Beyond Stories: Geospatial Influences on the Practice of Environmental History

Abstract

Scholars using quantitative and spatial methods have revisited some of the foundational texts in environmental history over the past decade, demonstrating that new technologies permit scholars to revisit some of the pivotal interpretative questions that helped to establish the field. This essay investigates the new opportunities as well as the perils that historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) present for environmental historians, and examines the ways in which scholars have crafted and redirected historical questions using new techniques in the spatial humanities. This essay explores the impact of scientific knowledge, and more specifically, HGIS, on reshaping our ideas about historical contingency and the use of evidence in environmental history, focusing on the ways data sets and digital technologies now permit a dramatically different approach to historical investigations. Environmental historians have been using HGIS in order to assess the long-term effects of agricultural policy and land use change on a range of landscapes, as well as to survey urban and marine regions with an eye to addressing new questions about development and sustainability. This essay evaluates the role of spatial studies in environmental history, examining the new types of data that recent technological developments have made usable for scholars in the humanities.