Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  Second, cutting down trees also changed the climate. Tree canopies shaded the land from sunlight and kept down summer temperatures on the ground. In the winter, even though the leaves in an oak and hickory forest would be gone, the trees themselves helped to insulate the soil below, moderating the effect of the cold. Felling forests made the landscape more vulnerable to weather extremes, creating soils that in the summer were drier and less conducive to plant growth.

  Third, deforestation played havoc with rivers. Trees helped to ensure that streams flowed steadily because their roots absorbed and released water throughout the year. Clearing the forest, however, generally increased the amount of water that ran off into streams. And without tree roots to hold the ground in place, soil too was sent barreling down hillsides. The increase in river sediment left less space for the water and increased the possibility of flooding. Meanwhile, the rapid runoff that followed in the wake of deforestation also made the landscape significantly drier for much of the year.34 Cutting down large sections of the continent’s forests thus helped to set the stage for disaster: droughts and floods that emerged directly from the sharp edge of an ax.

  CONCLUSION

  What motivated Europeans to journey to North America given the huge risks attached to such a project? The hope for new religious converts, simple curiosity, and, the most commonly cited reason, the search for precious minerals are the factors most often given. But the glitter of gold has obscured from many students of American history the full story behind Europe’s quest. Treasure was indeed an important motivating factor, but so was the craving for such resources as fish, timber, whale oil, and land on which to grow wheat, sugar, and grapes. What the Europeans actually found on their travels, and indeed even set out to find, was not so much mineral resources as biological ones. By bringing the temperate climate of North America and its rich expanse of land and biota into the orbit of their economy, the Europeans secured for themselves an extraordinary share of the earth’s natural capital. Europe, as historian E. L. Jones once put it, experienced a stunning “ecological windfall.”35

  NEW BELGIUM AND NEW ENGLAND

  This 1635 map, published in Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s Le Grand Atlas, showed animals to be found in the New World. (Bancroft Library)

  Europe’s tremendous good fortune, however, came at the expense of the land and native peoples of North America. Vast changes ensued as the explorers brought the two continents together for the first time in millions of years. Transformations ramified across the landscape: a horrifying decline in the native population resulting from exposure to Old World diseases, the devastation of fur-bearing animals and forests as both became incorporated into European markets, and changes in the very meaning of land itself as the colonists imposed the strictures of private property across the continent. The white settlers encountered a literally new world and then proceeded—perhaps naturally enough—to reinvent it in conformance with the image they had of their European homeland.

  Yet despite such enormous ecological success, the Europeans in no way liberated themselves from the constraints imposed by the natural world itself. They too, like the Indians, had to figure out how to wrest a living from the land without undercutting the resource base that made possible their way of life. And even then, the colonists were hardly in complete control of their ecological destiny. Natural forces could intervene to upset the best-laid plans and wither dreams into dust and death in this new and foreign place.

  3

  REFLECTIONS FROM A WOODLOT

  In 1845, nature writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), seeking to escape the hustle and bustle of daily life, went looking for a quiet little piece of land free from the intrusions of New England’s thriving agricultural economy. Ironically, he had to settle for an old woodlot in Concord, Massachusetts, a place where farmers routinely ventured to find fuel to heat their homes. One of the nineteenth century’s leading critics of progress and its impact on the natural world, Thoreau came of age in a region thoroughly transformed by human action, a place of fields and fences so devoid of forest and animal habitat that the largest mammal commonly encountered was the muskrat.1

  In Concord, near the legendary Walden Pond, Thoreau built himself a cabin and lived in it for about two years. The journal he kept while there formed the basis for his most famous book, Walden, Or Life in the Woods. “When I first paddled a boat on Walden,” he wrote, “it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods.” Relishing that fond memory, he continues: “But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?” At roughly the time that Thoreau headed to Walden, some 60 percent of the New England landscape had been converted from forest into open fields, almost the exact opposite of today, where the reverse ratio of forest to open space prevails. The incessant cutting of trees to create new farmland and supply households with fuel drove Thoreau to distraction. As he put it: “Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds.”2

  The domesticated countryside Thoreau confronted was the product of endless hours spent cutting down trees, planting fields, and tending fences, as the colonists and their descendants entered into battle with the earth and its ecosystems. In simple terms, an ecosystem is a collection of plants, animals, and nonliving things all interacting with one another in a particular locale. Left undisturbed by humankind, the New England landscape would eventually revert largely to inedible woody matter, to forest. Ecosystems in such “climax” states contain only small quantities of human food. Agriculture tries to stop nature from evolving toward this food-scarce condition and instead guides the land into yielding a supply of crops suitable for human consumption. Tillers of the soil seek to turn the landscape into an agroecosystem, a collection of domesticated plants for feeding people. Farming is always a battle with the natural world, a struggle to keep nature from doing what comes naturally.

  How did the landscape Thoreau sought to escape come to be? What kinds of threats emerged to stymie farmers in their quest to simplify the region’s diverse set of habitats? What was gained and lost, ecologically speaking, as the woods, to paraphrase Thoreau, went prematurely bald?

