Changes in the Land Chapters 1 3 ISS 310 People and Environment Spring 2002 Prof Alan Rudy Presented by Victor Torres Velez Thurs Jan 17 Chapter I The View from Walden Indian settlements looked like parks to the settlers Where was the wilderness then What did Thoreau see as missing lost or destroyed Why Ch 1 Thoreau heard of him The myth of a fallen humanity is central to Thoreau s writing and nowhere is this more visible than in his descriptions of past landscapes When I consider he wrote that the nobler animals have been exterminated here I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and as it were emasculated country Seen in this way a changed landscape meant a loss of wildness and virility that was ultimately spiritual in its import a sign of decline in both nature and humanity Ch 1 Anti Thoreau Progress ives Others saw the settlement of the continent the taming of the wilderness the conversion of the heathens as a positive civilizing process Though landscape was altered by this supposed social evolution the human process of development from Indian to clearer of the forest to prosperous farmer was the center of Rush s attention Environmental change was of secondary interest Ch 1 similarities and differences Thoreau took the state of nature as a sign of the state of society and his opponents took the state of society as a sign of the state of nature Both look from one to the other instead of at the process of mutual transformation Ch 1 Cronon says The replacement of Indians by predominantly European populations in New England was as much an ecological as a cultural revolution and the human side of that revolution cannot be fully understood until it is embedded in the ecological one Doing so requires a history not only of human actors conflicts and economies but of ecosystems as well Ch 1 Cronon s problems What kinds of problems did Cronon experience in doing his historical research Data Limitations Interpretation Ecological Science Ch 1 Data and interpretation Travelers accounts and other colonial writings are not only subjective but often highly generalized Colonial nomenclature could be quite imprecise and ethnocentric When reading colonial accounts describing floods insect invasions coastal alterations and significant changes in climate we are perhaps all too tempted to attribute these by some devious means to the influence of the arriving Europeans This will not always do Ch 1 Ecological Science He talks about functionalist climax ecology that models ecologies on organisms How does this model work and why doesn t it work for Cronon What is functionalism He also talks about ecosystems ecology and a focus on energy flows and disturbance How does this model work and why does Cronon prefer it Ch 1 adding humans to ecology Just as ecosystems have been changed by the historical activities of human beings so too have they had their own less recorded history forests have been transformed by disease drought and fire species have become extinct and landscapes have been drastically altered by climatic change without any human intervention at all But admitting that ecosystems have histories of their own still leaves us with the problem of how to view the people who inhabit them Are human beings inside or outside their systems Cronon Indians and Settlers The destruction of Indian communities in fact brought some of the most important ecological changes which followed the Europeans arrival in America 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 Ch 1 Cronon s conclusion How does Cronon want us to see the relationship between people and environment at the end of the chapter What do you think this will mean for the kinds of social reporting and ecological history that he provides in the rest of the book Cronon Ch 2 Landscape and Patchwork Main Ideas Thoughts on Note taking Merchantable Commodities Discrete Things not Parts of Interrelated System Selective Partial Vision Ch 2 Landscape and Patchwork What is the difference between Merchants and Settlers Note Remarkable abundance of Fish Birds Mammals Human Health What s the role of Forests Bogs Marshes and the Seashore What s the role of Fire Ch 2 Break it Down How did the merchantable commodity vision affect European understanding of New England s Nature and its Indigenous People How many Natures were there North South Microclimates Ch 2 Break it Down II How many Peoples were there North South Hunter gatherers vs Agriculturalists He talked about Space and Time WHY Ch 2 Key Quote Which species grew where in any particular place was thus the result of a cumulative sequence of ecological processes and historical events Whereas the natural ecosystem tended towards a patchwork of diverse communities arranged almost randomly on the landscape its very continuity depending on disorder the human tendency was to systematize the patchwork and impose a more regular pattern on it Cronon pp 32 33 Ch 3 Want and Plenty Selective reporting exaggeration and outright lies they dreamed of a world in which returns to labor were far greater than in England Misunderstandings about New England Abundant nature Scarce society Ch 3 Nature wealth and society Natural wealth varied across space and time Indians moved with abundance wealth occasionally went hungry English stayed in one place stored food Ch 3 Population and Abundance Leibig s Law and un conscious population control little impact do you agree with this little impact statement Note 100 000 Indians pre 1492 What you may not know is that global indigenous populations were decimated from 1500 1800 and 1800 is when exponential population growth is said to start Malthusian overpopulation theories Ch 3 Agriculture Describe the disorderly Indian agriculture Describe the relationship between agriculture soil depletion fire and hunting gathering Ch 3 THEY KEY POINT The migratory character and different gender division of labor of Indian life we seen by the English as LAZINESS a fact which undermined any already minimal ideas Europeans had about Indian rights to New England property Ownership should lie in the hands of improvers not wasters Ch 3 Improvement Notice how improvement means simplification enclosure and concentration of landholdings NEXT Property Wealth and Boundaries Conclusion The everyday seasonal and annual movements of people reflect their social ecological relations Gender labor and