776–1834), and the ranching period (1834–1900).
Different forms of evidence shed their own light on the problem
of periodic drought in California; the tree-ring data provided the
clearest picture of climate variability not yet tied to global patterns
like El Niño. Apart from its findings, the article represents the
Stephen R. Ell, “Iron in Two Seventeenth-Century Plague Epidemics,” ebenda., XV
22
(1985), 445–458; David E. Davis. “The Scarcity of Rats and the Black Death: An Ecological
Geschichte,” ebenda., (1986), 455–470. For the importance of rats to plague, see Anne Hardy, “The
Under-Appreciated Rodent: Harbingers of Plague from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First
Jahrhundert,” in this issue.
Special issue, “The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning in History,” ebenda., VXII (1986),
23
1–310; special issue, “Caribbean Slavery and British Capitalism,” ebenda., XVII (1987), 707–885.
For related themes, see Philip McCouat, “Art as a Barometer of Climate Changes,” Journal of
Art in Society (2015), available at http://www.artinsociety.com/art-as-a-barometer-of-
climate-changes.html (with many bibliographical references); John R. McNeill, Mosquito
Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York, 2010), a truly inter-
disciplinary book.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
228
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
JIH’s premier venture into the American West, a region where
environmentalism had deep roots, from the origins of the Sierra
Club forward. Researchers in what we can call the Trans-Mississippi
West had long endured the tendency of educational centers on the
East Coast to be more engaged in the history, demography, Und
even the environment of early modern France or England than
that of early modern California. Big data tended to follow the doc-
uments, and Europe (and East Asia) supplied some of the longest
runs. As it happened, the American West had excellent runs of
tree-ring data covering centuries of climate history. It also had sur-
viving indigenous populations of North American Indians with
special knowledge of the environment, and records in Spanish,
impenetrable to the monolingual. Like the increasingly significant
Journal of Environmental History, which was a major venue for pub-
lishing research on the American West, the JIH had yet to figure
out a balance between local and global studies.24
Research notes, review essays, and occasional special issues
prevailed in the 1990s, but sometimes the journal contained only
a single article. A notable exception to the dearth of groundbreak-
ing articles was Herlihy’s posthumous, wide-ranging look at biol-
ogy and history, which depicted the triumph of monogamy in the
Christian West. Google Scholar counts only thirty-two citations
for this article, a low number for him. His acknowledgment of
Richard Aronson, from the Marine Environmental Sciences Con-
sortium in Mobile, Alabama, was a sign of how interdisciplinary
studies benefited from formal and informal discussions between
scholars in different fields. At first glance, monogamy might seem
far cry from the domain of environmental history, but Herlihy’s
sensitivity to the big picture and his intellectual curiosity embraced
households as evolutionary phenomena, as well as suitable units of
moral and economic study. In the hands of some scientists, evolu-
tionary biology lent support to sociobiology. Eventually, Ideen
about a consilience in research centered on nature as biologists
and other scientists interpreted it. This viewpoint was a challenge
to the JIH and its foundational belief that the social sciences,
including history, were the fons et origo of interdisciplinary history,
subject to enrichment by the findings of natural scientists and
24 Daniel O. Larson, “California Climatic Reconstructions,” JIH, XXV (1994), 225–254.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
| 229
humanists. Even this modest intellectual generosity was not always
reciprocated.25
In Autumn 2004, the American environmental historian Ted
Steinberg wrote a review essay on an important reference work,
the Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (New York,
2004), edited by Shepard Krech III, John. R. McNeill, Und
Carolyn Merchant, themselves distinguished scholars. This three-
volume work, the monument to a field now come of age, Profi-
vided Steinberg with the occasion to survey the subject as well as
the publication. Deploying a metaphor from the theater, he ob-
served that a matured environmental history, if not at the center
stage of history, had at least become part of the chorus, though it
is not clear what exactly the libretto of history is that this chorus
is supporting. Steinberg mostly praised the work, singling out for
special notice William Cronon, Stephen White, and Worster
(admittedly his erstwhile advisor but necessarily in this company).
