• the area surrounding a place or thing; the environs, surroundings, or physical context: Bairuth, with its kind picturesque environment.
• the physical surroundings or conditions in which a person or other organism lives, develops, etc., or in which a thing exists; the external conditions in general affecting the life, existence, or properties of an organism or object: the organism is continually adapted to its environment
• the natural world or physical surroundings in general, either as a whole or within a particular geographical area, esp. as affected by human activity: the situation is clouded by a widespread confidence that this impact of man upon environment can continue indefinitely.
12 the other silence in silent spring chad montrie
20 in conversation with jess conard jessica varner
28 in conversation with maria ivanova karen m'closkey
34 on the road with herbert bayer melissa s. ragain
42 sounding extreme environments sonja dÜmpelmann 52 nuclear weapons and the unity of the environment marcus owens + christina antiporda
62 in conversation with michael oppenheimer karen m'closkey
70 spiritualizing the two cultures, c. 1978 rami kanafani
78 failure to build holly jean buck
84 in conversation with dipesh chakrabarty karen m'closkey
90 why environmental history matters vinita damodaran
96 making the seascape jip van besouw + lino camprubÍ
102 snow globes: cyclic drawings and cryospheric panoramas andrew witt
110 megafaunas of the past and future diana guo
118 beyond habitat laura j. martin image credits Upcoming Issues
Etienne Benson environments, environmentalisms, envirotechniques, environments, en vironmentalisms, envirotechniques, environments, environmentalisms, envirotechniques, environments, en vironmentalisms, envirotechniques, environments,environments,enviro nmentalisms, envirotechniques, env ironments, environmentalisms, en virotechniques, environments, envi ronmentalisms, envirotechniques, envirotechniques, environments, en ORO Editions
Etienne Benson is a historian of environmentalism and the environmental sciences. Since 2022, he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, where he heads the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life. His most recent book is Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). He is currently working on a history of geomorphology, the science of landforms.
EnvIRONMENTAL History, history of science
In 1805, André Thouin, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, published an account of the various “instruments of modern invention” in use in the Museum’s botanical garden.1 Such instruments were necessary, Thouin explained, because the garden was home to plants of a tremendous variety, each suited to its own native climate and soil: plants from frigid Kamchatka and from torrid Africa, alpine plants and aquatic plants, trees requiring dense, wellestablished soils, and trees requiring soils that were light and full of newly decomposed vegetable matter.
Founded in 1793 in the wake of the Revolution, the Museum of Natural History was tightly tied to the expansionary aims of Napoleonic France, even if such aims remained implicit in Thouin’s article and most other reports in the Museum’s Annales. 2 The “modern inventions” described by Thouin were tools of empire, designed both to explain and to exploit the plants gathered from throughout the world by French merchants, sailors, colonial officials, and naturalists. These inventions included parapluies to protect plants from the rain, contresols to protect them from the sun, châssis portatifs to protect them from cold winters, and grillages to protect them from birds and other pests.
Despite Thouin’s insistence on their status as modern inventions, these umbrellas, shades, frames, and fences were hardly revolutionary in themselves. On the contrary, they built on the work of numerous gardeners and botanists who had maintained the garden’s living collection since its establishment in the middle of the 17th century, and they in turn drew on the practical expertise of many others throughout France and beyond.3 It required no stroke of genius or esoteric program of study to recognize that human-built structures, from tiny flower pots to gargantuan greenhouses, could help to deliver the right amounts of sun, wind, and water to plants according to their specific needs.
What was novel, perhaps even revolutionary, was the way these devices were deployed in a particular material and social setting to give embodied reality to an emerging set of ideas about the form and function of living things in relation to their surroundings – ideas that were being developed at the time by Georges Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and other naturalists at the museum who believed that the organization of living bodies could only be explained in reference to their material surroundings and ways of life. It was not the devices themselves that were worthy of note, in other words, but rather their use as part of what one might call envirotechniques: methods of transforming environmental ideas into material realities and vice versa.4
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The concept of “environment” is neither a universal concept to be found in all human societies at all times, nor is it the invention of 20th-century environmentalists.5 Rather, it is a
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Chad Montrie
THE OTHER SILENCE IN SILENT SPRING
Chad Montrie is a professor in the history department at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He has authored several books, including The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (2018). From 2022–2023, he was a Fulbright Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary, where he completed research for “‘What is Labour’s Stake?’: Workers and the History of Environmentalism in Alberta,” Labour/Le Travail (2024), and “‘Agenda for the 1970s’: A Genealogy of Organized Labour’s Environmental Activism in Ontario,” Papers in Canadian History and Environment (2024).
