Ecological Imperialism In North America

The historical record is replete with evidence that contact led to widespread changes both in the ecosystems of the America's as well as the social, cultural, and cosmological situations of both Indians and Europeans. In Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby takes this knowledge and reframes it using a lens of deeper time. In a provocative claim, Crosby asserts that human impacts on the land can be seen in a series of waves, with the first coming from the first human groups who migrated to a truly untouched ecosystem somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 ybp. That these first groups set about using the resources they found to make a living in a truly untouched world (leading to fundamental changes on the land itself) speaks to a deep truth about the human species, namely that we carry the seeds of profound change (often via culture) within us.

After these first human colonists acted to change the land a period of relative isolation was reached until European colonization, which begins in earnest with Columbus' first contact in 1492. Crosby contends that this point of contact between New and Old World cultures acts as the second wave of human settlement, crashing onto the shores of the America's. And much like the first experience witnessed with indigenous populations entering the America’s, Europeans brought massive change with them. But while the larger lesson may be that human groups have been fundamentally using and reshaping the America's in successive efforts over time, there are genuinely deep issues observable between Indian and European groups, both in their conceptions of how they relate to the natural world and how those conceptions, practices, beliefs, and behaviors take physical shape on a landscape in dynamic flux post-contact.

In these beliefs and practices (and their resultant impact on America’s ecosystems) we can see the roots of attitudes and behaviors toward the natural world that still shape and direct human living today. For this reason it is critical to trace human marks left on the land and assess our own place and ways of living in a world increasingly placed under dire ecological strain.

Central to understanding how human behavior manifests itself in physical changes on an ecosystem is an investigation of the cultural beliefs, ideas, and cosmologies that articulate the relationships that exist between people and their environment. Extrapolating this information for native groups can prove a challenge due to the fact that Indians weren't united under singular nations, but often lived in bands and tribes loosely affiliated and connected by trade and/or kinship networks. Much of what these pre-contact Indian groups believed may be lost to time, due to the fact that native tribes and cultures were completely decimated and destabilized by rampant death caused by Old World disease that journeyed to the America’s with Europeans (an event Alfred Crosby cites as a “virgin soil epidemic”).

Based on evidence, both in the land and in the reflected cosmologies of tribes post-contact, native conceptions of their relationship to the natural world appear to be much more inclusive than the cosmologies of European colonists. For many native groups social life was fundamentally tied to the human place in a natural order, with an acknowledgment of a deep, connecting power running through all living things and places.

In sharp contrast to Native beliefs that tend to envision a place for human beings in a natural system European colonists arrived with a cosmological identify formed and fashioned by specific Christian-Judeo ideology that casts humanity in the central role of dominion over nature. This relationship is spelled out in Genesis 1:28 and articulated further by Christian belief in the Great Chain of Being. According to this rigidly hierarchical model, God sits atop all of creation with humanity situated on a level directly below divinity. This should not be taken to imply that European colonists saw equality in all human groups however, as evidenced by the often poor treatment extended to Black African slaves and indigenous Native groups.

Below human beings in this cosmic order lay the natural world, which European colonists believed God had given them direct rights to inhabit and control. For the Europeans divine proof that theirs was the correct way seemed to take on tangible evidence in the form of formerly inhabited native lands lying empty upon European arrival. But as Alfred Crosby, William Deneven, and William Cronon each point out, this clearing of the land had less to do with a divine hand intervening in the acts of men, as much as it did catastrophic Old World diseases decimating Native populations who had no previous exposure or immunity to them.

Thus, while Native populations were thrown into a chaos and disorder that irrevocably changed their relationships to the natural world, European colonization was able to make a foothold in the New World. It was a world full of the kind of space and abundant natural resource not seen in the more crowded confines of Europe, leading many to label it a “paradise” and “Eden.” But as European settler culture took root its impact and spread would ultimately have profound environmental impact in changing the very face of New World ecosystems and landscapes.

Much like their wildly divergent cosmologies another critical difference in how Natives and Europeans conceived of their relationships with the natural world can be found by tracing the forms of economy employed by both groups. In Changes on the Land, William Cronon contrasts this difference with an observation of how human beings conceptualize wealth. Simply put, one way to achieve wealth is to acquire more (a mindset of the European colonist) or desire less (an attitude attributed to many Native groups). The reasons for this marked difference in viewing the world are complex, but a key element has to do with how the two groups chose to make a living on the land. For Europeans in settled colonies resource acquisition and accumulation might be more feasible than for Native groups who weren’t rooted to one location and consistently moved across a region (in step with changing seasonal conditions throughout the year).

This isn't to say that Indians didn't hold conceptions of property. The fact that a partnership in the fur trade emerged between the two groups provides evidence that not only did Indian groups value property, but that cultures are not static and instead exist in constant, dynamic process. Property and how it could be gained from a reworked natural order were central to the survival of both groups, but how property was attained and what it symbolized show clear divides between colonists and Indians.

Perhaps the best way to show the fundamental divide between each group is to focus on European conceptions of commodities. For European colonists the acquisition of resources was paramount. Extracting and converting the natural abundance of New World environments into marketable commodities was intrinsically bound to both social status and basic survival. The European conception of commodities as a signal of social status contrast sharply with many traditional Native beliefs that held that social status wasn't fundamentally linked to one's possession, but in how one was able to gather and redistribute possessions in a broad and complex system of kinship and trade networks.

For natives property and goods were not bound in the same matrix of abstract ownership that lay at the foundation of European economy. This abstract system relies on one person (or group) claiming ownership of something, and then having that recognition institutionally accepted by all other outside parties. In an abstract ownership system land becomes a central, tangible form of social status, and the task of extracting resources and converting them into marketable commodity becomes the chief source of labor. It is this form of economy and abstract ownership that European colonists conceptualize and bring with them to the New World.

This system of abstract ownership and resource development deeply overlays colonial relations with both the natural environment as well as the Indian groups they either attempt to colonize (the form Spanish Imperialism takes in Central and South America) or completely displace (the practice of English settlers in North America). Along the eastern coast of central North America, and spreading west into the hinterlands of the Appalachian Mountains, European settlers were fortunate to find a climate and environment not completely unlike the European homes they had left behind. In spite of initially misguided efforts to replicate Old World agricultural systems wholesale (a mistake that often lead to mass starvation and death) colonists were able to gain traction that eventually lead to a spread of cultural beliefs and Old World biology across the North American landscape. Colonial attitudes towards private property and accessing the natural wealth of the land for trade in burgeoning commodities market is critical in understanding how this spread manifests itself in massive change to New World ecosystems.

Fundamentally linked to how Europeans and Natives conceptualized their link to property and the land were cultural ideas informing their relationships with animal species. The history of Native relations with animals is a long and complicated one. It is a relationship that has done much to shape current conceptions of Native groups holding essential characteristics that intrinsically tie them closer to the land. This myth of the Ecological Indian is explored in depth by Shepherd Krech who provides examples of Indian relationships and cultural practices relative to bison, beaver, and deer. The hunting practices and cosmologies founded on these animal populations clearly demonstrate that Native relationships with other animal species were far from the simple engagement often imagined by the Ecological Indian myth.

To envision Indian groups living in static harmony with nature fails to account for the actual ways in which human groups utilize resources for basic survival. While Native cosmologies are often focused around animal spirits and practices aimed at showing hunted creatures a level of respect, there is also clear evidence of both overhunting and wasteful hunting practices among Indian groups both before and after contact. Indian relationships with animals are further troubled by the active role Natives take on in the emerging fur trade that emerges in America with the introduction of European’s. Indian participation in the fur trade demonstrates a reorientation of hunting practices that are not necessarily bent directly on survival, but rather on the conversion of animals into resource commodities for eventual trade on the European market. What these complications demonstrate is not a people fallen from some natural state of pristine grace, but rather societies in flux and transition who made decisions and choices that impact the New Worlds ecosystems in a variety of meaningful ways. 

