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Chapter 7 "Co-Workers with Nature" Cooper, Thoreau, and Marsh Why not control our own woods and destiny more? Thoreau, "The Dispersion of Seeds" For Americans unfamiliar with the Cherokee georgic, Removal could be written off as yet one more instance of the inevitable disappearance of a primitive mode of life. Robert Beverley had much earlier described a loss of "Native Pleasures" resulting from colonization and had proposed a calculus of compensation in which a georgic society, through diversified economic engagement with the natural environment uniting beauty and use, might hope to repair the loss. Differing valuations ofthis loss are registered in our literature as early as the conflict between Thomas Morton and the Plymouth colonists. In New English Canaan (1637), Morton found the Indians to embody a native civility lost to the English, whereas William Bradford saw Morton and his Indian crew forsaking good work and good order for mere pleasure, idleness, and disruption. Late colonial and Federal-era agrarian writers found such "Indian" traits to characterize white backwoods farmers as well, who were supposed to have lacked the industry to produce at market levels. These writers followed Edward Johnson in celebrating increasing market embeddedness as the foundation of sociopolitical stability and the public good. Yet the image of the "Indian" persisted as a means of registering dissatisfactions with the results of particular economic engagements with the environment (dissatisfactions that today are registered for example in our appreciation of wilderness as a place of escape and recreation). In the antebellum era, an important locus of this appeal to the primitive was James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales, which gave "Indian" values a white spokesman in Natty Bumppo, thus bringing them respectably into dominant American discourses. While the Cherokees were strategically arguing that in certain respects they were "white," Cooper imagined translating an "Indian" relationship to the environment into white terms, 154 Chapter 7 thus finding a positive valuation where William Gilmore Simms, for example , found a negative one.I In the first of the Leather-Stocking Tales, The Pioneers (1823), Cooper set up an environmental debate, attaching various positions to various characters. Readers could identify (or not) withjudge Temple, the protoconservationist who lacks environmental knowledge; the laborer Billy Kirby or the scientific improver Richard Jones, who would, in different ways, thoughtlessly exploit natural resources; or the white Indian Natty Bumppo, who speaks for the wilderness.2 The judge's daughter, Elizabeth , gives yet another perspective, the one perhaps most familiar to Cooper's genteel Eastern readership. Elizabeth shows a fine appreciation of landscape aesthetics, but little understanding of the relationship between the form ofa landscape and its capacity to sustain human life and culture, as she interrupts her father's account ofthe early "starving-time" to ask, "But ... was there actual suffering? where were the beautiful and fertile vales ofthe Mohawk? could they not furnish food for your wants?" 3 Through the interaction ofthese characters, Cooper took it upon himself to educate such a readership in the relationship of economy to environment .4 The environmental debate in The Pioneers goes in two directions. On the one hand, Cooper imagines the possibility of an escape from economy altogether in the figure of Natty, who-ifwe do not look too closely at the fact that he gains his livelihood as a market hunter-seems to embody a nonexploitative relationship to the natural environment. On the other hand, within the terms of the settlement economy, Cooper addresses issues of law, property, and practical environmental management . In presenting this debate, he evokes the systems-theory approach to the relationship between economy and environment first envisioned by the Hakluyts and their cohort. Cooper fears that expansion will force the economy up against its environmental limits in America, anticipating a reiteration ofthe entropic scenario that the Hakluyts' program ofcolonization had attempted to prevent for England. Eventually, Cooper says, "the evil day must arrive, when their possessions shall become unequal to their wants" (16). Against that day, he investigates the social ecology of the settlements, hoping to derive its compatibility with nature. His inability to resolve the debate he poses is nowhere more strongly evident than in the hollow sound of the novel's last sentence, where we suddenly find Natty's values accommodated to those ofthe settler culture: "He had gone far towards the setting sun,- the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the wayfor the march ofthe nation across the continent" (456). In Man and Nature (1864), George Perkins Marsh...

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