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Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge
Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of “ecological” ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California’s Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual, Inescapable Ecologies brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world.
348 pages, Paperback
First published December 6, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 26, 2022
Read for class. A really fascinating book that was beautifully written and assembled disparate intellectual themes in a surprisingly elegant way. A fascinating coalescence of environmental history, the history of germ theory, medical and life sciences, and the history of colonialism and race.
A small tangent: I wrote a class paper on a Victorian science periodical called the English Mechanic, and one frequent contributor was an architect named Edward Lacy Garbett, who was a biblical literalist but also a communist advocating for class warfare and the abolition of the bourgeoisie. I was curious how contributors to the periodical thought about British empire, so I was particularly interested in Garbett’s description of his time spent in the British West Indies, likely Jamaica, where he perfectly exhibited the type of ideology that Nash explores in this book. He spoke of European bodies being unable to endure the tropical climates of Jamaica, and only able to work at higher elevations there, unlike Black plantation workers who were able to withstand the climate and endure hard plantation labour.
Nash, in this book, develops a thesis about how entangled notions of racial difference were in the development of both environmental sciences and public health studies:
“[Medical geographers] sought to map the spatial distribution of disease in the same way that Humboldt had mapped the distribution of plants. Like their mentor, medical geographers looked for correlations between the occurrence of disease and measured characteristics of the landscape. Practitioners held out the hope that with the collection of enough data—temperature, barometric pressure, rainfall, and so on— they would be able to predict the response of human bodies to diverse environmental conditions.
At root, the primary concern of nineteenth-century medical geography lay in preserving the health of the white race in unfamiliar lands. Behind the desire to uncover the relationship between bodies and landscape lay the belief that the success of Europeans had always hinged, to some undetermined extent, on climate and, moreover, that climate might ultimately set limits on their continuing colonial ambitions. Nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans understood race in multiple and contradictory ways—as variously a sign of biology, nationality, and culture. A concept anchored in incoherence, race necessarily eluded precise definition. Yet it was quite clear to contemporaries that race was associated in some way with place. Whites came from Europe, blacks from Africa. The yellow race originated in Asia, the red in America. Race always had a geographic component, and thus it is hardly surprising that ideas of race played a central role in nineteenth-century medical geography. After all, the question that most interested European medical geographers was whether those of northern European descent (i.e., whites) could survive and prosper in climates that they associated with “other” races.”
“Race, class, and environmental contamination are thus not independent “variables” for which researchers can statistically control. To the contrary, histories of segregation and the differing quality of local environments, along with any relevant shared genetic traits, have combined to help produce “race” as a meaningful category in epidemiologic research. Material differences in the environments that people occupy have helped to produce physical differences in specific bodies (which also happened to be racialized): depressed cholinesterase, sterility, chronic respiratory problems, perhaps even cancer. In the case of pesticides, it is not hard to see how environmental and social history may be critical factors in the production of disease. Because people do not live their lives in laboratories, the predisposition to disease is never solely a property of the individual; it is also the outcome of a person’s relationship to a preexist- ing social structure and to a series of material environments. But when epidemiologists control for “race,” the environmental experience of racialized populations is implicitly excluded from their analysis. Such reasoning, though seemingly nonracist to the authors of the DBCP study, nonetheless had the effect of again positioning Mexicans and Mexican Americans as poorly disciplined and uniquely susceptible bodies. In this way, epidemiologic research has often reproduced a long-standing racial logic that their authors otherwise sought to avoid.”
I think Nash makes a compelling case that a big part of medical history was attempting to divorce the human body from the rest of the environment, individualize it, rendering it an object separable from the rich set of collective relations within which it is inevitably implicated:
“The ability to produce health now lay with the doctor on the one hand and the individual on the other—an individual who was conceptualized as an autonomous and effective actor who was now urged to rid her house of flies, wash her hands, eat right, and exercise regularly. Changes in the nonhuman environment were no longer something with which doctors or patients need concern themselves. Environmental concerns could thus be left to others—engineers, entomologists, hydrologists, agronomists. The modern construction of the body as a discrete and bounded entity encouraged the isolation of medical from environmental concerns and enabled the further specialization of professionals.”
Will move towards closing this with an interesting excerpt that references Michelle Murphy who I think has been one of the most helpful thinkers for me when trying to bridge environmental studies to other fields like colonialism, labour organizing, and medicine. (Will be returning to this Nash text to work some things out.)
“To assert a cancer “cluster” in the late twentieth century was to articulate an understanding of the relationship between bodies and environments, humans and nature, that insisted on the relevance of local ecologies. Those who pushed for the recognition and investigation of clusters assumed that local environments had an ongoing effect on health that biomedical science too often failed to reveal and that government institutions were unwilling to fully investigate. They asserted the relevance of sick bodies to understanding the larger environment and the changes it was under- going. Whether they knew it or not, they were heirs of both Thomas Logan and Rachel Carson. Their opponents, meanwhile, marshaled the modern notion of an independent and self-contained body, insisting, among other things, that a lifetime of pesticide exposures had had no effect on their physical selves. As Michelle Murphy has argued, at any one time, there may exist “different ways of being a body in the world.””
