Historial Reflections: what I'm reading

I am reading environmental history theory right now.  It is much more interesting than it sounds and much more interesting than other historical theory.  This is because for some reason these authors feel that communicating is more important than being erudite.  I appreciate their desire to have me understand what they're saying.  I would call it considerate and smart.  What is the point of writing if no one can understand you, and why do people get published if they don't make sense? Ugh. I am enclosing some quotes from stuff I've read if you're interested.

Richard White, “Historiographical Essay American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field,” Pacific Historical Review 54 no. 3 (August 1985): 297-335.

“Nature does not dictate, but physical nature does, at any given time, set limits on what is humanly possible. Humans may think what they want; they cannot always do what they want, and not all they do turns out as planned.” (335)

William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17 (Autumn 1993): 1-22.

“Analogy…continually reminds us that we are engaged in an interpretive, hermeneutic enterprise, not a quest for absolute knowledge, and that competing interpretations about the meaning of the past for the present are not only possible but inevitable. Analogy is the logical foundation for metaphor and parable alike, all three of which are near the heart of our scholarly practice. The job of historical scholarship is to provide the richest possible contextual field within which to frame and discipline our analogies, not because we expect historical insight to give absolute answers—it won’t—but because it is the best source we have for questions whose subtlety and complexity can mirror that of the world we wish to understand. It is our own best route to memesis, self-knowledge, and—to repeat again that old-fashioned word—wisdom.
Hence the affection we historians feel for the parable: by seeing the past as a story to be told rather than as a problem to be solved, we leave ourselves open to analogies, metaphors, resonances, and interpretive contexts that would probably be obscured by a more rigidly rule-bound analytical approach.” (17)

“By telling parables that trace the often obscure connections between human history and ecological change, environmental history suggests where we ought to go looking if we wish to reflect on the ethical implications of our own lives.” (20)

“...beware of bugs that come from afar.”

William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Kind of Nature,” Environmental History 1 (January 1996): 7-28.

“If we set too high a stock on wilderness, too many other corners of the earth become less than natural and too many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their suffering or their fate.” (84-5)
I am also reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. It's very interesting, though I'm not in 100% in agreement with his conclusions so far. It's still a good, thought-provoking book.  He's a very engagin writer.