This document summarizes the evolving perceptions of the human-nature relationship among historians and scientists from the 19th century to present. It discusses key figures like George Perkins Marsh, Frederick Jackson Turner, Walter Prescott Webb, and Carl Sauer who interpreted nature and humanity's impact on it in various ways. Over time, the relationship has been viewed as both separate and interconnected, with nature seen as both passive and active. The document traces how views have moved from seeing nature as static and human impacts as negative, to recognizing nature's dynamism and the reciprocity between human and natural systems.

1. Jorgensen 1
Megan Jorgensen
Dr. Erika Lindgren
Historiography
9 April 2015
Historical Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship
In recent years, there has been an ever increasing amount of conflict between environmental
history and environmental politics. The mounting discord is due to controversy surrounding the
nature of the relationship between humans and the natural world. In order to gain a better
understanding of this, it is helpful to examine the profound origins of environmental history. Since
the investigation and analysis of the environment and its natural resources is a relatively new
phenomenon, the span of interpretation of the physical world ranges from the mid-19th
century to the
present. Throughout environmental history, it has consistently been believed that nature is cyclical,
harmonious, and passive, while human history is linear, dynamic, and active.1
As the 20th
century has
advanced, biological evidence has revealed that nature may be dynamic, challenging individuals to
perceive nature as active, rather than passive. However, historical understanding of the relationship
between humanity and nature has evolved in multifaceted arrays that have both rejected and accepted
nature as dynamic. Further examination has revealed, that overtime, historians have come to interpret
the human relationship to the environment as one of immense interconnectivity.
Beginning in the 19th
century until now, a persistent pattern of thought has maintained that
nature is “cyclic, harmonious, and passive, while human history is linear, dynamic and active.”2
This
view was articulated and widely popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, and Henry David Thoreau, esteemed writers of the romantic period. Not only does this
1 Andrew C. Isenberg, “HistoricizingNatural Environments:The Deep Roots of Environmental History,”in A
Companion to Western Historical Thought, ed. Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (Massachusetts:Blackwell Publishing,
2002),372.
2 Isenberg, “HistoricizingNatural Environments,” 373.

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acknowledgement of human society as dynamic coincide with the views of environmental historians
of the mid-19th
century, it also finds concurrence with the views of environmental scientists
concerned with wilderness preservation and conservation. They felt human greed and short-
sightedness was responsible for disrupting the biological processes responsible for maintaining
natural order.3
As a result, environmental historians and biologists recognized and characterized their
perception of the relationship between humans and the natural world as polarized. In other words,
they identified the presence of dualism between the discernments of humans and nature.
Since the mid-19th
century, environmental historians and other scholars have challenged the
dualism between linear, active humanity, and cyclic, passive nature. In particular, scholars of the
mid-19th
and early 20th
centuries have embodied the dualism in order to highlight the human
transformation of nature. According to environmental historian George Perkins Marsh, “man is
everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to
discords.”4
Contrarily, French scholars of the 1930s, who deeply influenced those of American
origin, accepted nature as static and orderly. Likewise, they held the view that nature was
transformed by a slowly evolving human society. Evidence suggests that it was during this time
period that scholars sought to emphasize the degree, minimal, majorly or at all, to which humanity
was involved in the transformation of nature. Thus, scholars began to interpret the relationship
between humanity and the natural world as one of interconnectivity.
With the continuation of the 20th
century, however, biologists and ecologists have developed
a progressively dynamic view of nature, suggesting there is a certain level of disequilibrium and
disharmony within the natural world, despite an absence of human action.5
As a result, environmental
historians have been impelled to consider nature as a dynamic force of change in natural and human
history, rather than merely a passive object of human alteration or break on human historical
3 Isenberg, 373.
4 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,1965), 36.
5 Isenberg, 373.

