INAUGURAL LECTURE
13 OCTOBER 2009
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY:
DYNAMIC ENGAGEMENT WITH TIME AND PLACE
JANE CARRUTHERS
HISTORY DEPARTMENT
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA
I wish to thank the University of South Africa for appointing me a full professor of
the university this year after 29 years of service. It is an honour, as it is to deliver my
inaugural lecture. The term ‘lecture’ is an encumbered one. As renowned humanities
scholar Stefan Collini noted in contrasting a lecture with an essay or research paper,
‘a lecture is an occasion ... the lecturer ... is licensed to pronounce [and to strike a]
declarative or argumentative pose ... the form is inherently pedagogic’.1 Unisa’s
guidelines suggest that the new professor conveys her latest knowledge of, views
about and insights into her area of specialisation.2 It is thus a pleasure to be able to
explain and to promote environmental history, which is my specialist area of
expertise.
By happy coincidence my inaugural lecture falls during a year that is being celebrated
as the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th since the publication
of his world- and mind-altering book On the Origin of Species. What Darwin did was
to incorporate history – change over time – into the natural world and successfully to
challenge notions of a preordained and timeless order or design. Darwin’s explanation
of the evolution of the world’s biota and the motor for its survival has been seminal in
the history of society and culture as well as in the history of science and it has shaped
our modern attitudes towards the natural world. In this regard, Darwin’s thinking has
impacted strongly on my own scholarly endeavours. Moreover, Darwin has a link
with South Africa. During his five-year long round-the-world voyage on the Beagle as
Captain Robert Fitzroy’s research assistant, Darwin visited Cape Town for nearly
three weeks, from 31 May to 18 June 1836, an episode in his life and intellectual
development about which we, in South Africa, hear surprisingly little. Despite the
Cape peninsula’s inclement winter weather with strong winds and rain, Darwin made
his way on horseback to Paarl and Franschhoek closely observing everything he saw.
He became aware of the Cape’s interesting geology, its rich vegetation and fauna, and
he also commented on the social and racial dimensions of urban Cape Town. He met
up with the intelligentsia of the region, men such as astronomer, botanist and protoevolutionist William Herschel, astronomer Thomas Maclear, explorer and zoologist
Dr Andrew Smith, and surveyor and artist Charles Bell, with all of whom Darwin had
interesting scientific discussions. Like today’s eco-tourists, Darwin was keen to see
South Africa’s large mammals but he did not venture far enough beyond the Cape
Fold Belt mountains into the Karoo where herds of antelope were still abundant.
Although Darwin was disappointed in the Cape – his diary entry includes the
1
comment ‘I never saw a much less interesting country’3 – it was important in his
thinking because it added to his experience of diverse geologies and to his later work
on mammalian evolution.4 It moulded his ideas in other respects too, for as argued in
a recent book entitled Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s
Views on Human Evolution by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, both leading
Darwin scholars, Darwin’s ideas about a common origin of humanity emanated from
his anti-slavery and Quaker social and family background and what he observed of
the suffering underclasses (particularly black people) during his circumnavigation of
the globe. Darwin’s visit to Cape Town and his being accompanied in the Cape
hinterland by a Khoekhoe guide receives considerable attention in this work.5
__________________________
When I joined Unisa at the beginning of 1980 the discipline of environmental history
was unknown in South Africa and many of my colleagues did not predict a bright
future for my endeavours.6 My stimulation came mainly from the work of
environmental activists and scholars abroad, among them Roderick Nash, Rachel
Carson, Peter Singer, Lynn White and John Passmore,7 events such as the first Earth
Day in April 1970, and the formation of international pressure groups such as the
United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Much publicity was then
being given to the environmental damage done to promote short-term human interest
and inappropriate notions of progress, and remote places and wildlife populations
seemed increasingly under threat. Around the time that I began my academic career,
environmentalism had, in fact, become a new social movement, an innovative facet of
civil society, and added its dimension to social, economic and scientific studies in
many parts of the world. In their turn, scientists in many fields had begun to focus on
the social importance of biodiversity and ecological health and services and my
husband and I were drawn into this circle.
By the 1980s the time was ripe for the humanities and social sciences in South
Africa to take cognisance of these developments and, in fact, a number of social
historians had noted environmental factors in their revisionist versions of our
turbulent past.8 But while scholars might have appreciated that the time for
reappraising some of the master narratives of our South African environmental stories
had come, some members of the academic community and the general public did not.
When certain aspects of my early Ph.D. research on demythologising the history of
the Kruger National Park were publicised, there was a barrage of abusive
correspondence and critical articles in the Afrikaner nationalist media that castigated
me for suggesting that there were more complex political motives behind the ‘heroic’
deeds of idols like Paul Kruger or J.G. Strijdom and I received personal hate mail.9
Despite the critique from the right-wing, however, during the late 1980s and
early 1990s, environmentalism emerged as a unifying non-racial philosophy among
South Africa’s political activists and an interesting body of literature developed
within the theme ‘apartheid divides, ecology unites’. After a divided political past, a
common cause of taking care of, or restoring, the physical environment across
traditional barriers of race was prophesised to be a crucial nation-building exercise.
Arguments revolved around the notion that environmentalism of all kinds, unlike
authoritarian apartheid, was bottom-up, grassroots community mobilisation, that
needed to be engaged in redistributing natural resources and acknowledging that their
political apportioning had a history.10 I found myself among congenial scholarly
company.
2
Since that time and for various reasons within and outside South Africa
environmental history has emerged to become not only mainstream but one of the
most significant areas of modern historical study. According to Peter Burke, the
renowned cultural historian, it has now moved through three phases which he calls the
age of pioneers, the age of consolidation, and at present has entered the age of
synthesis.11 Although environmental history by that name is a discipline of the
twentieth century, the impact of the environment on history is far from new and I
would like to provide a brief narrative of how it shaped white settlement in South
Africa and thus influenced the subsequent history of the subcontinent.
_________________________
In most parts of the world today when a new development is planned, an elaborate
environmental assessment process takes place. Consultants are employed to deliberate
the environmental, social and economic advantages and disadvantages of the scheme
in question, to decide on mitigating factors, to determine vulnerable environments and
species and to relate these to investment and other returns. It is not, however,
generally well known that what was possibly the world’s first environmental report
concerned the Cape and it was commissioned by the Dutch East India Company
(VOC) in connection with southern Africa.
The document in question was called the Remonstrantie and it was submitted
by Leendert Janszen and Mattijs Proot who had been stranded on the Cape coast with
sixty other sailors when their vessel, the Nieuwe Haerlem, went aground in March
1647. For a year the group took shelter close to the beach, protecting the cargo of
spices that had been salvaged and waiting to be rescued by a returning Dutch fleet.
