The return of the forest: Urbanization and reforestation in the northeastern United States.

摘要

This dissertation investigates the influence of urban growth on the return of trees in the northeast. In analyzing city dwellers' influence and dependence on landscapes beyond the city limits, it emphasizes the urban origins of the new eastern woods. In the early-twentieth-century northeast, the interactions between city and hinterland did not create the denuded landscape of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, but a new wildness of metropolitan nature. In focusing on this urban contribution to the creation of the new forests, this dissertation challenges both the anti-urban bias and the cliche of declension of much environmental history, and it illustrates the centrality of social processes to the production of natural landscapes.;This project focuses on the period between 1890 and 1930, when state governments of the Northeast, together with federal and local agencies, conservationists, scientists, civic activists, farmers, industrialists and laborers, decided how to create and manage new forests. Their legacy includes not only greater public land holdings, but also tree nurseries, forestry schools, forestry commissions and agencies, and many acres of new trees.;The forests that took root in those years were remarkably varied. Through an examination of the connections among cities and reforested watersheds in Pennsylvania, park land in New Hampshire, farm woodlots in Vermont, and industrial forests in Maine, this dissertation demonstrates that the woods of the Northeast were shaped by human choices. Turn-of-the-century forest activists, scientists, politicians, farmers, workers and tourists shaped the context in which forests returned, and in which they are managed today.;The growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, and the development of the timber industry all influenced the return of the trees. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are intertwined. The dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of reforestation. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses and farms are all part of a single transformed regional landscape.