This paper explores how historians—and others—continue to create a barrier between the natural world and the city, and why the so-called declensionist narrative—humans as agents of harmful physical change—still dominates our understanding of the urban environment. It suggests several ways to reconsider the declensionist narrative; to evaluate the connection between “first nature” and “second nature;” to better understand the relationship between urban and ecological systems; and to assess how cities are natural.
Some may argue that one cannot separate nature as place from nature as social construct, but I am admitting to being quite literal in the use of the word as some sort of place "out there" in this article. Among studies that deal with the social construction of nature, see volume 11 (Winter 1987) of Environmental Review, which devotes the whole issue to the topic.
2.
The "built environment" normally is used to describe urban development. In reality it is anything constructed by humans.
3.
Thomas P.Hughes, Human-BuiltWorld: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004 ), 8.
4.
Genevieve Massard-Guilbaud and Peter Thorsheim, "Cities, Environments, and European History," Journal of Urban History33 (July 2007): 692.
5.
John R. McNeill, "Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History," History and Theory42 (December 2003): 6-7.
6.
Douglas E. Kupel, "Investigating Urban Infrastructure," Journal of Urban History 27 (May 2001): 520. For more on urban environmental history, see Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr, "At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment: Updated with a Postscript by the Authors," http://www2.h-net.msu.edu; Joel A. Tarr, "Urban History and Environmental History in the United States: Complementary and Overlapping Fields," in Environmental Problems in European Cities in the 19th and 20th Century, ed. Christoph Bernhardt (Munster: Waxman, 2001): 25-39; Martin V. Melosi, "The Place of the City in Environmental History," Environmental History Review 17 (Spring 1993): 1-23; Christine M. Rosen and Joel A. Tarr, "The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History," Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 299-310. Samuel P. Hays has been less impressed with the overall performance of urban environmental history as a new subdiscipline. As he argued,
7.
The city has become a relatively new focus for environmental history. The effect of studies with an urban focus, however, has been minimal, largely because its practitioners have been more vigorous in asserting urban environmental history as content rather than perspective . . .
8.
Hays’ major point was that "There is much to urban environmental history that goes beyond urban boundaries." See Samuel P. Hays, "Toward Integration in Environmental History," Pacific Historical Review 70 (February 1, 2001): 59-67. See also Hays, Explorations in Environmental History: Essays by Samuel P. Hays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 70-77.
9.
Richard White , "Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature," Pacific Historical Review70 (February 2001): 103.
10.
Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) p. 100. Merchant’s views on humans and nature are, of course, decidedly more complex. In a recent work she makes clear the need to appreciate that
11.
We should think of ourselves not as dominant over nature (controlling and managing a passive, external nature) or of nature as dominant over us (casting humans as victims of an unpredictable, violent nature) but rather in dynamic relationship to nature as its partner.
12.
See Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003), 6.
13.
I must admit that one of my earliest attempts at defining urban environmental history in the early 1990s also failed to intertwine nature and the city in any meaningful way:
14.
. . . the physical features and resources of urban sites (and regions) influence and are shaped by natural forces, growth, spatial change and development, and human action. Thus the field combines the study of the natural history of the city with the history of city building and their possible intersections.
15.
See Melosi, "The Place of the City in Environmental History," 2.
16.
Melosi, "The Place of the City in Environmental History," 3; Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History," Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1087-106. See also Rosen and Tarr, "The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History," 301. The definition of environmental history sans the city has been echoed by others as well. See Mart A. Stewart, "Environmental History: Profile of a Developing Field," The History Teacher 31 (May 1998): 351-68.
17.
Bill Luckin, "Versions of the Environment," Journal of Urban History 24 (May 1998): 510. See also Matthew Gandy, "Urban Nature and the Ecological Imaginary," in In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, ed. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw (London: Routledge, 2006), 63.
18.
John McNeill takes issue with the criticism that environmental history’s narrative "are relentlessly depressing accounts of environmental destruction: just one damn decline after another." "I regard the criticism," he concludes, "as misplaced." J. R. McNeill, "Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 42 (December 2003): 35.
19.
William B. Meyer, Human Impact on the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2-3. Emmanuel Kreike posed a similar definition of the declensionist narrative: "The declinist paradigm construed human interference in pristine Nature as a disturbance typically resulting in a downward spiraling process of environmental degradation that might ultimately lead to the destruction of ecosystem Earth." See Emmanuel Kreike, "The Nature-Culture Trap: A Critique of Late 20th Century Global Paradigms of Environmental Change in Africa and Beyond," Global Environment 1 (2008): 119.
