The rise of environmental history as an academic discipline in the 1960's in North America was influenced by environmentalism's emergence during that period. One of environmental history's key characteristics is the marriage of ecology and history. Applying a new ideology to conventional methodology, environmental historians try to interpret bow human behaviors interact with the environment in different time periods. In order to demonstrate the importance of the discipline, this paper highlights environmental history's developments, meanings and myths, and discusses the field's major theories and contributions. Also addressed here are environmental history's possibilities for future development. This paper concludes that, although environmental history is a new transdisciplinary field, Taiwan academics should grant it full recognition as an area of scholarly inquiry.