emkrall – American Environments to 1893

April 13, 2014

Supplementary Reading: American Indians and National Parks

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Growing up on the East Coast made national parks a difficult concept for me to understand. A friend used to tell me about spending summers at her grandmother’s home in Grand Junction, Colorado, where her grandmother’s backyard was the Colorado National Monument. I only understood the word ‘monument’ as in a memorial, such as the Washington Monument, and was confused about why anyone would care to live near it, until I saw this picture:[1]

My ignorance about the West also extends to national parks. Reading American Indians and National Parks by Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek helped me understand the scale of national parks in that part of the country (Keller and Turek do not study only western parks, but most of the parks they study are in the West). For example, Glacier National Park in Montana is made up of 1,012,837 acres and contains 762 lakes.[2] While it may seem that there was enough land in the West for both parks and Indian tribes, Keller and Turek demonstrate why that is a myth and expose the complicated story of the United States government’s appropriation of tribal land. What Keller and Turek do for Indian tribes, Karl Jacoby does for “common folk” more generally in Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. After explaining Keller and Turek’s book, I will consider their history in light of Jacoby’s study.

Keller and Turek tell the story of the changing relationships between the Indian tribes who lived in or around the parks and the National Parks Service (NPS) and environmentalists between 1864 and 1994. They fill a void in scholarship by examining the formation of national parks through the perspective of the native people who lived in or around the parks in the United States. The authors assert that, though scholars have studied national parks and American Indians separately, the connection between them has largely been ignored, to the detriment of both fields. Keller and Turek focus their research on what they call the “crown jewels” of the parks system—including Glacier National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Yosemite National Park—nearly all of which have had disputes with native peoples concerning ownership and use of park land.[3]

Keller and Turek tell a hopeful story about the relationship between the NPS and Indian tribes; though the NPS has not always understood or treated American Indians well, policy and “awareness and sensitivity” have improved since the 1960s. Keller and Turek tell a less hopefully story about the relationship between conservationists and native peoples. By the end, the authors conclude, “honest dialogue can help idealists realize that protecting land is no simple matter.” Keller and Turek seek to “dispense with stereotypes of the Indian-as-ecologist/Indian-as-victim, and cease seeing tribal members as colorful, nostalgic versions of environmentalists themselves.” By understanding the culture and history of Indian tribes and the history of Indian tribes’ relationships to national parks, Keller and Turek demonstrate that fair policy is possible in theory: policy that takes into account not only the environment, but also the people who lived on and off of the land prior to the establishment of national parks. They also acknowledge that this is rarely, if ever, realized in practice.[4]

For sources, Keller and Turek rely on individual national parks’ archival sources, government documents, and a series of interviews the two authors conducted with Native Americans. The history is largely a bureaucratic one: the NPS, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Indian tribes—not individual people, but institutions—are the actors in the story. However, since Indian tribes were underrepresented politically, Keller and Turek gave them a collective voice by interviewing individual Native Americans.[5] The book’s focus on bureaucracy, though, makes reading American Indians and National Parks dull; quotations from the interviews are among the few highlights of the book.

In the conclusion to American Indians and National Parks, Keller and Turek list several general phases of relations between national parks and Indian tribes. The first phase started in 1864 with the beginning of the federal government’s seizure of land for parks and continued for fifty years after the establishment of the NPS in 1916. Keller and Turek note that this period was characterized by unfettered appropriation of land and “little genuine concern for native rights.” Next, there was a phase that was marked by Native American success in promoting their political interest, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Finally, the period beginning in 1987 with the NPS formulation of the Native American Relationships Management Policy, the service adopted a policy promising to “respect and actively promote tribal cultures as a component of the parks themselves.” [6] Although these stages indicate tidy progress in NPS and tribal relations, it was not a period of strictly upward progress. Keller and Turek emphasize the differences between each tribe and park, and include backward moments. No two situations were the same, but the authors tell a story of eventual progress. It would have been helpful if Keller and Turek had split the chapters into sections so these phases were clear from the beginning. Since they only explained the phases at the end of the book, the independent chapters had no context and it proved difficult to reconstruct Keller and Turek’s argument while reading the book.

