Fences represent the way in which European colonizers imposed their political ideology on the North American landscape. Back in Europe, fences were a ubiquitous part of rural existence, and when European colonizers came to America, they brought the practice of erecting fences with them. As a human imposition on the land that reflects early capitalist ideas about private property, fences changed the landscape it in a way that often had negative results. Fences, of course, do not occur in nature, and they can have a harmful impact on the landscape in a way that natural barriers do not. As fences enforced a monocultural approach to agriculture by confining plants and animals to separate areas, they imposed artificial order onto the balanced, complex, delicate ecosystem. Disturbing it by attempting to impose human order on top of it—particularly if that human order is informed by capitalist principles of private property and profit-making through processing and selling natural resources—can cause profound ecological damage. In this way, fences represent the ideological divide between how Europeans and Native people thought of humans’ relationship to the land, as well as the wide-ranging environmental effects than came about from the European colonial mindset.
Fences Quotes in Changes in the Land
Important as organisms like smallpox, the horse, and the pig were in their direct impact on American ecosystems, their full effect becomes visible only when they are treated as integral elements in a complex system of environmental and cultural relationships. The pig was not merely a pig but a creature bound among other things to the fence, the dandelion, and a very special definition of property. It is these kinds of relationships, the contradictions arising from them, and their changes in time, that will constitute an ecological approach to history.
Fences Symbol Timeline in Changes in the Land
