Thinking like a Microbe: Borders and Environmental History

Historian John McNeill notes that American environmental history “looks rather like some American TV weather maps, where everything, including advancing thunderstorms and high pressure cells, stops at the border.”¹ While American historians often ignore their northern political border, Canadian historians tend to pay close attention to the political importance of that same border. But what about other borders, particularly the boundaries between sexes, species, and ecosystems? In this exploration of the meanings of borders for Canadian and American environmental historians, I hope to complicate, without negating, the privileged role of national borders in historical studies by focusing on the ways that non-human life crosses boundaries.

Environmental historians urge us to take nature seriously – not just as a source of resources for national development, but as a dynamic actor in the narrative. Yet, on both sides of the border, environmental historians typically focus on humans, giving much less agency to non-humans. This is hardly surprising, because environmental history, both American and Canadian, has roots in political, administrative, and intellectual studies of resource development and environmental concern. As Alan MacEachern points out, long before American environmental history became fashionable, Canadian historians wrote about the ways natural resources influenced national development.² In the United States, Frederick Jackson Turner influenced generations of resource historians. But, these histories rarely examined what Richard White calls the “reciprocal influences” between cultures and the natural world.³

In the 1980s, American environmental historians challenged a core assumption of history: that humans were necessarily at the centre of the story. In adopting what the American wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold had called an “ecological interpretation of history,” they followed Leopold’s suggestion to “think like a mountain.” In the 1940s, Leopold had criticized land managers who valued species and ecosystems only as resources for human use, believing that historians and managers alike needed to displace their gaze from the human and take a holistic, ecological perspective on history. “Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land,” Leopold wrote, concluding that ecological processes often “steered the course of history.”⁴ American environmental historians of the 1980s and 1990s avoided the environmental determinism implicit in Leopold’s argument, but they agreed that biotic processes were important agents of change.

Like many environmental historians who followed him, Leopold valued pre-European settlement landscapes over the agricultural and industrial landscapes that followed. Because post-contact ecosystems were often simplified, Leopold felt they violated the central tenet of his land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”⁵ But, by the 1990s, ecologists and environmental historians agreed that the balance of nature was a myth, complex ecosystems were no more stable than simplified ecosystems, and, in the tumultuous course of ecological history, unruly change was common. As American environmental historians became more aware of what William Cronon termed in 1995 the “trouble with wilderness,” scholars began to shift their gaze away from an imagined pristine nature, focusing instead upon race, class, and culture in environmental history.⁶ These studies, however, often ignored Leopold’s core insight that the rest of nature matters. Instead of exploring what Arthur McEvoy called “the mutually constitutive nature of ecology, production, and cognition,” they focused on people alone.⁷

How do we take natureseriously, without making normative assumptions about pristine nature, and without ignoring social, political, and cultural complexity? Thinking like a microbe, not a mountain, might be one path. Why a microbe? While it is easy for people to project ideals of wilderness onto mountains, microbes do not lead us into the “pristine nature” trap. Few people have any illusion that microbes once enjoyed a balanced past that we can somehow recapture. A focus on microbes reminds us that non-human nature needs to be part of our histories. Even if what we care about is race, class, and gender, to understand those human stories, we need to pay attention to the nonhuman.

Microbes also force us to...