Environmental Justice, History
Published to wide acclaim in 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was a deftly written exposé of synthetic pesticides. The “silence” the title alluded to was what might happen with the continued unregulated use of those dangerous chemicals, and chapter by chapter, the popular science writer methodically evoked the possibility of an apocalyptic world where life could not persist. Serialized in the New Yorker in 1961 and then featured in a television program in 1963, Silent Spring introduced millions of Americans to the principles of ecology. It turned their attention toward a steadily worsening environmental and human health threat. For doing that, countless observers credited Carson’s book with catalyzing the American environmental movement, both at the time and since its original publication. In a jacket endorsement for the first edition, US Supreme Court justice and conservationist William O. Douglas called Silent Spring “the most revolutionary book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” referring to the “big book” origin story for the American Civil War. Famed children’s author and essayist E. B. White also described it in a review as “an Uncle Tom’s Cabin of a book,—the sort that will help turn the tide.”1
Following: Walter Reuther and UAW aid in protests with César Chávez during the Delano grape strike in 1965.
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There was another “silence” in Silent Spring, however, an absence its admirers overlooked yet one that had, and has, profound implications for understanding environmental problems as well as confronting and solving them. Entirely missing from the much-lauded jeremiad was any awareness of how class, race, and ethnicity determined people’s exposure to environmental hazards, who was responsible for those hazards, and what someone could do about them. While registering a compelling indictment against the unfettered use of pesticides, the book made almost no mention of farm workers, even though field and orchard hands had some of the most direct, frequent, and prolonged contact with the chemicals. Moreover, the few times Silent Spring hinted at the agricultural laborers’ plight, the references were brusque generalizations. In chapter 3, “Elixirs of Death,” Carson briefly noted the chance of exposure from dusting and spraying on farms, for instance, but the following and only full-sentence acknowledgment of the risks farm workers faced was not until chapter 12, “The Human Price.” “The sudden illness or death of farmers, spraymen, pilots, and others
meditation. Many of Bayer’s highway proposals provide the kind of exhilarating and restorative experiences described by Giedion above. Skiing, like driving, was a high-speed alternative to hiking, the preferred Bavarian method for communing with the natural world. Never moving in a straight line toward a determined end point, the skier descends gradually by a series of connected C-shapes, cutting an undulating line through space. The skier is never more aware of the terrain than when accommodating its ups and downs, an embodied experience that complemented the panoramic mountain view. Skiing and driving were not only modes of transportation; they were forms of recreation that allowed the sluggish human body to skim the broad, undulating surfaces of the earth. Ultimately, however, the natural world was a space to look at, move through or across, and to return home from, restored.
