Conservation movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Much attention has been given to preserving the natural characteristics of Hopetoun Falls, Australia, while allowing ample access for visitors.

 

The conservation movement, also known as nature conservation, is a political, environmental, and social movement that seeks to protect natural resources including animal and plant species as well as their habitat for the future. 

The early conservation movement included fisheries and wildlife management, water, soil conservation, and sustainable forestry. The contemporary conservation movement has broadened from the early movement's emphasis on use of sustainable yield of natural resources and preservation of wilderness areas to include preservation of biodiversity. Some say the conservation movement is part of the broader and more far-reaching environmental movement, while others argue that they differ both in ideology and practice. Chiefly in the United States, conservation is seen as differing from environmentalism in that it aims to preserve natural resources expressly for their continued sustainable use by humans. Outside the U.S. the term conservation more broadly includes environmentalism.

History

Early history

Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty's Dominions, title page of the first edition (1664).

The conservation movement can be traced back to John Evelyn's work Sylva, presented as a paper to the Royal Society in 1662. Published as a book two years later, it was one of the most highly influential texts on forestry ever published. Timber resources in England were becoming dangerously depleted at the time, and Evelyn advocated the importance of conserving the forests by managing the rate of depletion and ensuring that the cut down trees get replenished. 

The field developed during the 18th century, especially in Prussia and France where scientific forestry methods were developed. These methods were first applied rigorously in British India from the early-19th century. The government was interested in the use of forest produce and began managing the forests with measures to reduce the risk of wildfire in order to protect the "household" of nature, as it was then termed. This early ecological idea was in order to preserve the growth of delicate teak trees, which was an important resource for the Royal Navy. Concerns over teak depletion were raised as early as 1799 and 1805 when the Navy was undergoing a massive expansion during the Napoleonic Wars; this pressure led to the first formal conservation Act, which prohibited the felling of small teak trees. The first forestry officer was appointed in 1806 to regulate and preserve the trees necessary for shipbuilding. This promising start received a setback in the 1820s and 30s, when laissez-faire economics and complaints from private landowners brought these early conservation attempts to an end.

Origins of the modern conservation movement

Conservation was revived in the mid-19th century, with the first practical application of scientific conservation principles to the forests of India. The conservation ethic that began to evolve included three core principles: that human activity damaged the environment, that there was a civic duty to maintain the environment for future generations, and that scientific, empirically based methods should be applied to ensure this duty was carried out. Sir James Ranald Martin was prominent in promoting this ideology, publishing many medico-topographical reports that demonstrated the scale of damage wrought through large-scale deforestation and desiccation, and lobbying extensively for the institutionalization of forest conservation activities in British India through the establishment of Forest Departments. Edward Percy Stebbing warned of desertification of India. The Madras Board of Revenue started local conservation efforts in 1842, headed by Alexander Gibson, a professional botanist who systematically adopted a forest conservation program based on scientific principles. This was the first case of state management of forests in the world.

These local attempts gradually received more attention by the British government as the unregulated felling of trees continued unabated. In 1850, the British Association in Edinburgh formed a committee to study forest destruction at the behest of Dr. Hugh Cleghorn a pioneer in the nascent conservation movement.

He had become interested in forest conservation in Mysore in 1847 and gave several lectures at the Association on the failure of agriculture in India. These lectures influenced the government under Governor-General Lord Dalhousie to introduce the first permanent and large-scale forest conservation program in the world in 1855, a model that soon spread to other colonies, as well the United States. In the same year, Cleghorn organised the Madras Forest Department and in 1860 the Department banned the use shifting cultivation. Cleghorn's 1861 manual, The forests and gardens of South India, became the definitive work on the subject and was widely used by forest assistants in the subcontinent. In 1861, the Forest Department extended its remit into the Punjab.

Schlich, in the middle of the seated row, with students from the forestry school at Oxford, on a visit to the forests of Saxony in the year 1892.

Sir Dietrich Brandis, a German forester, joined the British service in 1856 as superintendent of the teak forests of Pegu division in eastern Burma. During that time Burma's teak forests were controlled by militant Karen tribals. He introduced the "taungya" system, in which Karen villagers provided labour for clearing, planting and weeding teak plantations. After seven years in Burma, Brandis was appointed Inspector General of Forests in India, a position he served in for 20 years. He formulated new forest legislation and helped establish research and training institutions. The Imperial Forest School at Dehradun was founded by him.

Germans were prominent in the forestry administration of British India. As well as Brandis, Berthold Ribbentrop and Sir William P.D. Schlich brought new methods to Indian conservation, the latter becoming the Inspector-General in 1883 after Brandis stepped down. Schlich helped to establish the journal Indian Forester in 1874, and became the founding director of the first forestry school in England at Cooper's Hill in 1885. He authored the five-volume Manual of Forestry (1889–96) on silviculture, forest management, forest protection, and forest utilisation, which became the standard and enduring textbook for forestry students.

Conservation in the United States

F. V. Hayden's map of Yellowstone National Park, 1871.

The American movement received its inspiration from 19th century works that exalted the inherent value of nature, quite apart from human usage. Author Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) made key philosophical contributions that exalted nature. Thoreau was interested in peoples' relationship with nature and studied this by living close to nature in a simple life. He published his experiences in the book Walden, which argued that people should become intimately close with nature. The ideas of Sir Brandis, Sir William P.D. Schlich and Carl A. Schenck were also very influential - Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the USDA Forest Service, relied heavily upon Brandis' advice for introducing professional forest management in the U.S. and on how to structure the Forest Service.

Both conservationists and preservationists appeared in political debates during the Progressive Era (the 1890s—early 1920s). There were three main positions. The laissez-faire position held that owners of private property—including lumber and mining companies, should be allowed to do anything they wished for their property.

The conservationists, led by future President Theodore Roosevelt and his close ally George Bird Grinnell, were motivated by the wanton waste that was taking place at the hand of market forces, including logging and hunting. This practice resulted in placing a large number of North American game species on the edge of extinction. Roosevelt recognized that the laissez-faire approach of the U.S. Government was too wasteful and inefficient. In any case, they noted, most of the natural resources in the western states were already owned by the federal government. The best course of action, they argued, was a long-term plan devised by national experts to maximize the long-term economic benefits of natural resources. To accomplish the mission, Roosevelt and Grinnell formed the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887. The Club was made up of the best minds and influential men of the day. The Boone and Crockett Club's contingency of conservationists, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals became Roosevelt's closest advisers during his march to preserve wildlife and habitat across North America. Preservationists, led by John Muir (1838–1914), argued that the conservation policies were not strong enough to protect the interest of the natural world because they continued to focus on the natural world as a source of economic production. 

The debate between conservation and preservation reached its peak in the public debates over the construction of California's Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park which supplies the water supply of San Francisco. Muir, leading the Sierra Club, declared that the valley must be preserved for the sake of its beauty: "No holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man." 

