Changes in the Land

by

William Cronon

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Changes in the Land Summary

Changes in the Land is “an ecological history of colonial New England.” The book’s author, William Cronon, argues that the New England landscape was drastically transformed during the 17th and 18th centuries. By focusing on ecological history, it is possible to learn more about human history.

In 1855, Henry David Thoreau compared the landscape around his home in Concord, Massachusetts, to what natural historians of the 17th century recorded, and he lamented the change that had evidently occurred. He was particularly struck by the depletion of animal and plant species. Early settlers in New England had been astonished by the fertility and abundance of the landscape.

Cronon explains that ecological history requires its own particular set of evidence, including the subjective observations of natural historians and other observers, colonial laws, town records, and ecological phenomena such as fossil pollen and tree rings. None of these forms of evidence were complete or unbiased, but together they form a useful picture. It is also important not to assume that without human intervention, environments always stay the same. In reality, ecological systems are in a constant state of change. Furthermore, Native people had been living in what is currently the U.S. for 10,000 years before European settlers arrived; thus, the landscape that settlers encountered had already been altered by human activity. Moreover, the way that any given human population alters their environment is always subject to change over time.

When European colonizers arrived, they were overwhelmed by what they understood as a land of “profits.” Indeed, part of what was distinctive about the colonizers’ perspective was that they saw the landscape and its resources in terms of commodities, meaning goods that had economic value. This way of thinking tended to deemphasize the web of ecological relationships in which every part of the natural world was situated.

It is true that precolonial New England was a land of extraordinary biodiversity, fertility, and abundance. There was a huge array of wild animals as well as rich forests. Yet the landscape had not been static prior to European arrival. Over 12,000 years prior, the region had been a “glacial tundra” that changed gradually into the land that the Europeans encountered. The seasons in New England were not dissimilar to those in Europe, although there was a greater contrast between summer and winter. However, some early colonizers failed to realize this and mistakenly assumed that the lush and temperate spring and summer conditions lasted year-round. Some even ended up starving to death in winter as a result of this miscalculation.

Native people’s lives were completely structured around the cycle of the seasons. Part of the way this manifested was through being mobile and moving their villages from place to place according to seasonal change. They also pursued different activities at different times of year. Northern indigenous communities fished in the spring and summer; gathered nuts, berries, and wild plants in summer; and hunted mammals such as beaver, caribou, and bear during the winter. Communities in Southern New England practiced agriculture, but they still moved their fields fairly regularly to avoid soil exhaustion. They would grow several crops on the same field, combining kidney beans, squash, and corn. Women tended to the crops and did other tasks that were compatible with taking care of children at the same time. Native communities practiced controlled burning of the forest in a way that cleared underwood and ultimately promoted the forest’s health and fertility. Overall, their agricultural practices maintained the “mosaic effect” of biodiversity.

Colonizers criticized the gendered division of labor in indigenous communities—because women tended to the fields, colonizers falsely claimed that it was women who did all the work. Meanwhile, indigenous people were baffled by the fact that European women appeared to do nothing. Colonizers argued that because Native people supposedly did not cultivate the land property, colonizers had the right to seize it from them. The two groups of people had conflicting understandings of property ownership and ultimately the colonizers only respected the authority of their own system.

For Native people, a village “owned” the land it inhabited in the sense that it had the right to use it and this right was respected by others (such as neighboring villages and tribes). Land was never sold but instead exchanged in arrangements that were “diplomatic” rather than “economic.” Personal possessions were also limited to objects that people had made or which they used and objects tended to be shared rather than kept for exclusive personal use. Similarly, animals were only “owned” at the moment in which they were killed. Native people believed that they had property rights to the product of the land, but as such these rights were flexible and shifted with the seasons. There was no context in which a person or group had permanent, exclusive rights to an area of land.

Colonizers discounted the indigenous system of property rights as “not real.” According to European understanding, owning something meant having exclusive private access to it forever. As land ownership was more and more frequently adjudicated by the English monarch, colonizers came to act as if Native people only had rights to land if this had been granted by the Crown. Over time, it became more common for land to be divided up according to abstract geographic boundaries rather than suitability for a particular agricultural purpose. Colonizers characterized Native people as lazy and “impoverished” for not cultivating the land in order to maximize profit, and they used this as an excuse to seize land from Native communities.

Particularly during the early colonial period, indigenous people were very willing to engage in trade with colonizers, mostly exchanging animal fur and skins for fabric, weaponry, tools, and decorative objects. During these interactions, Europeans passed on microorganisms causing many diseases against which Native people had no immunity. This had a devastating impact on the Native population: in many villages, up to 90 percent of inhabitants died. This mass death had a chaotic impact on indigenous social and political life and left surviving communities highly vulnerable. For a while, colonizers encouraged the use of wampum as currency in trade, but over time it lost value and many Native people found themselves destitute. Additionally, they had become dependent upon the very markets that were now excluding them. Now actually impoverished and unable to continue their preexisting way of life, many communities resorted to selling their land to survive. Animals such as the beaver largely died out as a result of overhunting.

Colonization also led to mass deforestation. Colonizers lumbered as if trees were an infinite resource, engaging in highly wasteful practices in order to access the most high-value timber. Even more devastating for the forest than lumbering was the expansion of farming, which led to huge areas of forest being hastily cleared with fire. The destruction of the forests had many powerful side effects, completing changing the ecosystem and climate of New England.

Although there were some similarities between Native and European agricultural practices, the two groups of people had starkly different ways of treating animals. Whereas Native people hunted wild animals, Europeans kept domestic grazing animals. Livestock—and especially pigs—caused a huge amount of conflict in colonial New England due to the problem of animals eating other people’s crops. The nuisance caused by livestock led to the widespread erection of fences. Eventually, different animal species started being kept inside their own respective enclosures. Fences also had the effect of visually marking the separation between different areas of private land. Grazing animals had a fairly destructive impact on the environment and were a leading factor in intensifying soil exhaustion. Facing depleted soil, colonizers took to using fish or ash from burned trees as moisturizing agents, which was both wasteful and insufficient for promoting sustainable fertility. Europeans had also brought over weeds and pests that caused significant problems to New England ecosystems.

It was the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution that brought the greatest change to the New England landscape. However, it is important not to let this accelerated change distract from the fact that the landscape was also drastically transformed during the colonial period. By 1800, New England had been turned into “a world of fields and fences.” At that point, the Native population had slid to a fraction of what it once was, while there was an enormous influx of settlers. It is easy to attribute all the environmental change that occurred during the colonial period to the capitalist economic system brought over by European colonizers, and indeed, this was by far the single greatest factor that created change during this time. In response to colonization, Native people fought back, tried to protect their existing ways of life, and attempted to adapt in order to have a chance at survival. Ultimately, they were not able to stop the enormous and often highly destructive changes that colonization brought to the landscape.