| This work is an environmental history of the predominantly-hardwood forests of the Appalachian Plateau in northern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania, from 1750 to 1840. Like other environmental histories, it analyzes how human behaviors caused certain ecological changes. I have also taken a more anthropological approach, by arguing that the cultural understandings with which people viewed forests were a critical component of ecological change. Specifically, I argue that the cultural models of forests held by Appalachian actors during the frontier and early industrial eras provided both the frameworks for interpretation and the goals which motivated forest-affecting behaviors. I identify a range of cultural models of forests, but more importantly, demonstrate how they were subsumed within a broader system of cultural logic. Behavioral data focused on settlement geography and wood use, and the ecological data focused on forests: specifically, their changing extent, composition, age-structure, and zonal communities. This environmental history is thus a story of accelerated environmental change during an inherently unstable historical period which focused on the interplay of cultural cognition, human behavior and ecological change. |
