Where Did Environmentalism Come From?

The Origins of Environmentalism? (Wikimedia Commons)

An interesting book arrived in the mail this week: Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism, by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson.  I'll be reviewing it for a history of science journal.

It looks like a fascinating book: great topic, deeply researched.  I'm sure I'll learn a lot.  (And the title had me at "Highlands"; love that part of the world.)

But the title's mention of the "Origins of Environmentalism" reminded me of something else:  that historians have often announced the discovery of these origins.  Here's a sample from my own bookshelf:

�      Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860(1995).  Grove sees environmentalism originating in colonial scientists' encounter with tropical environments, particular islands.

�      Gregory Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (2002).  Barton find these origins in nineteenth-century Indian forestry.

�      David Pepper, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism(1984).  According to Pepper, various strands of ideological and historical thought came together to form what we now call environmentalism.

�      Harriet Ritvo, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (2009).  Ritvo situates this dawn in the conflict between industrial development (including water supply works) and landscape conservation in England's Lake District.

�      Jacob Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (2013).  As I've discussed recently Hamblin links the catastrophic strand of environmentalism to dreams of global warfare.

�      Chris Sellers, Hazards of the Job (1997).  Sellers describes in his history of occupational health science the "workplace roots of environmentalism".

To these diverse places of origin we can add a multitude of individuals identified as the mothers or fathers of environmentalism: Rachel Carson or Aldo Leopold; further back, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh or John Muir; even further back, Gilbert White and the Romantic poets.  Alternatively, various events have been singled out as instigating environmentalism: Silent Spring in 1962, the first views of the entire Earth from space in 1968, or Earth Day in 1970.

Whoa.  At this point it's worth thinking about what we're doing here.  The motivation for origin stories is clear enough: they impart global significance to what otherwise might be considered interesting but merely local historical episodes.  The obvious problem, of course, is that any one phenomenon can only have so many "birthplaces," and only so many "parents," before things (including our ideas about how history works) start getting a little odd.

Another issue relates to how we understand an idea like environmentalism.   The notion that this idea originated somewhere implies that it can be reduced to an essencethat, having originated in a specific context then becameuniversally significant.  This essence may then be expressed in various circumstances without changing its essential character.  It may gain, lose, and recapture favor, or be revived or suppressed, but still remain what it was when first conceived.

One implication of this essentialist perspective is that the history of environmentalism risks becoming a linear account that lifts the �forerunners� of certain ideas out of their historical context.  An emphasis on origins also implies that environmentalism is the product of a few perceptive individuals whose insights are then disseminated into society.  Such a view could obscure how environmental attitudes have emerged from entire societies or classes.

An alternative view is that the interesting historical question is not so much identifying who first expressed environmentalist attitudes, but how these attitudes have evolved and been expressed in various contexts: how different ideas about human-environment relations relate to power structures, various kinds of knowledge, or the notion of collective (and not just individual) action.  This gives more scope to exploring how environmentalism itself reflects social conditions � whether these are struggles between industries and other interests, or consumerism, technocracy, Indigenous or wilderness values, or what have you.  The diversity, not the essence, becomes the interesting historical question.

As the books above demonstrate, the search for historical origins has generated much excellent scholarship.  But perhaps we also need to think about how this search can influence the answers we come up with.