The
nature of science
What is the difference between ecology and environment?
An ecologist is a scientist, an environmentalist is a concerned citizen
What
are the different ways we can put history and environment together?
Why/how did Europe go out, starting in the 15th century, and dominate the rest of the world?
Why did they decide to try? How did they do that? How come they succeeded?
This seems natural to us, but it is odd and surprising. A couple of centuries earlier China was way ahead of Europe in technology, including gunpowder. Why did the Europeans do it when the Chinese didn't?
But why did European plants and animals win rather than lose the competition with native species?
Historians don't usually use ecological arguments--what is this field of environmental history?
- science is more than just the facts
- science gives us predictive knowledge about the physical world
- science is facts and then
theories (description of cause and effect) of how those facts are
connected
- science changes because scientists work to come up with better theories
- if you look carefully at
how science works you find there isn't a neat dividing line between
theories and facts
What is the difference between ecology and environment?
An ecologist is a scientist, an environmentalist is a concerned citizen
- ecology is scientific study
of relationships within the natural environment
- environment is our surroundings
- in environmental history we are talking about the natural environment
- we are making a
distinction between the human-created world and the natural world
(humans vs. the environment)
- actually we can't draw a simple line between the two
- so ecology looks at the
patterns of interaction within the environment (tending to leave humans
out)
- history of a specific issue
- look at human history using the tools of ecology--Crosby
- look at how human ideas about nature have changed and vary--Nash
- look at the history of environmental policy--Rothman
- write history from the point of view of the land instead of from the point of view of people
Why/how did Europe go out, starting in the 15th century, and dominate the rest of the world?
Why did they decide to try? How did they do that? How come they succeeded?
- European culture encouraged
curiosity, believed in progress
- they needed more land and
resources to
feed all the people they had (economic arguments)
- pure accident
- usual explanation of how
they succeeded is that European civilization was more advanced, but
that wasn't really true in the beginning
- they didn't have much
competition (but a lot of that was due to diseases they brought)
- they became more advanced in thinking and in technology
This seems natural to us, but it is odd and surprising. A couple of centuries earlier China was way ahead of Europe in technology, including gunpowder. Why did the Europeans do it when the Chinese didn't?
- Chinese tended to have the
idea that the rest of the world was not worth conquering
- Europeans had new ideas--they believed in progress
- therefore they wanted to conquer the rest of the world
- they were more were beginning to develop the idea that humans could change the world
- were interested in expansion
We can understand this by looking
for ecological explanations.
Use the ideas of ecology to look at what human beings do, where they
go, and what happens when they get there. Europeans went to
climates similar to their own and took their own livestock and
plants.
But why did European plants and animals win rather than lose the competition with native species?
- why did Europeans go out to explore the rest of the world? you can make an argument about ideas or you can argue that they needed resources and food for a growing population
- why did they succeed? they had better technology (but this may be an effect rather than a cause)
- or you can argue that European people and the plants and animals they brought had a ecological advantage as well as a cultural advantage
- ecological
advantage--European plants and animals did better than the native ones
- cultural
advantage--"better" ways of doing things
Historians don't usually use ecological arguments--what is this field of environmental history?
- when Crosby published The Columbian Exchange people thought it very strange
- compare impact of European
plants and animals on North America with the impact the other way
(North American plants and animals on Europe)--very one-sided
- history traditionally focused on human beings--their society (how people interact) and culture (ideas and art)
- environmental history started from a political motivation--how did we get into the mess we are in?
- are we just going to look at how and why human beings messed up the environment?
- what about the other
direction--how did the environment change human beings?
- environmental history deals
with the intersection of the natural and the cultural/social (source)
- not one controls the other but how do they interact
- how do you integrate ecology, social relations, technology, and culture into a unified explanation of social change?