Working Environments: An Ecological Approach to Industrial Health and Safety

摘要

One of the many changes that environmentalism has brought to modern historiography is an emphasis on context and contingency. For historians, ecology offers both an object and a method of study. As a subject, it encompasses not only natural objects—plants, animals, the planet itself—but the many different ways in which human and natural systems interact with each other. As a mode of analysis, or what William Cronon called a "habit of thought," environmental history describes change in terms of that interaction, paying attention to the simultaneous and reciprocal influences that work between the natural and the social orders. In both of its guises, ecology highlights the dynamic interrelatedness of things and undermines our efforts to order them neatly. It focuses our attention on the complex interactions between subjects and contexts, on the systemic effects of obscure relationships and unforeseen events.