Читать книгу The New Environmental Economics - Eloi Laurent - Страница 25

Environmental history, that can be traced back to the early 1970s, offers a bilateral approach, shedding light on how humans have been affected by their natural environment and how reciprocally they have affected their environment. The birth of environmental history is generally located in August 1972, with the publication of a special issue of the Pacific Historical Review and more specifically a seminal article by Roderick Nash.¹ In it, Nash writes: “I never intended to teach the history of the land in the manner of geologists. I would, rather, attempt a history of attitude and action toward the land. This would involve a description of environmental change, but my interest in it would be as evidence of man’s values, ideals, ambitions, and fear.” Donald Worster was a pioneer in this historical field. In his masterpiece,² he explores the interrelation between the Great Depression and over-exploitation of land in the Great Plains. The key insight of Worster’s work is that the same society has produced both events under the influence of the same system: unfettered capitalism. “lt cannot be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulation or social disorder. lt came about because the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to … The Dust Bowl … was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself [the) task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth,” writes Worster.

Commenting on the work of Worster, one of the leading contemporary figures of environmental history, William Cronon (1992),³ explains that “Our histories of the Great Plains environment remain fixed on people because what we most care about in nature is its meaning for human beings. We care about the dust storms because they stand as a symbol of human endurance in the face of natural adversity – or as a symbol of human irresponsibility in the face of natural fragility. Human interests and conflicts create values in nature that in turn provide the moral center for our stories.” He adds “I would urge upon environmental historians the task of telling not just stories about nature, but stories about stories about nature.”

Cronon’s book on the development of the mid-West region⁴ expands on the idea that the social system imposes itself in some way on the natural world. Women and men are able to build cities in which fundamental assets are themselves. This is the case of the city of Chicago, devoid of almost any environmental asset at the time of its founding but which was able to take advantage of its social assets to become the urban center of the industrial development of the United States.

The history of the environment thus sheds light, beyond the moral apprehension of Nature, on the social and political dimension of the human relationship to the natural world. These issues were present at the very beginning of environmental governance, in the early nineteenth century.