Creating Sustainable Communities

Lessons from the Hudson River Region

Rik Scarce

• Publisher: Excelsior Editions
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438456423, 9781438456430
• eBook ISBN: 9781438456447
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Social Sciences

From Mount Marcy to Manhattan and beyond, the Hudson River region has become an incubator for rich and varied experiments in sustainable living. In this fascinating book, Rik Scarce showcases some of these efforts by telling the stories of dynamic individuals and organizations that are remaking the region's landscape through ecosystem stewardship, nurturing agricultural practices, and urban renewal for the twenty-first century, along with those promoting creative land-use planning, richly functioning communities, and green businesses. Together, their achievements point to the potential for other areas of the country to forge sustainable futures, and also remind us of the sobering realities and daunting challenges that await us as we attempt to remake our relationships with the planet and with each other.

Chapter 1

How We Lost Sustainability

Once upon a time, Glens Falls, New York, was among the wealthiest cities in the United States. Standing on the banks of the Hudson as the river arcs from its nursery in the nearby Adirondack Mountains, it was home to numerous sawmills and papermaking plants. Ancient trees cut from the mountains were floated downriver in huge “rafts” to be processed into wallpaper and toilet paper, the stuff of prosperity, transforming the little town above the cave that James Fennimore Cooper made famous in Last of the Mohicans¹ into the locus of immense wealth.

Today, few of us can locate Glens Falls on a map. Its lone paper mill employs fewer than six hundred blue collar workers, down from the “five thousand honest hands” about whom Pete Seeger once rhapsodized.² Between Glens Falls and New York City, two hundred river miles south, similar stories abound: General Electric’s factories dotted the river’s shore but now are all but gone. RCA once built stereos in Albany, and General Motors manufactured cars in Sleepy Hollow, yet no more. While IBM remains a presence in Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County, where it long has made some of its most powerful computers, since the 1990s it has shed thousands of employees.

Of course, the region’s economic story is not completely bleak. Far from it. New York Harbor—the mouth of the Hudson—was and is home to massive ports on both the New York and New Jersey sides of the river. For more than four hundred years the great city first known as New Amsterdam has been an economic growth machine, and Wall Street—one of the oldest tracks in Manhattan—is synonymous with capitalism’s potential and its pitfalls.

In this chapter I trace our economic system’s role in transforming the region’s Landscape over the four centuries since Henry Hudson sailed up the river that would take his name. I then discuss the work of scholars who have implicated business in the creation of the unsustainable social and ecological worlds we know so well—and others who insist that same force can be a driver of sustainability.

My goals here are, first, to demonstrate that Landscape transformation is a historical process. The destruction so many bemoan did not occur overnight; by the same token, the construction of a new Hudson region Landscape is possible . . . and likely will take decades to create. Second, I want to establish the causal foundation for the ecological challenges facing the region that I discuss in chapter 2, some of the community-based social problems that emerge in chapter 5, and even the potential for a planet-friendly capitalism like that advocated for in chapter 7.

Third, it is important to acknowledge the dominant forces that confront sustainability advocates; every individual in the region—to say nothing of the corporations, think tanks, and governments—is invested in our current economic system, making its alteration a challenge fraught with pitfalls. Finally, from Henry Hudson’s time this region’s Landscape has been in a constant state of flux—change is, after all, endemic to our economic system. Here, I hope to show how, even though this place has been ceaselessly remade, that very renovation process may in the end lead us to a stable Landscape where revision is replaced by simple vision.

A Landscape Overturned

At the heart of our economic system—at least in its classical form, the view that dominates even today—lies exploitation. Trees, soil, oil, minerals, air, water, wildlife, and workers are all used in the creation of profit, and few natural resources were more sought after in the early seventeenth century than beaver.

To say beaver were exploited is to understate the case by a fair bit. As early as the 1500s beaver felt hats were all the rage in Europe, status indicators of such lasting power that, though the styles varied, nations were formed and dissolved, and wars fought, for three centuries beaver remained the choice for headwear among elites on both sides of the Atlantic (Abraham Lincoln’s famous stovepipe hats were beaver).³ So, after their 1609 voyage, when Henry Hudson and his crew reported to their Dutch sponsors that many of the natives they encountered wore furs, it prompted competing trading companies to scramble to stake a claim to this New World territory.

Contemplating the plunder that followed, journalist Robert Boyle wrote, “Of all the mammals of New York, the beaver has the most checkered history. Beavers, of course, were the main object of the Dutch fur trade. They were trapped by the hundreds of thousands and their pelts shipped to Europe for the making of hats.”⁴ The Dutch did little or no trapping themselves, since beaver were found in the interior, away from the Hudson River, where it was forbidding and even forbidden to them.

