Clio Wired (History 696)

Cronon illustrates how several historians can write about the same event and arrive at different conclusions. For example some historians wrote about how some residents of the Great Plains persevered despite the ecological disaster of a devastating drought. Others wrote about how man may have caused the problem and were short sighted in choosing to farm in that region to begin with. How can one event spawn two different stories? This seems to support the postmodernists’ claim that if events can be seen from so many perspectives then we can never know which one is accurate if any of them are.

Further complicating matters Cronon points out that the historian’s use of narrative imposes a human way of organizing reality onto the natural world such that an event has a beginning, middle, and end. As an environmental historian he is especially concerned with how different people have lived in and used the natural world and is aware of the mechanics of nature. Nature does not have beginnings, middles, and ends, “things in nature just happen.” Many events are not linear such as the cyclical motion of the planets. After acknowledging these problems Cronin begins to find his way back to firmer ground.

He examines narrative and its use in history and suggests that it is so basic to our cultural beliefs that we automatically impose it on reality. It provides a way to defining were we come from and how we arrived where we are. Narrative, Cronin argues, is, “our best and most compelling tool for searching out meaning in a conflicted and contradictory world.” Postmodernism looses sight of what makes narrative valuable to historians namely that the difference between narrative and a chronology is that good stories make us care about the subject. Thus environmental historians can use narrative to tell how man has interacted with nature in the past and perhaps see lessons for the future.

Cronin’s own story arc began with his own doubts and questions about his own theoretical outlook as raised by the postmodernists. Dissatisfied with their direction he examines the nature and use of narrative and found value there but questions about bias remain. Cronon explained how he circulated versions of his article to colleagues and received several different responses and suggestions. “Each new version of the essay, and each letter and conversation that critiqued it, returned me to where I began: each became a different story about the meaning of stories, a different argument about how narrative does and does not ground itself in nature and the past. The essay, in other words, recapitulated the very problems it set out to solve.” But in this situation he found his answer, or something close to it.

Cronon suggests three ways to help restore confidence in narratives. First, good historians do not knowingly lie. Their stories cannot contravene known facts about the past. Secondly environmental historians’ stories must make ecological sense. They cannot obscure or exclude ecological facts when writing about man and his responses to the natural world, to do so would be another form of lying. Finally Cronin reminds us that scholars are members of a community and must circulate their work as he did with his essay in order to have objective viewpoints to aid him in weeding out errors as well as identify excluded facts. These are not simple objectives and can be frustrating but he points out, “the resulting text is…unquestionably better as a result.”

Having reached what Cronin calls his safe harbor his faith in narrative is secure and his belief in the value of environmental history sound. He encourages other historians to tell stories not only, “about nature but stories about stories about nature.” To him they are capable of great impact and keep us, “morally engaged with the world by showing us how to care about it and its origins in ways we had not done before.” Cronin ends his story by positing that man can not avoid story telling. It is within our nature and so narrative should be used responsibly, consciously and self-critically. He poses questions about man’s relationship to the world and notes that they are starting points for new stories.