In Changes in the Land, Cronon emphasizes that environmental history is inevitably a study of interdependent systems. Nature works as a system with many parts—hence the word “ecosystem”—and none of these parts can be properly understood in isolation without looking to how they interact with the rest of the system. Early in the book, Cronon raises the rhetorical question: “Are human beings inside or outside their systems?” The resounding answer found in the book is that humans are very much inside their systems (namely environmental systems, but also social communities, political economies, and ideologies). At the same time, however, Cronon shows that not everyone takes this view. In particular, while indigenous people in the American colonial period tended to have a keen understanding of the way in which they were interdependent with their ecosystem, European colonizers tended to think of themselves as individuals who had sovereignty and control over their environment. Cronon argues that this point of view was not only factually inaccurate, but that it led settlers to have a destructive impact on the landscape, even when they did not necessarily intend to.
Cronon makes a convincing case for the interdependence of all things through his analysis of the colonial New England landscape. As he writes early on the book, “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.” Crucially, this shows how one element of the natural world—in this case, a pig—is both part of an ecosystem and part of a variety of human systems that must be incorporated into a comprehensive understanding of the animal. One cannot understand the pigs of colonial New England without understanding the plants they ate (e.g., dandelions) and the way they were enclosed (fences). Moreover, pigs were not just part of the natural landscape but also the economy. As Cronon shows in the book, European colonizers had a markedly different understanding of their own relation to animals than Native people in this regard: Europeans viewed farm animals as property that belonged to a person like any other possession, whereas Native people believed that an animal could only “belong” to someone at the point at which it was killed. Depending on whose stewardship they were under, pigs were inextricably tied to one of these different concepts of ownership—and the political and economic systems to which they belonged.
One of the main arguments Cronon makes in the book is that while Native people had a keen understanding of the way in which they were part of—and interdependent with—their ecosystem, European colonizers tended to be in denial of this reality. Colonizers farmed the land in aggressive, destructive ways, leading to the permanent problems of deforestation and soil exhaustion. Crucially, they did so because they didn’t understand the ways in which they were dependent on the land, which was a delicate ecosystem that could easily be thrown off by overly intense human intervention. Yet while colonizers may have liked to imagine themselves as masters of the landscape, there were many ways in which they were forced to confront the reality that this was not the case. Cronon argues, for example, that “Europeans as well as Indians were inextricably bound to the wheel of the seasons.” He also shows the ways in which European colonizers altered the ecosystem with inadvertent negative results. For example, their intensive farming techniques contributed to the rise of a new crop of pests: “By using their animals and ploughs to create more extensive areas of cropland than the Indians had done, colonists unintentionally created habitats which many organisms found quite attractive.” These organisms included the Hessian fly and black stem rust, both of which had a highly destructive impact on colonizers’ lives and agricultural practices.
Perhaps the main message of the book is that whether people like it or not, they are part of various systems which are interdependent. This is a significant revision of the settler narrative of the American colonial period, which often emphasizes the sovereignty and supremacy of settlers over their environment. While the actions of settlers did indeed change the environment in an irrevocable manner, this was often not in the way that settlers actually intended, which proves that only an understanding of ecological interdependence will allow people to live in successful harmony with their environment. By the time settlers began to properly understand this truth (which was a major tenet of Native belief systems), it was often too late.
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Systems and Interdependence 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
