Changes in the Land Themes

In Changes in the Land, Cronon examines the enormous changes that the New England landscape underwent during the American colonial period while also reminding readers that the environment is necessarily always changing. Natural change occurs at different timescales—from the annual cycle of the seasons to the much more gradual change that occurs across different epochs of time—so it is mistaken to believe that the new England landscape was static before the arrival of European…

In Changes in the Land, Cronon emphasizes that environmental history is inevitably a study of interdependent systems. Nature works as a system with many parts—hence the word “ecosystem”—and none of these parts can be properly understood in isolation without looking to how they interact with the rest of the system. Early in the book, Cronon raises the rhetorical question: “Are human beings inside or outside their systems?” The resounding answer found in the book…

One of the main arguments Cronon makes in the book regards European colonizers’ lack of understanding of the New England landscape, the way Native people had been inhabiting it, and the highly destructive nature of their own engagement with it. This lack of understanding had two related sources: ignorance and arrogance. On one hand, it was perfectly understandable that European settlers had limited understanding of the North American landscape because it was generally very different…

Changes in the Land is considered to have helped inaugurate the field of environmental history, which was previously all but nonexistent in Western academia. In the book, Cronon makes the argument that environmental history and human history are inextricably linked, and that vital information about history in general can be found by focusing on the ecological landscape. Cronon shows that as long as humans have existed, human history has informed environmental history and vice versa…