Like many such reviews, Steinberg’s remarked that his own spe-
cialty, the study of environmental disasters, had received short
shrift.26
Taking their cue from Worster, Steinberg and others per-
ceived the field as encompassing three levels. The biotic level
includes nature, the resources and living creatures, and an eco-
system in which humans lived but were not central. At the next
level come the techno-economic cultural forces that operated on
the biotic—the stuff of the histories of technology and capitalism
“improving” nature and extracting from it the resources that
growing populations needed to survive. In the final tier are the
ideas and perceptions about nature that can develop into an intel-
lectual history of environmental history, like those offered by
Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Rachel Carson, or Aldo
Leopold, unter anderen. The main work of the JIH occupied
the second level, but in some ways, environmental history was
taking shape as an alternative method of interdisciplinary history,
25 David Herlihy, “Biology and History: The Triumph of Monogamy,” ebenda., XXV (1995),
571–584. For the strongest argument in favor of consilience, see Edward O. Wilson, Consil-
ience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York, 1998). This version of interdisciplinarity depreciates
the humanities and social sciences and invites them to imitate and collaborate with their
hegemons in the sciences or perish.
26 Ted Steinberg, “Fertilizing the Tree of Knowledge: Environmental History Comes of
Alter,” JIH, XXXV (2004), 265–278.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
230
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
a meta-interdisciplinary history that could absorb (and supersede?)
something like the JIH.
THE SPECIAL ISSUE “THE LITTLE ICE AGE: CLIMATE AND HISTORY
RECONSIDERED”
In this special issue (Winter 2014), the editors
explicitly referenced the precedent of 1980. Tatsächlich, de Vries,
a contributor to both special issues, cast an experienced eye over
developments during the previous thirty-five years, still suspicious
about the actual data supporting the Little Ice Age (LIA). Recent
articles in the JIH about climate had reduced the period to a factor
about which to accumulate evidence, though this position repre-
sented a drift away from the purposes of environmental history
to explain changes. An article by Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó
Gráda on the subject found no major trends in temperature from
the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century. This revi-
sionist research has not gone uncontested, but the debate about it
has transpired within the context of global warming since the mid-
to late nineteenth century, whether deliberately acknowledged or
not.27
As we have seen, back in the 1960s, along with researchers
who still raised the specter of global cooling were skeptics who
questioned the length and severity of the Little Ice Age. Sam
White’s article in this special issue rebuts Kelly and Ó Gráda’s
by adducing all the standard authorities and proxy evidence sup-
porting the reality of the Little Ice Age. These pro and con posi-
tions are testimony to the open-mindedness of the editors and a
lesson in how different methods can produce contrary results.
Ulf Büntgen and Lena Hellmann’s scientific perspective on the
Little Ice Age, which explores the period from 1350 Zu 1850
(the conventional dating of the LIA writ large), finds several cooling
periods separated by warming ones. They sensibly conclude that
methodologies and findings require refinement with respect to
units of measurement and rolling averages over smaller units of
Zeit; on this score, even a decade can be a crude standard of
measurement. As cycles proliferate and become more complex,
the big picture may become obscure, and any period of warming
Special issue, “The Little Ice Age: Climate and History Reconsidered,” ebenda., (2014),
27
299–645: Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, “The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate
Change in Early Modern Europe,” ebenda., 301–326.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
| 231
or cooling may look like a temporary blip. Anyone following con-
temporary debates about the urgency of climate change is familiar
with the significance of these points.28
In Autumn 2014, John Haldon and
THE NEW STATE OF THE ART
fourteen co-authors published a long article, “The Climate and
Environment of Byzantine Anatolia: Integrating Science, Geschichte,
and Archaeology,” demonstrating that environmental history does
not necessarily result from a collaboration of large teams deploying
different methodologies. Byzantine Anatolia, roughly the bound-
aries of modern Turkey, has advantages and disadvantages as a
region to study. Since these scholars also consider data from the
southern Balkans, their region sits at the boundaries of three major
circulation (weather) systems—the North Atlantic, the Southern
Asia monsoonal, and the Eurasian Continental (128). Nach
to the methods of Horden and Purcell, it is too extensive to count
as a microregion and too small to appear on most lists of the
world’s climatic zones. Is integrating science, Geschichte, and technol-
ogy the same thing as doing environmental history? The answer
must depend on execution. A collaboration of this size, welches ist
far more common among scientists than historians, suggests that
silos of expertise now communicate best around huge conference
tables or in email groups, no matter how small the region
beteiligt. The question remains whether Haldon’s region is too
small to yield enough data to produce clear pictures or findings
relevant to other researchers.29
The subject of Simon Nicholson’s review essay in Winter
2016 is free-market fundamentalism and environmentalism, sur-
veying policies and debates since the 1960s, almost the lifetime
of the journal. Even the special issue of 1980 had by now entered
Geschichte. The JIH had long eschewed articles stressing any practical
or contemporary salience, probably on the sensible grounds that
Sam White, “The Real Little Ice Age,” ebenda., 327–352; Ulf Büntgen and Lena Hellmann,
28
“The Little Ice Age in Perspective: Cold Spells and Caveats,” ebenda., 353–368.