Once safely back in the Netherlands, Janszen and Proot were asked by the VOC to
give a report on the potential of the Cape as a refreshment station for the company’s
fleets. By then the more unpleasant memories of being shipwrecked had faded, and on
26 July 1649 the two men submitted their feasibility study in which they outlined why
the development of Cape of Good Hope would be advantageous for the VOC.12
The Heeren XVII studied the report carefully because the Company was
cautious about investing Dutch capital in far-flung parts of the world in ventures that
were not certain to make a profit. After calculating the pros and cons of South Africa,
however, the Heeren accepted the recommendations and instructed the Chamber in
Amsterdam to make the Cape its rendezvous point for vessels going to and coming
from India and the East Indies where the Company had its other bases. Janszen and
Proot’s Remonstrantie makes for interesting environmental and social deconstruction.
The document was enthusiastic in declaring Table Bay to be a safe harbour, the
peninsula abounding in fresh water, fertile soil in which to grow fruit and vegetables,
and prolific offshore fishing and whaling, while timber was available on the slopes of
Table Mountain. Making the area even more attractive for colonisation, there were no
tropical and other endemic diseases and the local inhabitants – the Khoekhoe herders
– were said to be friendly, interested in trade, keen to supply livestock to visiting
ships, willing to work, to learn the Dutch language and to convert to Christianity. In
short, before long – according to the Remonstrantie – the Cape peninsula would be
transformed into a micro-Netherlands, populated by local proto-capitalists, families
working at intensive agriculture on small productive plots in harmony with their
labourers, improving infrastructure and benefiting the VOC. The future, however, was
quite different.
Janszen and Proot had misread both the environment and its inhabitants. Table
Bay is treacherous and many ships were unable to make landfall there – the Cape of
3
Good Hope was indeed more appropriately named the Cape of Storms. While it might
appear at first glance to be productive, the Cape soil is actually shallow, stony, sandy
or clayey and quite unsuitable for small-scale farming. Rust and other diseases
blighted the imported European crops that were unsuitable anyway for a winterrainfall area. The strong south-east wind was destructive, drought was a regular
occurrence and the VOC employees had no skills from their water-rich European
experience to draw on.
In that first hard winter of Jan van Riebeeck’s occupation of the Cape in 1652,
before the sheltering fort had been completed, the days and nights were cold, the rain
pelted down and the wind blew mercilessly. Conditions were so awful that four VOC
employees absconded, intending to walk along the coastline to Delagoa Bay and find
a ship to take them back to Europe. Armed with their swords, plus two pistols and a
dog (which was seriously injured by engaging a porcupine in combat), the group was
charged by two large rhinoceroses; they were frightened by the hostile landscape and
were unable to find anything to eat. Within a week the sorry little party was forced to
retreat back to the settlement and the leader, Jan Blanx, recorded: ‘I could not make a
dance of it alone, therefore resolved to return to the Fort, in hopes of mercy and grace
in God’s name.’ The VOC, however, was not merciful and in order to deter others
who might have similar ideas of escape, the sentences the men received were severe.
As the guide and leader, Blanx was extremely fortunate not to have been given a
death sentence, but he was tied to a pole, a bullet was fired over his head, he was then
keelhauled, given 150 lashes and enslaved in fetters for two years.13
It did not take long for the Dutch to learn that the local Khoekhoe clans were
not willing workers at all – they were transhumant pastoralists for whom livestock
was wealth and political power, who grew no crops of their own nor had they any
desire to become involved in cultivation. Castigating the Khoekhoe as lazy,
intractable and stupid – as well as savage, heathen and dirty – the VOC imported
slaves to supply manual labour. The consequence of this was the emergence of a
social order and class distinction based on race, an outcome that was to have the most
far-reaching consequences for the political, social, economic and environmental
future of our country. In addition, the Khoekhoe, whose status was soon downgraded
into near-slavery, resisted white settlement. Violent conflict resulted and, in fact, for
many reasons embedded in our past, it has remained a characteristic feature of life in
South Africa. Moreover, because cultivation was so difficult and the economic
policies of the VOC so restrictive, white settlers left the Company’s employ, drifting
far beyond the settlement’s official boundaries to become pastoralists themselves,
mimicking the simpler and sustainable lifestyle of the local people that was better
suited to environmental conditions.14
Janszen and Proot’s persuasive vision of a contained post at the Cape,
predicated on a benign climate and productive soils did not eventuate and the
refreshment station expanded into an extended colony over which the VOC had little
or no control. Further toll came from the environmental transformation that the
European connection brought. The stately trees around Table Mountain were soon
felled, European oaks and other exotic tree species were planted, interesting
indigenous botanical specimens were shipped off to Holland’s gardens and
museums,15 the seal colonies on the outlying islands were soon converted into trainoil and hundreds of thousands of skins exported to Europe. Before long, the penguin
and whale populations had been decimated too, and rhinoceros, hippopotamus, lions,
leopards, jackal and other wild animals no longer existed in the region. As white
settlement expanded into the interior with complex interaction with other economies
4
and societies in other biomes, we were bequeathed the complex political history of
our subcontinent.
Thus within a mere few decades, the VOC’s vision of European settlement,
confined to the Cape peninsula, based on intensive agricultural practice honed over
centuries on another continent and peacefully interacting with the Khoekhoe, had
been displaced by the reality of an extended colony stretching well into Xhosa
territory in the Eastern Cape, based on extensive pastoralism and nurturing a white
population whose links with the Netherlands and with Europe were increasingly
tenuous. That reality had come about because the environmental ideas, expectations
and history of metropolitan Europe had connected with the local in quite
unanticipated ways.
But as William Faulkner reminds us, ‘The past is not dead. It’s not even
16
past’. South African environmental history confirms this. Present-day South Africa
is still unable to manage its environment within sustainable limits and we lack
environmental understanding and appropriate restraints. Monoculture remains the
dominant form of agriculture, sugar-cane and other cash crops erode sensitive tropical
river valleys, marine resources are plundered in excess of their ability to reproduce,
inappropriately sited dams impound transient rivers and soon become silted, soil
erosion is not addressed and fragile highveld savannah grassland is converted into
plantations of exotic pines and eucalypts that transform the landscape and end up as
inferior quality paper for the export market. Coal-fired power stations pollute the
environment, while urban architecture, if commercial, resembles New York’s
skyscrapers, of if upmarket and domestic, Tuscany’s villas. Insanitary squatter camps
on urban outskirts accommodate many of the millions of poor who were once herded
into resource impoverished parts of South Africa and who continue to remain without
electricity, education, sewage, hospitals and other essential services. Environmental
factors and the unequal access to land and other natural resources have permeated our
complicated and divisive history and culture, and it is thus essential that the
humanities, as well as the natural sciences, give these issues the attention they
deserve.
_______________________________
A considerable literature has developed around the self-conscious analysis of
environmental history and here I shall allude only to some of the most important
issues. Essentially environmental history lies at the interface between culture and
nature and explores the nexus between them. A recent book defines it as explicitly
‘history’ and thus ‘belonging in the humanist tradition of studying complex
phenomena with respect for humans as, ultimately, persons with intentions and
morals, and belonging in the realm of the polity’.17 It has academic antecedents in
historical geography18 and in economic history, particularly in the work of the
Annales School based in France – Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Ferdinand Braudel,
and Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie – people who wrote an exciting new form of ‘total
history’ in the early twentieth century.19 We also have to recognise the work of
California landscape historian Carl Sauer and his British counterpart W.H. Hoskins,
and Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore20 in the scholarly trajectory. But
as a formally named sub-discipline environmental history emerged in the United
States in the late 1960s and 1970s and was directly related to the eco-politics of the
time when profligate use of natural resources, global warming, demographic growth,
inappropriate conservation practices and other environmental issues began to have
adverse global as well as local and regional impacts. Many of these concerns were not
5
original to environmental history, but within a Western paradigm ‘nature’, the
‘environment’ and ‘environmentalism’ quickly became strong tropes and
environmental history provided the intellectual prism through which to examine
them.21 By 1990 the overwhelming power of the environment in shaping culture was
regarded as being so fundamental that Donald Worster, one of the most influential
historians of our time, argued that environmental history should be accepted as central
to the discipline as a whole. Being the very point at which the natural and cultural
intersected it should, he believed, be not merely regarded as one of many equal
historical fields but one absolutely pivotal to understanding the past and one which
accepts that human life on earth has a historical spatial as well as a temporal
dimension.
African environmental history has been historiographically important.
Prioritising environmental issues has alerted historians of Africa to fresh subjects of
investigation, issues relating to imperialism and colonialism, the exploitation or
conservation of natural resources, and the effects of climate and specific geographies,
and it has also promoted thinking about new sources and the nature of evidence.22 In
Africa specifically, environmental history originated from a strong African social
history paradigm that had much to do with environmental justice, and its pursuit has
enlarged our understanding of the local, regional and continental past.23
While discussion over the parameters of environmental history was vibrant
and purposeful from the start, its theoretical foundations were, at the start, less secure.
This was remedied by the December 2003 issue of the prestigious and important
journal History and Theory which was entirely devoted to environmental history.24
History and Theory’s attention to environmental history would indicate – as John
McNeill believes it does – that the field has ‘begun to reap some of the benefits of
maturation’.25 Other historians would argue that together with a degree of maturity
and theoretical cohesion have also come a number of fresh directions that deserve to
be recognised.26 It is evident that there have been changes in environmental history
over the last decade that distinguish it from the earlier writings,27 one of which is that
the environment is used as a site for examining other axes of power. In this respect
African and southern Africa environmental history has given considerable insights
into the discipline as a whole.28
I have already alluded to the fact that environmental history has strong ties to
environmental science and the social sciences, and indeed, I argue that it is the
historical sub-discipline that forms an over-arching framework for analysis because
‘connections’ lie at its core and provide its direction and its strengths. As imperial
historian John MacKenzie puts it, ‘… here are histories which rely on cross
fertilisation in techniques, ideas, and modes of operation’,29 that ‘not only allow a
more complex reading of the past but also challenge and revitalise the subject of
history itself’.30
Generally speaking, environmental history has both suggested and provided
connections between the pasts of different biological and physical places. It has
created fresh intellectual links in regional, national and world histories, and it has
invigorated and reconfigured much of our understanding about connections between
the periphery and the metropole, the developing and developed world, between
traditional disciplinary boundaries and, perhaps most significantly, between
communities in southern Africa. Refracting our understanding about the past through
the prism of the environment around us has added excitement and relevance to
modern historical studies, and encouraged innovative research in many previously
6
neglected areas of study. Environmental history has brought past and present together
thematically and intellectually.
_________________________
I would like to expand upon my analysis of the field of environmental history by
suggesting that the essential attraction and importance of environmental history lies
in the connections that it is able to make at many levels of human experience.
Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde call it an ‘umbrella’ discipline,31 but my preferred
metaphor would be to liken it to ecology, a discipline with which environmental
history has strong and obvious connections. Ecology grew out of the realization that
the separation of a whole into component parts, which was the dominant nineteenthcentury paradigm of taxonomic science, was inadequate to answer the questions
around explaining the whole that society was beginning to ask in the twentieth.32
Ecology thus made connections between a habitat and its plants and animals, it made
connections between all biota, and connected past with present. It focussed on
communities in a living environment at different levels and times and was referred to
as a ‘philosophy’ rather than a distinct discipline.33 It was described as the study of
living beings in their surroundings, but also recognising and taking account of their
relationship to those surroundings and to each other. Environmental history shares
many of these characteristics and it is now extremely popular as practitioners turn out
an exponentially increasing number of books and articles on a wide variety of
themes, many of them to be read by an enthusiastic public as well as professional
audience. While many professionals are correctly critical of Jared Diamond as an
environmental historian, it is remarkable that his books Guns, Germs and Steel and
Collapse have taken the world by storm.34
Environmental history is powerful in connecting different national histories
and, at times, turning them into a single narrative.35 The nation state – that
nineteenth-century European invention of an imagined community that appears to be
on the retreat in many parts of the world – is not the only appropriate scale on which
to study historical events.36 Of all the historiographies, environmental history cannot
be divorced from transnational concerns and it generates links between public
history, heritage, frontier history, the history of science as well as connecting themes
and space.37 Natural resources exist in disregard of national boundaries and
environmental history raises issues that communities and cultures have in common:
issues such as food production, property and power. Consequently the connection
between different historiographies is intense and productive. Environmental history is
a world or global history and also a transnational one in which the flows of ideas,
goods and technologies come together, as they cross diverse boundaries at different
times.38 It also enriches national histories themselves by including the environmental
and international dimension and thus providing new insights on older themes. Klingle
suggests that there is an ‘artificial split between the local and the global’ which
environmental history attempts to bridge.39
Certainly environmental history resonates with the national perspective
depending on the study area and scholarly community. For example. in the case of
Australia, as Libby Robin argues so clearly, the dominating concern is how European
settlers came to terms scientifically, aesthetically, economically and politically with
an unusual and strangely fragile landscape and biota, peopled by Aboriginal
Australians with strong links to the ‘country’ that shapes their identity and nurtures
their existence.40 New Zealand has an important contribution to make because of the
speed of ecological transformation there,41 while South Asian environmental history
7
is characterised by investigating the nature and significance of the colonial
experience’, related particularly to agrarian history and a strong tradition of subaltern
studies.42 On the other hand, European environmental history is rooted in landscape
and urban history and the management of agricultural land.43 Martin Carey
summarises Latin American environmental history as being concerned with
‘colonialism, capitalism and conservation’44 and in many respects this applies to
African environmental history too. Much of the literature concerns the colonial
encounter, the rise of modern industrialization and jettisoning notions of an
‘untouched’ wilderness.45
Perhaps the most important connection that environmental history might make
is to elide what Cambridge scientist and novelist C.P. Snow famously called the ‘two
cultures’ in 1959.46 Both David Lowenthal and Donald Worster have argued that
environmental history has the potential to close the gap between the humanities and
the sciences, the environmental sciences in particular.47 Worster has referred to the
process as looking for common ground, of finding ‘open doorways through the walls
of specialisation that divide us’. As he writes, ‘So we are opening a door in the wall
that separates nature from culture, science from history, matter from mind. Where we
are arriving is not at some point where all academic boundaries and distinctions
disappear ... but one where those boundaries are more permeable than before’.48
William Beinart’s The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and
the Environment 1770-1950 is important in this regard,49 but all historians have
become more sensitive to the tropes and requirements of the natural sciences. At the
same time, particularly since jettisoning equilibrium theory and acknowledging chaos,
disturbance and change, natural scientists themselves have put history into their
work.50 The point is not for scientists to write bad history or historians bad science –
our respective disciplinary trainings and expertise are quite different – but rather than
promoting total inter- or multi-disciplinarity, environmental history provides space for
a ‘translatory role between disciplines’.51 The excitement is the thrill of finding those
connections, the challenge of the synthesis: it is those ‘fuzzy borders’ that are part of
the appeal of environmental history.52 Environmental history thus connects disciplines
in a way that other fields in history are not able to do and this collaborative and
inclusive approach leads to increased understanding of our world and our pasts.
