In the Joint Effort of Life: Thinking as an Environmental Historian

Abstract

The essay argues for the importance of environmental history as a critique of the currently dominant ways of thinking and acting towards the extra-human world. It is argued that, under the religious and philosophical influence of Judeo-Christianism, Western civilization has built their cultural identity around the idea of creation, especially from the European Renaissance onwards. Transposed from the divine to the sublunary realm, this “creationism” portrays the world as a unilateral product of human action – since it is the only creature in the animal kingdom driven by a conscious reason. Environmental historians, on the other hand, start out from a decentralized conception of agency to defend the principle that humans participate rather than create; the creativity lies in the encounters and relationships they establish and not in humans themselves. In other words, environmental historians assume a humanity-nature continuum and ask themselves what conditions, factors and processes are responsible for the emergence of systems of thought rooted in the “othering” of non-humans. To illustrate this point, it is briefly examined the historical process of replacing the indigenous population, native to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, by hybrid neo-European populations from 1500 onwards.