公众史学与环境

Public History and the Environment

环境史在20世纪60年代末70年代初从“宣传倡导”中诞生,是现代环保运动的产物。虽然环境史是一个充满希望的领域,但它仍然被束缚在学术岗位上。仅仅产出优秀的学术书籍和文章并不能确保形成一个读者群,也无法确保决策者、商业领袖或环保主义者谨遵“历史教训”。环境这一主题已在公众史学领域受到了欢迎,《公众史学家》杂志定期刊登环境问题文章,咨询公司、博物馆、档案馆、历史机构和政府历史办公室实施了很多环境项目,但这些活动还没有在公众史学和环境史之间形成一种明确的关系。学院派史学家、历史顾问和机构的史学家的著作已提供了一系列有关环境的看法,但“宣传倡导”的幽灵限制了三个团体的工作,制约了环境史在公共领域的潜力。有必要直面宣传倡导的问题,拓宽历史问题的范围是解决方案的一部分。可以将环境史视作一种思维模式,一种用来研究人类与物质环境之间相互作用的工具。需要找到一个中间地带,在其中设计具有重大历史根源的相关环境政策研究,以便公众了解。环境史三方的综合技能与专门知识可以被拆散使用,以吸引决策者和公众的注意。对学院派史学家和公众史学家来说,环境史研究可能没有共同的根基,但这两个群体有许多共同的兴趣。让环境史成为使公众更好地理解历史价值的一种手段,让丰富的专业知识引领人们理解人类与物质世界的基本关系。

Environmental history—as it emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in America—was born of“advocacy”,and spawned by the modern environmental movement.Environmental history is a field swelling with promise,but it is still tethered too tightly to its academic post.The production of good scholarly books and articles alone does not insure a readership among a variety of intended audiences.Nor does it guarantee that policymakers,business leaders,or environmentalists will act upon the“lessons of history”.The subject of the environment has been welcomed into the public history domain for some years.Articles dealing with environmental questions regularly appear in The Public Historian.Consulting firms,museums,archives,historical agencies,and government historical offices conduct numerous environmental projects.But these activities do not yet add up to a clear relationship between public history and environmental history.The work of academic historians,consultants,and institutional historians already offers an impressive range of perspectives on the environment,but the specter of“advocacy”has imposed limits on the work of all three groups,and has limited the potential of environmental history in the public realm.There is a need to address frontally the question of advocacy,and broadening the range of historical questions asked is a part of the solution.The author is more inclined to treat environmental history as a mode of thinking,a tool for studying human interaction with the physical environment.An intellectual middleground needs to be found in which pertinent environmental policy studies with significant historical roots are devised with the primary intent of reaching the public.The convergent skills and expertise of all three dimensions of environmental history can be forged into pieces meant to attract the attention of policy makers and the public.While environmental history may not have common roots for academic and public historians,both groups share many common interests.Let environmental history be a means to make the value of history better understood to the public.Let the richness of our profession offer leadership in understanding the essential relationship of humans to their physical world.