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momentum. Nevertheless, the evolution of this comprehension of the human-nature relationship has
not been precise or homogenous. Rather, both environmental scientists and historians have
sporadically reaffirmed an understanding of nature as fundamentally systematically prevailing. In the
end, the understanding of the relationship between humans and the natural world has changed in a
complex manner, both rejecting and accepting nature as dynamic. In the end, regardless of whether
or not nature is viewed as dynamic, historians have come to interpret the human relationship to the
environment as one of immense interconnectivity.
Until the middle of the 19th
century, environmental historians believed that nature’s order
surpassed historical change. Harmonious, self-regulating, and permanent, the natural world was
separate from the dynamic human history. However, several environmental historians began to
challenge this notion. Published between 1830 and 1833, Charles Lyell’s three-volume Principles
of Geology argued that human history was responsible for the slow, but massive alteration of
Earth’s natural landscapes.6
Lyell’s examination of the relationship between humans and the
natural world influenced the next generation of environmental scholars and historians. In particular,
Lyell’s interpretation influenced the work of Charles Darwin, an early 19th
century environmental
scientist whose studies on the Galapagos Islands of the Finch bird species, revealed the complexity of
the natural world. Darwin’s research suggested the occurrence of evolution, as well as the ideas of
natural selection and survival of the fittest. Darwin’s Origin of Species, a publication of his
scientific discovery, argued for a natural world in which historical change was standard.7
Darwin, among other scholars of the time period, unequivocally rejected the early 19th
century
interpretation of nature as static. To Lyell, and Darwin, the evolution of species was intrinsic to
the processes of nature. In essence, they saw nature as an ancient object, subject to the forces of
6 Isenberg, 374.
7 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (electronic resource) (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1996).

4. Jorgensen 4
human-induced historical change; interpretation of the human-nature relationship transformed into
one of colossal interdependency.
Beginning in the 1860s to the end of the 19th
century, environmental scholars George Perkins
Marsh, and Frederick Jackson Turner began to integrate human action as forces against a
changing natural environment. Both Marsh and Turner procured an interdisciplinary approach to
the relationship between humanity and nature. Having been influenced by the works of Lyell and
Darwin, both Marsh and Turner viewed the relationship between humans and the environment
was reciprocal. In other words, the impact of human action against nature resulted in an equally
influential response from the natural world. Despite having been influenced by similar
interpretations, Marsh and Turner had divergent views concerning the best approach to studying
the environment’s role in history.8 Marsh recognized the complex interconnections that define
the natural world, and thus took into consideration the environmental and social costs of
human manipulation and the alteration of nature. Within his research, Marsh chose to study
former interactions between humans and the environment. Ultimately, such scientific
experimentation exposed substantial degradation and fragmentation; Marsh interpreted them to be
human-caused.
Marsh’s text, Man and Nature (1864), represented the first distinguished synthesis
treating the various facets of man’s use of nature.9
Its publication was a seminal moment in the
evolution of American attitudes toward nature. The influence of his carefully constructed appeal
to enlightened self-interest eventually proved to be the decisive element in creating a politically
effective conservation movement.10
Marsh’s intent in writing Man and Nature was to identify the
effect of man’s actions on physical geography, to show the harm inflicted on the natural world
8 Isenberg, 374.
9 Arthur A. Ekirch,Jr., Man and Nature in America (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press,1973), 80.
10 Daniel Payne, Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics (Hanover: University
Press of New England,1996), 56.

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by these actions, and to suggest possible corrective measures. Marsh built his argument in Man
and Nature just as one would prepare a legal brief, resulting in a work that is unwieldy, but precise,
and well-documented as to be virtually irresistible in its conclusions.11
In it, Marsh argues through evidence, that “the ravages committed by man subvert the
relations and destroy the balance which nature had established between her organized and
inorganic creations; and she avenges herselfupon the intruder, by letting loose upon her
defaced provinces destructive energies hitherto kept in check.”12
Similarly, Marsh declares,
“there are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece, and even of Alpine Europe, where the
operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as
complete as that of the moon…The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant.”13
Marsh argued that a certain measure of transformation of terrestrial surface, of suppression of
natural, and stimulation of artificially modified productivity was necessary in order for it to
reach human needs, all while remain balanced. However, this measure had been deplorably
exceeded by man.14
To Marsh, human mismanagement of the natural world would eventually
destabilize the environmental processes necessary for the survival of humanity. Significantly, Marsh
had begun to view the relationship between nature and humanity as one in which the actions of
man directly impacted nature and nature impacted man; they were connected.
Like Marsh, Turner focused on the reciprocal relationship between people and nature.
However, Turner interpreted nature as an entity meant to be conquered by humans; he was
triumphalist rather than declensionist. Triumphalism is the belief that humans are superior to and
should triumph over others. Having been influenced by political scholars, such as John Locke, rather
than environmental scholars, Turner felt that the ongoing transformation of the wilderness into a
11 Payne, Voices in the Wilderness, 58.
12 Marsh,Man and Nature, 42.
13 Ibid.
14 Marsh, Man and Nature, 38.

