Reflections in Bullough's Pond
    Diana Muir
  2000 U. Press of New England, Hanover, USA/London, UK
   ISBN: 0874519098


From the inspiration of a nearby pond in a small Massachusetts town comes a reconstruction & interpretation of New England's natural history & the people who have lived there since time immemorial.

Diana Muir has taken a radically new approach to illustrate for us general readers, the vast inter-relationships between natural ecology & human economics. Put simply, this author offer us an exhilerating tour of Paleolithic megafauna, population crises & has bodaciously extrapolated - in the grand tradition of Bronowski, Attenborough & Burke - a lively, thoughtful & eminently readable history of New England's land, animals & people.

This author has a great time discussing, in an engaging & learned way, the vast topographical story & multitude of bounties of her beloved region. Her inspiration is an old, artificial millpond outside her front door: its reason for existence & how it & its natural ancestors fed & housed all living things from bacteria to moose since the glaciers receded. From long gone communities of people whose middens can be found into which they had discarded oyster shells measuring 20 inches to a long detailed look at the coast lands & the forests, swamps & creatures therein.

Whereas the aboriginal folk had practised a kind of birth control & farming we can hardly comprehend from our modern, must-do-something stance - we trod roughshod over all when we landed & claimed the New World for ourselves. We proceeded to accomplish in a few decades what hadn't been done since the last Ice Age. Diana Muir, however, has written no jeremiad & does not scold us for our wanton ways, rather she has written a gladsome opus to the industry & inventiveness of our minds & hands.

One little eager critter had been transforming the land over millenia & had the misfortune to be wrapped in a pelt that could be made into something people liked to wear. Thus upon the heads of any man who could afford it, set the demise of the beaver & that changed the topography of New England. Within 40 years, beavers had been trapped out. That is one species about which we know in recent history. Previously, entire populations had dissolved into dust & mud for reasons quite unrelated to humans.

Yankee history, Diana Muir asserts, was a string of ecological crises from which the only escape was to create new solutions - thus giving rise to Yankee ingenuity. In the post-Revolutionary decades, farming was about the only general occupation available & with the rise in population, there wasn't enough land to go around & what there was had been pretty much picked over & poorly husbanded. So what did the young men & women of this new nation do? They invented things that set in motion the Industrial Revolution that to this day, astonishes & awes us with its imagination & vigor.

Diana Muir has written the kind of history book I relish; the kind of history book that tells stories of how shoes & fish became major industries; she sews together previously disparate events into a patchwork quilt of the life & times of a topography over which we humans chased each other, the animals & our dreams.

Once the history lesson is over & we're caught up to the present, Diana Muir presents us with an entirely different adventure. In her chapter: The Third Revolution, she recapitulates in cogent paragraphs millenia of ecological realities from photosynthesis & the water cycle that our ancestors discovered to what we now know: that the Third Revolution will entail the discovery & deployment of new kinds of energy & materials. The alternative proposition, that there must be a limit to population growth, not being popular.

In her Epilogue, Diana Muir muses upon Genesis 1:28. In particular the words “...subdue...dominion over....every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” She poses the absurd image of Man subduing tigers who enjoy eating men: “...Today tigers are an endangered species...We possess a degree of mastery over our world that our ancestors only worked toward & wished for. Be very careful what you wish for...”

In the end she watches a red-tailed hawk patrolling the edges of Bullough's Pond, this niche of wildness set in a suburb which has inspired this writer, this thinker, this weaver of historical memories of people & animals long since gone, to compose an extra-ordinary elegy for a land she so obviously loves & to retell its wondrous & prolific story.

Reflections in Bullough's Pond is a remarkable read; a keeper to which I shall return again & again to engross myself in Diana Muir's matchless writing, impeccably cited resources & fascinating Notes. This is a symphony of a book & a must for anyone remotely interested in how land & water, fire & wind work together to create this Eden in which we live & to remember, once again, how very ingenious & inventive are we humans & what a profound impact we all have.

More from Diana Muir: The Glorious Fourth; Thanksgiving; Cocoa Ice & Giants in the Land.

Do check out my Interview with Diana Muir.
(10/01/00)

Rebecca