  FROM FORESTS TO FIELDS

  When the colonists arrived in New England, forest was the dominant form of vegetative cover. It was the main obstacle standing between them and their quest to remake the region into an agricultural utopia. Initially, the Europeans went in search of cleared areas suitable for planting crops, appropriating Indian fields and thereby saving themselves from the backbreaking labor involved in clearing forestland. Plymouth and many other New England towns, for instance, were established on old Indian fields. One early settler was even confident that enough “void ground” existed in New England to serve the short-term needs of all those who chose to venture overseas.3

  WALDEN POND

  In 1845, Henry Thoreau moved into a cabin on this spot in Concord, Massachusetts, a place where local farmers cut wood for fuel. (Library of Congress)

  Eventually, however, population growth outstripped the supply of Indian land, forcing the European settlers to cut down more forest themselves. For most of the colonists, cleared, arable land was the landscape most familiar to them from life back across the ocean. It took time to become accustomed to the hard labor involved in cutting down the woods. In the northern colonies, trees were usually chopped down, although sometimes a technique known as girdling was used. Girdling, a practice far more common in the South, involved cutting a horizontal channel all the way around the tree, which stopped the vertical flow of sap. Deprived of sap, the leaves would die and the branches eventually fell off, leaving the surrounding land dry and suitable for planting.

  New Englanders, however, generally clear-cut the forest, in part because the demand for fuel wood and
lumber encouraged it. The market for potash, an alkaline substance that came from burning hardwood trees, also drove farmers to cut and burn the woods with a vengeance. Used to manufacture soap, glass, and gunpowder and to bleach linens and print calicoes, potash served a range of industrial uses but at the expense of farms, which lost the nutrients that the ashes would otherwise have released back into the soil had they not been exported to market.

  With their very existence dependent on the successful production of food, farmers had little if any time for removing stumps and stones. Instead, they adapted to the half-cleared fields by planting Indian corn (maize) and grass; both grew well in such an environment. A pattern of “extensive” farming began to emerge. Rather than carefully tending arable land, engaging in crop rotation, manuring, and the thorough removal of stumps and stones—all recognized as part of proper agricultural practice in Europe—New England farmers simply exploited the soil and then forged ahead with the clearing of new land. Cutting down trees remained hard work, but it was easier to partially clear the land, plant it, and then move on to another small plot than to constantly improve the soil on one field to the high Old World standards. The colonists were too busy figuring out how to produce food rapidly to worry about efficient agricultural practices. Disheveled-looking their fields may well have been—indeed, many travelers commented on the rather sorry shape of the colonial landscape—but they were also serviceable and well adapted to surviving in a new, land-rich environment.4

  Early on, the colonists adopted the Indian practice of planting corn along with beans and pumpkins or squash. These plants reinforced one another, resulting in high agricultural yields. The stalks of corn facilitated the growth of beans by giving them a structure to climb. The beans, as noted earlier, replenished the nitrogen that the corn drained out of the soil, bolstering fertility. And the pumpkins were a valuable source of food in the pioneer environment. “All kind of garden fruits grow very well,” wrote Puritan Edward Johnson in 1654, “and let no man make a jest at pumpkins, for with this fruit the Lord was pleased to feed his people to their good content, till corn and cattle were increased.”5 After a few seasons, however, the colonists slowly began the process of transforming New England into an image of the Old World, planting European grains such as wheat and rye alongside the maize, a crop they never abandoned in part because it proved a more reliable source of food.

  New England, unlike the South, did not center its economy around an export crop like tobacco. Nor were its soils as fertile as those in the mid-Atlantic area—by the eighteenth century, the great grain-producing region of the colonies. Instead, New England’s soil had a moisture content that made it especially suited for growing grass to support livestock. Grass played the pivotal role in the region’s farm ecology. “To what produce is your climate best adapted?” George III asked Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson in 1774. “To grazing, Sir,” responded Hutchinson. “Your Majesty has not a finer Colony for grass in all your dominions: and nothing is more profitable in America than pasture, because labour is very dear.”6

  The grass fed cattle that, in turn, produced manure that was spread over the fields as fertilizer for growing corn and other crops. Grass and cattle helped to maintain soil fertility—the key to reproducing a sustainable form of farm life—by recycling nutrients back into the fields. It is no wonder then that the colonists especially valued the region’s meadows—grassy, uncultivated lowlands found along rivers or salt marshes. Old beaver ponds, the Europeans no doubt delighted in realizing, often became meadows, especially as the species was hunted to extinction. Meadow grass (hay) grew every year in these areas—no planting or cultivation needed. For the first two centuries of European existence in New England, meadows provided a crucial source of winter fodder. And best of all, they required little work on the colonists’ part. Early New Englanders settled such river sites as Concord, Sudbury, Dedham, and Medfield, Massachusetts, precisely to partake of the free grass. The hay supported the livestock, while animal manure regenerated the soil. In effect, the colonists maintained soil fertility and food production by relying on the nutrient subsidy provided by such natural meadows.