Nash quotes Henri Lefebvre in passing that I think is a useful way to close out some of my thoughts here: “Abstract space is not homogenous; it simply has homogeneity as its goal.” Harding and Haraway are in the endnotes and bibliography, but don’t show up directly in Nash’s text. But I think re-emphasizing their preoccupations with the situated nature of knowledge is a useful way for better understanding relations between environmental and medical sciences and the social relations they sustain or challenge.
A small tangent: I wrote a class paper on a Victorian science periodical called the English Mechanic, and one frequent contributor was an architect named Edward Lacy Garbett, who was a biblical literalist but also a communist advocating for class warfare and the abolition of the bourgeoisie. I was curious how contributors to the periodical thought about British empire, so I was particularly interested in Garbett’s description of his time spent in the British West Indies, likely Jamaica, where he perfectly exhibited the type of ideology that Nash explores in this book. He spoke of European bodies being unable to endure the tropical climates of Jamaica, and only able to work at higher elevations there, unlike Black plantation workers who were able to withstand the climate and endure hard plantation labour.
Nash, in this book, develops a thesis about how entangled notions of racial difference were in the development of both environmental sciences and public health studies:
“[Medical geographers] sought to map the spatial distribution of disease in the same way that Humboldt had mapped the distribution of plants. Like their mentor, medical geographers looked for correlations between the occurrence of disease and measured characteristics of the landscape. Practitioners held out the hope that with the collection of enough data—temperature, barometric pressure, rainfall, and so on— they would be able to predict the response of human bodies to diverse environmental conditions.
At root, the primary concern of nineteenth-century medical geography lay in preserving the health of the white race in unfamiliar lands. Behind the desire to uncover the relationship between bodies and landscape lay the belief that the success of Europeans had always hinged, to some undetermined extent, on climate and, moreover, that climate might ultimately set limits on their continuing colonial ambitions. Nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans understood race in multiple and contradictory ways—as variously a sign of biology, nationality, and culture. A concept anchored in incoherence, race necessarily eluded precise definition. Yet it was quite clear to contemporaries that race was associated in some way with place. Whites came from Europe, blacks from Africa. The yellow race originated in Asia, the red in America. Race always had a geographic component, and thus it is hardly surprising that ideas of race played a central role in nineteenth-century medical geography. After all, the question that most interested European medical geographers was whether those of northern European descent (i.e., whites) could survive and prosper in climates that they associated with “other” races.”
“Race, class, and environmental contamination are thus not independent “variables” for which researchers can statistically control. To the contrary, histories of segregation and the differing quality of local environments, along with any relevant shared genetic traits, have combined to help produce “race” as a meaningful category in epidemiologic research. Material differences in the environments that people occupy have helped to produce physical differences in specific bodies (which also happened to be racialized): depressed cholinesterase, sterility, chronic respiratory problems, perhaps even cancer. In the case of pesticides, it is not hard to see how environmental and social history may be critical factors in the production of disease. Because people do not live their lives in laboratories, the predisposition to disease is never solely a property of the individual; it is also the outcome of a person’s relationship to a preexist- ing social structure and to a series of material environments. But when epidemiologists control for “race,” the environmental experience of racialized populations is implicitly excluded from their analysis. Such reasoning, though seemingly nonracist to the authors of the DBCP study, nonetheless had the effect of again positioning Mexicans and Mexican Americans as poorly disciplined and uniquely susceptible bodies. In this way, epidemiologic research has often reproduced a long-standing racial logic that their authors otherwise sought to avoid.”
I think Nash makes a compelling case that a big part of medical history was attempting to divorce the human body from the rest of the environment, individualize it, rendering it an object separable from the rich set of collective relations within which it is inevitably implicated:
“The ability to produce health now lay with the doctor on the one hand and the individual on the other—an individual who was conceptualized as an autonomous and effective actor who was now urged to rid her house of flies, wash her hands, eat right, and exercise regularly. Changes in the nonhuman environment were no longer something with which doctors or patients need concern themselves. Environmental concerns could thus be left to others—engineers, entomologists, hydrologists, agronomists. The modern construction of the body as a discrete and bounded entity encouraged the isolation of medical from environmental concerns and enabled the further specialization of professionals.”
Will move towards closing this with an interesting excerpt that references Michelle Murphy who I think has been one of the most helpful thinkers for me when trying to bridge environmental studies to other fields like colonialism, labour organizing, and medicine. (Will be returning to this Nash text to work some things out.)
