Changes in the Land Literary Elements

Environmental History/Ecological History

New England in the precolonial period to just after the founding of America, 1620-1800

Narrated from a third-person perspective

Journalistic in tone with a focus on facts and history. The mood is even-tempered with a delicate balance that gives serious consideration to the philosophical and ideological differences between the Native American and European approaches to nature and ecology.

Protagonist: Respecting nature as nature. Antagonist: Disrespecting nature by viewing it as a commodity.

The central conflict is that between how native tribes had treated the wilderness of what would become New England for centuries and the completely contradictory and conflicting perspective brought to the New World from Europe by the early settlers.

The climax occurs when native tribes adopt European economic philosophy of viewing the value of beavers outside their natural use and instead as commodities which can be killed not for person use, but to trade with settlers in exchange for wampum.

On the very first page of the first chapter the author paints a portrait of Henry David Thoreau writing in his journal and making observations about the difference in wild edible plants between what he observes and what was written about in histories of New England: “Equally abundant were gooseberries, raspberries, and especially currants, which, Thoreau mused, “so many old writers speak of, but so few moderns find wild.” This reduction in abundance foreshadows the major theme explored in the book wastefulness on the part of the European settlers.

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“Captain Christopher Levett felt it necessary to inform readers of his 1628 account of New England that he would not `as some have done to my knowledge, speak more than is true.’ English readers must not be taken in by descriptions which made New England out to be a veritable paradise of milk and honey” is an allusion to the proverbial description of the perfection of heaven where all things are in abundance.

The legendary wastefulness of Americans when it comes to any source of fuel is summed up in concise bit of imagery: “In 1800, [New England] burned perhaps eighteen times more wood for fuel than it cut for lumber. When the effects of such burning are summed up for the whole colonial period, it is probable that New England consumed more than 260 million cords of firewood between 1630 and 1800.”

The settlers eagerness for beaver furs led to monumental increase in the level of hunting and trapping that inevitably hastened the collapse of the beaver population and the paradoxical eradication of the very commodity upon which they had placed such a premium value.

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“Whether or not a colony sought to purchase land from the Indians — something which Plymouth, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, in the absence of royal charters, felt compelled as a matter of expediency or ethics to do — all New England colonies ultimately derived their political rights of sovereignty from the Crown” overflows with example of metonyms in which a name is used to represent a larger concept related to it: Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and the Crown being the foremost examples.

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