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 to that of Europe. This led some colonizers to have basic misperceptions about how the environment worked—for example, by initially assuming that “strawberry time” lasted all year long. At the same time, their ignorance meant that they often failed to take the opportunity to learn from Native people about how this new environment worked—they even went so far as to claim that Native people themselves were foolish, naïve, and childlike and that they didn’t understand how to properly inhabit their own land. Overall, Cronon shows that the ignorance and arrogance of European colonizers stimulated the destructive changes made to the New England landscape during this period.
European settlers had a limited understanding of both how the North American landscape worked and how Native people chose to inhabit it. They observed that Native practices of land cultivation were very different from their own, but due to ideological differences and an attitude of superiority rooted in racism, colonizers generally failed to understand why indigenous people lived the way they did. One of the major misperceptions that colonizers held about indigenous ways of life lay in their assertion that Native people did not know how to properly cultivate their land, which meant that they lived an unnecessarily frugal life in a land of plenty. Cronon observes, “Many European visitors were struck by what seemed to them the poverty of Indians who lived in the midst of a landscape endowed so astonishingly with abundance.” They then used this ignorant belief to justify the seizure and aggressive farming of Native lands, which, in turn, had a negative impact on the environment—sometimes to the point of irrevocable destruction.
The truth was that Native people had a profound understanding of how to cultivate and inhabit the land, but Europeans mistakenly saw this way of life as “impoverished” because their ideology was so different from that of Native people. For instance, Native people did not believe in treating the land and its products as commodities, but instead took only what they needed to survive. This was not really poverty, but instead a more sustainable way of life that fit more harmoniously with the natural environment. Moreover, the Native practice of choosing to fast for periods of time actually meant that they were better able to cope with hunger when it did arise, unlike the Europeans who far more frequently died from starvation. However, because colonizers were unable or unwilling to appreciate the legitimacy of the Native belief system or wisdom about land cultivation, they aggressively imposed their own way of working the land which came to have a highly destructive impact. As Cronon argues, “It was common for colonial settlers to argue that the transformation to the land transformed it from a ‘barren’ landscape to one of fertility and abundance (in reality, the opposite was true; plant and animal life significantly diminished as a result of colonization).”
This is not to say that Europeans never tried to learn from Native people in order to enhance their own understanding of the landscape. However, as Cronon demonstrates, these attempts didn’t always work out very well. For example, Europeans attempted to mimic the practice of forest burning, which Native people employed in order to manage the land and ultimately increase its fertility and health. Cronon explains: “The use of fire to aid in clearing land was something English settlers borrowed from their Indian predecessors, but they applied it for different purposes and on a much more extensive scale.” Unlike the Native practice of forest burning, the Europeans’ enactment of this practice did not promote the health and fertility of the forest in a sustainable way and was not actually even designed for this purpose. As a result, the Europeans’ attempt to learn from the Native way of life backfired, because they were only imitating an individual act rather than the ideology and understanding that accompanied it. The result was that when Europeans engaged in forest burning, it resulted in long-term damage and deforestation.
Overall, then, the limits of European understanding had a massive and largely negative impact on the New England landscape. As Cronon shows throughout the book, the colonizers’ limited understanding was not only triggered by their actual lack of knowledge about the landscape, but also their ideological views, which differed from Native knowledge systems to an incompatible degree. The fact that Europeans saw colonization as a journey “from savagery to civilization” meant that they failed to see the problems caused by their own limited understanding. Cronon argues that “In [the settlers’’] vision, the transformation of wilderness betokened the planting of a garden, not the fall from one; any change in the New England environment was divinely ordained and wholly positive.” Ultimately, this meant that European settlers failed (or refused) to see the destructive impact they were having on the land and its indigenous inhabitants.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Colonization and the Limits of Understanding ThemeTracker
Colonization and the Limits of Understanding Quotes in Changes in the Land
Visitors inevitably observed and recorded greater numbers of “commodities” than other things which had not been labeled in this way. It was no accident that James Rosier referred to the coastal vegetation of Maine as “the profits and fruits which are naturally on these Ilands.”
New England’s seasonal cycles were little different from those of Europe. If anything, its summers were hotter and its winters colder. Colonists were prevented from realizing this only by their own high expectations of laborless wealth: many initially seemed to believe that strawberry time would last all year.
Here again was the paradox of want in a land of plenty. To a European sensibility, it made no sense to go hungry if one knew in advance there would be little food in winter. Colonists who starved did so because they learned too late how ill informed they had been about the New World’s perpetual abundance […] Indians died from starvation much less frequently than did early colonists, so there was a certain irony in European criticisms of Indians on this core. Whatever the contradictions of their own position, however, the colonists could not understand Indian attitudes toward winter food shortages. Consciously choosing hunger, rather than working harder in the leisurely time of summer, seemed a fool’s decision.
Here we must be careful about what we mean by “property,” lest we fall into the traps English colonists have set for us. Although ordinary language seems to suggests that property is generally a simple relationship between an individual person and a thing, it is actually a far more complicated social institution which varies widely between cultures. Saying that A owns B is in fact meaningless until the society in which A lives agrees to allow A a certain bundle of rights over B and to impose sanctions against the violations of those rights by anyone else.
What the Indians owned—or, more precisely, what their villages gave them claim to—was not the land but the thing that were on the land during the various seasons of the year. It was a conception of property shared by many of the hunter-gatherer and agricultural peoples of the world, but radically different from that of the invading Europeans.
Land was allocated to inhabitants using the same biblical philosophy that had justified taking it from Indians in the first place: individuals should only possess as much land as they were able to subdue and make productive […] A person with many servants and cattle could “improve” more land than one who had few, and so was granted more land, although the quantities varied from town to town. In this way, the social hierarchy of the English class system was reproduced, albeit in modified form, in the New World.
New England lumbering used forests as if they would last forever. Because prime mast trees were usually scattered among those of lesser value, many less-than-perfect trees were simply destroyed when larger ones were felled. Colonists were usually far more interested in conserving their own labor than in using available timber resources to the full.
The use of fire to aid in clearing land was something English settlers borrowed from their Indian predecessors, but they applied it for different purposes and on a much more extensive scale. Instead of burning the forest to remove undergrowth, they burned it to remove the forest itself. Doing so was not only profligate, consuming huge quantities of increasingly valuable timber, but dangerous as well.
The colonists themselves understood what they were doing almost wholly in positive terms, not as "deforestation," but as "the progress of cultivation” […] Reducing the forest was an essential first step toward reproducing the Old World mosaic in an American environment. For the New England landscape, and for the Indians, what followed was undoubtedly a new ecological order; for the colonists, on the other hand, it was an old and familiar way of life.
By making the arrival of the Europeans the center of our analysis, we run the risk of attributing all change to their agency, and none to the Indians. The implication sis not only that the earlier world of the “Indian” New England was somehow static but also that the Indians themselves were as passive and “natural” as the landscape. In fact, the Indians were anything but passive in their response to European encroachments.
