Changes in the Land: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

In 1855, Henry David Thoreau recorded the changes to the environment in his home of Concord, Massachusetts, which by that time had already been a European settlement for over 200 years. He compared what he saw around him to the observations made by the English traveler William Wood, who published his observations of southern New England in a 1633 book called New England’s Prospect. Thoreau noted that the landscape seemed to have changed significantly in this time. There were now fewer wild meadow grasses and fewer gooseberries, raspberries, and currants. The forests were bigger back in 1633, without as much underbrush.

While most of the same types of trees existed in 1855 as did in 1633, the same was not true of animal species. By the time Thoreau was writing, bears, moose, deer, porcupines, wolves, and beavers had all disappeared from the local environment, as had many types of fish and birds, including swans. Thoreau lamented these losses, characterizing them as a fall from Eden. He called the landscape he saw “tamed” and “emasculated.” His observations demonstrate the impact that European colonizers had on the land. Many settlers who lived before Thoreau’s time were aware of these changes too, yet unlike him they tended to celebrate rather than lament them. 

For example, in 1654 the historian Edward Johnson argued that the “barren” landscape had been turned into “a second England for fertileness.” Settlers like him held that the colonization of New England was “divinely ordained,” which meant that all changes to the landscape that resulted must inherently be positive. They argued that the process of colonization was a transformation “from savagery to civilization.” During this process, the Native population was killed and displaced by European settlers. Understanding how this happened requires examining the ecological history of the region. Ecological history requires different kinds of evidence to human history.

One of the most important sources for this book is the accounts of the environment made by European naturalists in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, this evidence is not necessarily reliable, because what naturalists reported seeing was inevitably colored by their beliefs. Moreover, naturalists only ever saw a small part of the country and tended to generalize based on this inherently limited information. Another source of evidence can be found in legal records from colonial towns and courts, such as laws that protected trees in town commons. Yet these also provide limited information, as it can be difficult to know what environmental changes prompted these laws (or what environmental changes the laws prompted themselves).

There are also forms of evidence that are very different from what historians ordinarily use, such as tree rings, charcoal deposits, and fossil pollen found in bog sediments. At the same time, some of the environmental changes that occurred during the colonial period have simply left no traceable record. As a result, claims about them must inherently remain speculative. The accounts made by naturalists often used imprecise language, making it difficult to definitively know what was being described. A type of plant might not be mentioned by its proper name in accounts made by naturalists, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

It can be tempting to attribute all ecological change that occurred during the colonial period to the impact of colonization, but in reality some of these changes were part of preexisting patterns, whereas others were “random.” Asking how much the environment changed as the result of human activity is always a relative question, as environments are always changing even without human intervention. When the field of ecology was first developed, it was common to characterize environments as “superorganisms” that went through their own life cycles as a unit. Humans were considered to be separate from ecological systems, having a “corrupting” influence on their natural cycles.  

Over time, scholars realized that the superorganism metaphor did not accurately describe ecological systems and how they changed, so by the middle of the twentieth century it fell out of use. As scholars began to see change as an inevitable part of ecological systems, they sought to understand the impact of humans on this process of change. It is wrong to think of any environment as existing in a state of static “changelessness.” Yet the question of whether humans are “inside or outside their systems” remains. Thoreau portrayed precolonial New England as a pure, untainted wilderness that was “maimed” by the arrival of colonizers.  

However, this is wrong. Native people had been living on the land for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans and had changed it for their purposes. Human impact on the land did not begin with European settlers; however, they did have a significantly different way of “belonging” to the environment than indigenous communities. Changes in the Land examines how these different modes of belonging impacted the environment in distinct ways. Before the arrival of Europeans, Native people cultivated the landscape in a kind of “equilibrium” that was disrupted by the process of colonization.

Yet it is also important to remember that Native people did not always treat the land in a way that was sustainable—sometimes they too had a disruptive impact, which harmed both the land and themselves. The fact that humans alter their environments is one of the definitive characteristics of the species. Often, features of the environment itself help determine the way a human community reacts to it.  The way that each community alters their environment itself changes over time—in other words, it has a history. Even though ecology has left behind the “superorganism” way of thinking, it is still useful to consider environments as complex, interrelated systems. No one part of a system can be properly understood in isolation. 

Examining the different parts of an environmental system in relation to each other is part of what defines the “ecological approach to history.” It is best to pursue this kind of research on a specific, local area, although New England—the focus of Changes in the Land—is fairly broad. In colonial New England, there was a clash between two groups of people (European and indigenous) who each had very different ways of relating to the landscape. Readers may or may not agree with Thoreau’s belief that the changes to the New England landscape that occurred as a result of colonization were a bad thing. Either way, it is true that the only way to truly understand human history is to examine the ways in which humanity is embedded within nature.