President Roosevelt put conservationist issue high on the national agenda. He worked with all the major figures of the movement, especially his chief advisor on the matter, Gifford Pinchot and was deeply committed to conserving natural resources. He encouraged the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to promote federal construction of dams to irrigate small farms and placed 230 million acres (360,000 mi² or 930,000 km²) under federal protection. Roosevelt set aside more federal land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined.

Roosevelt established the United States Forest Service, signed into law the creation of five national parks, and signed the year 1906 Antiquities Act, under which he proclaimed 18 new national monuments. He also established the first 51 bird reserves, four game preserves, and 150 national forests, including Shoshone National Forest, the nation's first. The area of the United States that he placed under public protection totals approximately 230,000,000 acres (930,000 km²). 

Gifford Pinchot had been appointed by McKinley as chief of Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture. In 1905, his department gained control of the national forest reserves. Pinchot promoted private use (for a fee) under federal supervision. In 1907, Roosevelt designated 16 million acres (65,000 km²) of new national forests just minutes before a deadline.

In May 1908, Roosevelt sponsored the Conference of Governors held in the White House, with a focus on natural resources and their most efficient use. Roosevelt delivered the opening address: "Conservation as a National Duty."

In 1903 Roosevelt toured the Yosemite Valley with John Muir, who had a very different view of conservation, and tried to minimize commercial use of water resources and forests. Working through the Sierra Club he founded, Muir succeeded in 1905 in having Congress transfer the Mariposa Grove and Yosemite Valley to the federal government. While Muir wanted nature preserved for its own sake, Roosevelt subscribed to Pinchot's formulation, "to make the forest produce the largest amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees."

Theodore Roosevelt's view on conservationism remained dominant for decades; - Franklin D. Roosevelt authorised the building of many large-scale dams and water projects, as well as the expansion of the National Forest System to buy out sub-marginal farms. In 1937, the Pittman–Robertson Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act was signed into law, providing funding for state agencies to carry out their conservation efforts.

Since 1970

Environmental reemerged on the national agenda in 1970, with Republican Richard Nixon playing a major role, especially with his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The debates over the public lands and environmental politics played a supporting role in the decline of liberalism and the rise of modern environmentalism. Although Americans consistently rank environmental issues as "important", polling data indicates that in the voting booth voters rank the environmental issues low relative to other political concerns. 

The growth of the Republican party's political power in the inland West (apart from the Pacific coast) was facilitated by the rise of popular opposition to public lands reform. Successful Democrats in the inland West and Alaska typically take more conservative positions on environmental issues than Democrats from the Coastal states. Conservatives drew on new organizational networks of think tanks, industry groups, and citizen-oriented organizations, and they began to deploy new strategies that affirmed the rights of individuals to their property, protection of extraction rights, to hunt and recreate, and to pursue happiness unencumbered by the federal government at the expense of resource conservation.

Conservation in Costa Rica

Figure 1. Costa Rica divided into different areas of conservation

Although the conservation movement developed in Europe in the 18th century, Costa Rica as a country has been heralded its champion in the current times. Costa Rica hosts an astonishing number of species, given its size, having more animal and plant species than the US and Canada combined while being only 250 miles long and 150 miles wide. A widely accepted theory for the origin of this unusual density of species is the free mixing of species from both North and South America occurring on this "inter-oceanic" and "inter-continental" landscape. Preserving the natural environment of this fragile landscape, therefore, has drawn the attention of many international scholars. 

Costa Rica has made conservation a national priority, and has been at the forefront of preserving its natural environment with over a quarter of its land designated as protected in some form, which is under the administrative control of SINAC (National System of Conservation Areas)  a division of MINAE (Ministry of Environment, Energy and Telecommunications). SINAC has subdivided the country into various zones depending on the ecological diversity of that region - these zones are depicted in figure 1. 

The country has used this ecological diversity to its economic advantage in the form of a thriving ecotourism industry, putting its commitment to nature, on display to visitors from across the globe. It is estimated that a record 2.6 million foreigners visited the country in 2015, almost half the population of Costa Rica itself. This tourism is facilitated by the fact that Costa Rica has a stable democracy and has a human development index of 0.776, the highest for any country in Latin America.

It is also the only country in the world that generates more than 99% of its electricity from renewable sources, relying on hydropower (78%), wind (10%), geothermal energy (10%), biomass and solar (1%). Critics have pointed out however, that in achieving this milestone, the country has built several dams (providing the bulk of its electricity) some of which have negatively impacted indigenous communities as well as the local flora and fauna.

Historical development

Figure 2. 16th century Spanish expansion in the Caribbean

"The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica" by Sterling Evans is a renowned book that traces the development of the conservation movement in Costa Rica from the mid 1700s to present day. Evans mentions that when the Spaniards first arrived in the Americas, the landscape of Costa Rica did not appear particularly hospitable to them, compared to Guatemala or Mexico which seemed more reminiscent of the Spanish climate. Therefore, up until the 18th century, there was very little agricultural development in the region. It also lacked gold and other minerals that Christopher Columbus had hoped to find in these areas (hence the name, Rich Coast). As a result, the forest cover of Costa Rica was left more or less intact by the European settlement in the Americas. 

By the mid-19th century, it was observed that the Costa Rican soil was particularly conducive to the growth of coffee. The global demand for coffee was growing rapidly, fueled by the demand from the working class in the industrializing west. The agricultural model adopted by coffee growers in Costa Rica was of small family owned farms known as cafeteras, and they strove to be responsible stewards of the land. This approach was in stark contrast to the coffee monoculture that would've developed by adopting a purely capitalistic ideology. As a result, even though the coffee production increased substantially from 1850 to 1950, there wasn't large scale deforestation in Costa Rica until the 1950s, contrary to popular belief.

Some of the key points often overlooked in Costa Rica's conservation history between 1850 and 2000 according to Evans, are as follows:

• President Bernardo Soto's government in 1888 began the process of attracting scholars from all over the world, particularly Switzerland and Germany in an effort to educate the locals about agricultural practices harmonious with the environment such that by 1914, Costa Rica became a leading scientific research center in tropical America
• The establishment of the University of Costa Rica (UCR) in the 1940s was a landmark event, since the university acted as a springboard for research into tropical studies in Central America. At the helm of UCR were many influential academics such as Rafael Lucas Rodríguez and Alexander Skutch whose forward thinking publications served as a foundation for the future policy decisions. Skutch noted,
  

  in the mid-1930s, Costa Rica was still largely unspoiled. Its population of less than a half a million people . . .was concentrated in the narrow Meseta Central. . . . Other advantages . . . to the naturalist were its political stability and the friendliness of its people. . . . Costa Rica has a record of continuous, orderly constitutional government that scarcely any other country in Latin America can match. Thus the naturalist working in some remote spot was not likely to have his studies suddenly interrupted or his thin lines of communication cut by a violent upheaval, as has happened to many in Latin America.

• By 1950, Costa Rica became heavily reliant on coffee exports to Europe and the US. Around the same time, it was battling the dilemma between increasing agricultural output on one hand and protecting natural resources for future use on the other. In 1958, however, the world coffee prices plummeted, and Costa Rica's main source of income was shown to be very vulnerable to unpredictable forces. The government responded by promoting internal manufacturing and encouraging other industries. One such industry that emerged as a result, was the meat industry.

