The Contemporaneity of Environmental History: Negotiating Scholarship,Useful History,and the New Human Condition

Abstract

Although a ‘product’ of the contemporary period, environmental history brings other disciplines, such as the natural sciences, to bear upon our understanding of contemporary history. It also expands our view of the contemporary era as one essentially linked to earlier epochs, linking twentieth-century ideas like the ‘environment’ to earlier special and cultural concepts. Environmental history complicates our view of contemporary history, challenging assumptions of modernization with narratives of decline and destruction. Environmental history, then, broadens our understanding of contemporary history, adding cultural, social, and scientific dimensions to deeply political issues.