That work was left to aboriginal peoples. In his environmental history of New York, David Stradling wrote, “The fur trade gave Native Americans their first exposure to the profit motive and thus initiated a changing relationship with nature. Never before had native peoples hunted so completely for trade.”⁵ Previously, the first Americans’ interactions with other species had been mediated by their strong cultural ties to nonhumans, which required reflective ceremonies and effectively restricted overhunting. Not so with the fur trade.

In asking how it was that acquisitive economics trumped established relations between aboriginal peoples and the beaver, Stradling poses a question that remains relevant today. For those first Americans, perhaps a “spiritual crisis” prompted by increasing disease (transmitted to them, unbeknownst to either group, through contact with the Europeans) compelled them to violate norms that had emerged over millennia living on this continent, or maybe “they simply found the market too alluring, the guns and gunpowder too useful to pass up. For most tribes the fur trade constituted their first prolonged interactions with Europeans, and through increasingly regularized trading, natives purchased a variety of goods, including cloth, tools, and metal pots, all of which they quickly wove into the fabric of their culture.”⁶

In 1655, the year of his death, early Dutch settler Adriaen van der Donck’s account of life in “New Netherland” was published. Written decades earlier, his memoir recounted a time that was already passing. “We also frequently trade with the Indians,” he wrote, “who come more than ten and twenty days’ journey from the interior, and who have been farther off to catch beavers, and they know of no limits to the country, and when spoken to on the subject, they deem such enquiries to be strange and singular.”⁷

Having all but extirpated beaver on their home continent, Europeans knew from experience that the exploitation could not go on forever, but it was an inconceivable notion to Native Americans. Indeed, by the time van der Donck’s book was published, the region’s beaver numbers already had crashed. While the fur trade with Europe was over, European economics nevertheless held sway—no other source existed for the goods that native people found so alluring. In Stradling’s account, the first great re-meaning of the Hudson region’s Landscape occurred rapidly and, in terms of the triple bottom line of ecology, economy, and equality, the new Landscape was complete: ecosystems were fundamentally altered, and powerful dependencies between aboriginal people and capitalism were created.

Graham Hodges, a Colgate University history professor, observes, “It’s important for Dutch strategic and diplomatic interests to have a colony along the Atlantic. The English control everything from present-day Maine down to South Carolina. So this is the only point where there is a non-English entryway along the Atlantic coast.” Those “strategic” efforts were first and foremost economic. So while the Dutch primarily sought to enrich corporations in the home country, when the British bloodlessly wrested control of the Hudson region in 1664, they were more bent on colonization—control of the land for both political and economic purposes. The British wanted a northern foothold to ward off the French, who controlled Canada south to the Adirondacks (their sweeping presence ran west and farther south, down the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys to the Gulf of Mexico).

The British undertook a subjugation process of land and people that was central to the creation of the continent’s third Landscape. The first emerged from native people’s manipulation of the ecology after their arrival, most significantly through the use of fire,⁸ and the second was the Dutch plunder of fur-bearing animals. In all three, people, ecology, and economy were intimately connected, but the character of those relationships varied in fundamental ways.

The region’s native peoples actively observed topography, plant and animal behavior, seasonal signs, and the like—practices long since forgotten. Tom Lake, a New York State naturalist, notes, “Native people employed what we would consider modern concepts of ecology thousands of years ago. . . . They understood that you can control nature in a way, but it’s a symbiosis. You’re actually helping by fostering new growth and at the same time you’re helping yourself because it’s going to attract different kinds of animals.”

Native people’s cosmology, too, contrasted profoundly with today’s dominant understandings. For aboriginal Americans “the whole world is alive,” observes Vassar College anthropologist Lucille Johnson. “You are in a living universe. You are also a part of that universe, not apart from that universe, as we tend to be. . . . For the Native Americans, people are of the world just as a deer is of the world, just as an ant is of the world, just as an oak tree is of the world.”

