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Beavers
Fences represent the way in which European colonizers imposed their political ideology on the North American landscape. Back in Europe, fences were a ubiquitous part of rural existence, and when European colonizers came to America, they brought the practice of erecting fences with them. As a human imposition on the land that reflects early capitalist ideas about private property, fences changed the landscape it in a way that often had negative results. Fences, of course, do not occur in nature, and they can have a harmful impact on the landscape in a way that natural barriers do not. As fences enforced a monocultural approach to agriculture by confining plants and animals to separate areas, they imposed artificial order onto the balanced, complex, delicate ecosystem. Disturbing it by attempting to impose human order on top of it—particularly if that human order is informed by capitalist principles of private property and profit-making through processing and selling natural resources—can cause profound ecological damage. In this way, fences represent the ideological divide between how Europeans and Native people thought of humans’ relationship to the land, as well as the wide-ranging environmental effects than came about from the European colonial mindset.
Fences Quotes in Changes in the Land
The Changes in the Land quotes below all refer to the symbol of Fences. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
Important as organisms like smallpox, the horse, and the pig were in their direct impact on American ecosystems, their full effect becomes visible only when they are treated as integral elements in a complex system of environmental and cultural relationships. The pig was not merely a pig but a creature bound among other things to the fence, the dandelion, and a very special definition of property. It is these kinds of relationships, the contradictions arising from them, and their changes in time, that will constitute an ecological approach to history.
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Fences Symbol Timeline in Changes in the Land
The timeline below shows where the symbol Fences appears in Changes in the Land. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 6: Taking the Forest
...excessive, wasteful manner, to the point that construction came to require untenable amounts of timber. Fences, for example, were made of timber, whereas back in Europe they would have been made...
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Chapter 7: A World of Fields and Fences
...rights were difficult to put in place. Colonizers also made Native people responsible for maintaining fences separating their land from others’, arguing that if these fences were improperly maintained colonizers could...
(full context)
...designed to help protect crops from neighboring cattle, but again farmers were forced to maintain fences if they wanted these rules to be enforced.
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Regardless, even a functional fence could be easily mowed down by a large animal, leading to a need for “fence...
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...was true of other animals, such as horses, sheep, and cows. Land was divided by fences and animals were kept in their own respective enclosed sections. Furthermore, whereas in earlier times...
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