fences

yer girl has finished reading Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, which is a book that i once asked a Discord eboy to buy for me and it is embarrassing how long it took for me to actually get to it, but i got through it pretty quickly when I did. It's a good thing this blog lets me yap about academic topics in a non-academic way lmao, like that time I shared my thoughts on Thomas More's Utopia: https://freyathefrypan.blogspot.com/2024/04/yer-girl-has-thoughts-on-utopia-by.html 

If I had to make everything I say sound like a conference presentation or essay I would go bonkers!!!!!

Anyway, Changes definitely makes me want to read more works of environmental history. Imagine more historical monographs that treated a land as an active participant in history rather than just the setting for it. Perhaps economic historians would argue that market forces determine the course of history or something, but the environment actually plays an even greater role and influences human culture. Cronon captures how nature and culture influence each other in this quote from pg 13 of Changes "Environment may initially shape the range of choices available to a people at a given moment, but then culture reshapes environment in responding to those choices. The reshaped environment presents a new set of possibilities for cultural production, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination." He also captures the essence of his methodology on pg 15 "Our project must be to locate a nature which is within rather than without history, for only by doing so can we find human communities which are inside rather than outside nature." 

Cronon talks about many fascinating things in this book that made me see society and nature differently. For example, about controlled burns of trees by Native tribes. These deliberate fires created conditions favourable to strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and other gatherable foods. And of course, it increased the growth of grass and therefore attracted deer in large numbers which could be hunted. Because the grassy areas were enlarged, it raised the herbivorous food supply and resulted in an increase of the deer and elk population. This in turn increased the population of lynxes and wolves.

This is mind-blowing, because it means Native hunters were not just depending on the bounty of nature, they had actually created the conditions for a food source that they were able to harvest. 

Europeans just thought the abundance of species in North America meant that they found an earthly paradise, virgin land and an untouched wilderness.

But this post is about fences.

I'm going to talk about the fence as a symbol, because Cronon touched on it briefly. 

You see, the English agricultural system mixed the raising of crops with the keeping of animals. This meant that they needed to separate the animals from the crops of the animals would eat the crops. They needed fences!!! So the fence became the most visible symbol of a land that Europeans thought had been "improved" by their settlement. The Puritan John Winthrop criticized the Natives because they did not enclose any land. 

I wanted to draw your attention to a passage from Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative. This is a pretty commonly read text especially in classes about early American literature. But in case you're not familiar with it, Mary Rowlandson was a Puritan woman who was held captive by the Wampanoag people during King Philip's War. This is an example of Rowlandson clinging to signs of English modification of the land for comfort. It's from the section of the narrative called "the seventh remove."

“As we went along, I saw a place where English cattle had been. That was comfort to me, such as it was. Quickly after that we came to an English path which so took with me that I thought I could have freely laid down and died” 

Traces of cattle and an English path were a great comfort to her, and something she clung to during her captivity. Imagine how excited she would have been by a fence.

By the way, this is shameless self promo, but you're also reading MY blog so I guess it doesn't matter. The essay that I wrote on Mary Rowlandson is one of my favourite pieces of academic writing I've ever done and I'm quite proud of it (it also got me into two PhD programs, waitlisted for one, and interviewed by three). If you wanna read it, here's the google drive link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iLfOi2TlilTt_0VlvW1be-Q6k0_2DnJG/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=110475621005188424434&rtpof=true&sd=true 

I would like y'all to now ponder the modern meaning of fences. What about white picket fences in North American suburbs? What do they symbolize? 

And why for the love of God do we destroy the native vegetation of North America to make flat patches of grass, like lawns and golf courses, and then declare this an "improvement" and a comfort???

It's because our society has unfortunately inherited too much from the New England Puritans, including how we see nature. In the Puritan worldview, man is meant to serve God but nature is meant to serve man. 

This is why I am a suburb abolitionist.