29 For some astute comments on regionalism and history, see Peregrine Horden and
Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (New York, 2000), In
which micro-regions are a central theme, defined by religious and geographical factors, sowie
as others, including the environment. John Haldon et al., “The Climate and Environment
of Byzantine Anatolia: Integrating Science, Geschichte, and Archaeology,” JIH, XLV (2014),
113–152.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
232
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
this endeavor, worthy as it may be, is not history; schließlich, viele
venues were dedicated to publishing policy issues. Nicholson,
convinced that the Anthropocene constituted a genuine break in
the ages of the earth, as well as in environmental history, empha-
sized the importance of human agency in shaping the earth’s en-
vironment. The lessons of Vietnam applied to more than state
policies; they may even have extended to the journal’s editorial
decisions about addressing issues of contemporary relevance before
it was too late. Another example of this encounter with contem-
porary relevance was a review essay by Timothy Newfield and
Inga Labuhn in Autumn 2017 that explored pre-industrial climate
and pre-laboratory disease by closely scrutinizing a special issue of
Quaternary Science Review (2016). Repackaging recent scientific
studies of an expanded Holocene for non-scientists debating the
Anthropocene certainly moved the discussion beyond narrowly
anthropocentric concerns.30
In Winter 2018, de Vries, once again offering the journal his
long perspective on the history of scholarship, published an article
about how the “New History” of the 1970s was faring almost fifty
years after its inception. Much of this essay concerns the arcana of
the historical profession, but two themes are apropos for the dis-
cussion at hand. Erste, the idea of interdisciplinary history arose
from a milieu in which the New History, whatever its complex-
ities, had moved beyond the traditional narrative framework of
telling stories about past wars and politics. Zweite, those who
espoused the “cultural turn” and a “return to narrative,” in the form
of microhistory, had delivered yet another view of modernity to the
discipline. Whatever it is and will be, no one could seriously call
the New History a fad. Some within the profession lamented
the splitting of history into what they perceived as various
advocacy sub-disciplines or over-specializations. The obvious
importance of environmental history spared it the worst of such
criticisms.31
Simon Nicholson, “The Birth of Free-Market Environmentalism,” JIH, XLVI (2016),
30
421–434; Timothy Newfield and Inga Labuhn, “Realized Consilience in Studies of Pre-
Industrial Climate and Pre-Laboratory Disease, ibid., XLVII (2017), 211–240—review essay
based on the special issue, “Mediterranean Holocene Climate, Environment and Human
Societies,” Quaternary Science Reviews, CXXXVI (2016), 1–252.
31 De Vries, “Changing the Narrative: The New History That Was and Is to Come,” JIH,
XLVIII (2018), 313–334. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
| 233
For whatever reason, de Vries, whose methodological skills
have afforded him the ability to range broadly across premodern
and modern Europe and to assess all manner of historical inquiry,
omitted environmental history from his survey of the New History.
