On Changes in the Land

Most Americans who pick up this book today will find little new within its pages. The reason for that, of course, is because Cronon nearly single-handedly launched the field of American environmental history with this short text. The material here is so deeply ingrained in American history surveys that it’s nearly impossible to get away from it. As a result, Cronon’s work is an overwhelming success in its clarity about the importance of pulling the environment into history, explanations of how the land was transformed, and sensitivity to the differences (and similarities) between English colonizers and indigenous Americans.

That said, for all its strength, the book is quite surface-level. Cronon spends time on topics like over-hunting, deforestation, land enclosure, and the effects that settlement (as opposed to semi-nomadism) had on physical space. However, the evidentiary base is sparse and most of these topics are discussed in a chapter or less. It may have been more useful if Cronon had written his study by emphasizing only one of these topics and, as other historians followed in his footsteps, write a synthetic work later. That is not this book, and we cannot really fault Cronon for it, given that his argument is less about the ecology in colonial New England and more about the importance of pulling the environment into history instead of seeing it as a static backdrop. In any case, I still would have loved a bit more detail.