Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

I only picked this up in support of the author after I read a bit about his role in the recent Wisconsin protests and the repercussions he faced therefor. I didn't actually expect to like the book. It sounded like a dry, academic study of a topic I wasn't much interested in. I couldn't have been more wrong. This book is not only fascinating and illuminative of a much overlooked and misunderstood period in history, but it is also relevant to aspects of today's political and economic struggles.Admittedly, the book gets off to a slow start. The first section explores what we are able to know about New England ecology before and during the colonial period, and the limitations on how we know it. The first chapter of the second section is an exploration of the diversity of New England ecology, both between the general northern and southern regions, as well as among the various "patchworks" of ecological areas within the two regions. These sections form a necessary base for the remainder of the book, but they are rather dry and academic.But beginning with the chapter "Seasons of Want and Plenty", Cronon gets into the real meat of his argument: the differences between the ways Indians vs. colonists used the land and the fundamental incompatibility of the two.I learned in school that the Indians had no system for surveying land, nor even a concept of land ownership. In fact, I learned, they didn't even believe land could be owned, and out of ignorance or for sport they would often sell the same parcel to different colonial groups, or to the same group multiple times. Cronon explodes the fallacy in that understanding. Indians did indeed have an understanding of land ownership, it's just that their understanding was fundamentally different from the colonists' understanding. Indians tended to own the land in common with their tribes, and various land use rights were recognized between and within the tribes. The right to hunt on certain land, for instance, could be sold - even sold to different parties - while still maintaining tribal ownership of the land itself.But to the colonists, however, land ownership included all rights thereto and accrued to the individual owner thereof (although most colonial villages did have common areas of land). Therefore, one of the first acts of each successive group of colonists was to mark the boundaries of their property, generally by the use of a fence, thereby prohibiting any use by any other parties. From the start, the two ways of life were mutually exclusive.Although the Indians, particularly in Southern New England, did practice agriculture, it was a semi-nomadic form of agriculture that depended on land use more than land ownership. The Indians tilled a particular field only for a few years before moving on and clearing another field, allowing the previous one to lie fallow and become overgrown. The Indians also made great use of controlled burning to clear fields. This prevented the decrease in soil fertility caused by overfarming, as well as creating great areas of borderlands between woodlands and fields, areas particularly hospitable to various berry plants and wildlife used for food and hides. These practices created the conditions for the great abundance of food, trees, and wildlife which so astounded the colonists.Unlike the Indians who saw this "natural" abundance as simply a means of sustaining life according to the season, the colonists saw each particular resource as a commodity to be owned, used, exploited and sold for profit. Trees, for instance, were in great demand for building houses and ships, fuel for warmth during the long winters, and export especially because of England's tree shortage at the time. The means by which the colonists claimed, harvested and transported these resources, however, ultimately undermined the conditions necessary to supply such resources in such abundance. Trees were rapidly cleared to create fields, thereby leaving a dearth of trees for other purposes. Fields were planted at maximum levels with single crops year after year, thereby depleting soil fertility. Beaver and other animals were hunted to near extinction, at least within New England.In fact, Cronon argues, this commoditization of the resources of the New World was the beginning of the rise of the capitalist economy in America, even though capitalism as it's understood today didn't truly develop until the Industrial Revolution.Cronon's book is somewhat slim, but it is dense. It is packed with consideration of how little things impacted the ecology and economy in big and often unexpected ways. The colonists brought many unfamiliar organisms to the New World - seeds that grew to become invasive species, pigs that wreaked havoc with farming and gathering of berries, diseases for which the Indians had no defense. While many of the changes the colonists wrought were intentional, many were not, but the impact was just as great.In addition to being a sweeping academic survey, Cronon's book is also a masterful narrative. He's not only listing the changes in different plant and animal species and the differences in land use, but he's telling a story of how those changes affected human lives, both the Indians and the colonists. It is a truly engaging account of the causes and effects which form the basis of the earliest history of our country and which still have echoes today.Cronon was, it seems, a bit of a pioneer with this book. I've recently read several books which explore how advances in anthropology, archeology and ecology have led to enormous gains in knowledge of Indian cultures and have produced radical changes in our understanding thereof, but Cronon helped to set these advances in motion simply by considering and exploring the impact of seemingly small and minor things that most of us take for granted. Highly recommended.