The Central American valley has been described as "perfect for cattle" by Carl Hoffman. Until 1970, the cattle raised in Costa Rica were primarily used for domestic consumption. Around 1970, the demand for beef from the US started showing an exponential growth due to the rise of the fast-food industry. This robust demand, coupled with the falling coffee prices gave the cattle industry a boost and forests started getting replaced with pastures. At its worst, Costa Rica was losing 4% of its forested area per year. 

An alternative analysis by Julia Flagg within the framework of "process-tracing" reveals that after gaining independence in 1821 the isolation of Costa Rica from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua was critical in shaping its future and served as a divergence point in the evolution of the Central American nations. According to Mahoney  “ . . . while all of the other provinces quickly became engulfed in warfare and political chaos, Costa Rica escaped such devastation and made tentative economic strides forward”. She also argues that the lack of a land-owning elite class in Costa Rica was instrumental in the development of good governance and maintaining a stable democracy in the country. The abolishing of the military in 1948 helped free up valuable resources that the government chose to invest into education and resource protection. The country entered into a positive reinforcement cycle thereafter, where new laws enacted drew international praise which helped solidify Costa Rica's position as global leader in resource protection .

Examples of active efforts

Environmental Services Program

To counter reducing forest area coverage in the 1980's, the Costa Rican government pioneered a scheme in 1997 known as PES, which rewarded private land owners for keeping forests intact on their lands in lieu of the services provided by these forests to the environment and the economy as a whole. The World Bank, which provided the loan initially from 2000 to 2006 to support the payments incentivizing afforestation, viewed the program as a success overall despite some of its shortcomings. 

It is estimated that the percentage of Costa Rican land covered by forests has gone up from around 20% in the 1980's to over 50% of the total area in 2013 - a growth of 250%. The program has also reduced the national carbon emissions by 11 million tons over a period of 6 years from 1999 to 2005. Indigenous communities and women in particular, have benefited due to this program. Buoyed by this success, the World Bank extended its support to the Costa Rican government's initiative by funding a new program titled "Mainstreaming Market-Based Instruments for Environmental Management". Over the years, many international agencies have pushed the national government to make the process of obtaining the payments easier so as to include more underdeveloped communities and cast a wider net for the program.

Green sea turtle conservation

A Green sea turtle

The green sea turtle is a globally endangered species and one of the most important nesting grounds for it is in Tortuguero, Costa Rica - the word Totuguero is derived from old Spanish maps meaning "place of turtles". After a steady global decline in its population due to overhunting for its meat and eggs, the Tortuguero National Park was established in 1975 in an effort to protect and save the turtle's breeding zone. A highly cited study by Tröeng and Rankin, investigated in 2004, the effects that this protective measure has had on the nesting trend. Although the population of turtles shows a large inter-annual variation thus making the task of determining the exact number very difficult, on an average, the trend has been positive over a long time scale of almost 35 years. The study illustrated that the enactment of three laws by the Costa Rican government was vital in stabilizing and increasing the population of these green sea turtles.

1. A ban on turtle and egg collection in 1963
2. A ban on the export of calipee (a part of the turtle's head that is considered a delicacy) in 1970 and finally,
3. The creation of the Tortuguero National Park in 1975 by the legislative assembly.

The lasting impact created by such forward thinking political decisions exhibits the necessity of meaningful governmental intervention.

Carbon neutral goal

Classroom of Earth University in Costa Rica - a carbon neutral university

Although they contribute only 0.15% to the world's greenhouse gas emissions, the governments of New Zealand and Costa Rica have independently expressed their intents to become carbon neutral in the next decade, with Costa Rica aiming to achieve an ambitious target of becoming carbon neutral by 2021. In doing so, it would become the world's first carbon neutral country, with the expectation of influencing policy decisions in other major countries. The proposal hopes to ignite the interest of private companies to engage in practices that reduce their emissions, for example, using more fuel efficient routes in transportation, relying more on digital documents than printed ones, adopting LED lighting in offices and using more efficient air conditioning systems.

Criticisms of active efforts

The government's approach to attain zero net emissions has yielded positive results overall, but has been described as insufficient and lacking by experts  because it neglects vehicular emissions which account for nearly 20% of the country's total emissions. The 2021 target has also been called "arbitrary" and "overambitious", since the efforts to reduce the country's reliance on imported oil will take much longer to take effect. 

In 2006, a study by Sierra and Russman analyzed the additional conservation obtained through PES, over and above the baseline conservation rate. The study concluded that the PES program definitely affected land use decisions because land owners used the payments for other productive activities thus keeping the forest cover intact. However, they also concluded that this was not the most effective use of funds because the majority of these forests would have remained intact even without the payments. The study suggested that it would a better strategy to engage in the protection of more critical habitats instead.

The Reventazón Dam has come under criticism recently for the loss of habitat it has caused for many species

The jaguar is an endangered species and its habitat came under threat due to construction of the Reventazón dam in the Reventazón valley. The Reventazón dam is the largest dam in Central America with an installed capacity of 305.5 MW. The two financiers of the project, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, financed it on the condition that the construction of the dam by the state-run Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) would "restore and maintain connectivity within the Barbilla-Destierro Corridor" which is critical to the survival of the jaguar. 

Protestors of this project claim that the construction has failed to meet the expectations on the following issues:

• The constructors did not completely clear vegetation from the areas that would be flooded due to this project. As a result, the uncleared vegetation in the flooded areas began to stagnate, creating the perfect conditions for the growth of the Water Hyacinth (an invasive species). The Water Hyacinth acted as a source for a large amount of carbon dioxide and methane emitted into the atmosphere.
• Reforestation around the reservoir lake to assist in the migration of the jaguars has not been completed making their movement more difficult.
• Due to the removal of a lot of material to facilitate construction, the neighboring Lancaster wetlands (home to more than 250 species of birds and 80 species of mammals, reptiles and amphibians) have been left in a state more susceptible to landslides.

What appears to be common in these criticisms is that the initiatives have moved things in the right direction overall, but the implementation hasn't been as good as promised.

Areas of concern

Deforestation and overpopulation are issues affecting all regions of the world. The consequent destruction of wildlife habitat has prompted the creation of conservation groups in other countries, some founded by local hunters who have witnessed declining wildlife populations first hand. Also, it was highly important for the conservation movement to solve problems of living conditions in the cities and the overpopulation of such places.

Boreal forest and the Arctic

The idea of incentive conservation is a modern one but its practice has clearly defended some of the sub Arctic wildernesses and the wildlife in those regions for thousands of years, especially by indigenous peoples such as the Evenk, Yakut, Sami, Inuit and Cree. The fur trade and hunting by these peoples have preserved these regions for thousands of years. Ironically, the pressure now upon them comes from non-renewable resources such as oil, sometimes to make synthetic clothing which is advocated as a humane substitute for fur. Similarly, in the case of the beaver, hunting and fur trade were thought to bring about the animal's demise, when in fact they were an integral part of its conservation. For many years children's books stated and still do, that the decline in the beaver population was due to the fur trade. In reality however, the decline in beaver numbers was because of habitat destruction and deforestation, as well as its continued persecution as a pest (it causes flooding). In Cree lands however, where the population valued the animal for meat and fur, it continued to thrive. The Inuit defend their relationship with the seal in response to outside critics.