While environmental historians of Africa have certainly made use of sources
from other disciplines,53 environmental history has remained distinctly ‘history’, the
benefit of which, in the words of Tom Griffiths, is that it prioritises the ‘historians’
traditional concerns of identity, agency, economy and politics’ using the narrative
and explanatory form.54 Moreover, the task of historians is to illuminate intellectual
dilemmas and human problems.55 But if environmental history has remained history,
it has nonetheless been able to interact with other disciplines in a way that has not
happened previously. Historian of fire Steven Pyne reminds us that environmental
history is shared territory and that many scholars who scrutinise the environment in
historical terms are not necessarily historians in the academy.56
The further characteristic connection that I would like to raise is that between
environmental history and society at large. As Mahesh Rangarajan has observed in
his useful book, Environmental Issues in India: A Reader, we are constantly assailed
by environmental concerns in all media and also in our personal lives.57 There is no
escape as humans breathe polluted air, use contaminated water, comment on the
oddities of recent seasons, or recognise vegetation change and degraded river systems
around us. The public and policy-makers are affected at a practical level by
environmental ideas – ideas around waste, appropriate usage, macro climate change,
8
managing scarce resources – and many of these issues play out in the political arena
and require historical context. Environmental history is thus particularly attractive to
the public because it has moral purpose and political purchase.58 It is not, of course,
the only historical field with passion, energy and an ethical sense that has engaged
with public discourse. Social history, too, had an agenda in order to broaden
historical studies away from the society’s powerful and to consider history from
‘below’, to incorporate those who were exploited.59 But as environmental sensitivity
grew from the 1960s onwards, history met the challenge by engaging in the moral
discussion about the profligate use of resources and by showing that there was
another basement level – that of the exploited resource. Environmental history is
political – it speaks to modern concerns and, perhaps of all the historiographies, is the
most activist.60 That moral dimension continues to connect environmental historians
with their societies and they have been able to engage with changes in the urgency of
environmental concerns. As Nash puts it, ‘Environmental history can offer a
powerful critique of modern capitalism and colonialism but also challenge the
romanticism of pre-modernity and pre-colonial societies and so counter the
primitivising claims of some environmental philosophies.’61
The public has become involved in environmental issues that beg historical
context through powerful international governmental and non-governmental forums
that often make front-page newspaper headlines and engage politicians.
Environmental history thus speaks to an urgent social issue, one which can perhaps
be described as the issue of our time. Historians are engaged with society in reevaluating dominant ideologies and outmoded tropes such as ‘degradation’ and
‘decline’, and questioning what is meant by pre-colonial environmental equilibrium.
For this reason, more recent environmental history on urban, international and
climatic subjects – among others – has been able to give us ‘more complex readings
of the history of science and knowledge’.62
Environmental history has done much to intellectualise the connections
between different biota around the world, food crops and their diffusion – James
McCann’s Maize and Grace is a wonderful recent example of this literature63– but
there are also intellectual issues around the introduction of animals and plants that
have had an effect on different parts of the world. The links between animals, plants
and human cultures are made explicit in environmental history.64 Many of these new
histories interrogate the cultural importance of ‘indigenous’ versus introduced or
‘exotic’ animals and plants.65 Ecological imperialism and feral animals are
rejuvenating aspects of history and connecting different biomes is encouraging
historical understanding in areas as different as the ice of the Antarctica and the
deserts of central Australia. The obvious importance of animals in human history is
that they illuminate so much about society. Harriet Ritvo has observed of the
Victorian era that ‘Killing large exotic animals emerged as both the quintessential
activity and symbol of imperialism’,66 and the work of John MacKenzie has also
been seminal in this regard.
Environmental history has also achieved fresh connections between scholars
and their sources. Whereas historians once studied documents almost exclusively,
environmental historians regard the environment itself as an historical source. Even
more than that, it is itself an historical actor with which humans interact. Prioritising
environmental issues internationally alerted historians to fresh subjects of
investigation, issues relating to the exploitation or conservation of natural resources,
the effects of climate and specific geographies and the relationship between nature
and culture. These topics demand that historians engage with a wider variety of
9
sources than ever before – oral, visual and spatial. In particular, it has been the
environment itself that has suggested new narratives about human society and ideas
on how better to understand human action.
____________________
Doug Weiner has reminded us that environmental history in the United States
grew out of intellectual concerns – wilderness and the American mindset, pollution,
forest history, conservation, irrigation, social and intellectual understandings of
nature, and the relationship between social and political systems and environmental
change.67 In South Africa the trajectory has been different with the subdiscipline
emerging from social history and being linked to justice and equity and historical
contexts peculiar to the region. Connecting humans and nature and tracking their
relationships through space as well as time have allowed us to think anew about
culture, gender, technology, politics and spirituality among many other ideas. New
questions about the nature of colonialism, of empire, of cultural attitudes towards the
environment invigorate students and the public alike. There is also much to tell in
uncovering historical attitudes to and effects of natural cycles and catastrophes –
many of which are still with us today, including climate change, earthquakes or even
merely how best to use scarce resources. There is a good deal of new literature about
the connections between indigenous knowledge systems and western ways of
thinking about the environment. Environmental history therefore has a great potential
for synthesis and inclusion in areas such as culture, gender, technology, politics,
spirituality and many more. As Hays has asserted, the main historical challenge is to
track the process by which this interaction between humans and their environment
has evolved.68
1
Introduction by Stefan Collini to C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1998) p. xxviii.
2
Correspondence Professor M.C. Mare to Professor E.J. Carruthers, 22 January 2009.
3
R.D.Keynes, ed., Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1988), p. 426.
4
C.R. Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (Mineola NY, Dover
Publications, 2006). See also W.S. Barnard, ‘Darwin at the Cape’, South African
Journal of Science 100, 2004, 243-248; C.R. Darwin, letter 729 to J.D. Hooker, 1844.
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-729.html; C.R.
Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries
Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World Under the Command of
Capt. Fitz Roy. R.N. (London, John Murray, 1845); R.D. Keynes, ed., Charles
Darwin’s Beagle Diary (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988); J.F.
Thackeray, ‘Darwin’s visit to South Africa in 1836’, South African Journal of Science
101, 2005, p. 218; P. Westra, ‘Charles Darwin’s Visit to the Cape in 1836 and his first
publication’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library 41 (2), 1986, pp. 79-82.
5
A. Desmond and J. Moore, Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped
Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (London, Allen Lane, 2009).
6
Exceptions were the late Professor Burridge Spies who alerted me to W.K.
Hancock’s, Discovering Monaro: A Study of Man’s Impact on his Environment
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1972) and Professor Greg Cuthbertson who
10
was extremely enthusiastic and supportive during the years we were together in the
Department of History.
7
R. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind 3 ed. (New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1982). Nash was an examiner of my Ph.D. thesis in 1988. R. Carson, Silent
Spring (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1962). L. White, ‘The historical roots of our
ecologic crisis’, Science 155, 10 March 1967, pp. 1203-1207; J. Passmore, Man’s
Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (New York,
Charles Scribners Sons, 1974); P. Singer, Animal Liberation (Wellingborough,
Thorsons, 1983).
8
For example, J. Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom (Johannesburg, Ravan
Press, 1979); W. Beinart and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa
(Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987); W. Beinart, The Political Economy of Pondoland,
1860 to 1930 (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1982); R. Elphick, Khoikhoi and the
Founding of White South Africa (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1985); K. Shillington,
The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 1870-1900 (Johannesburg, Ravan Press,
1985); P. Delius, The Land Belongs to Us (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1983); B.
Bozzoli, ed., Town and Countryside in the Transvaal (Johannesburg, Ravan Press,
1983).
9
Some of this work includes J. Carruthers, Game Protection in the Transvaal, 1846 to
1926. Archives Year Book for South African History (Pretoria, Government Printer,
1995); The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (Pietermaritzburg,
Natal University Press, 1995); ‘Defending Kruger’s honour? A reply to Professor
Hennie Grobler’, Journal of Southern African Studies 22(3) 1996, pp. 473-480;
‘Dissecting the myth: Paul Kruger and the Kruger National Park’, Journal of Southern
African Studies 20(2) 1994, pp. 263-284; ‘“Police boys” and poachers: Africans
wildlife protection and national parks, the Transvaal 1902-1950’, Koedoe 36(2) 1993,
pp. 11-22; ‘Swaziland’s twentieth century wildlife preservation efforts: the present as
a continuation of the past’, co-author Jeffrey Hackel, Environmental History Review
17(3) 1993, pp. 61-84; ‘The Dongola Wild Life Sanctuary: “psychological blunder,
economic folly and political monstrosity” or “more valuable than rubies and gold”?’,
Kleio 24 1992, pp. 82-100; ‘Creating a national park, 1910 to 1926’, Journal of
Southern African Studies 15(2) 1989, pp. 188-216; ‘Game protectionism in the
Transvaal, 1900-1910’, South African Historical Journal 20 1988, pp. 33-56; ‘The
Pongola Game Reserve: An eco-political study’, Koedoe 28 1985, pp. 1-16.
10
See for example, J. Cock and E. Koch, eds., Going Green: People, Politics and the
Environment in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.15; E.
Koch, D. Cooper and H. Coetzee, Water, Waste and Wildlife: The Politics of Ecology
in South Africa (London: Penguin, 1990); B. Huntley, R. Siegfried and C. Sunter,
South African Environments into the 21st Century (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau
Tafelberg, 1989); B. Huntley, ed., Biotic Diversity in Southern Africa: Concepts and
Conservation (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1989); A.B. Durning,
Apartheid's Environmental Toll, Worldwatch Paper 95 (Washington, DC:
Worldwatch Institute, 1990); S. Ellis, ‘Of elephants and men: Politics and nature
conservation in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 20(1) 1994, pp.
53-69. The organisations to which I refer include the Land and Agricultural Policy
Unit, Environmental Monitoring Group, EarthLife Africa, among many others, some
of which were well funded by international non-governmental organisations seeking
political change in South Africa. The incoming African National Congress (ANC),
together with its alliance partner the South African Communist Party, had been
11
strongly aligned to the USSR and as Weiner has shown, the Soviets were at the
‘cutting edge of conservation theory and practice’: D.R. Weiner, Models of Nature:
Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh,
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) p. viii. See also P. Steyn, ‘Environmental
management in South Africa: Twenty years of governmental response to the global
challenge’, Historia 46(1) 2002, pp. 25-53; P. Steyn and A. Wessels, ‘The emergence
of new environmentalism in South Africa, 1988-1992’, South African Historical
Journal 42 2000, pp.210-231; P. Steyn, ‘Popular environmental struggles in South
Africa, 1972-1992’, Historia 47 (1) 2002, pp. 125-158.
11
S. Sörlin and P. Warde, eds, Nature’s End: History and the Environment
(Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 350.
12
H.C.V. Leibbrandt, Précis of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope: Letters and
Documents Received, 1649-1662, Vol. 1 (Cape Town, Richards, 1896-1899)
13
B. Maclennan, The Wind Makes Dust: Four Centuries of Travel in Southern Africa
(Cape Town, Tafelberg, 2003), pp. 28-29; H.B. Thom, ed., Journal of Jan van
Riebeeck, Vol. 1 (Cape Town, Van Riebeeck Society, 1952-1958), pp. 61-72.
In January 1653, however, three of the prisoners were set free.
14
See P.J. van der Merwe, The Migrant Farmer in the History of the Cape Colony,
1657-1842 (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1995); P.J. van der Merwe, Trek: Studies
oor die Mobiliteit van die Pioniersbevolking aan die Kaap (Cape Town, Nasionale
Pers, 1945); R. Elphick, Kraal and Castle: Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South
Africa (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1972); R. Elphick and H. Giliomee, The
Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1820 (Cape Town, Longman, 1979).
15
L. Schiebinger, and C. Swan, eds, Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce and
Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press,
2005).
16
Quoted in Brenda Niall, Life Class (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2007),
p. 162.
17
Sörlin and Warde, Nature’s End, Preface, p. vii.
18
In the case of South Africa, see N.C. Pollock and S. Agnew, An Historical
Geography of South Africa (London, Longmans, 1963).
19
M. Bloch, Feudal Society (London, Routledge, 1962); F. Braudel, Capitalism and
Material Life, 1400-1800 (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, c. 1973); F. Braudel,
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (London,
Collins, 1972-1973); L. Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History (London,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950); L. Febvre, La Terre et L’évolution Humaine:
Introduction Géographique á l’histoire (N.p., Michel, 1970). First published in 1922.
