ENVIRONMENT

ENVIRONMENT. To reflect squarely upon the environment of early modern Europe, one needs to adopt a perspective shaped by the rise of environmentalism, a way of thinking that gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. This philosophy calls for a recognition of the intrinsic value of nature and a rejection of the view that humans are somehow outside of nature. Environmental historians are revisiting many of the issues familiar to historians of the early modern age through the perspective of environmentalism, balancing the traditional attention given to people and society with a focus on the environment itself—the natural and the man-made.

Early modern Europeans thought about the world they lived in. Most earned a precarious living directly from the land, and a minority had the leisure to reflect on the links between their society and the milieus it depended upon. Some worried about perceived changes to the natural world surrounding them, while others eagerly sought ways to improve or better control the features most relevant to economic or social life. Others immersed themselves in the study of nature and reflected upon the place of humankind in the universe. Voyages to very different lands, advances in science and technology, political clashes, and the sheer intellectual dynamism of the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment all contributed to the transformation of European thinking about the environment.

Early modern Europeans drained wetlands, tried to improve agricultural practices, and coped with the pollution associated with dense populations. They discovered new resources and worried about the depletion of forests. They sailed to the tropics and mapped their own lands, planted gardens, and fought diseases. All of this can be studied in the long-established fields of history: economic, political, social, and cultural. Other aspects of the period's environment can be explored in works on early modern agriculture and fisheries, mining, public works, urbanism, forestry, science, and medicine.

Not all environmental historians adopt the most rigorous tenets of environmentalism. Some simply share an attitude of respect for nature, perhaps founded on a new awareness of the intricacies and the fragility of ecosystems. Others remain attached to the deeply rooted concept of human stewardship of nature or, more uniquely, proclaim the hybrid character of much of the world around us. Many, in the end, cling to the centrality of human beings to life and, therefore, to history. Yet, however amenable it may be to a variety of interpretations, environmentalism represents an elemental reformulation of an enduring inquiry into the divide between nature and culture. It has led to a genuine broadening of historical research. The following sketch of the thematic and methodological wealth of early modern environmental history is structured around the three poles of the human experience of nature: first, its many and changing representations; second, the rich bodies of knowledge it has fostered; and third, the broad range of institutions and practices developed to guide our daily interactions with the natural world.

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY AND REPRESENTATIONS OF NATURE

The evolution of ideas about nature was first studied through textual analyses before cultural historians expanded this process to a quest for meaningful signs in countless objects. Long before the rise of environmentalism, historians of literature were drawn to the many meanings of the word nature and, distinctly, the quasi-universal explanatory power that it acquired in the eighteenth century. The early modern period soon emerged as a key stage in the evolution of European attitudes toward the natural world. The Renaissance and the scientific revolution advanced more materialistic, less religious, and certainly less magical interpretations of natural phenomena, even before enhancing human agency in these matters. The Enlightenment furthered this positivist trend, readily extending its faith in the perfectibility of humans to society and to its surroundings, while new articulations of private and public interests prepared the way for radical changes in European economies. At the same time, an aesthetic revolution, precursor to the Romantic movement, encouraged a less instrumental, yet still anthropocentric, appreciation of nature. Unsurprisingly, studies of the impact of these key cultural currents upon the ways in which Europeans conceived of their place in the environment reflect regional disparities in their timing and relative strength.

Although for most authors the natural world generally remained just a background, incidental to or even deliberately drawn to advance a thesis, the wealth of early modern literature permits some wide-ranging inquiries. Asking new questions from well-known texts has, for example, identified a great shift in the significance of mountains to early modern society, from repulsive poles to objects of curiosity and, eventually, to a veritable cult rooted in a new appreciation of the sublime. In turn, mountains lent themselves to speculations on the relationship of humans with what must pass for, in a European context, wild spaces. Similar investigations enriched the history of many sciences, including ecology, and influential revisions have turned to social groups often ignored by scholars, revealing, most notably, the pertinence of gender to environmental history.

