In his 2010 monograph The Human Footprint, environmental
historian Anthony Penna argues that the environment and world history cannot be
understood without a billion-year scope. Combining the growing fields of both
environmental and world history, he synthesizes the entire history of the earth
in about three hundred pages. The first two chapters are entirely
pre-historical and address the formation of the modern earth and the evolution
of humanoids, ending with the dominance of homo-sapiens. The remaining chapters are arranged
thematically and address the following: Food production, population
fluctuation, urbanization, mining/manufacturing, industrialization, trade,
energy, and climate. Within each chapter, Penna explains how humans and the
environment have interacted historically beginning in the pre-ancient world and
ending very close to present-day. He ends his text with a reflective commentary
on how “no species has changed the natural world as significantly as Homo sapiens”[1]
mainly for the worse.
Penna’s
text fits, as it is largely a historical synthesis, fits within a large body of
both world and environmental histories. He draws largely on the environmental
work of J.R. McNeill, Vaclav Smil, and Alfred Crosby, the economic studies of
T.H. Breen and K.N. Chaudhuri, and even the technological histories of David
Nye and Lewis Mumford just to name a few. In his essay “World History and
Environmental History,”[2]
Kenneth Pomeranz also demonstrates how the study of environmental history can
complement the field of world history. While asserting that historical research
is generally conducted along regional lines, Pomeranz contends that the
environment, which does not recognize political and cultural boundaries, is an
ideal lens for examining history from a global perspective. Additionally, since
some version of imperialism, state-making, developmentalism and resistance are
universal to environmental history over very large periods of time, it allows
historians to make very large scale comparisons in their studies. By examining
world history through an environmental lens, “reinforce[ing] the
still-contested point that the modern world was not simply born in Europe,”[3]
scholars are able to examine historical consequences in an extremely far
reaching manner, from pre-historical times up to current problems with global
inequalities. This is clear in The Human
Web as Penna tries to give equal historical importance to issues like
ancient mining practices and coal pollution from the nineteenth century.
Penna’s integration of the study of
technology with that of the environment is a tactic similar to that of Sarah
Pritchard in Confluence, her 2010
book that examines the history of the Rhone River, though there are some major
differences. In her book she assumes
that not only does the natural world have an agency, but, like in the case of
Bruno Latour’s “quasi-objects,” there is no real way to divide the study of
nature from the study of humans. Though many historical actors and historians
alike have attempted to separate nature from technology, she shows that they
are necessarily linked. But in her environmental history she integrates the
history of technological systems, “artifacts, practices, people, institutions,
and ecologies.”[4]
She brands this sort of study to be envirotechincal analysis. The systems that
envirotechnical studies analyze encompass not only everything that would
traditionally fit within the realm of environmental history, but also all of
the social, cultural and political dimensions of the history of technology. By
creating this field, she makes clear a concept that many previous historians
have implied: the indivisible link between technology and the environments
where they are used. Though Penna also makes many of these connections, after
his second chapter, he makes distinction between human society and nature as
separate entities that are frequently at odds. This could be due to his age. Though
Penna was clearly a pioneer in the field, in the generation of world
environmental historians like Stephen Pyne, Carolyn Merchant, and Alfred
Crosby, later generations of environmental historians such as William Cronon,
J.R. McNeill, along with Pritchard start to consider humans as a part of nature
that cannot be analyzed independently and really cannot ever be at odds with
each other. In fact, they question previous ideas that there even has been a
“natural balance” in the environment that could have been interrupted by
people.
