Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field

Environmental Stewardship and Decline in Old New England

Environmental Stewardship and Decline in Old New England BRIAN DONAHUE In March of 1845, Henry Thoreau went up to the woods and cut down six pine trees, framing the house where he would write the first draft of Walden, published in 1854. Thoreau’s sojourn at the pond marks the symbolic turning point in American environmental history. The frontier had long passed Concord. Commercial agriculture had driven the forest to its low ebb, a mere 11 percent of the landscape. The railroad, which beat Thoreau to the pond by a few months, embodied the industrial revolution that was transforming New England and opening the entire continent to the rapid extraction of natural resources. Northern farmers had burst out of the forest onto the fertile prairies, the cotton empire was sweeping across the South, and the Mexican War was setting the stage for a full assault on the riches of the West. Walden appeared just as American industrial capitalism was emerging from its agrarian birthplace in the Northeast and hitting its continental stride. At this moment, Thoreau launched an environmental counter-movement by ‘‘speaking a word for nature,’’ as he put it in ‘‘Walking.’’ He was not alone. Also raising the alarm was George Perkins Marsh, who in his 1847 Address to the Rutland County Agricultural Society warned that agricultural civilization was fully capable of degrading forests, soils, waterways, and climate, and that even young Vermont was already witnessing such improvident waste. And so Marsh and Thoreau, utilitarian Brian Donahue is Associate Professor of American Environmental Studies on the Jack Meyerhoff Foundation at Brandeis University. He is the author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in A New England Town (1999), and The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (2004). ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP • 85 and Romantic, led on to Pinchot and Muir and the modern conservation movement that has labored to restrain industrial capitalism’s exploitation of nature. That is the grand narrative of environmental history: pristine (or Native ) natural harmony, overturned by frontier exploitation and impoverishment of nature, engendering an ongoing struggle (and symbiosis) between mature capitalism and rising conservation consciousness. Richard Judd has called this the western synthesis because it looks back from the monumental twentieth-century battles over the landscape of the West.1 New England provides the prelude for this larger national drama. William Cronon began his seminal Changes in the Land at Walden Pond with Thoreau, surveying the diminished landscape that had resulted from the encounter between Europeans and the first American frontier, the East. Environmental decline to this point was not so dramatic as what would shortly follow, given the initially small European population and the lack of industrial tools, but there was little doubt about the outcome—from the beginning, the changes were for the worse. For Cronon , the essential change was from the Native system of usufruct land rights to the newcomers’ system of private property embedded in a market economy. Commodification of the land and its wildlife, vegetation, soil, and water, led decisively to degradation.2 Carolyn Merchant offered an important complication to Cronon’s narrative , introducing the idea of not one but two ‘‘ecological revolutions,’’ colonial and capitalist, in the two centuries leading up to Marsh and Thoreau. She thus aligned New England environmental history with the prevailing theory of a market revolution in the early republic. A patriarchal ecological regime expanded until it encountered a demographic contradiction between its requirement for large families and the requirement of its extensive, exhausting agriculture for fresh land. In response to this crisis and with the full emergence of a market economy, farming intensified and became more specialized and productive, but even more alienated from nature and destructive of the environment. Theodore Steinberg and John Cumbler carried the story further into nineteenth1 . Richard W. Judd, ‘‘Writing Environmental History from East to West,’’ in Ben A. Minteer and Robert E. Manning, eds., Reconstructing Conservation: Finding Common Ground (Washington, DC, 2003). 2. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983). 86 • BRIAN DONAHUE century industrialization and urbanization, charting the control of New England waterways by an emerging capitalist elite. With the market revolution came the legal and political power to undermine the older agrarian order, impose new depths of degradation, and frustrate early efforts for environmental reform. All these works essentially agree: the development of a market economy in...