Managing the River Commons
192 pages, 6 x 9
7 b&w illus., 3 maps
Paperback
Release Date:30 Jul 2021
ISBN:9781625345844
Managing the River Commons
Fishing and New England's Rural Economy
By Erik Reardon
University of Massachusetts Press
New England once hosted large numbers of anadromous fish, which migrate between rivers and the sea. Salmon, shad, and alewives served a variety of functions within the region's preindustrial landscape, furnishing not only maritime areas but also agricultural communities with an important source of nutrition and a valued article of rural exchange.
Historian Erik Reardon argues that to protect these fish, New England's farmer-fishermen pushed for conservation measures to limit commercial fishing and industrial uses of the river. Beginning in the colonial period and continuing to the mid-nineteenth century, they advocated for fishing regulations to promote sustainable returns, compelled local millers to open their dams during seasonal fish runs, and defeated corporate proposals to erect large-scale dams. As environmentalists work to restore rivers in New England and beyond in the present day, Managing the River Commons offers important lessons about historical conservation efforts that can help guide current campaigns to remove dams and allow anadromous fish to reclaim these waters.
Historian Erik Reardon argues that to protect these fish, New England's farmer-fishermen pushed for conservation measures to limit commercial fishing and industrial uses of the river. Beginning in the colonial period and continuing to the mid-nineteenth century, they advocated for fishing regulations to promote sustainable returns, compelled local millers to open their dams during seasonal fish runs, and defeated corporate proposals to erect large-scale dams. As environmentalists work to restore rivers in New England and beyond in the present day, Managing the River Commons offers important lessons about historical conservation efforts that can help guide current campaigns to remove dams and allow anadromous fish to reclaim these waters.
'Managing the River Commons is a concise, readable book with an ambitious temporal scope that speaks directly to present-day ecological concerns while challenging narratives and chronologies of environmental degradation.'—Keith Pluymers, American Historical Review
'Reardon persuasively argues for the importance of river fish for the ecology of the watershed, Native Americans, and early settlers. He also makes a case for their importance to the world today.'—John T. Cumbler, author of Cape Cod: An Environmental History of a Fragile Ecosystem
'Managing the River Commons shows how central river fish were to rural/agrarian New England prior to industrialization and how farmer-fishermen sought conservation and sustainable resource use. It goes beyond this by suggesting that river restoration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century shares a basic environmental ethos with those farmer-fishermen of preindustrial New England.'—Brian J. Payne, author of Fishing a Borderless Sea: Environmental Territorialism in the North Atlantic, 1818–1910
'Reardon should be commended for resurrecting the intractable historiographical debates of new rural historians and new labor historians of the 1980s and 1990s.'—H-Net Reviews
'Reardon provides a cautionary tale of human impacts on the commons but shows that through proper management, people can overcome historical issues related to the use of a commons and restore impacted species. Written from the perspective of an environmental historian, the book provides a unique perspective on fisheries conservation in the Northeast and elsewhere . . . Highly recommended.'—CHOICE
'In this timely and engaging book, Erik Reardon places pre-industrial communities' relationship with the environment under the microscope . . . This is a highly successful book that offers an important new insight into New England river economies.'—Journal of Agrarian Change
ERIK REARDON is visiting assistant professor of history at Bates College.
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