Those first Hudson peoples invested “natural” entities (their language included no such word as our nature) with respect and transcendental importance. The same was true for their fellow tribe members. Most native cultures were highly egalitarian, and when their economies were not entirely subsistence-based (the Lenni Lenape were major traders, and many tribes were known for their special talents in, for example, pottery or canoe building) profit never entered the picture. The people of the region farmed, but one early American estimate was they cleared only about 1 percent of the land, so light was their ecological footprint.⁹

The Dutch Landscape introduced a thoroughly European, anthropocentric understanding of relations between humans and the land in which economics was privileged over all else in social life save, perhaps, religion—although, as Max Weber argued, early Protestantism like that practiced in Holland can be seen as providing higher justification for capitalist business practices.¹⁰ “[F]or all their intensity in pursuit of the pelts given up by the Indians for mere trinkets,” writes the eloquent Vernon Benjamin, “the details of this New World, like the trees of the forest, hid an even larger reality that diminished these men and the grand ego of a world they came from. . . . [T]he Europeans who were so intensely focused on the profits of the pelt trade did not see the integrated, natural reality that loomed all around them.” He adds, “They were not ‘discovering’ a New World; they were dismembering an old one.”¹¹ Nature was God’s gift for humans to use—not to contemplate, appreciate, live harmoniously with, or worship—creating an unmistakable hierarchy not only of being but of cultures as well. Europeans felt free to break apart nature, whether for profit or science, their outlook privileging their desires over all others’.

In key respects, the particulars of the Landscape imposed by the English differed little from Dutch beliefs and behaviors. Humans continued to be the measure of all things, and under God’s direction the land was to be subjugated. However, there were important distinctions between the culture-ecology nexuses created by the two rivals. For one, in their best moments the British respected native people’s rights such that London restricted westward expansion of European settlement, something the Dutch, who were almost continuously at war with aboriginal peoples, likely would never have done.

Tragically, the other side of the coin was the British promotion of slavery, including the opening of a slave market in New York City in 1711. To economically and politically powerful New Yorkers—like, before them, Dutch New Amsterdamians—slaves and near-slaves, such as indentured servants and tenant farmers, were necessary for clearing the massive tracts of land that were fundamental to securing British claims to this part of the continent.¹² While native peoples, particularly the Lenni Lenape, had practiced fire-based swidden horticulture in the region for centuries (clearing land using fire, then farming it for two or three years before moving on), the English encouraged extensive land clearing for settled agriculture, a technology practiced on a scale unknown to the natives, remaking the Hudson Landscape on a thoroughly European model. The land was opened for continental animals to graze and European crops to be planted, and those tenant farmers, indentured servants, and outright slaves were compelled to work the land without being allowed to share in their labor’s financial fruits.

Industrializing the Hudson River Region

During the summer and fall of 1777, little more than a year after the colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, what many historians consider the turning point of the American Revolution took place in the Hudson region, concluding on the Hudson River shore with the surrender of an entire British army. The battles of Bennington and Saratoga ended an English effort to sever New England from the ostensibly less rebellious colonies to the south, greatly improving the revolutionaries’ prospects.

In the early years following independence, economically the United States remained as it had been under the king’s rule, agrarian. But the turn of the nineteenth century brought major changes. In 1807, Robert Fulton sailed the world’s first viable steamship up the Hudson from Manhattan to Albany and back. And as the years passed, important aspects of American industrialism began and thrived along the Hudson, giving rise to the fourth major Landscape the region has witnessed since Homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

Canals constructed by the Dutch in lower Manhattan presaged the Erie Canal, arguably the continent’s greatest such system, which ran along the Hudson and Mohawk rivers hundreds of miles west and ultimately out of the Hudson River drainage to Lake Erie. Governor DeWitt Clinton’s “ditch,” as the Erie Canal was derisively labeled by those who considered it a waste of taxpayer dollars, proved to be more economic boom than boondoggle, and it spurred the arrival of the Industrial Revolution on this continent.

At its peak, the canal floated ten thousand boats and more, and thirty thousand people’s livelihoods were directly linked to it.¹³ Much of the work was physical, not mechanical, performed by men and horses. Towns and cities sprang up to support first the canal’s construction and then its commerce, and what once was three hundred miles of dense forest dotted with the odd clearing for native farms and villages rapidly became a deforested water-borne highway linking one rapidly growing community after another. Farmland worked by thousands of eager settlers spread for tens of miles on either side of the canal, the whites’ presence made possible by the ongoing subjugation of the native people, who were killed off, driven westward, pacified, forced onto reservations, or assimilated.

The canal’s economic success—in the fifty-eight years it operated as a paying concern, beginning in 1825, revenues exceeded the state’s initial $7.5 million investment by roughly fifteen times—prompted the development of others. A privately owned...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Remaking a Region—Intentionally
• Chapter 1: How We Lost Sustainability
• Chapter 2: A Place under Siege
• Chapter 3: A Constant Bounty
• Chapter 4: Two Hundred Subdivisions Too Late?
• Chapter 5: Remaking Communities
• Chapter 6: How It All Adds Up
• Chapter 7: A Complete Disruption
• Chapter 8: A Landscape to Fight For
• Conclusion: A Practical Revolution
• Methodological Note
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover