Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England by Christopher L. Pastore (review)

As the effects of climate change become more pronounced in the modern world, environmental histories like Between Land and Sea will be important to help us understand the relationship between human and non-human nature. Humans alter nature and nature shapes the development of societies; the effects of this interaction have changed over the millennia, but humans have never lived in a Disneyesque world of complete harmony with nature.

Christopher L. Pastore makes this point clearly in Between Land and Sea by looking beyond the immediate effects of human occupation on the shores of Narragansett Bay. He incorporates an ever-widening hinterland into his analysis of the Bay and its resources. In so doing, he makes connections between the environment and economic activities that had not been obvious before, thus giving the reader a better sense of how decisions made in one place ripple through societies and across oceans.

One prominent theme in the book is the liminal nature of Narragansett Bay. The ever-shifting space at the water’s edge made the region difficult to define, to put boundaries around. From the beginning of their settlements, Europeans struggled to place legal and intellectual limits on this amorphous area. By the nineteenth century, Americans believed they had obtained control, not just over the Bay itself, but over much of its watershed, changing the region dramatically.

These efforts to delineate and control the Bay illustrate the idea that “Narragansett Bay was a deeply human construct” (8). Geological forces working over millennia created the ecosystem, but the fights over political jurisdiction and economic activities made what we think of as Narragansett Bay. Natural resources do not exist until human needs or desires create them. The resources (as defined by humans) available in any region shape the way that societies develop. At the same time, the uses of, and struggles over, these resources alter the environment and thus the existence, not only of the resources, but also of the societies that created them.

The book unfolds roughly chronologically, but rather than a straight narrative of change over time, Pastore chooses to focus on specific events and issues to illustrate his argument. The first chapter, for example, discusses the transition of wampum from a ceremonial item used to build relationships among Native Americans to a currency shared by Europeans and Native Americans. This shift had enormous ecological, as well as economic, consequences. Wampum, made from clam shells harvested from Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay, was exchanged for beaver furs hunted by Native groups in the continental interior. When Europeans became involved in this transaction, Native Americans could also then obtain metal tools and guns, which made hunting easier and more destructive. One consequence of the over-hunting of beaver was a change in water courses. As beaver dams were destroyed, or deteriorated after the animals were killed, the ponds and marshy areas dried up. Inland areas became drier as more water made its way into rivers that eventually fed into Narragansett Bay, possibly changing its chemical composition and thus the plant and animal life that it supported.

This one chapter, then, encapsulates the argument and structure of the book. It moves from wampum production, which is not readily associated with ecological change, to the inland fur trade, so important to European and Native American societies in the seventeenth century, and the over-hunting of beaver, which then had profound ramifications for Native and European societies as well as the environment surrounding Narragansett Bay. It is an elegant illustration of the interaction of humans and nature — how each shapes the other — and the ripple effect that decisions have throughout societies and in the environment.

The following chapters move through time, focusing on the effects of livestock cultivation, the eighteenth-century efforts to survey the Bay to settle political disputes, the intellectual construction of the Bay according to Enlightenment concepts of nature...