20.
See Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1989 [1961]), 446-47, 451, 528, 540, 571.
21.
Tarr, "Urban History and Environmental History in the United States," 26-29. For a similar perspective, see Howard Bridgman, Robin Warner, and John Dodson, Urban Biophysical Environments (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), xv, 1, 56.
22.
See, for example, Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford, 2006); Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear : Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).
23.
Richard White , "Afterword, Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature," Pacific Historical Review70 (February 2001): 105.
24.
George Perkins Marsh, The Earth as Modified by Human Action (a new edition of Man and Nature) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882), 10. See also William L. Thomas, Jr., Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 472-74.
25.
Donald E. Davis, Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 201.
26.
I note the larger issue of "What is Nature?" as an element in this discourse, but a deep exploration of this question may stray cosmically from my more specific interest of nature and the built environment. I say this with a certain sense of trepidation and with an understanding of the potentially intellectual peril in which in places me, especially among social constructionists and postmodernists. Nonetheless, for one very useful study on this broader and vital question, see Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995). See also Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).
27.
Alfred W. Crosby, "The Past and Present of Environmental History," American Historical Review100 (October 1995): 1177-89.
28.
David Kinkela , "Cities, Nature and Health: The Ecological Landscapes of Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson," The Place of the City in Environmental History, 5th Round Table on urban Environmental History, Berlin, Germany, July 3-6, 2008.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 445.
31.
Ibid., 446.
32.
Ibid., 443-44.
33.
Marston Bates , Man in Nature, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall , 1964), 1.
34.
Ibid., 1-2.
35.
See John P. Herron and Andrew G. Kirk, eds., Human/Nature: Biology, Culture, and Environmental History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).
36.
Michael Williams , "The Relations of Environmental History and Historical Geography," Journal of Historical Geography20 (1994): 13.
37.
See, for example, David Harvey, "Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (September 1990): 418-34.
38.
Ibid. See also Yi-Fu Tuan, Man and Nature Resource Paper No. 10 (Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers, Commission on College Geography, 1971), 3-7.
39.
Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 708.
40.
McNeill, "Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History," 6. In a recent book, McNeill and his co-editors make the following important observation in terms of global environmental change:
41.
Rather than subject the internal structures of social systems to critical scrutiny, such studies (like Diamond) seem to assume a simple dualism of society versus nature and to account for environmental problems in terms of the inexorable progression of technology or demography. . . . Rarer are historical studies that explicitly investigate contradictions within global human society over the natural environment.
42.
Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier, eds., Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2007), 4. See also Verena Winiwarter, "Approaches to Environmental History: A Field Guide to Its Concepts," in People and Nature in Historical Perspective, ed. Jozsef Laszlovszky and Ptere Szabo (Budapest: Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies & Archaeolingua, 2003), 4-5, in which she states not unlike McNeill,
43.
My work as an environmental historian is done with great respect for nature’s intricacy. It is based on an understanding of the dangers of human impacts on natural systems and ultimately on the presupposition that humans are part of nature as much as they are apart from it . . . As two colleagues have put it, environmental history is about the interactions between "humans and the rest of nature," a definition I subscribe to.
44.
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Donna Haraway (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150. See also Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Helga Weisz, "Society as Hybrid Between Material and Symbolic Realms: Towards a Theoretical Framework of Society-Nature Interaction," Advances in Human Ecology 8 (Autumn 1999): 215-51.
45.
Tuan, Man and Nature, 26.
46.
Forest Stearns and Tom Montag, The Urban Ecosystem: A Holistic Approach (Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc., 1974), 16.
47.
J. Breuste, H. Feldmann, and O. Uhlmann, eds., Urban Ecology (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1998), preface.
48.
Brian J.L. Berry and John D. Kasarda, Contemporary Urban Ecology (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 3.
49.
Another straightforward definition: "Within the natural sciences, the term ‘urban ecology’ is used to refer to biological and ecological studies conducted in areas with high densities of human." See "What is Urban Ecology?" Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, http://www.rbgmelb.org.au/arcue/pg5_html.html.
50.