Perhaps it is appropriate that this book review be done at this particular time; since it is so much about the convergence of cultures in early America and how the use of resources changed as a result. This is especially important as we pause for the holidays and the bounties that are so much a part of the American experience.William Cronin has been a leading figure in the study of the environmental history of the American West for a generation. This book is one of the reasons why. It is an elegant study, at once entertaining and enlightening as well as seminal in its characterization of the New England frontier and the relationships of the native population to the English immigrants in their homeland.Cronin’s thesis is straightforward. As he characterized it: “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. To the cultural consequences of the European invasion—what historians sometimes call ‘the frontier process’—we must add the ecological ones as well” (p. xv). So true, but that insight was lost on many earlier historians who had previously studied native/English interactions. What Cronin offers is a well-researched, effectively-argued, and finely-honed explanation of this situation.Chapters on the landscape and its changes over time, the different natures of agriculture among the native and English populations, ownership and patterns of use, and the interactions of both communities bring this together in a useful manner. Accessing standard historical materials as well as works in archaeology, anthropology, plant and animal science, and climatology Cronin synthesizes a major historical episode in a new way.His greatest conclusion, at least from my perspective, harkens back to the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner asserted, and I believe Turner was correct that this was the case, that the broad expanse of land available dominated the thinking of Europeans coming to America and prompted a structuring of the American experience along a specific path. Cronin makes the case that this European path was uniquely destructive to the New England ecology. “They assumed the limitless availability of more land to exploit,” he wrote, “and in the long run that was impossible” (p. 169). Ultimately, Cronin noted, “the people of plenty were a people of waste” (p. 170).

Even though I live in San Diego, I found this book to be well worth the read. Dense but short, "Changes in the Land" gives a close reading to the ecological impact of British colonization in New England. As Cronon states in his conclusion, this transformation has ramifications far outside New England, since the environmental degradation that accompanied early colonization forced settlers farther and farther afield.Twenty years after it was published, the scholarship is still, what I would consider "cutting edge". Cronon cuts across disciplines and primary sources to produce a nuanced model of the interrelationship of humans and the environment. Cronon's work is just as interesting for his (to me, anyway) novel technique of writing a history where the personalities of humans take a back seat to the consequnces of their decisions.The effect is at once radical and main stream. Radical, in that Cronon strips away traditional justifications for human decisions that reinforce the implicit assumptions that cause those same decisions. Main stream, in that he manages to stay away from the hyperbole and argument that plague revisions of history.I've also read Cronon's "Nature's Metropolis", which is his book about the development of the city of Chicago. I would recommend that book, as well as this one, to anyone interested in the subjects that Cronon covers. His scholarship is top notch.

This is one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking books I have read so far this year. Cronon's book is one of the pioneering works of ecological history. By looking at the causes of the ecological changes after European settlers arrive in New England, Cronon provides new insights into colonial history. By explaining how the landscape changed over time, the book opens your eyes to looking at the American landscape in a very different way.This is a reissue of the book with an excellent introduction by Demos and a nice concluding essay by Cronon explaining how he came to write this book.

Excelente libro

This is truly a great book, a classic I must say, for those interested in the history of the environnement. It is well written. It tells the story of the Indians' way of life before the settlement of the Europeans in America. I found it very inspiring and well narrated. Then the book follow the path of the Europeans, their encounter with the Indians, and the changes that follow in the way Indians used to leave and for the land on a massive scale.I highly recommand this book to those we wish to step back in time and to explore another way of life, the one of the Indians in comparaison to our own. The book clearly spell out the ways of our unforgiven civilization.

The book is for a class

This is the second time I have bought a book printed by Amazon (printed in Great Britain) which has not been up to standard (the first had missing pages). In this book the text is blurry, crooked and contains shadowing from an original photocopy. It is somewhat readable, but if you are sensitive to text format you should look for a better alternative. Better to buy secondhand on the market than newly printed from Amazon as they seem to be very lacking in ability to produce quality copies.