Rain is a blessing when it falls gently on parched fields, turning the earth green, causing the birds to sing.

We may be entering a new phase of history, a time when we begin to rediscover . . . the traditional teaching that power must entail restraint and responsibility, the ancient awareness that we are interdependent with all of nature and that our sense of community must take in the whole of creation.

Environmental historians . . . insist that we have got to go . . . down to the earth itself as an agent and presence in history. Here we will discover even more fundamental forces at work over time. And to appreciate those forces we must now and then get out of parliamentary chambers, out of birthing rooms and factories, get out of doors altogether, and ramble into fields, woods, and the open air. It is time we bought a good set of walking shoes, and we cannot avoid getting some mud on them.

There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.

Rain is a blessing when it falls gently on parched fields, turning the earth green, causing the birds to sing.

Environmental history was . . . born out of a moral purpose, with strong political commitments behind it, but also became, as it matured, a scholarly enterprise that had neither any simple, nor any single, moral or political agenda to promote. Its principal goal became one of deepening our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time and, conversely, how they have affected that environment and with what results.

Human domination over nature is quite simply an illusion, a passing dream by a naive species. It is an illusion that has cost us much, ensnared us in our own designs, given us a few boasts to make about our courage and genius, but all the same it is an illusion.