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Reflections in Bullough's Pond (Paperback)
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Reflections in Bullough's Pond (Paperback)
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From the vantage point of a nearby pond in Newton, Massachusetts,
Diana Muir reconstructs an intriguing interpretation of New
England's natural history and the people who have lived there since
pre-Columbian times. Taking a radically new way to illustrate for
general readers the vast interrelationships between natural ecology
and human economics, Muir weaves together an imaginative and
dramatic account of the changes, massive and subtle, that
successive generations of humankind and such animals as sheep and
beavers have worked on the land.
Her compelling narrative takes us to a New England populated by
individuals struggling to make a living from a land not generously
endowed by nature. Yankee history, she argues, was a string of
ecological crises from which the only escape lay in creating
radical new solutions to apparently insurmountable problems. Young
men and women coming of age in the 1790s faced a bleak future. In a
time when farming was virtually the only occupation, a burgeoning
population meant that there was not enough land to go around.
Worse, such land as there was had been worn out by generations of
careless use. With no prospects and no options, young men like Eli
Whitney and Thomas Blanchard might have resigned themselves to a
life of poverty. Instead, they started an industrial revolution,
the power of which astonished the world.
Reflections in Bullough's Pond is history on a grand scale. Drawing
on scholarship in fields ranging from archaeology to zoology, Muir
offers an exhilarating tour of Paleolithic megafauna, the
population crisis faced by New England natives in the pre-Columbian
period, the introduction of indoor plumbing, and the invention of
the shoe-peg. At the end, we understand ourselves and our world a
little better.
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