“To assert a cancer “cluster” in the late twentieth century was to articulate an understanding of the relationship between bodies and environments, humans and nature, that insisted on the relevance of local ecologies. Those who pushed for the recognition and investigation of clusters assumed that local environments had an ongoing effect on health that biomedical science too often failed to reveal and that government institutions were unwilling to fully investigate. They asserted the relevance of sick bodies to understanding the larger environment and the changes it was under- going. Whether they knew it or not, they were heirs of both Thomas Logan and Rachel Carson. Their opponents, meanwhile, marshaled the modern notion of an independent and self-contained body, insisting, among other things, that a lifetime of pesticide exposures had had no effect on their physical selves. As Michelle Murphy has argued, at any one time, there may exist “different ways of being a body in the world.””
Nash quotes Henri Lefebvre in passing that I think is a useful way to close out some of my thoughts here: “Abstract space is not homogenous; it simply has homogeneity as its goal.” Harding and Haraway are in the endnotes and bibliography, but don’t show up directly in Nash’s text. But I think re-emphasizing their preoccupations with the situated nature of knowledge is a useful way for better understanding relations between environmental and medical sciences and the social relations they sustain or challenge.
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October 22, 2024I read this for school; I enjoyed it, but I'm disappointed that, in the authors own words, this book is only one of two that have been written about the history of the overlap of bodily health and environment. I'm going to be reading the other, and while I'm looking forward to it, I'm also interested in seeing how they hold up against one another. Nash relies on repetition to drive home her points in a nearly irritating way, constantly reusing the same concepts and vocabulary. I honestly think that as informative as this book was, it did not have to be 215 pages. I believe she could have cut it down significantly and still have gotten all her arguments sufficiently across-- which is a compliment!
September 30, 2025
Good justification for place-based history
July 3, 2020
I used this book as a required text for my History of Medical Science course (focusing on epidemic diseases). I do not yet know whether my students found it to be as rich or readable as I did, but we have had some excellent class discussions about how and why the triumphs of bacteriology and pharmacology have underwritten overconfidence in the explanatory powers of reductionist science, to the detriment of society's understanding of and ability to redress environmental harms caused by human and industrial practices.
January 30, 2011
Wonderful analysis comparing people's perceptions on the link between people's health & their environment through time. Early medicine out West heavily linked disease w/ a person's surroundings, including temperature, elevation, precipitation, winds, & moisture. People were very in tune w/ their bodies & used their health as a proxy for the health of their environment, and vice versa. As Germ Theory arose, doctors depended much more on bacteria & pathogens, and labelled the older methods as scientific. Now, as we are being commonly & chronically poisoned by our environment, via the foods we eat, the contaminants in our air, pollutants in our water, whatever, we realize once again that our health is intricately connected to our relationship w/ the environment around us.
What I did not like was that the chapters tended to repeat concepts throughout, and points were restated too frequently. The book definitely could have been organized better to keep similar topics in the same location. Also, although the focus on California & specifically the Central Valley was useful, and definitely well done, a broader summary of the U.S. as a whole would have been nice.
My favorite quote was at the very end: "I am not advocating a return to medical topography or the miasma theory, yet it is worth questioning why so much of contemporary biomedicine is divorced from any study of the large environment and why individual solutions to disease such as improving one's diet are quickly institutionalized while other, more difficult social and environmental questions are not even discussed.
"Ultimately we cannot escape the environments in which we live, but it should be possible to foster a science & regulatory structure that strives to make visible the density of that connection." p. 214.
What I did not like was that the chapters tended to repeat concepts throughout, and points were restated too frequently. The book definitely could have been organized better to keep similar topics in the same location. Also, although the focus on California & specifically the Central Valley was useful, and definitely well done, a broader summary of the U.S. as a whole would have been nice.
My favorite quote was at the very end: "I am not advocating a return to medical topography or the miasma theory, yet it is worth questioning why so much of contemporary biomedicine is divorced from any study of the large environment and why individual solutions to disease such as improving one's diet are quickly institutionalized while other, more difficult social and environmental questions are not even discussed.
"Ultimately we cannot escape the environments in which we live, but it should be possible to foster a science & regulatory structure that strives to make visible the density of that connection." p. 214.
February 24, 2025
More just straight research than analysis but useful nonetheless
May 23, 2016
Overall, this was a very interesting read. Though at times the information could be a bit dull, I found that reading this book was definitely a learning experience, and it showed a new perspective of health that I hadn't thought about before. I was definitely intrigued by her focus on types of knowledge and how that knowledge was formed. I liked her telling of medicine in the 19th century as well as the health of farm workers during 1940ish-1980ish. I thought that this combination, though not one with an immediate connection, went very well together to make her point.
November 26, 2009
this is the most incredible book i've read in years and i'm sorry i had to rush through it and read it in a 24 hour span. this book is not only invaluable to historians, but policy makers as well. seriously, if you know anybody who is involved in environmental politics and policy, make them read this book.
April 22, 2013
An important read, particularly given its insights on how the environment shapes the human body even as humans seek to shape and exploit the environment.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews