Environment1

Environmental history has been described variously as the interdisciplinary study of the relations among culture, technology and nature through time, ² and as the story of the life and death, not of human individuals, but of societies and species in terms of their relationship with the world around them. ³ Some environmental historians argue from a materialist/structuralist perspective while others argue from a much more cultural perspective. There are thus divergent opinions over the extent to which nature influences human affairs, some taking the position of limited environmental determinism, others insisting that culture determines all. Worster straddles both worlds by asserting that the cultural history of nature is as significant as the ecological history of culture. ⁴ Disagreements exist on whether the natural world constitutes any kind of order or pattern that we can know and, if it does, whether that order can be comprehended by means of science. There is also debate on what is natural and what is not, whether indigenous people managed the whole environment or only some part of it, how much was wilderness and how much of this wilderness was mythical.