Keller and Turek begin the book with the hopeful chapter ,“‘A Lucky Compromise’: Apostle Islands and the Chippewa,” about the 1970 victory of the Chippewa in protecting their reservation’s land on the national stage.[7] This chapter is contrasted with the next: “From Yosemite to Zuni: Parks and Native People, 1864-1994,” which presents a bleaker picture of relations between tribes and the NPS. In its infancy, the NPS was a flawed institution, according to Keller and Turek. The NPS “bequeathed distortions and ignorance about native history” in founding and maintaining its parks.[8] These chapters set the scene for the case studies that compose the rest of the book.

In summary, chapter three addresses the paradox of artifact preservation coinciding with ignoring the living native peoples through the example of the Utes in Mesa Verde National Park. Chapter four deals land usage rights among the Blackfeet in Glacier National Park. Chapter five explores the relations between Paiutes and Mormons in controlling Pipe Spring. Chapter six attends to the problems that arose because of multiple tribes in a locale, as demonstrated in Olympic National Park and the surrounding area. Chapters seven and eight examine the tensions between conservationists and native tribes in using and controlling the Grand Canyon. Chapters nine and ten tell the stories of the Navajo and the Seminoles, respectively. Though these chapters are full of information, the text wants a more analytic voice to drive the argument. As it is, Keller and Turek are content to describe, and rarely argue.

Since Crimes against Nature studies the case of the Havasupai in the Grand Canyon, I will summarize Keller and Turek’s history of the Havasupai in Grand Canyon National Park in chapter eight as a reference to compare the stories told by the two books (though they address different periods). After giving a brief history of the Havasupai in the Grand Canyon area, Keller and Turek describe the Congressional bill transferring land to the tribe. From 1974 to 1976, a political fight broke out between the Havasupai and environmentalists who opposed the measure. Environmentalists were concerned that “the Havasupai, being poor, would place economic development ahead of preservation” and that the Grand Canyon was a national park in that it belonged to the American people, not the Havasupai. The land transfer bill eventually passed, but it stipulated that “transferred land ‘shall remain forever wild’” without an indication of what “forever wild” meant. Keller and Turek analyze the relationship between native tribes and environmentalists. The authors posit that conservationists believed that “The Grand Canyon … transcends humanity,” which means that no humans, not even native tribes, belong there. Second, Keller and Turek debunk the “Indian as Environmentalist” myth, arguing that it “freezes Indians as an idea and artifact” instead of treating them as a dynamic people. Finally, Keller and Turek acknowledge that the Canyon could have been better preserved if environmentalists had their way, but that situation would have made it “no longer be an Indian community or homeland for its people.”[9] The authors reveal their belief in the impossibility of reconciling the interests of native tribes and environmentalists.

American Indians and National Parks addresses themes that Jacoby also addresses, including the concept of “national” parks versus local spaces and environmental versus social justice. Where Jacoby’s stances are clear, Keller and Turek’s must be teased out of the text. Analogs to Jacoby’s opinions can be found in American Indians and National Parks, though. “Americans have often pursued environmental quality at the expense of social justice,” Jacoby claims. [10] Keller and Turek’s book also demonstrates this: though the NPS has improved its policies since 1916, conservationists have resisted deeply considering human interests in forming policy. The idea of local versus national control is present in both books. Jacoby demonstrates this by contrasting common Adirondack land use practices with how wealthy sportsmen and the state of New York used the land. In Keller and Turek’s view, this played out through the NPS control of native tribal lands. In both, there is an implicit recognition that local control was often superior to national in terms of environmental health. This directly counters Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, which is necessarily a national story of “Americanization.” Finally, Keller and Turek agree with Jacoby about man’s place in nature: both books include humans as an unavoidable, if not ideal, part of the natural world.

