A Field on Fire by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817392086
Publisher: University of Alabama Press

11

Down in the Sky

The Promise of Aerial Environmental History

ROBERT WELLMAN CAMPBELL

What distinguished the work of the first generation of environmental historians, and Donald Worster in particular, was perhaps above all a willingness to challenge fundamental assumptions of the historical profession. In doing so, they followed research agendas that their fellow historians didn’t see so much as opposing the scholarly currents of the time, but rather as bafflingly irrelevant and unattached to them. While Worster and others eagerly utilized the historical scholarship available to them, they took their new directions not from dialectic debates within the field, but from the realities outside of scholarship, porting those issues into their field. As often happens, this shift occurred not by discovering new issues, but by taking seriously issues that had previously been taken for granted as marginal. In fact anyone patiently observing Donald Worster in his native habitat of debate will be rewarded with a demonstration of this strategy, and of the surprising analytical power that comes in taking something literally.

So it stands with environmental history today and its operating assumption that in studying human societies it is studying a terrestrial species. This field studies land, with aquatic and aerial issues brought in as supplements to that core. To be sure, most environmental scholars proceed, like Aldo Leopold’s famous essay, from a concept of an ecological community integrating all of its components as critical. But the many rigorous studies on freshwater bodies and oceans, air pollution, the history of meteorology and so forth notwithstanding, even the most cursory glance though an environmental history database reveals how far out of balance the terms of this discussion still are. This is all the more regrettable given the physical and biological fact that humans are an aerial species.1

Like many of us I started this career with Changes in the Land, but perhaps it is the sky historians who should receive the lion’s share, before us land historians and the water historians as well. For seeing humans as creatures of the sky cannot but change our historical view of interactions with solid earth, which is in many ways a territory far more foreign to us than the sky. That such a claim seems striking highlights the degree to which environmental historians have taken the sky for granted. It also underscores the fact that before the historiographical implications of seeing humans as an aerial species might be even tentatively probed, it’s necessary to move briefly away from history proper to examine their basis, the material realities undergirding the claim that humans are principally an aerial species.

A Part of the Sky: Human Aeriality on the Physical Level

I began to think about those realities while researching the history of an airplane flown into thunderstorms for the purpose of taking in situ data on cloud physics and weather modification. On the lowest and broadest level of environmental history—the physical level—this research yielded two lessons about the sky. The first was its boundaries. Just as people often perceive nature as existing somewhere distant from them, they too perceive the sky as beginning above them at some indeterminate altitude.

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