Another example of this changing matrix of Native relationships with animals after contact comes with the rise of Native horse cultures that emerge on the Great Plains. In spite of the fact that horses originally evolved in the America’s, ancestral New World horse populations disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene approximately 10,000 years ago (an event that saw the disappearance of many other key megafauna on the American continent. Horse populations that migrated from the New World to Asia survived however leading to the establishment of prominent horse cultures across Europe. Colonial Spanish efforts reintroduced these large grazers back to the America's at contact and their proliferation into North America leads to heavy use and trade among Native populations on the Great Plains. These elaborate horse cultures of the Plains again show changing Native conceptions of their connection to animals, with observable results on North America’s ecosystem. Where the bison had served a crucial role in native hunting and cosmology prior to the advent of horse culture, the equine fundamentally altered Indian interaction with the immense bison populations of the mid-19th century. With improved hunting efficiency and an encroaching commodities market from the East, Plains Indians placed a new variable of stress on bison populations. Eventually these stressed animal groups were pushed to the point of complete collapse with the advent of the railroad, the discovery of buffalo hide tanning, and ever-increasing demands for buffalo product in the American and European commodity markets.

The eventual fate of the bison on America’s Great Plains provide valuable insight into the attitudes European settlers conceived of in their relationship to animals. Returning to the Great Chain of Being that informed and validated colonial beliefs in human dominion over the natural world, animals are found in the tier below human beings. However, just as with human beings, not all animals in this model are created equal. For European's the livestock crucial to their imported form of agrarianism had a higher place in the scheme of life than the wild animals often encountered in Native experience. This conception and reliance on domesticated animals is seen in the fact that a rich plethora of livestock (including cattle, pigs, sheep, and horses) accompany European colonists on their journey to the New World. At the time of contact these vast herds of domesticated livestock enter a foreign world where limited Indian attempts at domestication have resulted in the dog, turkey.

For European colonists livestock served as the most direct and obvious ties to the non-human world. That their conception of these animals were as another form of critical commodity reaffirms the central tenants informing European conceptions of their relationship with the natural world. Ultimately it is in these European animal imports we see the most profound and dynamic ways in which European colonial ideas and beliefs translate into the reality of massive physical changes on the ecosystems of the New World.

Among the single greatest consequences of European colonization for America's environments was the massive reshaping of ecosystems that resulted from the introduction of a completely new set of biota (termed the “Portmanteau biota of the Old World” by Alfred Crosby). The biological components that make up this biota include Old World plants, animals, and disease. Each benefitted from co-evolving in close contact with each other (and human beings) in the more densely packed environments of Europe. Upon their arrival in the New World each found an environment in which to thrive. The outcome of this biological success results in massive changes on the land.

Not long after contact invasive foreign plant species from the Old World quickly took root and began fundamentally reshaping America’s ecosystems. The reasons for their success were many but include the fact that many were introduced to a North American climate not completely unlike the European one in which they had evolved. The plants that tended to thrive in the New World were also hearty survivor species that had evolved in Europe to thrive in areas of biological disruption (such as the eroded lands and areas disturbed by European agricultural and pastoral efforts). Working in tandem with the animal species that they had co-evolved with, invasive Old World plant species were able to travel and spread far across the landscape, fundamentally reshaping ecosystems, often in advance of the European settler populations that would eventually settle after them. In this way, plants served as another method of reinforcing European conceptions of Manifest Destiny. Literally, from the ground up it appeared to settlers as if the land itself was changing its essential characteristics to better serve them, ultimately taking physical shape as a neo-Europe.

