International Social Science Journal (Chinese Edition)

No.2, 2022

Environmental history: origins, levels and trends

(Abstract)

Donald Worster

As a new field of history, Environmental History emerged in the mid 1970s. It focuses on the interactions between human and nature, changes in our ways of thinking about the past, and provides new issues, objects for research, approaches and data. There are three levels in its investigations - Nature, Cultures, and the integration of both. In recent years, such topics as integration between environmental history and sciences, climate change, infectious disceases, water, cities, environmental justice, species, gender, internationalisation of the discipline are attracting wide-spread attention.