Transcript Slide 1

“Major Themes in Environmental History”
First Semester
3 ECTS
Marco Armiero
Marie Curie Fellow – ICTA
[email protected]
http://marcoarmiero.webnode.it/
Synthesis of the previous lesson
• What is the Ecological Imperialism (the
making of Neo-Europes)
• Relevance of no-human agents
• The risk of determinism
• The three main paths in doing an eh of
empires:
• Causations; effects; cultures
Social history and eh
• The metaphor of the parachutist
• Env historians can have a vision of the
whole, but they miss the details
Risks and criticism about environmental
history
» Holistic approach: oversimplification; it allows
humans and nature to be seen as an integral
whole, but blurs out conflicts between different
human groups (Cronon)
» Ecological reductionism: neglecting the issue of
politics in the sense of forms of social action and
power relations. It can happen if we focus our
attention on technological solutions and problems
without analyzing their social and political
implication (Blackmar)
» Lack of interest in modes of production and their
role in shaping human beings’ relationships with
their environment (Worster; Steinberg).
Consequences: failure to address the role of social
differences in environmental change.
Therapy
• Gender-class-race analysis (GDR)
• Study of conflicts
• Social appropriation and power relations
T
Collateral effects…
Does nature disappear again, after so many
efforts spent in making it visible in history
discourse?
• Looking at how different social and/or
ethnic groups have used and interpreted
resources does not conceal these
resources behind class relations, cultures,
and economic structures; on the contrary,
this approach can highlight the diversity of
nature itself, and not just of ways of using
it.
• Power relations and social inequalities are
inscribed into nature and not external to it
Take a forest, for instance…
Scenario a.
(i) It is simply invisible because irrelevant
(ii) It is the fixed, “natural” background for the human actions
(traditional history, political history, etc.)
Scenario b. It is a mine of wood (economic history)
Scenario c. It does not exist or at least what really matters
are the discourses about it (cultural, post-modernist history)
Scenario d.
(i) The forest is there but it is not as it used to be (eh
declensionist narrative)
Applying social history to eh
• nature is neither the backdrop nor the
base buried under the sediment of social
relations and cultural constructions; nature
is mixed with them and we need to find the
nature in society as well as the social in
nature.
A forest, again
• Different actors –
ecological complexity and
not just social complexity
Conservationism and class
analysis in the Adirondacks
• What happens when
we apply this approach
to the history of
conservation?
Environmental inequalities
• Race + Class in the
zoning of the US
cities
• Workers movement +
civil rights
• Environmentalism was
nothing less than elitism
• Safe drinking water act
1974
• Toxic Control substance
act 1976
• Amendments to the
Clean Clear Act
• Federal Water Pollution
Control Act
An interview with the author
• Studying mountains in
Modern Italy