Environmental Historian

wilderness. history. walking. landscape. PhD

[environmentalhistorian]

1,000 Miles

“I wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be ‘carried of the spirit into the wilderness,’ I suppose. I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but I cannot, and so there is no re…

[environmentalhistorian]

Shank’s Pony

(noun) -  One's legs, used as a means of transport.

“Shanks' (or shanks's) mare (or nag or pony) derives from the name of the lower part of the leg between the knee and ankle - the shank, nowadays more often known as the shin-bone or tibia. This was alluded to in the early form of this term - shank's nag. This originated in Scotland in the 18th century...the term is commonly 'shanks' pony'. It is sometimes capitalised as 'Shank's pony' as some reports claim it to have derived from an individual called Shanks, who previously manufactured lawn-mowing machines, or from the Shanks & Company Ltd. (formed in 1853 and now absorbed into Armitage Shanks)."

[environmentalhistorian]

...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously.  You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you year toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.

Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping

[environmentalhistorian]

First Year Review

The first 8 months of being a PhD student is largely a build up to the, so called, First Year Progress Review. For environmental history this entails two central components: 1) Write an essay whi…

[environmentalhistorian]

Clio - Muse of History (holder of books)

[environmentalhistorian]

A passable definition (of Environmental History) was offered by an Australian stockman at whose cattle station I spent a couple of days in 1992. As he was showing me around his paddocks, generously overcoming his disdain for a city slicker who didn’t know the difference between a bandicoot and a billabong, I explained my interest in the history of soils, erosion, livestock, fertilisers, and such. Later, when his wife asked me what I did, the stockman answered for me: “He’s writing the history of the land, the real history.

J.R. McNeil

[environmentalhistorian]

...the importance of the natural world, its objective effects on people, and the concrete ways people affect it in turn are not at issue; they are the the very heart of our intellectual project.... ...scholars of environmental history also maintain a powerful commitment to narrative form.  Like all historians, we configure the events of the past into causal sequences - stories - that order and simplify those events to give them new meanings.  We do so because narrative is the chief literary form that tries to find meaning in an overwhelmingly crowded and disordered chronological reality.  When we choose a plot to order our environmental histories...(we are) trying to make sense of nature's place in the human past

William Cronon

[environmentalhistorian]

Introducing John Muir

A month ago, a friend of mine made me aware of a program at our University which provides a series of one-off lectures to the general public. One series is aimed towards the retired community, ent…

[environmentalhistorian]

It is this consciousness of destruction, this...inevitable change that gives...so peculiar a character and such a touching beauty to the solitudes of America.  One sees them with melancholy pleasure; one is in some sort of hurry to admire them.

de Tocqueville

[environmentalhistorian]

Here’s My Number (So Call Me Maybe)

Valentine’s Day catalyzes the contemplation of “love,” in all its varying varieties and definitions. As a PhD student of history you find you self-define by your “love&#822…

[environmentalhistorian]

my mind feels like a million loose strings, threads innumerable reaching out to too many ideas of too many things.

(yours truly)

[environmentalhistorian]

The memories of walks...are hitched on to particular times and places; they spontaneously form a kind of calendar or connecting thread upon which other memories may be strung...The author is but the accidental appendage of the tramp.

Leslie Stephens

[environmentalhistorian]

Her lyrical writing rendered her not a mere translator of the natural world, but an alchemist transmuting the steel of science into the gold of wonder.

Maria Paplova

[environmentalhistorian]

...each encounter with the natural world pleats together all the things you’ve read and heard, and adds to them, making something more of the bird or leaf or landscape in front of you, so that the older you get the more meaningful these things become.

Helen Macdonald

[environmentalhistorian]

Now being introduced to various faces of opportunity, I fear to step forward to shake their hands.

(yours truly)

[environmentalhistorian]

excursion

(noun)

from the Latin excurrere, ‘to run out

Oxford English Dictionary: the act of running out; escape from confinement; progression beyond fixed limits

[environmentalhistorian]

...there is a big difference between looking and seeing.  Without some basic understanding of the story lying behind (its) making...one may look at a landscape and appreciate nothing.

F. Pryor