Another look from Sanderson's Farm: A perspective on New England environmental history and conservation

Environmental History

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 9-34

  Donahue, Brian ^a,b  

^a BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; LAND MANAGEMENT; LAND USE PLANNING; NATURE CONSERVATION;

HARVARD FOREST; MASSACHUSETTS; NEW ENGLAND; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 33947312501     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/12.1.9     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. Percy W. Bidwell, "The Agricultural Revolution in New England," American Historical Review 26 (1921): 683-702;
2. Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (New York: Peter Smith, 1941);
3. Harold Fisher Wilson, The Hill Country of Northern New England: Its Social and Economic History, 1790-1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936);
4. John Donald Black, The Rural Economy of New England: A Regional Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).
5. Hugh M. Raup, "The View From John Sanderson's Farm: A Perspective for the Use of Land," Forest History to (1966): 3.
6. Bidwell, "Agricultural Revolution;"
7. Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990);
8. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
9. Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
10. Raup, "Sanderson," 6.
11. Wilson, Hill Country;
12. Black, Rural Economy, 159-60.
13. Raup, "Sanderson," 7, 9, 11.
14. Ibid., 10. Raup and Leopold did correspond, but their letters in the Harvard Forest archive contain little of substantive interest.
15. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation from Round River (1949; reprint, San Francisco: Sierra Club/Ballantine, 1970), 239-40, 258-61.
16. Hugh M. Raup, "Some Problems in Ecological Theory and their Relation to Conservation," Journal of Ecology 52 (Supplement) (1964): 19-28. Cowles stressed dynamic succession and never claimed much for the stability of the climax, as Clements later did. Raup's real argument was with Clements.
17. Raup, "Some Problems," 26-27.
18. In his economic argument Raup leaned heavily upon his colleague Ernest M. Gould, Jr., "Fifty Years of Management at the Harvard Forest," Harvard Forest Bulletin 29, 1960.
19. See, for example, David R. Foster, "Insights from Historical Geography to Ecology and Conservation: Lessons from the New England Landscape," special issue of the Journal of Biogeography 29 (2002);
20. David R. Foster and John D. Aber, eds., Forests in Time: The Environmental Consequences of 1,000 Years of Change in New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
21. David Foster, et al., Wildlands and Woodlands: A Vision for the Forests of Massachusetts (Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest, 2005). I am among the authors of this report.
22. See Hugh M. Raup and Reynold E. Carlson, "The History of Land Use in the Harvard Forest," Harvard Forest Bulletin 20 (1941), 25. Data on Massachusetts and Petersham land use and agricultural production in my paper are drawn from U.S. Census Population and Agricultural returns, Massachusetts state census returns, and Massachusetts tax valuation town aggregates.
23. Joseph S. Wood, The New England Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997);
24. David Jaffee, People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999);
25. Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004);
26. Gloria L. Main, Peoples of a Spacious Land: Families and Cultures in Colonial New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001);
27. Rothenberg, Market-Places to a Market Economy;
28. J. Ritchie Garrison, Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1770-1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003).
29. Garrison, Landscape and Material Life
30. Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism.
31. See, for example, numerous discussions in the minutes of Concord Farmers Club, Concord Free Public Library, 1865, 1866, 1875, 1883; also numerous discussions in state agricultural reports collected in the volumes Agriculture or Massachusetts 1849, 1853, 1859, 1864, 1865. See, also, David R. Foster, Thoreau's Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Townwide tax and census data for Petersham strongly suggest that from the early nineteenth century depleted pastures were being abandoned even as forest was being cleared to create new pastures, but more research on particular farms is needed to pin down the dynamics of these practices.
32. See Brian Donahue, "Skinning the Land: Economic Growth and the Ecology of Farming in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts," paper presented to the American Social History Society, Chicago, 1988;
33. Michael M. Bell, "Did New England go Downhill?" Geographical Review 79 (1989): 450-66;
34. Paul Glen Munyon, A Reassessment of New England Agriculture in the Last Thirty Years of the Nineteenth Century: New Hampshire, A Case Study (New York: Arno Press, 1978);
35. David J. Soll, "Milking the Landscape: Reforestation in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, 1850-1900," paper presented to the Boston Environmental History conference, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2006.
36. Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
37. Soll, "Milking the Landscape."
38. David R. Foster and John F. O'Keefe, New England Forests Through Time: Insights from the Harvard Forest Dioramas (Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest, 2000). All the dioramas are shown here, along with an updated interpretation of their historical and conservation meanings.
39. Gould, "Fifty Years of Management."
40. Michael Williams, Americans and their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
41. Thomas Dionysius Clark, The Greening of the South: The Recovery of the Land and Forest (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984).
42. Raup, "Some Problems," 24.
43. Foster and Aber, Forests in Time, 54, 369.
44. Ibid., 235-58.
45. See, for example, Thomas M. Bonnicksen, "Nature's Clearcuts: Lessons from the Past," in Closer Look (Washington, D.C.: American Forest and Paper Association, 1994), 22-28.
46. Many ecologists would argue that such an approach is not strictly necessary to protect water quality, but the Quabbin forest management program has nevertheless been successful on its own terms, and is widely regarded as a model of sustainable forestry of a fairly intensive kind. See Paul K. Barten, et al., "Managing a Watershed Protection Forest," Journal of Forestry 96 (1998): 8-15.
47. Foster, et al., Wildlands and Woodlands. The report and its detailed figures can be downloaded at http://www.wildlandsandwoodlands.org/.
48. This scale is appropriate and achievable in a small, fragmented region such as southern New England. The same proportions applied to heavily forested regions such as northern New England could yield reserves an order of magnitude larger.
49. David R. Foster, et al., "Oak, Chestnut and Fire: Climatic and Cultural Controls of Long-term Forest Dynamics in New England, USA," Journal of Biogeography 29 (2002): 1359-79.
50. David Lindenmayer and Jerry F. Franklin, Conserving Forest Biodiversity: A Comprehensive Multiscaled Approach (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002).
51. Mary M. Berlik, et al., "The Illusion of Preservation: A Global Environmental Argument for the Local Production of Natural Resources," Harvard Forest Paper 26 (2002).
52. Raup, "Some Problems," 26-27.