  Farming the land in this way was a delicate balancing act, made even more unpredictable by an assortment of threats from predators and plant disease. New England’s wildlife had long been a problem for those practicing agriculture, affecting not just the colonists but also the original farmers in the region. Crows and blackbirds (probably redwings and grackles) attacked seeds sown by Indians, forcing them to erect platformlike watch houses, often staffed by children, for scattering the birds. Although not nearly as simplified in terms of species diversity as the fields the Europeans tended, the agroecosystems maintained by Native Americans required this energy expenditure—the work involved in fending off birds—to return satisfactory yields. Generally speaking, as the landscape strayed from its diverse forest state, the more open it became to pests and disease and the more work and energy it took to maintain it in an agricultural form.

  As the colonists remade New England into a replica of the Old World landscape, abandoning corn, beans, and squash for fields planted with European wheat and rye, they ran into trouble. Passenger pigeons posed an early threat. Known to fly in flocks ranging in number from hundreds of thousands to millions—reportedly taking hours to travel by and leaving dung several inches thick on the forest floor—the birds descended in droves on grain fields. In 1642, the pigeons attacked grain in a number of Massachusetts towns. They also fed on the acorns and chestnuts in the surrounding forest, driving the settlers’ hogs (set free to feed in the woods) to the brink of starvation.7

  Native species of insects also found the new sources of plant food a major attraction. So many grasshoppers converged on the grain crops of the first Massachusetts settlements that the colonists were reportedly forced to use brooms to sweep them into the ocean. In 1646, caterpillars swarmed the region, becoming fairly regular visitors to the colonists’ grain fields in the ensuing years. The Indian practice of burning the land held down these insect populations. But with the Native Americans largely driven from the land and the prospect of a brand new source of concentrated food—the wheat and rye—insect populations reached new heights.

  Livestock too was threatened, especially by wolves. It took only a decade after the Pilgrims first arrived for a bounty to be placed on the gray wolf, with all the colonies eventually following suit. Sometimes especially rapacious animals might elicit stronger measures. In 1657, New Haven, Connecticut, posted a sum of five pounds for anyone who could kill “one great black woolfe of a more than ordinarie bigness, which is like to be more fierce and bould than the rest, and so occasions the more hurt.”8

  Some of the threats to agriculture were of the colonists’ own making. A fungus known as the black stem rust (or “blast”) proved devastating to rye and especially wheat. When the colonists brought barberries from Europe to North America to make jam, they also imported, unwittingly, this fungal parasite that used the barberry as a host. In the eighteenth century, a number of New England states passed laws aimed at eliminating barberry bushes, but with penalties rarely assessed, their effect remains open to question. The blast proved so insidious that in some areas of New England it came close to completely annihilating the wheat crop.

  By arresting forest growth and replacing it with an abridged form of plant life, the New England colonists found themselves locked in a battle with various pests and diseases. Simplifying nature had its costs. Sustaining this streamlined agro-ecosystem required the input of a great deal of human energy—whether that meant sweeping insects into the sea or pursuing wolves through the forest—to achieve the desired results.

  MALTHUSIAN CRUNCH

  Even if pests and disease could be fended off, there was still the threat posed by too many people pressing against a limited resource base. In much the way that the British economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) would later outline, population began to outstrip New England’s land su
pply as early as the 1720s. This trend, combined with an economic slump that began at the outset of the century, presented a serious challenge to the farm economy.

  The Malthusian crunch hit the older towns of eastern Massachusetts first. As population expanded against the limits of a finite supply of land, these settlements became more crowded. Inheritance customs added to the problem. Typically the eldest son received a double share of the estate left by the deceased; the remaining shares were divided evenly between both sons and daughters. During the first few generations, the division of land in this way still allowed each succeeding generation a sizable enough piece of property to operate a successful farm. But as the eighteenth century unfolded, the repeated division led to progressively smaller estates. In the 1600s, land holdings commonly ranged between 200 and 300 acres; by the second half of the 1700s, farm size plummeted to the point where the average holding may have been as small as only 40 to 60 acres. Reverend Samuel Chandler of Andover, Massachusetts, who had seven boys to take care of, wrote in the 1740s of being “much distressed for land for my children.”9 Relentless population pressure also forced up the price of land in older towns outside of Boston, such as Concord and Dedham, Massachusetts. Malthusian pressures may even have compelled New Englanders to rethink their views on inheritance. By the 1720s, some Massachusetts farms were being passed down intact to the oldest son, with the other siblings left to either migrate or find some other means of support. America, the land of opportunity, was in trouble.

  The ecological effects of the rise in population are difficult to pin down. Some historians have blamed the population and land imbalance for soil exhaustion and a consequent lowering of agricultural production. New England agriculture was beginning to unravel. Increasing population and prevailing inheritance patterns ran up against the ecological wall created by worn-out soils. “Patriarchy,” historian Carolyn Merchant writes, “had come into conflict with ecology.”10 But whether the declining yields stemmed from soil exhaustion or some other factor is unclear.