Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery

  • Steve Nicholls
University of Chicago Press: 2009. 536 pp. $30 9780226583402 | ISBN: 978-0-2265-8340-2

“We don't need history,” I recently heard a conservation scientist tell a group of students. He was being provocative, targeting those ecologists who treat the past as a baseline to which we should return. The world has changed too much and is changing too fast, he argued, for history to serve as a useful measure for restoring nature. The questions that animate conservation today do not ponder what we have lost or how we can get it back. The past is another world, and that world is gone. The questions now are: what kind of world do we want? And how can we create it?

Albert Bierstadt's 1864 work portrays the idyll of Yosemite before European settlers reached the American West. Credit: MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON, 2009/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

In this context, Steve Nicholls's Paradise Found seems quaintly historical. The book is a cornucopia overflowing with the abundance of nature long gone. In this history, no species simply existed in the past. In early North America, Nicholls writes, “the fertile coasts teemed with fish and marine mammals ... prairies were a carpet of wildflowers” and the mountains were “clothed in forests”.

This is history written as if the past were a spectacular nature documentary. This comes as little surprise when you learn that the author has been a producer of nature shows for television for the past 25 years, as he frequently reminds readers. The book even calls to mind historical re-enactments, as Nicholls asks his audience to imagine themselves with the eleventh-century Norsemen settlers in fabled Vinland; fishing for cod with the fifteenth-century explorer John Cabot; or sitting under a tulip poplar as a flock of passenger pigeons burdens the boughs overhead.

Nicholls laments species that have been driven to extinction, but his real concern is a decline in the abundance of animals. By this he seems to mean wildlife spectacles that would be suitable for television. But Nicholls engages an important historical and ecological argument here, too. “An accurate picture of the past is important,” he writes, as “a baseline to judge how effective conservation measures are.”

A debate is raging among historians and ecologists regarding 'shifting baselines', a concept developed by marine biologist Daniel Pauly to describe how people often assess environmental decline only in the context of their own lifetimes. The sentiment is familiar: “When I was a kid, fish were everywhere — and this big! Now they're much harder to catch, and smaller.” Each generation begins with a diminished baseline. This insight has led to massive efforts to find an accurate baseline for the natural world — what Nicholls calls 'paradise found' — by enlisting historians to scour records such as letters, diaries and ships' logs, which were also used by Nicholls to construct his narrative.

Although Nicholls acknowledges that early Native Americans often had a major impact on species and ecosystems, such as their hunting of bison in the Western grasslands, he portrays North America before its discovery by Europeans as Eden before the Fall. This is a common move in such accounts. But Nicholls seems to have no critical distance from his own paradisiacal tropes, nor any apparent awareness that these ideas also have a history that matters.

If paradise lies in the past, it logically follows that it is lost in the present. Similarly, what is missing in the present constituted paradise in the past. This is history as elegy, and makes Nicholls's stories about catastrophic crashes in wildlife populations sound like the same “inevitable trajectory” of decline. At one point, he even apologizes for the “all too familiar pattern”.

The problem is that such stories are not all the same. Some species are so successful today that they are an ecological nuisance — for example, mute swans, zebra mussels and white-tailed deer. Population size is not everything: it depends on habitat. Humans take up a lot of habitat, but we have also created new habitats, and many small populations can survive just fine. To his credit, Nicholls does not hide these complications, but he doesn't make much of them either. This makes Paradise Found the kind of history that undermines itself on close reading: so much complexity spills out of this bounteous tome that the narrative cannot hold it.

And that points to a much bigger problem. There is no new historical narrative to replace the simplistic story of shifting baselines and paradise lost. As a result, many ecologists are simply abandoning history. This is not good: ecology is a historical science, and history is not just data for constructing a baseline for ecological models. It unpacks everything that goes into making the baselines and models themselves — ideas, scientific theories, social practices, industries, economies, ecological conditions and species that together shaped the environment at any given time in the past. Historical narratives also frame how we think about moving forward. So they must adjust to new information, open up new inquiries, force us to rethink data and question conventional wisdom.

In many places, we have only fragments of the abundant ecosystems that once existed, and only fragments of their history. The point is not to assemble those fragments as gospel, showing the way to a past to which we might return. The point is to put this history in conversation with ecological possibilities for the present and in the future. The devil, as they say, is in the details. And we might find some useful history there too, if we could just stop searching for paradise.