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Those Dammed Shad: Would the River Fisheries of New England Have Survived in the Absence of Industrialization?
Daniel Vickers
| WHEN ecologists do history—that is, when they reconstruct the history of different species of flora and fauna through historical time—they confront many of the same problems historians do. One of the most troublesome of these issues is periodization, in particular, the tendency of historical research to treat one's starting point as a period of stability from which all significant change departs. In ecology, this practice gives rise to what Daniel Pauly has termed the shifting baseline syndrome—the inclination of researchers to assume that plants and animals lived in a pristine state of equilibrium until the day they became the subject of study. It describes the proclivity to forget that all ecological phenomenon have a prehistory—that the baseline from which a rising or falling population is measured was, in turn, the endpoint of earlier developments.1 |
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Situating that baseline in the ecological history of New England is a subject of some dispute. William Cronon has placed the beginnings of ecological degradation at the planting of commercial colonies in the early seventeenth century, whereas Carolyn Merchant situates the more dramatic transformation in the "capitalist ecological revolution" of the nineteenth century. Each of these positions bears a problem. Cronon's interpretation, persuasive as it is, does not consider that most colonial New Englanders participated only occasionally in markets that extended beyond the bounds of the regions in which they dwelt. Merchant's argument fits better with the limited commercial character of the preindustrial rural economy, but her portrait of colonial farmers as merely mimickers of nature does not fit comfortably into the developmental ethic that the Puritans brought with them to America from England. In the wake of these two important works, there is a certain consensus that from an ecological perspective the Algonquian woodland economy of the precontact period was relatively stable, whereas the industrial economy of the nineteenth century was highly transformative. But how do we characterize the two centuries from 1630 to 1830—between Cronon's "changes in the land" and Merchant's "capitalist ecological revolution"? Examining the history of fishing practices along New England's rivers can help to characterize the environmental habits of that period.2 |
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That industrialization devastated the river fisheries of New England is a fact beyond dispute. In 1800, alewives, shad, and salmon visited all of the region's many rivers every spring and summer to spawn in considerable numbers, and by 1900 in most of the same rivers these species were commercially extinct.3 Though a number of factors might have contributed to this debacle—urban pollution, overfishing, and weather—the decisive element of destruction in all the major watersheds of New England was the construction of dams across rivers of any considerable flow to provide power for the region's developing industrial economy. The connection between damming and the collapse of these migratory fish stocks was immediate and undeniable. Fishermen complained about it; early government inspectors agreed with them; and many industrialists themselves admitted that the fish, which had once teemed in these rivers, were an unfortunate casualty of progress. Modern historians have echoed this line of argument, and reasonably so, since the evidence for it is compelling.4 |
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