William Cronon’s Changes in the Land presaged a radical turn in environmental thought. His seminal work dramatically reconstructed our view of precolonial New England. He dismissed entirelythe received history that portrayed precolonial America as an uninhabited pristine wilderness. In the process, he gave Native Americans agency and forever blurred the line between humans and nature. Since Changes, it has become impossible to realistically think about humans as distinct from the “environment.”
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