The Easiest Lifestyle in the World

AQQ

Prof. James T. Lemon writes: "A relatively sloppy landscape was the reflection of the easiest lifestyle in the world. The wastefulness of American society today may well follow from the abundance of the colonial era."

"Agricultural and Society in Early America", Agricultural History Review 35 (1987): 89.

We think of early Americans as being poor. In most of the things that matter, air, land, forest, space, and water, they were surpassingly rich; and they squandered most of it. Talk about mortgaging your grandchildren's future.

An oldtimer once told Clifton Johnson, an early travel writer: "No matter how much land the old-time farmers cleared up they kept a piece of the best woodland for posterity. It was the sentiment of every farmer that this woodland should be saved to draw from to keep up the buildings on the place, and it was sacred to them. Yet as soon as posterity got their hands on it they turned it into money and swept those patches of woodland off the face of the earth as clean as you could sweep with a broom." (Highways and Byways of the Great Lakes, 1911, p. 13.) It appears that it may have been the grandchildren that destroyed the inheritance of the great grandchildren. Still, there is no doubt that the pioneer white settlers were wasteful of natural resources, and passed on the attitude.