Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

Historical ecologist William Cronon maintains a balanced evaluation throughout the text by drawing on writing by European visitors to New England and on settlers’ accounts of early settlements there. Cronon’s work remains remarkable to scholars because it was the first ecological history of the pre-colonial period. Cronon virtually created the scholarly discipline of ecological history. Additionally, one of Cronon’s chief accomplishments in the field of scholarly historical research lies in his use of direct Native American sources wherever possible. No other work, up to the publication of Cronon’s book, had pursued historical scholarship from the Native American point of view.

The early European settlers to New England were primarily English, and they brought their cultural beliefs and farming and animal husbandry practices with them. The settlers’ methods proved disastrous to the existing ecosystem, but the settlers saw this destruction of the existing natural world as appropriate: taming the land and forming it into familiar replicas of the towns and farms of England. A few contemporaneous European visitors saw the ecological changes as a disaster, but the vast majority of Europeans viewed New England as a land to be exploited for its natural resources.