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Cronon: Chapter 6, Taking the
Forest
ISS 310
People and Environment
Prof. Alan Rudy
1-29-02
1. Main Points?
Taking the Forest


Back to Ecology
Who are the players in this chapter?
 What
has changed on that front from previous chapters?
TIMBERRRRR!!!!


Timber/forests were “naturally” unimproved, “free” for the taking, part of
“the commons.”
Ownership came with felling trees and sawing logs.
 White
Oak - ship timbers/planks, barrel staves.
Oak - underwater ship timbers
 Cedar/Chestnuts -- outdoor construction
 White Pine -- ship masts (nothing like it in the UK)
 Black
 England’s
merchant marine and navy had depended on European stocks of
wood, NE a major liberator from dependence on Continental competitors
English Colonial
Conservationism??

Massachusetts’ second charter
 no

unauthorized cutting of big trees
Additional royal restrictions
 such

trees marked and more protected
Unable to enforce the laws….
New England Conservationism? II

Big trees, scattered, extracted very wastefully
 Saving
labor rather than trees
 Heck there’s an unlimited supply anyway, right?!
 Other trees used as cushions for desirable big trees
 Abundance
leads to high standards re: quality – leads to more waste
Consequences




No trees, basically at all, on Atlantic and Caribbean Islands
INTRACOLONIAL TRADE DRIVES DEFORESTATION
Deforestation leads to a price/value increase due to socially produced
“scarcity”
Ever greater transport costs as big trees recede from shoreline and
rivers-edges
Consequences II

ALSO:
 Cedars
disappear from swamps
 Useful trees of decent size disappear
 Nut trees become more scarce
 European misinterpretation of small tree size resulting from bad soils, not
historical action
 AGAIN:
Nature’s the problem and society missing!!
Responsibility (w/o blame)

Farmers cleared more land than did foresters
 Farmer
correlated trees and good soils
beeches produce rich humus
 Hickories, maples, ashes and
 Oaks generate thinner soils
 Coniferous, acidic soils ever
 Scrubby bushes ever worse
worse.
Consequences III

Wait a minute -- soils and trees produce one another not one produces
the other
 correlation
does not equal causation, it equals co-relation, evolving mutual
causation
 Root systems, evapotranspiration, fire, soil chemistry all key to ecosystem
reproduction
Ag Clearing Techniques

Girdling
 wasteful,
but soils get tree nutrients
 dangerous

and ugly
Late Summer Felling/Spring Burning
 wasteful, soils lose humus, get ashes
 Maize, rye, grain, pasture annual planting
Ag Clearing Techniques II

Lumbering and potash production and sales
 wealth,


tools, labor supply necessary for these simple commodities
Newly cleared lands over-valued (short-term)
Indians burned undergrowth (usufruct), colonists burned forests
(ownership) WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
Sawmills and Labor

Sawmills = settlement nuclei
 lumber
for ships, churches, houses, barns, outbuildings
 roads converged at mills, on rivers

Rivers drove grain and wood mills
 WHY?
 Shortage
 Low
and high cost of skilled labor.
productivity anyway - used best lumber only as a result.
Interpretation


AGAIN: low population leads to greater ecodamage because of
wastefulness of market/settlement w/ insufficient labor
In what ways might you see Michigan’s environment suffering because of
low population levels in some areas?
Construction and Use




Timber + Stone houses give way to timber only
Thatch/slate roofs give way to wood shingles
House sizes can be larger since lighter
Fences initially, and wastefully, wood not stone
Other Uses

BIGGEST USE, however, was for fuel
 typical
household = 30-40 cords of fuel wood
feet = an acre of wood/year
 4X4X300

Large land-owners had woodlots, small land-owners had to buy wood
brought in… class analysis.
 Smaller
farms  did more ecodamage?
What This Meant for the Weather


Little climactic change: wind, clouds, rainfall
However: warming and drying soils
 more
extremes: hotter summers, colder winters
 cool soils in forests used to:
• reduce temp extremes
• reduce wind 20-60 percent
 more
susceptible to fires and floods
What this means for soils

if soils froze more deeply, water cycles disrupted
 spring
floods came earlier, w/ greater top-soil loss
 increased, earlier flow rates = less recharge
 springs, ponds, rivers dry up in some places
 other areas flooded -- less evapotranspiration
Conclusion

All this undermined wood and grain mills!!!
 Too
much water, flooding in the spring
 Not enough water, drought the rest of the time.

NOT seen as deforestation but as civilization, progress
Concluding Quote


“Reducing the forest was an essential first step toward reproducing the
Old World mosaic in an American environment. For the New England
landscape and for the Indians, what followed was a new ecological order;
for the colonists, on the other hand, it was an old and familiar way of life.”
(126)
ONE OF PRODUCED SCARCITY NOT NATURAL SCARCITY