This time I am lifting from Adam Robert's excellent History of Science Fiction, in which he claims "one of the book's greatest strengths is its detailed and plausible rendering of the political context" (236). What Herbert spent six years "researching," then, was the complex political environs of the interplanetary empire he'd invented because Dune's reputation as an environmental novel is undeserved. The overgrown extremophiles who inhabit Arrakis are humans from Earth, but somehow survive on a planet with no viable means to create or sustain an atmosphere. As Roberts writes:

We may wonder, for instance, how Dune's atmosphere is oxygenated in the absence of planetary vegetation. In later books Herbert suggests that the sandworms fart oxygen, which hardly address the problem.

Indeed, without an atmospheric density in the neighborhood of 1.2 kg/m³ it wouldn't matter what element those sandworms farted---it would've drifted up and away. And where did all that sand come from anyway? The most efficient means of producing sand is wave action, but even if Herbert wanted to be inefficient, a little research would've taught him that sand requires big rocks and weathering processes. The geological history of a planet consisting entirely of sand is---will you let me get my geology geek on, please? The opportunities to do so are few and very far between. Fine then. I'll be mysterious.*

I don't mean to diminish Herbert's accomplishments in Dune. So long as he was alive, the series educated science types about the nuances and niceties of medieval politics. (The process, if not the history.) That said, I always found Herbert's forecast of future history more than a little pessimistic. Like the Terminator and Battlestar Galactica franchises, the Dune sextet pivots on a war between man and formerly enslaved machine, the result of which was a return to a pre-computational society. The mentats are bred---"Fancy meeting you here, dissertation. Please GO AWAY."---they are bred to be mathematical savants, and spice mystically allows for interstellar travel sans star-charts. So, no computers needed. However, Herbert's novels seem to argue that a rejection of the modern technology entails a rejection of modern political systems---as if dispensing with the convenience of a calculator is the first sign of feudalism's revival.

Besides the obvious problem with this---somehow those Athenians managed to be quasi-democratic before the Age of Apple---and despite Herbert's obvious critique of hierarchy and messianic thought, I can't help but think the novels engender a nostalgia for certainty in their readers. We might not know how spice works, but Our Dear God-Emperor surely does. (Despite having personally and purposely evolved into a human-sandworm hybrid---about which plot-point my dissertation rears its head like Giant Putin over unsuspecting Alaska.  So I'll stop now lest I invite insanity in, slap it on the back, and offer it a brew---which is, yes, how a body feels about a dissertation recently completed.  I hear tell this subsides in time, but so far I've felt none of it.)

So where was "Butcher Town," and how did its activities impact the health and environment of Charleston? For the answer to these and other sensational, even gruesome questions, please join me on Thursday, October 16th, at 7:00 P.M. for an illustrated program titled "Butcher Town: A Brief History of the Slaughter Houses of Early Charleston."

To learn more details about this program, and to download a printable flyer for this program, please visit our Upcoming Events page.

On this day in 1900, long before the advent of weather satellites or Doppler radar, there could be no detailed predictions about the storm's path as it raged out of the Atlantic and grew more powerful over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But there were warnings from the Weather Bureau in Washington, insisting that Galveston, Texas's 40,000 residents should find high ground. The highest available was in the center of town, less than 10 feet above sea level. Thousands headed there and increased their chances of survival. Thousands of others did not.

The 1900 hurricane, equivalent to a Category 4, slammed into Galveston early in the day. The ceaseless noise from the storm was maddening, "a runaway freight train that wouldn't stop howling" through town all day long. Debris flew through the air. Stately trees snapped. Grand mansions collapsed into heaps of kindling. No anemometer survived to take accurate wind readings; gusts likely reached 200 mph.

The sea began rising. It swept into town. Slowly at first, faster later in the day, it was inexorable and terrifying. It was everywhere. By early evening, salt water stood 10 feet deep in the city center. Then it rose higher.

Water picked up and then deposited houses, destroying neighborhoods and uprooting families. The next day much of Galveston was gone. When the floodwaters receded, they left the smell of rotting corpses and a wasteland. Approximately 6,000 people died in Galveston as a result of the 1900 hurricane, anonymous because it took place a half-century before we began naming killer storms. The hurricane and its aftermath were called the worst "natural disaster" in the nation's history, until Katrina hit three years ago.

That label was as misleading then as it is now. Why do we build urban centers in harm's way, along fragile coastlines, below sea level, in the path of storms, or at the foot of slopes that collapse upon us? Most often because of the fantasy that nature offers greatness without sacrifice. For New Orleans, the lure was the far-flung rivers of the Mississippi system. For Galveston, a perfect harbor seemed to guarantee a future as a trade center.

Before Sept. 8, 1900, Galveston had every reason to believe that nature would make good on its promise. The city boasted the nation's busiest cotton port and the third-largest port overall. Galveston was an elegant place, prosperous and promising, poised on the brink of its destiny.

A day later, the city was gone.

But Galveston refused to become a ghost town. It innovated and rebuilt. Workers using screw jacks raised the city's remaining buildings by more than 10 feet in some places. It was an extraordinary and grueling process. What came next was more so. Laborers brought in more than 10 million pounds of sand to fill in the void that yawned beneath the raised structures and the earth below. Galveston became an elevated city, safer on its sandy perch above the tides of the Gulf of Mexico.

At the same time, Galveston vowed that it would keep future floods out of its rebuilt homes. The city constructed a massive seawall, a 16-foot-thick, 17-foot-high structure standing between it and the Gulf. The seawall grew over more than six decades. It's now more than 10 miles long. Like the Mississippi River levee system, it's a monument to the human desire to control wild nature.

Galveston's post-1900 landscape symbolizes the romance of a city rising from ruins. It's more accurate, though, to think of it as an engineering marvel, a sustained act of will unprecedented in the nation's urban history.

It's also, in some important ways, a failure. Galveston never recaptured its lost commercial glory. It was quickly eclipsed by Houston, which was inland, safer, and closer to the rail connections and oil fields that became economically critical early in the 20th century. Today, Galveston is a beach town for Houston, a site of consumption rather than production.

In other ways, however, Galveston's efforts have paid off. The city has survived the passing of countless storms, and it will weather this hurricane as well. The people of New Orleans -- many of them forlorn and on the road once again -- may want to pause for a moment to take note of Galveston's disaster history and present. As New Orleans continues the slow process of rebuilding after Katrina, it must contemplate ways to make itself safer. At the same time, though, it should be wary because trade, the lifeblood of a commercial metropolis, always seeks higher ground.

[Author's note: I've stolen most of this post from myself.]

Back to school. Could be a synonym for "fall" and "autumn"--it seems every year this time of year, I'm returning to some form of a classroom. This time, I'm documenting my seasonal migration.

This blog is dedicated to my pursuit of a Ph.D. in the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The posts will be a blend of reflections on the graduate student life, tips & tricks to managing people and paperwork, and random thoughts of the hour.

In addition, this blog will have a certain Arctic flavor to it. My research will focus on the cultural and environmental history of the Inuvialuit people on their homeland, the Mackenzie Delta-Beaufort Sea region. Hence, I will add the occasional post that gives the down-low on what's going on up North.

When all is said and done, I hope this blog will have served a few purposes: 1) acts as a source of information for me to look back on and remember the particulars of the process; and 2) lives as a resource for others embarking on their own educational adventures.

With those goals in mind for the end, I begin the journey toward the Ph.D.

            The American Southwest - the title hints at the meaning, history and mental imagry attached to the region by inhabitants and observers. The "Southwest" is not southwest of Mexico City, so the geographic nature of its designation implies its conquest by the United States in 1848, as if the American nation's sovereignty over the region could change the spatial position of the land and the people that occupied it.  Popular American conceptions of the American West have underpinned this proprietary definition of the Southwest, but the historical treatments of the region, its people, and its place within the larger narrative of human experience have changed over the last few decades.  The American Southwest was once defined by American historians as part of the rewards of Manifest Destiny, and its incorporation into the nation was explained as the implementation of God's plan for the Anglo-Saxon race.  Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the frontier in 1893, and the academic investigation of the western region of the United States languished, as Americans tended to view the West as a completed process of frontier settlement.  This paper will examine the development of the historiographical treatment of the Southwest over the last three decades, and show how the New Western history and investigations into issues of national identity revitalized the field.  Once seen as a cultural artifact or a Hollywood backdrop, the history of the Southwest has become a dynamic exploration of continuity and variety, conquest and exchange, and culture and identity.  Once defined by its relationship to the conquering metropole, the Southwest is increasingly understood through its relationship to its environment and the experiences of its population.

            Turner had characterized the American West in terms of its significance as a frontier between expanding civilization and shrinking savagery.  Once Turner determined that the process of the frontier had been ended through white settlement, the study of the American West, and its subregions like the Southwest, foundered.  Many historians in the later part of the twentieth century avoided analyzing the American West, but produced important works on regional, ethnic and gender history that were set within the western region. This resulted in significant scholarship on the experiences of minority groups that had been subsumed by the frontier narrative.

