Changes in the Land, Chapters 1-3.

1
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

2
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?

3
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 hereI 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.

4
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.

5
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.

6
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.

7
Ch.1 Cronons problems

• What kinds of problems did Cronon experience in
  doing his historical research?
• Data Limitations
• Interpretation
• Ecological Science

8
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.

9
Ch.1 Ecological Science

• He talks about functionalist, climax ecology
  that models ecologies on organisms.
• How does this model work and why doesnt 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?

10
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?

11
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.!!

12
Ch.1 Cronons 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?

13
Cronon Ch.2Landscape and Patchwork

• Main Ideas? Thoughts on Note-taking.
• Merchantable Commodities
• Discrete Things not Parts of Inter-related System
• Selective/Partial Vision

14
Ch.2 Landscape and Patchwork

• What is the difference between Merchants and
  Settlers
• Note Remarkable abundance of
• Fish, Birds, Mammals, Human Health
• Whats the role of Forests, Bogs, Marshes, and
  the Seashore?
• Whats the role of Fire?

15
Ch.2 Break it Down

• How did the merchantable commodity vision
  affect European understanding of New Englands
  Nature and its Indigenous People?
• How many Natures were there?
• North-South
• Microclimates

16
Ch.2 Break it Down II

• How many Peoples were there?
• North-South
• Hunter-gatherers vs. Agriculturalists
• He talked about Space and Time WHY?

17
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)

18
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

19
Ch.3 Nature wealth and society

• Natural wealth varied across space and time
• Indians moved with abundance/wealth
• occasionally went hungry
• English stayed in one place
• stored food

20
Ch.3 Population and Abundance

• Leibigs Law and (un)conscious?! population
  control ? little impact
• do you agree with this little impact statement?
• Note gt100,000 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.

21
Ch.3 Agriculture

• Describe the disorderly Indian agriculture.
• Describe the relationship between agriculture,
  soil depletion, fire, and hunting-gathering

22
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.

23
Ch.3 Improvement

• Notice how improvement means simplification,
  enclosure and concentration of landholdings.
• NEXT Property, Wealth, and Boundaries

24
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 cant understand environmental problems
  without understanding production relations,
  markets, and property rights -- science is NOT
  enough.