Man's Corrupting Influence?

Cronon's Changes in the Land takes one of the most significant and simultaneously most over looked aspects of the colonization of the new land, the ecological, and throws it into the limelight.  For me, the book hearkened back to The Colombian Exchange by Alfred W. Crosby, in particular Crosby's thesis that, following the invasion of the new world, one of the greatest casualties during the exchange was biological diversity.  The same is detailed here, albeit far to the North of where Crosby's work focuses.  Cronon does an excellent job of setting the stage for his work on Walden Pond with Thoreau wistfully pining for the olden days where the wilds were just that: wild.  Changes in the Land uses property accounts, fossil records, and everyday journal entries to explore the world of New England as it was and how it was transformed into pasture and field for profit.  Settlers sought to actively European-ize the New World and succeeded; the fence, the weed, and the countless invasive beasts of burden were their calling cards.

The English system of agriculture and production can be considered one of the causes of this as it placed a focus of commodities produced by the land, not the land itself.  The physical space and what it contains was not nearly as important as what it could produce.  For Cronon, biology and economy are linked and the consequences for the Natives (both the people and the other species native to the Americas) were quite lethal in many cases.  The ecology that the Europeans brought with them had as much to do with their expansion and eventual takeover of New England as guns or swords.