Abstract

‘The environment’, as it emerged in the post-war years, was a fundamentally future-orientated concept, stimulating arguments about the trajectory that societies were on. As such, environmental arguments also became historical, drawing out ideas of how and when environmental problems emerged. Most canonical environmental texts of the period from the 1940s to the 1980s contain historical arguments. This paper examines those uses of History, arguing that the facts selected and narratives developed largely related to the kind of values authors wanted to espouse, rather than other criteria. This led to the histories of environmental degradation assembled often being very different. The paper addresses a range of environmental thinkers from the late 1940s to 1980s,as well as some of their more strident and influential opponents.