Reflections in Bullough S Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England

Without passing judgement on the author's intent (I'm not a deconstructionist), this work struck me as a powerful indictment of what man has done to his habitat. I should also note that I'm not a greenie, although this work pushed me a step or two in that direction. I found Ms. Muir's book very entertaining. I read it while on vacation, in two sittings. One would correctly infer I also found it a bit disturbing. Ms. Muir has interwoven fact with conjecture to create a probable eco-history of New England since the arrival of man. The conjecture is logically sound and has some evidentiary history. Early Americans, however, wrote no more history than early Africans or early Europeans; hence a degree of conjecture is necessary to flesh out game-theoretically sound propositions.The begining thesis is that the forests of pre-human New England were ecologically sound. This is certainly a reasonable proposition which carries with it implications Ms. Muir details. From that point, Muir creates an eco-history showing how mankind, including the American Indian (or aboriginal American, if you prefer)has destroyed one of the largest air-sheds in the world. Muir discusses the way in which efforts to reforest the area have failed to duplicate natural ecology, and the implications of that failure. The implications have even more profound impact in the contempory Northwest, where I live and where deforestation is not complete, than in the Northeast.Fortunately for the reader, Muir has written much more readably than I have here. She eschews jargon and labyrinthian technical explanations (in contrast with this sentence) to present a clear and convincing case. I recommend this book wholeheartedly.

Growing up in California, I learned little about the specific history of the development of New England beyond key events like the Pilgrims, the American Revolution, and advent of the Industrial Revolution in the mills. So even though I live only about 7 miles from Bullough's Pond and often drive past it, I knew nothing about it. That attracted me to the book, and I was well rewarded for my effort. If you are like me, you will be, too!Bullough's Pond is not Walden Pond. It is a man-made pond originally designed to serve a mill. Later, it was reshaped by a land developer to help attract home owners to suburban Newton, Massachusetts. When changes in road maintenance meant that more sand was used on streets in the winter, the pond threatened to become a meadow instead until it was dredged with state money. With the dredging, the population of flora and fauna changed substantially. Bullough's pond is symptomatic of the ecology of New England. The original forest is long gone, and what we see as nature here is usually a reflection of what we have done to economically exploit her. The book uses Bullough's Pond as an anology for a larger story about all of New England. So you will learn about Bullough's Pond, but that is only 5 percent of the book.Starting with the arrival of Native Americans across the land bridge from Asia in Siberia to Alaska, the book portrays a geography with a fragile environment that is easily upset by people. While hunter-gatherers lived here in small numbers, the impact was small. Later population pressure caused the numbers to climb past what hunting and berries could sustain. Harvesting of oysters and farming of maize and beans became important sources of food. When the European colonists arrived, they found a countryside that was already prepared for and employing sustainable agriculture. But the newcomers did not realize nor care about how to make the best use of the land. There was always more land, so it was quickly exploited in ways that soon robbed the land of its first-growth timber and its topsoil. Farming soon played out. The fisheries were eventually exhausted. Dams and pollution made drinking water dangerous. Drifting hydrocarbon emissions from Ohio power plants helped punch holes in the ozone layer. Diseases from around the world attacked favorite trees. The future of this ecology would depend on the decisions made to sustain and improve it.In parallel, Ms. Muir tells the story of Yankee ingenuity in turning to new resources when old ones played out. New England found itself economically transformed into a manufacturing region by the opportunity to export finished goods rather than heavy raw materials (first as ships, and later as rum), water power, new inventions, the railroad, and the steam engine. When lower labor costs drove manufacturing of shoes and textile out of New England, MIT's prowess brought new generations of economic development based on first chemicals, and later weapons sys