6. Jorgensen 6
civilized and independent America was a cause for celebration. In particular, human alteration
and exploitation of the natural world was responsible for American progress. Turner, in his renowned
and influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893),” says,
“American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This
perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new
opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces
dominating American character.”15
Turner felt the conquering of an untamed environment was
necessary for the creation of an American identity separate from England and all its travesties.
Likewise, Turner interpreted the natural world as an agent that, once conquered by people,
would produce the ideal American characteristics of fortitude, ingenuity, and independence.
Most significantly, Turner saw nature as a promoter of the foundation of a composite nationality for
the American people, just as the advance of the frontier decreased America’s dependence on
England. Turner asserted further that, “the growth of nationalism and the evolution of American
political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier.”16
Nonetheless, Turner
recognized the physical limit of the frontier and the reality that resources are finite. He closed
his esteemed essay by saying,
“Never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the
bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rosa. The
stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions;
the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in
spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape
from the bondage of the past.”17
Turner’s essay tremendously impacted American citizens’ perceptions concerning the natural world.
More importantly, Turner’s interpretation of the natural world incalculably paved the way for
future interpretations of the natural world. Marsh and Turner, although recognizing the
15 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significanceof the Frontier in American History,” Annual Report of the American
Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington,D.C.: Government PrintingOffice,1894),200.
16 Turner, “The Significanceof the Frontier,” 217.
17 Ibid.,227.

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importance of the environment, regarded it as passive. In the end, historians had begun to interpret
the human relationship to the environment as one in which anthropocentric actions directly impacted
the environment.
Having been inspired by Turner’s field of western American history, the 1930s and
subsequent decades brought re-conceptions concerning the relationship between humans and
the natural world. However, the new interpretations varied from Turner’s idea of human dominance
over nature. Historian Walter Prescott Webb, influenced by a series ofenvironmental and
economic catastrophes which plagued the Midwestern plains, wrote the persuasive narrative
The Great Plains (1931). While Marsh, Turner, and those who had influenced them, had remained
focused on humanity’s transformation of nature, Webb was the first to deeply examine the
limitations that nature placed on human endeavors.18 Central to Webb’s concentration, was his
study of geography in the Midwest. To Webb, comprehension of the historical influence of the Great
Plains and the natural world on American civilization could only be achieved through an
understanding of the physical forces that have worked and continue to work, in that region and any
subsequent landscape.19
Thus, The Great Plains chronicled the geography of the region and
offered an explanation as to why human populations were compelled to modify the natural
world. In essence, he interpreted nature as the cause for human modification and subsequent misuse
of finite natural resources; nature was active.
Correspondingly, Webb became a proponent of environmental determinism. According to
definition, environmental determinism, or geographical determinism, is the belief that physical
environment predisposes human social development towards particular trajectories .20
In
particular, Webb’s environmental determinism gained collaboration from supporters of the “New
18 Isenberg, 375.
19 Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1931),10.
20 “Determinism,” Merriam-Webster, Incorporated,lastmodified 2015,accessed March 4, 2015,
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/determinism.

8. Jorgensen 8
Western History” movement sparked by Turner. Recently, his work has been found useful when
studying the historical significance of the natural world in the lives of those inhabiting Africa, Asia,
and Australia.21
Webb’s interpretation of nature represented the widespread recognition by the
1930s ofthe importance of geographical perspectives in history and the social sciences. Like
Turner and Marsh, Webb acknowledged the reciprocity of nature; the actions of both nature and
humanity impact each other. In the end, his ideas were characteristic of the gradual transformation
that occurred among scholars, as they began to recognize the connectedness of humanity’s
relationship with nature.
One of the most influential individuals of the “New Western History” intellectual movement
was Carl Ortwin Sauer, a renowned geographer. As is apparent in his writings, the well-regarded
being “The Agency of Man on the Earth (1956),” and “The Morphology of Landscape (1925),”
Sauer was concerned with humanity’s role in changing, intentionally or unintentionally, the
face of the earth in directions determined by their immediate needs. To Sauer, said changes were
most noticeable when individuals migrated into new landscapes.22
Likewise, Sauer focused on the
cumulative effects of the physical and biological processes that humanity set in motion,
inhibited, or deflected.23
However, the most influential of these three works was “The Morphology
of Nature,” as it had a substantial impact on the American perception of the human-nature
relationship, and upon American academic geography. The essay was an attempt by Sauer to
define for geography and environmental scholars a stance within the field of study. Furthermore,
Sauer’s prevailing works powerfully eliminated the doctrine of environmental determinism that
21 Isenberg, 376.
22 Carl Sauer,Land and Life: a Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, ed. by John Leighly (Berkeley:
University of California Press,1963),4.
23 Sauer, Carl,Marston Bates, Lewis Mumford, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. by WilliamL.
Thomas (Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1956),49.