Students of literature have also invigorated historical research through their probes of the autonomy of a text from its surroundings and the multiplicity of its meanings. This late-twentieth-century trend allows for more critical readings of references to the cultural processes that made sense of the features of a natural milieu for its inhabitants. For instance, considerable work (enriched through collaboration with scientists) has taken place in areas such as the history of natural disasters and of animals, where written records proved singularly opaque because of their moral and exemplary style. More generally, the recent swell of cultural studies also irresistibly expanded the definition of the records likely to expose the mental images familiar to each society. A striking range of cultural manifestations and objects may now testify to the many meanings of various environments, be they obviously man-made, like a garden, or apparently more natural, like a lake, as lasting as a rural landscape or as fleeting as a fair, as universal as bad weather or as singular as early modern tastes for monsters and fantastic lands. Environmental history has much to gain from this blossoming of cultural history since all societies tightly weave their "sites of memory" with their surroundings. Most notably, cultural history has carried the history of landscapes well beyond the social, economic, and agricultural mechanisms of their formation and evolution. It has also brought modes of perception other than the visual within the reach of investigations. Odors, sounds, and tastes now enrich our understanding of the clashes of modernity and tradition characteristic of early modern life, perhaps most evidently in the jumble of urban environments.

Detractors of this embrace of the cultural dimensions of all environments may regret a loss of the "natural," turned into one of the dimensions of human experience rather than a fundamental and unique component of human experience as well as a reality outside of it. Indeed, a cultural analysis tends to present even very natural phenomena as hybrids. Yet, this juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial is precisely what is of interest to many historians when they turn to early modern Europe, because its preindustrial societies remained highly dependent upon environmental conditions while steadily expanding the range of tools available to control their fate.

The ambiguity of early modern stances vis-à-vis nature is perhaps most evident within the context of the great transoceanic expansion that created a frontier of tremendous economic and intellectual importance. This surge of European power, be it associated with the exploitation of tropical islands or the creation of "neo-Europes" by settlers, their animals, their crops, and their parasites, thoroughly challenged perspectives upon nature and the place of humans within their environments. The inquisitive mind of the Enlightenment entertained a great range of interpretations, from highly simplistic schemas to a nascent grasp of the interrelatedness of natural phenomena. Indeed, a loose parallel may be drawn between these intercontinental ventures and recent forays of environmental historians into the similarly unpredictable field of cultural history. Just as the former eventually fostered more relative assessments of the links between social structures and environment, the latter are helping to wrench environmental history away from an overly "essentialist" penchant, most evident in many historical uses of geography and the field of climate history. Exposing the complexities, the vagaries, and the relative weight of the cultural and natural forces that shape identity has made it easier to resist the temptation to link identity and locale too tightly. This is important to the field of environmental history, never entirely free from the specter of determinism.

INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

The contribution of geographers to environmental history is more readily recognized than that of historians of literature. Indeed, it is fair to say that the key to the history of a region or a nation has repeatedly been sought in its geography.

The influence of the French Annales historical school is perhaps most telling in this regard. Starting after World War II, its many disciples were intent on expanding their investigations beyond the political and narrative history that had been common until then. They sought to show history in its social, economic, and geographical contexts by articulating the relationships between a society and its milieu around the concept of "possibilism," that is, suggesting that throughout history, communities strove to make the most of the possibilities offered by a natural milieu while at the same time respecting their own priorities.

The range of closely or loosely Annales-inspired studies of interest to environmental historians is remarkable, in spite of a recognizable rural bias that was perhaps most evident in the early years of this movement. Cities have found the researchers they deserved, ordinary as well as exceptional settings have been treated, and syntheses were not long in appearing. Countless communities, from modest villages to great composite units such as the Mediterranean basin, have been firmly inscribed within their natural parameters, especially with regard to local symbioses between economic practices and resources. Nevertheless, many environmental historians will regret that, in these theses, the significance of a milieu resides precisely in the "thickness" of its links to the socioeconomic structures that it harbored. Environmental features less related to a community and its survival are likely to receive little attention, and some significant fluctuations or even deteriorations of the natural systems surrounding it may remain hidden behind its adaptability.

