Ted Steinberg

Review Essay

Split Personality Ponds

Diana Muir, Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England. [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000.] x + 312 pp.

NOT TOO LONG AGO, historians largely confined themselves to figuring out why things happened when they did. Why did the Great Awakening occur? What forces explain the American colonies' break with Britain? Why did the North and the South go to war in 1861? With such questions in mind, it was off to the archives to ferret out the root causes behind the major issues in the American past. History meant telling a convincing story about the unfolding of the Revolution, the Civil War, or some other event or development of consequence. For decades, causality remained at the heart of the historian's trade.

By the 1970s, historians had begun reading the work of scholars in other disciplines—philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics, among others—and "theory" took on central importance within the profession. The concepts and categories that historians had long taken for granted, once plain and obvious, became contested territory. Even the very facts about the past—the historian's stock in trade—seemed to lose the certainty they had once possessed. The department sherry hour became the scene of discussions over Derrida, Foucault, and the latest in French theory. Increasing numbers of historians spent their time scratching their heads wondering about the social construction of knowledge.

By some perverse irony, at the precise moment that many in the profession moved away from a traditional concern with causality, another group of scholars, calling themselves environmental historians, began using it with vigor, yielding important results. In the 1970s, this more down-to-earth contingent turned its attention to the largely autonomous natural world—plants and animals, soil and water, climate and weather—that plays so vital a role in the shape of human history. They asked an entirely different set of questions. How did cultures survive off the land? How did a society go about feeding itself? What were the environmental consequences of human action? Did some cultures decline and disappear because they lost their ecological foundations? Were too many people pressing against a limited supply of natural resources? Did scarcity lead to technological change and the birth of new modes of production? Of course environmental historians have taken advantage of critical theory, and many have embraced it wholeheartedly. But, that said, this small field provided (and provides ) ample room for those who still wondered about why history turned out as it did.

Diana Muir, the author of Reflections in Bullough's Pond, is one such causally minded person, though she would appear to have no formal training as an environmental historian. In her new book, Muir asks why it is that New England—a relatively modest, resource-poor area—paved the way for industrialization in the United States. New England's industrial transformation has of course received plenty of attention from historians. And still, a question so deceptively simple as why this particular region embraced the new economic order ahead of other parts of America remains largely unanswered.

Muir sets about answering the question by backing up, way into the distant past, to consider the forerunner of industrial transformation: the so-called Neolithic Revolution that led to the adoption of agriculture. What happened to cause New England's Indian population, which depended, initially at least, on hunting and gathering, to turn to farming? Some evidence, she rightly points out, suggests that hunters and collectors enjoyed a better standard of living with more leisure time than did their agricultural successors. Why would they willingly rush into the arms of poverty? Did they not know what they were in for? In fact, as Muir points out, these early Indian cultures may have had little choice in the matter. The population of southern New England boomed beginning roughly 10,000 years ago and continued growing up until the time of European contact in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Some scholars theorize that the native population exploded in response to the adoption of farming at this same time. Another theory, one to which Muir seems more inclined, holds that the risk of starvation forced this growing population, no longer able to support itself by gathering oysters and berries and hunting game, to cultivate and store crops.

Given the limits of archeological evidence, we may never know why agriculture arose in this region. But the latter theory at least has the virtue of calling our attention to the fact that, as the anthropologist Roy Rappaport reminds us, people survive "biologically or not at all."¹ All cultures—whether the people collect wild berries or eat out at McDonald's—must turn to the land to figure out how to go about feeding themselves. Reading French social critics is an admirable past-time, but below a certain caloric minimum, it is an activity that cannot take place.

Muir warms up with the Neolithic, but her analysis of the industrial revolution forms the heart of the book. Here she has a sounder evidentiary base from which to launch her argument. New England proceeded on its merry way until the mid eighteenth century, when the region locked onto a collision course with disaster as the population outstripped the available supply of land. Faced with a classic Malthusian dilemma, New Englanders could have tried to limit their numbers. They could have migrated to more sparsely populated areas, and many did indeed do that. Or they could have accepted a lower standard of living. But with the growth of the free market and the ability to transport commodities from one region to another, some New Englanders seized on yet another option: producing things for which people elsewhere on the globe would be willing to pay good money. Backed into an ecological corner they used their heads.

Environmental misfortune, in other words, was the handmaiden of progress. Muir goes so far as to say that an abundance of resources may even have hindered industrial transformation, a point she illustrates by exploring why other regions were not in the forefront of this development. The South, for example, possessed a more favorable climate for growing staple crops and, in this respect at least, had less incentive than New England to embrace industrial change. Large-scale slave labor, meanwhile, allowed southerners the luxury of never having to get much dirt under their fingernails. The aversion to manual labor, in turn, helped to retard industrial development. As Muir writes, "While Virginia grew tobacco, New England grew entrepreneurs" (128).

Of course ecological factors alone were hardly the sole cause of industrialization. History is rarely so monocausal and Muir resists the urge to resort to such crude ecological determinism. Cultural forces such as Puritanism with its vital work ethic, not to mention plain old Yankee ingenuity, she is keen to point out, also played a role. The imbalance between population and land, in other words, constituted a necessary but hardly a solitary explanation for the rise of this new economic order.

Other historians have preceded Muir in linking industrial change with a growing imbalance between population and resources. Richard Wilkinson made nearly the same argument in his 1973 work Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Perspective on Economic Development. England's industrial revolution, he argued, had its roots in resource scarcity—specifically, a timber shortage that prompted the shift to coal and steampower. Poverty rather than progress, he explained, in this case became the mother of invention. Technological innovation should be viewed not "as the fruits of a society's search for progress, but as the outcome of a valiant struggle of a society with its back to the ecological wall."²

Original or not, Muir's thesis has a more fundamental weakness: it overlooks the role of power in the past. Ecology may explain the need for change, but it does not completely account for the specific form change took. In New England's case at least, industrial transformation clearly redounded to the benefit of the region's mercantile elite and not to the workers and yeomen who performed the arduous labor and bore a disproportionate share of the costs. Muir provides readers with excellent descriptions of the ecological consequences of factory life, such as the declining fish runs and other changes in plant and animal species that resulted from the quest to power mills by controlling water with dams. She says far less, however, about the social losses that resulted from the reorganization of the landscape to meet the imperatives of industry—the lives disrupted as water was made to yield before a more profit-oriented rhythm. She could have strengthened her argument with more attention, for example, to the farmers whose diet depended on fish or to the other losers in this struggle to control the natural world.

Exploring the origins of industrial life, however, fulfills just a part of the book's agenda. Muir is also intent on making some more general observations about ecological change and its role in history. Even environmental historians, who should know better, can fall prey to the inclination to romanticize a past culture's relationship with nature, especially in the rush to condemn our own society's gluttony. And yet, as Muir rightly points out, contemporary New England has infinitely more forest cover than it did in the mid nineteenth century, when clear-cutting turned some three-quarters or more of the land (in the southern part of the region at least) into fields and pastures. The monstrous loss of habitat, in turn, led to the decimation of wildlife populations. In Henry David Thoreau's day, the largest mammal likely to cross one's path in eastern Massachusetts would have been the muskrat.³ By the mid nineteenth century, deer, moose, bear, and wolf had all vanished from the landscape.

But as farms and fields were abandoned during the balance of the nineteenth and into the century that followed, reforestation proceeded apace. Forest habitat increased and so did the animals that inhabited such locales. Say what you will about the ecological ills of modern life, New England has witnessed a wildlife explosion that would have done Noah proud. Deer, beaver, bear, turkey, coyotes, even eagles and mountain lions are reclaiming their erstwhile homes. In 1999, a moose actually wandered right into the thick of things in Boston. This wildlife boom has even led to special driver education courses, offered to prevent hapless suburbanites from barreling into deer on the roads. Beaver, a species hunted to near extinction in the eighteenth century to make fashionable hats, now have at least a foothold in every one of the New England states. Though hailed as a triumph by many environmentalists, the return of the beaver has created its share of problems. They have brought trees down on power lines, and in Massachusetts alone some $100,000 is spent each year to repair the damage beaver cause to roads and highways. Ecological good fortune, if it can be called that, apparently has its price.

How should we make sense of such ecological changes as these? What is "natural" in a world hopelessly lost in economic development, in a culture terminally incapable of keeping its hands off the landscape? When we look at the land, say, in a place like Bullough's Pond, where Muir herself lives, should we revel in the prospect of untouched nature or lament what generations of Americans have done to turn the place into a contrivance? When we ponder Bullough's Pond, that is, what exactly should we reflect on?

Muir points out that no pond existed at this locale until the 1660s when someone decided to erect a dam and grist mill there, transforming an area that had once been marshland. The dam prevented smelt from journeying upstream to spawn and interfered with beaver habitat. It also stopped silt from running downstream, forcing generations of millers to dredge the pond if they intended to continue to tap it as a source of waterpower. Nonetheless, for some two hundred years, New Englanders ground grain at this site. Then, in the late nineteenth century, a real estate company entered the picture and organized a residential development around the pond, setting the stage for Muir, decades later, to move in. One side effect interfered, however; no longer used as a source of waterpower, the pond filled up with silt, reverted to its former marsh-like existence, and attracted a number of different species of herons in the process. Apparently, some of the property owners hadn't planned on a marsh view when they bought their homes. In 1992, these homeowners prevailed on the state to dredge the pond once again, heralding the decline of the herons and the return of buffleheads and cormorants, species better suited to the deeper water. From marsh to pond to marsh to pond once again, Bullough's Pond has apparently fallen victim to a split personality disorder. The word "natural" hardly does justice to the complex set of human and ecological changes that have gone on here. As Muir herself writes, "Bullough's Pond, like the entire New England landscape, is a mere imitation of nature in a world shaped by human hands" (258). Nature—an untouched entity free from humankind's fingerprints—has ended, just as the writer Bill McKibben (who has written a blurb promoting Muir's book) observed.⁴

