Donald Worster Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Donald E. Worster is a professor of U.S. History and Environmentalism (among other duties and honorary positions) at Kansas University, which is located in the region where he was born. His work has primarily focused on the link between the economic development of the western and southern United States, changes in the physical environment, and the implications arising from this interaction. His general conclusion has been that economic development has resulted in a set of enormous and significant changes in the environment and in the relation between it and the people who determine its uses. The management of water resources in the expansion of American interests into the western portion of the continent led to, among other things, transfer of control over those resources to political and economic elites who retain control into the modern world. As the public sector took over the role of controlling and manipulating the water resources of the West, the seat of American power shifted from the original colony regions to imperially dominated and environmentally transformed virgin lands, from which indigenous peoples were removed. This method of imperial expansion is essentially similar to that previously followed by European powers and has been replicated in the overseas possessions brought into American possession. Ideologically, therefore, the basis of the American state and the wealth that it has brought to its people is based on the presumed right to seize and transform the physical land and the creatures that depend on it.

Ownership and control over the resources of the environment has been customarily accompanied by the professed belief that the land is a resource to be exploited to its maximum economic value with little, if any, consideration for the sustainability of that form of use. This was seen in the Dust Bowl tragedy of the 1930s, when inappropriate use of fertilizers and other chemicals led to the destruction of farmable land and caused widespread hunger and forcible migration. Worster’s argument is that insufficient lessons have been learned from the past and that there are real dangers of similar events being repeated in the future. This method of viewing history, which is typically deployed by Professor Worster, helps to highlight lessons for the present and the future.

The models of ecology used by Worster in his work have been faulted by critics, who point to their somewhat over-simplistic qualities. Specifically, the complex ecological dynamics of most ecosystems over time and the complex interactions and responses between human and non-human systems make the straight-forward narratives of books like his Dust Bowl less compelling in light of contemporary disequilibrium ecological theory. Nevertheless, Worster has blazed a trail for work in the humanities, uniting history and ecology in a new way.

Bibliography:

Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford University Press, 1992);
Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, (Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 2004).