As historians and citizens we need to embrace a more humble view of human agency. We must acknowledge the unpredictability involved in incorporating nature into human designs and, in so doing, bring natural forces to the fore of the historical process. As Marx wrote, people “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.”4 They butt up against imposing social and economic forces, to be sure, but also ecological factors as formidable as the ones Marx called our attention to more than 100 years ago. When it comes to the human control of nature, beware: Things rarely turn out the way they are supposed to. The wind shifts, the earth moves, and, now and again, when you least expect it, a flock of birds swoops in for a meal.
NOTES
PROLOGUE: ROCKS AND HISTORY
1. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York, 1986), 305–306.
2. Charles B. Hunt, Natural Regions of the United States and Canada (San Francisco, 1974), 203.
3. Quoted in Tim Flannery, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (New York, 2001), 267.
CHAPTER 1: WILDERNESS UNDER FIRE
1. Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York, 1992), 339.
2. Tim Flannery, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (New York, 2001), 176.
3. Ibid., 187; Shepard Krech, III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, 1999), 38–39.
4. Krech, The Ecological Indian, 29–30, 40.
5. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1997), 159, 355; idem, “Why Was Post-Pleistocene Development of Human Societies Slightly More Rapid in the Old World Than in the New World?” in Americans before Columbus: Ice Age Origins, comp. and ed. Ronald C. Carlisle (Pittsburgh, PA, 1988), 27.
6. John D. Daniels, “The Indian Population of North America in 1492,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 49 (April 1992): 298–299, 300, 306, 310–311, 320.
7. Ibid., 314, 315, 317.
8. Krech, The Ecological Indian, 85, 92, 93.
9. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), 39–40, 53 (quotation).
10. Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (New York, 1990), 46–49.
11. Ibid., 43, 45, 51–52.
12. Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, NE, 1983), 160, 165, 167, 170, 171.
13. M. Kat Anderson, Michael G. Barbour, and Valerie Whitworth, “A World of Balance and Plenty: Land, Plants, Animals, and Humans in a Pre-European California,” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley, CA, 1998), 33; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 40–42; William Cronon and Richard White, “Indians in the Land,” American Heritage 37 (August/September 1986): 21.
14. Quoted in Krech, The Ecological Indian, 201.
15. Ibid., 164–165, 170–171, quotation from p. 165.
16. Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York, 1989), 41–42 (1st quotation); Krech, The Ecological Indian, 103 (2d quotation).
17. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 42, 44 (quotation).
18. Krech, The Ecological Indian, 104.
19. Quoted in ibid., 104–105.
20. White, The Roots of Dependency, 184–185.
21. Anderson, Barbour, and Whitworth, “A World of Balance,” 19–20, 35.
22. White, The Roots of Dependency, 186; Silver, A New Face on the Countryside, 61, 62.
23. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 46–48.
24. Mitchell T. Mulholland, “Territoriality and Horticulture: A Perspective for Prehistoric Southern New England,” in Holocene Human Ecology in Northeastern North America, ed. George P. Nicholas (New York, 1988), 137–166.
25. Cronon and White, “Indians in the Land,” 20.
CHAPTER 2: A TRULY NEW WORLD
1. David W. Stahle et al., “The Lost Colony and Jamestown Droughts,” Science 280 (April 24, 1998): 564–567.
2. Tim Flannery, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (New York, 2001), 83–84.
3. Quoted in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” American Historical Review 87 (December 1982): 1270.
4. Quoted in S. Max Edelson, “Planting the Lowcountry: Agricultural Enterprise and Economic Experience in the Lower South, 1695–1785” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1998), 13.
5. Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate,” 1266; idem, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 42 (April 1984): 227.
6. Quoted in Carville Earle, Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems (Stanford, CA, 1992), 27.
7. Stahle et al., “The Lost Colony,” 566.
8. Earle, Geographical Inquiry, 32–40.
9. Quoted in H. Roy Merrens and George D. Terry, “Dying in Paradise: Malaria, Mortality, and the Perceptual Environment in Colonial South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 50 (November 1984): 549.
10. Quoted in Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate,” 1272.
11. Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York, 2000), xiii.
12. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Climate and Mastery of the Wilderness in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Seventeenth-Century New England, ed. Colonial Society of Massachusetts (Boston, 1984), 31, 32 (quotation), 35–36.
13. Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., “The Demography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston, 1992), 37.
14. Elizabeth A. Fenn, “Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffrey Amherst,” Journal of American History 86 (March 2000): 1559 (quotation), 1560–1561.
15. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York, 1986), 202 (1st quotation); Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (New York, 1990), 74 (2d quotation).
16. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 208 (1st quotation); Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, 1997), 39 (2d quotation).
17. Fenn, “Biological Warfare,” 1552, 1558, 1573.
18. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT, 1972), 66, 107.
19. Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 7, 10–11, 38, 164–168.
20. Quoted in Calloway, New Worlds for All, 14.
21. Quotations in ibid., 52.
22. Quoted in Silver, A New Face on the Countryside, 190.
23. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), 65.
