I'm going to bed now (about 3 hours too late for a morning jog, unfortunately) so I'm not going to delve too deeply into this now but it says something about environmental history that when asked for work relating to settler colonialism multiple people invoke Changes in the Land.

I mean this neither as a diss to those suggesting the work nor to Cronon--it's a great book! I think I'm simply marking what is true, that this book is not really engaging with what we'd now call the (past and present) realities of settler colonialism.

This is a book in environmental history, written, I think, in 1983, coming out of a grad seminar for Edmund Morgan. Separate from the named paradigm of "settler colonialism" not then really existing, I wouldn't expect this work to be engaging with those ideas.

And yet. And yet when asked about #envhist and settler colonialism it's what (some) people think of. That's a problem, I think. And again, I'm not calling anyone out. I'm calling our field out. Or at least asking why people are seeing a connection that I don't think exists.