Changes

When Jamaica Kincaid writes, “They should have never left their home, their precious England, a place they loved so much, a place they had to leave but never forget. And so everywhere they went they turned it into England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them, so you can imagine the destruction of the people and land that came from that,” I was reminded of something I learned in an Environmental History class last year (24). The professor had us read a book, Changes in the Land by William Cronan in which Cronan gives an ecological view of New England before and after the English settled there, and how the colonists and Indians treated the land differently. He talks about the colonists describing the land as a land of plenty. They could only see what they could get out of it whether it was masts for ships or the firewood that was in need in England. To the Indians, the land was something to be used, but no one could really own the land. The colonists felt differently; they wanted to possess it and fence it off. Cronan tells how the Indians burned forests to make the forest perfect for hunting conditions and growing berries that were essential for their diets. The colonists didn’t feel that this style of using the land meant the Indians actually owned it.

Basically, Cronan’s book brought a new light to the history of New England in a way that I had never thought of before. I really love New England because it reminds me of Britain. I never realized that the reason it reminds me of Britain is because they changed it to look that way. They cut down trees to make it more pastoral and inadvertently brought grasses and weeds from England through their cattle’s manure, changing New England’s landscape forever.

Colleen Murphy