Changes in the Land,Chapter 5

ISS 310: People and Environment

Spring 2002

Prof. Alan Rudy

1/24/02

1. What is the common relation between population and environmental damage?

2. What do you have usufruct rights to and what do you have property rights to?

Commodities of the Hunt: Trade Diseases Property Ecological Change Hunting Commodification

Exchange Use/Status -- Wampumeag Accumulation/Abstraction -- Price

Sedentarism

Early Trade and Diseases: Indians eager by 1525 -- 33 years after ?? Diseases

Historical-Geographic isolation Low population densities No domesticated animals Neither genetic, nor acquired resistance

80-90% Mortality Rates Endemic and Acute Hunter-gatherer North less than Ag South

Smallpox, TB, Influenza, Pneumonia, Measles, Typhus, Dysentery, Syphilis

Consequences of Diseases:

Powerfully disrupts kinship patterns, inter- and intra-group politics, healing/religion.

Facilitates colonial property take-over if Indians had “improved” and thereby

“owned” ag lands, but died, then those lands could be taken

indication of “God’s will” behind Colonist take-over

Second nature reverts to first nature? SMALL GROUPS -- explain (90-91)

Hunting: Colonists were too ineffective a

hunters to obtain furs by themselves, needed Indian men.

But Indian men were lazy and had inferior technology!

How could Indians be more efficient and skillful?

SEE Cronon’s ARGUMENT??? Cronon is BUILDING an argument with the

structure of the book, ECOLOGY

Northern and Southern NE SOCIAL ECOLOGIES

Indians (N and S) and Colonists (English) POLITICAL ECOLOGY

Sovereignty and Property ECONOMIC ECOLOGY

Population, Hunting, Trade Each point adds a layer and refers back Why THAT order? N-S-P-E?

Commodification: For Indians, from exchange of equivalents

(use) to accumulation of abstractions (price). 1) Use Euro-goods for Indian purposes 2) Trade for Indian purposes

Indian-Colonist trade grew not due to Indian demand but because of Colonists’ need to pay debts (not supply-demand).

Trade + Disease worked against old political and status hierarchies. Declining population worked against social

sanctions against accumulation.

Summary (of sorts): Trade + Pop =

Eco Deregulation (Indians) Eco Damage (for Colonists)

Game populations Fur (Indian need for cloth) Rich land from beaver dams

Sedentarism Indians

Domesticated animals Disease

Colonists Normal Env’tal Accounts

Pop = Eco Damage

Conclusion: Nature (ecology) + Social Relations (gender, culture, etc.) + Political Organization (status, state, etc.) + Economic Structure (tech., class, etc.) + Population (numbers, trends) + Health (diseases, lifespan, etc.) =

All must be understood in changing relation to one another in order to coherently explore environmental change and respond to crises.

None alone will do (not holism, philosophy, democracy, biotech, consumption, birth control, or medicine) alone.