Similarly, the animal species that arrived with European colonists had their own massive and distinct impact on changing the fundamental characteristics of America's ecosystems. Prior to contact large-scale domestication of animal species was not an agricultural practice utilized by Native groups. This was not a reality experienced by European colonists who were fundamentally tied to their vast herds of domesticated animals, and critically dependent on them for survival. Hogs served as a crucial source of protein for settler groups, particularly in the early years before European agricultural efforts were fully institutionalized. Cattle were crucial not only as a source of meat, and milk, but also as an eventual source of hide (not completely unlike the one-stop shopping source bison provided to Native groups). These teeming populations of livestock had immediate effects on the land by the mere fact that they relied on considerable amount of land and resource to grow. Furthermore, working in tandem with the Old World plant species, animals served as an incredibly efficient means of dispersing Old World plant seeds across the American landscape. As European colonization took root and began to spread west the impact of new animals on the land took visible shape in the creation of trade routes and roads needed to bring the animals to market (routes that William Deneven claims often overlay former roads created and maintained by Indians). Domesticated animal populations serve as the single largest variable in changing the ecosystems of America, but it was a variable over which European settlers had limited control.

While the proliferation of domesticated livestock not only resulted in the rise of feral populations (precursors to the razorbacks of the south as well as the wild mustang herds of the Plains and West), European settlement also had the unintended consequence of introducing undesired invasive animal species (such as Old World rat) into the New World. In their own ways these uninvited species acted to fundamentally alter ecosystems in their own unique ways (often by facilitating the spread of disease).

The most visibly change on Native human beings and the roles they played in their ecosystem can be traced by the devastating impact of Old World disease on New World populations. While dates fixing the first Native groups in the America's are difficult to ascertain it is clear that they were on the continent by 10,000 years ago. From that date until the point of contact these indigenous groups existed in complete isolation from the Old World (and the plethora of diseases that evolved alongside human beings and livestock living within close contact). This isolation meant that when these Old World diseases did eventually arrive on the shores of the New World, Native groups had no natural immunities to protect them. Disease spread rampantly and far among Native Groups killing millions within generations.

A pertinent question is just how large Native populations were at the time of contact, and how truly the impact disease had on Native demographics. Estimates of Native populations pre-contact range from as low as 8.4 million to as high as 166 million, but regardless of the specific numbers it is clear that Old World disease played a crucial role in decimating and destabilizing Native societies. Some estimates project losses of up to 90% among native groups after only a century of contact. The Old World diseases that wreaked havoc on Native groups included bubonic plague, yellow fever, influenza, measles, typhus, and smallpox (which acted as the most virulent and devastating Old World disease on Native populations). With these virgin soil epidemics Native life was thrown into chaos and in the process of cultural destabilization many deserted their ancestral homelands. This, in turn, meant that European colonists often arrived to settle areas that were completely abandoned providing colonial settlers once again with further “evidence” of the righteousness of their cause. Not only did these events further entrench the myth of Manifest Destiny, but in them the roots of assumed “progress” and exceptionalism that have formed a critical component of the American identity can be traced.

But while the agents of biological imperialism played a crucial role in reshaping American ecosystems and landscape, the individual economic and cultural actions of human groups (both Native and settler) must be examined, in order to gain a more complete picture of what contact meant in terms of deep changes for the ecosystems of the America's.  Central to analyzing the effects of European and Native practices on New World ecosystems is an analysis of how each group practiced their economies (which, as shown earlier, were wildly divergent in their conception of property, resources, and the role of human beings within a natural world context).

As William Cronon points out in Changes in the Land, there were legitimate differences in how individual Native groups made their living in the New England area at the time of contact. Northern tribes tended to rely on a highly migratory, hunting-gathering subsistence pattern that drew heavily on the opportunities to gather natural resources from the Atlantic Ocean. This contrasts with the practices of Southern tribes who relied on mixed economies based around hunting, gathering and a form of agriculture wildly different from that eventually employed by colonial settlers. For these Southern tribes mixed economies effectively served as a crucial security net. In the event one crop or animal species failed, there was something else that the group could rely on for survival. Returning to Native conceptions of property rights, Native usufruct land practices demonstrate how divergent those conceptions were from the abstract ownership relied upon by colonists. For Native groups practicing agriculture there was an assumed property right for work being done on the land. The area cultivated wasn't held as property itself, but rather the right to access and make use of it was. In turn, Native agricultural practices based on usufruct property rights had critical impact on the land.  Property rights over use (and not over the land itself) meant a mobile form of agriculture that could move readily and avoid many of the problems with eventual soil infertility and erosion that faced colonial agricultural practice.

