Reflections in Bullough's Pond : Economy and Ecosystem in New England

by Diana Muir
320 pages (May 2000) University Press of New England; ISBN: 0874519098

Reviewed by Robert Stevenson, Biology Dept, UMass Boston

Advance publicity for Reflections in Bullough's Pond and the testimonials on the back cover from Senator John Kerry, conservation biologist Paul Ehrlich, environmental author Bill McKibben and activist Fred Krupp set high expectations as I began Muir’s book. I was not disappointed. Muir’s synthesis is broad and her writing topnotch. I highly recommend the book to a wide audience, but especially to conservation biologists.

Reflections in Bullough's Pond documents how individuals from the Pleistocene era to the present day flourished and struggled across the New England landscape. Muir chronicles the impact of human inventions on the environment and on our lifestyles. She argues that it was the combination of culture, external historical forces, and environment that produced the Industrial Revolution. When people exhausted local resources for farming, they turned to manufacturing. Manufacturing brought division of labor and drudgery which, in turn, inspired the invention of machines to replace the drudgery. We invented machines to make other machines. Yankee hard work and inventiveness brought great advances in technology and wealth that have become a hallmark of American society. Here, every man had the right to make his fortune as the globalization process began. However, the mill floors of Lawrence, Fall River, and Hartford brought new kinds of environmental destruction and drudgery; our ecological footprint widened.

Muir has integrated scholarly works from an astounding array of disciplines including history, sociology, environmental studies, technology, and ecology, into an attractive presentation that is accessible to a general audience. Her description of the interactions of social and ecological systems is an accomplishment that would please any conservation biologist; in fact, some luminaries in our discipline are now focusing on these interactions. In additional to a most readable text, Muir has included thirty-eight pages of notes so that anyone can locate her sources.

The book has 18 chapters, each composed of an engaging title, an appropriate quotation to set the tone, and a well written narrative with supporting maps, figures and plates providing visual imagery for her points. For instances Chapter 9, titled "Peddling the Future," starts with the following quotation:

"I have seen [Yankee peddlers] on the peninsula of Cape Cod, and in the neighborhood of Lake Erie, distant from each other more that six hundred miles. They make their way to Detroit, four hundred miles farther, to Canada, to Kentucky, and , if I am not mistaken, to New Orleans and St. Louis."

- Timothy Dwight, 1821

The first paragraph reads:

"If Lynn, Massachusetts, was a provincial backwater when it first sent commercial travelers out to drum up shoe sales, Berlin, Connecticut, was the veriest boondocks. Salem harbor was, after all, within a morning’s walk of even the most remote farm in Lynn; when the land ran out, Lynn loaded shoes onto ships and sent them to distant ports. Lynn might be a backwater, but it was a backwater at the edge of the Atlantic economy. When Berlin ran out of land, its sons loaded tin pans in saddlebags and plodded over the Litchfield hills."

Muir describes in Chapter 9 how the ox cart turnpikes, subsequent canals and railroads provided the transportation network to export oysters from New Haven, brooms from Hadley, axes from Canton and shoes from Lynn. Each town specialized in manufacturing specific goods. Cheap transportation was key to profits. The peddlers became part of a vast network that located supplies and provided goods to American farmers.

Other chapters deal with topics such as the origin and mechanization of the shoemaking industry, the impact of clearing forests and draining marshes on wildlife, the development of steam power and the textile industry throughout New England, and the impact of sewage on the oyster industry in Long Island Sound. Each chapter is rich in details and scope.

A passage from Chapter 14, titled "The Maine Woods," about the history of papermaking illustrates the quality of writing (p. 195):

"Berkshire county was America’s leading center of paper production; its market was New York, the young nation’s leading city. A steady flow of rags traveled up the Hudson, and fresh supplies of paper moved down, slowed only by the tedium of overland transportation from mill to riverboat, and by winter, when ice closed the Hudson. Business correspondence between the two centers was unchanging: New York merchants wrote to the Berkshire manufacturers enjoining them to increase production of paper; Berkshire mill owners wrote to New York merchants beseeching them to send more rags. ….

Mechanization only made the supply problem worse. Every innovation enabling mill owners to produce more paper at cheaper rates created fresh demand for their product. Linen rags were imported from Europe by the shipload to meet the paper demands of Americans, who shifted from linen to cotton clothing more rapidly than Europeans, and, industrializing faster, purchased more paper even as they generated fewer linen rags. Worn-out jute and hempen rope purchased from shipyards was used to make Manila paper, although scrap rope could not be made into white paper. Worn out sails could be used, and were much sought after by the voracious mills. The most bizarre episode in the quest for new sources of rags was surely the use of cloth wrappings taken from Egyptian mummies. Shiploads of bodies were stripped of their fine linen wrappings and of the papyrus filling used by ancient embalmers, but even in mummy procurement mill owners encountered competition. The Egyptian government, regarding the relics with Islamic distain for pagan relics, permitted the use of the pre-Islamic bodies as locomotive fuel on the new Suez railroad."

In addition to the spicy passages, the narrative provides other connections. After reading this passage it is not surprising that Crane Co., (http://www.crane.com/about/history/timeline.asp) supplier of the currency to the US treasury would be located in Dalton MA in the heart of the Berkshires.

There are only a few passages with which I find fault. The introduction starts, "New England is rich despite the fact that it was born poor." Muir goes on to call attention to the poor climate and low soil fertility but does not acknowledge, until later in the book, the richness of the marine environment (see Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World -- by Mark Kurlansky [reviewed in "Conservation Perspectives, May 2000]). She also comments (p. 185-186) on the loss of New England’s stature at the end of the Industrial Revolution when many mills left the region. She attributes this loss to a lack of inventiveness and attitudes about work and leisure by the Irish and French Canadian people who provided the labor for the mills. I am not convinced that her cultural explanations are true, but neither do I have the expertise to refute them.

The book is tied together by Muir's imagination of the reflections from her local pond, Bullough’s Pond, and how these reflections have changed through time. Clearly, Muir is concerned about the carrying capacity of the planet and the struggles we all experience between the independence and freedom gained by driving a car and the impact we know automobiles have on global climate change (p. 246-247). She recognizes the importance of population (p 11-12) and that the world is no longer "empty" (p. 179) in the paradigm of Daly (Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development).

The book is written from the heart and ends with a vision for a third revolution - new ways to organize society. Muir writes,

"It is the replacement of the arrogant assumption that humanity is above nature with the realization that we are part of nature that is bringing on the Third Revolution in technology. Ten thousand years ago we were expelled from the Garden of Eden into a world of private property and agriculture. Three hundred years ago we began the passage from a world of hayfields and woodlots to a world of steam engines and synthetic chemicals. The marvel of industrialization was that natural limitations – that laws that govern the birth of a lamb and the growth of a leaf – no longer seemed to set a limit on the possible. The Industrial Revolution turned night into day, annihilated distance, and enabled us to fly higher than ever Icarus dreamed. The realization that not only are we part of nature, but that the natural world sets limits to what we can do need not prevent us from illuminating our homes, speaking with friends thousands of miles away, or flying across continents. It does caution us to find ways to do these things without destroying our world."

Reflections in Bullough's Pond provides a unique overview of New England history during the last 400 year. In the applied discipline of Conservation Biology our goals are quite clear. We need to preserve habitat. What is not so clear is how to do this. If one believes that it is possible to look into the future by looking into the past, Muir’s book provides a wonderful perspective on the interaction between human and natural systems. I will use it in my classes.