About this title: This book offers an original and persuasive interpretation of the changing circumstances in New England's plant and animal communities that occurred with the shift from Indian to European dominance.
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"This book changed forever my view of the New England landscape. When the first colonists arrived from Europe, they were surprised at the shear abundance of resources: trees, berries, arable land, fresh water, etc. And, from the very beginning, from day one, the colonists abused these resources, assuming that they would never run out."
"Very good Marxist-influenced historical anthropology of the ecological changes wrought upon Native lands by European occupation. Written not theoretically, but with lots of detail from first-hand sources (colonial land records, memoirs, Native testimonials, etc.).
Particularly fascinating are discussions of differences in land rights between Natives and colonists - the Natives did have notions of property and rights, sovereignty over the land being identified with a sachem (which referred both to a specific leader and the whole community). But this sovereignty meant rights for the whole community over specific USES of the land. The mercantile colonists, on the other hand, enforced (through combination of 'legal' and dubious devices) notions of abstract, alienable property rights 'owned' to an individual land-holder. The landholder did not own the land in specific relation to its use, but abstractly, that is regardless of the character or relationship to the function of the land. The Natives did 'own' the land in different ways, but had no 'market' associated with it.
Cronon relates differences in how the land was named and bounded by Native and colonist to demonstrate this: Natives used specific-use names like "place-to-rest-between-the-waters" or "maize-growing-land", while the colonists employed names of the landholder (Williamsbridge) or referring back to English towns (New Hempstead). Native land boundaries often attached to specific features in the landscape, a vale or ridge or forest edge; colonial boundaries referred to abstract quantitative measurement (so many kilometers from such and such).
Cronon's great eye for ecological detail and relationship comes through in a later chapter on the destructive effects of animal husbandry and pasturage in New England. Cattle roaming literally stamped down on the earth, limiting its ability to recycle water and nutrients; rampant forest clearing (to clear pasture for cattle and pigs and sell timber for a terribly expanding market in wood), produced lands susceptible to drought and flood, where once before were steady streams. (Native used wood for fires, and lots and lots of fires, which awed the colonialists. But this dwindles in comparison to the colonialist's insatiable demand for it wood, both in manufacture and in home-building - Natives lived much in thatch houses, small enough to dissemble and move around in a few hours time; colonialists built big houses from large wood planks.)
This is not a book about Native resistance, although Cronon relates evidence more and more acknowledged now that European transmitted diseases killed, in many places, 90-95% of the Native population in a generation in waves of epidemics in the 1600's. This calamity and the psycho-social-economic disruption of Native societies it caused, relates to the relative speed of European colonization and weakness of Native resistance. Many communities simply lacked the labor to work the lands to sustain themselves and provide enough security and resources to fight.
The book also has a thorough bibliographic essay at the end; something not done much in great short treatises like this one."
"As someone else here mentioned, this book reads like a dissertation, so don't expect an ecological potboiler.
I really enjoyed reading this and couldn't help but think back to Eric Sloane's old sentimental favorites "A Reverence for Wood" and "Our Vanishing Landscape," especially in regards to the cutting of virgin timber and the radical transformation of the landscape.
If I have any complaint at all about the content, it would be that Mr. Cronon doesn't address the interdependence that had existed between (what were to be called) the Indians and (what was to become) New England since the previous glacial-age much, but really that's not a part of his thesis so it's a fine hair to split. The book focuses primarily on the Colonists, and then the Indians only in relationship to the Colonists."
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