Storytelling and History: Why Narratives Matter

I owe a great intellectual debt to William Cronon and his History 460 class I took at UW-Madison

One of the most important things I learned in graduate school was that history is storytelling—and that there are different ways to tell a story about any given event. William Cronon’s “A Place for Stories” was one of the most influential articles I read on the topic. Using different published histories of the Dust Bowl as examples, Cronon illustrated how historians could start with the same facts and come to very different conclusions, based on how they told their stories.

Cronon focused on two main types of narratives. There’s the “progressive” type of narrative, “in which the plot line gradually ascends toward an ending that is somehow more positive – happier, richer, freer, better – than the beginning.” And then there’s the “declensionist” narrative, “in which the plot line eventually falls toward an ending that is more negative – sadder, poorer, less free, worse – than the place where the story began.”

Take the history of agriculture, for instance. The classic narrative used in most discussions of agricultural history is a progressive one—originating in European Enlightenment thought. Primitive humans started out as hunter/gatherers, then developed agriculture. Agricultural methods remained fairly primitive and inefficient until the modern age, when advances in machinery and chemicals made it possible to dramatically increase yields, thus ushering in an age of unprecedented material abundance. The future will be better and brighter each year.

The standard environmentalist narrative, in contrast, is a declensionist one—first discussed in the 1930s and strongly developed in the 1970s. Those primitive hunter/gatherers were the happiest and healthiest people on earth, living in harmony with nature. But they grew discontent in their bliss and invented agriculture, which led to division of labor, urbanization, exploitation, social injustice, and environmental degradation—all of which continue to get worse and worse with each new technological “advance.” If this trend isn’t reversed—and it may already be too late—these negative consequences will destroy the earth and humans too.

There’s a third narrative that Cronon didn’t mention in this article but was strongly influenced by his own book Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. I’m going to call this type of narrative, which is becoming increasingly popular today, a “pluralistic” narrative. Throughout history, people of equal intelligence and value have lived all over the world and developed foodways that fit into their local climate. There was not necessarily always a clear line between hunting/gathering and agriculture; the majority of the world’s peoples did both. But then the Europeans decided that their foodways were the best and forced everyone else in the world to farm the way they did, which caused massive environmental devastation and the destruction of Indigenous foodways in colonized areas. The best hope for the future is to decolonize these food systems and rebuild foodways that are suited to local climates and cultures.

In studying the history of organic farming, I’ve run into all three of these narratives. The progressive narrative is often used by anti-organic agricultural scientists, while organic farmers from Sir Albert Howard on have been telling declensionist narratives. The pluralistic narrative is rapidly gaining in popularity among agroecologists, and my newer writing has been influenced by it as well. But since, as Cronon points out, all of these narratives are a little too neat and tidy to fully explain the complexity of reality, I hope that my writing won’t end up fitting perfectly into any of them.