Environmental History

Environmental history examines how human societies and the natural world have shaped each other over time. For most of human evolution, our impact on ecosystems was comparable to that of other large mammals. The shift began with the advent of agriculture ten millennia ago, when forests and grasslands were converted to cropland and pasture on an expanding scale. A succession of intellectual movements—from Romanticism and Transcendentalism in the late eighteenth century to the modern conservation and environmental movements—challenged the view of nature as a limitless resource. Figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau first celebrated wilderness for its intrinsic value, while John Muir’s campaigns led to the birth of North American national parks. In the twentieth century, the conservation ethic broadened from protecting species and habitats to tackling global threats including ozone depletion, biodiversity loss and climate change. Today environmental history draws on diverse archives—archaeological remains, tree rings, ice cores, historical documents and more—to reveal how climatic shifts, land use, technological revolutions and policies have combined to produce the world we inhabit.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Severe multi-year drought coincident with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 BC provides a high-resolution tree-ring and stable isotope record from central Anatolia that isolates a continuous three-year dry period. This signal aligns precisely with the fall of the Hittite Empire, demonstrating how compound hydroclimatic extremes can overwhelm long-standing resilience practices in complex societies and trigger political disintegration.

Marine resource abundance drove pre-agricultural population increase in Stone Age Scandinavia uses shell midden deposits and trophic-level production proxies to show that two pulses of elevated marine productivity fueled a nearly four-fold rise in Mesolithic populations. These findings highlight how climate-driven shifts in coastal ecosystems can scaffold major demographic and cultural transformations without the advent of farming.

Environmental History publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in environmental history across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Tree-ring δ18O: The ratio of heavy to light oxygen isotopes in annual tree rings, used to reconstruct past precipitation and temperature variations.

Shell midden: A deposit of discarded mollusc shells and other domestic refuse that records changes in marine resource use over time.

Network modelling: Computational simulation of interlinked nodes (e.g., cities or polities) to assess how failures spread through socio-economic systems.

Multiproxy approach: The integration of several independent biogeochemical, palaeoecological or archaeological indicators to reconstruct past environmental or cultural changes.

Stable isotope analysis: Measurement of non-radioactive isotopes (such as carbon-13 or nitrogen-15) in biological or sedimentary materials to infer climatic, dietary or ecological information.

References

1. Severe multi-year drought coincident with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 bc. Nature (2023).
2. Marine resource abundance drove pre-agricultural population increase in Stone Age Scandinavia. Nature Communications (2020).
3. Are civilizations destined to collapse? Lessons from the Mediterranean Bronze Age. Global Environmental Change (2024).
4. Settlement dynamics, subsistence economies and climate change during the late Holocene at Nunura Bay (Sechura Desert, Peru): A multiproxy approach. PLOS ONE (2023).
5. Agricultural adaptations to mid-late Holocene climate change in western Türkiye. Scientific Reports (2023).