Has Environmental History Lost Its Way?

Road kill. Plywood. Gas Masks. Black soil.

These were among the myriad topics covered during the “State of the Field: Environmental History” panel at the 2015 OAH in St. Louis. With the exception of soil, they are not, perhaps, the first subjects that come to mind when we think of environmental history. That is precisely why, when  Lincoln Bramwell  (Chief Historian of the US Forest Service and a member of the conference’s program committee) asked me to organize the panel, I asked  Gary Kroll  (SUNY Plattsburgh),  Janet Ore  (Colorado State), Gerard Fitzgerald  (George Mason), and  Mark Hersey  (Mississippi State) to be panelists. [1]  With the exception of Hersey, none of these scholars claims environmental history as his or her primary field of expertise. Kroll and Fitzgerald have degrees in the history of science and Ore is a historian of vernacular architecture. Nevertheless, all of them  do  environmental history.