Download Cronon: Chapter 6, Taking the Forest

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.
 Black Oak - underwater ship timbers
 Cedar/Chestnuts -- outdoor construction
 White Pine -- ship masts (nothing like it in the UK)
 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
 Hickories, maples, ashes and beeches
produce rich humus
 Oaks generate thinner soils
 Coniferous, acidic soils ever worse.
 Scrubby bushes ever 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
and high cost of skilled
labor.
 Low 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
 4X4X300 feet = an acre of wood/year

Large land-owners had woodlots,
small land-owners had to buy
wood brought in… class analysis.
farms  did more
ecodamage?
 Smaller
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