A death-defying attempt to articulate a coherent definition of environmental history

If the environment is everything from the microparticle to the universe, then all history, it may be argued, is collapsible to environmental history, which in turn ceases to be distinguishable from history as such. Our cognitive maps of the world are continually being produced and revised, and their production is closely tied up with our systems of politics and economics and the practices associated with those systems. So what we study when we study the human-nature relationship is a set of shadows and distorted images-a moving target. The objects of our study, social actors, are armed with their own socially constructed cognitive maps, which we, armed with our own maps and tools, try to understand.