Bibliography

Jacoby, Karl. Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden
History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Keller, Robert H. and Michael F. Turek. American Indians and National Parks. Tucson:
The University of Arizona Press, 1998.

[1] Sally Bellacqua, Monument Canyon, http://www.nps.gov/colm/photosmultimedia/index.htm.

[2] Glacier National Park Fact Sheet, http://www.nps.gov/glac/parknews/fact-sheet.htm.

[3] Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998), xv, xii-xiii.

[4] Keller and Turek, 232-240.

[5] Keller and Turek, 241-242.

[6] Keller and Turek, 233-234.

[7] Keller and Turek, 3-16.

[8] Keller and Turek, 17-29.

[9] Keller and Turek, 164-184.

[10] Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 198.

April 6, 2014

Representations of Disasters

I read the article called “Distant Disasters, Local Fears: Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Revolution, and Passion in The Atlantic Monthly, 1880-84″ by Sheila Hones. In it, Hones draws on essays about natural disasters, essays about social problems that included references to natural disasters, and fiction pieces that used natural disasters as part of the plot (173). From reading other blog posts, it seems that this article is unique. Instead of writing about Gilded Age disasters themselves, Hones writes about how authors published in The Atlantic during the period represented disasters in their stories and reporting (170). “Distant disasters thus provide the textual framework for an exploration of local anxieties,” Hones argues, and proceeds to explain how authors did this.

First, Hones demonstrates the connection between the “social atmosphere” and the attitude toward disasters of educated Bostonians during the 1880s: “the large natural world is meaningful and ordered while the local social world is prone at any particular moment to turmoil” (172-173). Next, authors created what Hones calls “narrative distance” between the upper-class writers and readership of The Atlantic and the disasters experienced far away, such as the eruption of Krakatoa (175). Finally, disasters were understood to be, though destructive, also creative of new life. In disasters, authors found a way to understand their local concerns about social change as possibly a good thing in the end. Hones says the example of the volcano is “a potent symbol for a conservative community proudly finding its roots in revolution” (190-191). The United States, then, was a volcano: eruptive democracy led to eventual stability. This corresponds to Brandon’s post about how disasters might/might not be a good thing. But the fact that they might even be considered a good thing is interesting in itself.

Hones has interesting things to say about the locale of disasters. One author wrote about the Mississippi River floods in The Atlantic. The author showed that the natural disaster threatened America’s “self-regulation at the national level” (187). With the Civil War recently concluded, the author saw the possibility of local governments responding to the disaster instead of the federal government and the author worried that it would “create the ‘gravest political dangers'” (187). This made me think about how natural disasters are also national disasters. In the moment of a natural disaster, a local community is unable to respond. It seems that communities outside of the one destroyed must respond if any rebuilding/assistance can occur. This is the case, at least, where humans have built second nature on top of first nature. If humans are living in first nature, then they can move somewhere else, right?

Some thoughts from the other readings:

In Steven Biel’s introduction, he states, “catastrophic disturbances of routine actually tell us a great deal about the ‘normal’ workings of culture, society, and politics” (5). This makes sense, but it also makes me wonder if a disaster can be a historical event? Because who are the actors? Can a disaster be an actor in the same way that nature can?

Also, in the overview article by Jonathan Bergman, he cites Matthew Mulcahy, who writes, “‘[d]isasters become disasters only when natural forces meet human ones'” (936), which means that disasters need humans (and to an extent, second nature) present in order to actually be a disaster. I think this is interesting and it reminds me of Crosby’s broad view of changes in nature in Ecological Imperialism. If a disaster occurred in an uninhabited place, could we really call it a disaster?

March 30, 2014

Dislocation in Nature’s Metropolis

I enjoyed reading Parts II of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. His exploration of the process of grain, lumber, and meat becoming commodities was fascinating, especially when he showed the distinct roles grain elevators, fences, and stockyards played in those processes. I had never considered that animals (along with alcohol) are easier to transport than plants: “pigs (along with whisky) were generally the most compact and valuable way of bringing [farmers’ corn crops] to market” (226). Not only is this an interesting idea, it is also an example of the geography/transportation of capital. Cronon quotes from one source, “‘Corn thus becomes incarnate; for what is a hog, but fifteen or twenty bushels of corn on four legs?'” (226).

