The first American settlers cut down millions of trees to deliberately engineer climate change
Long term, it worked, but not how they intended
European settlers expected paradise — plump fruits, lush grasses, and clean, crisp waters. It seemed obvious the New World would come with all the riches of Eden, cultivated by a perpetually mild climate. After all, the land was roughly the same latitude as Europe.
The logic was flawed. Not only did America’s first colonists encounter dense, dark wilderness in the Northeast, their winters were freezing and summers dripped with humidity. Frequent, strong storms rolled in at a moment’s notice. They were shocked, disappointed, and dangerously unprepared.
Rather than adapt, a collection of scientists, doctors, and writers campaigned to deforest the land. In their minds, cutting down thousands of acres at a time would improve the weather. Whether they were “successful” or not really isn’t the point. The fact that American colonists and preeminent thinkers actually advocated climate change by mass deforestation is a stormy stain in scientific history.
It’s not like they didn’t have a little warning. Some of the earliest settlers wrote back to Europe disappointed with the “climate” — a term they used mostly to describe temperature and precipitation on a micro scale — and warned prospective colonists away.
According to 2005’s Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, Rhode Island missionary James MacSparran spent many of his 36 years in the New World warning colonists against emigrating. Before his death in 1757, he called the climate “intemperate,” with unpredictable swings in weather extremes, and terrifying thunderstorms. To him, it was “destructive to human bodies.” Science writer John Evelyn wrote in 1664 that forest moisture was contributing to disease. One Dr. Alexander Hewett maintained that “no European, without hazard, can endure the fatigues of laboring in the open air.”
But still they came, and thousands died from exposure and hunger, the terrain and seasons unforgiving to European farming. Soon, mastering the American climate became not only a matter of survival but a form of political propaganda. Unless the settlers could prove that the land and weather were manageable, they wouldn’t be able to attract more colonists. And without more colonists, they could not completely conquer the land. It was a colonial catch-22.
Ironically, Columbus was one of the first explorers who offered proof that deforestation “worked.” In the 2003 study Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, we learn that Columbus observed “from experience” that clearing forests in the Madeira, Canary, and Azores archipelagos appeared to have reduced rain and mist.
In North America, where Columbus never set foot, settlers took his prophecy to heart. A collection of scientific thinkers and propagandists used loose observations and anecdotal evidence to insist that mass deforestation could work in constructing milder weather. (And hey, they needed to clear a bunch of ancestral Native American lands for agriculture anyway.)
Their theories, by today’s standards, are simple-minded. Then, the concept of climate was almost entirely thought to correlate to latitude, and scientific minds mainly accounted for only temperature and wind movement, which they believed was largely determined by the amount of sunlight an area received. Why the American Northeast, with similar latitude to the Mediterranean, was not more arid, they struggled to square. Some believed the continent was brand new and had just emerged from the ocean or an ice cap. Either way, they believed exposing more of the land to circulating air and sunlight would reduce the region’s nonsensical humidity and, actually, lead to less frequent rainfall.
Plus, beginning the task would surely attract more of their European brethren.
When the first colonists arrived, wrote John Adams, “the whole continent was one dismal wilderness, the haunt of wolves and bears and more savage men. Now the forests are removed, the land covered with fields of corn, orchards bending with fruit, and the magnificent habitations of rational and civilized people.”
By the 18th century, American colonists had drained marshes, tilled soil, and chopped down millions of acres of virgin forests. Before the settlers arrived, the United States had about one billion acres of forests, which covered about half of the country, including Alaska. In the time since 1600, it would be reduced by about 286 million acres (an area roughly the size of Colombia), converted to mostly agricultural use.
People insisted the climate had improved. In 1769, Edward Antill wrote a letter to the American Philosophical Society: “Whoever compares the present state of the air, with it formerly, before the country was opened, cleared and drained, will find that, we are every year fast advancing to that pure and perfect temperament of air, fit for making the best and richest Wines of every kind.” (Admirable ends, but questionable means.) Prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather remarked, “Our cold is much moderated since the opening and clearing of our woods, and the winds do not blow roughly as in the days of our fathers, when water, cast up into the air, would commonly be turned into ice before it came to the ground.”
Even our most famous forefathers chimed in with benevolent compliments for the deforestation agenda. In his Notes on Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “A change in our climate…is taking place very sensibly….The elderly inform me, the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do now.” In a 1763 letter, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Cleared land absorbs more heat and melts snow quicker.” He added one caveat, however: More study was necessary to confirm these findings.
By 1811, Harvard-educated Hugh Williamson reported that New England snows had been more than halved over a fifty-year period. He argued that once future generations had “cultivated the interior part of the country, we shall seldom be visited by frosts or snows.” Period. “It follows, that a country, in a state of nature, covered with trees, must be much colder than the same country when cleared.”
Contrarians reported the absolute opposite, and their voices helped fuel a 19th-century conservation movement and more rigorous climate science. It was an uphill battle, however, with prominent voices continuing to extol the merits of a utopian civilization based primarily around commercialized agriculture.
Climate hadn’t been “improving,” argued Massachusetts doctor Job Wilson, who studied meteorological records spanning 16 years. Deforestation had made the country’s heat and cold even more extreme. One William Dunbar wrote to the American Philosophical Society, “It is with us a general remark, that of late years the summers have become hotter and the winters colder than formerly.” Noah Webster, of dictionary fame, agreed that clearing trees could certainly exaggerate extremes.
But attacking deforestation science often came with its own political motivations. America wanted to attract more people to the Western frontier, where the air was dry and hot. Desert loomed for hundreds of miles. Expansionists decried deforestation, promising to plant new wooded expanses for a more pleasant and habitable West. The country’s relationship with climate was a veritable Goldilocks tale — nothing was ever just right for everyone. And the reasons had less to do with science and more to do with motivations.
On the other hand, enough 18th-century outcry contributed to more fastidious measurements and data on climate impact. And as more people insisted deforestation led to macro-scale climate change, a small 19th-century conservation movement bloomed, then increased again after World War I. Now, modern scientists attribute forest cover as an important influence in climate, especially as it relates to light absorption and carbon dioxide. Forests offset harmful greenhouse gases that would otherwise enter the earth’s atmosphere.
But the world still deforests 15 billion trees every year. Since the beginning of human civilization, the global tree count has fallen by 46 percent. And warming trends are increasing drought risk and shrinking geographic ranges for trees. If we continue at this pace, we will have less and less forest cover, whether we like it or not. And that is a bigger problem than a couple of pesky summer thunderstorms.
