That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is shown by an ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land. The characteristics of the land determined the facts quite as potently as the characteristics of the men who lived on it. A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)
The alarming condition of our planet necessitates that we respond both to global changes that make local differences and to local practices that influence global change. We are thoughtful primates, proud of our intellectual and technical accomplishments. But the truth is that we are only part of a complex network of elements and relations that make up planet Earth. Within this enormous ecosystem we live our lives influenced by events and conditions that began long ago and far away.
My aim in this chapter is to bridge the gulf dividing the Two Cultures, C. P. Snow’s (1959) term for the division between physical and biological sciences on the one side and the social sciences and humanities on the other. To explain this focus I should offer some personal background. I read Snow’s essay in high school and was horrified to realize that I would soon have to choose “between camps.” I avoided having to make that choice owing to an early and abiding interest in archeology, a discipline whose practice unequivocally requires both the sciences and the humanities. This meant, however, that my professional life would be spent trying to master very different areas of study and engaging in shuttle diplomacy among them. So I am trained in paleoclimatology, geomorphology, archeology, anthropology, ethnohistory, and classics; I have some familiarity with complex systems theory, ecology, history, and geography. For thirty years I have been studying the historical ecology of Burgundy, France. We have been able to trace environmental worldviews—what Aldo Leopold terms a land ethic—over 2,800 years’ time and to connect local Burgundian practices with environmental, economic, and social changes at the global scale (Crumley 2000; Crumley & Marquardt 1987; Gunn et al. 2004). It is with these tools that I pursue the practice and implications of historical ecology, hoping to help construct a theoretical and practical framework that will bridge the Two Cultures gulf. Other historical ecologists have different tools in their toolbox and diverse interests.
Historical ecology traces the complex relationships between our species and the planet we live on, charted over the long term (Crumley 1987a, 1994, 1998, 2001; BalĂ©e 1998; Egan & Howell 2001). It is a term new to both ecology and to history1; practitioners take the term ecology to include humans as a component of all ecosystems, and the term history to include the Earth system as well as the social and physical past of our species. Historical ecologists take a holistic, practical, and dialectical perspective on environmental change and on the practice of interdisciplinary research. They draw on a broad spectrum of evidence from the biological and physical sciences, ecology, and the social sciences and humanities. As a whole, this information forms a picture of human–environment relations over time in a particular geographic location. The goal of historical ecologists is to use scientific knowledge in conjunction with local knowledge to make effective and equitable management decisions.
Development of an interdisciplinary grammar and the identification of shared concepts and understandings are fundamental to the practice of historical ecology (Newell et al. 2005). A good example of such development is the term landscape, a unit of analysis in many academic disciplines (archeology, geography, geomorphology, ecology, architecture, art, regional planning) and also a concept recognized by the general public. Such concepts, along with widely held understandings about the way the world works—what anthropologists call cultural models—provide the basis for decisions about which practices are maintained or modified and which ideas are given substance. Landscapes retain the physical evidence of these understandings. They record both intentional and unintentional acts and reveal both the role of humans in the modification of the global ecosystem and the importance of past natural events in shaping human choice and action. In short, landscapes are read and interpreted by everyone, as likely to promote lively discussion in a gathering of citizens as in a group of scholars from various disciplines.
A working definition of landscape is the spatial manifestation of the human–environment relation (Marquardt & Crumley 1987:1). Landscape is thus a convenient idea that serves as an initial (but never the only) spatial scale of analysis. This is for two reasons. First, landscapes do not have an intrinsic temporal or spatial or cognitive scale (for example, one can speak of the medieval landscape of Europe or New York’s Central Park landscape), but what all landscapes have in common is that they allow us to follow changes in the interaction of humans with their environment over some specified amount of time. Thus “the medieval landscape of Europe” assumes that different elements and relations pertained in Roman or Renaissance or contemporary times and that “Europe” itself was a different size and shape and meant something else. Second, all landscapes are in both real and cognitive “flux” as they are physically modified and imagined in myriad ways.
The landscape “scale” is thus powerfully integrative, enabling the simultaneous study of both the physical environment and human activity, and leading the investigation of factors that helped form a landscape—such as its geology, or an historical event, or an invasive species—to data aggregated at other scales. As with spatial scales, multiple temporal scales are necessarily part of the analysis as data sets with different temporal ranges are collated. Together, spatial and temporal scales are limited only by available data and the research question, and they can include a spatial range from microscopic to global and a temporal range from very recent events to deep geological time.