This brings
up another issue in Penna’s text. Penna’s first two chapters act as a way to
show how geological events such as the formation of the Himalayas impacted the
long-term climate conditions in the area and therefore the eventual human land
use there. The chapters were reminiscent of a high school environmental science
textbook. Though they were very interesting, I am not sure that they really
contributed to his text. The events that he narrates occurred so long before
the existence of people that it is unclear whether or not they contributed to
events in human history. Additionally, these chapters assume that historians
must accept current science in order to understand history. This is problematic
for any historian of science. Almost every scientific paradigm from the past
has been disproved and it stands to reason that many of the current scientific
paradigms are also culturally and socially determined and do not necessarily
represent any objective truth. It also forces a lot of speculation about ‘what could
have happened’ in the past without knowing what actually did. This section is
especially problematic due to Penna’s stylistic choices. His grammar is
especially poor and the quotations from his sources are awkwardly situated
within the paragraphs. This gives the impression that he is unclear about the
science that he is citing. It also means that the reader is far less efficient
and invests more reading time than necessary to understand the content. Another
issue with The Human Footprint and
environmental histories generally is the fact that they often contain a lot of
presentism. The study of environmental history, which became widely popular in
the late 1980s, emerged alongside the environmentalist history. This leads to
the problem of taking modern concerns and transporting them into the past where
they did not really exist. On this note, it can lead historians, like Penna
does, into adopting a moral or political stance in their work. Though it does
essentially negate any pretense of an objective history, this is not
necessarily negative. In fact, it can also make the study of history relevant
to many more people and applicable to many of today’s political and social
issues. A final issue with Penna’s text is also his attitude of environmental
determinism. Penna is not the only historian who engages in environmental
determinism[5]
but since he begins his narrative so early in earth’s history, it is especially
clear in his book. It suggests that there is some measure of inevitability in
history; if people are from an environmentally suitable place, they will be
economically successful. Of course, this is almost a tautology. In the words of
Eric Hobsbawn: “what happened was inevitable because nothing else happened.”[6]
One unique aspect of Penna’s book is
his large discussion about the environment in urban history. Though some
historians such as Martin Melosi, and Joel Tarr and Clay McShane have recently
examined the history of urban environments coming from a history of technology
perspective, traditionally, environmental historians have ignored the urban
landscape, possibly due to a perception that once urbanized, a landscape no
longer has any value as an environmental space.[7]
The main ways that historians have embarked on this sort of environmental
history is through the examination of waste management, disease control, and
the role of animals in history. Penna engages with these topics, explaining the
role of both infectious and environmental disease in chapters four, six, seven,
and nine; waste management in three, five, six, and seven; and animals in four,
five, seven, and nine. He also engages in the growing field of energy history.
This was explored at length by Alfred Crosby in Children of the Sun, who basically argues that the history of
humanity has been driven by the search for more energy.[8]
Though he does explore the use of animal muscle power in industrialization, he
does not examine the role of animals as energy storage units. Sam White in
particular has shown the value of pigs as energy depositories for excess
calories that could be harvested in times of energy shortages. Asian pigs in
particular were such valuable resources that they managed to spread all over
the world and replace nearly all other varieties of pig. [9]
The Human Footprint certainly offers many ways that one could examine the environment and
world history. However, I am not sure that he contributes much new to the field
as he only synthesizes the work of others. Of course it is perfectly possible
to write an original argument based on the research of others like McNeill and
McNeill did in The Human Web, but
since Penna’s text lacks any specific narrative other than that people and
their environments impact each other. Additionally, large macro-histories
present many problems particularly in overgeneralization and even threaten to
venture on superficial and essentialist versions of history. This is not
necessarily completely negative. The
Human Footprint has the capacity to introduce concepts of “big history” and
environmental world history to a lay audience or a low-level college classroom,
readers who would be unlikely to appreciate a more serious academic work. As
such, despite some problem areas, this text could easily have a valuable
function for designing a course on the environment and world history.
[1] Penna, Anthony N. The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
[2]
Pomeranz, Kenneth “World History and Environmental History,”[2]
in Burke, Edmund, and Kenneth
Pomeranz. The environment and world history. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009. p. 3-32
[3] Ibid 8
[4] Pritchard, Sara B. Confluence: the
nature of technology and the remaking of the Rhône. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 2011. p. 19
[5]
See Jared Diamond, William McNeill’s Plagues
and Peoples
[6] Hobspawn,
Eric “Marx and History” New Left Review I/143
(January 1987): 39-50 p. 43
[7] Di
Chiro, Giovanna “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environmental and
Social Justice” Cronon, William. 1996. Uncommon
ground: rethinking the human place in nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
[8] Crosby, Alfred W. Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's
Unappeasable Appetite for Energy. New
York: W.W. Norton, 2006.
[9]
Sam White, “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal
Cultures and Evolutionary History,” Environmental
History 16 (January 2011): 94–120.
