This paper examines the environmental history of New England from 1600 to 1800, drawing primarily on William Cronon's Changes in the Land and Carolyn Merchant's Major Problems in American Environmental History. It analyzes how two fundamentally different cultural relationships to land — the Native American ethic of sustenance and ecological stewardship versus the European settler ethos of commodity accumulation — produced dramatic transformations in plant, animal, and human communities. Key topics include Native American burning practices, the fur trade's ecological consequences, the introduction of domesticated livestock, and the rise of a market economy that treated land and animals as capital. The paper ultimately frames these divergent histories as the product of polarized paradigms: one oriented toward sustaining the land, the other toward extracting profit from it.
The paper demonstrates historiographical synthesis — drawing on multiple scholars (Cronon, Merchant, Worster) to construct a unified argument about how cultural values shape environmental outcomes. Rather than summarizing each source separately, the writer weaves them together to build a single interpretive claim about the colonial transformation of New England's ecology.
The paper opens with an epigraph and theoretical framing, then defines environmental history via Worster and Cronon. It proceeds thematically: Native American stewardship practices (burning, hunting), the European commodity mindset, the fur trade as ecological agent, and the ecological impact of livestock. The conclusion returns to the paper's central contrast, tying the ecological devastation of 1800 to the clash of foundational cultural paradigms.
"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.
These changes were the direct result of the approach each culture brought to the land. Cronon portrays the Indians as more ecologically attuned than their European counterparts — oriented toward the land and its long-term well-being. The Native Americans relied on their hunting and farming products for their inherent usefulness, not as a source of accumulation or status. By contrast, the European settlers saw both the land and its animals as things to be owned, purchased, or sold. Cronon draws on the memories, notes, letters, and histories of various settlers, conquerors, and European observers to document their approach to the land as a source of commodity. As colonists described the new world, they repeatedly wrote home about its "commodity" value, seeing it as a source of future economic gain. As commodities, the land and animals were severed from any understanding of their ecological usefulness and were exploited and squandered by the newcomers. These vastly different cultural norms underlie Cronon's central thesis: the "Children of Nature" saw the land as an enduring source to be fostered and appreciated, while the settlers saw it as something that could instead foster and appreciate their capital.
According to Cronon, the Indian people who offered invaluable lessons to the settlers had lived on that land for over ten thousand years. During that time, they created a world of abundance, stability, and regular food supply by working carefully with the land. When the settlers first arrived, they were fascinated by the patterns the natives had established to create a viable relationship with their environment.
"What most impressed English visitors was the Indians' burning of extensive sections of the surrounding forest once or twice a year. 'The Salvages,' wrote Thomas Morton, 'are accustomed to set fire of the Country in all places where they come, and to burne it twize a yeare, viz: at the Spring, and the fall of the leafe.'"
By burning the forests, the Native Americans of New England found a way to clear underbrush and make their hunting more productive. Since these regular patterns of extracting nature's bounty were the source of their food, shelter, and clothing, it was vital that they created and maintained a workable system to do so. Their clothing and homes were made from the skins of foraging animals, who also benefited from careful forest clearing; creating open space was therefore not merely self-serving but served the broader ecological community. Their hunter-gatherer societies were not without infrastructure, contrary to popular repute; they were, in fact, more adept at identifying what kind of infrastructure was needed and appropriate.
Cronon elaborates on the precision of these burning practices:
"By removing underwood and fallen trees, the Indians reduced the total accumulated fuel at ground level. With only small nonwoody plants to consume, the annual fires moved quickly, burned with relatively low temperatures, and soon extinguished themselves. They were more ground fires than forest fires, not usually involving larger trees, and so they rarely grew out of control. Fires of this kind could be used to drive game for hunting, to clear fields for planting, and, on at least one occasion, to fend off European invaders."
Cronon makes clear that the Native Americans could not fathom a culture of such wanton natural destruction. When they burned, it was not to destroy but to build; even their fires served explicit, multi-fold, and ecologically purposeful ends.
"Because the enlarged edge areas actually raised the total herbivorous food supply, they not merely attracted game but helped create much larger populations of it. Indian burning promoted the increase of exactly those species whose abundance so impressed English colonists: elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail, ruffed grouse, and so on. When these populations increased, so did the carnivorous eagles, hawks, lynxes, foxes, and wolves."
Because their relationship to the land was so tied to its usefulness and to their ability not only to make use of its products but also to replenish its supply, the Indians were not fully aware that they were selling the land to European traders; Cronon argues they believed they were only relinquishing usufruct rights. As he notes, concepts of land tenure closely mirrored systems of ecological use.
The settlers approached the New World as an Eden bestowed upon them by God — not as a living earth in need of care and respect. As a result, they rapidly depleted the natural wealth they found upon arrival, despite the Indians' long and successful history on the same land. Merchant portrays this as the natural result of capitalism and what she terms "radical ecology," which amplifies capitalism's dominating personality in relation to the natural world. Within decades, New England was transformed from a world of trees, forests, and free-ranging foragers into a land of fences, property lines, and domesticated animals.
The settlers' approach to acquiring land mirrored their use of it. They killed animals not primarily for food, clothing, or shelter, but to supply the fur trade and furnish Londoners with fashionable hats and the accessories of current fads. Their approach was oriented not toward sustaining the land but toward extracting maximum value from it in service of distant markets.
"Few English observers could have realized this. People accustomed to keeping domesticated animals lacked the conceptual tools to recognize the more distant kind of husbandry practiced by their Native American neighbors," Cronon writes. The Native Americans viewed animals differently; they did not treat them as markers of property lines but allowed them to move freely across the land. There were also fewer livestock species in Indian villages than in settler towns, meaning the animals' ecological footprint was substantially smaller. Cronon emphasizes the ecologically demanding and destructive impact that domesticated livestock have on land, and argues that while the Native Americans succeeded in maintaining a careful balance among land, person, and animal, the settlers did not.
The effects of European settlers on New England by 1800 left a landscape unrecognizable to the Native Americans who had lived comfortably and cooperatively on that land for thousands of years — a land stripped of its natural value and emptied of its natural resources. These two divergent histories of the same land are the result of polarized paradigms for life: one, a lifestyle of sustenance; the other, a lifestyle of success. As both Cronon and Merchant demonstrate, the ecological and cultural costs of that second paradigm were enormous, and their consequences extended far beyond the boundaries of colonial New England.
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.
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