Sources and References

• William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983)
• William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991)
• William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (1996)
• Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972)
• Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (1986)
• Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977)
• Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979)
• Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (1983)
• Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1995)
• Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (1989)
• Graeme Wynn, Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History (2007)
• Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935–1970 (2001)
• Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (2006)
• Stephen Bocking, Nature’s Experts: Science, Politics, and the Environment (2004)
• Matthew Evenden, Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River (2004)
• Liza Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada (2009)
• Colin Coates, The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec (2000)
• Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (1999)
• Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (2012)
• Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (2002)
• Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
• Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (2017)
• Dagomar Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age (2018)
• Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (2016)

Chapter 1: The Making of a Field

What Environmental History Is

Environmental history studies the reciprocal relationship between human societies and the non-human world across time. It asks how climates, soils, watersheds, animals, forests, microbes, and minerals have shaped human choices, and how human activity, thought, and institutions have in turn transformed the biophysical environment. The field rejects the older historiographical habit of treating “nature” as a static backdrop to political narratives. It insists instead that soil exhaustion, bison collapse, smallpox epidemics, river impoundments, and carbon emissions are themselves historical events with chronologies, causes, and consequences.

The discipline coalesced in the United States in the 1970s, but its intellectual roots run deeper. One tributary was the American tradition of conservation history, which since George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) had traced the environmental costs of settler expansion. A second was the French Annales school, especially Fernand Braudel’s insistence on the slow, geographical longue durée. A third was the contemporary environmental movement itself, which, catalysed by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the first Earth Day (1970), convinced a younger cohort of historians that ecological crisis demanded a historical accounting.

Donald Worster, one of the field’s founding figures, proposed that environmental history operates across three interlocking registers. The first is nature itself: the actual ecosystems, species populations, and biogeochemical processes that can be reconstructed through paleoecology, climatology, and historical geography. The second is human ecology: the modes of production, technologies, and labour regimes through which human societies appropriate nature. The third is cultural and intellectual: the ideas, values, myths, and laws through which societies imagine the natural world. A good environmental history moves among these registers rather than privileging any one.

Why North America

The North American continent offers a particularly rich theatre for the field because of the compression of its documented settler history, the scale of its ecological transformations, and the continued presence of Indigenous nations whose knowledge systems predate and outlast the colonial project. Treating the continent as a single unit rather than as two nationally siloed stories reveals watersheds, migration corridors, fire regimes, and climate zones that ignore the forty-ninth parallel. Graeme Wynn’s survey of Canada and Arctic North America and Mark Fiege’s The Republic of Nature both suggest that environmental phenomena consistently cut across the border, even when policy regimes diverged sharply.

Chapter 2: Indigenous Ecologies before 1492

The Myth of the Pristine

Early European travellers, and many later historians, imagined the pre-contact Americas as a vast, empty wilderness sparsely occupied by peoples who “lived lightly on the land.” Environmental historians have systematically dismantled this image. The continent north of the Rio Grande supported tens of millions of people before 1492, organised into sophisticated political, agricultural, and trading societies whose ecological footprint was substantial, purposeful, and historically dynamic. To call it wilderness is to erase that history.

Shepard Krech III’s The Ecological Indian sharpened the debate by warning against the equally distorting counter-myth of a continent-wide Indigenous conservation ethic. Krech showed that Indigenous relationships with game, fire, and plants varied enormously by region, culture, and period. Some practices sustained populations of deer, salmon, or bison for centuries; others, under duress, drove species into local collapse. The point is neither to sanctify nor to condemn, but to restore Indigenous peoples to history as agents whose ecological knowledge and choices mattered.

Fire, Farm, and Forest

Across eastern woodlands, Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples used controlled fire to open understoreys, stimulate the growth of nut-bearing trees, improve browse for deer, and maintain agricultural clearings. What Europeans read as “natural” park-like forests were in fact anthropogenic landscapes, shaped by generations of burning. The Haudenosaunee practised maize-bean-squash intercropping (the “three sisters”) that fixed nitrogen, reduced erosion, and yielded exceptional caloric returns per hectare. Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, at its eleventh-century height housed perhaps 20,000 people sustained by intensive maize agriculture and long-distance trade; its eventual decline probably reflects a combination of soil exhaustion, deforestation, and climate stress.

