Except for the limited areas the European settlers found
under Indian cultivation, they considered the land vacant and
available to those who could put it to productive use--for ag-
riculture and for commercial profit. They did not honor the In-
dians' communal approach to land use or their sense of obli-
gation to pass the land undamaged to future generations.
Instead, Europeans introduced the concept of private property
and treated land increasingly as a commodity to be bought and
sold in the market. New Englanders used Genesis 1:28 to justify
their claim to the land, noting that the Lord directed man to
multiply and to subdue the earth. They brought a burgeoning
market economy that drew the Indians into increasing eco-
nomic dependency. And, most serious, the colonists transmit-
ted diseases to which the Indians had no immunity; entire vil-
lages were decimated, and the Indians could no longer maintain
their long-established relationship to the land.

The growing economy in New England, short on capital and
labor and dependent on exploiting the natural environment, left
a legacy of waste. Farmers girdled trees or felled them with an
ax, and great quantities of wood fueled inefficient fireplaces.
Domesticated grazing animals multiplied rapidly, depleting the
limited pastureland and forcing expansion into the interior.
Plowed lands sustained increasing soil erosion. By the end of the
colonial period, many species of plants, grasses, and animals had
disappeared.

Farther south, profligate use of the land had become in-
creasingly common. Thomas Jefferson noted of his fellow Vir-
ginian tobacco planters, "The indifferent state of agriculture
among us does not proceed from a want of knowledge merely;
it is from our having such quantities of land to waste as we
please." ² As one field became infertile or lost topsoil through
erosion, the farmer had only to move to a field yet untouched.

After the colonies gained their independence, the seven
states that claimed lands west of the Appalachians ceded their

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