1. THE NEW ENGLAND FOREST
The Seventeenth Century
1600 – 1730

2. Pilgrims Sail on Mayflower

• Pilgrim: wanderer
• Separatists--left to form new church
• Congregationalists--power in the congregation
• Founded Plymouth Colony, 1620
• Religious and economic reasons

3. Pilgrim’s First Landing Place

• Near Provincetown on Cape Cod
• Took Indian seed corn
• Land was "open and without under-wood"

4. Plymouth Rock

• William Bradford
• "a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men"
• "wild and savage"
• Found cornfields abandoned due to Indian plague deaths

5. Bradford’s Narrative:

Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647

• Structure of hero narrative
  • Hero’s absence: Plymouth is absent of hero
  • Transference: Bradford is transported from Old to New England by ship; between Antichrist and new Canaan
  • Combat between hero and villain: Bradford versus the wilderness (ocean, forest, Indians)
  • Receipt of gift: Squanto and the fish
  • Victory: survival, harvest, defeat of wild

6. Plymouth Colony

• Wooden stockade separates nature from culture; civilized from wild; unknown from home

7. Plymouth Colony Houses

• Wood and thatch
• Fenced (symbolic)
• Fixed location
• Human centered
• Settled agriculture
• Land tenure
• Rectangular grid pattern

8. Plymouth Colony Harvest

• Indian crops used by colonists
• Maize (corn), squash, beans, pumpkins
• Polycultures: have ecological and nutritional advantages

9. Harvesting Oats

• European crops added to ecosystem: wheat, rye, oats, barley
• Three field rotations: corn; rye, oats, or barley; fallow
• Livestock: cattle, horses, pigs, goats, oxen: Crosby thesis

10. Puritan Migration, 1629

• John Winthrop. "Conclusions for the Plantation in New England," 1629
• "The whole earth is the lord’s garden; increase and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it." Genesis 1: 28
• Infinite variety of fish, fowl, deer, nuts, furs, salt, pitch, tar, potash, soap, masts, iron, hemp; food for cattle, goats, pigs

11. Forest Types

• Red spruce-balsam fir-northern hardwoods (birch, aspen, red maple)
• White pine-hemlock-hardwoods (white, red, black oak, chestnut, hickory)
• Oak-pitch pine; basswood, ash, maple, birch

12. Forest Ecology

• "Virgin" forest (1756) to drained land (1956)
• Drier air
• Fewer trees
• Stronger winds
• More runoff

13. Wilderness

• Pre-eighteenth century meanings
• Wildern, wildeor, wyldern: self-willed, unruly, out of control, savage, beastlike
• Forested lands of northern Europe
• Deserts: desolate, barren, wasteland
• Bewilderment, terror, fear, trembling
• Antithesis of paradise, garden, civilization

14. Puritan Wilderness

• Thomas Hooker, 1636: "Come into and go through a vast and roaring wilderness."
• Roger Williams, 1643: "a wild and howling" land.
• Peter Bulkeley, 1646: "We are brought out of a fat land into a wilderness."
• Symbolic functions: ecological takeover; subjugation; spiritual wilderness

15. Romantic Wilderness

• Edmund Burke, Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757
• Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 1761
• Sublime: waterfalls, mountains, canyons, clouds, oceans, sunsets, rainbows
• God’s presence: awe, terror, exultation
• Nature as cathedral, temple, Bible

16. American Wilderness

• Appreciation begins as forests disappear.
• In east in mid-19th century; in west as frontier closes in late 19th century
• Idea of "uninhabited" wilderness appears as Indians are removed to reservations, 1850s-1880s
• Wilderness Act, 1964: Earth and its life are untrammeled; man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

17. Wilderness as Construct

• William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," (1995)
• "Wilderness is no more natural than nature is."
• "Wilderness is a profoundly human creation."
• Not a pristine sanctuary, but a product of civilization.
• "Wilderness is part of the problem."

18. Reactions to Cronon

• Wild Earth (Winter 1996): "Opposing Wilderness Deconstruction."
• Gary Snyder: "Nature is no social construction"
• Bill Willers: "The Trouble with Cronon"
• George Sessions:"Reinventing Nature?"

19. Debate

• Wilderness is a human construction
• Wilderness is an evolved reality