             Albert Camarillo became part of what he described as "the new social history that has focused on heretofore excluded from traditional historic studies."[1]  His book on the experiences of Mexican-Americans, or Chicanos, in Santa Barbara and Southern California was part of a larger academic effort to reclaim the history of Chicano communities from obscurity. Although he did not necessarily consider his work part of Western history, he did endeavor to establish the continuity of the Chicano historical experiences after 1848.  Camarillo disproved the perception that Chicanos lost their historical grounding as they transitioned from Mexicans to Americans. By demonstrating the political and economic displacement of Chicanos in California, and illustrating the development of barrios and their relationship to the dominant Anglo-American culture, Camarillo exposed a part of Western history that had nothing to do with the Turnarian closing of the frontier.  Camarillo used economic, demographic and social data to articulate the vibrant, dynamic history of Chicano people in Southern California, and the larger history of capitalist development in the West, and by doing so established a useful model for understanding Hispanic displacement in the Southwest.  He integrated the Chicano experience into the exploitive and racialized economic system that enabled the incorporation of the American West, and in many ways anticipated the goals of the of the New Western historians that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. 

             Historians like Patricia Limerick and Donald Worster also pursued themes of continuity in the West, although not through exclusive focus on the social history of underrepresented, minority groups.  Instead, these historians of the New West revitalized the field by connecting their analysis of the West to the lives and interactions of the diverse inhabitants, and the economic and social consequences of the western geography and extreme environment.  With these approaches they were able to directly contribute to the understanding of the Southwest, by establishing frameworks that connected an understanding of the West and its subregions to the interrogation of the history of the people that lived there and the events and conditions they experienced.

             Instead of viewing the region of the West only in relation to the course of white settlement, Patricia Limerick rejected Turner's thesis and defined the West as a geographic location, not an idea, in her 1987 ground-breaking work Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West.[2]   Her decision to define the West as a region freed the study of the West from the "conceptual fog" that she determined prevented Western historians from engaging in relevant interpretation and debate.[3]   This allowed her to integrate Chicano, or Mexican-American, history, and the work of social historians like Camarillo, into a larger narrative of conquest and continuity.  Limerick focused on the variety and interactions of western inhabitants by seeing the west as a meeting ground of different groups of people.  Limerick recognized that the Southwest was a contested borderland and a diverse common ground.  In Limerick's book, the conquest of the Southwest, so often seen from the perspectives of the victors in western narratives, was reoriented and made to show the experiences of the people living in the contested area and subjected to the "Anglo-American talent to change overnight from being intruders to being legitimate residents and, conversely to turn the natives into "foreigners.""[4]  By weaving the biographies and social histories into a synthesis treatment of the American West, Limerick was able to build on the historiographical innovations of the 1960s and 1970s, but she also helped redefine the field of Western history and redirect it in ways that contributed to the understanding of the Southwest.

            A couple of years before Patricia Limerick published Legacy of Conquest, Donald Worster established continuity and conquest within Western history in his book, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West, by connecting the arid environment of the Southwest to the economic inequality and instrumentalism that developed in the region.  Worster also rejected Turner's frontier thesis, and like Limerick chose to define the perspective of his work according to the reality of the land itself, not the general direction of the movement of white settlement.  He, however, focused his analysis of the region on the way the technological advances in irrigation and riparian manipulation arose in response to the arid conditions of the Southwest..  He explained how the distinct demands of arid environments historically resulted in the development of "hydraulic societies," but that the domination of nature in the arid regions of the American West went further than previous irrigation-based empires.[5] Pursuing a policy of "total use for greater wealth," an alliance of capitalists, politicians and regulators constructed an economic and political structure that favored the accumulation of wealth, property and power in the hands of relatively few people.[6]  Worster warned of the anti-democratic and ultimately anti-life implications of the Capitalist State, and urged his readers to accommodate nature instead of subduing it.  Through his analysis of the powerful economic structures that enabled the accumulation of capital, Worster also exposed the social and economic constraints experienced by the inhabitants of the Southwest.  He not only highlighted the importance of the region, and advocated wise stewardship of nature, but also recommended a re-examination of nature's relationship to human history.

In 1994, work on the American West was published in The Oxford History of the American West, and the wealth and diversity of historical studies brought together in the book illustrate the multiple subjects, perspectives and processes involved in western history.[8]   The complex history of the Southwest was featured within the Heritage section, and the article by David Weber, The Spanish-Mexican Rim, describes the Spanish influence on the region.  Weber explored the interaction between native Southwesterners and Spanish, and the role that the northern portion of the Spanish American empire played in the international competitions between Spain and France.  Weber followed the story through the emergence of the Mexican Empire in 1821, and its subsequent decades as a republic, and rejected the earlier interpretations that "dismissed the long Spanish-Mexican tenure in the region as a time of despotism, religious intolerance, and economic stagnation,"[9]  He instead integrated the Spanish heritage of the Southwest into an analysis of the West, reminding his readers of the significance of the continuity of the history of the region.  Outside of the artificial constraints of the modern boundaries of nation-states, Weber conducted an analysis that connected the Spanish-Mexican heritage to Native American and colonial history.

            Cultural historians like Matt Garcia built upon the foundations of the New Western history in attempts to uncover more about the experiences and contributions of Mexican-Americans within American history.  In his 2001 book, A World of its Own: Race, Labor and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970, Garcia specifically investigated the political culture of Mexican-American citrus-workers.[10]  By merging analyses of Chicano cultural and community development, in a way that struck an "appropriate balance between space, time, and social being," Garcia sought to answer certain questions about the history of the Chicano population of the suburbs around Los Angeles.[11]  Garcia's main query was the explanation for the lack of labor activism within Chicano communities of the San Gabriel-San Bernardino Valley.  Garcia characterized Mexican-American laborers in Los Angeles as active agents engaged in less obvious forms of resistance, which they expressed through their popular culture and community cohesion.  Garcia tapped into the work of social historians, like Camarillo, to show the material conditions of Chicano laborers, the racism that manifested in a dual-wage system, sub-standard living conditions, and second class status, and the "barrioization" movement that consolidated the Chicano population within enclaves.[12] Garcia used the frameworks of theorists like Edward Soja and Antonio Gramsci in order to uncover other forms of political activity within Chicano communities, and the ways geographic and cultural choices allowed Chicanos to engage in counter-hegemonic activity in response to the discrimination they faced in Los Angeles.  Garcia connected theatre and dancehall culture to political activism and intercultural exchange, recognizing alternative ways Chicanos had to critique and change Los Angeles society.  Garcia's book was the product of his own extensive scholarship and oral interviews, but was also a part of the growing scholarship that was re-examining the history of the West, the experiences of the inhabitants of western communities and the relationship different groups of western inhabitants had to dominant Anglo-American culture and their own natural environment.  While part of the growing scholarship on cultural history, Garcia's book also signified the dynamic potential of New Western history, once released from the ethnocentric constraints of the Turner Thesis.

             Like Chicano political culture, southwestern national identity is another complex subject that cannot be successfully explained through Turner's frontier process.  An understanding of Anglo-American national identity can benefit from an understanding of the place of the frontier within popular culture, and the idea that the American West signified the historic "struggle with the wilderness [that] turned Europeans into Americans."[13]  However, this perspective obscures the identities of nonwhite inhabitants of the West.  Andres Resendez's 2005 book, Changing National Identities of the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850,  examined the identity choices of Tejanos, Nuevomexicanos, Mexicans, and Americans in the Southwest in the first half of the nineteenth century.  The region transitioned from the periphery of the Spanish empire, to the northern states of Mexico, and ultimately into the American Southwest, and the people that lived on the borderland faced stark choices between Mexican and American national identity.  Resendez found that identity choices of people living on the frontier did not derive from inherent identification with either national project, but instead grew out of "situational" logic, as Southwesterners were buffeted by the forces of the American economy and coerced by the Mexican state.[14]

            Resendez used evidence of Mexican state-formation, southwestern market choices, cross-cultural marriages, ethnic literature, and violent resistance to explore the forces that influenced identity choices among Southwesterners. He integrated history of the Spanish heritage in the region, and the nation's colonial legacy, with a rich variety of frontier inhabitant experiences to explain the construction of national identity on the Mexican-America border.  He treated the Southwest as a region and an idea in order to understand the ways its inhabitants understood themselves and navigated their positions to competing national claims.  Examining an era of changes and choices, Resendez also showed the continuity of the Southwest through his decision to treat the region as a discrete location, with a rich past and a dynamic cultural heritage that included the contributions of many cultures.

