Donald Worster > Quotes

“We trust ourselves, far more than our ancestors did… The root of our predicament lies in the simple fact that, though we remain a flawed and unstable species, plagued now as in the past by a thousand weaknesses, we have insisted on both unlimited freedom and unlimited power. It would now seem clear that, if we want to stop the devastation of the earth, the growing threats to our food, water, air, and fellow creatures, we must find some way to limit both.”
― Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West

“All those “why” questions are rooted in culture, which is to say, in ethical beliefs. I emphasize the point not to denigrate the achievements of scientists, but only to remind that natural science cannot by itself fathom the sources of the crisis it has identified, for the sources lie not in the nature that scientists study but in the human nature and, especially, in the human culture that historians and other humanists have made their study.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“The marketplace is an institution that teaches self-advancement, private acquisition, and the domination of nature. Its way of thinking is incompatible with the round river. Ecological harmony is a nonmarket value that takes a collective will to achieve.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“the old broad-gauged, integrative “natural history” began to fragment into specializations. History increasingly began an archival pursuit, carried on by urban scholars; there was less and less dirt on it. Recently, however, that drift toward an unnatural history has run up against a few hard facts: dwindling energy supplies, population pressures on available food, the limits and costs of technology. A growing number of scholars, consequently, have begun to talk about something called “environmental history” … the new history will re-create, though in a more sophisticated form, the old parson-naturalists synthesis. It will, that is, seek to combine once again natural science and history … into a major intellectual enterprise that will alter considerably our understanding of historical processes. What the inquiry involves … is the development of an ecological perspective on history.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“Too often science seems oblivious to the fact that human beings have been interacting with nature over a long period of time ... and that what we mean by nature is, to some extent, a product of that history.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“So we are making a pathway across the levee that separates nature from culture, science from history, matter from mind.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“historians expect scientists to acknowledge that their ideas of nature, even their most complex scientific ideas, are the products of the cultures in which they live. Ideas of nature have a history, and their history is linked inextricably to the history of culture, whether economic, aesthetic, or whatever. We cannot isolate the study of our views of nature into one division called “science” and into other divisions called literature, the arts, religion, or philosophy, for they all float along together in a common flow of ideas and perceptions.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“A human life, like any mountain trail, winds and twists through a very complicated, ever-changing landscape, taking unexpected turns and ending up in unexpected places. The lay of the land, the physical or natural environment, has some influence over the path one chooses to take -- going around rather than over boulders, say, or along the banks of a stream rather than through a tangled wood. Likewise in the course of an individual life, nature helps give shape to the direction a man or woman takes and determines how his or her life unfolds. So also does one's inner self, the drives and emotions that one inherits from ancestors far back in evolutionary time, determine the route. But the trail of any one's life is also shaped by the ideas floating around in the cultural air one breathes. All those influences make it impossible to explain easily why a person's life follows this path rather than another.”
― Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

“Giving all due respect to the present generation of scientists who have worked hard to give us the most reliable account of nature they can, historians nonetheless find the scientific ideas of other eras intrinsically interesting, often as interesting as those of our own day, and for all we know, they are valid in their own way.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“We can no more get out of a relationship with nature than we can get out of history.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“Every science that the environmental historian approaches presents him or her with a language, and that language is filled, like any of the world’s languages, with metaphors, figures of speech, hidden structures, even world-views — in short, it is filled with culture. The environmental historian wants to learn that language … and use it to improve his understanding of the human past. But as a historian, trained in the modes of thought common to the humanities, where language itself is an important object of analysis, he must insist that the words of the scientists not go unexamined. They are themselves worthy of attention as expressions of culture.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“and harvesting”
― Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

“Historians are trained to look for personal biography in every idea, no matter how scientifically objective it is supposed to be, and to look for the influence of contemporary opinion on the rise and fall of scientific theories.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination