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

Down, Down, Down, No More: Environmental History Moves Beyond Declension

Down, Down, Down, No More Environmental History Moves Beyond Declension TED STEINBERG There is a saying that I once heard that goes something like this: twenty years from now you will be the same person you are now. The only difference will be the people you get to know and the books you read along the way. Twenty years ago I sat down with William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, by all accounts today the seminal work in early American environmental history. I was already somewhat familiar with the community studies tradition practiced by social historians such as Philip Greven, Kenneth Lockridge, John Demos, and others. These historians produced an impressive body of literature that forever changed the way we viewed life in the period before 1800. Cronon’s book, however, broke new ground—literally. The environment had never been more than a backdrop to these earlier social histories, but as John Demos has written recently: ‘‘Changes in the Land reversed all that. Following its publication , the environment would be much more than a stage—would become, indeed, an important actor in its own right. . . . The ‘community’ of community studies would never again look quite the same.’’1 Ted Steinberg is the author of Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (2002) and Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (2000). His new book, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, is forthcoming. 1. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 2003), xiii. Examples of the community studies tradition include, Philip J. Greven Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, 1636–1736 (New York, 1970); and John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970). DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, NO MORE • 111 There is no question that, from a historiographical standpoint, Changes constituted a radical departure from the earlier community studies tradition. To begin with, Cronon made the ecosystem, not the arbitrary town boundary, his locus of study. These ecosystems, Cronon argued, had a history every bit as important as the political and social history that unfolded within them. Indeed, environment and culture, he argued, existed in a ‘‘dialectical’’ relationship with each other. As he wrote: ‘‘Environment may initially shape the range of choices available to people at a given moment, but then culture reshapes environment in responding to those choices. The reshaped environment presents a new set of possibilities for cultural reproduction, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination.’’2 If such statements were not radical enough, the overall political message contained in the book seemed to me a very progressive one. Adopting a comparative approach, Cronon highlighted the important differences between how the Indians and the colonists related to the land: usufruct versus private property, subsistence strategies versus market relations, and so forth. In coming to grips with the driving forces behind the ecological changes he deduced in the book, Cronon was careful to point out that history is rarely the result of a single cause. Still, it is hard to read the book and not come away convinced that economic structures played the leading role in explaining the decline in trees and wildlife and the substitution of ‘‘a world of fields and fences’’ in their place. ‘‘Ultimately,’’ Cronon wrote, ‘‘English property systems encouraged colonists to regard the products of the land—not to mention the land itself—as commodities, and so led them to orient a significant margin of their production toward commercial sale in the marketplace. . . . Capitalism and environmental degradation went hand in hand.’’3 Those last words were fighting words. After Demos reviewed the book in the New York Times, economic historian Robert Higgs wrote in to protest. He objected to what he termed the ‘‘antihumanism’’ and ‘‘present -mindedness’’ of environmental history. ‘‘This capitalism that the modern environmentalists hate so deeply is nothing more than the liberty of individual humans to express their own values as the supreme determinants of resource use,’’ he wrote. And as for Cronon’s claim that capi2 . Cronon, Changes in the Land., 13. 3. Ibid., 161. 112 • TED STEINBERG talism and ecological degradation went together, he remarked: ‘‘I wonder how he [Cronon] would have viewed the matter had he lived among those wresting a precarious livelihood from...