Changes In The Land William Cronon Summary

The Impact of Ecology on History In the study of human history there are many details required to obtain a complete picture of how a group of people lived and why they lived that way. One of the lesser known yet essential aspects of life is the environment in which the people lived and how they interacted with said environment. In William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, Cronon highlights how the study of ecology is vital to understanding human history and demonstrates that by showing a clear picture of the pre-colonial and postcolonial history of New England. When examining how a group lived, the lack of an ecological record warps the way the group is perceived. One example of this is the Indian people who inhabited New England before it was colonized by Europeans. Cronon talks about how the “record of pre colonial New England ecosystems was inevitably
An example of this is the modern house which is typically a large climate controlled living space stocked with modern amenities; this facet of living originated from the need to survive harsh heat and cold. Many other tools developed in the colonial day were plows and other agricultural tools. These allowed for the mass harvest of crops which were able to sustain larger and larger populations on fertile land. Modern medicine also has roots in colonial times where people were dying in droves due to new disease that had no treatment and so over the course of 400 years humans developed medicines to fight these diseases that utterly decimated the populations of places like colonial Jamestown. If not for the need to adapt to environment human progress would have plateaued and we would have simply existed along with every other creature in the food