Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conversation in Northern New England

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Brown, Dona

Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England. By Richard Judd. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. xiv 335 PP. Illustrations, notes, index. $35.00.

Richard Judd has accomplished two remarkable things with his Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England. First, it is an elegant piece of scholarly work and an important contribution to the study of environmental and regional history. Perhaps more important, his book also challenges-and seriously damages-one of the most pervasive myths about the conservation movement today. Historians have often argued-and politicians and activists have too often believed-that the effort to conserve American land has been the preserve of educated elites, acting against the common-sense judgements of ordinary people living on the land. In Common Lands, Common People, Judd argues that something like the opposite has often been true: "Conservation," he argues, "is a grass-roots phenomenon," based in the traditional land use cultures of rural people (p. 12).

Basing his argument on an analysis of land use in nineteenth-century northern New England, Judd suggests that rural northern New Englanders forged their own conservation ethic out of a "tangled thicket of social forces" that included a legacy of common stewardship of lands and waters, a utilitarian approach to land value, and a love for the mixed agricultural landscape of farms, fields, orchards, and woodlots. Northern New Englanders operated under the influence of several sometimes contradictory notions: "a belief in democratic access to, and common stewardship of, the land; an aggressive approach to reshaping nature to serve human needs; and a pietistic, perfectionist vision of the balance of cultural and natural features in the evolving landscape" (p. 7).

Several environmental histories have painted vivid portraits of the massive waste and destruction of the environment caused by the tree-burning, first-generation settlers of northern New England. Judd's work points to a more complex reality for later generations. To be sure, northern New Englanders believed that nature existed to serve human purposes, and that land should be aggressively shaped and reshaped to suit those purposes. But those beliefs were combined with a reverence for the cultivated middle landscape as an ordained order and a profound sense of the shared nature of that landscape.

Through analysis of a series of conflicts over forests, fisheries, and game, Judd evaluates the impact of traditional rural conservation values on local, state, and even national policy, chronicling the ways that the rural ethic challenged, competed with, and sometimes shaped the increasingly influential views of progressive urban reformers. The complexity, ambivalence, and diversity of ordinary people's thoughts about the land they inhabited are laid out in rich detail. Sometimes, indeed, the very great diversity and ambivalence of these voices makes one suspect that perhaps there was really no common rural vision after all. But Judd's analysis pulls the different voices together and creates a believable synthesis. In the process, he has also helped to shift the terms of debate for contemporary conservation movements.

Reviewed by Dona Brown. Ms. Brown teaches history at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth

Century (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995) and a forthcoming University Press of New England collection of nineteenth-century tourist writing.