1. Cronon: Chapter 6, Taking the Forest
ISS 310
People and Environment
Prof. Alan Rudy
1. Main Points?

2. Taking the Forest Back to Ecology Who are the players in this chapter?
What has changed on that front from previous chapters?

3. 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

4. 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….

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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!!

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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?

12. 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.

13. 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?

14. 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

15. Other Uses BIGGEST USE, however, was for fuel
typical household = 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.
Smaller farms  did more ecodamage?

16. 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 percent
more susceptible to fires and floods

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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