The State of the Field of Environmental History

This article reviews the state and evolution of the field of environmental history since about 1970. It focuses chiefly on the work of professional historians, but because environmental history is pursued by many varieties of scholars, it occasionally discusses the work of archeologists, geographers, and others. It offers a working definition of the field and an account of its origins, development, and institutionalization from the 1970s until 2010. It briefly surveys the literature on several world regions, concentrating most heavily on South Asia and Latin America, where environmental history at present has grown especially lively. It considers the prominence of Americanists (that is, historians of the United States, not the same thing as Americans) in the field and how that prominence is now waning. It reviews the utility of environmental history for historians, sketches some of the critiques of environmental history, and comments upon some signal findings of recent years.