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Introduction philip d. curtin In the eighteenth century, an individual like Gilbert White of Selborne studied the world around him by personal observation. With today ’s professional specialization, he would be thought of as a dilettante, the scientific equivalent of a little old lady in running shoes. Yet many informed people, with or without professional specialization, want to understand as much as they can of the whole environment, how it came to be as it is, in the light of historical change over the long run. This book presents a broad picture of one ecosystem for the general reader, as well as for specialists who want to understand the rapidly changing body of knowledge produced in fields other than their own. The changing relations between biological species and other aspects of the natural world within the Chesapeake watershed are the central focus of this volume. A historian, a paleobotanist, and a geologist at the Johns Hopkins University, the editors of this volume, gathered as an informal planning committee. We began by assembling representatives of as many scientific and scholarly fields as possible, asking each to explain how his or her field contributes to the whole process of understanding ecological change—and to explain these contributions to other specialists in nonspecialized language—to produce a book that speaks to the serious lay reader. Disciplines represented by the authors include climatology , anthropology and bio-anthropology, zoology and biology, archaeology , botany, geography, oceanography and marine biology. A bevy of historians also cover a variety of periods and specialties. With the financial support of the National Science Foundation, the group held a preliminary conference to discuss draft papers. The group met again a year later to discuss revised drafts. A court reporter took notes, and the comments were then circulated for the authors’ use in preparing final drafts, which form the content of this volume. If any one word describes these meetings, it is not, perhaps, collegial so much as congenial. Most academics spend vast amounts of time in meetings and writing papers, but this common enterprise was different. One of the most intriguing aspects of our gatherings was the explication of methods. The geologist might describe the stratigraphy of hills and valleys as evidence of movement in crustal plates of the earth, the advancing and receding glaciers, or the rising and falling ocean levels that determined the formations of the present-day watershed and Bay. The climatologist, among many other things, examines the spacing of tree rings as an indicator of wet and dry periods. The paleobotanist extracts cores of sediment from the Bay or wetlands to discover pollen grains whose identities indicate a changing climate, the arrival of exotic plants, or forest fires. Marine scientists measure salinity and temperature of the waters of the Bay and study fish populations to interpret the movement and composition of the fresh and salt water that compose the Chesapeake estuary. Examining the history of the Chesapeake ecosystem, a zoologist might use fossil evidence from middens and other deposits to establish early bird and animal populations. A bio-anthropologist would examine teeth and bones from burial sites of indigenous people to determine their diet and health, while an archaeologist might seek physical evidence about early settlement patterns and means of procuring food. An archaeologist and a botanist might excavate early gardens,looking for seeds and nuts,discovering the foods and flowers of the European settlers.Historians comb through documents, letters, and bills of lading to decipher disease patterns, uses of and attitudes toward natural resources, and changing farming practices and their impact on the land; they even analyze descriptions of witness trees, used in early surveys to identify boundaries, to deduce the distribution of species in a given time period. All these approaches (and others) were employed by the contributors to this volume. One of the earliest and most significant lessons of this interdisciplinary effort was both the diversity of approaches and the common ground among distinct fields of study; there was also a sense of surprise at the wealth of what others knew and at how they came to know it.We learned that divergence of interpretation has traditionally existed and continues to exist among disciplines in their view of humanity’s role in the natural landscape. Historians stress temporal dimensions of the landscape in human affairs, while social scientists wish to learn how particular people respond to environmental challenges in providing for their families—and how these responses in...

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