Satan, approaching Paradise in Paradise Lost, is bent on conquest. Yet he notices that this land offers much that his domain does not, rows of ‘goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit’, being enjoyed by the original humans in ‘simplicity and spotless innocence.’ In fact, Satan is so impressed with the beauty of Paradise and its inhabitants that he feels a twinge of regret before ‘honor and empire’ goad him into ‘conquering this new world’ (J. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 146–394).
While Milton was composing his epic, other Europeans were out conquering other new worlds, often writing lavishly about the natural wonders that they encountered. Steve Nicholls draws on these accounts in Paradise Found, an environmental history of North America that covers more than 500 years in as many pages. The chapters present variations on the following theme: once, plants and animals existed in tremendous abundance, being harvested more-or-less sustainably by clever Indians. European explorers visited and wrote breathless superlative-choked letters about how amazing it all was. Then colonists arrived and initiated processes that would ruin Paradise and degrade its inhabitants, every bit as efficiently as Milton's Satan, but not half as conflicted. Much later, dimly comprehending what had been lost, governments implemented conservation measures that, while better than nothing, could only salvage a shadow of nature's former glory. To Nicholls, North American ecosystems are brilliant tapestries that have been left in the sun to bleach and unravel: entire threads have been lost, and those that remain are faded and frayed.
There is something to be said for this reading of history, and for its retelling in a manner that fuses accessibility, scholarliness and advocacy. Conservationists are highly sensitized to biodiversity loss, but Nicholls's focus on the atrophy of populations reminds us that even many extant species have withered to the point of ecological irrelevance. The book pulls together an imposing amount of reference material, and Nicholls gives plenty of airtime to both primary historical sources and recent relevant peer-reviewed science.
The narrative suffers, however, from several ambiguities and inconsistencies, which are conveniently encapsulated in the enigmatic title. Beyond establishing an allegorical link to Milton's poem, the word ‘Paradise’ reveals more about the author's view of pre-European America than that of the first explorers and settlers. Nicholls spends a lot of time trying to imagine ‘how exhilarating it must have been’ to be a sixteenth-century naturalist and comparing his own experiences unfavourably to those ‘of the first Europeans to stand on these shores.’ But those first Europeans, their occasionally exuberant reports notwithstanding, spent a lot of time starving and freezing and generally being miserable; settlements repeatedly vanished without a trace, Virginia was a ‘death trap’ for English colonists and shipwrecked explorers died of scurvy on desolate islands.
So is the use of ‘Paradise’ intentionally vague and a tad ironic, helping to illuminate different perspectives on nature? Probably, although I would be more confident in that interpretation if Nicholls's preference for the pre-European version of the continent were not so evident. He struggles for words to describe that world, eventually running out of modifiers and recycling them: the natural abundance of pre-European America was ‘immense,’ ‘incalculable,’ ‘infinite,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘unimaginable,’ ‘incomprehensibly vast,’ ‘seemingly endless,’ ‘incredible’ and ‘unimaginable’ again, and finally ‘extraordinary, almost unbelievable.’
No and yes. ‘Extraordinary’ is odd; the central thesis of the book is that this natural abundance was ordinary, and today's impoverished biota is extraordinary. But ‘almost unbelievable’ is true enough. As Nicholls notes several times, explorers’ accounts were often exaggerated, even fabricated. It is not clear how far we can trust the reports of excitable observers who, in addition to astonishing abundance, reported 12-feet-tall moose, egg-laying porcupines and herds of 300 bears. Although sceptical of these more outlandish claims and deferring to more rigorous quantitative estimates when available, Nicholls nonetheless builds his story around images passed down by the same observers: sturgeon so plentiful that they threatened canoes, porpoises so common that they endangered bathers, sea turtles so numerous that Columbus worried about running aground on them, and counties-full of ‘100,000, or 1,000,000, or 100,000,000’ bison. He seems willing to do this because the architects of the ‘Paradise publicity campaign for the New World. . . didn't always lie about what was here’ (my emphasis), but that is not a ringing endorsement. Nobody can quibble with the qualitative argument: we have many fewer bison, wolves, otters and auks than we used to. But how many fewer is a question that these explorers’ accounts cannot adequately answer.
The other perplexing word in the title is ‘discovery’. Nobody has to tell Nicholls that white men did not discover America, the book is as much about indigenous Americans as it is about abundant wildlife, and indeed he chronicles the repeated ‘discovery’ by Europeans of different parts of the continent at different times. Thus, like ‘Paradise’, Nicholls's ‘discovery’ might be a thin slice of irony sandwiched between two layers of meaning, but it is hard to tell. In any case, this word choice is symptomatic of a deeper problem. A recurring motif of the book is that we may be ‘grossly underestimating what nature should look like’ (emphasis in original). Well, what should it look like? Nicholls has a firm opinion on this point, lamenting, for example, the inability to restore the Great Lakes ‘to their state when the missionaries and coureurs of France first saw them’.
This baseline is, obviously and unavoidably, arbitrary. But Nicholls seems uncomfortable acknowledging that. Instead, he repeatedly implies that there was something almost cosmically correct about ‘the ecological balance that existed when Europeans arrived’ and blames the loss of this balance on the pillars of ‘Western philosophy’: capitalism, Christianity and democracy. In contrast, Nicholls defends ‘Indian philosophy’ against attempts, ‘fashionable in more academic circles’, to over-revise the Noble Savage stereotype: ‘let's not throw the baby out with the bath water’. Sure, Native Americans had mercantile instincts and were strategic, sometimes brutally so, in their manipulation of nature. ‘But the point I want to make,’ Nicholls writes in closing, ‘is that, even if populations were reduced, they were able to bounce back’.
Tell that to the Pleistocene megafauna, animals that, fortunately for Nicholls's arguments, ‘predate the historical framework of this book’. Fine, but their extinctions might still have informed the theoretical framework of this book. I share Nicholls's sadness at never having had the chance to see a flock of passenger pigeons. But those who are equally sad about never having had the chance to see a mammoth have written different books about extinction, ones that emphasize human population size, technology and prey naiveté (not to mention climate change) at least as much as differences between monolithically depicted cultures.