One of Cronon’s conclusions in Part II is that “once within the corporate system, places lost their particularity and became functional abstractions on organizational charts” (259). Cronon carries the theme of dislocation into Part III. After carefully connecting Chicago to its hinterlands/rural areas to their Metropolis through the three commodities in Part II, “Nature to Market,” Cronon commences a different investigation in Part III, “The Geography of Capital.” Through a clever investigation of individuals’ estates at bankruptcy or death, Cronon composes a series of maps that illustrate Chicago’s position as the “gateway city” and why it beat St. Louis for the title. A gateway, though, is hardly a place in itself because it isn’t a destination. As goods are entering and exiting, the gateway is a place of dislocation. The examples of Montgomery Ward and Company’s mail-order catalogs and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair further demonstrate the dislocation. The mail-order catalogs, Cronon writes, “offered its readers a map of capital, of second nature.” “The most remarkable thing about the catalog, like capital itself, is how thoroughly it obscures these relationships [between metropolis and hinterland]” (339). Similarly, Cronon refers to Henry Adams’s analysis of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Adams called the fair a “Babel of loose … unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts” (344).

Initially, I thought the book was only about Chicago, so I didn’t expect to encounter so much dislocation. Since the story is about the rise of Chicago and the West, it makes more sense: the whole thing is about dislocation. It’s weird that moving goods around was/is essential to the process of creating capital.

I, like Wade, am interested in the relationship between second nature and capital. I don’t think second nature (refresher: “the artificial nature that people erect atop first nature” [xix]) is the exact same thing as capital, but I wish Cronon would have clarified their relationship. Maybe the difference between second nature and capital is that there is a way to have second nature without creating capital, such as the example of a self-sufficient pioneer.

March 23, 2014

The “air thick with progress” and “water…at the heart of it all”

In Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England , Theodore Steinberg uses a variety of strong verbs to describe how humans intervened in New England’s waterways. “Compelled by these plans to control the natural world, they developed the water, improved it for sale, and managed it with an eye toward its economic potential” (95). This sentence exhibits many of Steinberg’s verbs: controlled, developed, improved, and managed; others he employed throughout the book include dominated, manipulated, and tapped.

Besides displaying Steinberg’s varied diction, I bring up this issue of verbs because it troubled me. Throughout the book, I kept wondering why Steinberg did not ever write the word ‘used’ to refer to how New Englanders dealt with water. The closest any characters in this history come to just plain old using water are Native Americans, early white settlers who “used rivers at first to mark the periphery and limits of their land” (24), and settlers who established agricultural systems in the region. The compulsion to control marks the rest of the history of New England’s water in Steinberg’s view. I agree with his argument to an extent and see the validity of how industrialization shaped the rivers and streams (and how people thought about water as a resource), but I do wish he would have explicitly stated the difference between ‘using’ and ‘controlling’ water and showed ways in which that was possible.

Steinberg bookends his argument with the case of Henry David Thoreau who acts as a foil to industrializing New Englanders: both interact very differently with the same waterways. Thoreau’s account offers an enlightening cultural/artistic perspective, but does it help Steinberg’s argument? I think it mainly serves to create a dualism between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ uses of nature: one is appreciative and the other is exploitative. Neither provide an opportunity for a third way in which humans can use and not abuse the resource of water.

In Manish’s post, I find a similar concern to my own. He writes, “the relationship between man and nature is best when man demonstrates a balance. He can utilize nature as a resource for his own benefit but he must take caution for abuse of the land can lead nature to grave repercussions such as illness.” There probably are examples of ways in which this balance occurred in nineteenth-century New England, but Steinberg chooses to focus on the transformative effects of industrialization. That is a legitimate focus because change is exciting and maybe history would be terribly boring without it.

