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CHAPTER 1
Subversive Subjects
Donald Worster and the Radical Origins of Environmental History
TED STEINBERG
If ecology, as Paul Sears once said, is a "subversive subject," what of environmental history?
Environmental history had its start in the 1970s at a time when people around the globe began to show increasing concern, both popular and scholarly, in the fate of the earth. Roderick Nash, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, first taught "American Environmental History" the same semester as activists took to the streets on Earth Day. Nash reported that he "felt good about helping make the university, and particularly the Department of History, more responsive to the problems of society. I was, at last, 'relevant.'"
The newly emerging environmental consciousness Nash perceived had a number of causes. It nevertheless owed a great deal to the radicalism of the 1960s, especially the antiwar movement. Though support for environmentalism was hardly universal among the New Left, radicals began embracing this cause in the second half of the decade. Groups such as the War Resisters League began to articulate the connection between involvement in Vietnam and environmental issues when the extent of the US military's use of defoliants became more widely known. By the time Nash taught his new course, radical politics had come to inform environmental thinking, a point underscored by national Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes's turn to the massive 1969 antiwar protests as a model for the event.
Political commitment helped give birth to environmental history, and radical politics, understandably enough, would come to characterize much of the early important work in this new area of study. William Cronon's book on New England, written in 1983, raised the issue of how an alienated market in land helped to lay a foundation for the transition to capitalism; Richard White's work on Native Americans and their descent into dependency, published the same year, drew on Immanuel Wallerstein's core-and-periphery theory of the global capitalist system; and Carolyn Merchant's study, a few years later, of nature, gender, and science was described in one review as "overtly political" in the way that it deplored the domination of nature "and the simultaneous exploitation of women, Indians, and the poor."
Many of the canonical works, whatever their differences in focus, have a decidedly radical cast, if by radical we mean a history interested in the root causes of oppression and exploitation. This radical orientation is especially pronounced in the work of Donald Worster, who came to the field a bit earlier than the above-mentioned historians. Worster's work can be usefully divided into two periods. The first phase, extending from 1971 to 1985, is important in two respects. It witnessed Worster's shift toward a concern with ecology and political economy and, growing out of this development, a call for postnationalist history that would transcend the boundaries that historians had for so long taken for granted. Much like the first wave of New Left historians who set out to overturn the consensus school of historiography, Worster combined a concern with the impact and expansion of capitalism with a focus on problems of contemporary importance. In the second period (1985–1993), Worster turned toward the thinkers of the Frankfurt School for inspiration and embraced "value-laden" history. The result was an emphasis on the role of the modern technocratic state in the unfolding economic order. Together, the two periods of scholarship amounted to a radical challenge not simply to political history but to those New Left historians who turned to the study of history "from the bottom up" and eventually took to focusing on race, class, and gender as the guiding categories of analysis.
Today, of course, the field of environmental history has evolved into a mature subdiscipline with a much more catholic set of political concerns and scholarly interests. Those who work in the field sometimes seem to struggle with the issue of its relevance to contemporary ecological problems, and for that reason alone it is important to examine the radical tradition and one of its most important champions, if only to be reminded of why history matters.
Worster was born in 1941 in the Mohave Desert town of Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River, a watercourse that would later come to figure prominently in his work. When his father left to serve in World War II, Worster returned to Kansas, where his parents originally hailed but fled because of the economic dislocation brought on by the Great Depression. Worster was thus raised on the Great Plains — the locus for some of his most important scholarly work — on a farm near the city of Hutchinson, Kansas. There, because of the sway of his grandmother Maud Gamble Ball, he came under the influence of the Scottish Campbellite Church of Christ, the same church, as it turns out, attended by John Muir, a figure Worster would later study in a full-length biography.
After taking a degree from the University of Kansas, Worster moved to the University of Maine in 1964 to work as a debate coach. By his own account, New England seems to have made quite an impression on Worster. Not having grown up around an ocean or forest, Worster was struck by the beauty of his new surroundings. He began reading New England nature writers such as Henry David Thoreau as well as other key figures — such as Aldo Leopold — who were shaping the emerging environmental movement. When he wasn't reading, Worster watched the snow fall and went off for romps in the woods and somehow realized, he later recalled, "that there was a part of me dwelling out there."