In Weimar Germany, where Bayer had spent his early career, automobiles were associated with bourgeois leisure activity and access to nature outside of the city limits. Nature, due to its associations with purity, cleanliness, and health, was a remedy for industrialized urban life. The mountainous landscapes of the Alps are reflected in Bayer’s adamant protection of mountainous viewsheds in his adopted hometown of Aspen, Colorado. Further, Bayer understood environmental design as the process of protecting the natural world by maintaining a strict separation between humanmade and natural spaces, a separation the highway helped to enforce:
We must learn to look upon nature with reverence as the source of all existence.… The artist will not imitate nature but create a spiritual world of itself, side by side with nature.... The structures which man erects will not compete with nature nor set themselves up against it. Both the natural environment and man-made environment will exist with each other if their boundaries are understood.11
Even as leisure activities like skiing, hiking, or driving might move through natural spaces, design’s task was to protect the purity of nature by creating a synthetic nature in the form of engaging, immersive abstractions. While developed with safety in mind, this category of highway proposal also responded to the perceived inadequacy of the landscape between the destination and the point of departure. In the absence of natural features recognizable to Bayer, synthetic variances in the landscape could serve the purpose of maintaining attention, heightening the sense of apparent motion, while providing embodied forms of entertainment. Monumental primary-colored gates to drive under, earthen mounds to weave through, and even terrifying gorges to traverse, all piqued drivers’ attention using the elements of compression and extension, approach and departure, and visual and kinetic sensation that simulated the experience of moving through a
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Sonja Dümpelmann
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Breaking news
IN CONVERSATION WITH
Michael Oppenheimer, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs and director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and Environment at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
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+ References to human-induced climate change from CO2 emissions appeared as early as 1896. However, one of the first to warn about its deleterious effects is a 1965 report on the environment by the US President’s Science Advisory Committee. Later, a 1969 memo to President Nixon said we should consider stopping fossil fuel use. When did you become aware of the problem?
Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs and director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and Environment at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Educated as a chemist and physicist and working at the interface between public policy and science, Oppenheimer has long been a leader in calling for governmental action on climate change. His efforts to bring together scientists and policymakers to elaborate the implications of climate change played a significant role in initiating the negotiations that led to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the parent document of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Karen M’Closkey spoke with Oppenheimer about scientific assessments, uncertainty, and how he has remained optimistic after 40 years of advocacy.
+ You were one of the earliest and most outspoken scientists warning about climate change. In your congressional testimony in 1986, you said, “If left unchecked [it] will come to dominate all others in its effect on our environment. …We do not need a comprehensive understanding to undertake action.” In 1990, you followed up with Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect, coauthored with Robert H. Boyle. Did you imagine that efforts to reduce greenhouse gases would be so slow given the evidence at that time?
I became aware of the issue when I read an article by Gordon McDonald in the alumni magazine MIT Technology Review in 1969. His article was about the multiple ways that humans influence, and could influence, the climate globally and otherwise. I am a very calm person. I don’t get frightened by big threats. This scared me. At the time, I was in a transition from thinking about science as a career to thinking about science as a tool for public betterment. I received a Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1970 and went to work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory, applying atomic and molecular chemistry and physics to astrophysics. It was intellectually stimulating, but I decided that astrophysics research was costly to governments and secondary in importance to me compared to solving problems burdening people and societies. Thus, by the late 1970s, I had decided that academia wasn’t a good fit for me, so after 10 years at Harvard, I left for a job as an activist scientist doing policy-relevant work on acid rain, ozone depletion, and climate change for the next 21 years with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
One way that I’ve managed to work on this problem for more than 40 years is that I didn’t give much thought to how long it would take. There was no way to have a good frame of reference for how long it would take the world to recognize a problem like this, to make the institutional arrangements to negotiate with other countries, and to educate people about it. With the encouragement of the foundations that supported my work at EDF, I joined up with several other scientists in 1985 to develop a five-year plan to move the issue from the scientific community to the policy arena. We thought the time for action was ripe because a consensus on the inevitability of climate change and the need for governments to consider action had been reached among scientists. Our objective was called a framework convention, a type of treaty.
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It took seven years, but the convention was signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. So, we had the treaty, but very little work had been done politically in the US to get people interested in the proposition. This was the big lacuna that the environmental movement let lie there. People came to me in the mid-’80s and said, “You’re trying to generate a treaty on an issue that nobody has heard of, and that would involve tearing apart the fossil fuel industry: you’ve got to be joking.” I guess there was no clear strategy; maybe there couldn’t have been one that early. People didn’t start waking up to it until we started seeing consequences in the climate that scientists could point to and say, This is climate change. So, my timeframe in the early days was probably a decade or two for getting some serious action. Now, almost 40 years later, we have some serious action by governments – though not serious enough.
Rami Kanafani
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Spiritualizing the Two Cultures, c. 1978
Rami Kanafani is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. His work examines countercultural architectural practices in the postwar US and their contribution to a spiritually and environmentally defined planetary culture. He seeks to take seriously the spatial and spiritual dimensions of New Age thinking and its focus on ecology in architecture in response to the rise of environmentalism.
ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY
I n describing the emergence of the environmental humanities in Western academic institutions, Ursula K. Heise draws a distinction between recently formed fields in the humanities—such as disability studies, digital humanities, and human-animal studies, which “propose a new object of study, a new humanistic perspective on a nonhumanistic field, or a particular set of new methods”—and a new environmental humanities discourse that brings issues of climate and the environment to the scale of local communities.1 For Heise, the field of environmental humanities concerns itself with questions of social and environmental justice, human and nonhuman ethics, and socioeconomic injustices within small communities, thereby departing from its more scientific precedent, environmental studies.
The distinction that Heise foregrounds is the latest commentary on the problem of the “two cultures”—the sciences and the humanities—that British novelist C. P. Snow proposed in 1959.2 The environmental humanities, for Heise, attempts what Snow thought unimaginable: a synthesis of the sciences and the humanities in the face of an existential environmental threat. The urgency of such a synthesis is the product of the recent awareness, resounding across academic and public life, of anthropogenic climate change and the campaign to codify a new geologic epoch named the Anthropocene. Addressing the imperatives to rethink human/nonhuman/ environment relations, the environmental humanities hold as a core principle that issues relating to environment and climate change are, at their origin, of a humanistic, rather than a purely scientific, nature. While possible solutions to environmental issues have been, to a large extent, considered the purview of the methods of positivist science, the environmental humanities undermine the uncritical and ecstatic embrace of institutional, technoscientific solutions in favor of a shift of perspective and scale to individuals and local communities, be they human or nonhuman.
Critiques of more positivist approaches to environmental problems did not originate with the environmental humanities. In the 1970s, members of a countercultural “New Age” group named the Lindisfarne Association (1973–2012) addressed environmental questions by resorting to spirituality, claiming that a revolution in individual spiritual life can usher in a planetary age in which Snow’s fragmented two cultures are reconciled. The association was founded in Southampton, New York but soon moved to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan in an attempt to put its ideas into practice by turning the cathedral into a prototypal site of an environmentally integrated community, which they called a “meta-industrial village.” They believed that a truly “planetary culture,” one that unites the planet’s people under the banner of wholeness, could only be achieved by recourse to spiritual traditions that had been excluded from modern life. If, as religion scholar Mircea Eliade claims, “modern man has ‘forgotten’ religion, but the secret survives, buried in his unconscious,” what Lindisfarne imagined was a revolution of consciousness to restore spirituality to a central role in dealing with modern problems, including environmental ones.3 The absence of serious historiographic considerations of the role of spirituality and religion in modern architecture and in environmental thinking aligns with the tendency to associate modernization with secularization and the diminished influence of religion on life in modernity.
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The historiography of modernity—establishing a direct link between processes of industrialization and the rise of new conditions and experiences that are patently modern—has shifted to describe what architectural historian Daniel Barber calls the environmentalization of discourses and disciplines, prime among them architecture.4
+ It is interesting how much of your work draws on ancient and Enlightenment thinkers more than on ecophilosophers or environmental historians. Given that the “human condition has changed,” as you say, how do their ideas still hold power?
Well, I think their ideas do hold power because—and this is where my work is different from eco-philosophical work—Enlightenment philosophers were asking a lot of metaquestions about the history of modernity. The meta-questions are about freedom, autonomy, and respecting human beings, not as a means for something but as ends in themselves. Those values were very important to my work in postcolonial thinking. Regarding the climate work, what fascinates me is human phenomenology— the human experience of the world limited by our perceptual apparatus—and the relationship between those limitations and what we cognitively learn. Cognitively, we work out that the planet’s climate acts like a whole – a “climate system.” We don’t experience the climate system. Similarly, we speak of an Earth system where the geological and biological processes come together. These are what we know cognitively, not what we experience. Instead, we experience seasons or beautiful or bad days or, now, erratic weather.
