Seeing Like a Protester: Nature, Power, and Environmental Struggles

Take a forest, for instance. What are we, as historians, supposed to see in it? For a long time historians have simply been blind towards nature; that forest has been invisible to us. Still, being able to see it has not necessarily meant understanding it. Focused only on market dynamics, extraction and transportation costs, some economic historians have looked at that forest as a "wood quarry", giving a onedimensional image to it and its history. Obviously, shifting from a narrow economic vision to a cultural or post-modernist one has not made the forest more visible. Thus the arrival of environmental history on the historiographical scene has represented a unique chance to see and understand that forest. Indeed, the question could be: what should an environmental historian see in that forest? The answer should be easy--nature, of course. But things are more complicated than this. What is nature? What are its relationships with economy, culture, and society? In which ways have they worked historically? These questions remain. In this article I argue that we can better see and understand the environment if we look at it through the lens of conflict. I will show that adopting a conflict-based approach can enlighten nature and society, thus exposing both. Speaking about social ecology, Ramachandra Guha stated that he saw it essentially as "a problem focus, albeit with important theoretical and methodological implications." I have a similar idea of a conflict-based approach to environmental history. In other words, I do not claim to offer here a new methodology; social and environmental historians, and even political ecologists, have been working on conflicts for a long time.