Noch, the works of Cronon, Crosby (1931–2018), Händler,
McNeill, Worster, and others all counted, in one way or another,
as New History, and their reach often extended beyond North
Amerika. Environmental historians have also grappled with similar
problems in writing narratives about their field, their solutions
ranging from biography to regional and global works. Their pio-
neering narratives, by definition interdisciplinary, merit attention
Weil, in addition to the importance of their findings in their
own right, their methods of presenting them may assist those in
other disciplines looking for a way forward. As Hoffmann admira-
bly stated in his environmental history of medieval Europe, “This is
a history as if nature mattered.” In this sense, every publication in
environmental history was a work of New History.32
Recent articles show the JIH on a steady course with respect
to the role of environmental history in its pages. In Summer 2018,
another large team, led by Nicola Di Cosmo with eight collabo-
rators, investigated environmental stress on steppe nomads in the
Uighur Empire of Central Asia from 744 Zu 840. Crisis and
response are again the main story. Three Spanish scholars pre-
sented new data on military recruits in Mediterranean Spain from
1850 Zu 1949 to demonstrate that better climatic conditions for
farming resulted in improved nutrition and taller soldiers. Breaking
old ground in new places can continue for a long time.33
The JIH and environmental history have matured during the last
fifty years; predicting where they are headed is not the task of this
Artikel. What the JIH has accomplished thus far, Jedoch, may be
American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), caught these two trends in mid-passage. His
omission of environmental history is unusual, because the debate about whether history could
be objective began with the idea that historical analysis could, and should, be more scientific,
and environmental history was a place where the two cultures appeared to intersect.
32 Worth noting is Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1900
(New York, 1988), which received a review by Richard M. Douglas in JIH, XVIII (1988),
489–490, and Merchant’s American Environmental History (New York, 2007). Hoffmann,
Environmental History, 3.
33 Nicolo di Cosmo et al., “Environmental Stress and Steppe Nomads: Rethinking the His-
tory of the Uyghur Empire (744–840) with Paleoclimate Data,” JIH, XLVIII (2018), 439–464.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
234
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
a guide to how it will contribute to the future of interdisciplinary
Geschichte. Certainly the 1980 special issue on “History and Climate”
was a landmark—a model of how to bring together the best ideas
at a conference and then to publish the results. The editors must
choose which of the many suggestions and proposals that they re-
ceive for special issues merit their attention; they cannot publish all
of them. Occasional review essays can address the neglect of timely
or fresh subjects. The specialist journals in environmental history
must bear the main burden of keeping people up to date in their
field. The task of the JIH—a publication explicitly founded to fos-
ter interdisciplinarity—has to balance competing claims and keep
the focus on collaborative and innovative methodologies.
Several articles within the past decades have drawn attention
to the connections between climate changes and epidemics. Für
Beispiel, Post’s work in the journal and in recruiting contributors
stressed this issue in early modern Europe, and in Winter 1988,
Anne Hardy, who also has a special article in this issue about rats
and the plague, explored the relationships between nutrition and
diet in London via big data from 1750 Zu 1909. Outside the JIH,
this problem has gained considerable traction as changes in climate
affect the spread of viruses like Zika and West Nile into previously
hostile climates. Bruce Campbell posited another major Great
Übergang, linking the great plague that lasted from 1348 Zu
1352 to climate change. On a broader canvas, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.,
cogently explored epidemics in history from the plague of Athens
to the AIDS crisis. Although his focus is more on the emotional than
the medical responses to these disasters, he asks a question that
applies universally: Why do epidemics sometimes issue into violence
against the sick and germinate widespread panic—as in the case of
the influenza outbreak of 1918/9, a prototypical pandemic—or
incline people into scapegoating. Although Campbell is more
concerned with the environment than is Cohn, both their studies
take an interdisciplinary approach to the broader topic of human
ecology and changes, either in climate or in people’s minds. Beide
these scholars are indefatigable publishers of articles that lay the
foundations for subsequent books.34
34 Hardy, “Diagnosis, Death, and Diet: The Case of London, 1750–1909,” JIH, XVIII
(1988), 387–402; Bruce M. S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in
the Late-Medieval World (New York, 2016); Cohn, Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the
Plague of Athens to AIDS (New York, 2018).
