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, such that it is not really possible to understand one without understanding the other. Indeed, Cronon makes a compelling case that human and environmental history are so closely tied that it is impossible to understand human history without looking to the environment. At the same time, they remain different fields, in part because, as Cronon argues, “Environmental history is in some ways harder to access than human history, requires much different methods.” Thus, while Cronon highlights the vital importance of environmental history to human history, he also shows how each field provides its own distinct set of information.
In the book, Cronon shows how human and environmental history complement each other, like pieces of the same puzzle. He argues that historians have thoroughly documented the human stories of colonization, and thus his intention is to provide the environmental side of the story. In the book’s introduction, Cronon argues, “My thesis is simple: the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes—well known to historians—in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations—less well known to historians—in the region's plant and animal communities.” Crucially, once people understand the ecological changes that occurred during this period, they will in turn better understand human history.
One example of how Cronon’s environmental history enhances existing understandings of the human history of colonization is by showing how Native and European people’s respective socio-political systems were in large part determined by the environmental landscape. As he succinctly explains, “In one sense, economy […] becomes a subset of ecology.” The environmental landscape in which the Native people of New England determined the social and economic systems they developed. For example, the comparably more intense winters meant that Native people needed thick, warm clothing, and the abundance of beavers meant that Native people wore beaver skins. When Europeans arrived and needed warmer clothing than their fabric clothes, they engaged in a fur trade with Native people, which “revolutionized Indian economies” and led to the eventual extinction of the beaver in many parts of North America, which in turn forced the people of New England (both indigenous people and colonizers) to find new forms of warm clothing. Cronon argues that when the beaver and other animals died out as a (direct or indirect) result of colonization, “The real losers were the Indians, whose earlier way of life was encountering increasing ecological constraints.” As this example shows, the environment (and changes to it) determines social and economic history.
Another example of how ecological change has a profound impact on human history is through the devastating story of how Native people were affected by European diseases. Disease is both an ecological and human issue—it is caused by natural phenomena (viruses and bacteria) which in turn has a huge impact on human social life. When Europeans arrived in New England, they brought with them diseases to which they had developed immunity, but to which Native people had not—the result was a series of epidemics that killed a huge percentage of many Native communities. Although these deaths had a purportedly “natural” cause, it is impossible to understand how Native people suddenly started dying en masse from disease without also understanding the story of social interactions between indigenous and European people during this period. Furthermore, the ecological issue of disease in turn had a profound impact on Native social life, changing the human history of indigenous people in New England forever.
In Changes in the Land, Cronon effectively shows that any human history inevitably contains environmental history within it, and vice versa. As he argues toward the end of the book, “To compare New England ecosystems in 1600 with those in 1800 as if examining two snapshots […] is to imply that the European invasion was the chief agent of environmental change.” Here, he makes the point that not only are human and environmental histories linked, but that evidence of one is embedded in the other. Because historians have tended to neglect the ecological dimension of history, Cronon foregrounds this dimension in order to complete the picture of New England history during the American colonial period.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Human vs. Environmental History ThemeTracker
Human vs. Environmental History Quotes in Changes in the Land
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.
