Changes in the Land, Chapters 1-3.

ISS 310: People and Environment

Spring 2002

Prof. Alan Rudy

Presented by Victor Torres-Velez

Thurs., Jan. 17

Chapter I: The View from Walden

Indian settlements looked like parks to the settlers. Where was the wilderness then?

What did Thoreau see as missing, lost, or destroyed? Why?

Ch.1: Thoreau – heard of him?

The myth of a fallen humanity is central to Thoreau's writing, and nowhere is this more visible than in his descriptions of past landscapes.

•   "When I consider," he wrote, "that the nobler

animals have been exterminated here…I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country."

Seen in this way, a changed landscape meant a loss of wildness and virility that was ultimately spiritual in its import, a sign of decline in both nature and humanity.

Ch.1: Anti-Thoreau, Progress-ives

Others saw the settlement of the continent, the taming of the wilderness, the conversion of the heathens, as a positive, civilizing process.

Though landscape was altered by this supposed social evolution, the human process of development ‑ from Indian to clearer of the forest to prosperous farmer ‑ was the center of Rush's attention. Environmental change was of secondary interest.

Ch.1: similarities and differences

Thoreau took the state of nature as a sign of the state of society and his opponents took the state of society as a sign of the state of nature.

Both look from one to the other instead of at the process of mutual transformation.

Ch.1: Cronon says:

“The replacement of Indians by predominantly European populations in New England was as much an ecological as a cultural revolution, and the human side of that revolution cannot be fully understood until it is embedded in the ecological one. Doing so requires a history, not only of human actors, conflicts, and economies, but of ecosystems as well.”

Ch.1: Cronon’s problems

What kinds of problems did Cronon experience in doing his historical research?

Data Limitations

Interpretation

Ecological Science

Ch.1: Data and interpretation

Travelers' accounts and other colonial writings are not only subjective but often highly generalized. Colonial nomenclature could be quite imprecise and ethnocentric,

When reading colonial accounts describing floods, insect invasions, coastal alterations, and significant changes in climate, we are perhaps all too tempted to attribute these by some devious means to the influence of the arriving Europeans. This will not always do.

Ch.1: Ecological Science

He talks about “functionalist,” climax ecology that models ecologies on organisms.

How does this model work and why doesn’t it work for Cronon? (What is functionalism?)

He also talks about ecosystems ecology and a focus on energy flows and disturbance.

How does this model work and why does Cronon prefer it?

Ch.1: adding humans to ecology?

Just as ecosystems have been changed by the historical activities of human beings, so too, have they had their own less-recorded history: forests have been transformed by disease, drought, and fire, species have become extinct, and landscapes have been drastically altered by climatic change without any human intervention at all.

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 human, beings inside, or outside, their systems?

Cronon: Indians and Settlers

The destruction of Indian communities in fact brought some of the most important ecological changes which followed the Europeans' arrival in America. The choice is not between two landscapes, one with and one without a human influence; it is between two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem.!!

Ch.1: Cronon’s conclusion?

How does Cronon want us to see the relationship between people and environment at the end of the chapter?

What do you think this will mean for the kinds of social reporting and ecological history that he provides in the rest of the book?

Cronon: Ch.2Landscape and Patchwork

Main Ideas? Thoughts on Note-taking. Merchantable Commodities

Discrete Things not Parts of Inter-related System

Selective/Partial Vision

Ch.2 Landscape and Patchwork

What is the difference between Merchants and Settlers

Note: Remarkable abundance of Fish, Birds, Mammals, Human Health

What’s the role of Forests, Bogs, Marshes, and the Seashore?

What’s the role of Fire?

Ch.2: Break it Down

How did the “merchantable commodity” vision affect European understanding of New England’s Nature and its Indigenous People?

How many Natures were there? North-South Microclimates

Ch.2: Break it Down II

How many Peoples were there? North-South Hunter-gatherers vs.

Agriculturalists He talked about Space and Time:

WHY?

Ch.2: Key Quote:“Which species grew where in any particular place was thus the result of a cumulative sequence of ecological processes and historical events…. Whereas the natural ecosystem tended towards a patchwork of diverse communities arranged almost randomly on the landscape – its very continuity depending on disorder – the human tendency was to systematize the patchwork and impose a more regular pattern on it.” (Cronon, pp.32-33)

Ch. 3: Want and Plenty

“Selective reporting, exaggeration, and outright lies…”

“they dreamed of a world in which returns to labor were far greater than in England…”

Misunderstandings about New England? Abundant nature -- Scarce society

Ch.3: Nature wealth and society

Natural wealth varied across space and time Indians moved with

abundance/wealthoccasionally went hungry

English stayed in one placestored food

Ch.3: Population and Abundance Leibig’s Law and (un)conscious[?!] population

control little impact do you agree with this little impact statement?

Note >100,000 Indians pre-1492 What you may not know is that global

indigenous populations were decimated from 1500-1800, and 1800 is when “exponential” population growth is said to start… Malthusian overpopulation theories.

Ch.3: Agriculture

Describe the “disorderly” Indian agriculture.

Describe the relationship between agriculture, soil depletion, fire, and hunting-gathering

Ch.3: THEY KEY POINT:

The migratory character, and different gender division of labor, of Indian life we seen by the English as LAZINESS a fact which undermined any already minimal

ideas Europeans had about Indian rights to New England property.

Ownership should lie in the hands of “improvers,” not “wasters.”

Ch.3: Improvement

Notice how “improvement” means simplification, enclosure and concentration of landholdings.

NEXT: Property, Wealth, and Boundaries

Conclusion: The everyday, seasonal and annual

movements of people reflect their social ecological relations.

Gender, labor, and class relations are part and parcel of social ecological processes.

The kinds of nature people know is related to the kinds of social values people have.

You can’t understand environmental problems without understanding production relations, markets, and property rights -- science is NOT enough.