Native groups of the Southeast engaged in similar patterns of land use based on usufruct property rights, while also employing the technique of swidden (or “slash and burn”) agriculture. In the swidden agricultural system areas of land were cleared of trees (often through girding or burning). This had the effect of creating nutrient rich ash, and in this fertile soil mounds of corn, squash, and bean were planted (though not in the familiar patterns later employed by colonial settlers). Like other Native agriculturalists, those practicing swidden techniques would use the land until soil depletion necessitated a period of letting an area lie fallow. And while Native agricultural practices had clear impact on American ecosystems, it was highly divergent from the effects that would follow European settler forms of agrarianism. 

Carried with them from an Old World setting in which space was at an ever-increasing premium, the agricultural practices employed by European settlers had their own dramatic and unique impacts on the environment. As mentioned earlier, the form of abstract property ownership underpinning European economic practices meant that land itself was held as commodity. In this conceptualization extracting the resources on a bounded and owned piece of land in perpetuity was crucial. And, as William Cronon explains in Changes on the Land, the techniques and practices utilized to develop resource into marketable commodity had profound impact on the soil fertility of the land itself.

In preparing land for planting, European settlers would clear trees from areas designated for farming. This was done both to promote the ordered monocultures translated on the land as well as cultivate space for the use of livestock draft animals. Over time the practices of changing individual sections of land for this form of agriculture had profound effects on both the soil and the ways water moved within an ecosystem. With less shade from winter snowpack tended to melt faster, which in turn leading to heavy erosion and erratic temperatures, which fundamentally reordered New World ecosystems. The result, according to Cronon, was that instead of the patchwork pattern of ecosystems in various stages of use, Europeans colonial efforts effectively impose the first tracings of a gridded and reorganized landscape. It is this conceptualization and production of space (with little to no acknowledgment of ecosystems or how the imposition of a human construct acts to sever them) that will eventually move across the North American landscape in the distinctive grid pattern that still orders and bounds the lives and environment of North America. 

Agricultural practices (both Native and settler) lay at the heart of a number of other crucial ecosystem changes throughout the America’s.  In the Ecological Indian, Shepherd Krech cites the Hohokam of the Sonoran Desert as a clear example of Indian groups utilizing the resources in their environment to achieve the means of economy and survival. Living in the area around modern-day Phoenix, the Hohokam practiced a form of agriculture that relied on rerouting massive amounts of water within their dry desert ecosystem. In order to achieve this they constructed the largest system of canals found in the New World prior to contact. Eventually the Hohokam culture failed for a variety of reasons, (many linked to rapid changes within their ecosystem possibly brought on by their agricultural practices), but the evidence of their impact on the land can still be witnessed in the forms of the ancestral canal systems they left behind. Similarly, the movement of water for agriculture in the arid desert Southwest has also been practiced with great success by the Hopi for over 1,000 years. Relying on a specifically cultivated form of drought-resistant corn, and utilizing sophisticated methods reliant on local topography to channel and reroute water, the Hopi have long made a living in the desert practicing techniques that have had impacts on local ecology. 

But for all of the impacts Native agriculture had on American ecosystems, the single most pervasive Native practice in altering and reshaping their environments comes in the form of their use of fire to create and maintain particularly desirable meadow and edge habitats. William Deneven argues that this activity was so pervasive (and ecologically invasive) that a valid argument can be made that the America of 1750 was more ecologically “natural” (in the sense of resembling something pre-human contact) than the continent at the time of European contact in 1492.  The creation of these edge habitats served many uses for tribes, but central was the creation of ecosystems that promoted larger deer herd populations for Native hunting.