March 16, 2014

Ideas Have Consequences

After reading Lisa Brady’s War Upon the Land, it’s hard to believe this statue of William Tecumseh Sherman was installed in Central Park in 1903.

Aside from that, I think the blog posts so far show an interesting engagement with Brady’s definition of nature. Ian and Sean helpfully point out why it may be limiting to exclude humans from a definition of nature. I agree with them on a theoretical level. But on the practical level of writing and thinking about environmental history, it makes it easier if we define nature as Brady does: “the nonhuman physical environment in its constituent parts or as a larger whole” (13). But maybe easier isn’t better.

Brady’s notion of “landscape” is a helpful way to think about about how humans shape the environment. So much of Brady’s book deals with designing and manipulating nature that her idea of landscape as “shaped land, land modified for permanent human occupation, for dwelling, agriculture, manufacturing, government, worship, and for pleasure” is useful because it allows for human alteration and usage of the land as a reasonable, and not a negative, process (13).

Brady mentions the proliferation of weeds as one of the consequences of Union armies marching through the South (131). This mention of weeds reminded me of Crosby’s book, when he points out that weeds are among the first plants to populate an area after it has been destroyed. Those weeds make way for longer-lasting plants. This means that, perhaps if we take a larger view of the environmental consequences of the Civil War (as Crosby takes a very wide view of ecological history in his book), the results are less dismal. The combination of the destruction of the land and the dismantling of the institution of slavery, though, spelled doom for the Southern way of life and ensured that the South could not return to how it was before the war (134). Even taking a larger view of history could not help return the South to its previous agroecosystem.

I also appreciated how Brady depicted nature as a historical agent insofar as it has “power to shape human decisions” (6). Brady relied on nineteenth-century Northern ideas about nature as an entity that was able to be conquered, civilized, and improved. Those ideas were the driving force in the book. I think the ideas themselves, carried through by the agents of Union generals (many of whom were trained as engineers at West point) helped bring about the destruction of Southern landscapes. For Brady, these ideas had consequences in the hands of Union generals and their massive armies.

February 23, 2014

Of Bison and Men (And Environmental Factors)

Understanding the narrative components of Andrew C. Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison helps me understand the book better. This story is a tragedy, chronicling the downfalls of several characters: the bison, the environment, the Indians, and the Euroamerican hunters. The bison’s story is, perhaps, the saddest. At the beginning of the story, the free and wild bison covered the plains. At the end, they suffered two fates. First, they “had become an imprisoned species only by the constant intervention of human keepers” (165) and then almost all the American bison ended up domesticated, privately-owned, and raised only to be killed for meat (189).

Looking from beginning to end–without the all-important middle–the losers in this story were also the environment, the Indians, and the Euroamerican hunters. The environment suffered as the destruction of the bison upset the diversity of life on the plains environment, causing invasive plant life to overtake the places where the shortgrass used to grow. The Indians suffered along with the bison as Euroamericans sought to control the Indians by cutting off their their only trading asset–the bison. Even the Euroamerican hunters suffered as they failed to receive the bulk of the payment and Euroamerican merchants and industrialists accumulated wealth.

Isenberg’s view, however, is that the middle of the story is the most important part. In the middle, the story gets complicated (because humans, human society, and ecology are all complicated and dynamic): the destruction of the bison “was a consequence of the encounter between Indians and Euroamericans in the Great Plains — an encounter in which the interactions of indigenous and Euroamerican ecologies were as significant as, and inextricably bound to, economic and cultural exchanges” (12). Isenberg spends the rest of the book working out those inextricable exchanges, elucidating the ways in which these exchanges reciprocally influenced each other.

A compelling part of Isenberg’s argument is where he places humans in the story. He emphasizes the dangers of holding the view of the dualism of humans and nature (the insistence “that whereas human culture is dynamic, nature is essentially stable” [195]). But Isenberg does not discount human influence. He explains human societies as “embedded in the complex ecology of the region” (194). Humans, in Isenberg’s view, have agency, but human decisions are influenced by (and cannot be understood apart from) the complex workings of their physical and social environments.

