Teaching Environmental History: Environmental Thinking and Practice in Europe, 1500 to the Present.

Abstract

THE ECOLOGIST'S WEB OF LIFE serves as the guiding principle for teaching and learning in my course on environmental history.' Hence, our main task is to work at figuring out how everything we study is connected. From an imagined center of the web we move outward to explore two main areas of environmental history in the western European past: 1) the varied and shifting conceptions of nature, primarily since the Middle Ages, and 2) environmental change created by human endeavor and new technology. Our example of environmental change is the case of industrializing Britain and the impact of railways on the human and physical environments of England and Wales. In pursuing European conceptions of nature we move along two dimensions (Worster 1985; Merchant 1980). The imperialist or mechanistic view regards nature as a system of resources to be managed and exploited for human benefit; standing apart from the natural world, humans can exercise dominion over it. In striking contrast, the organic or holistic conception holds that humans are part of nature, one component of a complex whole. Rather than dominion over nature, organicism reflects a central concern with what today we call ecological balance, a prudent concern to maintain a desirable coexistence among humans, other organisms, and the inorganic components of the environment.