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
E N V IR O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y
| 235
Scientists prefer to reveal their discoveries in articles, seldom
deigning to write books that are likely to become obsolete
quickly. Much social science, especially economics, also follows
this pattern. Some humanists write books in isolation, maybe after
a previous article or two claiming their territory. How does an
interdisciplinary journal accommodate these cultural differences
and remain in the forefront of publishing the best research? Der
evidence on environmental history in the JIH suggests that using
networks to hold conferences on major themes that result in a
special issue may well be the best solution.
One of the special features of environmental history is the
requirement that its practitioners already acquire, or be willing
to acquire, a basic familiarity with the language and methods of
Wissenschaft, let alone spoken languages besides English. Since these
skills are rarely present in a single scholar, historians writing about
ideas concerning the environment and bioarchaeologists looking at
trace minerals in skeletal remains may not always be on the same
page. Big data is one way to bring these cultures together. Aus
the very beginning, the JIH found demography in history to be an
ideal way to present new questions and new regimes of research,
especially after computers made it possible to crunch numbers and
run regression analyses cheaply and almost anywhere. In some
respects, climate and disease have lately become de rigueur for
demography, offering scholars an opportunity to go beyond mor-
tality tables and daily caloric intake to investigate the causes of
ändern, in populations and in climates, im Laufe der Zeit.
The special concerns of the JIH’s editors, the editorial board,
and their colleagues may at times appear idiosyncratic, und das
salience of premodern Europe and its environmental history in
the journal may strike some outsiders as arcane or provincial.
The Little Ice Age, Jedoch, was broad subject matter from
the outset; debates about it were important precursors to the most
recent discussions about global warming. Environmental history,
like interdisciplinarity, is not always easy to define, and the past
fifty years of the JIH reveal that a willingness to stretch the initial
boundaries of both has been successful.
A theme deriving from medieval history, a field rightly pre-
occupied with multilingualism and changes in the meanings of
Wörter, provides a fitting way to conclude this survey. Principally
because of the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century (Und
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3
236
| S T E V E N A . EP S T E I N
subsequent global outbreaks into the nineteenth), medievalists
have made important contributions to studies of climate, famines,
epidemics, and other issues. One other contribution, possibly less
welcome in interdisciplinary studies, concerns the place that most
modern historians allow for theology or religion in environmental
Geschichte. Most historians prefer to leave debates about a subject like
God’s providence to theologians. Although they may understand
that a certain literacy in the sciences is necessary for proper inter-
disciplinary environmental history (even if they remain ill-
equipped to reduplicate the research or even sift the gold from
the dross), they have not accorded the history of religion, Wie-
immer, the same respect. Zum Beispiel, medievalists are well aware that
the Muslim world permitted no massacring of Jews, Christians, oder
any other scapegoats because in its theology, the plague was a mercy
and a martyrdom from God. People evidently believed it. Christian
theologians taught that the plague was, like much else, zu mit-
sequence of human sin. In their parts of Europe, massacres of Jews
in the first outbreak of plague, but not the subsequent ones, war
popular pogroms that the established authorities generally
deplored (officially) but found difficult to stop. Comparative
theology matters in this context, but the supernatural, Jedoch
defined, does not find an entry into these scholarly debates.
Perhaps a lesson for environmental history in and out of the
JIH, and for the journal itself, is that sifting the fads from the
enduring subjects need not exclude the lesson that values, sogar
spiritual ones, have consequences.35
35 The pioneer in this work about the Muslim reaction to plague is Michael Dols, The Black
Death in the Middle East (Princeton, 1977), reviewed in JIH by William McNeill, JIH, VIII
(1978), 769–770.
l
D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D
F
R
Ö
M
H
T
T
P
:
/
/
D
ich
R
e
C
T
.
M
ich
T
.
e
D
u
/
J
ich
/
N
H
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D
l
F
/
/
/
/
5
0
2
2
1
3
1
7
0
2
5
2
1
/
J
ich
N
H
_
A
_
0
1
4
1
0
P
D
.
F
B
j
G
u
e
S
T
T
Ö
N
0
7
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3