            The historiographical scholarship on the American Southwest has progressed over the last few decades, and culminated in the kind of sophisticated analysis of heritage, culture and identity exemplified by historians such as David Weber, Matt Garcia and Andres Resendez.  Yet these kinds of interpretive works would not have been possible without the contributions of Chicano and New Western historians.  The "conceptual fog" that so worried Patricia Limerick was lifted from the study of the American Southwest and other western regions, and the ensuing analysis has given insight into the  previously obscured lives of southwestern residents.  Not only freed from the limitations set by Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, studies of the Southwest have uncovered evidence of widespread personal agency and political culture among Mexican Americans, re-examined connections between human history and ecology, and recognized the importance of identity and continuity in a contested region shaped by conquest.

© Feather Crawford Freed 2008

    All Rights Reserved

[2] Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest : The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York and

                 London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987).

[3] Limerick, pg 24.

[4] Limerick, pg 239.

[5] Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pg7.

[6] Worster, pg 262.

[7] William Cronan, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Making of the Great West (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991)

[8] Clyde Milner, ed., The  Oxford History of Western History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

[9] David Weber, "The Spanish-Mexican  Rim," The  Oxford History of Western History, pg 73.

[10] Matt  Garcia, A World of its Own: Race Citrus, and Labor in the Making of Greater Los Angeles (Chapel

Hill and London:  The University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

[11] Garcia, pg 5.

[12] Camarillo, pg 53.

[13] Limerick, pg.20

[14] Andres Resendez,  Changing National Identities on the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

BLAM!

Cut to this day in 1942, when Walt Disney's Bambi premiered at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The huge audience was delighted; "from all over the darkened house childish laughter broke forth continuously." Reviewers also typically appreciated the film. The Times, for instance, gushed:

In colors that would surprise even the spectrum itself, Disney's cartoon craftsmen have re-created a woodland that shimmers and glows and darkens altogether magically. The wind over a green field, the morning light on the meadow, the hushed naves of the forest inhabited by all sorts of hidden folk, the artists have made with a simple and loving touch.

Still, many critics, even those wowed by the wonders of Disney's spectacular animation, were somewhat put off by an animal cartoon that lacked madcap hijinks. And after its splashy release, even though Bambi ran successfully throughout the nation, it didn't recover its enormous production costs. The film was, initially at least, a commercial failure. In the wake of World War II, though, subsequent releases and shrewd marketing made it into one of the top grossing pictures of the era. By 1988, it had earned its distributor more than $47 million. By comparison, Casablanca, also released in 1942, had earned less than a tenth that.

Returning for a moment to Radio City Music Hall on this day in 1942, the Times also noted that, scattered amidst the laughter, there were a few "tears and boohoos." Which doesn't surprise. Because, as the above clip suggests, Bambi's an extraordinarily sad movie. Given that, it seems odd, particularly with the war ongoing, that no contemporary critics wondered if children viewing the film could handle the thought of Bambi losing his mother. In subsequent years, this has become the pivotal question about the film. Pauline Kael suggests:

It is one of the paradoxes of the movie business that the movies designed expressly for children are generally the ones that frighten them the most. I have never heard children screaming from fear at any of those movies we're always told they should be protected from as they screamed at Bambi and Dumbo Bambi's mother is murdered, Dumbo's mother is goaded to madness and separated from Dumbo; those movies really hit children where it counts.

It was almost much worse. Walt Disney originally wanted Bambi's mother shot onscreen as Bambi ran away to safety. Bambi later was to have returned to the spot of his mother's death, where he would have found only the imprint in the snow where the hunters had dragged away her corpse. Disney, of course, reconsidered. And so we are left with the relatively bloodless version above.

Perhaps more interesting, at least to an erstwhile environmental historian like me, is Bambi's depiction of the natural world. The film is based on Felix Salten's Bambi: A Life in the Woods, originally published in 1926. Salten was a classic "nature faker," an author who relied on anthropomorphized animals for his main characters, creatures who talked and imparted important life lessons to readers. Disney, even though he aimed for realism -- he had one of his animators spend half a year sketching deer in Maine's Baxter Park and later imported a pair of fawns to his studios so that his artists could study their movements -- stripped away much of the ecological grit present in Salten's novel. Disney denatured Bambi.

Disney's animators famously cutified the animals they drew by exaggerating the size of their heads and eyes and shrinking their muzzles, giving them the proportions of human babies. Initially, Disney resisted this tactic with Bambi. But after his artists had trouble imparting dramatic expressions to Bambi and his friends, they reverted to form: "a smaller muzzle and much larger cranium finally created the new design." Anthropologist Elizabeth Lawrence writes: "With a huge head dwarfing its trunk and a pair of oversized eyes with pupils and lashes Disney's Bambi arouses sympathy and nurturance and a sense of parenthood."

At the same time, Bambi's is a woodland without predation. Whereas Salten's Bambi encounters ferrets killing mice, crows killing a baby rabbit (the offspring of the character who inspired Thumper), foxes killing pheasants and ducks, and owls killing mice (mice don't fare very well in Salten), in Disney's Bambi, Friend Owl is best buddies with Thumper -- unlikely bedfellows indeed. The only two instances in which nature appears to be even remotely red in tooth and claw are the difficulty of winter and the competition among bucks during mating season.

More telling, humans are entirely set apart from the natural world. Although they are never seen in Bambi, people wreak havoc throughout: hunters kill Bambi's mother, they set fire to the forest, and their dogs attack Faline. The warning Bambi's mother gives her son before she dies hangs in the air for the remainder of the film: "Man is in the forest." Salten also depicted hunters as dangerous. But at the end of Salten's story, Bambi's father leads his son to view a dead poacher, the wound in his neck still fresh, "a small red mouth. Blood was oozing out slowly." Bambi's father, himself nearing the end of his life, then explains:

He isn't all powerful as they say...Everything that lives and grows doesn't come from him. He's just the same as we. He has the same fears, the same needs, and suffers in the same way. He can be killed like us, and then he lies helpless on the ground like all the rest of us, as you see him now.

In Salten's work, then, human and non-human animals alike are part of the natural world. Disney, too, hoped to end with the complex scene above. But test audiences reacted poorly -- "four hundred people shot straight in the air" -- to seeing a human corpse on screen. Thus ended Disney's flirtation with a complex conclusion for Bambi. Commerce, as ever, trumped art in the Magic Kingdom.

Assessing a film's impact is always difficult. But there's little doubt that Bambi has shaped the culture. No less an authority than Kiefer Sutherland recalls that Bambi was the first film he ever saw and that "it taught [him] about -- I guess on a broad scale -- sexuality." Getting into a bit more detail than may be necessary, Sutherland admits: "I was in love with Thumper's girlfriend from the time I was seven until I was ten. She's got all that eye shadow on and she's looking real good." Any movie that can make a furry out of a man like Jack Bauer is strong stuff.

More seriously, Bambi's portrayal of a natural world in which there's no place for humans props up a classic and destructive American cultural dichotomy. As environmental historian William Cronon argues in his brilliant essay, "The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature", the ongoing opposition of the human and non-human worlds, the separation of people from nature in other words, often stands in the way of effective environmental stewardship. Only when people recognize that they are an inseparable part of nature, rather than fetishizing a nature set apart from themselves, will they begin to care for ecosystems ranging from gorgeous pristine wilderness to decaying urban landscapes.

In the meantime, though, that giant head, those huge eyes, so totally cute. No, I don't mean Kiefer Sutherland, you sicko. I mean Bambi, the poor deer.

*ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY PhD WORKSHOP*
Australian National University, Canberra
27-31 October, 2008

*Are you writing a PhD in some aspect of environmental history?*

For five days in October this year, environmental historians at the
Australian National University will be running a workshop for PhD students
from around the country who are researching aspects of environmental history in Australia, New Zealand or elsewhere.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together doctoral students with common
interests to learn from one another about how to address significant,
exciting themes in this emerging field of scholarship.  Students will be
expected to participate by speaking and writing about their own research,
and by doing some preparatory reading that will be provided in advance.

Morning sessions will be held each of the five days (Monday 27 October to
Friday 31 October). These will feature seminars on major themes in
environmental history as well as student presentations on their doctoral
research.  Afternoons will mostly be reserved for preparatory reading,
fieldwork, optional museum and archival visits, and informal meetings.

Course organisers and presenters will be Professor Tom Griffiths (History
Program, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU), Dr Libby Robin (Fenner
School of Environment and Society ANU/Centre for Historical Research
National Museum of Australia), Dr Nicholas Brown (History Program, Research
School of Social Sciences ANU/Centre for Historical Research National Museum of Australia) and Professor Heather Goodall (Centre for Transforming Cultures, University of Technology, Sydney).

How to apply
The workshop is designed for doctoral students currently enrolled at
universities in Australia and New Zealand who are undertaking studies in
environmental history (in all its forms).  The number of participants will
be strictly limited (to facilitate discussion).  There is no registration
fee.

Please apply by providing the following:
•    a brief curriculum vitae
•    two short statements (totalling no more than 500 words) explaining the
subject of your doctoral research and what you hope to gain from such a
workshop, and
•    documented support from your supervisor (a signature will do!)

