Cronon Changes In The Land Book Review

Occasionally, a professor will assign a book in their lecture whose origins can be traced to a seminar paper. Undergraduates typically respond to this piece of trivia with emotions ranging from indifference to mild admiration. Graduate students however, tend to display more of an annoyed reverence which conveys the understood difficulties involved in forming an original and unique argument designed to contribute to the existing historical scholarship. In this regard, I am quite annoyed with William Cronon, who wrote Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England during his time as a master’s student at Yale University. The book not only contributed to the history of colonial New England by casting the environment as …show more content…
(9-15) For Cronon, it is less about how drastic the changes were then about what the changes were. Soil exhaustion and erosion, the reduction of and changing of tree species, the emergence of fences, foreign livestock, and the dominance of foreign grasses and pests points the blame squarely at the feet of the European capitalist. He concedes the fact that nature evolves and changes on its own. The author also argues that the indigenous population manipulated their environment for their own purposes, yet that the crux of my one major critique with Changes in the Land. Cronon’s presentation of the Native American’s relationship with their environment is never isolated from the European perspective and therefore always influenced by it. He describes a pre-colonial period where Indians maintained a quaint, nearly symbiotic relationship with nature. (34-53) Yes they manipulated their environment, but in a way that had far more positive than negative effects. It was European pressures on indigenous culture, by way of disease, encroachment on land, and trade that facilitated the shift to a more deleterious, one-sided relationship. In making this argument, Cronon is clearly