On the Great Plains, the arrival of the horse after Spanish contact revolutionised bison hunting, but earlier communities had long managed bison populations through communal jumps, pounds, and prescribed burning to maintain grassland. On the Northwest Coast, elaborate weirs, traps, and clan-governed fishing rights supported dense populations entirely from Pacific salmon runs, cedar forests, and intertidal zones. The Pacific salmon economies were among the most productive non-agricultural food systems on earth, and they demonstrate that complexity and sedentism were not exclusive to grain farmers.

Chapter 3: The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism

Crosby’s Framework

Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972) reframed 1492 as a biological event rather than merely a political one. The linking of the Old and New Worlds inaugurated a vast, involuntary exchange of plants, animals, and pathogens whose consequences reached every ecosystem on both sides of the Atlantic. European arrivals brought wheat, barley, sugar cane, bananas, grapes, and coffee; horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, and rats; and a devastating cargo of pathogens—smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, mumps, yellow fever, and malaria—to which Indigenous populations had no inherited immunity. The Americas returned maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, tobacco, chili peppers, beans, and squash, reshaping diets and demographies across Europe, Africa, and Asia.

In Ecological Imperialism, Crosby argued that the European conquest of temperate lands owed as much to this biotic portmanteau as to steel or gunpowder. Wherever climates resembled those of southern Europe, the “neo-Europes” of North America, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand allowed European weeds, grasses, livestock, and diseases to flourish, displacing native organisms and rendering the land more hospitable to settler agriculture.

The Demographic Catastrophe

The most important single consequence was the collapse of Indigenous populations. Estimates remain contested, but most scholars now accept that between 1492 and 1650 the Indigenous population of the Americas fell by perhaps 80 to 95 percent, overwhelmingly because of introduced disease. In some regions entire communities disappeared before Europeans arrived in person, carried ahead along existing trade networks. This catastrophe is the indispensable context for every subsequent story in North American environmental history: the “empty” lands colonists encountered were emptied, and the forests that regrew over abandoned fields sequestered enough carbon that some climatologists see a faint signature in the global cooling of the seventeenth century.

Chapter 4: Colonial Landscapes and the Fur Trade

Property, Fences, and the Improved Land

Cronon’s Changes in the Land remains the canonical account of how English settlement transformed New England ecology. Where Indigenous communities had held land through overlapping, seasonal use-rights, English settlers imposed a system of private property, fencing, and permanent cultivation. They replaced shifting maize plots with monocultures of wheat, rye, and barley, introduced cattle and pigs that trampled Indigenous fields, and cleared forests at rates that depleted fuel wood within a generation. Second nature—the human-engineered landscape of fences, ditches, orchards, and mills—replaced the earlier mosaic of burned woodlands and shifting fields.

Carolyn Merchant’s Ecological Revolutions extends this story, arguing that New England underwent two successive ecological revolutions: a colonial revolution (roughly 1600–1800) that imposed extractive agriculture and commodified land, and a capitalist revolution (roughly 1800–1860) that industrialised farming and reorganised gender and labour in the rural household.

Beavers, Cod, and the Commerce of Wildness

While farms transformed the coast, the interior was reshaped by the fur trade. French, English, and Dutch traders working with Indigenous partners incorporated the continent’s beaver, marten, fox, and lynx populations into a trans-Atlantic commodity market. Beaver populations, in particular, collapsed across eastern North America within a century of contact. Because beavers are keystone ecosystem engineers, their disappearance drained wetlands, altered stream hydrology, and transformed forest succession. Colin Coates’s work on early Quebec and Richard White’s The Roots of Dependency both show how the trade drew Indigenous economies into patterns of debt, dependence, and ecological overreach that had not existed before the market’s arrival.

Offshore, the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks and the Gulf of St. Lawrence sustained a seasonal European workforce from the early sixteenth century, exporting salt fish to Mediterranean markets and seeding the first European footholds in Acadia and Newfoundland. Already in the colonial period, observers complained of declining catches near shore—an early foreshadowing of the collapse that would come centuries later.

