Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Economy of New England.

Changes in the Land – William Cronon.

Es mucho lo que yo salgo a la naturaleza. A ese mundo aparte de lo humano, de nuestra civilización. A esos espacios donde es posible parar, descansar, respirar, sentir curiosidad. Tanto así, que han sido estos espacios los que me han llevado a estudiar lo que hoy estudio.

Con las páginas he llegado a tener una visión diferente de la que tenía de esos espacios. Gracias a autores como Tsing, Moore, incluso Smith y Lowenthall he tenido una serie de reflexiones sobre ese patrimonio natural. Intentando responder a preguntas cómo: ¿Por qué salimos a la naturaleza? ¿Por qué ese afán de mantenerla separada de nosotros? ¿Para qué hacer de las ciudades espacios dónde lo no humano no puede prosperar? Mi relación con el mundo natural no será la misma otra vez.

“There has been no timeless wilderness in a state of perfect changelessness, no climax forest in permanent stasis” (p. 11)

Ahora, es pertinente una anotación: me encuentro adelantando una maestría en Gerencia Sostenible del Patrimonio (Sustainable Heritage Management), razón por la cual los últimos (y próximos) libros van a estarse alejando de la literatura, acercándose más a las ‘ciencias sociales’. Espero, sin embargo, poder continuar leyendo literatura universal, así como tachando libros de La Lista. Esta es una de esas posibles relaciones con los libros: son repositorios de conocimiento. En ellos hay respuestas, como también preguntas, pueden ser socios de los profesores, así como sus saboteadores. Quien lee siempre podrá seguir aprendiendo sobre el mundo y sí mismo; quien lee, siempre será un estudiante.

Ahora que soy estudiante de nuevo, leer va a ser una constante…

Aquí es dónde entra este libro de William Cronon, uno que busca:

“My thesis is simple: the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes -well known to historians- in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations- less well known to historians- in the region’s plants and animal communities.” (p. vii)

¡WOW! Que gran libro. Está bien escrito, se lee fácil y sin mayor dificultad. Está bien documentado, y el autor hace algo que es en realidad bastante difícil: delimitar su objeto de estudio tanto espacial como temporalmente -que buen aprendizaje es este para cualquier investigador…

En Changes in the Land, el paisaje cobra vida, más que vida, sentido. Cronon se sienta a meticulosamente a describir el impacto de diferentes modos de organizar la vida humana -«two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem.” (p. 12)-, en las especies animales y vegetales en Nueva Inglaterra. Cómo aquello que vemos -y que incluso he logrado llegar a ver- no está dado, ni tampoco ha sido siempre de esa manera. Es mucho lo que desconocemos los lugares donde vivimos, así como del impacto que nuestras instituciones tienen sobre nosotros mismos y lo demás.

Este libro es además un cuento con moraleja, con una advertencia sobre nuestra relación con el mundo a nuestro alrededor. El legado no solo es material. Es mucho lo que recibimos como herencia que es intangible: instituciones políticas, económicas, sociales, de propiedad… ¡y su impacto es grande!

¿Cómo seremos nosotros como ancestros?

• “Different peoples choose different ways of interacting with their surrounding environments, and their choices ramify through not only the human community but the larger ecosystem as well” (p. vii)
• “Just as ecosystems have been changes by their historical activities of human beings, so too have they had their own less-recorded history: forests have been transformed by disease, drought, and fire, species have become extinct and landscapes have been drastically altered by climatic change without any human intervention at all.” (p. 11)
• “Whereas the natural ecosystem tended toward a patchwork of diverse communities arranged almost randomly on the landscape -its very continuity depending on that disorder- the human tendency was to systematize the patchwork and impose a more regular pattern on it. People sought to give their landscape a new purposefulness, often by simplifying its seemingly chaotic tangle.” (p. 33)
• “But whereas Indian villages moved from habitat to habitat to find maximum abundance through minimal work, and so reduce their impact on the land, the English believed in and required permanent settlements. Once a village was established, its improvements -cleared fields, pastures, buildings, fences, and so on- were regarded as more or less fixed features of the landscape.” (p. 53)
• “It was capital -the ability to store wealth in the expectation that one could increase its quantity- that set European societies apart from precolonial Indian ones.” (p. 78)
• “Marshall Sahlins has pointed out that there are in fact two ways to be rich, one of which was rarely recognized by Europeans in the seventeenth century. ‘Wants,’ Sahlin says, ‘may be ‘easily satisfied’ either by producing more or desiring little’” (p. 80)
• “The Indians’ relationships to the deer, moose, and beaver they hunted were far different from those of the Europeans to the pigs, cows, sheep, and horse they owned. Where Indians had contended themselves with burning the woods and concentrating their hunting in the fall and winter months, the English sought a much more total and year-round control over their animals’ lives.” (p. 128)
• “Rich and poor alike were relatively easily satiated, and so made relative slender demands on the ecosystems which furnished their economy its resources.” (p. 166)
• “The landscape of New England thus increasingly met not only the needs of its inhabitants for food and shelter but the demands of faraway markets for cattle, corn, fur, timber, and other goods whose ‘values’ became expressions of the colonists’ socially determined ‘needs’.” (p. 167)
• “We live with their legacy today. When the geographer Carl Sauer wrote in the twentieth century that Americans had ‘not learned the difference between yield and loot,’ ha was describing one of the most longstanding tendencies of their way of life. Ecological abundance and economic prodigality went hand in hand: the people of plenty were a people of waste.” (p. 170)

Bibliografía:

• Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Economy of New England.
• William Cronon.
• Hill and Wang
• New York
• 1983 (1995)
• 235 pages.