Send your application to Dr Libby Robin, Fenner School of Environment and
Society, Building 43, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, or
via email Libby.Robin@anu.edu.au by Friday, 15 August 2008.

Financial support will be available to participants from outside Canberra.
This will include a return discount economy airfare plus a contribution of
up to $150 to your accommodation expenses. Enquiries should be directed to Karen Smith, Administrator, History Program, RSSS, ANU. karen.smith@anu.edu.au or ph: (+61) 02 6125 2354

We look forward to hearing from you!

This PhD Workshop is a biannual initiative of the History Program, Research
School of Social Sciences, and the Fenner School of Environment and Society,
ANU.  It is sponsored by the Research School of Social Sciences, the Fenner
School of Environment and Society and the Centre for Historical Research,
National Museum of Australia.

Heather Goodall
University of Technology, Sydney

Heather.Goodall@uts.edu.au

Colorado State University has launched a School of Global Environmental Sustainability that will eventually touch all academic disciplines and push even English majors to learn about technology that could clean up the Earth.

The university will spend $350,000 in the first year to develop the new school, which will eventually have its own majors and offer certificates in environmental sustainability.

But it will also take existing CSU colleges and force professors to work together on a new set of classes that will teach students — in creative ways — about environmental technology.

Engineering majors could get a certificate in environmental economics, for example. Interior design majors could take a course in green building materials. History majors could learn about American environmental history.

Read more: CSU program to turn all majors "green"

El incremento de la vida y los combustibles no es cosa de casualidad, el sistema capitalista tiene un ciclo definido para estos fenomenos, en un sistema globalizado nos afecta a todos, así pues no se extrañen que los precios sigan subiendo y los costos se incrementen; tomen esto en cuenta para su presupuesto personal o familiar, por que nada solucionamos con quemar camionetas o parar el tráfico, es inevitable muchas veces la carestía y el mal rato que nos toca, por favor no le hechen la culpa al paisano si la verdad aveces los responsables son los del norte por su control sobre nosotros.

Lo mejor que puede hacer cualquier persona es llevarse bien con el vecino, con el amigo, con su compatriota por que todos estamos en lo mismo, no gaste por gusto, gaste con gusto.

On this day in 1874, Harper's Weekly ran the above cartoon. As recently as mid century, bison, roaming in herds across the continent's midsection, had numbered somewhere between 30 and 200 million. By 1874, though, many observers assumed the animals, along with the Plains Indians who depended on them for survival, would soon disappear from the American scene, a species and a race vanishing because of the impact of industrialization and white settlement throughout the West.

Buffalo robes became a hot commodity in the 1850s, when settlers, pouring into Kansas Territory, began hunting bison for sport. But it was the arrival of the railroad -- it always is in Western history, isn't it? -- following the Civil War, that pushed the species toward the tipping point. The railroads needed to feed workers who laid their tracks. And market hunters were happy to provide relatively cheap bison meat. At the same time, more railroads meant more settlers in the region, better access to eastern markets, and greater demand than ever for hides. Eventually, the railroads also realized that the bison themselves were a tourist attraction. And riders marveled at the great, shaggy beasts and sometimes shot them from trains.

Bison robes were prized for their durability and their warmth, qualities that made them especially useful in the West. Then, starting early in the 1870s, tanneries in the United States and Europe began using bison hides for leather. Because of this new commercial application for the animals' skins, coupled with the widespread availability of more accurate rifles, the slaughter accelerated. By the mid 1870s, the bison had largely disappeared from their range on the southern plains.

In 1871, R. C. McCormick, a delegate to congress from the Arizona Territory, introduced legislation to protect the bison. Like the animals themselves, his bill died. McCormick, undeterred, tried again the following year, lobbying his colleagues by showing gruesome images of piles of bison carcasses, stripped of their hides, rotting in the sun. Finally, in 1874, congress passed legislation protecting the animals. President Grant, though, listened to his old friend and trusted adviser, General William T. Sherman, who insisted that the destruction of the bison would hasten the end of the Indian wars in the West. With the buffalo gone, Sherman argued, the Plains Indians would be forced to assimilate; they would have to embrace sedentary agriculture. Grant vetoed the bill. The hunt continued.

A decade later, just a few hundred bison, a small herd located near Yellowstone National Park, were still alive in the United States. Somewhere, Kevin Costner just shed a tear. Or maybe he thought of a great idea for a sequel.

Without further ado:

Closed and Open Systems:  Two Arenas of Human History

The Dust Bowl was one of America's greatest environmental catastrophes, and as such, many environmentalists use the Dust Bowl as an example of what occurs when there is rampant disregard for natural processes.  However, not everyone agrees with the environmentalists' view of the circumstances surrounding the Dust Bowl.  In particular, three historical interpretations can be seen as indicative of various approaches to environmental disasters, each with its strengths and weaknesses.  James C. Malin's belief in an open system is the idea around which he forms his interpretation of the Dust Bowl, whereas Donald Worster's roots in ecological thinking and critique of unfettered development, both of which assume a closed system, that informed his thesis of an anthropogenic Dust Bowl.  The third interpretation from the Great Plains Committee will be used as a parallel to Worster's own interpretation, though it, too, is unique.  However, the dichotomy between viewing the world as closed or open is the ultimate difference between interpretations of Worster and Malin.  It is also the reason that Worster's argument is the stronger.  By taking into account the drastic changes that took place along the prairie with the rise of industrial agriculture, Worster is able to form a more complete explanation of the Dust Bowl than Malin.

Malin outlines his philosophic approach to the Dust Bowl in his book, The Grassland of North America. In the chapter entitled, "An Open System," Malin states that "The world is no more closed in 1946 than in 1446..." (Malin 335).  Here, Malin gives his view of nature.  Simply stated, Malin discusses nature as an infinite resource that has no limits and which can always be developed.  Because nature is constantly changing, and thus, has no state of equilibrium that can be violated, humanity cannot conceivably overexploit the planet.  Instead, should humanity encounter what we might call a "natural disaster" such as the Dust Bowl, Malin believes the disaster occurred simply because of a lack of human ability to adapt, rather than the human ability to be the cause of its own ills.  This view can certainly be seen in the context of the time in which it was written, the mid-twentieth century, during which technology was seen as the answer to many of humanity's troubles.

Thus, for Malin, the problem of the Dust Bowl was not that the farmers unintentionally created a dangerous situation through unwise agricultural practices, as Worster and the Great Plains Committee believe, but rather, that the farmers were simply the unlucky inhabitants of a land that naturally acted in such a destructive manner.  Agents such as animals, drought, and fire were "continually disturbing some part of the grasslands, delaying or destroying a theoretically normal succession series and forestalling any achievement of a uniform theoretical climax" (Malin 138).  The statement outlines, again, Malin's belief that harm cannot be done, because there is no stable ecological system to damage, and that the Dust Bowl was not anthropogenic.

Worster's interpretation differs tremendously.  First, his philosophic outlook is based on his view of science as a necessary tool to explore the realities of history.  In his book, Dust Bowl, Worster says that, "...science is our indispensable ally in understanding the past in a fuller and more authoritative light" (Worster 247).  This world view is coupled with a near-Marxist (though Worster is careful to distance himself from the "Marxist" label) critique of capitalism.  In fact, it is the unrelenting onslaught of the laissez-faire 1920s to which Worster credits the Dust Bowl.  "There was nothing in the Plains society to check the progress of commercial farming, nothing to prevent it from taking the risks it was willing to take for profit.  That is how and why the Dust Bowl came about" (Worster 7).  Both of Worster's foundations, that of ecology and also a critique of unrestrained capitalism, imply a closed system view of nature, as opposed to Malin's belief in an open system.

On account of his closed system view, Worster suggests that it was the growth of the wheat crop that helped to create the Dust Bowl.  "For the "dirty thirties," as they were called, were primarily the work of man, not nature...natural factors did not make the storms - they merely made them possible" (Worster 13).  Unlike Malin, Worster does not believe that nature was entirely the cause of the Dust Bowl.  He continues:  "The storms were mainly the result of stripping the landscape of its natural vegetation..." (Worster 13).  Instead of suggesting that the problem of the Dust Bowl was human inability to cope with natural forces as Malin does, Worster is insisting that it was human damage to the natural environment that altered the Great Plains so drastically and ultimately caused the Dust Bowl.

