In the preface to changes in the land, William cronon notes that his aims to write an ecological history of colonial New England that is not a history of New England Indians or of colonial relations, or the transformation of English colonist from puritans to Yankees. Instead Cronon emphasizes the natural and human influences on what is a dynamic natural system.
He begins by outlining two common pitfalls of studying ecology and Native Americans respectively. he points out that it is not only tempering to believe that when Europeans arrived in the New World they confronted Virgin Island, the forest Primeval, a wilderness which had existed for eons uninfluenced by human hand, but also that nothing could be further from the truth. Moreover, just because Native American groups interacted with the environment differently than Europeans colonists does not imply that they were and better or worse.
Choose either Native American or European colonists as the subject of your paper, and analyze how this group manipulated the environment according to their own set of values and the technological resources they had at their disposal.
Please DO NOT judge your subjects as either good or bad for the environment. Instead focus on how the group you selected remade New England for their purposes. The choice,,, in other words, to cite Cronon, is not between two landscapes, one with and one without human influence,, it is between two human ways of living two ways of belonging to an ecosystem.
Your analysis should demonstrate your familiarity with the breathe of the book ( in other words, information should not all come from on chapter). Be specific as you can including descriptions and concrete examples to illustrate your arguments..
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