Environmental History in the American West

Hal K. Rothman

The western environment is so central to the study of this complex region that the environmental history of the American West largely transcends the noisy and sometimes rancorous discussion between the so-called “new” and “old” western historians.  Underlying the debate between those who argue the concepts of the civilizing frontier and the declensionist conquest is the baseline of a physical world different from the humid climates east of the Mississippi River.  Endless plains, snow-capped mountains, giant trees, and unforgiving deserts seem more typical in this trans-Mississippi region.  When sixteenth-century Spaniards entered New Mexico; when nineteenth-century easterners travelled the Oregon Trail in covered wagons; and when twentieth-century westerners speed along superhighways to build new lives in the Golden State of California, the Sun Belt, or the inland northwest; they all encountered a West that appeared unfamiliar, foreign, challenging, and sometimes daunting.  For those who came from the loamy, rolling moraines of the Midwest, the rocky and timbered lands of the Northeast, and the soupy humidity of the South, the West looked, felt, and even smelled different. 

For historians, that difference in environment and perception and its consequences in the collision of cultures that followed have proved to be fruitful areas of inquiry.  The western environment has influenced the shaping of the social, cultural, and economic institutions of all of its many societies. Prehistoric and historic Native Americans, no less than modern settlers, found themselves responding to the vagaries of the physical world and the appearance of new and different people, sometimes Indian and sometimes not, who had different economic and cultural goals.  The tension these complex adaptations created, so aptly described by noted world historian Alfred W. Crosby, author of Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 AD, as both “encounter” and “exchange,” centers the approach of historians who address the impact of the western environment on the human history of the region.

Led by Walter Prescott Webb and James Malin, an earlier generation of scholars presented a history well aware of the impact of environment on the people of the West.  In recent years, though, five historians—Donald Worster, Richard White, William Cronon, Donald Pisani, and Stephen J. Pyne have especially helped shape the field of western environmental history.  These five have fused the study of human habitation in the West with the physical realities of the region, showing the impact of environment on the institutions, culture, values, and society of westerners.  Each has made major points about the history of the region and the relationship of its various people to the physical environment, opening new avenues of inquiry for subsequent scholars.

The figurative dean of modern western environmental historians, Donald Worster, has produced a number of important histories of the region. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s and Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West have addressed the implications of capitalist society on the arid lands.  In Worster’s passionate and eloquent prose, Dust Bowl shows that the problems of the “Dirty Thirties” were primarily caused not by the drought of the decade but rather by the aggressive agricultural practices of the previous fifty years.  An expanding amount of land in cultivation, technological advancement, speculative land practices, declining or constant crop prices, and a marginal environment combined to create the conditions in which the Dust Bowl occurred.  In Worster’s view, the drought that began in 1929 only served as the spark that ignited the figurative fuel left from fifty years of the application of humid clime practices and capitalist economics to a semi-arid world.  The Dust Bowl was not a natural disaster; it resulted from a culture acting in accordance with the value system it fostered. 

Rivers of Empire tells a similar story, albeit one based on the development of institutions as well as the practices of a society.  Worster sees the centralized control of water in the West as evidence that the region has become a hydraulic society, an oligarchy in which control of water equals dominance of society as a whole.  This concentration of water and power functions through the bureaucracy of the Bureau of Reclamation which caters to the powerful landed and water-holding constituencies.  In such relationships, Worster perceives a betrayal of the concept of democracy.

Worster’s view of the relationship between technology and culture mirrors the increasing ambivalence with which science and technology are treated, both in scholarship and in popular writing and thinking.  Worster sees technology advancing more quickly than human understanding of its intended and unintended consequences.  Instead of simply producing the desired response, the application of technology opens many new avenues with solutions to existing questions and new problems inextricably intertwined.  Americans in particular and humanity in general embrace new technologies because at some basic level, Worster believes, they are testimony to our competence as a species, to our allegiance to a hierarchy with humans at its pinnacle.  His fear, expressed in these works and others, is that the modern concept of freedom in the United States—defined as doing whatever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want, and however we want—is in conflict with any and every meaningful step to assure the integrity of the physical world.  In a typically well-thought out essay in the Summer 1994 issue of Environmental History Review, “Nature and the Disorder of History,” he describes environmental conservation as “an effort to protect certain rates of change going on within the biological world from incompatible changes going on within our economy and technology.”  This desire to protect leads him to view personal, private, and public forms of regulation as the first step toward solving environmental problems.

