A Climate of Crisis by Patrick Allitt

Author:Patrick Allitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

SECOND-GENERATION ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

Worster was, unmistakably, an environmental advocate as well as an environmental historian, and to read Dust Bowl or Rivers of Empire is to feel the intensity of his indignation. William Cronon, by contrast, lowered the rhetorical temperature while bringing a new level of intellectual subtlety to environmental history. Born in 1954, Cronon had undertaken a meteorically successful education, which culminated in a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. He published his first influential book, Changes in the Land (1983), before his thirtieth birthday. A study of the way New England changed between the first English settlement in 1619 and the American Revolution, it demonstrated the interplay between human cultures and environment, emphasizing that the meaning of land, lakes, trees, rivers, and plants was very different to the settlers than to the Indians. Agreeing with Worster that the Europeans’ introduction of capitalist principles had led to exhaustion of the land and to unsustainable practices, he added that they had set to work on a landscape that was already heavily marked by human modifications. He emphatically rejected the old fallacy that the settlers had encountered a “virgin land” whose Indian population had lived in harmony and equilibrium with the plants and animals.29

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