The Body Environmental

In the 1980s, the community of McFarland, California, rallied to address the disproportionate degree of illness among their citizens. In a town of six thousand, thirteen children had cancer, most of who lived in the same neighborhood. The number was three times what could be expected as "typical" (p. 182).

Environmental conditions in the Central Valley of California had long been affected by the human presence and were now adversely affecting the humans present. In this agricultural town—like many others—toxic pesticides from the local agricultural industry were now registering in human bodies as but one example of some vicious costs of modernity.¹ The McFarland story is an alarmingly familiar one, increasingly common in rural areas since the rise of widespread pesticide use over the twentieth century. However, our familiarity with the story can be more recently dated to the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, when Carson's groundbreaking exploration of the link between pesticide use and cancer awoke the nation to potential effects of toxic environments on those living within such environments. Scholars have pointed to this publication as a cultural watershed, when in the collective consciousness the perceived wall between humans and the natural environment suddenly appeared to be permeable, and environmental concerns became directly linked to human health.

But whose consciousness are we talking about with this watershed? Citizens of McFarland and other Central Valley communities likely would not have needed to read Rachel Carson to be aware that working in the fields was hurting their eyes, their skin, their ability to breathe, or to know that the air smelled foul and the water tasted strange. They would not have needed to read Rachel Carson to understand that their children were suffering from cancer in disproportionate numbers. Perhaps on a local level, in communities like McFarland, that "wall" between humans and the environment has always been seen as permeable or altogether absent.

In Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease and Knowledge, historian Linda Nash explores this local understanding of health and disease. Nash reveals that awareness of the link between health and environment is neither a post–Rachel Carson environmentalist idea nor exclusively rooted in modern environmental justice struggles. Rather, Nash argues, Carson was picking up on a long tradition of considering the environment as key to understanding the health of human bodies. Inescapable Ecologies thus illuminates that in addition to the ways traditionally tread by environmental historians—through the lens of the market and through their own labor—Americans also have interpreted the environment through the experience of personal health and disease.

In presenting a history of the environment and human health that dates from the mid-nineteenth century, Nash refigures the emphases of environmental history in the era before Carson, and before post–World War II concerns of toxic environments (ranging from smog and nuclear fallout to pesticides) shaped a new approach to environmentalism. In this, her first book, Nash has crafted an excellent and readable "cultural history" of disease and environment, discussing the ways in which local people and health professionals have perceived the influence of the natural environment on settlement, health, and survival over time. These voices have engaged in a robust discussion of the vulnerability of human bodies to the environment, to manufactured ecological change, and to the forces of modernization. If environmental historians seek to understand the repercussions of imposing modernity on the land, Nash reveals the repercussions of imposing modernity for the humans that inhabit that land or at least how those humans may have perceived those repercussions.

Inescapable Ecologies contributes as well to the history of health. Regardless of the evolution of broader medical trends in conceptualizing bodies, diagnoses, and treatment, human health has always been understood by locals—and often by those medical professionals working in the field—as intimately tied to environmental health. While laboratory science and the medical profession at large may have evolved toward a more modern understanding...