Donald Worster: Historians and Nature
If ever there was a scientific theory that is fundamentally historical, that purports to explain change over time, it is evolution through natural selection and its corollary, humankind’s dual inheritance. Yet I have to admit that my fellow historians, teaching in history departments and professing to study that process of change, have been highly resistant to evolutionary theory. Why has that been generally so? Why have historians insisted on drawing a rigid boundary separating culture from nature? And what are the possibilities for overcoming this separation?
The good news is that the field of environmental history, which has been emerging over the past two or three decades, has successfully contested the old dualism that separates historians from the natural sciences. Environmental historians focus on the relations that humans have carried on with the rest of nature. They take for granted that humans are part of the natural world and that historians should make history more truthful by placing human life in that broader context. In contrast to social or political historians, environmental historians read books and articles on evolution and ecology and have been trying to bridge the gap separating them from the natural sciences.
So far, however, environmental historians have focused mainly on the human impact on nature–i.e., how humans have changed the land, exploited natural resources, and replaced the wilderness with cities. Let me give you an example that represents an effort to bring evolution into history but does so by emphasizing the growing human impact on evolution.
In 2003 Edmund Russell, a historian at the University of Virginia, published an important essay entitled “Evolutionary History.” He begins by noting that evolution can occur through artificial selection, like the breeding of dogs or cattle, as well as through natural selection. Darwin, Russell reminds us, began his book On the Origin of Species by comparing the two kinds of selection. He observed how plant and animal breeders change their domesticated plants and animals and then concluded that nature does for the whole earth what the cattle breeder does with his livestock. Artificial selection led him to natural selection. However, Russell turns Darwin’s reasoning around to show that what the cattle breeder does for the farm, humans are doing for the whole earth–guiding evolution to suit their needs. The chasm between what is natural and what is artificial vanishes, and in Russell’s view the whole environment is becoming increasingly a product of human intervention....
Russell has offered us an important way to bring history and evolution together. However, I want to propose another way of thinking, one that regards human cultures not as completely independent forces changing the world, but as strategies that people develop in order to adjust to the natural world and exploit its resources. Instead of making nature a subset of culture, as Russell does, historians might see culture as a subset of nature. We can think of this approach, following the lead of biologists, as redefining culture as a mental response to opportunities or pressures posed by the natural environment. In other words, culture can be defined as a form of “adaptation.”
The word adaptation is as familiar to historians as it is to biologists. Historians often talk of cultures clashing and adapting to one other, mixing and merging through trade, immigration, and mass communications, or they talk about societies adapting to new technologies like the automobile or computer. More rarely, however, do they talk about people adapting to their natural environments. And this is a huge failing: historians have paid insufficient attention to evolutionary adaptation in general and in particular to the role that culture plays in adaptation to environment–adaptation to the capacity of soils to grow crops, the supply of water needed to sustain life, the vicissitudes of climate, the limits to growth and material consumption in a finite landscape....