Subversive Subjects

Donald Worster and the Radical Origins of Environmental History

TED STEINBERG

If ecology, as Paul Sears once said, is a "subversive subject," what of environmental history?

Environmental history had its start in the 1970s at a time when people around the globe began to show increasing concern, both popular and scholarly, in the fate of the earth. Roderick Nash, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, first taught "American Environmental History" the same semester as activists took to the streets on Earth Day. Nash reported that he "felt good about helping make the university, and particularly the Department of History, more responsive to the problems of society. I was, at last, 'relevant.'"

The newly emerging environmental consciousness Nash perceived had a number of causes. It nevertheless owed a great deal to the radicalism of the 1960s, especially the antiwar movement. Though support for environmentalism was hardly universal among the New Left, radicals began embracing this cause in the second half of the decade. Groups such as the War Resisters League began to articulate the connection between involvement in Vietnam and environmental issues when the extent of the US military's use of defoliants became more widely known. By the time Nash taught his new course, radical politics had come to inform environmental thinking, a point underscored by national Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes's turn to the massive 1969 antiwar protests as a model for the event.

Political commitment helped give birth to environmental history, and radical politics, understandably enough, would come to characterize much of the early important work in this new area of study. William Cronon's book on New England, written in 1983, raised the issue of how an alienated market in land helped to lay a foundation for the transition to capitalism; Richard White's work on Native Americans and their descent into dependency, published the same year, drew on Immanuel Wallerstein's core-and-periphery theory of the global capitalist system; and Carolyn Merchant's study, a few years later, of nature, gender, and science was described in one review as "overtly political" in the way that it deplored the domination of nature "and the simultaneous exploitation of women, Indians, and the poor."

Many of the canonical works, whatever their differences in focus, have a decidedly radical cast, if by radical we mean a history interested in the root causes of oppression and exploitation. This radical orientation is especially pronounced in the work of Donald Worster, who came to the field a bit earlier than the above-mentioned historians. Worster's work can be usefully divided into two periods. The first phase, extending from 1971 to 1985, is important in two respects. It witnessed Worster's shift toward a concern with ecology and political economy and, growing out of this development, a call for postnationalist history that would transcend the boundaries that historians had for so long taken for granted. Much like the first wave of New Left historians who set out to overturn the consensus school of historiography, Worster combined a concern with the impact and expansion of capitalism with a focus on problems of contemporary importance. In the second period (1985–1993), Worster turned toward the thinkers of the Frankfurt School for inspiration and embraced "value-laden" history. The result was an emphasis on the role of the modern technocratic state in the unfolding economic order. Together, the two periods of scholarship amounted to a radical challenge not simply to political history but to those New Left historians who turned to the study of history "from the bottom up" and eventually took to focusing on race, class, and gender as the guiding categories of analysis.

Today, of course, the field of environmental history has evolved into a mature subdiscipline with a much more catholic set of political concerns and scholarly interests. Those who work in the field sometimes seem to struggle with the issue of its relevance to contemporary ecological problems, and for that reason alone it is important to examine the radical tradition and one of its most important champions, if only to be reminded of why history matters.

Worster was born in 1941 in the Mohave Desert town of Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River, a watercourse that would later come to figure prominently in his work. When his father left to serve in World War II, Worster returned to Kansas, where his parents originally hailed but fled because of the economic dislocation brought on by the Great Depression. Worster was thus raised on the Great Plains — the locus for some of his most important scholarly work — on a farm near the city of Hutchinson, Kansas. There, because of the sway of his grandmother Maud Gamble Ball, he came under the influence of the Scottish Campbellite Church of Christ, the same church, as it turns out, attended by John Muir, a figure Worster would later study in a full-length biography.

After taking a degree from the University of Kansas, Worster moved to the University of Maine in 1964 to work as a debate coach. By his own account, New England seems to have made quite an impression on Worster. Not having grown up around an ocean or forest, Worster was struck by the beauty of his new...