9. Jorgensen 9
had dominated American geography since the turn of the century.24 Over time, Sauer’s
interpretation of nature lead to the determination that,
“there is such thing as a humane use of the earth; the simpler cultures are less
destructive of the terrestrial basis of man’s existence than our present technology; and
the possessors ofmodern technology may find in the past experiences ofman on the
earth guidance toward a balance of the capacities of the land with the requirements of
life that gives some promise ofpermanence.”25
Sauer’s interpretation of nature influenced others to re-evaluate their perceptions of the human-nature
relationship; interconnectivity between humanity and the environment existed.
Most notably, rather than define the landscape simply as a geographical location, Sauer
created and established the “cultural landscape”, a concept which united geography and culture.
According to Sauer, “the cultural landscape is fashioned out of a natural area by a cultural
group…culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the
result.”26
Furthermore, Sauer asserted that regional environments provided opportunities for
individuals that were either seized, missed, or misused by cultural groups to create precise
landscapes. Sauer proclaimed in “The Morphology of Nature,” that humanity had acted naively
towards nature. Instead of considering the implications of human action on the environment, they had
remained narrowly focused on the ability of nature to sanction or inhibit human endeavors, just as
environmental scholars such as Turner, Marsh, and Webb had done. Sauer indicated that focus must
be on the importance of the landscape to humanity and its sudden transformation. Furthermore,
interrelation between cultures and landscapes had occurred.27
Sauer’s interpretation of the human-
environmental relationship, as articulated in his dominant works, was representative of the ongoing
alteration that occurred as scholars began to interpret the human relationship to the environment as
one of vast interconnectivity; he saw nature as active, rather than passive.
24 Sauer, Land and Life, 6.
25 Ibid.,7.
26 Sauer, Land and Life, 51.
27 Ibid.,349.

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More influential than Webb and Sauer in the amalgamation of geography and history was
the work of a number of several French historians. Most especially, Lucien Febvre and Marc
Bloch, who founded the journal Annales d’histoire economique et sociale, argued for the study
of history within geography and other theoretically-grounded disciplines, just as Marsh,
Turner, Sauer had.28
Both Febvre and Bloch were inspired by another French intellectual, Vidal de
la Blache, whose experimentation and research stressed the interaction of people and nature in the
transformation and settlement of landscapes. Similar to Sauer, Febvre and Bloch rejected
environmental determinism. According to Febvre, “geography was the key to understanding human
history, but I did not explain everything. There is some geography in a wheat field, but a wheat field
is not a geographical fact.”29
In other words, a field of wheat was also the product of a farmer, seeds,
and the implements and techniques of cultivation, forces exerted by cultural history. The aim of
Febvre and Bloch was to retreat from the action of politics to a history in which all change is
slow, repetitive, and an ever-recurring cycle.30
Thus, like Sauer, Febvre and Bloch recognized the
interconnectivity of humanity and the natural world.
Webb, Sauer, Febvre and Bloch, having been influenced by environmental historians and
scholars of the past, embedded human history into the context of the natural world. However, their
work examined deeper this interpretation of an active nature, interconnected to humanity, than the
esteemed Marsh and Turner. This profound concentration on geography enabled their
examination of the environment much more complex and profound than the studies and
interpretations of their predecessors. Although nature was not the only agent in human history,
as demography and climate were also active agents, it afforded the circumstances necessary to
facilitate certain human possibilities and impede others. In the end, Febvre and Bloch were
considered two environmental scholars who, among others, have come to interpret the human
28 Isenberg, 376.
29 Lucien Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History (New York: Knopf, 1925),46.
30 Isenberg, 376.