20
C.O. Sauer, ‘The morphology of landscape’, University of California Publications
in Geography 2(2) 1925, pp. 19-53; W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English
Landscape (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970). First published in 1955. C.J. Glacken,
Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967).
21
See, for example, D. Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth (New York, Cambridge
University Press, 1988); A.W. Crosby, ‘The past and present of environmental
history’, American Historical Review 100 1995, pp. 1177-1189; ‘A round table:
Environmental history’, Journal of American History 76(4) 1990; R. White,
‘American environmental history: The development of a new historical field’, Pacific
Historical Review 54 1985, pp. 297-337; D. Worster, ‘Nature and the disorder of
history’, Environmental History Review 18(2) 1994, pp. 1-15; D. Worster, ‘World
without borders: The internationalizing of environmental history’, Environmental
12
Review 6 1982, pp. 8-13; D.Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History
and the Ecological Imagination (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993); P.
Coates, ‘Clio’s new greenhouse’, History Today, August 1996, pp. 5-22; S.P. Hays,
‘Toward integration in environmental history’, Pacific Historical Review 70(1) 2001,
pp. 59-68; M.A. Stewart, ‘Environmental history: Profile of a developing field’, The
History Teacher 31(3) 1998, pp. 351-368; T. Steinberg, ‘Down to earth: Nature,
agency and power in history’, The American Historical Review 107(3) 2002, pp. 798820; J.D. Hughes, What is Environmental History? (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2006).
22
J. Carruthers, ‘Towards an environmental history of South Africa: Some
perspectives’, Review article, South African Historical Journal 23 1990, pp. 184-195;
J. Carruthers, ‘Africa: Histories, ecologies and societies’, Environment and History 10
2004, pp. 379-406.
23
A. Taylor, ‘Unnatural inequalities: Social and environmental history’,
Environmental History 1(4) 1996, pp. 6-19; N. Jacobs, Environment, Power, and
Injustice: A South African History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003)
p.1; p.206; W. Beinart, and J. McGregor, J., Social History and African Environments
(Oxford, James Currey, 2003); W. Beinart, ‘African history and environmental
history’, African Affairs 99 2000, pp. 269-302; W. Beinart and P. Coates,
Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (New
York, Routledge, 1995); J. Carruthers, ‘Dainfern and Diepsloot: Environmental
justice and environmental history in Johannesburg, South Africa’, Environmental
Justice 1(3) 2008, pp. 121-125; J. Carruthers, ‘“South Africa: A world in one
country”: Land restitution in national parks and protected areas’, Conservation and
Society 5(3) 2007, pp. 292-306.
24
History and Theory, Theme Issue ‘Environmental history: Nature at work’, 42,
December 2003; K. Asdal, ‘The problematic nature of nature: The post-constructivist
challenge to environmental history’, History and Theory 42 2003, pp. 60-74; E.
Stroud, ‘Does nature always matter? Following dirt through history’, History and
Theory 42 2003, pp. 75-81; A. Sachs, ‘The ultimate “other”: Post-colonialism and
Alexander von Humboldt’s ecological relationship with nature’, History and Theory
42 2003, pp. 111-135; B. Fay, ‘Environmental history: Nature at work’, History and
Theory 42 2003, pp. 1-4.
25
J.R. McNeill, ‘Observations on the nature and culture of environmental history’,
History and Theory 42 2003, p. 41; R. White, ‘Afterward: Environmental history,
watching a historical field mature’, in ‘A round table: Environmental history’, Journal
of American History 76(4) 1990, pp. 103-111.
26
T. Griffiths, ‘How many trees make a forest? Cultural debates about vegetation
change in Australia’, Australian Journal of Botany 50(4) 2002, pp. 375-389.
27
See Carruthers, ‘Africa; Histories, ecologies and societies’; J. Carruthers, ‘Tracking
in game trails: Looking afresh at the politics of environmental history in South
Africa’, Environmental History 11(4) 2006, pp. 804-829; ‘Environmental history in
southern Africa: An overview’; N. Jacobs, ‘Latitudes and longitudes: Comparative
perspectives on Cape environmental history’, Kronos 29 2003, pp. 7-29; P. Steyn, ‘A
greener past? An assessment of South African environmental historiography’, New
Contree 46 1999, pp. 7-27.
28
See D.S. Moore, J. Kosek and A. Pandian, eds, Race, Nature and the Politics of
Difference (Durham NC, Duke University Press, 2003); J.M. McCann, Green Land,
Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa (Portsmouth,
13
Heinemann, 1999); J.M. McCann, ‘Climate and causation in African history’,
International Journal of African Historical Studies 32(2-3) 1999, pp. 261-280.
29
‘Introduction’, Environment and History 10(4) 2000, p. 371; see J.M. MacKenzie,
ed., Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, Manchester University Press,
1990); J.M. MacKenzie, Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires: Imperialism,
Scotland and the Environment (East Linton, Tuckwell Press, 1995); J.M. MacKenzie,
The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1988).
30
‘Introduction’, Environment and History 10(4) 2000, p. 377.
31
S. Sörlin, and P. Warde, ‘The problem of the problem of environmental history: A
re-reading of the field’, Environmental History 12(1) 2007, pp. 107-130.
32
P.L. Farber, Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to
E.O. Wilson (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); R.P. McIntosh, The
Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
33
P. Bowler, The Fontana History of the Environmental Sciences (London, Fontana,
1992), pp. 365-36.
34
J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (London, Allen
Lane, 2005); Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13
000 Years (London, Vintage, 1998).
35
A.W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 9001900 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986).
36
McNeill, ‘Observations’, p. 38.
37
See A. Irirye and P-Y. Saunier, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History
(Houndmills, Macmillan, 2009). For South African and other comparisons, see for
instance, Beinart and Coates, Environment and History; T.R. Dunlap, Nature and the
English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999); W. Beinart and L.
Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007.
38
For the historiography see, as examples: R. Chakrabarti, ed., Does Environmental
History Matter? (Kolata, Readers Service, 2006); P. Coates, ‘Clio’s new greenhouse’,
History Today, August 1996, pp. 15-22; P. Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since
Ancient Times (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998); W. Cronon, ‘A place
for stories: Nature, history and narrative’, Journal of American History, 78(4) 1992,
pp.1347-1376; Journal of American History 76(4) 1990 ‘A round table:
Environmental history’; D. Lowenthal, ‘Environmental history: From genesis to
apocalypse’, History Today 51(4) 2001, pp. 36-44; A.R. Main, ‘Ghosts of the past:
Where does environmental history begin?’, Environment and History 2(1) 1996, pp.
97-114; C. Nash, ‘Environmental history, philosophy and difference’, Journal of
Historical Geography 26(1) 2000, pp. 23-27; R. Nash, ‘American environmental
history: A new teaching frontier’, Pacific Historical Review 41(3) 1972, pp. 362-372;
Pacific Historical Review, ‘Forum: Environmental History, Retrospect and Prospect’,
70(1) 2001, pp. 55-111; S. Pyne, ‘Environmental history without historians’,
Environmental History 10(1) 2005, pp. 72-74; S.R. Rajan, ‘The ends of environmental
history: Some questions’, Environment and History 3(2) 1997, pp. 245-247; J.F.
Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern
World (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003); H. Ritvo, ‘Discipline and
indiscipline’, Environmental History 10(1) 2005, pp. 75-76; R. Grove, ‘Editorial’,
Environment and History 6(2) 2000, pp. 127-129; R. Grove, Editorial, Environment
14
and History 1(1) 1995, pp. 1-2; and R. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial
Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
39
M. Klingle, ‘Spaces of consumption in environmental history’, History and Theory
42 2003, p. 108.
40
L. Robin, Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in
Australia (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1998); L. Robin, How a
Continent Created a Nation (Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2007); S.
Pyne, Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (New York, Henry Holt, 1991); E.
Pawson and S. Dovers, ‘Environmental history and the challenges of
interdisciplinarity: An Antipodean perspective’, Environment and History 9(1) 2003,
pp. 53-76; J. Dargavel, ‘Editorial’, Special issue: Australia, Environment and History
4(2) 1998.
41
T. Brooking and E. Pawson, ‘Editorial: New Zealand environmental histories’,
Special issue: New Zealand, Environment and History 9(4) 2003.
42
M. Rangarajan, ‘Environmental histories of South Asia: A review essay’, Special
issue: South Asia, Environment and History, 2(2) 1996, pp. 129-143; Rangarajan, ed.,
Environmental Issues in India.
43
C. Ford, ‘Nature’s fortunes: New directions in the writing of European
environmental history’, The Journal of Modern History 79 2007, pp. 112-133; M.
Osborn, M., ‘Sowing the Field of British Environmental History’, www.hnet.org/~environ/historiography/british.htm; P.J.E.M. Van Dam, ‘Euro-English and
the art of environmental history’, Environmental History 10 2004, pp.103-105; M.
Cioc, B-O. Linner and M. Osborn, ‘Environmental history writing in northern
Europe’, Environmental History 5(3) 2000, pp. 396-406; T.L. Whited, J.I. Engels,
R.C. Hoffman, H. Ibsend and W. Verstegen, Northern Europe: An Environmental
History (Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO, 2005); D.R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology,
Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh, University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
44
M. Carey, ’Latin American environmental history: Current trends, interdisciplinary
insights, and future directions’, Environmental History 14 2009, pp. 221-252.
45
See for example C.M. Thompson, ‘Ranchers, scientists, and grass-roots
development in the United States and Kenya’, Environmental Values, 11(3), 2002, pp.
303-326; C. Twyman, ‘Livelihood opportunity and diversity in Kalahari wildlife
management areas, Botswana: Re-thinking community resource management, Journal
of Southern African Studies 26(4) 2000, pp. 783-806; D. Potts, ‘Worker-peasants and
farmer-housewives in Africa: The debate about “committed” farmers, access to land
and agricultural production’, Journal of Southern African Studies 26(4) 2000, pp. 807832; B. Cousins, ‘Livestock production and common property struggles in South
African agrarian reform’, Journal of Peasant Studies 23(2-3) 1996, pp. 166-208; J.D.
Hackel, ‘A case study of conservation and development conflicts: Swaziland’s Hlane
Road’, Journal of Southern African Studies 27(4) 2001, pp 813-832; G. Carswell,
‘African farmers in colonial Kigezi, Uganda, 1930-1962: Opportunity, constraint and
sustainability’, D.Phil. thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London, 1997; J. Beall, O. Crankshaw and S. Parnell, ‘Victims, villains and fixers:
The urban environment and Johannesburg’s poor’, Journal of Southern African
Studies 26(4) 2000, pp. 833-856; W.M. Adams and M. Mulligan, Decolonizing
Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era (London, Earthscan,
2003), C.A.M. Attwell and F.P.D. Cotterill, ‘Postmodernism and African
15
conservation science, Biodiversity and Conservation 9 2000, pp. 559-577; J. Fairhead
and M. Leach, ‘Reading forest history backwards: The interaction of policy and local
land use in Guinea’s forest-savanna mosaic’, Environment and History 1(1) 1995, pp.
55-92; J. McCann, ‘The Plow and the Forest: Narratives of Deforestation in Ethiopia,
1840-1992’, Environmental History 21997, pp. 138-159; T. Giles-Vernick, Cutting
the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rain Forest
(Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2002); T. Giles-Vernick, ‘Doli:
Translating an African environmental history of loss in the Sangha River basin of
Equatorial Africa’, Journal of African History 41(3) 2000, pp. 373-394; Y.Q. Lawi,
‘Where physical and ideological landscapes meet: Landscape use and ecological
knowledge in Iraqw, Northern Tanzania, 1920s-1950s’, International Journal of
African Historical Studies 32(2-3) 1999, pp. 281-310; M. Draper, M. Spierenburg and
H. Wels, ‘African dreams of cohesion: Elite pacting and community development in
Transfrontier Conservation Areas in southern Africa’, Culture and Organization 10(4)
2004, pp 341-353; W. Wolmer, ‘Transboundary conservation: The politics of
ecological integrity in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park’, Journal of Southern
African Studies 29(1) 2003, pp. 261-278; R. Matheka, ‘The political ecology of
wildlife conservation in Kenya, 1895-1975’, Ph.D. thesis, Rhodes University, 2001;
C. Mavhunga, ‘”If they are as thirsty as all that, let them come down to the pool”;
Unearthing “wildlife” history and reconstructing “heritage” in Gonarezhou National
Park, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s’, Historia 47(2) 2002, pp. 531558; R. Duffy, Killing for Conservation: Wildlife Policy in Zimbabwe (Oxford, James
Currey, 2000); J.A. Adams and T. O. McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa:
Conservation Without Illusion (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996); G.
Maddox, ‘”Degradation narratives” and “population time bombs”: Myths and realities
about African environments’, in S. Dovers, R. Edgecombe and B. Guest, eds, South
Africa’s Environmental History: Cases and Comparisons (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2003); T. Driver, ‘Anti-erosion policies in the mountain areas of Lesotho: The
South African connection’, Environment and History 5(1) 1999, pp. 1-26; H.
Siiskonen, ‘Deforestation in the Owambo region, north Namibia, since the 1850s’,
Environment and History 2(3) 1996, pp. 291-308; K. Brown, ‘The conservation and
utilisation of the natural world: Silviculture in the Cape Colony, c.1902-1910’,
Environment and History 7(4) 2001, pp. 427-448; A.C. Dahlberg and P.M. Blaikie,
‘Changes in landscape or interpretation? Reflections based on the environmental and
socio-economic history of a village in NE Botswana’, Environment and History 5(2)
1999, pp. 127-174; N. Jacobs, ‘Grasslands and thickets: Bush encroachment and
herding in the Kalahari thornveld’, Environment and History 6(3) 2000, pp. 289-316.