Chapter 5: Industrialisation and the Great West

Chicago, the Metabolic City

In Nature’s Metropolis, Cronon follows the commodity flows that made nineteenth-century Chicago the organising hub of a continental hinterland. Grain elevators, futures markets, and railway timetables abstracted wheat, lumber, and cattle from their places of origin and fed them into a single industrial metabolism. The prairies were ploughed into a wheat belt; the white pine forests of Wisconsin and Michigan were converted into the lumber that rebuilt Chicago after the 1871 fire; the grasslands were stocked with cattle whose bodies passed through the disassembly lines of the Union Stock Yards. The city, Cronon argues, cannot be understood apart from its hinterland, and the hinterland cannot be understood apart from the city that remade it.

Railroads, Bison, and the Plains

The continental railroads of the 1860s and 1870s enabled not only the grain trade but also the near-extermination of the bison. From perhaps thirty million animals at mid-century, the herds were reduced to a few hundred by the 1880s, hunted for hides, for the leather-belt drives of eastern factories, and as a deliberate military strategy to starve Indigenous nations off the plains and onto reservations. The slaughter was at once an ecological event, a commercial enterprise, and an instrument of dispossession.

Mining, Smelting, and the Vertical Frontier

Hard-rock mining at Butte, Sudbury, Leadville, and Cobalt pushed the resource frontier underground and upward into the atmosphere. Sulphur dioxide from copper and nickel smelters denuded whole districts; tailings poisoned watersheds. Stephen Bocking and Liza Piper have traced how the expansion of industrial extraction into the Canadian north brought a distinctive environmental regime of boom-and-bust towns, long-distance labour migration, and ecological sacrifice zones to regions that had previously been shaped primarily by Indigenous land use.

Chapter 6: Conservation, Wilderness, and the National Park

The Birth of Conservation

The ecological damage of the Gilded Age generated a reaction. In the United States, a gentleman conservation movement coalesced around figures such as John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Theodore Roosevelt. Muir, mystical and preservationist, argued that wild places were temples whose value was spiritual. Pinchot, the technocrat of the new U.S. Forest Service, argued that forests were renewable resources to be managed for “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time.” Their dispute over the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite (decided in favour of the dam in 1913) became the defining quarrel of early American conservation.

In Canada, a parallel movement produced Banff (1885), Yoho, Glacier, Jasper, and later a dense network of parks administered from 1911 by the world’s first national parks service. Tina Loo’s States of Nature traces how Canadian wildlife conservation developed its own idioms—less utilitarian than Pinchot’s, less mystical than Muir’s, and deeply entangled with ideas of national identity, masculinity, and the imagined North.

The Trouble with Wilderness

Cronon’s 1996 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” challenged the moral architecture of the whole preservationist tradition. The wilderness idea, Cronon argued, is not an encounter with pristine nature but a cultural product of late-nineteenth-century urban elites who romanticised the frontier just as it was closing. It depends on erasing the Indigenous inhabitants who made and lived in the landscapes that settlers then declared “untouched.” Yellowstone (1872), Yosemite, Banff, and Glacier were all created by the removal of Indigenous peoples, whose hunting, burning, and residence had shaped the very ecologies the parks were intended to preserve. Cronon’s essay was controversial, but its central point has reshaped the field: wilderness is a history, not a baseline.

Chapter 7: Dust, Dams, and the Modernist Reconfiguration of Land and Water

The Dust Bowl

Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl is perhaps the field’s most influential single monograph. The black blizzards of the 1930s, Worster argued, were not an act of God but a predictable consequence of capitalist agriculture meeting a semi-arid grassland. The southern plains had been ploughed up during the wheat boom of the First World War and the 1920s; when drought struck in 1931, the exposed soil simply blew away. Worster’s account links ecology, labour, migration, and federal policy: the Soil Conservation Service, shelterbelts, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration represented a New Deal attempt to rebuild a livable rural ecology on terms that the market alone would never supply.

The Organic Machine

Richard White’s The Organic Machine takes up the Columbia River as the paradigmatic case of twentieth-century water engineering. Through Bonneville, Grand Coulee, and a cascade of downstream dams, the river was rebuilt to deliver hydroelectric power, irrigation, flood control, and aluminium for the wartime aircraft industry. White refuses the simple nature-versus-technology story. The dammed Columbia, he argues, is neither natural nor artificial but an “organic machine,” a hybrid in which labour, salmon, sediment, turbines, and the river’s own gravity remain entangled. His framing applies equally to the Tennessee Valley Authority in the American South, the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project on the Canadian border, and Matthew Evenden’s account of the contested Fraser River, where salmon runs were defended, sometimes successfully, against hydro development.