The third and final interpretation comes from the Great Plains Committee, a federal organization whose mission was to investigate the causes of the Dust Bowl and further, to suggest a solution.  Their view of the Dust Bowl paralleled Worster's.  The empirical reasons for this are obvious:  the data that the Committee analyzed was from their own time period.  Of course, this leaves the Committee's interpretation open to the criticism of Malin, who states that the Committee didn't analyze the history of the Pre-Columbian Great Plains.  However, the Committee was not entirely concerned with historical interpretations of the plains.  Rather, the Committee was concerned with comforting a nation facing a large crisis, and to offer a solution to that problem.  If the Committee had simply created a Malin-like interpretation, one that placed the cause of the problem outside of human control, the solution to the problem would similarly be outside the scope of human ability.  This interpretation would certainly have been looked upon negatively by the people of the Great Plains as callous and ultimately useless.  Such a situation may not have been a primary or even direct cause of the Committee's choice of interpretation, but because the Committee was more or less a political body, the effect of public opinion on the creation of the Committee's document cannot be disregarded.

Worster's interpretation, however, combines the best elements of the Committee's view with more recent and less biased scholarship.  Worster is able to recognize the direct and heavy impact of human civilization on the land, whereas Malin trivializes the impact by suggesting humans simply expedited already occurring natural processes.  This is a good example of Malin's short sightedness:  though he is the only author to use geologic data from millennia ago to make his case, Malin seems painfully unaware of the length of time he is studying.  While it is undeniable that the Great Plains have changed dramatically over thousands of years, Malin does not acknowledge the extremely slow rate at which those changes took place.  Why?  Perhaps it is because as a traditional historian, Malin is unable to see nature as anything but the "stage" upon which human drama unfolds.  The idea of history as a study of human and environment interacting seems to be incomprehensible to Malin.

Worster, however, is able to see that human impact on the Plains took place and form his own interpretation of the Dust Bowl.  Instead of ignoring or trivializing the effects humans have on the Great Plains, Worster uses the relationship as a way to understand what actually occurred in the 1930s.  It is this approach, one that seeks to integrate a complicated mixture of science, history, and anthropology that ultimately gives the most holistic picture of the Dust Bowl.  Worster gives a firmer interpretation of the Dust Bowl because he understands the reciprocal nature of the human interaction with the land.

These interpretations are thus based on contrasting world views.  Malin's closed system, Worster's open system, and the Committee's concern for providing an immediate solution to the beleaguered farmers all influence the manner in which the authors see the events of and leading up to the Dust Bowl.  Though each interpretation has its strengths, it is Worster's that ultimately stands out.  Because of his view of the world as a closed system and the ethical and historical implications that follow from it, Worster best and most creatively analyzes the Dust Bowl.

*This table outlines some of the main differences between Malin and Worster.

Works Cited

Malin, James C.. The Grassland of North America: Prolegomena to Its History, with Addenda & Postscript. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967.

United States. Great Plains Committee.The Future of the Great Plains. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1936.

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl. 25th Anniversary Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, 2004.

[The Dust Bowl] came about because the expansionary energy of the United States had finally encountered a volatile, marginal land, destroying the delicate balance that evolved there....What brought [farmers] to the region was a social system, a set of values, an economic order. There is no word that so fully sums up those elements as "capitalism."

Worster doesn't dispute the commonly-held idea that the heavy use of new industrialized farming methods and technologies was the immediate cause of the Dust Bowl's erosion, crop failures, dust storms, and rapid desertification. But he argues that the unsustainable agricultural practices of the era were reflective of a social order that encouraged capitalistic exploitation without limit:

Americans blazed their way across a richly endowed continent with a ruthless, devastating efficiency unmatched by any people anywhere. When the white men came to the plains, they talked expansively of "busting" and "breaking" the land. And that is exactly what they did. Some environmental catastrophes are nature's work; others are the slowly accumulating effects of ignorance or poverty. The Dust Bowl, in contrast, was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth.

Worster argues that the farmers of the Great Plains were culturally capable of viewing the land in only one way: as a source of capital, a means for the creation of wealth, an asset to be exploited to its fullest potential for generating profit. This encouraged farmers to use methods and technologies that simply weren't sustainable in the delicate and vulnerable ecology of the Great Plains, and the inevitable result was ecological disaster. Capitalism requires the assumption that wealth and growth are potentially limitless—but in reality, the land very definitely does have its limits in terms of the wealth it can provide, and in the Great Plains, those limits were reached in the 1930s after only a few decades of intensive industrialized agriculture.

I think Worster sometimes treats the farmers of the Great Plains a bit unfairly—he emphasizes the tragedy of their poverty when it supports his case for the economic disaster that followed the ecological crisis that was the Dust Bowl, but he also takes them to task for their small-mindedness and lack of foresight even in those cases in which farmers exploited the land only because doing so was entirely necessary if they hoped to achieve even the barest subsistence living. A Depression dirt farmer simply wasn't likely to have a wide range of economic choices available to him—and no doubt the idea of trying to work the land for all it was worth held a great deal of appeal when anything less was likely to leave your family hungry. And further, it was no doubt far easier for Worster to apply an ecological consciousness to the situation when he was writing in 1979 than it would have been for an uneducated farmer to do so decades before the word or idea of "ecology" had entered the popular consciousness at all.

That said, I think Worster is entirely correct that unfettered capitalistic exploitation of this sort will inevitably result in ecological disaster. We might not have known better during the 1930s, but in 2008, we surely ought to be able to recognize the fact that land cannot be exploited without limit. Writing in 1979, Worster wasn't at all convinced that we'd learned the lesson of the Dust Bowl. Farmers have altered or abandoned some of the most dangerous practices of pre-Dust Bowl farming—but in some cases, the replacement methods and technologies have been perhaps even more dangerous. The Great Plains are no longer beset by mammoth dust storms (or at least not very often), but they're only producing high crop yields and high profits due to the expanded use of poisonous, polluting pesticides, and via practices like the draining of irreplaceable aquifers and watersheds in order to irrigate places that would otherwise be too dry for commercial agriculture. It's only a matter of time before the watersheds run dry—and maybe we'll find another technology to replace them, but it will only buy us time before the next ecological disaster strikes.

The solution to the problem is to approach agriculture with an ecological mindset: with sensitivity to the nature of the land, and to the limits of its resources, and with the aim of perpetuating local ecological systems instead of destroying them through unrestrained exploitation. But of course there's just as much pressure now—if not a great deal more—than there was during the Great Depression to ignore ecological complexities in favor of extreme and unsustainable agricultural production. Then as now, there's an awful lot of money to be made by ignoring ecological realities and pretending that we'll always be able to find new resources to exploit, or another technological band-aid to keep the depleted and devastated land producing for one more season.

While environmental concerns are indeed major - and many require action sooner rather than later - sometimes it also helps to take a longer view. This perspective can make it easier to appreciate the larger meaning of the earth, and creation.

Renowned environmental historian Donald Worster recently sat down for an interview with CEP. He spoke of the environmental history of the Great Plains – its volatile weather and climate, history of water use, agricultural development, and the risks of climate change in this unpredictable realm of the natural world.

He also discusses how fossil fuel usage began during the industrialized era, and visions for a future that makes better use of renewable energies.

Dr. Worster is also a Kansan. His parents were from Reno County. They moved to California during the World War II era (which is where he was born) but they soon moved back. Dr. Worster was raised in Reno County and still has family who farms in the area.

For a .pdf download of this interview, please click here.

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Maril Hazlett, CEP: Why don’t you start out by telling us a little about yourself, and how you got involved with environmental history.

Donald Worster: Well, I was raised along the banks of Cow Creek in Reno County. There are a lot of good people out there. I also grew up deeply impressed by the landscape. Some people find it monotonous or uninteresting, but I grew up with a prairie sense of sky, land, climate… the big broad rivers rippling through…

This all mattered a lot to me. All the seasons of Kansas, the wildlife and bird life, the weather patterns and so on. These always were very much part of my awareness.

When I became a historian I got very tired of simply reading about politics, theology, etc… It all seemed like such an urban view of history.

MH: I noticed that, too, when I went to school. Back East is a very urban perspective.

DW: During the late sixties, I was a graduate student at Yale. The rise of the modern environmental movement very much influenced me – writers like Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich. Earth Day 1970.

I ended up combining my own background with all these new environmental ideas. What emerged for myself, and several others, was a new discipline called environmental history.

Environmental history looks at how human societies, at all scales, are related to the natural world. And we don’t define the “natural world” as the countryside alone. It includes all kinds of things that come under the category of the creation - the world that humans didn’t make - including plants, animals, micro-organisms, weather patterns, climate patterns, etc.

So we have really invented a new field of history. Sometimes it sounds a bit like agriculture, sometimes a bit like geography. It also has a lot of science in it. It studies how people have thought and felt about their relationships to the natural world - what they wanted in the way of living, what they wanted emotionally from the world around them, economically, all of that.

As an historian, I bring humans and nature together by crossing the lines of other academic disciplines. Environmental history can be carried out anywhere on the face of the earth, but to me the best places to study all this is right here at home, on the Great Plains.

MH: What in particular makes you say that?

DW: On the Plains, the elemental contact of people and natural world is right on the surface. The Plains environment has been a defining issue for its inhabitants, going back to the Native Americans.