46
See the introduction by Stefan Collini to Snow, The Two Cultures, as well as K.
Blaser, ‘The history of nature and the nature of history: Stephen Jay Gould on science,
philosophy and history’, The History Teacher 32(3) 1999, pp. 411-430; S.J. Gould,
The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the
Misconceived Gap between Science and the Humanities (London, Jonathan Cape,
2003); E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York, Knopf, 1998).
47
D. Worster, ‘The two cultures revisited: environmental history and the
environmental sciences’, Environment and History 2(1) 1996, pp. 3-14; D.
Lowenthal, ‘Environmental history: From genesis to apocalypse’, History Today
51(4) 2001, pp. 36-44. As far as African history is concerned, see J. Carruthers,
‘“Wilding the farm or farming the wild”: The evolution of scientific game ranching in
South Africa from the 1960s to the present’, Transactions of the Royal Society of
16
South Africa 63(2) 2008, pp. 160-181; J. Carruthers, ‘Scientists in society: A history
of the Royal Society of South Africa’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South
Africa 63(1) 2008, pp. 1-30; J. Carruthers, ‘Influences on wildlife management and
conservation biology in South Africa c.1900 to c.1940’, South African Historical
Journal 58 2007, pp. 65-90; J. Carruthers, ‘Conservation and wildlife management in
South African national parks 1930s-1960s’, Journal of the History of Biology 41
2007, pp. 203-236; K. Brown, ‘Political entomology: The insectile challenge to
agricultural development in the Cape Colony, 1895-1910’, Journal of Southern
African Studies 29(2) 2003, pp. 529-550; D. Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary research and the
African rinderpest epizootic: The Cape Colony, 1896-1898’, Journal of Southern
African Studies 29(1) 2003, pp. 133-154; P. Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental
Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press,
2001); H. Tilley, ‘African environments and environmental sciences: The African
Research survey, ecological paradigms and British colonial development’, in W.
Beinart and J. McGregor, eds, Social History and African Environments (Oxford,
James Currey, 2003), pp. 109-130; H. Tilley, ‘Africa as a living laboratory’, D.Phil.
thesis, University of Oxford, 2001; S. Dubow, ‘A commonwealth of science: The
British Association in South Africa, 1905 and 1929’, in S. Dubow, ed., Science and
Society in Southern Africa (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 1142; J. Carruthers, ‘”Our beautiful and useful allies”: Aspects of ornithology in 20thcentury South Africa’, Historia 49(1) 2004, pp. 89-109; S. Dubow, A Commonwealth
of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820-2000 (Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2006).
48
Worster, ‘The two cultures revisited’ p. 13.
49
W. Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the
Environment 1770-1950 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003).
50
See, for example, J. Du Toit, K. Rogers and H. Biggs, eds, The Kruger Experience:
Ecology and Management of Savanna Heterogeneity (Washington, Island Press,
2003); S. Budiansky, Nature’s Keepers: The New Science of Nature Management
(New York etc., The Free Press, 1995); G.C. Daly, ed., Nature’s Services: Societal
Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (Washington, Island Press, 1997) or even L.H.
Gunderson and C.S. Holling, eds, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in
Human and Natural Systems (Washington, Island Press, 2002).
51
Sörlin and Warde, ‘The problem of the problem’, p. 118. An excellent simple book
in this regard is R.Q. Grafton, L. Robin and R.J. Wasson, eds, Understanding the
Environment: Bridging the Disciplinary Divide (Sydney, University of New South
Wales Press, 2005).
52
McNeill, ‘Observations’, p. 9; see also W. Gevers, ‘“Science” or “Sciences”: The
difference one letter makes’, South African Journal of Science 100 2004, pp. 235-246;
E. Pawson and S. Dovers, ‘Environmental history and the challenges of
interdisciplinarity: An Antipodean perspective’, Environment and History 9(1) 2003,
pp. 53-76. See also B. Walker and D. Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining
Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Washington, Island Press, 2006) and
the international conference organised in September 2008 by the Centre de
Recherches Historiques, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris
entitled ‘Common ground, converging gazes: Integrating the social and environmental
in history’.
53
M. Leach, and R. Mearns, eds, The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom
on the African Environment (Portsmouth, N.H., Heinemann, 1996); G. Maddox, H.
17
Giblin and I. Kimambo, eds, Custodians of the Land: Ecology and Culture in the
History of Tanzania (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1996); R. Grove, and J.
McGregor, eds, Special Issue: Zimbabwe, Environment and History 1(3) 1995.
54
Griffiths, ‘How many trees make a forest?’ pp. 376-378.
55
See McNeill, ‘Observations on the nature and culture of environmental history’.
56
S. Pyne, ‘Environmental history without historians’, Environmental History 10(1)
2005, p. 72.
57
See Rangarajan, ‘Introduction’, Environmental Issues in India.
58
W. Cronon, ‘A place for stories: Nature, history and narrative’, Journal of
American History 78(4) 1992, p. 1375.
59
Taylor, ‘Unnatural inequalities: Social and environmental history’.
60
See, for example, C. Mauch, N. Stoltzfus, and D.R. Weiner, Shades of Green:
Environmental Activism around the Globe (Lanham, Maryland, Rowman &
Littlefield, 2006); A. Bramwell, The Fading of the Greens: The Decline of
Environmental Politics in the West (New Haven and London, Yale University Press,
1994).
61
C. Nash, ‘Environmental history, philosophy and difference’, Journal of Historical
Geography 26(1) 2000, pp. 23-27; see also J.W. Moore, ‘The Modern World-System
as environmental history: Ecology and the rise of capitalism’, Theory and Society 32
2003, pp. 307-377.
62
Beinart, ‘African history and environmental history’.
63
J.M. McCann, Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop,
1500-2000 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005).
64
H. Ritvo, ‘Animal planet’, Environmental History 9(2) 2004, pp. 204-220: L. Van
Sittert, ‘From “mere weeds” and “bosjes” to a Cape floral kingdom: The re-imagining
of indigenous flora at the Cape, c1890-1939’, Kronos 28 2002, pp. 102-126.; J.
Comaroff and J. Comaroff, ‘Naturing the nation: Aliens, apocalypse and the
postcolonial state’, Social Identities 7(2) 2001, pp. 233-265; L. van Sittert, ‘“The seed
blows about in every breeze”: Noxious weed eradication in the Cape Colony, 18601909’, Journal of Southern African Studies 26(4) 2000, pp. 655-674.
65
See, for example, L. Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation (Sydney, University
of New South Wales Press, 2007).
66
H. Ritvo, ‘Destroyers and preservers: Big game in the Victorian Empire’, History
Today January 2002, pp. 33-39.
67
D.R. Weiner, ‘A death-defying attempt to articulate a coherent definition of
environmental history’, Environmental History 10 (2005), pp. 404-420.
68
S.P. Hays, ‘Toward integration in environmental history’, Pacific Historical
Review, 70(1) 2001, p. 60.
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