Henry David Thoreau was an American nature writer. He lived from 1817 to 1862. And I want to begin this week's audio recording by quoting from some of what he wrote in 1845. This is, you can find this text in the beginning of Steinberg's chapter. Steinberg has these quotes as well.
But he wrote, In 1845, when he had sought escape from Boston, Massachusetts, from the city life, from the hustle and bustle of Boston, by moving into a cabin in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts. And when I say woods, I mean a place where farmers used to go to chop down trees so that they could build more fires and build more fences. He wrote, when I first paddled a boat on Walden, i was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods but since i left those shores the wood-choppers have still further laid waste and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood with occasional vistas through which you see the water my muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth how can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down So here we have in Thoreau the classic environmentalist text. What he's really describing here is spoiled wilderness, a place that before the woodchoppers came and cut down the trees, it was an unspoiled wilderness. He says even, thank God they cannot cut down the clouds.
He sees the trees there, therefore, as... the same thing as the clouds, right? These natural entities that should have been left untouched by humans. He's describing, as Steinberg tells us, a countryside that was being pillaged. It was being domesticated.
It became not a place untouched by humans, but a place where humans were transforming it through their own work, through cutting. through planting, through fencing. It was a place where humans were doing battle with the natural world, doing battle with the ecosystem. And as Steinberg tells us in this chapter, this was a process that came as the result of colonists moving farther and farther from the cities onto land that Indians had already inhabited, but land that that they generally clear cut, take all the forest, take all the trees down to use as timber, because there was such great demand for lumber, and also demand for fuel.
Remember that wood was being burned for fuel. But not only does Steinberg begin this chapter with Henry David Thoreau and his view from Walden, so too does William Cronin in the other selection that you read for this week. Chapter 1 of William Cronin's book, Changes in the Land, Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. I want to talk a little bit about this book and William Cronin before we get into exactly what he says.
...to say that this book, William Cronin's Changes in the Land, is the single most important work ever written in environmental history. William Cronin wrote it as a graduate student at Yale. He was... a graduate student there, and he began to try and to write about the colonial experience in New England, and he wanted to write about it in a new way.
And he made his way over outside of the main library, where Yale students had been going to find the writings of colonists, the main archives there that left the records of colonists. And he found his way to other libraries on the Yale campus, including the Forestry Library. And he began to teach himself ecological science and the science of forestry. And he began to think about the way that different sources could be used to tell this history of New England.
And he looked at environmental sources. Now, he's not the first historian to ever think about the natural world as a source, but he was the first to do it. systematically and the first to do it in a book that was so widely read. or the view from Walden, Cronin talks about, this is on page 10, this functionalist emphasis on equilibrium and climax.
He's talking about forests here, and he's talking about ecology, and he cautions us against misreading the science, if we're to understand the history of this period in New England. And I'm wondering if you can explain why that's such an important question. What does Cronin...
Cronin. what is Cronin trying to get at there? What I mean by that is Cronin is really trying to lay out for the reader, not necessarily what happened, but how he came to this story, how this book came to be really. That's why he's talking so much about the sources that he used, is because he knew that the readers were going to be unfamiliar with these environmental sources. Readers of this book, when it came out, were not familiar with environmental history, as I suggested.
This was one of the founding works when it came out in 1983. So he had to kind of teach his audience how to understand these environmental sources that he was using. It would be a great essay question, frankly, for that first test, right? What were the sources that he was using and and how did he explain how he was going to use them? One of the central lessons of this book is Cronin's use of ecology, of the science of ecology. And he talks about, in the concluding couple paragraphs of that chapter, he talks about, in the historical sense, how, quote, change was less the result of disturbance than of the ordinary processes whereby communities maintained and transformed themselves.
End quote. Think about that quote. Change was less the result of disturbance than of the ordinary process of ecology. What then does that mean about, well, he says the golden age or the myth of the golden age of American history, right?
If change in the environment is a natural process, then what does that, how does that change the way we think about human actors? Can we just, in other words, see the colonists as destroyers of some idyllic environmental place or idyllic environmental balance? It suggests, I think, instead, that if ecologies are naturally changing, always changing, that disturbance has to be put in that light rather than just something that is blamed simply on colonists. Or on anyone. Indians, colonists, any people.
The choice is not between a landscape untouched by man, a pristine landscape, and then some other human-ravaged, some exploited... environment. There's a much bigger gray area in the middle between those things. This is one of the greatest contributions of Cronin's work.
And we see the impact of Cronin's work on Steinberg's own chapter where he talks about the balancing act in colonial agriculture. He talks about when colonists planted wheat and rye, how the birds came, they descended, they gobbled up the crops. How insects appeared, caterpillars. Native Americans had burned the fields, right, which had kept the bugs at bay. But colonists were no longer burning the fields so that they could get more profit out of each individual piece of land.
And that changed the ecology, that disrupted the ecology. But that, as Cronin explains, that disruption is a natural part of ecology. So we see wolves move in to kill livestock.
We see caterpillars move in and other... insects to eat up the crops. We see fungus growing on wheat. These are all naturally what's going to happen in an ecosystem.
Another thing to think about here, and we're going to talk a lot about farming throughout this class and think about agriculture, but getting a plant to grow in a field is an act to defy ecology, right? It is an anti-environmental act. When you look out in nature, things don't grow in perfect rows, right? Trees don't grow, plants don't grow in perfect rows, like farmers want them to, right? There's a reason for that.
Farmers are always fighting nature when they're trying to get things to grow, when they're trying to create agricultural communities like the colonists were in the 17th and 18th century in New England. And finally, think about what Steinberg says about the Malthusian crunch. How does population affect the natural world?
Alright, that's it for this week. Thank you.