Chapter 8: Extraction, Pollution, and the Postwar Environmental Movement

Fisheries and Forests under Pressure

Twentieth-century industrial extraction pressed North American ecosystems toward collapse in new ways. The 1992 moratorium on the northern cod fishery off Newfoundland, following decades of overfishing by factory trawlers, ended a five-hundred-year-old economy and threw tens of thousands out of work. Alan MacEachern and others have reconstructed the interplay of science, politics, and industry behind the collapse, showing how the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans had consistently overestimated stocks under pressure from political demands to maintain quotas. Liza Piper’s The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada traces the parallel story of pulp-and-paper and mining pushing into the northern boreal, with consequences for caribou, fish, and Indigenous communities.

Oil, Gas, and the Petro-state

Oil and gas reshaped both national economies across the twentieth century. From Spindletop (1901) through the East Texas fields, the Permian Basin, Leduc (1947), and ultimately the Athabasca oil sands, hydrocarbons financed mass automobile suburbs, continental supply chains, and the petrochemical transformation of agriculture. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital situates this shift in a longer global argument about why coal, and then oil, became the energetic backbone of capitalist growth despite available alternatives.

Silent Spring and the Environmental Movement

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) offered the mass public a vocabulary for understanding chemical pollution as an ecological and medical problem simultaneously. Her account of DDT and other organochlorines concentrating through food webs galvanised the movement that produced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and Canadian analogues such as the Department of the Environment (1971) and a succession of provincial environmental assessment regimes. Environmental justice scholarship and activism, which emerged more forcefully in the 1980s, reminded the movement that pollution is never uniformly distributed: hazardous waste, refineries, and contaminated drinking water consistently fall upon racialised and working-class communities. Love Canal in upstate New York and the destruction of Africville in Halifax are two episodes from opposite ends of the continent that illustrate the uneven geography of environmental harm.

Chapter 9: Tourism, Climate, and the Anthropocene

Consuming Nature

The same century that industrialised resource extraction also industrialised leisure. Scenic highways, national and provincial parks, cottage country, ski resorts, and wilderness outfitters built a tourist economy that sold “nature” as a consumable experience. The Canadian Shield—rendered iconic by the Group of Seven—became a landscape of canoe routes and summer cabins; Algonquin, Muskoka, and the Laurentians were refashioned as playgrounds for urban professionals. Tourism complicates any simple opposition of development and conservation: parks were preserved in part because they could be sold, and scenery itself became a commodity. Tina Loo and Graeme Wynn have both shown how wildlife management policy in the twentieth century was shaped as much by the demands of sport hunters and photographers as by science.

Climate as History

Environmental history’s most recent turn has brought climate change itself into historical narrative. A first body of work—exemplified by Sam White’s A Cold Welcome and Dagomar Degroot’s The Frigid Golden Age—reconstructs how earlier climatic fluctuations, especially the Little Ice Age, shaped the European encounter with North America: failed colonies, frozen harbours, and crop crises that pushed imperial policy in new directions. A second body, building on Andreas Malm and on the broader Anthropocene debate, asks how fossil-fuel capitalism itself became the engine of planetary warming. Historians now treat wildfires in British Columbia and California, hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, and the thawing of the Arctic not as natural disasters but as events with traceable political and economic histories.

Why It Matters

To write environmental history in the present is to write about a continent whose forests, rivers, coastlines, and atmosphere are being reshaped in real time by decisions that will outlive us. The field’s methodological insistence on binding together ecology, economy, and culture is not an academic preference but a description of how change actually works. The Dust Bowl, the cod collapse, the disappearance of the Columbia’s salmon, and the growing frequency of catastrophic fire are all consequences of political and ecological decisions made over decades. Cronon, Worster, White, Merchant, Wynn, Loo, Piper, Evenden, and their colleagues have shown that the history of North America cannot be told without the soil, the water, the animals, and the air. Their work also suggests, more hopefully, that different decisions were possible, and that a history attentive to the non-human world may help us to imagine different decisions still.