3
" the old broad-gauged, integrative “natural history” began to fragment into specializations. History increasingly began an archival pursuit, carried on by urban scholars; there was less and less dirt on it. Recently, however, that drift toward an unnatural history has run up against a few hard facts: dwindling energy supplies, population pressures on available food, the limits and costs of technology. A growing number of scholars, consequently, have begun to talk about something called “environmental history” … the new history will re-create, though in a more sophisticated form, the old parson-naturalists synthesis. It will, that is, seek to combine once again natural science and history … into a major intellectual enterprise that will alter considerably our understanding of historical processes. What the inquiry involves … is the development of an ecological perspective on history. "
― , Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination
7
" historians expect scientists to acknowledge that their ideas of nature, even their most complex scientific ideas, are the products of the cultures in which they live. Ideas of nature have a history, and their history is linked inextricably to the history of culture, whether economic, aesthetic, or whatever. We cannot isolate the study of our views of nature into one division called “science” and into other divisions called literature, the arts, religion, or philosophy, for they all float along together in a common flow of ideas and perceptions. "
― , Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination
9
" Every science that the environmental historian approaches presents him or her with a language, and that language is filled, like any of the world’s languages, with metaphors, figures of speech, hidden structures, even world-views — in short, it is filled with culture. The environmental historian wants to learn that language … and use it to improve his understanding of the human past. But as a historian, trained in the modes of thought common to the humanities, where language itself is an important object of analysis, he must insist that the words of the scientists not go unexamined. They are themselves worthy of attention as expressions of culture. "
― , Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination
