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Environmental historians base their understanding of human and nature relations primarily on historical methodology, but often borrow from the work of scientists and scholars in fields outside of history. As a result, many scholarly contributions pertinant to environmental history are written by scholars who typically would not identify themselves as historians.


HISTORY OF THE FIELD


Applying human innovations for the purpose of altering human attitudes on the environment could be said to have begun with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau with their essays on the subject. These created sentiment that directly impacted later generations.
John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt can be considered in the subsequent generation of environmentalists.

The first inventions and innovations that were originated with the specific intention of changing the human conception of humanity in relationship to the environment were the work of Arthur C. Pillsbury . Pillsbury built the first lapse-time camera to show the motion of plants in 1912 - 1913 and then filed the first lapse-time movie and showed it to the Superintendent and others in charge of Yosemite in 1912 to raise consciousness and ensure the preservation of the wild flowers then becoming extinct. In 1927 Pillsbury invented the first microscopic motion picture camera, again to enlarge the scope of human vision. His later inventions continued this work. Pillsbury's work is overlooked because he focused on creating visuals instead of text. With the growing coonsciousness of the greater impact of visuals this is now changing.

Another major contributor to the field was Aldo Leopold with his various writings while teaching at the University Of Wisconsin . '' A Sand County Almanac '' is an excellent source, which helps the reader to understand what it is that an enivronmentalist is. Not to be mistaken for the modern environmental movement Leopold was clearly a conservationalist.

The modern field emerged in the early 1970s in conjunction with the rise of environmentalism as a social movement in the United States and the world. A scholarly organization emerged out of a breakfast session at the (year) American Historical Association meeting (or was an Organization of American Historians?). That organization, the American Society for Environmental History began to publish a newsletter, ''ASEH News'' and also a scholarly journal. The journal first entitled ''Environmental Review'' was developed to support scholars interested in the study of human/nature interactions. The journal went through several title changes, including ''Environmental History Review'', and is currently published under the title ''Environmental History''.


PRECEDENTS IN THE FIELD