It may well be true, as Muir argues, that the New England landscape "is as much a creature of civilization as Commonwealth Avenue or the State House itself" (2). But is that an inherently bad thing? Muir takes care to state at the opening of the book that she has no interest in writing a jeremiad, no desire to indict the profligacy of modern consumer culture. Those in search of a guilt trip need to turn elsewhere for a good read. Still, one detects at least some lamentation in Muir's decision to call our attention to the artificiality of the contemporary landscape. After all, isn't there a certain amount of contrivance present in any landscape inhabited by human beings? All cultures transform nature (admittedly some more than others) to feed, shelter, and clothe themselves. Survival depends on using and shaping the landscape to one degree or another. Why single out artificial New England if not to bemoan all the changes?

It all comes down in the end to how we size up and judge the value of these ecological changes. Unfortunately, ecologists give little guidance on this score; they have never been able to offer a well-wrought picture of what constitutes ecological well-being. Muir rightly points out that when we favor ponds over marshes, for instance, we make a host of other decisions as well. "Our actions determine not only which watercourses will be ponds and which will become marshes, but which species will live and which will die, which will give birth to deformed young and which will [sic] driven from their places on earth by species imported from across an ocean" (258). But is a world with more marshes better than one with more ponds? Should we aspire to more herons or more cormorants? More forest or grass? More carbon dioxide or oxygen?

These questions do not invite easy answers. We could start, however, by assuming that those ecological changes that undermine a culture's ability to survive off the land or that leave society unprepared to deal with future environmental challenges are maladaptive and should be resisted. Albeit a very anthropocentric view, it has the virtue of moving us beyond matters of taste in birds and bees to something that I think we all can agree is important: the very survival of our culture. We would also do well to supplement this view with some thought about who, most likely, will pay the costs of ecological change. For example, building too many cars and roads contributes to rising amounts of greenhouse gases, and it appears that poor rather than rich people shoulder the burden of global warming. Under these circumstances, it seems fair to indict a culture that organizes itself around automobiles as ecologically suspect.

Ultimately, we should consider the possibility that we are on the brink of another revolution like the Neolithic or industrial one. If our culture's troubles with global warming, ozone, and declines in water quality and biodiversity suggest a level of profound ecological dysfunction, then perhaps someone will create innovations, as our ancestors did in the nineteenth century, that will transform our relationship with the land, allowing us to avoid starvation or a decrease in our living standard. There are, however, some substantial obstacles to such a third revolution. Muir correctly draws our attention to legal doctrines laid down in the nineteenth century that have outlived their usefulness, such as mill acts that effectively subsidized the most aggressive use of water in the name of economic growth—at a heavy cost to small farmers. We need a new legal framework that takes "the integrity of life-sustaining natural systems" into account (254). Conversely, the law, at least over the past ten years, seems headed in precisely the opposite direction. Private property has become even more sacrosanct during that time, giving homeowners great latitude in developing their land, even if it means compromising the greater social and ecological good.⁵ If a third revolution is to emerge, a way will have to be found to overcome our culture's love affair with private property—a very tall order.

When we run full steam ahead into that proverbial ecological wall, who will pay the price? If it is the poor that wind up bearing the costs, those at the top will have little incentive for change. The reflections we see in Bullough's Pond may well be our own. But the decision to transform a marsh into a pond or, for that matter, any of the major revisions done to the landscape of what is now modern America are not ones that all of us have played equal roles in making. Nor will the costs of dam making writ large be borne by only those who placed the plug. These issues too demand some reflection when we stand pond-side on a lazy, summer afternoon.

TED STEINBERG, professor of history and law, Case Western Reserve University, is the author of Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (2000) and Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (1991). His new book, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2002.

NOTES

^1. Roy A. Rappaport, "The Flow of Energy in an Agricultural Society," in Energy and Power, ed. by Dennis Flanagan et al. (San Francisco, 1971), 80.

^2. Richard G. Wilkinson, Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Perspective on Economic Development (New York, 1973), 126. I have discussed some of the more general theoretical issues pertaining to industrialization and ecology in "An Ecological Perspective on the Origins of Industrialization," Environmental Review 10 (1986): 261–276.

^3. David R. Foster, Thoreau's Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 151.

^4. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York, 1989).

^5. I discuss this shift in the law and its consequences for our society's handling of natural disasters in Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, 2000), 117–123.

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