Latin America (Bolivia)

The Izoceño-Guaraní of Santa Cruz Department, Bolivia is a tribe of hunters who were influential in establishing the Capitania del Alto y Bajo Isoso (CABI). CABI promotes economic growth and survival of the Izoceno people while discouraging the rapid destruction of habitat within Bolivia's Gran Chaco. They are responsible for the creation of the 34,000 square kilometre Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park and Integrated Management Area (KINP). The KINP protects the most biodiverse portion of the Gran Chaco, an ecoregion shared with Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. In 1996, the Wildlife Conservation Society joined forces with CABI to institute wildlife and hunting monitoring programs in 23 Izoceño communities. The partnership combines traditional beliefs and local knowledge with the political and administrative tools needed to effectively manage habitats. The programs rely solely on voluntary participation by local hunters who perform self-monitoring techniques and keep records of their hunts. The information obtained by the hunters participating in the program has provided CABI with important data required to make educated decisions about the use of the land. Hunters have been willing participants in this program because of pride in their traditional activities, encouragement by their communities and expectations of benefits to the area.

Africa (Botswana)

In order to discourage illegal South African hunting parties and ensure future local use and sustainability, indigenous hunters in Botswana began lobbying for and implementing conservation practices in the 1960s. The Fauna Preservation Society of Ngamiland (FPS) was formed in 1962 by the husband and wife team: Robert Kay and June Kay, environmentalists working in conjunction with the Batawana tribes to preserve wildlife habitat. 

The FPS promotes habitat conservation and provides local education for preservation of wildlife. Conservation initiatives were met with strong opposition from the Botswana government because of the monies tied to big-game hunting. In 1963, BaTawanga Chiefs and tribal hunter/adventurers in conjunction with the FPS founded Moremi National Park and Wildlife Refuge, the first area to be set aside by tribal people rather than governmental forces. Moremi National Park is home to a variety of wildlife, including lions, giraffes, elephants, buffalo, zebra, cheetahs and antelope, and covers an area of 3,000 square kilometers. Most of the groups involved with establishing this protected land were involved with hunting and were motivated by their personal observations of declining wildlife and habitat.

Environmental history

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The city of Machu Picchu was constructed c. 1450 AD, at the height of the Inca Empire. It has commanding views down two valleys and a nearly impassable mountain at its back. There is an ample supply of spring water and enough land for a plentiful food supply. The hillsides leading to it have been terraced to provide farmland for crops, reduce soil erosion, protect against landslides, and create steep slopes to discourage potential invaders.

Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs and vice versa. 

Environmental history emerged in the United States out of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and much of its impetus still stems from present-day global environmental concerns. The field was founded on conservation issues but has broadened in scope to include more general social and scientific history and may deal with cities, population or sustainable development. As all history occurs in the natural world, environmental history tends to focus on particular time-scales, geographic regions, or key themes. It is also a strongly multidisciplinary subject that draws widely on both the humanities and natural science. 

The subject matter of environmental history can be divided into three main components. The first, nature itself and its change over time, includes the physical impact of humans on the Earth's land, water, atmosphere and biosphere. The second category, how humans use nature, includes the environmental consequences of increasing population, more effective technology and changing patterns of production and consumption. Other key themes are the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer communities to settled agriculture in the neolithic revolution, the effects of colonial expansion and settlements, and the environmental and human consequences of the industrial and technological revolutions. Finally, environmental historians study how people think about nature - the way attitudes, beliefs and values influence interaction with nature, especially in the form of myths, religion and science.

Origin of name and early works

In 1967 Roderick Nash published "Wilderness and the American Mind", a work that has become a classic text of early environmental history. In an address to the Organization of American Historians in 1969 (published in 1970) Nash used the expression "environmental history", although 1972 is generally taken as the date when the term was first coined. The 1959 book by Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920, while being a major contribution to American political history, is now also regarded as a founding document in the field of environmental history. Hays is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pittsburgh.

Historiography

Brief overviews of the historiography of environmental history have been given by J. R. McNeill, Richard White, and J. Donald Hughes. In 2014 Oxford University Press published a volume of 25 essays called The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History.

Definition

There is no universally accepted definition of environmental history. In general terms it is a history that tries to explain why our environment is like it is and how humanity has influenced its current condition, as well as commenting on the problems and opportunities of tomorrow. Donald Worster's widely quoted 1988 definition states that environmental history is the "interaction between human cultures and the environment in the past".

In 2001, J. Donald Hughes defined the subject as the “study of human relationships through time with the natural communities of which they are a part in order to explain the processes of change that affect that relationship”. and, in 2006, as "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". "As a method, environmental history is the use of ecological analysis as a means of understanding human history...an account of changes in human societies as they relate to changes in the natural environment”. Environmental historians are also interested in "what people think about nature, and how they have expressed those ideas in folk religions, popular culture, literature and art”. In 2003, J. R. McNeill defined it as "the history of the mutual relations between humankind and the rest of nature".

Subject matter

Traditional historical analysis has over time extended its range of study from the activities and influence of a few significant people to a much broader social, political, economic, and cultural analysis. Environmental history further broadens the subject matter of conventional history. In 1988, Donald Worster stated that environmental history “attempts to make history more inclusive in its narratives” by examining the “role and place of nature in human life”, and in 1993, that “Environmental history explores the ways in which the biophysical world has influenced the course of human history and the ways in which people have thought about and tried to transform their surroundings”. The interdependency of human and environmental factors in the creation of landscapes is expressed through the notion of the cultural landscape. Worster also questioned the scope of the discipline, asking: "We study humans and nature; therefore can anything human or natural be outside our enquiry?"

 

Environmental history is generally treated as a subfield of history. But some environmental historians challenge this assumption, arguing that while traditional history is human history – the story of people and their institutions, "humans cannot place themselves outside the principles of nature". In this sense, they argue that environmental history is a version of human history within a larger context, one less dependent on anthropocentrism (even though anthropogenic change is at the center of its narrative).

Dimensions

General view of Funkville in 1864, Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, USA

 

J. Donald Hughes responded to the view that environmental history is "light on theory" or lacking theoretical structure by viewing the subject through the lens of three "dimensions": nature and culture, history and science, and scale. This advances beyond Worster's recognition of three broad clusters of issues to be addressed by environmental historians although both historians recognize that the emphasis of their categories might vary according to the particular study as, clearly, some studies will concentrate more on society and human affairs and others more on the environment.