These perceptual limitations are central to how we experience the world and how we have evolved. Ingrained habits have to do with evolution because they must be habits that have helped us survive. At the same time, we are now faced with a problem that challenges the habits or instincts that have evolved over evolutionary timescales. So, what I bring to bear on my thinking is this whole question of deep history, which is much deeper than the history of capitalism and the history of contemporary inequalities, but which runs through capitalism, through contemporary inequalities. And again, to go back to my early work, it gave primacy to the institutions of capitalism, thinking that getting rid of capitalist institutions would solve our problems. Now, I see this crisis as challenging our evolved habits of thought and action and raising the more philosophical question of what it means to be human. I don’t think what I am saying is at loggerheads with what my critics are saying, but sometimes the argument is at cross purposes. The questions that interest me are not necessarily the questions that are of interest to scholars who are more keen on finding in capitalism an answer to the question as to why we’re in this situation and potentially a way of solving the problem.
+ You have written about how the rise of secular thought and becoming modern has diminished fear, leading to a loss of reverence for the natural world. Our efforts to control nature have contributed to our current climate crisis. Can fear inspire a new reverence that avoids seeking largescale global solutions?
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If you go back to the world, let’s say before industrialization, and look at peasant societies or Indigenous societies, you will find that the seasons were of great importance to agriculturalists and people who went trading by sailing boats. You were dependent on when the trade winds came and how they blew. You were dependent on the currents in the ocean. And so, I would say that most pre-industrial societies were aware of what I call “planetarity” because they depended on the planet doing its work. And in those societies, you see one way in which they kept the human realm delimited and small because they didn’t have the technology to expand it was through injunctions – don’t do this, don’t do that, because that could cause trouble. And those
injunctions sometimes take the form of what an Enlightenment person might regard as superstition. But one function of superstitions was to keep the human world delimited. These societies supported smaller populations, and fear was one way to keep the human realm safer. The Enlightenment was described as the overcoming of this fear. Some of the overcoming of fear was good for people. For instance, the history of modern medicine is full of fights against ideas that modern medicine found wrongheaded. For colonized people, overcoming the fear of colonizers was very important politically. On the other hand, human fears of other creatures kept them safe from humans, too. These kinds of checks and balances were lost when we developed technology that made us, collectively, a threat to wildlife. You can look at the history of urbanization and industrialization as overcoming our fear of other species and eventually overcoming our fear of the planet. The idea that you can travel by train or fly in any weather was celebrated as freedom. Before that, travel was seasonal. In India, before the British came, even wars were seasonal. So, technology is a history of forgetting the planet. But now, through this crisis, technology has reminded us that the planet exists. We cannot go back to the fears of the old kind because of what we know now. But I often think that the secular form that fear has taken in modern society is the idea of risk.
+ Risk is based on the rise of statistics and probability. It is another way to tame things by producing averages and norms around which we build our infrastructure. As you say, the challenge is that we cannot go back, technologically speaking, but we are in this perpetual cycle of scaling up.
I agree. Modern societies are based on risk management. Life insurance, pension funds, home insurance. Managing these risks is easier to do when the planet is not a bigger risk to you. But if you have warmed up the planet, you must take even bigger risks to keep the small risk management going. Then you end up with geoengineering the climate of the whole planet so that we can continue our lifestyles. We end up wanting to manage even bigger risks in order to make life seem normal.
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Recently, I have been looking at Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021). He is a smart, good-hearted philanthropist, but he is also devoted to capitalism and techno-fixing. At the same time, I’ve been looking at Marxist de-growth literature. These different worldviews would agree on some things. Nobody wants infant mortality to go up. Nobody wants MRI machines to go away. The fact that you can now add several years to a person who is 85 is, socially, a very expensive proposition, but we, as biological creatures, love those extra years. Capitalism and technology have reached a point where they speak to certain fundamental biological drives within us. If birds could invent this technology, I think they would do it. We happen to be the only creatures that have succeeded in creating longer lives for ourselves, and that is irrespective of whether you believe in socialism or capitalism. Justice requires that everybody should be able to live the full term of their natural life as made available by technology. It is a demand made by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and human
As a field within the discipline of history, environmental history has been described by Donald Worster, an early pioneer, as the interdisciplinary study of the relations of culture, technology, and nature over time. According to Richard Grove, it is the historically documented part of the story of the life and death of societies and species in terms of their relationships with the world around them. In this essay, I will discuss how a range of fears, anxieties, and disquiets about climate and environmental degradation in the early modern period, sparked by the destruction wrought by colonial empires, led to debates and initiatives for environmental preservation and conservation. Clearly, several of these concerns explored by environmental historians are relevant to our current dilemmas regarding the Anthropocene and global warming.
