Clarence Glacken: Pioneer Environmental Historian

Clarence Glacken's magnum opus Traces on the Rhodian Shore, first published in 1967, was an intellectual history about ideas of nature and culture from ancient Greece to the end of the eighteenth century. The Professional Geographer called it 'One of the best and most important books published by a geographer in the English-speaking world in the last hundred years'. Traces remains in print five decades after its initial publication, and is regarded as one of the foundational classics in the field of environmental history. Glacken himself is considered a path breaker in the discipline and is read widely by environmental historians. Little, however, is known about this pioneering scholar and especially, that he was prolific in his later years, having written an unpublished (and lost) sequel to Traces, and a full draft of another book. Drawing extensively upon the Glacken archives at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, this paper describes his intellectual evolution as a scholar, and explores his contributions to the field of environmental history.