Steve Mullins

Can environmental history save the world

As a ‘genre of history’ in Australia environmental history is relatively new, emerging in the 1960s and 70s from encounters between history, geography and the natural sciences in the context of growing environmental concern and activism. Interdisciplinary in orientation, the field also exhibited an unusually high level of engagement with current environmental issues and organisations. In this era of national research priorities and debates about the role and purpose of university-based research, it therefore seemed fair to ask: ‘can environmental history save the world?’ In response, a panel of new and established researchers offer their perspectives on issues of relevance and utility within this diverse and dynamic genre. This article has been peer-reviewed.

To Auckland by the Ganges: The journal of a sea voyage to New Zealand in 1863

To Auckland by the Ganges: The journal of a sea voyage to New Zealand in 1863 by Robert M. Grogans Whittles Publishing, Dunbeath, 2012, £16.99 (pb) 138 pages, with black-and -white illustrations, b...

Inscription of Historical Seascapes: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Construction of the Capricorn Coast's Scenic Highway

According to Stephen Dovers, environmental history can provide broad historical perspectives on things like colonial impacts, the evolution of technologies, the emergence of institution settings, the growth of commodity trade and changing land use regimes. It is a useful method of gathering baseline data on the past states of natural environments and, because this often relies on ‘local knowledge’, has the potential to foster community participation and engender community empowerment. Through the intelligent critique of past regimes, such history can, moreover, convey policy lessons, by offering what elsewhere Dovers describes as an ‘antidote to policy amnesia’. He also suggests that ‘a more innocent and less driven purpose’ of environmental history is ‘to unearth stories worth listening to’. While Dovers is careful not to claim too much for environmental history, and concedes that it ‘provides clues and some cues at best’, he may well be understating the power of stories, especially those that relate to relationships between people and place. Peter Hay reminds us that there is a powerful congruence between empathy with place and a commitment to the protection and maintenance of local natural ecosystems. A deep sense of place instils a desire to act ethically towards that place, and usually it is grounded in a concern for the life — human and otherwise — that has been integral to it. However, it is also formed out of emotional attachments to scenery — land and seascapes built up, as Simon Schama puts it, ‘as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’.