Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), p. 267

Years ago, the eminent historical geographerH.C.Darby reflected upon the difficulties of dealing with space and time together, a challenge that he regarded as central to his discipline. Decades on, the various solutions he proposed seem curiously limited: among other things he advocated the analysis of relict features in the landscape and the use, singly or together, of vertical themes (broadly historical narratives) and geographical cross-sections in constructing accounts of changing places. Cross-sections – narrow slices through the column of time – were embraced because they allowed students of the past to describe the geography (landscape patterns and differences from place to place) of former epochs. Moreover, suggested Darby, a series of such cross-sections, drawn at different times could capture something of the dynamics of change. To illustrate this point, he turned to the dioramas depicting the area encompassed by the Harvard Forest at several periods since c. 1700. Although they were unusual, by virtue of their construction in three dimensions rather than in words, these six scale-models of the Petersham, Massachusetts area at intervals representing ‘The pre-settlement Forest’, ‘Initial clearing of the land, ad 1740’, ‘The height of agriculture, ad 1830’, ‘Farm abandonment and white pine establishment, ad 1850,’ and so on were taken, individually, to exemplify the geographer’s essential interest in regions, areas or landscapes and, collectively, to embrace time, or history.

Today, few geographers pay much regard to these and other similar contortions intended to create room for the study of the past in a discipline that was then resolutely focused on contemporary spatial patterns. The world has moved on. But the intellectual anxieties that led Darby into such musings are worth remark, because they have shaped the discipline of geography into the present. Efforts to construct the subject as the study of space (or areal differentiation) with systematic and synthetic (or regional) emphases served to marginalize work in the human-environment tradition that sought to integrate and understand the complex intersections ofnature and culture that shape life on earth. Thus, it might be argued, geographers substantially abandoned forms and fields of inquiry that have since proved 268 the agricultural fertileground for the work of ecologists, environmental historians and others.

These thoughts are provoked by my reading of Forests in time, a work centred on the Harvard Forest that includes illustrations of the dioramas that captured Darby’s attention – and much more. Let there be no mistake. This is a remarkable book. The product of close collaborations among fifty scholars devoted to integrating ‘biology and environmental science with an understanding of the complexities of landscape history in order to forge meaningful interpretations of the present’ (p.xi), it offers a wonderfully full, thoughtful and accessible account of the physiology of ecosystems and the interactions of humans, plants and animals in north-eastern America over the last millennium. It is also, in a way, a reminder of what a certain kind of geography might have been and a powerful argument for the reopening of conversations and collaborations across the lines that all too often divide that discipline into distinct, systematic, enclaves.

Established in 1907, through the efforts (in part at least) of Nathaniel Shaler, an important figure in early American geography, the Harvard Forest has long been the focus of historical as well as scientific work, and these emphases were sharpened and invigorated in 1988 when scholars from several disciplines, universities and research institutes came together under the auspices of the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research program. Combining ecological history, experimental field manipulations and long term measurements in cross-disciplinary studies attentive to a variety of scales from site and the landscape to sub-regional and regional levels, the LTER initiative has yielded, in this book, an altogether fascinating account of the changing forest ecosystems and landscapes of New England.

The book is divided into five parts. The first sets the scene. The second, three times as long and probably the section of the volume of most general interest to agricultural and environmental historians, explores regional history and landscape dynamics. Chapter Four, the first in this section of the book, offers a superb encapsulation of ‘The environmental and human history of New England’, and others explore the forest’s responses to land use and climate changes and consider wildlife dynamics. Part Three assesses the legacies of historical change in the modern forest landscape. Here specialists explore such matters as the influence of land-use patterns on soil properties, and exchanges between the forest and the atmosphere. Part Four, the longest, reports on a series of long-term experiments that compare ‘ecosystem responses to historical disturbances with those initiated by novel’ contemporary stresses (p.232); hurricane blow-downs, gap dynamics and soil warming are among history review the topics investigated in these pages. Finally, a relatively brief fifth section contemplates ‘Lessons from the Forest and its history.’

Fittingly, the final words of this impressive volume are structured by a series of reflections upon the works of Hugh Raup, a former director of the Harvard Forest. These point, among other things, to the fact that ecology has become a genuinely historical science since Raup wrote in the 1960s that an historical perspective can aid understanding of ‘what appears unexplainable in the present’ (p.396), and that people as well as biogeochemical processes will shape the landscape of New England in the future as in the past. All in all, this volume is a model of its kind. It offers a coherent, interdisciplinary synthesis of historical and scientific research and a compelling account of changes driven by human actions and natural processes over hundreds of years. Whether one thinks of it (as Michael Williams has in Science, 306, 26 November 2004) as a biography of the Harvard Forest or (as Timothy Fahey does on the dust-jacket) as ‘a guide to understanding ecological changes on our human-dominated planet’ one comes away from this work with a heightened awareness of the value of paying close attention to particular localities in efforts to understand the ramifications of human-environment interactions through time, and convinced, with Thoreau, that the forests of New England are cultural as well as natural places.