Although environmental history maintains as its base function that history ought to be a study of the ecological association between humans and the natural world, environmental historians have not been principally effective in focusing on how our evolutionary past ought to update historical analysis. Donald Worster's essay "History as Natural History" argues that an ecological approach to human history must implement a method similar to the one biologists use with other species. In Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, he attempts to structurally analyze the development, progression, and what he predicts as the looming collapse of the Western American empire. His text mixes both mythology and symbolism in this study of Western environmental history. The text is framed within a top down model, comparing and connecting the impact of hydraulic societies throughout history with the development of U.S. advancement in the West. …show more content…
He points to the dubious notions and eventual fate of Thomas Jefferson's agrarian myth and illustrates how the American Western Empire represents "a coercive, monolithic, and hierarchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise" (7). The West is still seen to be a land of unrestricted freedom, and in some coercive, monolithic, and hierarchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital. While this might in part be true, there are multiple lenses with which to view the West; as a region of force and of caution, of class conflict and of resource profiteering, and ultimately of imperial