William Cronon

William Cronon

William Cronon studies American environmental history and the history of the American West. Cronon’s research seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us. His first book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), was a study of how the New England landscape changed as control of the region shifted from Indians to European colonists. Cronon is currently at work on a history of Portage, Wisconsin, from the end of the last Ice Age down to the present. He is also completing a book entitled Saving Nature in Time: The Environmental Past and the Human Future on the evolving relationship between environmental history and environmentalism, and what the two might learn from each other.