Environmental History: The View at the Grand Canyon

Worster, Donald

My purpose is to explore an extraordinary place on Earth, the Grand Canyon and its adjoining country, through the lens of an environmental historian. I will not try to present a single, unified interpretation of the Canyon's history, but rather present (and scrutinize) rival views of its history and of its historical implications. Environmental history is not a single way of seeing the past, but an unruly clutch of many ways of seeing and interpreting. Those ways may not necessarily be in conflict with one another, but the conflicts are often hard to reconcile. I once tried to lay out a unified, three-point model of the field, one that I thought might help resolve some of its internal contradictions or tensions, but the ink was hardly dry before some of my colleagues began to critique it. Historians don't like models, and they certainly don't like other historians' models. Typically, they sort themselves into camps or rivalries or schools, practicing this kind or that kind of history, but not all kinds at once. So it is with environmental history. At the risk of generating still more disputation, I will identify two rival ways of doing environmental history that characterize the field right now--one emphasizing the cultural construction of nature, and the other emphasizing nature's construction of society. The first approach tends to focus on how different cultures, or different groups within a single culture (subcultures identified by race, ethnicity, class, or gender), have perceived and shaped their environment. The second approach tends to emphasize how powerfu1 natural forces (geography, climate, soils, biota) have influenced the development of human economy and society. The first is deeply grounded in culture studies; the second in evolutionary science. The first group of historians tends to quote people like Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and other cultural theorists, most of them French. The second group tend to quote the likes of Charles Darwin, E.O. Wilson, and Jared Diamond, mostly British and American scientists. All of this may threaten with too much abstractness, but I will try to illustrate the differences concretely by using the Grand Canyon as a case study. The Canyon works wonderfully well for this purpose, for it is emphatically a landscape of dramatic contrasts. On the one hand, there are the great plateaus stretching for miles and miles--immense plateaus across which people have been walking or riding for thousands of years, and especially over the past century. On those plateaus a lot of cultural construction of nature has been going on--not only there, but obviously and emphatically there. And then we come to the great chasm itself, which drops away from our feet into deep evolutionary and geological time. A journey down into that chasm, I will suggest, leaves one with many questions about what we mean by history and about the role that nature has played in the construction of culture and human experience. I will argue that environmental history looks very different if you stay up on the plateau, prowling around the human structures and tourist interpretations that have accreted here, than if you plunge deep within the chasm.

Environmental History: The View at the Grand Canyon

Collections