Environments Archives - Not Even Past

The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps

Photo of Alfred Crosby (via Washington Post)

This essay is adapted from Dr. Raby’s remarks at a symposium to honor Al Crosby that was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin on February 4, 2019.

Alfred Crosby’s work has been with me for a long time––actually longer than I can remember. I routinely assign Ecological Imperialism in my undergraduate course on Global Environmental History, but long before I had ever read that book, I had unknowingly encountered his work. That is, of course, through the concept of the “Columbian exchange”––also the title of his most influential book. By the time I went to elementary school, this once revolutionary way of framing the role of disease, crops, weeds, and domestic animals as central to world history was presented simply as common knowledge.

By putting environmental history at the center, Crosby replaced the older narrative of conquest with a narrative of biocultural encounter and exchange. Instead of a one-way process largely determined by European might, Crosby showed the importance of, on one hand, the great tragedy of virgin soil epidemics and indigenous demographic collapse and, on the other, the ongoing story of how the crops domesticated by the indigenous peoples of the Americas remade the landscapes and cultures of the rest of the world.

In many ways, I think we take this narrative shift for granted today. But to be taken for granted in this way is, I think, a major accomplishment for any historian…perhaps especially for an environmental historian. Even as the field continues to be one of the most rapidly growing subfields of history, many environmental historians still fear that their work remains on the fringes. Is environmental history still seen as a novelty or fad? Do our colleagues take the field seriously enough, say, to give pigs and dandelions a key place in a survey course on U.S. or world history?

Al Crosby’s feat is all the more impressive because he was essentially writing “environmental history” before there was such a thing. In interviews, he often pointed out that half a dozen presses rejected The Columbian Exchange before it finally got published in 1972––its biological perspective on European contact with the Americas was seen as just too arcane of a subject.

But only a few years later Crosby could be counted among the first generation of self-described environmental historians. Crosby was one of the founding members of the American Society for Environmental History, for example, when it was founded in 1977. There was now a new group of scholars who insisted on taking nature seriously as an actor in human history––focusing not on military conquests or presidential politics, but rather on how humans and nature have fundamentally shaped and reshaped each other.

Crosby was no longer alone, but he still stood out. And the ways in which he stood out reveal the lasting impact and relevance of his contributions.

For one thing, it is important to note that the other major founders of environmental history were, for the most part, focused on the United States and especially U.S. Western history. In contrast, Crosby’s work was truly global in scope. Rather than the one-way story of European expansion, The Columbian Exchange shows us New World crops remaking Europe, Africa, and Asia. And with Ecological Imperialism, he tested his thesis about the interplay of ecology and empire not just in the Americas, but with cases everywhere from the Canary Islands to Iceland and New Zealand. In fact, in all his books––on everything from the rise of quantification to the history of energy––Crosby explored truly global exchanges and transformations.

Some of the most groundbreaking work in transnational African and Latin American environmental history in the 1990s and 2000s––works that are themselves now classics––were in fact directly inspired by aspects of Crosby’s arguments. Elinore Melville explored the process of ecological imperialism beyond the temperate zone, by following Spanish sheep into sixteenth-century Mexico. James McCann showed how New World maize became an African staple, adapted to local cultures and climates. Judith Carney argued that rice culture in the Americas took more than just the movement of seeds; its success was dependent on the enslaved Africans who worked in the rice fields and their agricultural experiences and knowledge. These works took the interconnections between biology and cultural knowledge that Crosby himself emphasized, but pushed them into new contexts and new corners of the world.

With the sole exception of his book on the 1918 flu pandemic, Crosby’s temporal scale was as grand as his geographical scope. Recently, there has been a surge of self-described “Big Histories” or “Deep Histories” that view human history and the present through the lens of evolution, neuroscience, or even cosmology.

Crosby was doing “Big” and “Deep” history well before the arrival of these studies. The full title of Ecological Imperialism notes that it starts in 900, but in fact, its explanatory frame extends back beyond the Norse expansion into the North Atlantic. It begins 200 million years ago, with the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea, and, hence, the beginning of the evolution of quite distinct biogeographic realms in the Old and New Worlds.

This event was cataclysmic because it brought human and geological history into the same frame, in Crosby’s words:

“The seams of Pangaea were clos[ed], drawn together by the sailmaker’s needle. Chickens met kiwis, cattle met kangaroos, Irish met potatoes, Comanches met horses, Incas met smallpox––all for the first time.” (131)

This, Crosby explains––along with the penchant of Old World humans for living at close quarters with domesticated animals––was the ultimate cause of that immunological difference that made the Columbian exchange so unequal and allowed the empires of Europe their sweeping success in lands with similar climates.

