Environment in Question

In lieu of answering my own prompt, I wanted to highlight my changing thoughts of Cronon’s Changes in the Land from the perspective of an undergraduate to a graduate student.

My sophomore year as an undergraduate, I took a class which encompassed the historiography of New York State history and colonial culture. We read Cronon’s work as a pseudo-bible for environmental history, a case example for understanding the relationship on the New York frontier as settlers met Natives west of the Adirondacks and into the Finger Lake region. Taking Cronon’s word with out any real thought or conscious discourse, I saw environmental history (in a context to New York State of course) as an unavoidable ‘school’ of historical thought.

Re-reading this work as a first year graduate student, and for an entirely different purpose, I took away a nuanced idea of environmental history. On purely speculative (and perhaps completely and utterly false) notion, I drew up the idea that “environmental history” when termed by Cronon is an anachronism. Critically analyzing the argument and its self admitted short comings, could Cronon call his thesis based on inevitably ambiguous primary sources? When the mindset of the earliest Europeans in North America did not fathom ‘environment’ as we know it, and saw it purely as an economic tool, could their records be trusted by historians today? Cronon takes his contemporary term of ‘environment’ coupled by his knowledge of environmental science and subjects it to historical analysis. With such firm accusations and arguments articulated by Cronon (he did have a very consumable writing style), how could an analytical reader give credit to an author who presupposes his arguments with: “The types of evidence which can be used to evaluate ecological change before 1800 are not uniformly reliable, and some are a sort not used by historians.”

Sentences such as that, in addition to this gem- "A second fund of data resides in various colonial towns, court, and legislative records, although here the evidence of ecological change can sometimes be tantalizingly elliptical.”- make me as a historian question Cronon’s primary sources and their credibility to accuracy.

This long winded and potentially changeable mindset is the product of unease while reading Cronon and his many objections to what one should regard as environmental history. Although a great read, did Cronon bite off more than he could chew in an academic sense?