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 settlers. Cronon argues against the idea that the Native people who lived in New England for many hundreds of years before the arrival of European invaders didn’t change the land. At the same time, he emphasizes that European settlers introduced the most sudden and extreme changes the landscape had ever encountered. In this sense, Cronon challenges the idea that there is a clear binary between natural and unnatural change, even as he also highlights the importance of remembering that many of the changes to the North American landscape during the American colonial period would never have occurred without “unnatural” human intervention.
Early in the book, Cronon emphasizes that prior to the arrival of European colonizers, the New England landscape had already been undergoing change—both natural and unnatural. This is a key element of Cronon’s argument, as prior to the publication of Changes in the Land, few historians acknowledged that the North American landscape was subject to change before the arrival of Europeans. At the same time, Cronon’s description of the changes that preceded the European invasion highlight that these changes were either completely natural (meaning they were not caused by human activity whatsoever) or were low-impact and sustainable, the result of indigenous people’s more harmonious relation to their environment. Cronon points out that much of the change that occurred in the New England landscape prior to colonization was entirely natural and took place over such a long period of time that any change not have been noticeable within any human lifetime. He points out that “The period during which Indians had inhabited the area had seen climactic warming transform southern New England from the glacial tundra of 12,500 years ago to a series of forests […].” This was, of course, a drastic change—but it was both entirely natural, and it occurred over such a long period that it would not have seemed significant to any animal or human who lived within this period.
Cronon also identifies the changes that Native people made to the New England landscape before European colonizers arrived. He points out that these changes tended to be fairly in sync with natural forms of change and far less impactful than the changes that would be made by Europeans. At the same time, he argues that across different cultures, “the human tendency was to systematize the patchwork and impose a new regular pattern on it.” Indigenous people imposed such order even if they did so to a far lesser degree than Europeans. For example, they engaged in sustainable cycles of forest burning, a practice that ultimately kept the forest healthy and fertile: “It increased the rate at which forest nutrients were recycled into the soil, so that grasses, shrubs, and nonwoody plants tended to grow more luxuriantly following a fire than they had before […] burning also tended to destroy plant diseases and pests, not to mention the fleas which inevitably became abundant around Indian settlements.” This was in some ways an “unnatural” change, but one that promoted sustainable, natural abundance. The forms of “unnatural” change enacted by indigenous people were a stark contrast to those imposed by European settlers. Although there were some similarities between the ways in which the two communities changed the environment, Europeans generally altered the land in such an intense, accelerated, and unsustainable fashion that the overall effect was quite different.
Whereas Native people tended to change the land in a way that was generally in sync with the land itself, Europeans instilled changes that radically disrupted the natural cycles of the landscape, thereby changing it forever. Like indigenous people, European colonizers also practiced forest burning (indeed, this was a tactic that they picked up from the land’s Native inhabitants). However, whereas the Native practice of forest burning enhanced the landscape’s natural fertility and abundance, the way in which Europeans burned forests destroyed the landscape. Native burning practices tended to only target weeds and undergrowth, thereby making the overall forest healthier, but European burning was straightforwardly destructive and led to permanent deforestation. Although both types of forest burning were in some ways “unnatural,” the fact that indigenous people’s engagement in this practice was more in sync with the natural rhythms of the landscape meant that it didn’t change the land in an artificial or extreme manner. Moreover, colonizers also altered the landscape in ways that took it much further way from its natural state. These included erecting fences, planting crops in monocultural fields, and keeping domesticated grazing animals. All of these practices had (either direct or indirect) negative effects on the environment by throwing off its natural systems and cycles in an extreme, artificial manner.
Overall, while Cronon shows that it is often difficult to draw precise distinctions between natural and unnatural change, he also emphasizes the importance of acknowledging that most of the change that occurred within the New England landscape had an unnatural cause: European colonization. Indeed, Cronon highlights that some of these unnatural changes—like systematic deforestation—went on to stimulate long-term shifts (such as climate change) that might initially appear to be natural but were actually caused by artificial alterations to the landscape.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Natural vs. Unnatural Change ThemeTracker
Natural vs. Unnatural Change 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