Another leading scholar in the field, Richard White, is most noted for his work on Native Americans and for initiating a prominent subfield, regional and subregional environmental histories.  In The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among Choctaw, Pawnee, and Navajo, White illustrates the impact of both malicious and well-intended policy on people of other cultural systems.  These cross-cultural contacts and the lack of communication and understanding that accompanied them led to disaster for Indian peoples.  Rules made by people far away who neither cared nor understood Indian mores or needs placed Native Americans at a tremendous disadvantage.  Neo-technocratic efforts to help by applying the solutions of modern science to environmental problems devastated Indian economies and deleteriously affected Indian culture.  The enforced stock reduction of the 1930s on the Navajo reservation is only the best-known example of the well-intentioned paving of this road to Hell.

An earlier work of White’s, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington, paved the way for the many subsequent regional and subregional studies of local areas.  Examining these islands off the coast of Washington, White looked at the evolution of the physical world as the result of human action.  He shows that even remote and peripheral places experience profound impact from distant changes in economics, patterns of living, and taste.  A combination of local history and a study of the physical world, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change offered a new way to look at the relations between people and the world they inhabited.

William Cronon’s work has excited much interest in recent years.  His Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, easily the most discussed book of 1992, details the process by which “first nature,” the natural world before substantive human intervention, became “second nature,” the world of fields, farms, stockyards, and markets that is so familiar to modern Americans.  Cronon traces the ways in which commodities as diverse as frozen water (ice) and hogs became part of a market system that successfully conveyed the products of the grasses and forests of the West to stomachs and structures of Chicago and every other major American city.  Cronon sees this process as transformative, not only in environmental terms, but also from cultural, economic, and social perspectives.  From this, he envisions an integrated history of the physical world, its various peoples, and the combinations of their interaction.

Cronon has also stepped to the fore in analyzing the way in which environmental historians, and indeed all historians, tell their stories.  In a challenging piece in the March 1992 issue of The Journal of American History, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Cronon begins to address the meaning of the perspective and orientation of scholars in the history of environmental transformation.  For environmental historians, Cronon argues, “human acts occur within a network of relationships, processes, and systems, that are as ecological as they are cultural.”  Yet, environmental historians put these processes within a narrative structure, an orderly form in which to organize randomness creating a dichotomy that speaks to the multiple meaning of stories that are, in essence, about stories.  This insight, coupled with Cronon’s attempt to reconcile the human need for meaningful stories with the randomness of nature, has sparked much dialogue about what environmental historians do in the West and elsewhere. 

Donald J. Pisani’s work focuses on the development of institutions, in particular those related to water and irrigation.  He, too, looks at the development of reclamation in the United States, but from an entirely different perspective than Worster.  In his To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848-1902, Pisani presents a fragmented West, divided by local rather than regional or national allegiances, and battling against itself for economic gain in a zero-sum equation.  Local elites play a formative role in Pisani’s work, shaping law, policy, and local and regional society to their advantage.  This provides the basis for a region-wide water law, a cornerstone in the process of developing western institutions.  Based on perhaps the most extensive archival research into the history of the application of law to public policy since the venerated Paul Wallace Gates’s studies of land policy, this first of a projected three-volume history of reclamation in the West builds from the ground up to argue for the importance of peripheries in establishing western institutions.

The most science-based of these scholars is Stephen J. Pyne.  Although national in scope, Fire in America looks at fire from scientific, ecological, and cultural perspectives.  Pyne demonstrates the transformative characteristics of fire as well as the human response—suppression—which led to the fires at Yellowstone National Park in 1988, as well as the ones throughout the West common during each summer.  He traced the evolution of policy in response to fire and showed how people responded to what in much of the region became a dreaded annual event.  Heroic men facing overwhelming conflagration become vanguards of technological culture, challenging the natural world with the best tools science has to offer.  Pyne’s work shows that the long, hot, smoky, and lethal summer of 1994 is likely to be prototype rather than an anomaly.

Although these five have set the standards for scholarship about the environmental history of the American West, numerous others have contributed important ideas to what is a happily cacophonous dialogue.  Regional environmental histories have become common, as have studies of the federal agencies that manage parks, forests, wilderness, and other designated classes of federal land.  Some have emphasized the ecological changes caused by different kinds of land use, and technology and infrastructure have attracted the interest of more.

Of these subsets, the regional environmental histories are most prominent.  William E. deBuys’s Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range shows the environmental consequences of human endeavor in one region of northern New Mexico from before the arrival of the Spanish to the very recent past.  Philip V. Scarpino covers the upper Midwest in Great River: An Environmental History of the Upper Mississippi, 1890-1950.  Dan L. Flores’s literary and historical Caprock Canyons: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains is unique in its autobiographical approach to history.  Flores lived on the land he wrote of (the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains of west Texas), and from his experience and relationship to it he fashioned a stunning piece of work.  Hal K. Rothman’s On Rims and Ridges: The Los Alamos Area Since 1880 fits in the genre, mixing environment, technology, and ethnicity in an effort to discern the fate of local communities dependent on federal largesse. 

