Second Nature: an Environmental History of New England

ichard W. Judd explores the mix of ecological process and human activity JUDD Rthat has shaped New England over the past 12,000 years. He traces a succession of cultures through New England’s changing postglacial environment to the 1600s, when the arrival of Europeans interrupted this coevolution of nature and culture. He shows how Frontier expansion culminated in a unique SECOND NATURE landscape of forest, farm, and village that has become the embodiment of what SECOND SECOND Judd calls “second nature”—culturally modified landscapes that supersede a more pristine “first nature.” An Environmental History of New England Judd considers how in the 1800s, despite industrialization and urbanization, the dominant cultural expression of Romanticism provided new ways to appreciate nature and sustained a long tradition of local resource management. He demonstrates how in the 1970s environmentalists moved quickly from N battling pollution and preserving wild lands to sheltering farms, villages, and AT woodlands from intrusive development. These campaigns, uniquely suited to the region’s land-use history, ecology, and culture, were a fitting capstone to the URE environmental history of New England. “Beautifully written, Second Nature manages to be both scholarly and accessible, deeply rooted in a very broad array of both primary and secondary sources.” —Dona Brown, author of Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America RICHARD W. JUDD is the Col. James C. McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine and author, most recently, of The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Origins of Modern Conservation, 1730–1850. A volume in the series Environmental History of the Northeast Cover design by Sally Nichols Cover painting by Willard LeRoy Metcalf, American (1858–1925), Gloucester Harbor, oil on canvas, 1895; canvas: 26 1/8 x 29 1/4 in; frame: 35 3/8 x 38 1/2 x 2 1/4 in. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Gift of George D. Pratt (Class of 1893). Acc. No: AC P.1932.16 MA University of Massachusetts Press SS Amherst & Boston www.umass.edu/umpress AC H U S ETT RICHARD W. JUDD S JUDD_cover_final.indd 1 3/24/14 10:26 AM “This page intentionally left blank” SECOND NATURE A volume in the series Environmental History of the Northeast Edited by Anthony N. Penna Richard W. Judd SECOND NATURE An Environmental History of New England Richard W. Judd University of Massachusetts Press Amherst and Boston Copyright © 2014 by University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-62534-066-5 (paper); 101-3 (hardcover) Designed by Sally Nichols Set in Adobe Arno Pro Printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is on file at the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. For Pat and Jamie “This page intentionally left blank” CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction: People and the Land in New England 1 Part I The New World Transformed:New England to 1800 17 1. New England’s Natives 21 2. Contact, Colonization, and War 39 3. The Ecologies of Frontier Farming 69 Part II Reconstructing Nature in the Industrial Age, 1800 to 1900 95 4. Industrializing the Margins 99 5. Farm and Factory 122 6. A Transcendental Place 143 Part III Synthetic Technologies, Organic Needs: Conservation in New England, 1850 to 2000 175 7. Science, Conservation, and the Commons 179 8. Conserving Urban Ecologies 210 9. Saving Second Nature 240 Notes 273 Index 325 “This page intentionally left blank” PREFACE his book began as an experiment. The decades since the T1980s have seen a remarkable outpouring of New England environmental history, building on the work of an earlier generation of his- torians and geographers who likewise compiled a surprisingly full record of scholarship on the environment and human habitation of the region. It remained to be seen whether this interesting but disparate body of research could be knit together into a history of New England dating from the first human arrivals there. Blending the old and the new would mean reconciling two different approaches to history: the environmental determinism that characterized most of the early work on people and land, and the modern environmental-era understanding of culture as antagonistic to and dominant over nature. I resolved to combine these approaches by describing nature and culture not as antagonistic or even as dialectical, but essentially as an ecological whole: a bioregion. This approach was influenced by my own childhood experience with the partly wild, partly domestic landscapes of northern Michigan where, along with my brother, sister, and cousins, I ranged a world shaped largely by small woods operators, hardscrabble farmers, and an annual flood of tourists hail- ing from downstate Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. It was a heavily humanized world, under construction at least since the 1870s, yet in many respects it was natural, at least from the perspective of the summers we spent on a lake ringed | ix x | preface with cottages and backed by woods, swamps, and pastures stretching off to the horizon. Later I lived for nearly two decades in the relentlessly artificial landscapes of suburban southern California before leaving for Maine with my wife, Pat. In New England, the endlessly fascinating landscapes of cities, pastures, woods, villages, and harbors once again drove home the porousness of the boundary between natural and artificial. Here the dialectic of nature and culture dissolved into an organic whole. The title of the book,Second Nature, emerged out of this life experience. The termsecond nature is undeniably nebulous. All landscapes, including the wildest ones, are cultural constructs, and all built landscapes are in some respects natural—even southern California, as the occasional brush fire, mud slide, or earthquake reminds us. But somewhere along this continuum, a bal- ance is struck between nature and artifice that assumes a certain salience: a confluence of land use, collective memory, and natural process that is widely accepted as distinctive to the region. These landscapes become second nature in the regional way of life. Like all landscapes, they are dynamic and historically specific, but their logic, integrity, and continuity suggest a certain rightness in a people’s relation to the land. This book is a general survey of environmental history, but my special interest lies is the way economic, cultural, and ecological forces converged to create New England’s second-nature landscapes. Weaving this history around the idea of second nature is also an experiment. It sets aside the two standard narratives that define environmental history as a discipline: on one hand, the idea that environment determines the culture and society of a region, and on the other, the idea that culture dominates and undermines a region’s natural ecosystems. This book takes nature as part of the region’s history, but not the history. It embeds nature in social development and argues that the blended landscape that grows out of this development is as important to the historian as is the original nature. This approach makes sense in New England. The region’s long postpioneer settlement experience pro- vides a panorama of shaped environments in which the layers of interaction between people and the land are so interwoven that culture and nature can- not be isolated and analyzed according to the classic dualistic methodologies. Nature becomes undeniably artificial over the course of New England’s long human history, and in a region where ecological process is endowed with such powerful regenerative properties, cultural landscapes become natural almost as quickly as they materialize. This interweaving encourages a venture into areas that were considered, at one time, beyond the ken of the environmental preface | xi historian. New England’s farms, cities, mills, and factories are products of nature as well as constructions of culture. The most radical aspect of this experiment is casting aside the assumption that environmental history must be a narrative of declension and destruction. It fronts the idea that the emergence of second nature is as important to this narrative as is the eclipse of first nature. In addition, it takes as a measure of historical judgment not the degree to which culture impoverishes the original ecology, but the degree to which the new humanized ecology is sustain- able and affords the diversity and richness that all societies—and all natural ecosystems—require. I do not propose this approach as a model for all environmental history, nor do I propose a simple celebration of second-nature landscapes. The declension narrative was and is still a significant tool for drawing attention to the con- sequences of abusing nature, and in a complacent society, the need for these cautionary tales is ongoing. Nor is New England second nature above criti- cism. But too often the lesson drawn from the classic declensionist approach is that the nature we live with today is irrevocably degraded. If that is true, then we will be unlikely to accept responsibility for it. Tracing the historical construction of second nature, in short, encourages a more fluid and adapt- able understanding of the nature we need to protect. There is a place for both approaches, and this book, I hope, will add one more dimension to a diverse discipline that continues to respond in creative ways to the challenges of the world around it. “This page intentionally left blank” SECOND NATURE “This page intentionally left blank” Introduction People and the Land in New England egions are not usually the stuff of history. More than states Rand less than nations, they seldom fit comfortably into the standard historical narrative of politics, war, and economic change.

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