I agree with Ian’s assessment of the definition of nature in the book. He writes, “By noting how the buffalo were actually devastated by other factors outside of human hand, it offers a perception that humanity’s alteration of the environment is a natural progression of the world.” Similarly, a passage in Isenberg confirms this view: “A bison hide did not cease to be part of nature when it had been removed from the carcass and sold. The hide continued to flow through the environment like all energy and material” (196). Though procuring a hide also meant killing the animal, Isenberg glazes over that to show that a hide’s movement from an animal to a vat of lime to a leather belt in a machine was a natural movement.

February 16, 2014

Nature as a Stage

“When it came to society, only the polite were created equal” (425). This is my favorite sentence in Richard L. Bushman’s book, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. This quotation illustrates the recurring problem of the contradiction between republican ideals and middle-class aspirations for gentility.

Bushman explores the margins between the people who considered themselves genteel and the people who were not genteel by using the example of the city street. Streets acted as a stage, a space where refined people “had to steer clear of the vulgar population” while acting on the “genteel stage where a performance was required” (368). Just as city streets were a stage, the city itself was also a stage–and a performance. “Cities, like people or houses, could be evaluated for their taste and beauty,” Bushman claims (139).

Bushman employs this idea of performance several times, arguing that “houses and gardens were on view and performing before critical audiences,” too (132). In class on Saturday, Ian talked about the parallel between a bird building a nest and a person building a house as an argument of the naturalness of human-created buildings. I think Bushman’s notion of humans appropriating their houses as symbols of their gentility is consistent with Ian’s comment. It complicates the idea, but I think we can still argue that homes are natural even if people use them to demonstrate their “gentility.”

In country towns, the margin between the genteel and the uncouth “was between the villagers and the farmers, who by common agreement were rude and coarse beyond redemption” (378). This surprised me, and Bushman acknowledges that “the merciless ridicule of this population by people of otherwise broad sympathies stuns a modern reader” (378). I thought Americans have always esteemed farmers: how different this nineteenth-century sentiment was from Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer” mind-set. Later, Bushman complicates the disparity between the city and the country. Though in speech, “country” meant plain and “city” meant fashionable, Bushman emphasizes that relationship between city people and country people was “separate but engaged,” and their relationships did not take one the one-dimensionality of their language (400).

Ian wrote that Bushman did not make nature play a significant role in the book. I, too, was surprised by that. In addition to the narrative of the West, I think nature plays the largest roles in the city/country discussion, the formation of cities, and the “geography of refinement.” I think Bushman emphasizes the human action in creating space and appropriating space, with space and nature as passive actors in the performance, contrasting other ideas of nature we have encountered so far in the class.

February 15, 2014

Chicago and Its Hinterland

In the Preface to Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon explains how he will use the word “nature” in the text. He writes about how difficult it is to use the word “nature” while also trying to suggest “that the boundary between human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural, is profoundly problematic” (Cronon, xix). I think Henry is correct to say that Cronon’s argument only makes sense in light of his definition of nature. Cronon states, “Nature’s Metropolis and the Great West are in fact different labels for a single region and the relationships that defined it” (19). This wouldn’t make sense without allowing for human action as a part of nature (this is what Cronon calls “second nature”).

Based on the readings from the first section of The Great Wilderness Debate, I concluded that wilderness is necessarily uninhabited. I also considered whether or not nature has to be an uninhabited space since the definition of nature is related to definition of wilderness. Cronon’s argument convinced me that the line between the natural and unnatural worlds is not as distinct as I thought. Ian appropriately characterizes this blurry line by saying that Cronon “perceive[s] cities as the next evolution of a natural ecosystem.” I agree with Ian’s assessment of Cronon’s argument, but I have a visceral reaction to it–how can the big, scary, immoral city be an extension of the “first nature” world?

I think this is difficult for me to accept because I just finished reading Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter. The narrator, Hannah, describes her life as a farmer in rural Kentucky. Then, Hannah mourns for the loss of her way of life because her three children grew up, went away to college, and never returned to their hometown. This novel made me want to move back to northcentral Pennsylvania (where I grew up) and become a farmer, because the narrator is obsessed with belonging to a place. Despite my gut reaction that this can only happen in the country, maybe a person can truly belong to a city, too.

Cronon importantly brings time into the equation of Chicago’s history. “Before the city, there was the land,” Cronon writes (23). Using von Thünen’s Isolated State theory to help explain the continuity between urban and rural areas, Cronon explains the limitations of the theory: von Thünen “made no effort to place his city-country system in time. The lone city in the midst of the featureless plain had no history, and so poses real problems when one tries to apply it to the extremely dynamic processes that reshaped city and country in the nineteenth-century West” (52). I appreciate Cronon’s critique. Cronon helpfully places Chicago’s (and its hinterland’s) emergence squarely in time, allowing the reader to understand “the city’s place in nature” (8).

February 14, 2014

Final Paper Topic

Out of Place, In Place: American Utopian Communities and Their Environments, 1830-1890

The number and prominence of utopian communities in America grew during the middle of the nineteenth century. The founders and members of the communities had ideas about the alternative ways of life, and those ideas necessitated living apart from the rest of the country. I hope to explore the ways the members of these communities interacted with and thought about the natural environments where they chose to live. The following historical questions will direct my research. What ideas did members of utopian communities have about their natural environments and their relationships with those environments? What role did ideals of “living close to the land” play in the formation of these communities? How did members of utopian communities practically interact with their environments? Are there any tensions between the ways members of utopian communities thought about and practically lived in their environments? If so, what were those tensions between thinking and living? I expect to use diaries, letters, and periodicals as primary sources for my paper. These sources will give insight into the daily lives of community members as well as insight into their ideas about the communities.

February 9, 2014

The “Seams of Pangaea”

In Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Alfred W. Crosby attempts to explain why Europeans “triumphed” in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and South America (regions he calls “Neo-Europes) (7). The period Crosby studies is one thousand years long, and the region encompasses nearly the whole globe. Crosby bravely studies a vast subject in terms of time and place. This vastness is both the reason why Crosby can present such an enticing argument and also why the argument may fail to be convincing.

The vastness of time and place is the reason Crosby can present his argument because he needs the full thousand years to trace how ecological causes–not Europeans’ “superiority in arms, organization, and fanaticism”–led to European success in the Neo-Europes. Though disease worked quickly, plants and animals took longer to change Neo-European environments than the timeline of conventional stories of human-centered European imperialism in the New World. Crosby acknowledges the length of time necessary to validate his argument: “the success of the portmanteau biota and of its dominant member, the European human, was a team effort by organisms that had evolved in conflict and cooperation over a long time” (293).

The vastness of time and place is also worrying because it is so vast. I found the fourth chapter, “The Fortunate Isles” and the tenth chapter, “New Zealand,” most convincing because Crosby focused on particular regions. “The stories of all the continental Neo-Europes are too long and complicated to tell within the limitations of this book,” writes Crosby, “therefore, we turn to New Zealand.” It is admirable that he acknowledges the impossibility of chronicling the stories of the other regions. Additionally, Crosby’s evidence is primarily secondary. I think the scope of his argument necessitated secondary evidence, but history relies on primary evidence. But then maybe this isn’t really history as much as an ecological study with historical implications?

I had a different reaction to this book than Sean did (February 9). He said that it resolved his doubts about environmental history as an academic discipline. Ecological Imperialism did the opposite for me. Crosby’s argument is convincing because it makes a lot of sense, and he uses convincing evidence. And I really want to believe it because it seems right. Crosby’s argument is ambitious and it seems convincing . But maybe it’s just a little too good to be true.