Book review: Paradise Lost? Chapter 2

Chapter 2: An Eighteenth-Century Flower Child, William Bartram. Charlotte M. Porter

Born in Kingsessing, Pennsylvania, in 1739, William Bartram grew up in a prosperous environment for what will later become his vocation. Their house had its own botanic garden, and his dad was a self-taught botanist who corresponded with English Quakers and members of the Royal Society of London on subjects related to natural history. In 1772, William Bartram was hired by a wealthy British to collect and draw plants. This is when Bartram started traveling in different areas of the country. His journey lasted from 1773 to 1777, and out of this experience a book was published in 1791: Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territory of the Muschogugles, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions, Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians. According to the author of the article, Charlotte M. Porter, even though the term “environment” does not appear in that lengthy title, its last part suggest a study of the interaction between nature and humans.
Among the many places he went through, Porter focuses on William Bartram’s journey through the Alachua Savanna, in central East Florida. According to Porter, the Alachua Savanna was one of the greatest landscapes of Bartram’s travel, being an amazing natural garden. Bartram had been hired for scientific purposes, but this was not his only focus. Indeed, by traveling with skin traders, he became more accustomed to their habits, and also studied their relations to the native Indian tribes. From Porter’s article, it seems that one of the most important element emerging from Bartram’s narrative is the concept of “asymmetry”. He describes the asymmetry in the “natural communities”, and also asymmetries in extension of species, where they were numerous or scarce. There were then exchange asymmetries: between the American scientists and the British colonists, or also between the skin traders and the Indians. Bartram realized how the skin traders would ask for more and more products from the Indians, but gave in exchange fewer European goods. He observed how the colonial. He was concerned with the consequences for the Indians hunting grounds and the pauperization of the Indians. Bartram worries that this excessive exploitation of nature will lead to the disappearance of the Indians, and the deterioration of the Floridian wildlife.
Porter’s article is comprehensive (she draws different needed contexts enabling a more in-depth analysis of Bartram’s book), and very dense. She brings the reader many things to think of, even though it feels at times a little over-whelming in regards to the numbers of tracks she encourages them to follow.