William Cronon is an environmental historian concerned reading landscapes as place, time and memory. This is different to an environmentalism that shares with its Romantic predecessor a view of capitalist-urban-industrial society and cultural modernity as being in opposition to nature: nature is stable, balanced homeostatic, self-healing, purifying and benign whilst capitalism is unstable, destructive and in disequilibrium.

So if nature as wilderness is our salvation, then there is the need to protect wilderness. This underpins a lot of wilderness/landscape photography.

Instead of trying to escape from history into nature, the task is to bring nature into history, thereby challenging the very foundations of environmentalism. History is telling stories or constructing narratives about our past. The past is a story to be told in terms of place, time and memory. We are reading landscapes by understanding both their natural history and also their cultural and human history.

History is not the past but the stories we tell about the past. Things and events in the past exist whilst environmental history is the story we tell about those things that actually happened.