William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England Interprets and analyzes the changing conditions in New England’s wildlife communities such as plant and animal that happened to shift from Native American dominance to European dominance. Cronon explains that the transition from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes, commonly known to historians, on how these people organized their lives, but it also involves basic reorganizations, less well known to historians, in the region’s plant and animal communities (Cronon, xv). As the distant world and occupants of Europe were bit by bit introduced to North America’s ecosystem, the limits between the two were obscured. Cronon utilizes an assortment of proof to clarify the circumstances that prompted the dramatic ecological consequences following European contact with New England such as deforestation and different understandings that result in confusion.
For the newly arriving European settlers, the landscape held symbolic meaning and value to both environmental and economic. Cronan points out thinkers like Benjamin Rush, “The landscape was a visible confirmation of the state of human society. Both underwent an evolutionary development from savagery to civilization,” (Cronan, 6). This way Cronon describes that colonists did not arrive on the
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In spite of the fact that European and Native American thoughts regarding property and land utilize differed, neither proved purer rather each outlined ways people altered the environment, must be certain that the Indians were not any more static than that the colonists in their activities and organization. When Cronon describe pre-colonial Indian ways of life, he intends no suggestion that they were somehow “purer” or more “Indian” than the ways of life Indians chose or were forced into, following their contact with colonists (Cronon,