The European intellectual engagement with the environment and concerns about famines, diseases, and forest desiccation became particularly critical in shaping how modern Western colonial empires crafted their strategies for domination and expansion. For example, the British Empire, from the 18th century onwards, collected a veritable doomsday book of data on soils, weather, agriculture, geology, botany, zoology, and anthropology. Similar documentary pursuits were undertaken by other European empires, who also set about developing institutions for monitoring and conserving ecologies through a vast number of scientific networks that were spread across different colonies. In terms of climatic knowledge, the experiences of Europeans in tropical environments led to debates about extinction, endemism, and a nascent climatic environmentalism leading to draconian forest legislation. At the same time, the tropics were culturally perceived as leading to degeneracy and racial inferiority.
Vinita Damodaran is a historian of modern India at the University of Sussex, where she is director of the Centre for World Environmental History. Her research focuses on sustainable development dialogues in the global South, particularly as it relates to questions of environmental change, identity, and resistance in Eastern India. Her work ranges from the social and political history of Bihar to the environmental history of South Asia, including using historical records to understand climate change in the Indian Ocean World. She is the author of several books and articles in established journals.
history, environmental justice
Vinita Damodaran
Why
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Environmental History Matters ORO Editions
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Jip van Besouw + Lino Camprubí
Jip van Besouw is a historian and philosopher of science who works mainly on the physical sciences of the early modern period. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sevilla, in the project DEEPMED. Jip is interested in how environments were talked about and intervened in, historically. His most recent research focuses on conceptualizations and representations of rivers and seas in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Lino Camprubí is professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Universidad de Sevilla and PI of the ERC-CoG DEEPMED. He is the author of Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (MIT, 2014), co-author of Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell (Lexington Books, 2022), and author of “A Brave Deep World: Technologies in the Territorialization of Seas and Oceans” in the Cambridge History of Technology (Cambridge UP, 2025).
PHIlosophy OF SCIENCE, HISTORY
Amid rampantly rising temperatures and CO2 levels of our oceans, acidification of marine environments, and expanding offshore energy infrastructure, it is worth remembering that oceans were long considered unchangeable – spaces humans could not know or use. Historically, seas were generally perceived as the opposite of lands. This opposition was set out clearly by early modern legal scholars such as Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), who described the seas as naturally free. The mare liberum was outside of the realm of private property and politics, a space in which people and things had no impact. In contrast to lands, seas could not be built on, worked, plundered, or given shape. In short, Grotius held, seas could not be possessed or claimed and, therefore, ships of any nation should be allowed to move over them freely. Only terra could become territory.1
In this conception, oceans were not an “environment” with which humans could properly interact. Immutability meant immunity to impact. How did this perception give way to one in which oceans became spaces for humans to transform into “built environments”? Here, we set out how cultural and technological changes enabled new conceptions of seas as continuations of lands and, later, new metaphorical, material, and political uses of the seas.
