Changes in the Land

While I was reading Changes in the Land I was reminded of a book that I read while I was studying Classics at the University of Mary Washington.  The book was called Pan’s Travail by J. Donald Hughes and it was about how the Greeks and Romans had an impact on their environment.  It turns the environment in to an actor and how the environment and the people on it make decisions based on their situation because of the environment.  It was very similar to Cronon’s description of how the colonists were making changes in the land and how their decisions effected how they could use the land in the future. I do not think that Prescott and Bloch share these concerns with Cronon.  Prescott talks about the terrain in how it helped Cortez in his conquest of Mexico and how the environment gave Cortez his advantage. Bloch was writing about feudal societies and how that type of land use had been going on for many years already. 

Cronon changes this around and speaks solely about how the environment.  He speaks about how the environment played a role in the colonists lives.  He is employing social history but through the environment.  Everything people do in their environment is going to make an impact so it makes sense that it would be a factor that historians look at. Surprisingly not many of them do.  As Cronon ask in the beginning of the book, “Are human beings inside or outside their systems?… The choice is not between two landscapes, one with and one without a human influence; it is between two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem” (Cronon, 12).  I think this embodies the arguments of the book. There is no right way of living just different ways of doing so with one that could effect the landscape more than the other. In order to survive people are required to exploit their natural resource.  There are just more and less sustainable ways of doing so.