Institutional environmental histories of the West have a secure niche within the field.  When it was published, Alfred Runte’s National Parks: The American Experience was the first major book to address the history of the national park system in nearly twenty years.  Comprehensive and controversial, the book suggested two theses still under consideration and in dispute among historians.  Runte argued that scenic character and economic need determined the boundaries of national parks, coining two oft-discussed terms: “scenic monumentalism” and “worthless lands.”  In his view, national parks were selected from lands without commercial economic worth.  These concepts served as catalysts for much debate about the role of federal agencies in protecting ecosystems.  In The United States Forest Service: A History, Harold K. Steen analyzes the history of that agency, while former Forest Service Chief Historian David A. Clary’s Timber and the Forest Service attacks what the author sees as the one-dimensional policy of that agency.  Other books address aspects of these and other resources management agencies.  The importance of the role of federal agencies in the region means that the list of such studies will continue to grow.

Historians have also begun to debate the ecological impact of pre-industrial peoples.  In his “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800-1850,” published in the September 1991 issue of The Journal of American History, Dan Flores shows how “horse Indians”—the Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyennes, and Arapahos who migrated onto the Southern Plains in the first half of the eighteenth century—failed to establish a “dynamic ecological equilibrium” between the needs of their horses and the herds of bison grazing the plains.  These imperialist Indians displaced their predecessors, measured wealth in their herds of horses, and increasingly hunted for the market.  Combined with the decline in bison population as a result of more intensive hunting, their presence and the ten to fifteen horses per individual cut into the grazing available for bison.  The condition of Plains Indians began to decline shortly after an 1840 peace agreement between the four groups that allowed all access to the bison-rich plains.  On the Kiowa calendar, for example, after 1841, only one year in the subsequent thirty-five carries the notation for “many buffalo.”  In his “Workings of the Geodialectic: High Plains Indians and Their Horses in the Region of the Arkansas River Valley, 1800-1870,”  published in the Summer 1992 issue of Environmental History Review, James E. Sherow shows how horses proved to be both a marvelous advantage for Plains Indians and a simultaneously destructive force to the world around them.  Horses meant status and herd sizes grew, but the plains themselves could not sustain the increased demand for grazing.  The result was a declining environment that sustained fewer horses as the number of animals in search of grazing increased. 

In Enchantment and Exploitation, deBuys makes a similar point about Hispano livestock farmers in northern New Mexico.  They, too, taxed the limited capabilities of their physical environment, expanding the amount of land they used, turning marginal lands into pasture, and gradually depleting the resources at hand.  A process similar to the diminished arability of southern Europe and the Middle East in the first centuries of the common era, this accumulated impact belies the notion that people close to the land automatically treat it well.  While they may revere the natural world, they also seek to maximize their use of it.

With insights such as these, environmental history has opened the door for scholars to study the way human beings interact with the physical world around them.  This subfield seeks to relate human experience—personal and institutional, public and private—and the physical world, assessing the impacts of both on each other.  Its mode of organizing the past offers new ways to understand human history, new frames in which to put the decisions of the people of times gone by.  In places such as the American West, where the attributes of the physical world played an instrumental role in the ways humans shaped their institutions, environmental history is a crucial tool for seeing the past clearly.

The real significance of environmental history in the West can in the end be best assessed by looking at its impact on the field as a whole.  For western historians, both new and old, the importance of the environment can no longer be ignored.  Historians in all of the many subareas of the field recognize the importance, both of the environment and of the concept of place, in crafting well-rounded histories of the American West.  Within the field, environment has become a category of analysis much like social history, urban history, or women’s history.  The result for western history has been a broadening of methodology and subject matter, as well as a more comprehensive understanding of the meaning of the past in the American West. 

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. 

———. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.

———. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative.” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347-1376.

Crosby, Alfred. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900AD. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

deBuys, William E. Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985.

Flores, Dan L. Caprock Canyons: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

———. “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800-1850.” Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 465-485.

Malin, James C. History and Ecology: Studies of the Grassland. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Pisani, Donald J. To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848-1902. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.

Pyne, Stephen J. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Rothman, Hal K. On Rims and Ridges: The Los Alamos Area Since 1880. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Runte, Alfred. National Parks: The American Experience. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.

Scarpino, Philip V. Great River: An Environmental History of the Upper Mississippi, 1890-1950. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985.

Sherow, James E. “Workings of the Geodialectic: High Plains Indians and Their Horses in the Region of the Arkansas River Valley, 1800-1870.” Environmental History Review (Summer 1992).

Steen, Harold K. The United States Forest Service: A History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976.

Webb, Walter Prescott. Great Plains. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1931.

White, Richard. Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980.

———. Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among Choctaw, Pawnee, and Navajo.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

———. “Nature and the Disorder of History.” Environmental History Review 18 (Summer 1994).

———. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

———. The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.