Socio-ecological regime shifts in New England (USA),1620–2020

Abstract

Relationships between nature and society are made manifest in the production of landscapes. Consequently, landscape changes indicate changes in the relationships between nature and society. Forged at regional scales over long periods of time, nature/society relationships, like natural and social systems, exhibit periods of equilibrium, stability, and incremental change that eventually give way to new periods of equilibrium, stability, and incremental change in which causal relationships have changed. The paper presents a landscape changebased, grounded theory periodization of the New England (USA) region’s Anthropocene history. Its intent is to provide temporal boundaries within which processes, events, records, and artifacts can be examined within shared socio-ecological frames of reference, a first step in the development of new socio-ecologically-based historical narratives. Locating the “inaugural moment” of New England’s Anthropocene epoch at the establishment of Plymouth Colony in 1620, the beginning of England’s colonialization of this forested North American region, the paper presents and interprets regularity analyses of population density, land-use/land cover, and other data related to landscape shaping processes, identifying socio-ecological regime shifts from the aboriginal Late Woodlands regime to the English Colonial regime and subsequent shifts to the American Industrial regime in 1830 and the American Post-Industrial regime in 1970 along with their nested, subsidiary regimes. Previous periodizations of the region’s history are discussed, and a narrative of the region’s Anthropocene history is outlined based on the paper’s periodization. It is observed that displacements of a socio-ecological regime serve as resources for the next regime, that ghosts of past regimes are present in today’s environmental challenges, but that socio-ecological regime shifts are difficult to forecast.