By integrating evidence from many different disciplines, the history of human–environment interactions may be sketched for a particular locale. The unique characteristics of every place challenge researchers to integrate a congeries of empirical environmental and cultural information. This necessarily requires the abandonment of notions of “nested” variables—often collectively termed hierarchies—common in biology and appropriated by other disciplines. In the real world, both environments and societies present themselves as mosaics, the temporal and spatial boundaries of which are fluid and crisscross one another (de Vries 2002, 2005; Marquardt & Crumley 1987; Nicholas 2001; Pickett & White 1985; Wiens 1976; Winterhalder 1984). Complex systems theory offers a means by which this nonhierarchical, nonlinear organization may be conceived in the term heterarchy (Crumley 1987b, 1995, 2001, 2003; Ehrenreich et al. 1995; Hofstadter 1979; Marquardt & Crumley 1987; McCulloch 1945; Minsky & Papert 1972). The fundamental utility of this term for rethinking human–environment relations will be explored below.
The social and environmental history of each region of the world may be investigated using archeology, archival materials, oral tradition and history, and proxy measures drawn from the Earth sciences for studying the area’s previous and current environmental characteristics. Of obvious importance are rules for analyzing and combining diverse categories of evidence. For each category, the customary disciplinary techniques and protocols are respected (for example, in the analysis of pollen or soil or the excavation of an archeological site), but the structure of the inquiry as a whole is synergetic: collectively researchers exchange information and construct the overall design of the research, then continue to communicate as the work advances, together modifying the research design and working out problems as necessity arises.
Inasmuch as historical ecology begins with the presumption that contemporary landscapes are the result of multiple factors that have interacted in complex ways throughout history, independent data sets provide an important cross-check in building consensus among collaborators. For example, oxygenisotope dating of Kenyan geomorphological samples places a flood event sometime during a ten-year period in the mid-nineteenth century; oral tradition associates the flood with the initiation of an age-grade in 1856 or 1857. If the evidence from the two sources is contradictory (oral tradition places the flooding in 1888), specialists then return to their data with new queries. (How accurate is the chronological control? Could there have been more than one flood event?) Thus the advantages of both multidisciplinary research (specialists work alone using appropriate techniques) and of interdisciplinary research (specialists cooperate and discover new aspects of their data) are combined.
While this working arrangement between the Two Cultures may sound ideal, everyone knows that very real battles are being fought. Rather than following Snow into a dualistic world where warring camps send emissaries who more often than not meet a bad end, I suggest a means by which the perception of great dissimilarity between the two may be erased and a third great river of knowledge—older than either—be joined with them. This latter is the empirical approach that carried our most distant human ancestors into the present (Mithen 1996). How was its value lost to us? Three influential and interrelated movements in Western intellectual history—the Enlightenment, the formation of the first nation-states, and positivism—have led the majority of intellectual elites and a considerable portion of the general public to abjure traditional knowledge, an empirical tool with which humans have always made their way in the world. In its place is an almost religious belief in our ultimate redemption by a sophisticated technology; somehow we will be saved from the outcome of our reckless use of chemicals, bioengineering, nuclear physics, and fossil fuels.
Do not mistake the arguments among the Two Cultures combatants as simply academic; they are profoundly political. Everywhere their discourse advocates the dismissal of empirically derived qualitative information in favor of quantifiable data; the ridicule of indigenous knowledge in favor of technological superiority; the adoption of a definition of complexity that favors hierarchical power over democratic principles. These premises, argued in scholarly articles innocently housed in dusty libraries, nonetheless underwrite global agendas that threaten the planet and impoverish humanity.
Historical ecologists regard history and politics as inseparable. For example, changes in a landscape can be viewed as a history of shifting social power (Crumley 1987a; Mann 1986).
Viewed from the present day, landscape history is invariably tied to contemporary politics of compliance, often contrasting scientific and institutional goals with traditional societies’ practices and public awareness and participation (Brosius 2001; Johnston 1994, 1997, 1998, 2001). One need only think of contested cities such as Jerusalem or contested monuments such as Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, where Native American religious traditions are pitted against the very different interests of ranchers, sport climbers, and the Park Service. The study of collaborative schemes for solving such community and institutional differences of opinion on environmental issues has made surprising headway in recent years. Some of these schema—collective bargaining, stakeholder participation, role playing, and the European Union’s term concertation (meaning cooperative dialogue)—produce solutions that are widely acceptable. The study of such schemes underscores the fundamental role of values and perceptions in forming worldviews. Stakeholders challenge, debate, and come to understand others’ positions, and under...