Ecologically, this is an area that is extraordinarily vulnerable. And volatile, with extreme weather and climate. Every organism, every living thing, has got to deal with that volatility. We range from extremely cold winters to extremely hot summers. We alternate between wet years and droughts. There’s colossal wind patterns.

All this combines to make life here a challenge compared to some other parts of the world. The Great Plains environment is one of the most unpredictable places on the earth - certainly in the United States. And it has been a challenge for people who live here. Everybody has tried to come to grips with the nature of this place. But what is the nature?

MH: It’s hard to describe an environment – or its weather and climate – when the system experiences such flux already.

DW: Right. Which year are you talking about, and which month of the year? This is also true for a lot of the western part of the United States because it is so drought prone.

But the Great Plains is where our continent’s kingdoms of nature come together and swirl around. It runs from New Mexico and Texas, all the way up into the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

MH: You define the Plains by its environment, then, as a geographical area. Not necessarily defined by state or country.

DW: And the Plains is a huge part of the United States – it’s got to be getting on to eight hundred million acres, I would say. Close to a third of the United States, if you take it in its broadest dimensions… Iowa… tallgrass prairie country…

Somebody once called the Plains the boneyard of America, because we have had so many disasters. We’ve failed so many times. So many different groups have failed here.

MH: What are some of the major examples of those failures?

DW: Anthropologists have studied how during Indian times, every time there was a drought, the Indian peoples migrated eastward. They moved in and out of the Plains according to the climate patterns. They came in during the good years, moving along the river bottoms where they could raise food and hunt. During drought years they headed back towards Missouri, closer to where there was more plentiful wood and surface water. Surface water is essential for any settlement, and in the Plains that resource comes and goes.

I’m not sure if I would call that example a failure, though. Recognizing and adjusting to the constraints of your environment is not a failure.

MH: Hmm. Recently, we maybe haven’t quite got the hang of that lesson.

DW: Americans of European background have had the same dance with this place, the Plains. Same as the Indians did.

The 1870’s would be a good example. Then, it looked lush out on the Plains. Clear up into the 1880s. People talked about how “the rain followed the plow.” They thought that agriculture had the power to increase rainfall.

Then comes the 1890’s. There was a severe drought. The line of white settlement actually fell back across the Plains. Many counties were severely depopulated, some up to 90%. European Americans were repeating the Indian pattern, coming and going in response to larger environmental cycles.

The 1930’s are a very dramatic example of how humans on the Plains suffered, during the Dust Bowl – the drought, the dust storms. That hasn’t happened since, though. What has changed is that the federal government has basically paid people to stay here. It has transferred wealth from other parts of the country into the Plains, to stabilize agriculture. This is a safety net that the Indians or 19th century settlers did not have.

MH: Extensive federal supports. Subsidies. They’ve offered Kansas and other ag states a safety net for surviving the Plains.

DW: Since World War II. Subsidies. Agricultural subsidies, drought assistance, crop insurance. There are some counties on the northern plains where more than half of the money that comes in derives from the federal government, if you include social security, Medicare, along with farm programs.

Now, there’s a lot of humanity behind that. Subsidies help cushion people against short-term environmental dangers and risk. However, they can also unintentionally expose them to new long-term disasters.

Subsidies can keep people in the same place, doing the same thing without having to work with the environment’s limits as much as they could. People might figure out how to adjust in the short-term, like to changes in weather, but they are a lot less likely to figure out strategies for the long-term, like how to adjust to larger cycles of climate and drought.

And subsidies can be dangerous. Think about it - the Plains has to depend on the good will of outsiders. It makes us dependent on taxpayers in New Jersey and Florida. If they or their legislators decide they don’t want to continue to transfer their tax dollars into the Plains to keep this place alive – say they think we’re getting too much for a bushel of corn these days - we are in very serious trouble.

I don’t think most people up and down the Great Plains realize - we have shifted our dependence on nature, to a dependence on the federal budget. At the same time, we are of course extraordinarily dependent on very flexible and volatile crop markets around the world.

We have created a lot more economic volatilities, to pile on top of the environmental ones nature has already given us.

MH: Living on – and living off of – the Plains is a high-risk proposition, in terms of the environment and the economy. At the best of times.

But on top of that we are now facing some major environmental challenges – the risks posed by climate change, new choices in renewable energy, and extremely rapid development of wind resources and biofuels.

DW: Well, the most serious new card in the deck is man-made climate change. To this point it has all been nature’s climate patterns we’ve had to deal with, and they are volatile enough.

This wild card is unprecedented in all of human history. Our excessive burning of fossil fuels has resulted in global climate change, and we don’t even begin to know the outcome. We’ve got lots of projections, but no one really knows how it will work. All we know is that fossil fuel carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is having an effect.

MH: And that the risks are high.

DW: And those risks make the Plains even more vulnerable. But we have to keep in mind, many people also see lots of possibilities. Like the way we are, or were until recently, throwing money into ethanol.

There’s an interesting historical comparison there, with how people poured money into Kansas farmland during the 1920s, developing agricultural production. The world market looked great and it all went bust in the 1930’s. In fact, it contributed to the problems of the 1930’s.

MH: The Great Depression.

DW: Right. And the Dust Bowl, the time of large-scale wind erosion on the Plains.

In a way, our basic economic institutions and principles have always been a mining economy. You come in, you get the resource, and you leave as quickly as possible when it runs out. The western part of the U.S. has seen this cycle in terms of minerals. But in the Plains we do it with agriculture. Long ago, our families raced in and started to mine the soil fertility, mine the water.

In western Kansas, right now we are mining water from the Ogallala Aquifer, although we don’t think of it in those terms. Just like copper, all the water from the Ogallala mine will be gone some day. When copper mines ran out the mining enterprises all moved offshore to other countries. They left behind derelict mining towns all over the west. And the mining tailings.

Agriculture in the Great Plains has often looked like the mining industry. Going for broke in the good years, suffering through the bad years. And crying for help in the bad years, when we bust.

MH: Maybe we shouldn’t take it all. Maybe we should agree on some limits.

DW: Actually, in some ways we already have agreed. At the federal level we have done this in economics since the 1930’s.

Both political parties have basically accepted that the federal government has to play an interventionist role in the economy. They argue about how that intervention will work, but everyone in the federal economic system is constantly dealing with monetary policy and taxation and government regulation, trying to keep this ship on an even keel.

In other words, they are planning the economy. Corporations, Congress, they all want as much predictability and stability as they can get. Growth, but stability, there’s got to be a balance. It is not working all that well yet because we don’t understand all the factors.

But it is in the area of the environment that we have not yet accepted the idea of limits giving us some long-term stability. In ecological terms, we need to think about institutions and regulatory practices that can deal with the volatilities of the natural world. And help us to live with them, and not make them worse.

And that requires… well, it requires planning. It requires some kind of public agency intervening and trying to take the long view and trying to figure out where we are going, how to keep things stable as possible, to maintain some sort of balance - so that people’s savings don’t get wiped out and their livelihoods and they don’t end up as refugees heading for California. Like what happened with the Dust Bowl.

MH: We don’t want a new set of Okies heading out of here.

DW: I don’t think anyone in Kansas really wants to go through that again. They are unaware of how easily it could happen.

MH: Your parents went through the Dust Bowl. My grandparents did. Their memories kept it alive in my mind. Part of who I am as a Kansan is - not wanting anyone to ever have to go through what they did.

DW: There is still a large group of people in this state who believe the Dirty Thirties were simply a problem created by nature. That humans had nothing to do with it.

MH: It was a lot more complicated than that.

DW: Exactly. It was a lot more complicated than that. Agricultural practices helped create the conditions that led to the erosion, and when drought struck and a combination of weather conditions happened, they were sunk.

And because they don’t accept that humans had a huge role in making the Dust Bowl years in the first place, they can’t see anything that we are doing today that could create another similar situation with climate change. They just say, well, nature walloped us once, so it may wallop us again. It’s a kind of fatalism.

But that fatalism then allows them to say- don’t tell me I have to change my way of life, because it could have serious ramifications down the road. Oh no, it is just not possible for humans to affect nature like that.

MH: Why do so many of us reject that idea so strongly? That our actions can have an impact on nature?

DW: It requires taking some responsibility, and people are bearing pretty heavy burdens of responsibility already. They have got to raise their kids, they have got to make sure their business or whatever they are involved in survives. They have got a job to do.

Taking on responsibility for something as big as planet Earth, and what we are doing to it, is very hard. People have done many things to try and tread lighter but they resist having their burden of responsibility enlarged.

And of course the biggest problem is - regardless of all the easy solutions you often hear - taking responsibility for what we are doing to the Earth requires us to look at how we consume and how we produce. And how we make money, and how much money we are making. And our economic goals. That is extremely difficult in this country. Since we were founded, one of our goals has been to increase personal wealth. You are nobody unless you do that.

And we consume far beyond the rest of the world, and yet it is not enough.