Themes

Several themes are used to express these historical dimensions. A more traditional historical approach is to analyse the transformation of the globe’s ecology through themes like the separation of man from nature during the neolithic revolution, imperialism and colonial expansion, exploration, agricultural change, the effects of the industrial and technological revolution, and urban expansion. More environmental topics include human impact through influences on forestry, fire, climate change, sustainability and so on. According to Paul Warde, “the increasingly sophisticated history of colonization and migration can take on an environmental aspect, tracing the pathways of ideas and species around the globe and indeed is bringing about an increased use of such analogies and ‘colonial’ understandings of processes within European history.” The importance of the colonial enterprise in Africa, the Caribbean and Indian Ocean has been detailed by Richard Grove. Much of the literature consists of case-studies targeted at the global, national and local levels.

Scale

Although environmental history can cover billions of years of history over the whole Earth, it can equally concern itself with local scales and brief time periods. Many environmental historians are occupied with local, regional and national histories. Some historians link their subject exclusively to the span of human history – "every time period in human history" while others include the period before human presence on Earth as a legitimate part of the discipline. Ian Simmons's Environmental History of Great Britain covers a period of about 10,000 years. There is a tendency to difference in time scales between natural and social phenomena: the causes of environmental change that stretch back in time may be dealt with socially over a comparatively brief period.

Although at all times environmental influences have extended beyond particular geographic regions and cultures, during the 20th and early 21st centuries anthropogenic environmental change has assumed global proportions, most prominently with climate change but also as a result of settlement, the spread of disease and the globalization of world trade.

History

Nature preservationist John Muir with U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (left) on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park

The questions of environmental history date back to antiquity, including  Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who asserted that different cultures and human temperaments could be related to the surroundings in which peoples lived in Airs, Waters, Places. Scholars as varied as Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu found climate to be a key determinant of human behavior. During the Enlightenment, there was a rising awareness of the environment and scientists addressed themes of sustainability via natural history and medicine. However, the origins of the subject in its present form are generally traced to the 20th century. 

In 1929 a group of French historians founded the journal Annales, in many ways a forerunner of modern environmental history since it took as its subject matter the reciprocal global influences of the environment and human society. The idea of the impact of the physical environment on civilizations was espoused by this Annales School to describe the long term developments that shape human history by focusing away from political and intellectual history, toward agriculture, demography, and geography. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a pupil of the Annales School, was the first to really embrace, in the 1950s, environmental history in a more contemporary form. One of the most influential members of the Annales School was Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), whose book A Geographical Introduction to History is now a classic in the field. 

The most influential empirical and theoretical work in the subject has been done in the United States where teaching programs first emerged and a generation of trained environmental historians is now active. In the United States environmental history as an independent field of study emerged in the general cultural reassessment and reform of the 1960s and 1970s along with environmentalism, "conservation history", and a gathering awareness of the global scale of some environmental issues. This was in large part a reaction to the way nature was represented in history at the time, which “portrayed the advance of culture and technology as releasing humans from dependence on the natural world and providing them with the means to manage it [and] celebrated human mastery over other forms of life and the natural environment, and expected technological improvement and economic growth to accelerate”. Environmental historians intended to develop a post-colonial historiography that was "more inclusive in its narratives".

Moral and political inspiration

Moral and political inspiration to environmental historians has come from American writers and activists such as Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson. Environmental history "frequently promoted a moral and political agenda although it steadily became a more scholarly enterprise". Early attempts to define the field were made in the United States by Roderick Nash in “The State of Environmental History” and in other works by frontier historians Frederick Jackson Turner, James Malin, and Walter Prescott Webb, who analyzed the process of settlement. Their work was expanded by a second generation of more specialized environmental historians such as Alfred Crosby, Samuel P. Hays, Donald Worster, William Cronon, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, J. R. McNeill, Donald Hughes, and Chad Montrie in the United States and Paul Warde, Sverker Sorlin, Robert A. Lambert, T.C. Smout, and Peter Coates in Europe.

British Empire

Although environmental history was growing rapidly after 1970, it only reached historians of the British Empire in the 1990s. Gregory Barton argues that the concept of environmentalism emerged from forestry studies, and emphasizes the British imperial role in that research. He argues that imperial forestry movement in India around 1900 included government reservations, new methods of fire protection, and attention to revenue-producing forest management. The result eased the fight between romantic preservationists and laissez-faire businessmen, thus giving the compromise from which modern environmentalism emerged.

In recent years numerous scholars cited by James Beattie have examined the environmental impact of the Empire. Beinart and Hughes argue that the discovery and commercial or scientific use of new plants was an important concern in the 18th and 19th centuries. The efficient use of rivers through dams and irrigation projects was an expensive but important method of raising agricultural productivity. Searching for more efficient ways of using natural resources, the British moved flora, fauna and commodities around the world, sometimes resulting in ecological disruption and radical environmental change. Imperialism also stimulated more modern attitudes toward nature and subsidized botany and agricultural research. Scholars have used the British Empire to examine the utility of the new concept of eco-cultural networks as a lens for examining interconnected, wide-ranging social and environmental processes.

Current practice

Frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932)

In the United States the American Society for Environmental History was founded in 1975 while the first institute devoted specifically to environmental history in Europe was established in 1991, based at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1986, the Dutch foundation for the history of environment and hygiene Net Werk was founded and publishes four newsletters per year. In the UK the White Horse Press in Cambridge has, since 1995, published the journal Environment and History which aims to bring scholars in the humanities and biological sciences closer together in constructing long and well-founded perspectives on present day environmental problems and a similar publication Tijdschrift voor Ecologische Geschiedenis (Journal for Environmental History) is a combined Flemish-Dutch initiative mainly dealing with topics in the Netherlands and Belgium although it also has an interest in European environmental history. Each issue contains abstracts in English, French and German. In 1999 the Journal was converted into a yearbook for environmental history. In Canada the Network in Canadian History and Environment facilitates the growth of environmental history through numerous workshops and a significant digital infrastructure including their website and podcast.

Communication between European nations is restricted by language difficulties. In April 1999 a meeting was held in Germany to overcome these problems and to co-ordinate environmental history in Europe. This meeting resulted in the creation of the European Society for Environmental History in 1999. Only two years after its establishment, ESEH held its first international conference in St. Andrews, Scotland. Around 120 scholars attended the meeting and 105 papers were presented on topics covering the whole spectrum of environmental history. The conference showed that environmental history is a viable and lively field in Europe and since then ESEH has expanded to over 400 members and continues to grow and attracted international conferences in 2003 and 2005. In 1999 the Centre for Environmental History was established at the University of Stirling. Some history departments at European universities are now offering introductory courses in environmental history and postgraduate courses in Environmental history have been established at the Universities of Nottingham, Stirling and Dundee and more recently a Graduierten Kolleg was created at the University of Göttingen in Germany. In 2009, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC), an international, interdisciplinary center for research and education in the environmental humanities and social sciences, was founded as a joint initiative of Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the Deutsches Museum, with the generous support of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The Environment & Society Portal (environmentandsociety.org) is the Rachel Carson Center's open access digital archive and publication platform.