11. Jorgensen 11
relationship to the environment as one of immense interconnectivity; no longer was nature viewed as
passive.
Following the scholars who had been influenced by geography, came a group of scholars
who began to focus on the ecology of the natural world; the central insight of ecology was that
everything is connected. One prominent scholar of this period was Aldo Leopold, a one-time
forest ranger and a professor of game at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was
considered the father of environmental ethics for his “land ethic” which proscribed actions that
harmed the beauty of ecological integrity of the environment.31
Much of Leopold’s career was
spent in the desert southwest, and it was there that he began to develop the principles that made him
the founder of wildlife management in the United States. Emphasizing interconnections in a
dynamic nature, rather than the static, enduring influences of landscape or climate that
scholars before them had argued for, Leopold and his followers conceived ofnature as a
process rather than strictly a place; nature was no longer perceived as passive. However,
Leopold ultimately argued for an inherent order in nature that humans altered at their own peril.32
Leopold, and other scholars who shared similar perceptions regarding the human-nature
relationship, were influenced heavily by earlier scholars who had focused on pre-colonial land usage.
In the 1920s, anthropologist Frank Speck, for example, argued that Indians’ hunting techniques
functioned to conserve game supplies. Subsequently, the Depression-era scholarly search for
alternative economic models fueled this interpretation of pre-colonial land uses as sustainable
alternatives to capitalist resource exploitation.33
As a result, “functionalism” emerged as a
school of anthropology that conceived of the relationships between cultural groups and nature
as interconnected. In other words, they presumed the purpose of cultural proscriptions on land use
was the sustainability of the human relationship to nature. In 1935, British ecologist A. G. Tansley
31 Isenberg, 377.
32 Ibid.,377.
33 Frank Speck, “Mistassini HuntingTerritories in the Labrador Peninsula,” American Anthropologist 25 (1923): 452.

12. Jorgensen 12
devised the term “ecosystem” to indicate the complex interconnections that functioned to
maintain natural stability.34
Other ecologists and wildlife biologists came to perceive the
necessitation of human management as superfluous; nature could take care of itself.
By the 1940s, Leopold, influenced by Tansley and another British ecologist Charles Elton,
articulated that nature was a self-regulating system. In his essay “Thinking Like a Mountain
(1949),” he accounts the disastrous effects of the elimination of wolves in the west. If wolves
were eradicated completely, as hunters and authorities in the United States were determined to
achieve by the 1950s, populations of grazing and browsing species would expand beyond the
ability of the environment to sustain them. Specifically, Leopold witnessed such travesty with the
overpopulation of deer in the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona and in the forests of Wisconsin. In
order to restore functional integrity to these landscapes, Leopold argued, the restoration of wolves
must occur.35
Like Speck’s Indians, the wolves functioned to conserve resources and maintain
environmental stability. Leopold argued that overstocking a landscape with cattle maximized the
productivity of the land, but at the risk of overgrazing and the disruption of natural regulating
processes. Wolves that preyed on the cattle were doing their “job of trimming the herd to fit the
range.” In other words, they maintained natural order inhibited by human endeavors.36
Leopold’s powerful words in his narrative, A Sand County Almanac (1949) have provided
his highest legacy. A unique book and classic work of conservation, A Sand County Almanac
contained outspoken arguments with a highly ethical regard for America’s relationship to the
land. Leopold explicitly recognized that the human community needed to extend its boundaries to
include “soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”37
The first part of the book
34 Isenberg, 378.
35 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press,1949),
129.
36 Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 132.
37 Bill McKibben,ed. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (New York: Literary Classicsof the
United States, 2008), 265.

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traces the transformation that occurred in the Wisconsin countryside during a year. The second
section is a gathering of informal pieces that Leopold wrote over a 40-year period as he traveled
around the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere. In
the last section, Leopold addressed the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation,
including the nature of “sportsmanship” in American and the ethical call to love and respect the
land.38
In the end, Leopold was representative of the transformation that occurred as scholars began
to interpret the human relationship to the environment as one in which human action had a
detrimental impact on nature.
Following Leopold and his followers, environmental historian David Worster emerged. The
chief intellectual proponent of Leopold’s interpretation of the human-nature relationship, Worster
has helped bring humanity’s interaction with nature to the forefront of historical thinking. He
argued, in The Wealth of Nature (1993), that “nature constitutes a different and greater kind of
order than anything that we, acting as one species alone, can create.”39
According to this view, a
natural disaster such as the southern plains dust bowl of the 1930s was not a climate abnormality but
a reminder, like Leopold’s Kaibab deer eruption, of the “imperative of recognizing and
accommodating to the order of nature.”40
In Worster’s writings, the western past emerged not as
a march of Manifest Destiny, but as an unfolding relationship between man and nature, and
the forging of a multicultural society. In Under Western Skies (1992), Worster compellingly
wrote of the changing relationship between the land, Native Americans, and the descendants of
Europe through the use of fascinating case studies, stating that often times, nature wins the
struggle. He wrote, “Human domination over nature is quite simply an illusion, a passing dream by a
38 Leopold, Sand County Almanac, xvi.
39 David Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination, (New York: Oxford
University Press,1993),183.
40 Isenberg, 379.

14. Jorgensen 14
naïve species. It is an illusion that has cost us so much, ensnared us in our own designs…”41 To
Worster, the interconnectivity of the human-nature relationship must be considered in relation to the
maintenance of natural order.
Worster, having also been influenced by Karl Marx, argued in his book Dust Bowl (1979),
that the root of the ecological catastrophe in the southern plains was the capitalist view that
“nature must be seen as capital. A business culture attaches no other value to nature than this;
the nonhuman world is de-sanctified and de-mystified as a consequence.”42
Influenced by
Leopold’s “land ethic,” Worster called for a spiritual regard for nature, in conjunction to a
communitarian social organization, to restore the natural order that existed prior to capitalist
degradation. In the end, Worster, having been influenced by Leopold and the “functionalists” who
recognized the interconnectedness of the human-nature relationship, stands as an ecologist and
environmental historian representative of the transformation that occurred over time as scholars
began to interpret the human relationship to the environment as one of immense interconnectivity.
Like ecologists who had come before him, Worster interpreted the environment as an active, rather
than passive natural world.
By the 1950s, ecologists and environmental historians began to focus on the influence of
human and natural populations on the world; concern for global population growth occurred. Unlike
Leopold and scholars of the like, they emphasized the unpredictability and uncontrollability of
nature through the study of population fluctuations among plant and animal species. One of the
first scholars of this interpretation of nature was Hans Zinsser, whose Rats, Lice, and History
(1935) argued that the determinant of human history was the non-human carriers of infectious
diseases; nature.43
Another popular scholar was William McNeill, who’s Plagues and Peoples
41 David Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University
Press,1992),
42 Isenberg, 379.
43 Hans Zinsser,Rats, Lice, and History (Boston,1935).

15. Jorgensen 15
(1976) also professed that disease, rather than humans, impacted history. He equated the decline
of ancient empires in the Mediterranean, India, and China, the Black Death, and the depopulation of
the Americas after Columbus to nature-induced disease. According to McNeill, “we all want human
experience to make sense, and historians cater to this universal demand by emphasizing elements in
the past that are calculable, definable, and, often, controllable as well.”44
Although both Zinsser and
McNeill took a variable approach to that of Leopold and scholars of the like, they too, recognized the
interconnectivity of the human-nature relationship.
In order to comprehend disease, McNeill and other scholars utilized models from
environmental scientists. During this time, the concept of biological “niche” became relevant.
According to Elton, an influencer of Leopold, “an animal population tended to expand until it
reached the limit of its environment to sustain it.” As Leopold argued conservation of predators
would keep populations in check, McNeill and others believed certain kinds of diseases aided in
keeping the human population in check. By second half of the 20th
century, scholars determined
that industrialization and medical advancement had eliminated the poverty and disease that
inhibited human population growth. Scholars feared that vaccines had rendered the concept of
biological “niche” irrelevant, or had transformed the entire planet into the human niche.45
In other
words, there was concern among environmental scholars, that nature had been neglected. With this
concern, came the realization that the relationship between humans and the natural world was
interrelated.
Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University population biologist, argued in The Population
Bomb (1968) that human population growth would inevitably result in the exhaustion of
natural resources. Thus, people needed to manage and control the populations of both themselves
44 WilliamH.McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City: Anchor Press,1976),4.
45 Isenberg, 380.

