The Destruction Of The World Of Ancient Europe And David...

History serves a purpose. By extension, environmental or natural history, some would they are natural history is history, has a purpose. I believe that Paul Sutter articulated it best when he said environmental history should â€Å"lend value to the world in which they are entangled, both to narrate the past and to inform action in the present.† How one can accomplish this is a difficult question; William Cronan gives a good mechanism, when he says â€Å"environmental history is at least as important for the way it asks and answers questions - by analogy, metaphor, and parable and the search to discover their meanings - than for any specific problems it may actually solve.† In this way, Diana Davis’ Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa and David Blackbourn’s The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany best serve to educate about the past and to inform the presen t. Diana Davis shows her readers that the misappropriation and misuse of knowledge relating to the natural world were used to justify colonization and to declensionist policies, Diana Davis plainly says her purpose: to stop the use of the destructive declensionist narrative, â€Å"that postcolonial states have embraced† David Blackbourn on the other hand creates a timeline from the unification of Germany to the Nazis to his present day Germany and he connects multiple narratives to connect conquest of people to The Conquest of Nature,