ABSTRACT
The historian of American environmental history, John McNeill, postulated three main "varieties" of environmental history, of which only two really apply to the pre-modern aspect of the field. One is a "material" approach to environmental history, which seeks to record changes in the "biological and physical environments and how those changes affect human societies". The other is a cultural/intellectual approach that "emphasizes representations and images of nature in arts and letters, how these have changed, and what they reveal about the people and societies that produced them". The cultural/intellectual approach is the "realist" wing, because it seeks a broad consensus or overview of widely-shared contemporary attitudes towards nature and the environment. Traditionally, environmental influences were divided into factors that were either "exogenous", or "endogenous". However, historians see any attempt to favor one or the other as setting up a "false dichotomy" between these two forces, since they are so inter-related.
