Human vs. Environmental History Theme Analysis

The great strength of ecological analysis in writing history is its ability to uncover processes and long-term changes which might otherwise remain invisible. It is especially helpful in evaluating, as I do here, historical changes in modes of production: in one sense, economy in such an approach becomes a subset of ecology.

When I describe Indian ways of life, I intend no suggestion that these were somehow “purer” or more “Indian” than the ways of life Indians chose (or were forced into) following their contact with colonists.

As we shall see, the period of human occupation in postglacial New England has seen environmental changes on an enormous scale, many of them wholly apart from human influence. There has been no timeless wilderness in a state of perfect changelessness, no climax forest in permanent stasis.

But admitting that ecosystems have histories of their own still leaves us with the problem of how to view the people who inhabit them. Are humans inside or outside their systems?

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.

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.”

When human beings, Indian or European, inhabited and altered New England environments, they were a part of that linear history. Their activities often mimicked certain ecological processes that occurred in nature, but with a crucial difference. Whereas the natural landscape tended toward a patchwork of diverse communities arranged almost randomly on the landscape—its very continuity depended on that disorder—the human tendency was to systematize that patchwork and impose a more regular pattern on it.

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.

Such animals had fallen victim especially to the new Indian dependence on a market in prestige goods. The Indians, not realizing the full ramifications of what that market meant, and finally having little choice but to participate in it, fell victim too: to disease, demographic collapse, economic dependency, and the loss of a world of ecological relationships they could never find again.

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.

The dynamics which led colonists to accumulate wealth and capital were the most dramatic point of contrast between the New England economy of 1600 and that of 1800. The economic transformation paralleled the ecological one, and so it is easy to assert that the one caused the other: New England ecology was transformed as the region became integrated into the emerging capitalist economy of the North Atlantic. Capitalism and environmental degradation went hand in hand.

Economic and ecological imperialisms reinforced each other.

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.

Ecology can help us analyze why Indians in 1800 had trouble sustaining themselves on the lands which remained to them, but it cannot explain why they had been compelled to live on those lands in the first place. Only politics can do that.

Colonial economies underwent nearly as profound an evolution in New England as those of the Indians.