Exercise #2: Family Environmental History
Instructions
For Exercise #2, you will bring the environmental concepts home by looking at your own and your family environmental history.
Our lives and present environments are products of history. Our parents and grandparents grew up in very different environments from those of today. In our study of environmental history, it is helpful to think about our families’ past environments and their meaning for us today.
- Write an informal essay, between 700 and 1100 words, reflecting on your personal environmental history going back to your grandparents, parents, and your own generation. See the Exercise 2 Samples for a guide to this exercise.
- In formulating your response, consider the environments in which they and you have lived. Where were they located? What natural resources sustained your families and their communities? To what extent were those environments “natural” or human-made, native, or exotic (that is, transformed by European or other non-native species)? How have your families helped to transform their environments? Does your own ethnic and class heritage or gender play a role in the way you and your family have related to and valued the environment? How did the relationships your grandparents and parents had with their environments differ from the ones you have had in the past and wish to have in the future?
- Post your response by clicking ‘Add Submission’ below.
- Please note, you should write and edit your submission in a separate file then copy and paste it into the submission box. Once submitted to the HIST 3991 trubox site, you will not be able to edit your post.
Are you a student of HIST 3991? Click here to add a submission to this assignment.
Submissions
A Brief Look at the Wagner’s Environmental History
September 8, 2021 By: Student Example Three
The twentieth century has brought dramatic changes to my family’s relationship with the environment, including our respective views of its value and our effect upon it. Farmers, mosaic artists, a university professor, a computer language programmer, gardeners and now me, an aspiring “environmentalist,” make up a family that has had varying connections to the world around us. My mother’s mother, Agnes Linnevold, grew up in Texas with her five brothers and sisters on a small subsistence farm, her father supporting the family through farming and driving cattle. The soil of that dry earth and the scorching sun of Texas brought…
Personal Environmental History
September 8, 2021 By: Student Example Two
The historical environments of my family have included rural, urban and suburban locations in five states and three countries. However, for the purpose of this paper I will limit the family environments to the ones that supported my mother’s side of the family and my immediate family. I will show that each generation of my European American family possessed differing views of their environment as well as a unique relationship to their environment. In 1915 my mother’s parents married and settled in the small Oklahoma town of Norman while my father was attending the university there. The area around…
My Personal Environmental History
September 8, 2021 By: Student Example
My grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe to Israel in the 1940’s. In this paper, I will focus on my grandparents’ from my mother’s side, since I believe that they represent attitudes of the generation of Holocaust survivors that arrived to Israel after World War II. These attitudes had major impact on how they viewed and changed the environment to serve their needs. My grandparents were born and raised in small villages on the Poland -Russian border. When they entered their adult lives, War World Two broke. As a Jew, my grandfather was sent to a labor camp in Siberia. My…