It is important to note that Grotius’s views were long dominant but never universally shared. First, there was resistance to the idea that immutability took oceans outside of politics: the early modern period witnessed a long debate about whether monarchs could impose dominion over the seas, for instance through naval warfare.2 Besides, even those who followed Grotius in defending the doctrine of mare liberum, such as the 20th-century authoritarian theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), implicitly granted political meaning to the ocean.3 Like Grotius, Schmitt wrote to legitimize the dominant political powers of his time and, in fact, defended specific maritime political rights, ranging from protecting fishing grounds and merchant fleets to sinking and plundering enemy vessels. Second, alternative voices described oceans as less-thanimmutable spaces. Imaginations of underwater worlds had always existed, fueled by tales and tangible experiences of sailors and fishers. From sea gods and mermaids to shipwrecks and sunken continents, not everyone imagined the deep sea as empty. Nevertheless, the ocean remained largely inaccessible to humans in these alternative imaginations for the simple reason that—apart from the first few meters under the surface frequented by pearl and sponge divers—living humans had no business within the deep seas. When did this start to change?
Dikes, Coastal Defenses, and Rising Seabeds
It was through early modern investigations of rivers and shallow seas, directly related to constructing and controlling coastal landscapes, that new perceptions of deep seas arose. A first relevant case of conceptualizing how human intervention was changing the seas comes from the Dutch Republic. Dominated by the delta plain of the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt, the inhabitants of the Low Countries had built dikes at least since the 11th century. With these dikes, central to efforts to create and protect arable lands, the Dutch actively made their fluvial landscape.4 In the 1720s and 1730s, one of the leading cartographers and meteorologists of the Republic, Nicolaas Cruquius (1678–1754), asserted that this reshaping of Dutch rivers impacted the seas as well. While doing so, Cruquius gave one of the first quantitative estimates in history of how fast sea levels were rising.5
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This was not just empty speculation. Acting as a special advisor to governments, Cruquius was asked to investigate and report on water management at specific locations. His reports addressed issues ranging from coastal erosion and river sedimentation to the building of new canals. Dealing with the case of sedimentation at the mouth of the Meuse near Rotterdam, Cruquius came to the conclusion that sediment transport by the river was so significant that it would make the seabed rise
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Laura J. Martin
BEYOND HABITAT
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ecology, ENvironmental history
Climate change and persistent pollutants threaten to make habitat uninhabitable. What happens then? When we look to a future with less available habitat, we imagine suffering (mass death, forced migration, and societal collapse), epic escape (technological miracles, enclaved utopias, and colonizing the moon), or dismal compromise (such as Tuvalu’s plans for “digital migration”).1 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of permanent habitat loss due to flooding, sea level rise, and erosion.2 Recent news headlines include “23% of Earth’s Natural Habitats Could Be Gone by 2100,” “Climate Change and Habitat Loss Push Amphibians Closer to Extinction,” and “Animals are Running Out of Places to Live.”3
Since ideas of environmental threat and environmental futures are so often about habitat, we must question what habitat is, where it came from as an idea, and most importantly, how we might think beyond habitat. This is not just a theoretical exercise but a crucial step toward a more sustainable and inclusive future.
The word habitat emerged from the discipline of natural history, and its first known use was in W. Withering’s Arrangement of British Plants (1796) as “the natural place of growth of a plant in its wild state.”4 Habitat appeared sporadically in 19th-century European biogeographical literature, although Darwin did not think in terms of habitat. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin explained speciation as the result of selection for variations “in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature” – a much more extensive rendering of selective forces than habitat.5
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In the early 20th century, however, ecologists organized their new scientific discipline around the concept of habitat. In 1905, English botanist Arthur G. Tansley defined ecology as the study of “those relations which depend directly upon differences of habitat among plants.”6 Early ecologists worked to describe and differentiate habitats by their “life conditions” (environmental variables), which they believed drove selection. As Tansley put it: “We find the plants of the mountain differing from those of the valley, the plants of marshy land differing from those of the dry plain, the plants of the coast differing from those of the interior, the plants of the sand-dunes differing from those of the salt-marshes.”7 Ecology was the science of explaining plant forms shared across vast geographic differences; why, say, montane plant species in Switzerland looked like species in Colorado. Ecologists contended that habitat determined form.
Laura J. Martin is an associate professor of environmental studies at Williams College. Her research on biodiversity has been featured in venues including the New York Times and the Atlantic, and was recently recognized by the Falling Walls Foundation as breaking the barriers between the sciences and the humanities. She is the author of Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration (Harvard University Press).
