The King’s Green Pad

In my last post I made it my task to recommend each month a new or classic work of environmental history. My recommendation this month is an acknowledged classic: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill and Wang, 1983) by William Cronon, who is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

This book recounts the history of aboriginal and European encounters in 17th-century New England through an ecological lens. Colonization brought about a clash of cultures, of political and commercial regimes, and of spiritual worldviews, but it also brought into conflict two very different modes of inhabiting the land. Cronon’s thesis, he says, is “simple”: “the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes—well known to historians—in the ways these people organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental transformations—less well known to historians—in the region’s plant and animal communities” (p. vii). Colonization, in other words, was also a dynamic and transformative ecological encounter.

Europeans were predisposed to view the “New World” as a landscape untouched by human hands, a Forest Primeval, a “howling wilderness.” But the land they beheld, so different in many ways from what they were accustomed, was certainly not uninhabited or unused; it was shaped by peoples with much different ways of belonging to the ecosystem. European observers agreed that the New England landscape possessed incredible abundance in plant and animal life—birds, fish, timber. It was an environment in which European settlers hoped to practice a life in keeping with their habits in England. But the unfamiliar seasonal variations and the ecological conditions made it impossible for them simply replicate their old ways of being in nature.

Native peoples, Cronon argues, had learned to exploit the seasonal and ecological diversity of their environment by practicing mobility. Mobile villages were essential for native subsistence strategies, some groups depending more on hunter-gatherer modes while others developed agriculture. Europeans saw these lifestyles as “uncivilized” and unsettled, ignoring or not seeing that Native farming techniques were more productive and less ecologically damaging than European farming. They also did not recognize that the park-like appearance of New England’s forests, which in many places were curiously devoid of underbrush, was a product of systematic and deliberate burning by Native peoples, who thus cleared the land to facilitate hunting, travel, or farming. This was not untouched wilderness; it was deeply shaped by human hands.

Europeans saw this landscape and its resources as commodities, however, and in seizing possession of the land they began to impose a new order on the environment. In keeping with English notions of property-rights settlers fenced in and ordered the land for production, asserting that Native land usage was not real usage at all. Instead of depending on the hunt for food they brought with them their domesticated livestock. Land itself, according to Cronon, became “a form of capital, a thing consumed for the express purpose of creating augmented wealth” (p. 169). And this created two central ecological contradictions of the colonial encounter between Europeans and Natives. First was the inherent and continual conflict between the land uses of the colonists and Indians. Second, the colonists’ modes of production and of owning the land were ecologically destructive because they were premised on the limitless availability of more land to exploit. (p. 169). As Cronon notes, we still live with the legacy of these contradictions today.

This is a wonderful book from a scholar who has established a reputation as a foremost historian of the environment. For more of Cronon’s scholarship try this essay or read his incredible book on Chicago

Next month, a recommendation of Donald Worster’s A Passion for Nature, a new biography of John Muir.

This post was authored by Will Van Arragon, Assistant Professor of History at The King’s University College in Edmonton, AB.