A Field on Fire
A Field on Fire
The Future of Environmental History
Inspired by the pioneering work of preeminent environmental historian Donald Worster, the contributors to A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History reflect on the past and future of this discipline. Featuring wide-ranging essays by leading environmental historians from the United States, Europe, and China, the collection challenges scholars to rethink some of their orthodoxies, inviting them to approach familiar stories from new angles, to integrate new methodologies, and to think creatively about the questions this field is well positioned to answer.
Worster’s groundbreaking research serves as the organizational framework for the collection. Editors Mark D. Hersey and Ted Steinberg have arranged the book into three sections corresponding to the primary concerns of Worster’s influential scholarship: the problem of natural limits, the transnational nature of environmental issues, and the question of method. Under the heading “Facing Limits,” five essays explore the inherent tensions between democracy, technology, capitalism, and the environment. The “Crossing Borders” section underscores the ways in which environmental history moves easily across national and disciplinary boundaries. Finally, “Doing Environmental History” invokes Worster’s work as an essayist by offering self-conscious reflections about the practice and purpose of environmental history.
The essays aim to provoke a discussion on the future of the field, pointing to untapped and underdeveloped avenues ripe for further exploration. A forward thinker like Worster presents bold challenges to a new generation of environmental historians on everything from capitalism and the Anthropocene to war and wilderness. This engaging volume includes a very special afterword by one of Worster’s oldest friends, the eminent intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers, who has known Worster for close to fifty years.
Ted Steinberg is Adeline Barry Davee Distinguished Professor of History and professor of law at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York; American Green: The Obsessive Quest for a Perfect Lawn; Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History; Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America; and Nature Incorporated; Industrialization and the Waters of New England.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: A Good Set of Walking Shoes by Mark D. Hersey
Part I. Facing Limits
Chapter 1. Subversive Subjects: Donald Worster and the Radical Origins of Environmental History by Ted Steinberg
Chapter 2. Can Capitalism Ever Be Green? by Adam Rome
Chapter 3. Seeing Like a God: Environmentalism in the Anthropocene by Frank Zelko
Chapter 4. The Locked Door: Thomas Midgley Jr., Chlorofluorocarbons, and the Unintended Consequences of Technology by Kevin C. Armitage
Chapter 5. Malibu, California: Edenic Illusions and Natural Disasters by Christof Mauch
Chapter 6. Energizing Environmental History by Brian C. Black
Part II. World without Borders
Chapter 7. The Force of Fiber: Reconnecting the Philippines with Latin America and the American West via Transnational Environmental History by Sterling Evans
Chapter 8. Hunting and Wilderness in the Creation of National Identities by Mikko Saikku
Chapter 9. Why We Need Comparative History: The Case of China and the United States by Shen Hou
Chapter 10. The World in a Tin Can: Migrants in Environmental History by Marco Armiero
Chapter 11. Down in the Sky: The Promise of Aerial Environmental History by Robert Wellman Campbell
Chapter 12. Rivers of Dust: An Environmental Historian Appraises the American Legal System by Karl Boyd Brooks
Part III. Doing Environmental History
Chapter 13. Whole Earth without Borders: Earth Photographs, Space Data, and the Importance of Visual Culture within Environmental History by Neil M. Maher
Chapter 14. Beyond Stories: Geospatial Influences on the Practice of Environmental History by Sara M. Gregg
Chapter 15. Low-Hanging Fruit: Science and Environmental History by Edmund Russell
Chapter 16. The Watershed of War: Environmental History and the “Big Civil War” by Brian Allen Drake
Chapter 17. War from the Ground Up: Integrating Military and Environmental Histories by Lisa M. Brady
Afterword: The Distinctiveness of Environmental History by Daniel T. Rodgers
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index
Science as Service
Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930
Edited by Alan I Marcus
Service as Mandate
How American Land-Grant Universities Shaped the Modern World, 1920–2015
Edited by Alan I Marcus
The Defoliation of America
Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests
By Amy Marie Hay; Foreword by Mark D. Hersey
