What role does a story play in environmental history?

A story or narrative is essential to our understanding of environmental history, and to figure out the human place in nature. An environmental historian is basically a storyteller. One of the challenges before him/her is to decide on what to include which he/she thinks are important and what to exclude that is unimportant. So this act of separating important from unimportant leads one to the question of objective writing. There is no doubt that when a storyteller of nature writes a story he/she is influenced by his/her ideologies and background like any other historian. But in the narratives of environmental historians stories move around nature with humans remaining at the center of discussion. It is here that a nature historian is able to distinguish himself from a typical chronicler. Unlike a storyteller, the chronicler keeps on recording the events without getting into the question of causation. So many times the chronicles are purely political in nature having full of praise for rulers and have details of conflicts. Nature many a time remains silent in its description. It also barely has twists and turns like we observe in a narrative. A storyteller of nature has the natural tendency to look for why and how of an event or phenomena of the past. So for a storyteller, the scene of action and natural surrounding is very significant. When an environmental historian weaves story he/she ensures that a scene is constructed so that in the end he/she is able to reach to a scene which is different from the opening one. In other words, the beginning gets marinated in the middle leading to a completely opposite end. This basic character of environmental history also allows to distinguish itself from ecological studies wherein humans are considered as exogenous variables meaning thereby that their role in such studies is not obligatory. Humans are the principal character within the nature stories.