MH: What is enough? Where is the shut-off button?

DW: To take responsibility for our role in global climate change is to face that question head-on. What is enough?

I wish I could say the solution is new technology that will make us all infinitely rich (laughs). Although faith in technology, there is something to that. We do have to behave like a creative entrepreneurial society, not a scared society hanging on to the way we did things in the past.

We are really afraid to face this fossil fuel issue. I suppose it is because we have mostly had it so easy and so abundant but there is a lot of fear out there. But if we don’t have any real confidence in our entrepreneurial capability, then we certainly have no confidence in our ability to handle resource issues more responsibly.

MH: Is there any historical precedent that you can think of, say between a fossil fuel economy and a more renewable energy economy? When in history have humans gone through such a massive switch?

DW: Well, when we invented the fossil fuel economy, we went through a huge switch, We went from a renewable economy based on water power, based on wood, based on whatever was growing, based on the annual accumulation of sunlight in plants.

Originally, that is all we had. We didn’t really become a predominantly fossil fuel economy until about the 1870’s. We were burning coal before that. The British were burning coal much earlier. But the Industrial Revolution came about in the U.S. by harnessing water power. In this country we were still burning a lot of wood at the time of the Civil War. We burned more wood than coal. And the oil part of our fossil fuel usage didn’t really become a big factor until the 1920’s.

It took us decades to make the transition to fossil fuels. It didn’t happen all at once. It didn’t happen all in one place.

For example, Britain. When did that transition occur in Great Britain? When there was a scarcity of wood and forest. Only then did people begin to turn to coal. It’s nasty stuff to mine, handle, burn. They called it a poor man’s fuel. Rich people got to burn beautiful oak logs.

It took Britain decades, a century, to go through the transition to fossil fuels. But it changed everything. The consequences never could have been predicted. What it did for people, what they didn’t really calculate at the time – burning fossil fuels opened up enormities of energy, of affluence. Suddenly with all this energy, there was wealth. There was transportation, etc.

To undo all of that - we can’t. There is no way. Instead, we have to invent some kind of renewable energy system. And some countries have got to lead the way and others will follow decades later. That is the way the transition happened the first time as far as I can tell.

The idea that the U.S. has to wait until China and India join us in cutting emissions is just not the way to make this energy transition work. People have got to lead the way, find ways to make it possible, develop the technology, and hope that other countries will adopt it.

We didn’t get the coal industry by ourselves. It came to us from England. The oil industry on the other hand, we invented, but then we gave it to the rest of the world. So why can’t we invent something to replace the oil era and give it to the rest of the world?

MH: We invented nuclear power.

DW: And it may come back.

MH: To tie it up – this is one of two questions that we ask everybody. In twenty years or so, what would your vision of Kansas be? What would it look like? Not what you fear it might look like, but what you hope it might look like?

DW: What I would hope it would look like - is that we have found ways to generate energy in this state without any fossil fuels at all. I don’t think we will make it in twenty years.

MH: Probably not.

DW: But we will have made a start. We will be able to meet most of our own energy needs right here, without importing energy from any other part of the world. We would have found a way to live without mining underground water. We have got to find a way to raise food in this state without depending on the pumping of water because (1) it is going be extremely expensive to pump whatever is left and (2) there is not going to be much that is left.

I hope at that point we have will have begun to create an agriculture that is not so dependent on fossil fuels and the other chemicals we use in farming. We need an agriculture that is more in tune with the whole natural world around us. Kansas ought to be a leader in creating an agriculture that is ecologically harmonious.

I don’t know about the word “sustainable.” I don’t use it. I don’t know what the term really means.

MH: What other word would you use?

DW: I talk about ecological harmony instead of sustainability. That means that our actions do not adversely impact soils, vegetation, human health, etc. I use the word harmony in the sense of healthy. If we can advance toward a greater degree of health in all of these dimensions – and not a doctor’s office idea of health. Health in terms of healthy landscape, a healthy environment.

These are platitudes, but sustainability… well, I just don’t know what the term means. Everything is sustainable to a certain degree but in an ultimate sense, nothing is.

MH: There is always going to be an environmental impact of some kind. Nothing is untouched.

DW: And health isn’t just about human health. Health should mean restoring our riparian habitats that we have decimated by irrigation. It should mean allowing other species to have the necessary space for their habitat.

And we should realize that we don’t have to go to Colorado and some national park to see beauty. Kansas is a place of great beauty and ecological diversity. Here we do still have a chance to live harmoniously with nature. We need more open space - we need to set aside more land from urban development, commercial development and from agriculture. We have also put too much land into agriculture. I would like to see a future which agriculture is practiced differently, but also occupies a little bit less of the landscape.

And I want people to love being in this state. To love not just because it is familiar, in the sense of “good old Kansas,” but they love its beauty.

MH: They should appreciate it. This is an amazing place. They don’t have to apologize for living here.

DW: We don’t make it more beautiful by building more highways or that sort of stuff. But we make it more beautiful by preserving our riverine forests and native prairies, and bringing wildlife back into the landscape and protecting the beauty, the bird populations, and all the rest.

We could generate our own electricity, we know we have got great soils, we could potentially have great, clean river systems. There is so much we could do to restore lost habitat. In an increasingly overcrowded world, Kansas is especially beautiful.

The scale of our towns is also manageable politically. We are just not overwhelmed with the number of people that are crowding into southern California. Or the East Coast, etc.

MH: Well, if the ocean rises they will all be showing up here.

DW: If climate change really does progress, if we don’t manage to arrest it, we will have another Dust Bowl. Kansas will look like the Chihuahuan desert. It could create not just a drought but a desert that could basically wipe out agriculture in this state and shift wheat production clear out of the US into Canada. Is that really what we want in 15 to 75 to 100 years?

MH: Last, kind of a random question. I ask this of everyone, so don’t laugh too hard. What is your favorite country music song or singer? Do you have one?

DW: My favorite country music song or singer… Well, the singer would have to be Patsy Cline. And any of her songs, I like all of them so much. Sweet Dreams is awesome, but I don’t know which one I would choose if I had to choose one. She is the queen.

And Waylon Jennings. Oklahoma Sunshine.

--- Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org

Other CEP Conversations include:
- Thad Holcombe, Ecumenical Christian Ministries (ECM) - Care for Creation (.pdf)
- Dan Nagengast, Kansas Rural Center - The Potential of Community Wind (.pdf)
- Kimberly Gencur-Svaty - Transmission Development in Kansas (.pdf)

Now, just when I was about to cross the highway, there was a strong and putrid stench coming from the road. The was also the excited buzz of flies which convinced me that something dead lay nearby. When I turned to look to the right of the highway, there was the sprawling carcass of a dead horse, feet bent, long stilled by the cold.

It was the beginning of the spring semester and I had spent the last two weeks in-doors writing, so I hadn't seen the decaying carcass. The first thing that shocked me was that it had been there for days. Since it was a dead horse, nobody had bothered to remove it.

Only pedestrians could have noticed it. But on a highway without a side-walk, and where where pedestrians walk at their own peril (the negative traits of the age of "fast capitalism" could be well applicable to the Eastern Cape), it was hard for motorists to do notice anything. --- except for their sense of smell---. But the stench was one that even a fast-moving motorist with the side screens slightly opened, would not fail to perceive. Is it only in the Trans-kei area of the Eastern Cape where most locals allow the carcasses of their dead horses to decompose naturally? And it so, what was the place of nature among the Xhosa both traditional and modern in the Transkei and Eastern Cape?

"While it used to be quite common in many areas to simply leave your deceased horse in the woods to decompose naturally", Erica Street (Equinomics) says, many farms are now surrounded by housing developments filled with neighbors who will not appreciate the smell of a decaying animal or the vermin that it attracts. Moreover, leaving a carcass in such close proximity to people's homes could potentially contaminate the water supply or contribute to the spread of disease".

Why then the indifference to dead horse carcasses and sanitation in the Eastern Cape?

---

The expression 'where horses go to die' first came to me through a Zulu student studying in the Eastern Cape. It wasn't up to two weeks that I arrived South Africa in October 1998, and preparing myself for a long stay, that my new environment struck me in many ways. One of the first things I noticed was not just the co-existence of European living patterns and the traditional African, the spatial orientation between the urban the rural), a small but increasing African middle class that looked like a buffer between the two and the squatter dwellers, but also the enduring everyday tensions that characterized the harsh divide between the rich and the poor. Though I was affiliated to the middle class, was black, without being South African, I felt quite uneasy with the harsh class distinctions. I was affected by a sense of guilt living in a decent house, in a decent neighborhood, mostly of fenced homes, mowed lawns, water taps and green hoses, swings, often small pools, beautiful hedges, and shady European or Australian trees, each home posting a number of dogs to scare passers-by on the neighborhood's streets and to alert those in doors or in the backyard. The realities of not just the apartheid era and system, but of the long track of South African history struck me in terms of the lack, pain, and alienation that characterized most rural South Africans, "location", and squatter camp dwellers that trooped daily into the city and back again to their areas popularly termed 'locations'. I was filled with many questions like any new arrival but which my hosts: my nephew who was a lecturer in French, and a German couple could not answer. They too, I found, had had similar questions when they came, questions which they had learnt to defray with time, as they came to focus on the little they could do to bring about change, with all the obstacles that these precluded, and to look at their own professional progress. The end of apartheid had brought lots of opportunities in education, research, developmental and humanitarian work and commerce in South Africa, but these were only open to those already poised, with ample educational qualifications and experience, to reap the windfall.

