Introduction: Telling Environmental Histories

Abstract

The introduction to this book considers what new insights can be gained by bringing together the approaches of oral and environmental history. Oral history brings attention to memory and the stories people tell about the environments they move into and across. The insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active more-than-human world shapes experiences and people. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shape human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience are moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour. The chapter includes a discussion of the historiography around oral and environmental history in India, Australia, the UK and North America.