See Marina Fischer-Kowalski, "Society’s Metabolism: The Intellectual History of Materials Flow Analysis, Part I, 1860-1970," Journal of Industrial Ecology 2 (1998): 61-78; Marina Fischer-Kowalski, "Society’s Metabolism: The Intellectual History of Materials Flow Analysis, Part II, 1970-1998," Journal of Industrial Ecology (1999): 107-36.
51.
Anne Whiston Spirn, "Urban Ecosystems, City Planning, and Environmental Education: Literature, Precedents, Key Concepts, and Prospects," in Understanding Urban Ecosystems, ed. Berkowitz , Nilon, and Hollweg, 201.
52.
See William Rees, "Understanding Urban Ecosystems: An Ecological Economics Perspective," in Understanding Urban Ecosystems: A New Frontier for Science and Education, ed. Alan R. Berkowitz, Charles H. Nilon, and Karen S. Hollweg (New York: Springer, 1999), 129. See also Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, eds., In the Nature of Cities; Ken Newcombie, Jetse D. Kalma, and Alan R. Aston, "The Metabolism of a City: The Case of Hong Kong," Ambio (1978): 3.
53.
Ronald J.Johnston, The American Urban System: A Geographic Perspective ( New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 304-05.
54.
Thomas R. Detwyler and Melvin G. Marcus, eds. Urbanization and Environment (Belmont, CA: Duxbury Press, 1972), 21.
55.
Breuste, Feldmann, and Uhlmann, eds., Urban Ecology, 4.
56.
Paul Wheatley , "The Concept of Urbanism," in Man, Settlement and Urbanism, ed. Peter J. Veko, Ruth Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1972), 606.
57.
For a discussion of the place of nature in cities, see Ian C. Laurie, Nature in Cities: The Natural Environment in the Design and Development of Urban Green Space (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979); Christopher G. Boone and Ali Modarres, City and Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
58.
Rees, "Understanding Urban Ecosystems," 116.
59.
See ibid., 124-25; Richard Stren, Rodney White, and Joseph Whitney, eds., Sustainable Cities: Urbanization and the Environment in International Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).
60.
Mark LaGory , "Twentieth Century Urban Growth: An Ecological Approach," Sociological Focus12 (August 1979): 187.
61.
See Spenser W. Havlick, The Urban Organism (New York: Macmillan , 1974), 12.
62.
Winiwarter, "Approaches to Environmental History," 11.
63.
Craig E. Colten, ed., Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 1.
64.
Ibid., 3.
65.
Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
66.
Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 6-10.
67.
Ibid., 4, 9.
68.
Ibid., 2.
69.
Matthew Klingle , Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press , 2007), xii.
70.
Ibid., xiii.
71.
Ibid., 4, 9.
72.
Andrew C. Isenberg, ed., The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space ( Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), xiv.
73.
Lisa Benton-Short and John Rennie Short, Cities and Nature ( London: Routledge, 2008), 3-8.
74.
Ibid., 4-5.
75.
William Cronon , "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative ," Journal of American History78 (March 1992): 1369.
76.
Neil Smith, "Foreword," in In the Nature of Cities, ed. Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, xi-xii.
77.
Discussion of this latter point can be found in Erik Swyngedouw, "Metabolic Urbanization: The Making of Cyborg Cities," in In the Nature of Cities, ed. Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, 22.
78.
C.S. Holling and Gordon Orians, "Toward an Urban Ecology," Bulletin of the. Ecological Society of America52 (1971): 2-3.
79.
Ian L. McHarg, "The Place of Nature in the City of Man," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 352 (1964): 1. See also Joel A. Tarr, "The City and the Natural Environment," http://www.gdrc.org/uem/doc-tarr.html.
80.
See Daniel H. Carson, Man-Environment Interactions: Evaluations and Applications, Part I (Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, 1974), 4-11.
81.
McHarg, "The Place of Nature in the City of Man," 5.
82.
Bruce Stephenson, "Urban Environmental History: the Essence of a Contradiction," Journal of Urban History 31 (September 2005): 892.
83.
Winiwarter, "Approaches to Environmental History," 11. See also Laurie, Nature in Cities, 3-4.
84.
Cinnamon and everything not so nice, "Are Humans Part of Nature?" February 23 and 26, 2007, http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474976916782.
85.
Kevin Lynch , "The City as Environment," Scientific American213 (September 1965): 219.
