From forests to farmlands to forests again the landscape history and ecology of New England has been transformed by the actions and attitudes of its inhabitants. A fascinating trio of books on the subject are:
Each book stands on its own merits, but they complement one another well when read as a unit. So here's a brief review of each.
Thoreau's Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape by David R. Foster
Hardcover - 288 pages (April 1999) Harvard Univ Pr; ISBN: 0674886453
Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-19th century was a farming community. Its open, rolling fields and farmlands, punctuated by stone wall boundaries and woodlots for fuel, serve as a microcosm of the New England countryside in Thoreau's Country. David Foster skillfully excerpts entries from the journals of Henry David Thoreau that paint a finely-detailed picture of the landscape and portray Thoreau as a man of his times who appreciated the well-managed farms of his community as well as the natural world.
Thoreau's Country covers a wide range of landscape ecology topics from "meadows and mowers" to "woodlands and sproutlands," from forest succession to social change, from passenger pigeons to the American Chestnut. Foster divides each subject into two segments: an explanation/summation that he has written, and a series of journal entries by Thoreau on the topic. Thoreau's words steal the show. His observation skills, simultaneously precise and powerful, create a visual sense of place for the reader that is so vivid that I can picture myself walking through the long-gone fields, listening to the sounds of both scythes and bobolinks.
Thoreau was, of course, a man ahead of his times (and sadly ours) in terms of conservation ethics, and many of the journal entries address human intervention and action as well as natural processes:
"What are the natural features which make a township handsome? A river, with its waterfalls and meadows, a lake, a hill, a cliff or individual rocks; a forest, and ancient trees standing singly. Such things are beautiful; they have a high use which dollars and cents never represent. If the inhabitants of a town were wise, they would seek to preserve these things, though at considerable expense.... I do not think him fit to be the founder of a state or even of a town who does not foresee the use of these things, but legislates chiefly for oxen, as it were. --- January 3, 1861."
Foster has chosen well among Thoreau's journals to present a snapshot of a vanished 19th century landscape and a compilation of Thoreau's observations, opinions, and philosophy about nature and the environment. A bibliographical essay at the end of Thoreau's Country explains how Foster compiled the journal entries, and is helpful in leading readers to additional sources for each of the topics covered in the book. Abigail Rorer's black and white illustrations are beautiful and evocative of a bygone New England.
New England Forests Through Time: Insights from the Harvard Forest Dioramas by David R. Foster and John F. O'Keefe
Paperback - 70 pages (August 2000) Harvard Univ Pr; ISBN: 0674003446
Thoreau's Country presents the word pictures that New England Forests Through Time shows visually through photographs of the Harvard Forest dioramas. Rather than a slice of time, New England Forests Through Time is an overview of 300 years of landscape ecology in central New England from the pre-settlement forests circa 1700 to the height of agriculture in the 1830's to the reforestation of abandoned farms, which is the New England we know today. The book also deals with the human and natural resources that have shaped the land, the implications for wildlife habitat, and issues of forest management and conservation.
Several of the dioramas show the transformations of the land from the vantage point of a single hillside in Central Massachusetts, putting the New England of Thoreau's time into a larger perspective. Other dioramas depict forestry management techniques of Professor Richard Fisher and his colleagues at the Harvard Forest in the 1930's, precursors of today's "ecosystem management" approach to forest management. The text that accompanies the photographs is crisp and concise.
The dioramas look amazingly real in print and offer a convincing reason to make a special trip to Petersham, MA, to see the miniature landscapes housed in the Fisher Museum at the Harvard Forest.
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon
Paperback - 241 pages 1st Ed. edition (June 1984) Hill & Wang Pub; ISBN: 0809001586
Changes in the Land is a comprehensive study of history, anthropology, and ecology in pre-colonial and colonial New England. At the book's core is the transformation of the landscape due to differences in land management and land ownership between the Indians and the colonists. In William Cronon's words, "The choice is not between two landscapes, one with and one without a human influence; it is between two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem."
I first read Changes in the Land at least ten years ago, and continue to read it regularly. I consider it one of the best reference books on land use in New England. I've incorporated several of Cronon's concepts into the environmental education classes that I teach at Mass. Audubon Society's Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary in South Natick, a landscape rich in the history of Indians and European settlers.
One of Cronon's ideas that never fails to surprise children and adults alike is our twentieth-century forests do not look like forests through which the Indians roamed. New England forests were neither wild nor untouched, but were managed by the Indians to maximize diversity and the abundance of natural resources. For example, the Indians used fire to create an open forest with a grassy herbaceous layer -- a far cry from the brushy tangle of understory shrubs that we consider natural to our forested landscape.
Changes in the Land contrasts the vastly different "human ways of living" between the Indians and the European settlers. The mobile, seasonal lifestyle of the Indians, their lack of permanent land ownership and the failure to "improve" the land were unfathomable to the colonists. Nevertheless, the Indians consciously managed the natural resources around them, creating an ecological landscape that met their needs. Land ownership -- and taming and farming it -- was an integral part of life for the colonists. Because the Indians didn't "own" their lands in the same manner, the settlers rationalized the taking of Indian lands. The colonists' way of life won out, irrevocably transforming the ecology of New England's vast forests and resources.
The Indians could not understand the New England settlers' wasteful habits; nor could other Europeans. It never occurred to the first colonists that the abundant resources of the new land might run out, that they would need to be stewards of the land, not merely consumers. Cronon ends the book on this note: "We live with their legacy today. When the geographer Carl Sauer wrote in the twentieth century that Americans had 'not yet learned the difference between yield and loot,' he was describing one of the most long-standing tendencies of their way of life. Ecological abundance and economic prodigality went hand in hand: the people of plenty were a people of waste."
