History Professor Doug Sackman’s classes are distinctly concerned with our surroundings. His courses include the History of the West and Pacific Northwest, Frontiers of Native America, American Environmental History, and a freshman seminar called Ecotopia. Professor Sackman specializes in Environmental History, a discipline that examines how humans have changed and been shaped by their environment over time. Sackman is most interested in the American West, the environment he was born and raised in.
So far he has published two books, Orange Empire and Wild Men, and edited A Companion to American Environmental History. He is currently working on an overview of Environmental History.
What have you been up to lately?
I recently went to Oakland for the Western History Association Conference, one of the professional associations I am a part of. I’m also going to be the co-chair of the upcoming program for the conference in Tuscon in 2015. I’m excited about that; the theme we came up with is “Vital Signs: Earth Power Lives.” The president wanted to emphasize human relations to the environment as a theme for the conference.
The whole sub-field of Environmental History had from the beginning been associated with the American West when it first began in the seventies. Since then, environmental history has been global, planetary, and is flourishing in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. We thought it was time to bring that back home, so I got to toy around with different ways of expressing that.
Vital Signs are those critical measures of the health of the person but also the community, and by bringing in Power and Lives, we want to refer us back to the politics of how we live in the American West and looking forward at the coming challenges of climate change, global warming and so forth and looking back at the different ways people have experienced nature in their lives.
What is Environmental History and how did you get interested in it?
Well, I sort of accidentally got into graduate school doing history. I wanted to go to graduate school, I know that. I was a political science major as a undergraduate student, and when I decided to go to graduate school I didn’t know what to focus on.
I spent a year working an unglamorous job at the Willamette Weekly, which is the weekly newspaper in Portland, doing layout of the classified section and what we called the “smut section,” and then I also worked for a family-run small publishers and education that did a lot of ESL teaching. When I was investigating graduate schools in political science I found out how much voting behavior I would have to track, I started looking at interdisciplinary programs. I ended up going towards a Critical Theory and Cultural Studies program at U.C. Irvine that you connected with an established discipline, and I looked at the list and realized, oh yeah, history, I like history.
As for Environmental History, I have always been interested in the politics of the environment. It was one of the things that I incorporated into my senior project at Reed College. But I didn’t know that there was a field of Environmental History and I was exposed to that my first semester reading a [Metropolis] by William Cronin. I thought, oh, wow, there’s this established field, I can do what I want to do.
Can you tell me about the books that you have published so far?
Well, it was great fun turning a very thick dissertation into a less thick but still thick book, my first one, Orange Empire. The second book [Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America] I wrote was very different, instead of being a contribution to academic scholarship and written for other historians as well as a general public. It was part of a series called “New Narratives in American History”, that explicitly was about taking away the academic infrastructure of the writing and embedding issues that historians think are important into a narrative. So I went back to an issue I was interested in from a symbolic anthropology class in my undergraduate days when I looked at Yurok Indians in Northern California and their relationship to salmon. I thought this series would be a good time to look at the anthropologist Kroeber and his relationship to California Indians. What I chose to do was re-do his relationship with the most famous California Indian, which was Ishi. He emerges out of the forest in 1911 and becomes a touchstone of an earlier primitive past they called him uncorrupted. So I looked at Kroeber and Ishi’s relationship for a story to unfold of Indian-white relations but also the ambivalences about modernity for Americans and its rapidly modernizing, urbanizing and industrializing world in the twentieth-century. Ishi ends up going to live in the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco. So that was the second book I got to write, and it emphasized the more narrative elements, it had to be more implicit as I developed the story.
What’s the deal with your middle name (Cazaux)?
It’s French, it’s pronounced Ca-zouh and I thought it would look cool in print. It’s my mom’s maiden name so she was very happy about that.
Are you planning anything else?
I was asked to go to a big account and sweeping history of the American West. I’m just at the initial stages but I’m kind of excited, it is going to be called American Panorama: Rediscovering the American West.
In the ’80s and ’90s, New Western History emerged which was a revisionist history that criticized the framework that Frederick Jackson Turner had set up for the field, and they expanded it greatly to pay more attention to the diverse peoples of the West and the environment among other things. That work inspired a lot of great new work in history and part of my job in this new work is to bring a lot of that together into an overall narrative of history in the West. I’m using this idea of a panorama, this art form, as representing landscape and line as a way to get into the story, and into the breadth of the landscape but also the breadth and variety of the peoples of the West.
How do you deal with writing about things that are gone? How do approach it practically and what you feel your role is in resurrecting these people and landscapes that are no longer there?
As historians we always have to deal with things that are past, gone and disappeared. We have to use these traces, the things left behind, things stored in archives, things that people have recorded and published.
It is a challenge to put it all together in a way that lives again. This was actually a topic in the book about Ishi, about how a man who lived and in death great concern was shown for him, but it took a hundred years to get his brain back and united with his body in burial. But I think there is something similar going on in a historian’s path to take something that is left and perhaps not otherwise remembered and bring it back. And by remembering it you are putting the parts back together that have been dismembered, scattered, forgotten.
Looking ahead, how do you think our times will be looked at in history?
Part of me sees a lot of things that we are dealing with today as an acceleration of things being dealt with at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century—with anxieties about disconnection with the land and social dislocations going on as well. I think we are seeing a lot of the same phenomena, technology has accelerated those in various ways but you see the pushback as well, the search for reconnecting, refinding new ways of feeling and expressing community. All of those issues are going on in our politics too, the desire to Occupy Wall Street and assert the values of people rather than profits. Also, we’re in a period where the environmental writings are on the wall with the birth of the 7 billionth person; it’s not just a matter of the number of people, but how do we live together in a place of limited resources. I think that the last hundred years have seen a lot of rehearsals of these issues but I think we’re going to be facing them in a much bigger way in the next hundred years. There will be a need to find resources for community as we face the coming challenges.
On a lighter note, what do you like to do in your spare time?
I like to play basketball. I’m a member of the NBA, the Noontime Basketball Association, when faculty, staff and alumni sort of drag themselves up and down the court. I’ve always liked bicycling, I think it’s a great way to see the world. I was inspired in college when I took a trip from Portland down the coast. I try to bike at least from the ferry because I live on Vashon Island.
What is a memorable trip for you?
I did a European bike trip after college with Sonya who eventually, it took awhile, became my wife. But that is very good practice for marriage, sleeping in a small tent across Europe and surviving.
Is there something surprising about you that students may not know?
When I was hired I had a rat-tail that was about a foot and a half long. It was a matter of principle to get hired for a tenure line job while keeping that relic from college.
PHOTO COURTESY / HATTIE LINDSLEY