Cronon argues that in order to understand the ecological shifts that occurred in New England during the American colonial period, it is necessary to examine the social, political, and cultural differences between Native American and European peoples. He argues that the most important of these cultural differences lie in the socioeconomic systems used by the two groups. Crucially, Europeans practiced an early form of capitalism, meaning that they believed land, plants, and animals could be owned as property. Moreover, they viewed the products of the land as commodities that should ideally be produced and sold at a profit. This was a stark contrast to Native people, who had a different concept of ownership: while they did believe that inhabiting land gave people certain rights to it, they generally did not think of land and its products as commodities that could be owned or sold for a profit. Cronon demonstrates how the clash between these two systems of belief was inherently destructive: it meant that when European colonizers imposed their own ideology via farming and construction, the landscape was changed forever.
One of the most important aspects of the sociopolitical difference between Europeans and indigenous people was the question of property ownership. The right to own property was a key aspect of the European worldview, as Europeans believed that land, plants, and animals could all be possessed as the property of individual humans. Indigenous people had a much different view. It was not that they had no concept of property whatsoever—indeed, this argument was actually used by Europeans for the nefarious purpose of justifying their seizure of Native American land. Rather, their conception of property differed greatly from that of the Europeans: they believed that living on a given area of land gave people certain rights to it, even if they didn’t necessarily “own” it in the European sense of the word. As Cronon argues, “Native people generally understood themselves to have rights to the products of the land during different seasons, not that they owned the land itself.” Because Native people tended to move around more, the idea that a person (or group of people) could possess an area of land in an absolute, fixed way was less relevant to them. Furthermore, this mobile lifestyle meant that they had few possessions in general: “The need for diversity and mobility led New England Indians to avoid acquiring much surplus property.” Ultimately, European colonizers exploited the difference in how Native people conceptualized property in order to unethically seize Native land.
Cronon shows that the desire to gain ownership of the North American landscape and profit from its products was a major motivation for European colonization in the first place. As he argues, “Colonists were moved to transform the soil by a property system that taught them to treat land as capital.” Settlers perceived New England to be a land of plenty; however, rather than appreciating this natural abundance in its own right, they saw the land as an untapped source of profit. Due to the clash between their own belief systems and those of Native people, settlers claimed that Native people were foolish or mistaken for only harvesting the exact amount they needed for survival. By imposing their own understandings of property ownership, commodities, and profit onto the landscape, European colonizers did not just change the social world of New England, but the environment itself.
Throughout the book, Cronon repeatedly emphasizes that European settlers saw the land and its products as commodities and thus sources of profit. He even quotes an English explorer named James Rosier describing the plants in Maine as “the profits and fruits which are naturally on these lands.” Viewing the landscape as property filled with commodities affected the way colonizers treated it. Cronon points out that “New England lumbering used forests as if they would last forever.” Seeing trees as commodities and potential profits, settlers lumbered in a remarkably aggressive manner, neglecting the reality that trees were a finite resource that served an important role within the natural landscape. Ultimately, cutting down trees en masse had a highly destructive impact on the environment. Indeed, Cronon links the colonizers’ capitalist views of nature as a commodity to their lack of understanding of nature as an interdependent ecosystem. He claims, “Seeing landscapes in terms of commodities meant something else as well: it treated members of an ecosystem as isolated and extractable units.” The result of this attitude meant that colonizers failed to appreciate the way in which every part of the landscape was part of a delicate, balanced system. Aggressively lumbering trees, for instance, had a kind of domino effect on the environment as whole (such as the extinction of animals who used the forest as their habitat and long-term climate change) because trees were an integral part of a fragile, delicately balanced ecosystem. Overall, Cronon shows that European ideas about property ownership, commodities, and profit destructively changed the New England environment because these views were less aligned with nature than the socioeconomic belief systems of Native people were.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Property Ownership, Commodities, and Profit ThemeTracker
Property Ownership, Commodities, and Profit 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.
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.”
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.
The need for diversity and mobility led New England Indians to avoid acquiring much surplus property, confident as they were that their mobility and skill would supply any need that arose.
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.
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.