16. Jorgensen 16
and wildlife.46 As a result, historians and ecologists began to integrate the study of niches and
population with the history of human colonization and expansion. Historian Alfred Crosby
made the most compelling argument regarding the role of ecological invasions in history in his
two majorly significant works The Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism: the
Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986). Both works asserted that “Europeans possessed
irresistible ecological advantages when they colonized temperate regions of the world: Australia,
New Zealand, North America, and the southern cone of South America.” Europeans’ “portmanteau
biota” of diseases, animals, and plants overwhelmed indigenous human, animal, and plant species
which had not previously been exposed to them. Consequently, they had no means to resist human
populations.47
Nature, according to McNeill, Crosby, and other scholars of the like, was unpredictable and
unquestionably in control. According to Crosby, “Europeans were seldom masters of the biological
changes they triggered. They benefited from the great majority of these changes, but benefit or not,
their role was less often a matter of judgment and choice than of being downstream of a bursting
dam.”48
Crosby’s use of metaphorical thinking illustrated both the possibilities and the drawbacks of
the use of biological “niche,” population, and ecological invasion in order to understand the human-
nature relationship. Scholars of this school of thought interpreted nature to be dynamic, but
deterministic, similar to Webb’s views. To them, human existence was deeply biological; human
judgment and choice did not matter. In the end, scholars of this period were representative of the
transformation that occurred as historians began to view the relationship between humans and nature
as one of immense interconnectivity.
46 Paul Ehrlich, ThePopulation Bomb (New York: Ballantine,1968),15.
47 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge
University Press,1986).
48 Crosby,Ecological Imperialism, 192.

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Most influential in the wilderness interpretation of nature was environmental historian
Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, a work that sought to define “wilderness”
and its relationship to the American mind. According to Nash, “there is no specific material
object that is wilderness. The term designates a quality that produces a certain mood or feeling
in a given individual and, as a consequence, may be assigned by that person to a specific place.”
As a result, a universally acceptable definition of wilderness is elusive.49
Significantly, Nash argued
that a basic fear of wilderness, a legacy of the Dark Ages and Puritanism, enlivened Americans to
raze forests and destroy wildlife in the struggle to substitute them with farms and domesticated
animals. Like Turner, Nash was influenced by observations of the near-exhaustion of wilderness by
the end of the 19th
century. Likewise, Nash maintained that Americans’ fears of wilderness were
quickly replaced by an anxiety that they had become overly “mechanized, industrialized, and
urbanized.”50
Subsequently, preservation was initiated with the establishment of the National Park
Service and with the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, which Nash triumphed over, as for the
first time “wilderness” was concretely defined. In the end, Nash understood the vast interconnectivity
between humans and the environment.
Environmental historians working in the last two decades, having been heavily influenced by
scholars of the past, made explicit the interaction between humanity and the non-human natural
environment. However, most ascribe to neither environmental nor cultural de terminism.
Similarly, modern scholars do not regard environments or cultures as static. Rather, environments,
absent from human influence, are liable to change. Likewise, cultures, in relation to nature, are
equally dynamic. Furthermore, environmental scholars today have chosen to integrate
considerations of class, ethnicity, and gender into their work, particularly as it relates to
America’s capitalistic society, into their study and interpretation of the human-nature
49 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press,1973),1.
50 Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4.

18. Jorgensen 18
relationship. Ultimately, modern environmental historians, while deeply examining the
interpretations of scholars before them, must determine whether environmental change is the
consequence of human action, natural origin, both. As a result, reconsideration of many
assumptions concerning the relationship between humanity and the natural world has
occurred. Ultimately, scholars, despite having completely equivalent perceptions, they have
come to interpret the human relationship to the environment as one of immense
interconnectivity.
To conclude, there has been considerable controversy concerning the relationship between
humans and the natural world. It is helpful to deeply explore the deep origins of environmental
history in order to fully comprehend this debate. Because environmental history is a particularly new
field of study, research is limited. Nonetheless, throughout environmental history, it has firmly been
perceived that nature is cyclical, harmonious, and passive, while human history is linear, dynamic,
and active. In other words, it has been believed that nature is something to be conquered by
humanity. As time has progressed, scientific evidence has revealed that nature may be dynamic,
demanding individuals to recognize nature as active, rather than passive. Nature acted in response to
human action, but also impacted humanity. However, historical understanding of the relationship
between humanity and nature has evolved in multidimensional approaches that have both precluded
and recognized nature as dynamic. Further examination has revealed, that overtime, historians have
come to interpret the human relationship to the environment as one of immense interconnectivity.

19. Jorgensen 19