Related disciplines

The 77 km long Panama Canal, opened in 1914, connects the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean, replacing a long and treacherous shipping route passing via the Drake Passage and Cape Horn at the tip of South America. Construction was plagued by problems, including disease (particularly malaria and yellow fever) and landslides. By the time the canal was completed, a total of 27,500 French and American workmen are estimated to have died.

 

Environmental history prides itself in bridging the gap between the arts and natural sciences although to date the scales weigh on the side of science. A definitive list of related subjects would be lengthy indeed and singling out those for special mention a difficult task. However, those frequently quoted include, historical geography, the history and philosophy of science, history of technology and climate science. On the biological side there is, above all, ecology and historical ecology, but also forestry and especially forest history, archaeology and anthropology. When the subject engages in environmental advocacy it has much in common with environmentalism. 

With increasing globalization and the impact of global trade on resource distribution, concern over never-ending economic growth and the many human inequities environmental history is now gaining allies in the fields of ecological and environmental economics.

Engagement with sociological thinkers and the humanities is limited but cannot be ignored through the beliefs and ideas that guide human action. This has been seen as the reason for a perceived lack of support from traditional historians.

Issues

The subject has a number of areas of lively debate. These include discussion concerning: what subject matter is most appropriate; whether environmental advocacy can detract from scholarly objectivity; standards of professionalism in a subject where much outstanding work has been done by non-historians; the relative contribution of nature and humans in determining the passage of history; the degree of connection with, and acceptance by, other disciplines - but especially mainstream history. For Paul Warde the sheer scale, scope and diffuseness of the environmental history endeavour calls for an analytical toolkit "a range of common issues and questions to push forward collectively" and a "core problem". He sees a lack of "human agency" in its texts and suggest it be written more to act: as a source of information for environmental scientists; incorporation of the notion of risk; a closer analysis of what it is we mean by "environment"; confronting the way environmental history is at odds with the humanities because it emphasises the division between "materialist, and cultural or constructivist explanations for human behaviour".

Global sustainability

Achieving sustainability will enable the Earth to continue supporting human life as we know it. Blue Marble NASA composite images: 2001 (left), 2002 (right)

Many of the themes of environmental history inevitably examine the circumstances that produced the environmental problems of the present day, a litany of themes that challenge global sustainability including: population, consumerism and materialism, climate change, waste disposal, deforestation and loss of wilderness, industrial agriculture, species extinction, depletion of natural resources, invasive organisms and urban development. The simple message of sustainable use of renewable resources is frequently repeated and early as 1864 George Perkins Marsh was pointing out that the changes we make in the environment may later reduce the environments usefulness to humans so any changes should be made with great care - what we would nowadays call enlightened self-interest. Richard Grove has pointed out that "States will act to prevent environmental degradation only when their economic interests are threatened".

Advocacy

It is not clear whether environmental history should promote a moral or political agenda. The strong emotions raised by environmentalism, conservation and sustainability can interfere with historical objectivity: polemical tracts and strong advocacy can compromise objectivity and professionalism. Engagement with the political process certainly has its academic perils although accuracy and commitment to the historical method is not necessarily threatened by environmental involvement: environmental historians have a reasonable expectation that their work will inform policy-makers.

A recent historiographical shift has placed an increased emphasis on inequality as an element of environmental history. Imbalances of power in resources, industry, and politics have resulted in the burden of industrial pollution being shifted to less powerful populations in both the geographic and social spheres. An critical examination of the traditional environmentalist movement from this historical perspective notes the ways in which early advocates of environmentalism sought the aesthetic preservation of middle-class spaces and sheltered their own communities from the worst effects of air and water pollution, while neglecting the plight of the less privileged. 

Communities with less economic and sociopolitical power often lack the resources to get involved in environmental advocacy. Environmental history increasingly highlights the ways in which the middle-class environmental movement has fallen short and left behind entire communities. Interdisciplinary research now understands historic inequality as a lens through which to predict future social developments in the environmental sphere, particularly with regard to climate change. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs cautions that a warming planet will exacerbate environmental and other inequalities, particularly with regard to: "(a) increase in the exposure of the disadvantaged groups to the adverse effects of climate change; (b) increase in their susceptibility to damage caused by climate change; and (c) decrease in their ability to cope and recover from the damage suffered." As an interdisciplinary field that encompasses a new understanding of social justice dynamics in a rapidly changing global climate, environmental history is inherently advocative.

Declensionist narratives

Narratives of environmental history tend to be declensionist, that is, accounts of progressive decline under human activity.

Presentism and culpability

Under the accusation of "presentism" it is sometimes claimed that, with its genesis in the late 20th century environmentalism and conservation issues, environmental history is simply a reaction to contemporary problems, an "attempt to read late twentieth century developments and concerns back into past historical periods in which they were not operative, and certainly not conscious to human participants during those times". This is strongly related to the idea of culpability. In environmental debate blame can always be apportioned, but it is more constructive for the future to understand the values and imperatives of the period under discussion so that causes are determined and the context explained.

Environmental determinism

Ploughing farmer in ancient Egypt. Mural in the burial chamber of artisan Sennedjem c. 1200 BCE

For some environmental historians "the general conditions of the environment, the scale and arrangement of land and sea, the availability of resources, and the presence or absence of animals available for domestication, and associated organisms and disease vectors, that makes the development of human cultures possible and even predispose the direction of their development" and that "history is inevitably guided by forces that are not of human origin or subject to human choice". This approach has been attributed to American environmental historians Webb and Turner and, more recently to Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, where the presence or absence of disease vectors and resources such as plants and animals that are amenable to domestication that may not only stimulate the development of human culture but even determine, to some extent, the direction of that development. The claim that the path of history has been forged by environmental rather than cultural forces is referred to as environmental determinism while, at the other extreme, is what may be called cultural determinism. An example of cultural determinism would be the view that human influence is so pervasive that the idea of pristine nature has little validity - that there is no way of relating to nature without culture.

Methodology

Recording historical events

Useful guidance on the process of doing environmental history has been given by Donald Worster, Carolyn Merchant, William Cronon and Ian Simmons. Worster's three core subject areas (the environment itself, human impacts on the environment, and human thought about the environment) are generally taken as a starting point for the student as they encompass many of the different skills required. The tools are those of both history and science with a requirement for fluency in the language of natural science and especially ecology. In fact methodologies and insights from a range of physical and social sciences is required, there seeming to be universal agreement that environmental history is indeed a multidisciplinary subject.

Future

Old and new human uses of the atmosphere

Environmental history, like all historical studies, shares the hope that through an examination of past events it may be possible to forge a more considered future. In particular a greater depth of historical knowledge can inform environmental controversies and guide policy decisions.

The subject continues to provide new perspectives, offering cooperation between scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds and providing an improved historical context to resource and environmental problems. There seems little doubt that, with increasing concern for our environmental future, environmental history will continue along the path of environmental advocacy from which it originated as “human impact on the living systems of the planet bring us no closer to utopia, but instead to a crisis of survival” with key themes being population growth, climate change, conflict over environmental policy at different levels of human organization, extinction, biological invasions, the environmental consequences of technology especially biotechnology, the reduced supply of resources - most notably energy, materials and water. Hughes comments that environmental historians “will find themselves increasingly challenged by the need to explain the background of the world market economy and its effects on the global environment. Supranational instrumentalities threaten to overpower conservation in a drive for what is called sustainable development, but which in fact envisions no limits to economic growth”. Hughes also notes that "environmental history is notably absent from nations that most adamantly reject US, or Western influences".