Crosby brought in Pangea and the Paleolithic, but unlike some “Big Histories,” he was not trying to write a history of everything. Nor, I think, did he reduce history to geological and biological science. The scope, scale, and interdisciplinary nature of his work flowed necessarily from the kinds of questions he asked. These were indeed big questions, and also fundamentally historical questions––questions about human agency, about global inequalities in power, and about the roots of global imperialism.

At a time when others might attribute the spread of European empire to “their superiority in arms, organization and fanaticism,” Crosby had the audacity to ask, in the Prologue of Ecological Imperialism, “but what in heaven’s name is the reason that the sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion?” (7)

In the years since, authors like Charles Mann and Jared Diamond have sold many books repeating or updating aspects of Crosby’s argument. Other authors have dug deeper into the theoretical frameworks he offered, building on and extending them. One example is Stuart McCook’s new work on the “neo-Columbian exchange”––by which he means a second wave of globalization of crops and plant pests since 1700, mediated by imperial scientific institutions and global corporations. Likewise, UT History PhD, Gregory Cushman, has explored the role of fertilizer in enabling a process of “neo-ecological imperialism”––the importation of nutrients and energy from far away ecosystems to prop up a new crop of colonial powers. Not coincidentally, both authors place seemingly mundane historical objects at the center of modern history––a common approach today in global histories, after Crosby’s dandelions–for McCook it is the humble cup of coffee, for Cushman it is bird poop!

In many of these direct and more subtle ways, Crosby’s influence is indelible. Crosby helped to make mosquitos and sheep a respectable topic for historians––something that might even have something to tell us about “big questions,” like the rise and fall of empires.

I really regret that I never got a chance to meet him in person. At the same time, in some ways I feel almost like I have met him because, much more than most academic writers, Crosby’s personality, his great enthusiasm for his topics, and his often wry sense of humor shine through in his writing. Crosby’s voice and approach live on as much in the expanding new scholarship of environmental history as in his own body of work––as pervasive, permanent, and familiar in the historical landscape as the plentiful dandelions that sparked his imagination.

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2015)

By Marisol Bayona Roman

Though the authors of The Shock of the Anthropocene apply their skills as historians of science throughout, the book is far more than a straightforward history. Written at the intersection of science, history, and the broader humanities, Bonneuil and Fressoz provide well-reasoned and well-founded arguments that surgically take apart the dominant view of the Anthropocene as an epoch of human-provoked environmental crises that have only recently come to our attention, and for which scientific advances and sustainability-oriented mindsets are the only solution.

The book is divided into three parts, each oriented toward a particular goal. The first part introduces the scientific data on greenhouse gas emissions, biosphere degradation, changing biogeochemical cycles, and energy mobilization upon which the definition of the Anthropocene rely. Fressoz and Bonneuil show how the distinction between the realms of nature and culture—think, for example, of the opposition that emerges in Europeans’ quests to conquer the wilderness of the New World and impose their ways onto “savage” and “uncultured” natives in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—is no longer so clear-cut, and how placing the blame for the environmental crises of the Anthropocene on an ambiguous human whole can propagate a hegemonic narrative. These observations set up part two of the book, in which the authors reintroduce the political and break down the hegemonic qualities of the Anthropocene discourse. They show the ways in which scientific research has helped produce an undifferentiated and distanced view of the Earth and the anthropos that minimizes the key role of major nation-states in the development of today’s environmental crises, and the dangers of designating the scientist as the ultimate hero of the epoch. This completes the foundation for part three, a collection of seven histories that expose the imprecision inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene by focusing on one aspect of its development. For example, in their history of energy—the Thermocene, as they call it—the authors note how the dominant account, which asserts that the transitions from wood to coal to oil have been driven by a search for efficiency, obfuscates responsibility for the negative consequences of these decisions. Bonneuil and Fressoz demonstrate instead that the history of energy is one of successive additions (i.e. wood and coal and oil) shaped by political, military, and ideological decisions that have often gone against principles of efficiency and technological progress. The authors close this history by addressing the political on a global level, highlighting the key role of Anglophone countries such as the United States and Great Britain in the technological changes and environmental consequences of the Thermocene.