Like studies of the Annales school, historical geographies of the early modern age may also be said at times to treat nature as a significant but passive background. Nonetheless, historically minded geographers continue to contribute to our knowledge of the evolution of urban and rural landscapes, the emergence of industrial clusters, the ever-changing map of commerce, patterns of land degradation or land reclamation, and so forth. Environmental historians will always profitably revisit such social and spatial arrangements, even if, in their call for a full recognition of the dynamics of a milieu, they choose to focus on the processes of greatest interest to them. They may, for instance, analyze the anthropization of a milieu, that is, the growing role played by humans in its evolution, or they may question its sustainability, seeking in effect a measure of the lasting power of the relationship between a society and its environment.

Many disciplines besides geography are contributing to the growth of environmental history. "Hard sciences," such as medicine, botany, zoology, and ecology, are helping to decipher the material traces of earlier environments. Their contributions are most welcome with regard to prehistoric or particularly long periods with a lack of written sources. However, historians of the early modern age are also learning to use the data provided by ever-sharper scientific tools, to make sense of pollen deposits, animal remains, traces of contaminants, climate fluctuations, epidemics, or, less dramatically, diets. From the social sciences, disciplines such as anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, sociology, or economics, all familiar with the conceptualization of networks and practices that are frequently connected with the environment, also inform many inquiries of an environmental and historical nature. Indeed, the border between environmental history and neighboring fields such as economic history or historical demography ought to remain porous. After all, many productions severely taxed a region's natural resources, and population levels often had a direct impact on European environments, notably in marginal regions. Historians of agriculture, technology, consumption patterns, the material world, military affairs, and many others have much to say about early modern landscapes.

INSTITUTIONS AND PRACTICES

Because the early modern period is at the root of much of the institutional context of European life, the role played by various authorities in mediating the relations between rural or urban communities and their natural surroundings has, quite logically, attracted the attention of environmental historians. A first area of interest concerns the many regulations that anticipated the protection and conservation measures initiated in the twentieth century. Medieval and early modern controls of nuisances were intended to benefit human beings rather than the environment itself. Nonetheless, the range and coherence of the principles they invoked remain significant in the eyes of environmental historians. An array of edicts, intended to protect public health as well as property or the rights of corporate bodies, became law. In many different contexts across Europe, municipal, regional, or even royal powers reached deep into legal precedents to control the deeds of entrepreneurs. While never crafted to safeguard an environment for its own sake, these measures nonetheless tenaciously articulated its many values. Research in this area is often pursued within urban settings, a preference justified by the intricacies and intensities of the issues they raised and the records they left. Beyond the walls of cities, forests also receive considerable attention. Initial probes fueled a long polemic on the overexploitation and an eventual scarcity of wood before the age of coal. Thoughts then turned to the state's intrusions in the relations between these territories and surrounding villages, and soon to the multitude of functions played by forests in the lives of these communities.

Environmental historians also explore the rich world of public works, the early modern period marking an important step in the affirmation of the will of Europeans to restructure their environment. From the great designs of the Renaissance to the sustained eighteenth-century focus on movement and exchanges, from dams to enclosures to land reclamation initiatives, environmental historians are reworking a field familiar to students of engineering, architecture, institutions or, again, agriculture and technology. Their goal is to direct attention away from the heroes or even villains of these stories to the natural milieus where they competed, and their agendas are shaped by important regional distinctions in the timing and types of works undertaken.

Finally, major political landmarks often play a role in environmental histories. Most evidently, the great revolutions that concluded the early modern period were not without impact upon European environments, although it is now clear that in this area as in many others, continuities and changes are not easily sorted out. This truism simply recalls the fact that the early modern age was an age of transition. Then, as before, Europeans continued to reshape their environment without escaping its many imperatives. Yet their successes and failures are of particular interest to environmental historians because they prepared European societies for the radically more assertive attitudes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

See also Agriculture; Enlightenment; Industrial Revolution; Industry; Renaissance; Scientific Revolution; Weather and Climate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco, 1980.

Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York, 1996.

Smout, T. Christopher. Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600. Edinburgh, 2000.

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Watkins, Charles. ed. European Woods and Forests Studies in Cultural History. New York, 1998.

Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Cambridge, U.K., 1994; 1st ed., 1977.

Zupko, Ronald, and Robert Laures. Straws in the Wind: Medieval Urban Environmental Law, The Case of Northern Italy. Boulder, 1996.

Further references will be found through the web sites of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) and the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH).

PIERRE CLAUDE REYNARD