Several years ago William Cronon wrote a book called _Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England_. Cronon described the economy of the tribal peoples of New England in some detail. It was his book that taught me how much tribal people modified the landscape in order to maintain a workable economy. The arriving Europeans were, of course, completely oblivious to the rules and the effects of the tribal economic program. Cronon devoted his entire book to this subject. It is just the beginning of Muir's book. She adopts Cronon's land-centric perspective and goes on to describe, not only the Industrial Revolution in New England, but also its causes (a combination of a scarcity of resources and a Protestant work ethic) and its consequences (e.g., water pollution) for the land.Muir is fairly even-handed through most of the book. She presents facts in rapid-fire fashion in terse, very readable prose. Toward the end of the book, however, I felt that she became a bit shrill at certain junctures. For example, she faults the Irish for having no entrepreneurial spirit, which contributed to the decline of the New England economy in the early 20th century when cotton mills moved south and the regional industry failed to adapt to this evolutionary inevitability. Muir describes the Irish and the French-Canadians as having a "pre-modern" live-for-today attitude, but makes no mention of the fact that these ethnic groups were actively prevented from joining the cultural evolution toward modernity by repressive British social policies in Ireland and Canada.While I disagree with Muir's selective presentation of the facts of the social history of the Irish and French-Canadians, I am quite firmly in agreement with her views on water pollution. She is quite perceptive about the reasons for the failure of industry and government in New England to clean up after themselves when faced with apparent links between pollution and public health. In the 19th century public health official were never able to find typhoid-causing bacteria in the drinking water supplies, but when faced with strong circumstantial evidence that linked sloppy disposable of human waste and disease, industry and government set up water treatment plants to clean up drinking water. By contrast, although iron-clad links between chemical pollution and cancer and birth defects have not been made, there is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest a cause and effect. However, nothing has been done to prevent the release of chemical pollutants into the public waterways simply because there is not political will to do it, as there was in the 19th and early 20th century.So in addition to being a fascinating marshalling of historical facts, this book does have a definite point of view, which makes it all the more compelling to read, whether you agree with the author or not. It is a relief to read a book about environmental history that

It is hard to imagine how Reflections in Bullough's Pond could have been better written. Diana Muir gives an account of the interplay between New England's economic history and its environment in a lapidary prose which never leaves the reader behind. By the end of the book we are enlightened about the ebb and flow of these matters over the five hundred-odd years from early European settlement to modern times without ever being overwhelmed, for Ms Muir always wears her erudition lightly. She breaks new ground in her treatment of the environment as both an economic resource and as a complex-often vulnerable-amalgam of ecosystems. Her thesis is that we are living on capital, be it fossil fuel, topsoil or forest-she is particularly compelling on the vulnerable biochemistry of these last. Unusually, however, Ms Muir is scrupulous in her use of statistics and fastidious in her argument. She never seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the economic impulse, though she does not flinch from her conclusion: an argument for restraint in economic activity and population.Nor does she lose sight of the propensity of ecosystems to renew themselves, albeit often in new forms: she is pleased-almost amused-by the return of the beaver and the moose, while regretting the extinction of the elm and the emergence of local spruce monocultures. Indeed Ms Muir expresses herself more forcefully on the loss of flora than fauna. Perhaps this is because the long life cycles of the former make it harder to take an optimistic view of their capacity to renew themselves. Alternatively it may be because the collapse of agriculture in New England following the opening up of the West, has stimulated the return to southern New England of so many species formerly evicted to Canada. Reflections in Bullough's Pond is no naïve elegy for a Paradise Lost; it never loses sight of a human interplay with the landscape which long antedates industrialisation, not to say European settlement. In a particularly ingenious section of the book, Ms Muir reminds us that in the middle of the nineteenth century, the courts and legislatures altered common law doctrines of liability to free up industrial activity. This reflected the climate of the times. Ms Muir argues that the climate of our own times may well give rise to more extensive liability concepts to restrain the corporations, notions very much with the tail wind of popular and professional thinking.Given the book's generosity and elegance, it seems curmudgeonly to cavil at any part of it. But a couple of issues do arise. First forests. Since the invention of agriculture, we have cleared them for the simple reason that we have better uses for the land. This has been going on in the Old World for millennia. Of course there have been local environmental disasters, eg in North Africa and Mesopotamia, but nothing sufficiently general to justify veneration of forests as a precautionary measure. This is an artefact o