24. Quoted in ibid., 60.
25. Margaret Wickens Pearce, “Native Mapping in Southern New England Indian Deeds,” in Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use, ed. G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago, 1998), 174–177.
26. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 75.
27. Calvin Martin, “The European Impact on the Culture of a Northeastern Algonquian Tribe: An Ecological Interpretation,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 31 (January 1974): 25.
28. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 94–97.
29. Silver, A New Face on the Countryside, 94 (quotation), 97.
30. Charles F. Carroll, The Timber Economy of Puritan New England (Providence, RI, 1973), 8–11.
31. Silver, A New Face on the Countryside, 17–18
, 121–123.
32. Quotations in Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York, 1989), 78, 79.
33. Silver, A New Face on the Countryside, 110–111.
34. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 124–126.
35. E. L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economics and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge, UK, 1981), 84.
CHAPTER 3: REFLECTIONS FROM A WOODLOT
1. David R. Foster, Thoreau’s Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 151.
2. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Sherman Paul (1854 and 1849; reprint, Boston, 1960), 132; Foster, Thoreau’s Country, 8, 9, 87 (last quotation).
3. Quotation in Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York, 1989), 57.
4. John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580–1845 (New Haven, CT, 1982), 173–174, 181.
5. Quoted in ibid., 185.
6. Quoted in Robert A. Gross, “Culture and Cultivation: Agriculture and Society in Thoreau’s Concord,” Journal of American History 69 (June 1982): 47.
7. E. L. Jones, “Creative Disruptions in American Agriculture, 1620–1820,” Agricultural History 48 (October 1974): 519.
8. Quoted in William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), 133.
9. Quoted in James A. Henretta et al., America’s History, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Boston, 2000), 1:111.
10. Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), 187.
11. Brian Donahue, “Plowland, Pastureland, Woodland and Meadow: Husbandry in Concord, Massachusetts, 1635–1771” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1995), 369.
12. Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976), 107.
13. Sarah F. McMahon, “ ‘All Things in Their Proper Season:’ Seasonal Rhythms of Diet in Nineteenth Century New England,” Agricultural History 63 (Spring 1989): 130, 132, 140–142, 145 (1st quotation), 146; idem, “A Comfortable Subsistence: The Changing Composition of Diet in Rural New England, 1620–1840,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 42 (January 1985): 44; Diana Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (Hanover, NH, 2000), 63 (2d quotation).
14. William R. Baron, “Eighteenth-Century New England Climate Variation and Its Suggested Impact on Society,” Maine Historical Society Quarterly 21 (Spring 1982): 201.
15. Quoted in Alan Taylor, “ ‘The Hungry Year’: 1789 on the Northern Border of Revolutionary America,” in Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Alessa Johns (New York, 1999), 151.
16. Ibid., 153–161.
17. John D. Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore, 1977), 4.
18. David M. Ludlum, Early American Winters, 1604–1820 (Boston, 1966), 190 (1st and 2d quotations); Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis, 47 (3d quotation), 48.
19. Alan Taylor, “The Great Change Begins: Settling the Forest of Central New York,” New York History (July 1995): 266.
20. Quoted in Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis, 106.
21. Ibid., 4.
22. Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, “Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 41 (July 1984): 333–364.
23. Winifred B. Rothenberg, “The Productivity Consequences of Market Integration: Agriculture in Massachusetts, 1771–1801,” in American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War, ed. Robert E. Gallman and John Joseph Wallis (Chicago, 1992), 335.
24. Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 77–78.
25. Gross, “Culture and Cultivation,” 49.
26. Peter D. McClelland, Sowing Modernity: America’s First Agricultural Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 129, 162–164.
27. McMahon, “A Comfortable Subsistence,” 47–48.
28. Foster, Thoreau’s Country, 138–139.
29. Quoted in Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 515n.
CHAPTER 4: A WORLD OF COMMODITIES
1. Quoted in Leah Hager Cohen, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things (New York, 1997), 236.
2. John T. Cumbler, “The Early Making of an Environmental Consciousness: Fish, Fisheries Commissions, and the Connecticut River,” Environmental History Review 15 (Winter 1991): 75 (quotation); Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York, 1991), 170; John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State: New England, 1790–1930 (New York, 2001), 15–16.
3. Gary Kulik, “Dams, Fish, and Farmers: Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation, ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 42–43.
4. Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 85, 87.
5. Quoted in ibid., 147.
6. Quoted in Richard Manning, Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie (New York, 1995), 94.
7. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), 111, 113, 116, 120, 125, 145.
8. Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York, 1989), 160–161.
9. Ibid., 130 (1st quotation); Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 450 (2d quotation).
10. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 132; Thomas R. Cox et al., This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present (Lincoln, NE, 1985), 72; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 179.
11. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 184–185, 188.
12. Ibid., 193–194; Cox et al., This Well-Wooded Land, 125.
13. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 159; Cox et al., This Well-Wooded Land, 158; Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 201–202.
14. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 208–209.
15. Ibid., 211–212.
16. Ibid., 221.
17. Ibid., 217–218; James Willard Hurst, Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836–1915, rev. ed. (Madison, WI, 1984), 140, 141.
18. Hurst, Law and Economic Growth, 127.
19. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 233–236.
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