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William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review. Fall 1993, 1-22.

Attempting to establish a link between environmental history and contemporary debates surrounding the environmental movement, William Cronon explores a wide range of issues that any student of the past can appreciate.  Cronon begins his essay by discussing the various audiences of environmental history, arguing that each group presents an unique set of risks and opportunities that influence the usefulness of this body of scholarship.  Among these diverse audiences are fellow historians, policymakers, the general public, and the earth itself.  Cronon ends his examination of multiple audiences with what he admits is an ambiguous conclusion, stating that competing needs of different groups can lead environmental historians to either become academically narrow or so pragmatic that they forget how to do good history.  Arguing that how we discover what we know is equally important to what we know, Cronon leaves the reader with four articles of faith that guide his work.  Included in these “historical habits of thought” are the underlying assumptions that a dialogue exists between humans and nature and that all human history has a natural context;  that neither nature or culture is static;  that all environmental knowledge, including that of environmental historians, is culturally constructed and historically contingent; and finally that due to the fact that historians view the past as a story to be told rather than a problem to be solved historical wisdom usually comes in the form of a parable.  Cronon ends his essay by asserting that asking the question, "what is the story?," reminds us of the dynamic relationship between nature and humans and illustrates that people cannot exist outside of nature (there can only be people thinking the are outside of nature) and in turn there cannot be a nature separate from humanity.[J. Dusselier].