At its birth, American environmental history had strong connections with intellectual history. Books such as Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind and Donald Worster's Nature's Economy made the rise of preservationist and ecological thinking central to the field's early identity. But during the last several decades, as intellectual historians have engaged in their own soul-searching, American environmental historians retreated from engagement with intellectual history in favor of a “cultural turn.” In some ways, this retreat was surprising, because environmental historians became more circumspect about the very approaches that intellectual historians were questioning in their own scholarly practices: whether we could generalize from elite sources, disengage ideas from their social or cultural contexts, separate out a distinct intellectual realm and its exemplary intellects from histories of popular knowledge, or locate such a thing as an “American mind.” The second generation of American environmental historians continued to study environmental ideas, of course, but with less willingness to venerate canonical environmental thinkers and more interest in how American ideas of nature were socially and culturally constructed. As environmental historians became more critical of environmentalist ideas—finding in them signs of class position, racial formation, consumer status, and uncritical borrowings from science—we tended to become suspicious of the realm of ideas in general. Despite these parallels within our fields, the moment compelled environmental historians to turn away from intellectual history. One sad result is that environmental historians do not seem to have stayed abreast of intellectual historiography. Another, if my cursory review of this journal's recent tables of contents is any indication, is that environmental topics seem peripheral to the field of intellectual history. For the sake of both fields, it's time to restore the fragmented habitats that have isolated our subdisciplines.

中文翻译：

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让知识分子回到环境史

美国环境史在其诞生之初就与思想史有着密切的联系。罗德里克·纳什的书荒野与美国思想和唐纳德·沃斯特的自然经济使保护主义和生态思想的兴起成为该领域早期身份的核心。但是在过去的几十年里，随着知识史学家开始进行他们自己的反省，美国环境史学家放弃了对知识史的参与，转而支持“文化转向”。在某些方面，这种撤退是令人惊讶的，因为环境历史学家对知识史学家在他们自己的学术实践中质疑的方法变得更加谨慎：我们是否可以从精英资源中进行概括，将思想从他们的社会或文化背景中分离出来，分离出一个独特的知识领域及其从大众知识史中的模范知识，或定位“美国思想”之类的东西。” 当然，第二代美国环境史学家继续研究环境思想，但他们不太愿意崇敬经典的环境思想家，而对美国的自然思想是如何在社会和文化上构建的更感兴趣。随着环境历史学家越来越批评环境伊斯特观念——在它们中发现阶级地位、种族形成、消费者地位和不加批判地从科学中借用的迹象——我们倾向于对一般观念领域产生怀疑。尽管在我们的领域中存在这些相似之处，但这一时刻迫使环境历史学家远离思想史。一个可悲的结果是，环境史学家似乎没有跟上思想史学的步伐。另一个，如果我对这本期刊最近的目录的粗略回顾有任何迹象的话，那就是环境主题似乎与思想史领域无关。为了这两个领域，是时候恢复那些孤立我们的子学科的支离破碎的栖息地了。