With the fundamental altering in Native cultures and practices that come after contact this practice of native fire use ended with profound physical changes on local ecosystems. The meadows and edge habitats controlled by Native fire practice slowly began to disappear, overgrown by numerous trees and plants (many of them invasive species of European import). Native use of fire to alter ecosystems is both controversial and critical to deepening the understanding the human beings act in ways that have direct impact on fundamentally changing physical environments. The fact that Indians were utilizing fire management practices in such specific ways not only undermines the central tenants of the Ecological Indian, but also provides clear evidence that human beings are coevolved to act alongside other living entities within any given ecosystem. In this way we are not set apart or distinct from nature, but critical agents whose actions have profound consequence.

Attaining a nuanced perspective that human groups actively reshape environment to meet their own visions of good living is a fundamental insight offered by environmental history. As Shepherd Krech posits in his analysis of the Ecological Indian myth, subscribing to something like the myth of the Ecological Indian (which posits a human group outside the realm of active agency on the landscape) is ultimately dehumanizing. Subscribing to the myth severs Indians from the realities of human cultural creation, acts and behaviors that fundamentally use nature and change ecosystems in measurable, meaningful ways.

Environmental history offers the insight that not only were Native and Colonial groups exceedingly complex in their attitudes and actions that play out on the environment, but that those choices and decisions still impact and shape the world we live in today. Confronting the historical record of environmental degradation in North America and challenging pervasive myths like that of the Ecological Indian is crucially important in a transnational and globalized context. The realities of deepening environmental damage and degradation across the planet demand nuanced and articulated views of the costs of material culture and our lingering cultural assumptions and attitudes about the human relationship with the natural world.

This issue of better utilizing the lessons of history to gain a deeper perspective of how our actions play out on our environment is a driving point of William Cronon’s controversial essay, “the Trouble with Wilderness.” In his essay, Cronon attempts to show that our modern attitudes and ideas about wilderness are ultimately self-defeating. Similar to Krech’s thesis, the trouble with how we envision wilderness, for Cronon, is that it provides no practical place for human beings in its equation. Born out of Romantic-era thought on the assumed serene and restorative power of landscape it places all human beings who are not in the role of consuming wilderness at a loss. As with the myth of the Ecological Indian an assumption that wilderness is any place human beings are not is demeaning, dehumanizing, and ultimately at odds with reality. And on an even deeper level such a limited conception of the world risks placing the very areas we live and depend on at enormous risk. If the only place “nature” exists is the “out there” of wilderness than what concern need be paid to the ecology of the urban? This issue inherently entangles itself deeply with social justice concerns over who must subsidize the numerous hidden costs of environmental destruction (thus making the concept of wilderness uniquely paradoxical and antithetical to the characteristics of freedom and democracy it is assumed to promote).

Ultimately the challenge and opportunity offered by environmental history is an acknowledgement that we do leave marks on the land. So, as Cronon suggests in “the Trouble with Wilderness,” a central question for our species must ask what kind of marks we should leave. For Cronon, solutions demand thinking beyond limiting, reductionist dichotomies and simultaneously embracing the non-human Other in all its forms and all its places. Such solutions call for critical self-awareness of our actions as well as the task of living rightly in a world well beyond our full control or understanding. The lessons offered by environmental history clearly convey how human attitudes and activities in the America (both Indian and Colonial) lead to dynamic changes on the ecosystems of the New World.

The examples of Native and settler relationships with the physical reality of America’s ecosystems lay a course for understanding the rise of institutions and ideologies that shape and govern our world today. These lessons show that profound changes on the land are fundamentally linked to human activity at the same moment that human activity is dynamic, complex, and informed by a wide variety of beliefs, attitudes, and ideas. Throughout Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby constructs a narrative that attempts to convey the myriad of factors at work in bringing about contact between the New and Old Worlds (and the eventual mass environmental change that accompanied it). Contact relied on a the separation of human populations for thousands of years, the emergence of a particular culture capable of utilizing technology to bring about contact, and a diverse set of attitudes, beliefs, and biological misfortune (or opportunity, depending on perspective) to create a space in which contact could take place. And just as that historical reality was open to a plethora of fluid variables and potential changes, so is the modern reality we occupy. Nothing is inevitable or free from the exceedingly complex and unpredictable nature of life itself.