Worster decided to continue on in the region when he was accepted in 1966 into the graduate program in American Studies at Yale University. He studied intellectual history at Yale but had trouble squaring the study of New England's religious past — a popular subject among intellectual historians on campus — with the planetary crisis he saw unfolding before his eyes. Mark Lytle, a graduate student colleague (who would later write a biography of Rachel Carson titled The Gentle Subversive), once purportedly asked Worster to explain environmental history to him. "Is this history for the bears?" he inquired. "You're damn right it's for the bears," Worster replied, "the bears and all the rest of us."
Working within the confines of this conservative climate, Worster's dissertation, completed in 1971, was an intellectual history, though admittedly of an unconventional topic, at least for the time in which he wrote. Titled "The Economy of Nature: An Essay on the Development of Ecological Thought," the dissertation laid the groundwork for Worster's first book, which traced the history of ecological ideas in Anglo-American culture starting in the eighteenth century. Nature's Economy, as the book was titled, examined the thinking of several key figures and worked to show that what represented progress with respect to the science of ecology was often the product of the respective human values that informed the period in which the scientific ideas took root.
It has always struck me that the hero of this book is Thoreau. Worster portrayed Thoreau as an advocate of the arcadian tradition, which sought a far more humble relationship with the earth than the imperial managers who show up later in the book in the form of the Bureau of Biological Survey waging allout war against wolves and coyotes. The Romantics, Worster wrote, "were the first great subversives of modern times," challenging, among other things, "the values and institutions of expansionary capitalism." In the face of the "ecological alienation" caused by industrial capitalism, the factories and the ringing of axes in New England's forest, Thoreau put forth a philosophy that was radical to its core. It proposed communal relations with the natural world and could find no moral authority for elevating humankind and its colonizing desires toward the land above the rights of muskrats or any other animal or plant for that matter. Nature's Economy not only explained the origins of the major trends in ecological thinking, but also it made a larger, more radical point: that moral reason must play a role in how an intellectual approaches the study of science.
It is worth pausing to note that if Thoreau inspired Worster, he also animated at least one New Left scholar who pioneered history from the bottom up: Staughton Lynd, who overlapped at Yale with Worster (and who was denied tenure in 1968 subsequent to a defiant trip he took to Hanoi during the Vietnam War). In his intellectual history of American radicalism, published in 1968, Lynd not only tried to explain why Thoreau took the positions he did and how they shaped an American radical tradition, but also looked to the bard from Walden to endorse a form of radical history that was heavy on moral reason, that is, to offer a model for a better world. Drawing connections between Karl Marx and Thoreau, Lynd showed how the latter arrived at a critique of alienated labor every bit as powerful as the man most associated with this strain of radical thought. Lynd also disputed that the goal of society should be the protection of property. Private property only allowed those in possession of it to profit off the labor of those without. A radical tradition dating to Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson, Lynd held, had contended that "the earth belongs to the living." Yet Lynd made nary a mention of the earth itself or Thoreau's arcadian ethic. Out of these two very different readings of Thoreau (Lynd's and Worster's) would emerge two competing forms of radical history — one social, the other environmental. It is a split that remains largely unresolved to this day.
Now it was Worster's turn to not simply interpret the world but to change it. Building on the discussion of the 1930s Great Plains dust storms covered in Nature's Economy, Worster set off to offer a full-scale study of what he called one of the worst ecological disasters in the history of the world. The resulting book, titled Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, opens with a quotation from Marx that unites a concern with alienated labor and alienated land. It reads: "All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil." Worster later called the epigraph cheeky, but I would argue that it captured his belief that social oppression and environmental exploitation originated on some common economic ground. Worster's focus on capitalism is certainly what made me want to study with him when he relocated to Brandeis University in 1984.
The book represents Worster's shift away from intellectual history toward a concern with the relationship between ecology and political economy. Dust Bowl laid the blame for the dirty thirties at the doorstep of the capitalist system. Worster indicted capitalism at precisely the point in the 1970s when the global economy had entered a state of crisis. Indeed, the book came out in the same year that Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain and Paul Volcker reformed US monetary policy in ways that aided the ruling elite at the expense of the poor. Under capitalism, which Worster imagined in much broader terms than Marx as an "economic culture" founded on a set of precepts such as the maximization of natural resource use, the deck was stacked against an appreciation for the limits of nature. This economic culture also helped to erode any sense of community, except among the Mennonites whose communalism fostered, in Worster's words, "a sense of place to anchor a wind-blown culture." For all the book's concern with capitalism, for all its emphasis on the limits of nature and the mindless quest to transcend those limits, for all its stress on the massive failure of accommodation that had taken place on the plains, there is still one other element of the book that, in a sense, may represent its most radical component. When I repaired to the dusty basement of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, bookstore in 1983 to purchase a used copy of Dust Bowl, I opened it to find these words, "The Southern Plains are a vast austerity." The year before I had started out from a New York City suburb and traveled some sixteen thousand miles around North America in a Datsun B-210; I had never seen anyone capture better what I saw on those lonely plains roads. Precious few historians can get a reader to care about a place the way Donald Worster does in this book.
Environmental history it seemed to me at the time threatened to upend the history profession entirely, even its most radical radicals such as Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, and Howard Zinn, because it threatened the anthropocentrism of those who thought human beings had a set of rights that were somehow higher and above other living organisms.
Who was this man, this Donald Worster so eager to take on an entire field of study? The answer came when I managed to get my hands on a copy of a conference paper Worster published, while teaching at the University of Hawaii, in 1982 in Environmental Review, the journal of the American Society for Environmental History. It didn't look like much, a mere six pages — devoid of a single footnote — banged out on a typewriter. What it said, however, amounted to nothing short of a manifesto. It begins as follows: "An intriguing question that has never gotten much attention is why the study of history, which is the study of social change over time, should itself often be highly resistant to change." The essay then moves on to offer a stinging critique of the nation-state and its dominance over the discipline, while calling for a "postnationalist history," a year before Benedict Anderson published his own well-received critique of this issue. The essay ends by invoking Thoreau and that great voice of the American West, Wallace Stegner. Worster held up their philosophies as "guides to academic research."
Worster went on to paraphrase Stegner, who grew up in both the United States and Canada and was no stranger to crossing borders: "I no longer really think of myself as an American. I know what it is to feel intense attachment to a specific locale and acknowledge the need for geographic roots, for a tenacious, manageable sense of identity. And I answer, on the other hand, the call to a greater world citizenship that reaches out to embrace the interests of all humanity, all nature, as my own." Whether Stegner actually wrote this or not — there is no footnote to check — is beside the point. This is as much Worster speaking as Stegner, speaking deeply radical thoughts that go all the way back to Tom Paine's 1792 injunction: "My country is the world." Could there have been a more articulate plea for the new social historian and the gritty environmental historian to join hands?
There wasn't much joining of hands, barely even a handshake at first. Radical history evolved to focus on the triad of race, class, and gender. Environmental history, meanwhile, began to set off on a somewhat different course, one that questioned the bright-line division of the so-called nature-culture dichotomy. Those working in the field, under the influence of poststructuralism, tended instead to embrace the idea of nature as a cultural construction. Instead of Worster's autonomous natural world, many environmental historians began writing about hybridity and second nature — that is, viewing all environments as the product of natural and cultural forces. Worster, however, stuck to his guns. "I'm not a detached scholar," he told the New York Times in 1985.
Not indeed. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West is a textbook example of what Howard Zinn in 1970 called "value-laden historiography." By this, Zinn did not mean making up facts or distorting the past to fit some preconceived value set. He meant that current political concerns could be used to help historians formulate questions about the past. Repulsed by the idea of history as a form of what he called "private enterprise" — centered on professionalism, promotion, and garnering prestige — Zinn instead advocated for what he viewed as an engaged form of history that elevated "ultimate values" over "instrumental ones." That was precisely the agenda of Rivers of Empire.
The central question that motivates Worster's book is this: How did the American West emerge as a "hydraulic society," that is, a social order founded on large-scale technological control of water in an arid environment? To answer this question, Worster turned to the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, including Karl Wittfogel, who formulated the concept of hydraulic societies, and especially Max Horkheimer. Though Worster's reliance on Wittfogel is often mentioned in discussions of the book, in truth, Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason published in 1947 may well have been the most important influence on this project, especially Horkheimer's thoughts on instrumental reason that privileges means over ends or, in Worster's own words, involves knowing "more and more about how to do things, [and] less and less about what it is that is worth doing." According to Worster, the water-based empire in the American West rested on a capitalist state made up of private agriculturalists underwritten by public planners, technocrats, and their representatives in government who had little patience with "ultimate matters" and instead employed instrumental reason to the West's rivers. This approach reduced rivers to little more than a means to an end, that is, a tool for "maximum yield, maximum profit."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Field On Fire"
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