Environmental History of Colonial New England, 1600–1800

Introduction: Nature, Society, and Environmental History

"Human acts occur within a network of relationships, processes, and systems that are as ecological as they are cultural. To such basic historical categories as gender, class, and race, environmental historians would add a theoretical vocabulary in which plants, animals, soils, climates, and other nonhuman entities become the coactors and codeterminants of a history not just of people but of the earth itself." — William Cronon

The connection between the history of nature and society defines the very concept of history itself. Both Cronon and Merchant argue that examining how and why human communities transform over time — and their relation to the land that changes and is changed by them — is most integral to the development of the "New World." As it focuses on the confluence of nature and society, environmental history covers the history of the United States beginning with the changes brought by the Pilgrims, whose reestablishment of Native American territories as Colonial New England birthed two divergent histories of American land, wilderness, and landscape by 1800.

Worster defines environmental history in the most commonly cited manner in Changes in the Land and Major Problems in American Environmental History: "Defined in the vernacular, then, environmental history deals with the role and place of nature in human life." The environmental history of New England takes into account the idea of nature, the idea of wilderness, and the important realities of water flows, gene pools, oceans, forestation, and the intertwining of autonomous agents and the land they use. As Cronon writes, "Wherever the two spheres, the natural and the cultural, confront or interact with one another, environmental history finds its essential themes."

Cronon constructs a picture of New England as an intricate relationship between ideology and practice — one that led the region to become shaped by Western and American views rather than by the values of the Indians native to the land. This process began very early in the history of modern America, and its occurrence was, in actuality, in direct contrast to the stories of national origin taught in most classrooms. In Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, Cronon refutes the widely held assumption that the colonists arrived in America with superior technology, greater infrastructural capabilities, and a better understanding of the land. Instead, he brings to light the fact that the Europeans arrived with imported farming techniques that, when applied to the crops commonly cultivated by the Indians and native to the land, actually destroyed the land's resources and the land itself.

The cultural consequences of the influx of European settlers to New England are far better known than the ecological ramifications. But the shift from the Native American approach to the land to that employed by the settlers involved a historically critical — and previously underexamined — reorganization of plant and animal communities. Cronon engages this discussion not only in terms of land use and agricultural production, but also takes into account subtle differences between Native American and settler lifestyles, such as the domestication of animals. Between 1600 and 1800, there were fundamental changes in the plant, animal, and bird populations of the New England region.

References

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Merchant, Carolyn. Major Problems in American Environmental History. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Worster, Donald. "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History." Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (March 1990): 1087–1106. Quoted in Merchant, Major Problems in American Environmental History, p. 4.