Environmental Histories of the Mid-Atlantic: An Introduction

We hope that those of you interested in the history of Pennsylvania—of “Penn’s woods”—embrace the field of environmental history. This approach to the past examines the relationships human beings have had with the natural world: how and why humans have changed the environment, and how that changed environment has, in turn, reshaped human society. The basis for those relationships can range from the animate (such as elk) to the inanimate (oil), and even to the intangible (the pastoral ideal). As a scholarly approach to the past, environmental history emerged in the 1970s as a growing awareness of global environmental issues and an explosion of popular environmentalist movements swept through society.¹ Perhaps this brief definition is old news to you, because by now environmental history has matured as a scholarly field. Its books have won some of the profession’s most prestigious awards and this year the American Historical Association has named an environmental historian, William Cronon, as its president.² You might have gained a familiarity with this field also from the past pages of Pennsylvania History, which has published a scattering of environmental history articles over the past three decades including a 1999 special issue edited by Joel Tarr focused on “The Pennsylvania Environment.”³

However, that volume is now more than a decade old and the first years of the twenty-first century have brought a wealth of new environmental scholarship as well as increasing popular attention to the thorny issues linking humans to the rest of nature. As guest editors, we set out to craft a special issue centered on two overarching goals. First, we wanted to highlight for the usual readers of Pennsylvania History the broad range of possibilities for enhancing their own scholarship through adopting the lens of environmental history. Moving beyond this audience, our second goal was to demonstrate for environmental scholars the importance of bringing their attention “back East” and to the Mid-Atlantic in particular. In doing so, we hope this volume will serve as a benchmark for future work and as an invitation to undertake the type of engaged scholarship necessary to link academic history with the region’s broader social, political, and, yes, physical landscapes.

We begin with a retrospective interview in which Joel Tarr, one of the grandmasters of the field, speaks informally about the scholarly developments he has seen (and certainly shaped) during the course of his career. Time has proven correct his earlier prediction that interest in the teaching of environmental history would increase in the future, for the 2011 Pennsylvania Historical Association conference featured a roundtable discussion on this topic with remarks by Stephen Cutcliffe, Charles Hardy III, and David Soll. That discussion has been adapted and included here to provide examples of ways to incorporate environmental history into the broader curriculum. Moving beyond the classroom, we are also delighted to present articles by Peter Linehan, James Longhurst, and Brenda Barrett that raise important issues concerning the relationships between historical scholarship, environmental activism, and public policy. Indeed, calls to action conclude the latter two essays with Longhurst urging scholars to “actively guide the records of [the environmental movement] into archives” and Barrett profiling “a public history project [to] memorialize a revered leader” that quickly became “a more activist group that seeks to influence public policy.”

At the heart of this volume are the ten essays that make up the “New Perspectives” section. Instead of presenting the usual case studies, we asked these scholars to review the recent literature and provide thoughtful speculations on the directions in which the field may move. While the topics of some of the essays in the 1999 special issue (natural resources, pollution, social activism, and public policy) reappear in these pages, the current volume broadens the perspective to include Native Americans, tourism, race, outdoor recreation, and much more. Environmental history, John R. McNeill claims, “is about as interdisciplinary as intellectual pursuits can get”; we have acknowledged this by including the perspectives of an anthropologist and an agroecologist along with those of historians having wide...