This publication is of great merit. The sheer breadth of knowledge on which the authors rely is a wonderful example of interdisciplinary research, and the clarity with which they synthesize and present the information is impressive, to say the least. However, this feat produces a dense text that limits its potential readership. The section “The discourse of a new geopower,” for example, is crucial to the transition between Part Two and Part Three because it reveals how the current “authorized narrative” of the Anthropocene represents, reproduces, and supports certain hegemonies on a global scale. But in order to follow the thread of this chapter, the reader must contend with Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower, Peder Anker’s imperial ecology, and Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere, all introduced in the span of three pages. These concepts are explained briefly and cited appropriately, but their complexity prohibits this book from being a leisurely read for those who are not already familiar with the ideas. These shortcomings aside, The Shock of the Anthropocene is a welcome and necessary read for scholars of any field concerned with the status of the concept of the Anthropocene.

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon (1983)

By Jesse Ritner

Thirty-five years ago William Cronon wrote Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. It has aged well. The continued relevance of the book is likely a result of two things. First, it is eminently readable. Flipping through the pages, one can imagine the forests that Cronon describes and feel his connection to them. Second, the problem he poses about the limits of disciplinary work in writing the history of environmental change are more poignant now than ever before, as humanists across disciplines attempt to write to current concerns about climate change and the relationship between humans and nature. Cronon argues that the cultural and ecological consequences of colonization are deeply connected. As such, they demand the tools of both a historian and an ecologist. He traces the process by which Indigenous communities and European communities made meaning of the environment to the ecological changes that resulted from the influx of a new culture. His book is not meant to suggest a single material cause of conflict, but looks at how cultural histories of diverse issues – such as land acquisition, the development of capitalist economies, the growth of towns, and the fur trade – can benefit from studying the relationship between human action and ecological consequence.

Cronon offers transparency about his methods and sources as well as any other author. He begins his book with an explanation of what ecological sources might be for a colonial history of New England. He pinpoints four varieties: naturalists’ accounts written by early colonists and their ancestors, town records that register disagreements over ownership and property, the work of historical ecologists, and then what he terms “interpolations,” which use modern ecological literature to assess the probability of past change. By looking at these materials together, Cronon demonstrates that changes in people’s livelihoods and the means of production are not simply social, but are often dependent on ecological changes. As a result, his book is not about two landscapes, one before colonization and one after, but about two different ways of belonging to an ecosystem.

Following his discussion of methodology, Cronon moves on to explore the relationship between property ownership and human interactions with ecosystems. He begins by analyzing the diversity of New England woodlands in the pre-colonial era. He makes a clear distinction between the northern and southern halves of New England, determined mostly by the lack of agriculture further north. This created a different relationship to property and different modes of production for northern Indians. As a result, the makeup of the forests was different. Different modes of production also occurred, however, as a result of different relationships to seasonality. Cronon argues that European conceptions of poverty often disguise the importance of seasonal practices to Indigenous peoples. This has also led to a false perception that European societies do not also adjust their work and technologies to the seasons. Mobility was central for Indigenous populations, who hunted, fished, or farmed depending on the season. In contrast Europeans relied on storing food over the cold winters. This demanded a type of non-mobile settlement that was previously uncommon in New England. Cronon contends that the conflict over seasonality, not over a specific resource, was the root of European and Indigenous conflicts. The role of stability in European seasonality necessitated the creation of a new property regime in New England that limited Indigenous abilities to interact with the ecosystem and profoundly changed the land. In his estimation we live today with the consequences of this new property regime.

In the final parts of the book, Cronon looks at the fallout from this conflict through the commodification of furs, trees, and livestock. In each of these cases. Cronon shows that transformations of property regimes and the effects these transformations had on the ecosystems surrounding them were a process, rather than an immediate change. Through examining this process, he deconstructs the development of European property regimes, the commodification of resources, and the changes in both European and Indigenous means of production. The most notable result of these changes was the destruction of “edge areas” that were home to diverse flora and denser populations of fauna. These “edge areas” gave the woods the park-like appearance that early naturalists encountered in New England and that Thoreau mourns the loss of in Walden.

There are moments when the age of Cronon’s book shows. The lack of local ecological specificity, the omission of variations in specific Indigenous communities, and the overshadowing of violence and direct human conflict by broad ecological changes all demonstrate that the politics and principles of writing Native American histories have changed in the past few decades. Yet, the connections that Cronon draws powerfully denaturalize the idea that humans exist outside of nature. The clarity of his argument, and the pleasure of reading his work allow this book to maintain its place as a staple in everything from undergraduate introductory classes and grad-student seminars on Native American and Environmental histories, to bookstore shelves, and as a gift for friends and relatives who love history and camping. Few books are so intellectually satisfying and casually readable at the same time. For this reason, and many more, Cronon’s book will continue to worth reading in years to come.

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