So I was happy when they introduced me to Kaya, a young Zulu student who was studying German and Sociology. The first subject I inquired from him was to know about the lives of mineworkers once they returned from "active duty" or from having "served time" in the distant mines close to Bloemfontein and Johannesburg. The regular image of gruffly old men dressed in gray coats, sporting grey beards and plodding in and out of town back to the locations, with cane sticks or knob-kieries, was alive in my mind, just as of the plump women vendors stationed about their wares (fruits for the most time) popularly seen downtown Umtata.  "The old men usually return here, sick, knackered" he says. "You know" he said mockingly 'there's a popular saying that the Transkei is the country where dead horses come to die".

Though I had never seen a dead horse, and used to wonder as a young man where dying pets often met their end (I had never seen any die naturally), the image of horses that were once lively, robust and useful coming home to die, was to stick with me for a long time.

I became interested in the life trajectory of mineworkers as one of the affected social groups and a tightly knit one with a social history. Subsequently between 1999 and 2002 I focused my efforts on understanding this community and soon forgot about the subject of dead horses.

It came up however during my research on mineworkers when I learnt of a miner's entire family (save for one kid that was absent) that had subsisted on the carcass of a dead horse and died of poisoning. Upon learning of the event, my supervisor (a medical doctor) and myself reflected on the event for days and then dropped it. The concept that dead horses could be abandoned to the forces of nature was a strong and disturbing one, and the fact that a family would feast on the remains was even ridiculous. Could it have been hunger, or a pastoral habit?

Research and Resources for Environmental History and Education for Sustainable Development.

A new website and project on the theme of 'History and Sustainability' has been launched at the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, University of Cambridge, UK. This project has emerged from the earlier 'Documenting Environmental Change' project (www.envdoc.org).

Since the report of the Brundtland Commission in 1987, the idea of 'Sustainable development' or 'Sustainability' has become increasingly prominent across the globe, applied and discussed at a trans-national, international, national, regional and community level. Yet historians have as yet contributed relatively little to these debates, despite the emergence since the 1970s of Environmental History as an increasingly important strand of the discipline.

Historians of all places and periods have, however, much to contribute to our knowledge of the human experience in attempting to live 'sustainably'. This site and project provides resources and links to those interested in more closely learning from, and enriching the humanities and history in particular in our understanding of the long history and possibly long future of human and environmental interactions.

The History and Sustainability project seeks to bring together environmental, economic and social historians, historians of political thought, anthropologists and others to address these questions. The project also seeks to build links between different educational providers within and without academia, in developing the study of History and Sustainability.

The website provides links, resources, papers, course profiles and research and events news in the UK and international community for environmental historians and sustainability studies. We are delighted to receive suggestioins for links or work in this field!

Project co-ordinator: Paul Warde (psw1000@cam.ac.uk)

Illegal logging and the heart of darkness

Amsterdam, Netherlands — Imagine looking up and seeing a thick canopy every shade of green, rays of sunlight streaming through leaves as birds twitter and chirp. The humidity is so thick it hangs like a fog over the damp plants on the ground. Something moves in the distance, you can't see what it is, maybe a gorilla? More likely an illegal logger who has come to take it all away.

Tucked into the nook of Africa's western coastline, Cameroon's landscape is a contradiction of dry and vast savannahs in the north and humid, dense tropical forests in the south. Ecologically and culturally, Cameroon is extremely rich. More than 200 ethnic groups make their homes in Cameroon. And the area has a particularly high diversity of wildlife - over 400 mammal species, almost 700 bird species and countless species of plants.

But for how much longer will the communities and the animals enjoy their forest home? Cameroon's environment is under threat. The forests have seen extensive conversion over the last decades. Once lush tropical forests home to many species are now agricultural lands and logging concessions can be found deep in these ancient forests.

In this region, illegal and destructive logging practices are the norm and three Dutch companies are at the heart of the problem…

*** 

In the following piece published in in Earth & Sky: "A Clear Voice for Science", Jorge Salazar features an interview with Greg Asner who talks about a hidden threat to the rain forest. Though I found the premise in the title valid as well as the call for scientific observation, I felt that the argument is one-sided and that the qualification of the scientific approach is limited to that of the 'hard sciences'. The limitations of using airbourne and satellite sensing alone to butress the causes and impact of deforestation is obvious from the article or approach. It's not just the quantity of the trees that make a forest, but also the quality (biology and architecture has more to say on this) wherefore the economic value of the tree. There is an obvious difference between the quality and kinds of trees that are worth transporting from south to north and those that local and indigenous people exploit or clear to make way for agriculture. In fact, in most cases, the felling of primary trees that have lasted for hundreds of years is quite demanding for locals who in some cases attach a spiritual and cultural significance to such trees. Secondly, there is the question of motivation in conservation vis-a-vis forestry exploitation. Thirdly scientific observation is much more than aerial surveys. The author dwells on the biological (though the nature of the trees exploited are not specified) and on the results of logging but not on the eco-systemic nature of logging and deforestation. Human social interaction is not factored into the approach though Salazar mentions these concerns at the beginning of his presentation. While aerial surveys and remote sending are of great value in charting out human interventions on the environment, a uni-dcsiplinary approach leaves much to be desired even to the casual observer.

Greg Asner

In science, a first step toward knowledge usually involves observation. Here’s an interview with Greg Asner, who uses satellite data to analyze the ecological impacts of selective logging in the Brazilian Amazon Basin. Earth & Sky’s Jorge Salazar spoke with him in November, 2005.

Salazar: What is selective logging?

Asner: It’s the thinning of the forest, rather than the wholesale clear–cutting of it.

Typically, a logger will build a very small road into an area and select species of trees to cut down. These are trees that will bring that person some money at the sawmill.

So, you can imagine your average logger going out on the road and walking around in the forest and looking for these few trees, and taking the time to cut them down. That’s an enormous effort to do that. These are really large trees of 100 feet to several hundred feet tall. Imagine cutting down these trees, cutting the crowns off these trees and dragging the main part of the stem out to an area where it can be loaded onto a truck. It’s an extremely manual kind of effort.

Salazar: What’s the problem with selective logging? How does it hurt the forest?

Asner: Selective logging does not cause the same damage to the forest as deforestation by clear–cutting. It causes less damage. It’s a thinning of the forest. It does cause some of the most valuable trees to be taken out. And there is a lot of collateral damage that’s caused inside the forest.

One reason for the collateral damage is that many of the trees are connected by vines in tropical forests. So, when your average logger cuts down one tree, that tree tends to pull down its neighbors.?

But secondly – and probably the biggest concern – is that we and other groups are finding that after selective logging occurs, the understory of the forest tends to dry out. The reason for the drying is that sunlight is usually not easily permitted to get to the forest floor in a tropical forest. The tree canopy generally is closed to sunlight. But after selective logging, sunlight makes it down to the forest floor and tends to dry out the dead material that’s left from the logging event. Dead material includes leaves, branches, tree crowns, stumps, and so forth. That material is easily ignited and tends to burn.

So people ask, “Is selective logging as large a form of damage as deforestation?” And the answer is no, initially, not nearly the same level of damage.

But over the long run, the fact that fire is introduced to a place that really hasn’t had fire historically is a cause of great concern to scientists. The long–term effects of selective logging certainly have the potential to be a rather large problem, although it’s hard to say if it is more or less of a problem than deforestation.

Salazar: How great is the area of the Amazon affected by selective logging?

Asner: Our study shows that across a period from 1999 to 2002, selective logging covered an area anywhere from 5,000 to more than 7,000 square miles each year. Deforestation, a different type of disturbance altogether, ranges anywhere from about 6,000 to nearly 8,000 square miles.

So, suddenly we find that selective logging matches the geographic area of deforestation each year. What that essentially tells us is that the area of disturbance in the Amazon is double what we thought it was prior to our study.

Salazar: So they take the trees one by one essentially. Sounds hard to detect.

Asner: As seen by satellites, selective logging looks very different from other forms of deforestation, which involves the actual clearing of the forest for cattle pasture or agriculture.

The imprint that it leaves in the forest is one in which there might be a small road in any given location. Plus, there’s damage caused by the single tree that got knocked down. Associated with this is an area of disturbance in the understory of the forest caused by the pulling of the tree out to a place where it can be loaded onto trucks.