Michael Bess sees the world increasingly permeated by potent technologies in a process he calls “artificialization” which has been accelerating since the 1700s, but at a greatly accelerated rate after 1945. Over the next fifty years, this transformative process stands a good chance of turning our physical world, and our society, upside-down. Environmental historians can “play a vital role in helping humankind to understand the gale-force of artifice that we have unleashed on our planet and on ourselves”.

Against this background “environmental history can give an essential perspective, offering knowledge of the historical process that led to the present situation, give examples of past problems and solutions, and an analysis of the historical forces that must be dealt with” or, as expressed by William Cronon, "The viability and success of new human modes of existing within the constraints of the environment and its resources requires both an understanding of the past and an articulation of a new ethic for the future."

Cultural ecology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments. Human adaptation refers to both biological and cultural processes that enable a population to survive and reproduce within a given or changing environment. This may be carried out diachronically (examining entities that existed in different epochs), or synchronically (examining a present system and its components). The central argument is that the natural environment, in small scale or subsistence societies dependent in part upon it, is a major contributor to social organization and other human institutions. In the academic realm, when combined with study of political economy, the study of economies as polities, it becomes political ecology, another academic subfield. It also helps interrogate historical events like the Easter Island Syndrome.

History

Anthropologist Julian Steward (1902-1972) coined the term, envisioning cultural ecology as a methodology for understanding how humans adapt to such a wide variety of environments. In his Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955), cultural ecology represents the "ways in which culture change is induced by adaptation to the environment." A key point is that any particular human adaptation is in part historically inherited and involves the technologies, practices, and knowledge that allow people to live in an environment. This means that while the environment influences the character of human adaptation, it does not determine it. In this way, Steward wisely separated the vagaries of the environment from the inner workings of a culture that occupied a given environment. Viewed over the long term, this means that environment and culture are on more or less separate evolutionary tracks and that the ability of one to influence the other is dependent on how each is structured. It is this assertion - that the physical and biological environment affects culture - that has proved controversial, because it implies an element of environmental determinism over human actions, which some social scientists find problematic, particularly those writing from a Marxist perspective. Cultural ecology recognizes that ecological locale plays a significant role in shaping the cultures of a region.

Steward's method was to:

• Document the technologies and methods used to exploit the environment to get a living from it.
• Look at patterns of human behavior/culture associated with using the environment.
• Assess how much these patterns of behavior influenced other aspects of culture (e.g., how, in a drought-prone region, great concern over rainfall patterns meant this became central to everyday life, and led to the development of a religious belief system in which rainfall and water figured very strongly. This belief system may not appear in a society where good rainfall for crops can be taken for granted, or where irrigation was practiced).

Steward's concept of cultural ecology became widespread among anthropologists and archaeologists of the mid-20th century, though they would later be critiqued for their environmental determinism. Cultural ecology was one of the central tenets and driving factors in the development of processual archaeology in the 1960s, as archaeologists understood cultural change through the framework of technology and its effects on environmental adaptation.

In anthropology

Cultural ecology as developed by Steward is a major subdiscipline of anthropology. It derives from the work of Franz Boas and has branched out to cover a number of aspects of human society, in particular the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such behaviour as hoarding or gifting (e.g. the tradition of the potlatch on the Northwest North American coast).

As transdisciplinary project

One 2000s-era conception of cultural ecology is as a general theory that regards ecology as a paradigm not only for the natural and human sciences, but for cultural studies as well. In his Die Ökologie des Wissens (The Ecology of Knowledge), Peter Finke explains that this theory brings together the various cultures of knowledge that have evolved in history, and that have been separated into more and more specialized disciplines and subdisciplines in the evolution of modern science (Finke 2005). In this view, cultural ecology considers the sphere of human culture not as separate from but as interdependent with and transfused by ecological processes and natural energy cycles. At the same time, it recognizes the relative independence and self-reflexive dynamics of cultural processes. As the dependency of culture on nature, and the ineradicable presence of nature in culture, are gaining interdisciplinary attention, the difference between cultural evolution and natural evolution is increasingly acknowledged by cultural ecologists. Rather than genetic laws, information and communication have become major driving forces of cultural evolution (see Finke 2005, 2006). Thus, causal deterministic laws do not apply to culture in a strict sense, but there are nevertheless productive analogies that can be drawn between ecological and cultural processes. 

Gregory Bateson was the first to draw such analogies in his project of an Ecology of Mind (Bateson 1973), which was based on general principles of complex dynamic life processes, e.g. the concept of feedback loops, which he saw as operating both between the mind and the world and within the mind itself. Bateson thinks of the mind neither as an autonomous metaphysical force nor as a mere neurological function of the brain, but as a "dehierarchized concept of a mutual dependency between the (human) organism and its (natural) environment, subject and object, culture and nature", and thus as "a synonym for a cybernetic system of information circuits that are relevant for the survival of the species." (Gersdorf/ Mayer 2005: 9). 

Finke fuses these ideas with concepts from systems theory. He describes the various sections and subsystems of society as 'cultural ecosystems' with their own processes of production, consumption, and reduction of energy (physical as well as psychic energy). This also applies to the cultural ecosystems of art and of literature, which follow their own internal forces of selection and self-renewal, but also have an important function within the cultural system as a whole (see next section).

In literary studies

The interrelatedness between culture and nature has been a special focus of literary culture from its archaic beginnings in myth, ritual, and oral story-telling, in legends and fairy tales, in the genres of pastoral literature, nature poetry. Important texts in this tradition include the stories of mutual transformations between human and nonhuman life, most famously collected in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which became a highly influential text throughout literary history and across different cultures. This attention to culture-nature interaction became especially prominent in the era of romanticism, but continues to be characteristic of literary stagings of human experience up to the present. 

The mutual opening and symbolic reconnection of culture and nature, mind and body, human and nonhuman life in a holistic and yet radically pluralistic way seems to be one significant mode in which literature functions and in which literary knowledge is produced. From this perspective, literature can itself be described as the symbolic medium of a particularly powerful form of "cultural ecology" (Zapf 2002). Literary texts have staged and explored, in ever new scenarios, the complex feedback relationship of prevailing cultural systems with the needs and manifestations of human and nonhuman "nature." From this paradoxical act of creative regression they have derived their specific power of innovation and cultural self-renewal. 

