Environmental history seeks to understand the range of human interactions with the physical environment in the past. The field has been around officially since the organization of the American Society for Environmental History in the early 1970s.
Environmental history is an interdisciplinary field.
Scholars doing environmental history come from disciplines such as historical geography, landscape architecture, urban planning, archaeology and anthropology, agricultural studies, sociology and natural sciences, such as biology and ecology, to name a few. Environmental historians, who have been trained in history graduate schools, may have been trained in intellectual history or the varieties of social history. Many come to environmental history from a interest in regional studies. Much environmental history in recent years has been done by historians of the American West. Perhaps the best way to learn about the field is to engage it.