Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change; Unearthing the Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History

On 28 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina burst the levees of New Orleans.1 The storm and resulting flood brought about one of the three most serious natural disasters in American history.2 In comparison to other past natural disasters perhaps only the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Asian tsunami of 26 December 2004 will have made such a decisive psychical impression on popular memory and attitudes. But the 2005 flood had two almost equally sizeable predecessors; the Mississippi floods of 1927 and 1937; events that certainly loomed large in American history and in landmark works in the written history of the global environment. In particular these floods prompted Gordon East to write The geography behind history, published the year after the 1937 flood.3 In it East warned that: If only by its more dramatic interventions, a relentless nature makes us painfully aware of the uneasy terms on which human groups occupy and utilise the earth. The common boast that man has become master of his world has a hollow ring to it when we recall the recurrent floods and famines which afflict the peasants of northern China, the devastating floods of the Mississippi in 1937, the more recent destruction by ice of View Falls bridge across the Niagara river, the assertion that in Central Africa ‘the desert is on the move’, the widespread soil erosion in parts of Africa and the Middle West of the United States and finally the continual threat of drought which hangs over the great grain lands of the world — alike in the United States, Canada and South Russia. These and similar happenings or forebodings serve to emphasise the fact that, even for peoples which have reached high levels of material culture, the physical environment remains a veritable Pandora’s Box, ever ready to burst out and scatter its noxious contents.