German ecocritic Hubert Zapf argues that literature draws its cognitive and creative potential from a threefold dynamics in its relationship to the larger cultural system: as a "cultural-critical metadiscourse," an "imaginative counterdiscourse," and a "reintegrative interdiscourse" (Zapf 2001, 2002). It is a textual form which breaks up ossified social structures and ideologies, symbolically empowers the marginalized, and reconnects what is culturally separated. In that way, literature counteracts economic, political or pragmatic forms of interpreting and instrumentalizing human life, and breaks up one-dimensional views of the world and the self, opening them up towards their repressed or excluded other. Literature is thus, on the one hand, a sensorium for what goes wrong in a society, for the biophobic, life-paralyzing implications of one-sided forms of consciousness and civilizational uniformity, and it is, on the other hand, a medium of constant cultural self-renewal, in which the neglected biophilic energies can find a symbolic space of expression and of (re-)integration into the larger ecology of cultural discourses. This approach has been applied and widened in volumes of essays by scholars from over the world (ed. Zapf 2008, 2016), as well as in a recent monograph (Zapf 2016).

In geography

In geography, cultural ecology developed in response to the "landscape morphology" approach of Carl O. Sauer. Sauer's school was criticized for being unscientific and later for holding a "reified" or "superorganic" conception of culture. Cultural ecology applied ideas from ecology and systems theory to understand the adaptation of humans to their environment. These cultural ecologists focused on flows of energy and materials, examining how beliefs and institutions in a culture regulated its interchanges with the natural ecology that surrounded it. In this perspective humans were as much a part of the ecology as any other organism. Important practitioners of this form of cultural ecology include Karl Butzer and David Stoddart. 

The second form of cultural ecology introduced decision theory from agricultural economics, particularly inspired by the works of Alexander Chayanov and Ester Boserup. These cultural ecologists were concerned with how human groups made decisions about how they use their natural environment. They were particularly concerned with the question of agricultural intensification, refining the competing models of Thomas Malthus and Boserup. Notable cultural ecologists in this second tradition include Harold Brookfield and Billie Lee Turner II. Starting in the 1980s, cultural ecology came under criticism from political ecology. Political ecologists charged that cultural ecology ignored the connections between the local-scale systems they studied and the global political economy. Today few geographers self-identify as cultural ecologists, but ideas from cultural ecology have been adopted and built on by political ecology, land change science, and sustainability science.

Conceptual views

Human species

Books about culture and ecology began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the first to be published in the United Kingdom was The Human Species by a zoologist, Anthony Barnett. It came out in 1950-subtitled The biology of man but was about a much narrower subset of topics. It dealt with the cultural bearing of some outstanding areas of environmental knowledge about health and disease, food, the sizes and quality of human populations, and the diversity of human types and their abilities. Barnett's view was that his selected areas of information "....are all topics on which knowledge is not only desirable, but for a twentieth-century adult, necessary". He went on to point out some of the concepts underpinning human ecology towards the social problems facing his readers in the 1950s as well as the assertion that human nature cannot change, what this statement could mean, and whether it is true. The third chapter deals in more detail with some aspects of human genetics. 

Then come five chapters on the evolution of man, and the differences between groups of men (or "races") and between individual men and women today in relation to population growth (the topic of 'human diversity'). Finally, there is a series of chapters on various aspects of human populations (the topic of "life and death"). Like other animals man must, in order to survive, overcome the dangers of starvation and infection; at the same time he must be fertile. Four chapters therefore deal with food, disease and the growth and decline of human populations. 

Barnett anticipated that his personal scheme might be criticised on the grounds that it omits an account of those human characteristics, which distinguish humankind most clearly, and sharply from other animals. That is to say, the point might be expressed by saying that human behavior is ignored; or some might say that human psychology is left out, or that no account is taken of the human mind. He justified his limited view, not because little importance was attached to what was left out, but because the omitted topics were so important that each needed a book of similar size even for a summary account. In other words, the author was embedded in a world of academic specialists and therefore somewhat worried about taking a partial conceptual, and idiosyncratic view of the zoology of Homo sapiens.

Ecology

Moves to produce prescriptions for adjusting human culture to ecological realities were also afoot in North America. Paul Sears, in his 1957 Condon Lecture at the University of Oregon, titled "The Ecology of Man," he mandated "serious attention to the ecology of man" and demanded "its skillful application to human affairs." Sears was one of the few prominent ecologists to successfully write for popular audiences. Sears documents the mistakes American farmers made in creating conditions that led to the disastrous Dust Bowl. This book gave momentum to the soil conservation movement in the United States.

Impact on nature

During this same time was J.A. Lauwery's Man's Impact on Nature, which was part of a series on 'Interdependence in Nature' published in 1969. Both Russel's and Lauwerys' books were about cultural ecology, although not titled as such. People still had difficulty in escaping from their labels. Even Beginnings and Blunders, produced in 1970 by the polymath zoologist Lancelot Hogben, with the subtitle Before Science Began, clung to anthropology as a traditional reference point. However, its slant makes it clear that 'cultural ecology' would be a more apt title to cover his wide-ranging description of how early societies adapted to environment with tools, technologies and social groupings. In 1973 the physicist Jacob Bronowski produced The Ascent of Man, which summarized a magnificent thirteen part BBC television series about all the ways in which humans have molded the Earth and its future.

Changing the Earth

By the 1980s the human ecological-functional view had prevailed. It had become a conventional way to present scientific concepts in the ecological perspective of human animals dominating an overpopulated world, with the practical aim of producing a greener culture. This is exemplified by I. G. Simmons' book Changing the Face of the Earth, with its telling subtitle "Culture, Environment History" which was published in 1989. Simmons was a geographer, and his book was a tribute to the influence of W.L Thomas' edited collection, Man's role in 'Changing the Face of the Earth that came out in 1956. 

Simmons' book was one of many interdisciplinary culture/environment publications of the 1970s and 1980s, which triggered a crisis in geography with regards its subject matter, academic sub-divisions, and boundaries. This was resolved by officially adopting conceptual frameworks as an approach to facilitate the organisation of research and teaching that cuts cross old subject divisions. Cultural ecology is in fact a conceptual arena that has, over the past six decades allowed sociologists, physicists, zoologists and geographers to enter common intellectual ground from the sidelines of their specialist subjects.

21st Century

In the first decade of the 21st century, there are publications dealing with the ways in which humans can develop a more acceptable cultural relationship with the environment. An example is sacred ecology, a sub-topic of cultural ecology, produced by Fikret Berkes in 1999. It seeks lessons from traditional ways of life in Northern Canada to shape a new environmental perception for urban dwellers. This particular conceptualisation of people and environment comes from various cultural levels of local knowledge about species and place, resource management systems using local experience, social institutions with their rules and codes of behaviour, and a world view through religion, ethics and broadly defined belief systems. 

Despite the differences in information concepts, all of the publications carry the message that culture is a balancing act between the mindset devoted to the exploitation of natural resources and that, which conserves them. Perhaps the best model of cultural ecology in this context is, paradoxically, the mismatch of culture and ecology that have occurred when Europeans suppressed the age-old native methods of land use and have tried to settle European farming cultures on soils manifestly incapable of supporting them. There is a sacred ecology associated with environmental awareness, and the task of cultural ecology is to inspire urban dwellers to develop a more acceptable sustainable cultural relationship with the environment that supports them.

Educational framework