Maybe this question doesn't belong here, as it is not specifically a question about a historical event, so feel free moderators, to remove my post if you deem it necessary. Anyways, are there any environmental historians around here? I just made my first foray into environmental history via the book The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail by W. Jeffrey Bolster (teaches history at the Uni. of New Hampshire) and found it to be both enlightening and refreshing. I haven't always understood the significance of the role that environment plays into the human story, but I am learning that perhaps humans and the environment are inextricably intertwined in a way that's difficult to really academically grasp. Are any of you familiar with Bolster's work? Is this idea of the connection between humanity and nature the fundamental thesis explaining the justification for studying environmental history?
I consider myself foremost an environmental historian, specifically of the American West (even more specifically of the Great Plains). As /u/agentdcf notes in his excellent reply, this particular flavor of environmental history is really quite rich at this point.
When introducing undergraduates to the idea of environmental history, I tend to describe it as the history of how humans have affected the natural world, and, more importantly, how the natural world has in turn affected humans. The key insight of environmental history is that these two things are intimately linked to one another--human societies and cultures do not exist in isolation from nature.
Environmental historians have several different ways of getting at that basic point. In the late 80s two seminal environmental historians, Donald Worster and Alfred Crosby, described three of these approaches:
There are three levels on which the new history proceeds, three clusters of issues it addresses, though not necessarily all in the same project, three sets of questions it seeks to answer, each drawing on a range of outside disciplines and employing special methods of analysis. The first deals with understanding nature itself, as organized and functioning in past times; we include both organic and inorganic aspects of nature, and not least the human organism as it has been a link in nature's food chains, now functioning as womb, now belly, now eater, now eaten, now a host for microorganisms, now a kind of parasite. The second level in this history brings in the socioeconomic realm as it interacts with the environment. Here we are concerned with tools and work, with the social relations that grow out of that work, with the various modes people have devised of producing goods from natural resources. A community organized to catch fish at sea may have very different institutions, gender roles, or seasonal rhythms than one raising sheep in high mountain pastures. Power to make decisions, environmental or other, is seldom distributed through a society with perfect equality, so locating the configurations of power is part of this level of analysis. Then, forming a third level for the historian is that more intangible and uniquely human type of encounter – the purely mental or intellectual, in which perceptions, ethics, laws, myths, and other structures of meaning become part of an individual’s or group’s dialogue with nature. People are constantly engaged in constructing maps of the world around them, in defining what a resource is, in determining which sorts of behavior may be environmentally degrading and ought to be prohibited, and generally in choosing the ends of their lives. Though for the purposes of clarification, we may try to distinguish between these three levels of environmental study, in fact they constitute a single dynamic inquiry in which nature, social and economic organization, thought and desire are treated as one whole. And this whole changes as nature changes, as people change, forming a dialectic that runs through all of the past down to the present.
Sadly I don't know much about maritime environmental history in particular, but I offer you these titles that were mentioned in the William and Mary Quarterly (very positive) review of The Mortal Sea:
Might be a good jumping off point for more reading.
I don't know Bolster's book, but yes, environmental history is excactly as you say, the relationships between humans and "non-human nature." One can break down those relationships into two components, material and cultural. Materially, the relationships between humans and nature include things like land uses, agriculture, forestry, mining, pollution, urbanization, and so on. Culturally, these relationships include ideas of "nature," or, as William Cronon (one of the most important environmental historians) put it, the boundary between "human" and "nature." We 20th and 21st century Westerners have a pretty settled idea of the existence of that boundary; we take for granted that humans are a different category of being than "animals," for example, or that human settlements are fundamentally different kinds of places than "wilderness." However, Cronon argues that this particular boundary is a historical construction, a product of the West in the nineteenth century which (re)invented the idea of the "wilderness." Societies in other times and places have had much different conceptions of the appropriate role between humans and nature, and just what "human" and "nature" are.
Are there particular areas of environmental history you're interested in?