Environmental history is a rapidly developing interdisciplinary field founded in the United States in 1977, but quickly growing international in scope. Scholars in this field are broadly concerned with the relationship between humans and natural and built environments. Environmental historians focus on cultural attitudes toward nature, the history of parks, forests, rivers, and wildlife, environmental degradation and its causes and consequences, the effects of environmental change on societies, environmental politics, law, science, and much more. One thing all environmental historians agree on is that history happens in places. We believe that a more complete human history must take into account the physical characteristics of place that so profoundly shape human development.

Environmental history resources at Arizona State University

At least eight members of the Arizona State University History Department faculty and eight of our Ph.D. students are engaged in environmental history research and teaching (see brief descriptions below). Our work crosses many different geographic regions of the world.  We utilize insights and methods from other disciplines, including historical geography, sociology, law, ecology, and literary criticism.  We have strong connections with important scholarly initiatives across campus, including the Global Institute of Sustainability, Decision Center for a Desert City, the Center for the History of Biology, the North American Center for Transborder Studies, and the Institute for Humanities Research, among others.  Many of us have won grants to support research on national parks, water conservation and education, wildlife, religion and environmental values, tribal natural resources policy, international development, and urban studies. 

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Sustainability Studies and the New American University

Environmental historians at Arizona State University contribute to the university’s campus-wide sustainability initiatives and participate in the graduate program of the new School of Sustainability.  We apply historical perspective to the effort to build secure, resilient, and healthy communities attentive to and protective of the living systems and environmental resources that sustain our social order. Our efforts reflect Arizona State University’s vision of the “New American University for the 21st Century”—a university where scholars are dedicated to global perspectives, committed to beneficial social transformation, and engaged in problem-solving research serving local, state, and regional communities. 

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Related Training Opportunities

Graduate students have the opportunity to gain special skills, interdisciplinary training, and research funding through participation in a wide variety of research initiatives and public programs with an environmental focus. History faculty and graduate students are involved in the Urban Ecology IGERT, Central Arizona Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research project (CAP-LTER), water research with the Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), sustainability studies with the Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS), a Grand Canyon historical interpretation project, a US-Mexico Borderlands Environmental History project, and other research projects sponsored by the public history program involving the Arizona Department of Water Resources, Salt River Project, National Park.

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Arizona State University Faculty Working in Environmental History

• Stephen Batalden is a historian of Russian and East European history, director of the Melikian Center, and collaborator with a group of historians whose research involves sustainable international development, looking at issues ranging from national security to risk management and environmental crises.
• Don Fixico has written The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century : American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources (1998); and The Urban Indian Experience in America (2000), among other books.  He is particularly interested in how the Native cultural ethos shapes natural resources management on Indian reservations.
• Susan Gray studies the cultural landscapes and social and economic formations of the Great Lakes Region.  Her most recent work includes a treaty-rights case involving Indigenous land claims. As coordinator for a transborder collaboration between Arizona State University ad York University in Toronto, she is teaching a joint graduate seminar in environmental history with York University colleague Colin Coates in the fall of 2007.
• Paul Hirt
• Hava Samuelson is a historian of religion and environmental values.  She wrote the essays on Judaism for the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005), and the Oxford Handbook on Religion and Ecology (2006), and is the editor of Judaism and Ecology (2002).  She is currently writing “Nature, Judaism, and the Jews.”
• Phillip VanderMeer is a U.S. urban and political historian whose forthcoming study of Phoenix, entitled “The Making of a Desert City,” emphasizes the area’s changing natural and built environment.  He has directed MA theses on Arizona mountains, a conflict over dam projects in Nebraska, and urban park systems.
• Jannelle Warren-Findley works as a public historian and academic scholar at the intersection of natural and cultural resources studies. She has three decades of experience in historic preservation, and has written major policy studies about issues in resource management, published numerous articles and is writing two NPS history projects as a contractor.
• Linda Sargent Wood is a cultural historian and co-director of the ³Nature, Culture, and History at the Grand Canyon² project. She has trained teachers to apply environmental history in the classroom.  Her in-progress monograph on holistic  thought in 20th century America includes biographical studies of key environmental leaders.

Faculty in Related Programs 

• Stephen Pyne is a Regents Professor who teaches environmental history in the School of Life Sciences. Past president of the American Society for Environmental History, Pyne has written a score of books analyzing fire history around the world.  Other works include studies of the Grand Canyon and Antarctica.

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Arizona State University Graduate Students Working in Environmental History

• Sarah Bohl
• Annie Gustafson
• Will McArthur
• Jedediah Rogers
• Clara Keyt
• Adam Tompkins
• Patricia Biggs-Cornelius
• Phillip “Cody” Marshall

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