Deforestation and ecological change

Deforestation and ecological change are not merely scenery in the novel but a long, cumulative transformation of land: settlement, agriculture, and timber markets clear forests while displacing wildlife and narrowing the resources available to Indigenous communities. Across generations, the narrative places the promise of inexhaustible timber beside visible ecological alteration, showing how natural regrowth can coexist with losses that are neither immediate nor easily reversed.

Commercial Forests and the Promise of Permanence

Charles Duquet’s turn toward timber begins in his dissatisfaction with the fur trade. Beaver and other animals could disappear, and markets could swing between scarcity and surplus; he therefore searched for a commodity that seemed more permanent. He settled on forest products, imagining timber for ships, houses, and fuel as a resource that could support lasting wealth. Because he believed the forest was vast and self-renewing, he planned to accumulate money through furs and then expand into timber rather than abandon the profitable trade at once.

That confidence met a commercial route. When Captain Verdwijnen traded in India, Duquet considered how a three-cornered route might work for a lumber merchant. Later, an opportunity to supply English and Scottish shipbuilders drew him into secret, complicated, and risky trade with the enemy. Shipbuilding sharpened the scale of demand: fifty acres of oak were needed for one seventy-four-gun warship, and hardwood forests along New France’s rivers began to fall to Duquet’s ambitions. The wood travelled outward into distant markets, while the ecological cost remained in the forests from which it was taken.

The novel repeatedly exposes the gap between the idea of permanent supply and the changing landscapes that idea produces. When Duquet returned to Wobik, he found the village enlarged by fifty houses, with a grain mill, a water-powered sawmill, a broad sheep common, and a road where he remembered a muddy trail. Fields and crops had replaced visible woodland. He briefly wondered whether forests could be as vulnerable as beavers, but reassured himself that trees resprouted from stumps, spread seed, and grew from roots. He concluded that New France’s forests were too vast to disappear. The scene makes the contradiction plain: the landscape has already changed markedly, yet the belief in limitless recovery survives.

Settlement and Mi’kmaq Ecological Knowledge

The expansion of Acadian settlement alters more than the tree cover. In Mi’kmaq country, French families cultivate maize and turnips, drain salt marshes for hay, and exchange woodland and animal products in an economy increasingly organized around surplus. Moose, caribou, and bears retreat, while beavers are heavily reduced by demand for their pelts. The beaver skin, once placed on graves, has become a form of money exchanged for guns and metal pots. These changes connect the fur trade to altered practices and relationships, not simply to a declining animal population.

The consequences are also visible in everyday access to food and medicine. After a settler named Philippe Null acquires livestock, his cattle and horses roam freely and consume nutritious and medicinal plants within a day’s walk. Pigs brought by other Acadians forage in the woods and dig for clams, competing directly with Mi’kmaq women who gather shellfish. A Mi’kmaq toddler is killed by a hog while trying to imitate the clam diggers. The episode shows how introduced domestic animals, settlement patterns, and resource competition can make ecological change a direct threat to community life.

Sosep understands this transformation as cumulative encroachment. He observes that settlers’ animals damage food sources, their boats and nets take fish, and the plants they bring displace local plants. He acknowledges that many settlers may not intend harm, but stresses the imbalance between a numerous incoming population and a small Indigenous one. His warning that Mi’kmaq people must preserve their own world in thought and practice gives the environmental changes a cultural and political dimension: survival depends on retaining a way of understanding people, plants, animals, and birds as mutually helpful persons, even while living in two worlds.

Settlement continues to expand through the conversion of marsh and woodland into farmland. Settlers from La Rochelle and elsewhere drain grassy marshes, fell trees, and establish houses along muddy streets; their appetite for surplus includes shellfish, berries, fish, logs, hay, and hides, which are exchanged for more livestock and poultry. The Mi’kmaq may tolerate or befriend newcomers, but the expanding economy steadily reshapes habitats and access to resources. The narrative thus distinguishes coexistence between individuals from the larger pressure exerted by settlement and commercial extraction.

Logging, Regrowth, and Ecological Transformation

The spread of commercial logging changes the forest even where trees return. In the disputed region between Maine, New Hampshire, and New Brunswick, Achille joins a crew that will cut pine through the winter and work rafts when the ice breaks. The scale of the activity is widespread: men cut in hundreds of places. Seedlings emerge on cleared ground, but each cutover tract develops a slightly different succession of species. The forest remains alive, yet it is no longer the same forest. Few people notice the change, while the same woodland is regarded as both an obstacle and a source of wealth. Achille sees a parallel in the treatment of the Mi’kmaq, whom settlers use and diminish.

The damage becomes more conspicuous in the timber frontier of New Zealand. Shore stations combine logging camps and trading posts dealing in flax, spars, and lumber; associated warehouses, sawmills, and small shipyards draw Europeans to harbors with convenient timber. Operators take the most valuable trees and move on, leaving smoldering stumps and large quantities of waste. After cutting kahikatea, they turn to kauri; in places, downed trees carpet the ground for miles, and burning is used to clear the mass. The fire removes far more than saleable timber, including brush, vines, birds, insects, fruit, bats, epiphytes, ferns, and forest litter. The extractive system treats the unfamiliar forest chiefly as material for profit, and its aftermath is a stripped and burned landscape.

The same pattern of seemingly inexhaustible supply appears in the United States. James Duke and Lennart Vogel had expected Ohio timberland to offer a reserve after forests in New England and New York had been cut out. Instead, Vogel reports that thousands of settlers arrived, burned and cut nearly all the white pine, and replaced the woodland with farms. Prime trees were piled for burning. The episode overturns the assumption that land acquired as a future reserve will remain forest: migration and agricultural clearing can erase its value as timber before the company’s plans mature.

Corporate Ambition, Waste, and Recognition

Armenius Breitsprecher recognizes the consequences of the company’s pursuit of newly discovered Michigan timber. As James Duke exults in the vast supply and proposes mobilizing a thousand workers, Armenius sees an intention to clear the continent. He condemns the waste of sound wood, destruction of soil, gullying and erosion, and disregard for the future. His account identifies a chain of damage: rapid extraction leaves forests and soils degraded, while the conviction that another forest is always available turns the next tract into a substitute rather than a reason to restrain cutting. The company’s growth, in his view, risks making rapacity its operating engine.

Dieter Breitsprecher later challenges the political and commercial systems that prolong this pattern. He objects to conservation laws whose loopholes permit continued exploitation, especially the land-lieu clause, which allows logged-off land to be exchanged for untouched timber elsewhere. He argues that only a small fraction of standing forest becomes lumber; much is burned or abandoned. The issue is therefore not only the quantity of trees felled but the waste built into the land-acquisition and logging system. Although he criticizes lobbying and legislation, his own connection to the company complicates his position: Duke & Breitsprecher employs lobbyists, and he recognizes that he benefits by association from practices he privately condemns.

Dieter’s commercial arguments also begin to accommodate longer time horizons. He tells the board that timber will become scarce and more valuable, and that continued forest holdings may support future lumber or paper production. Old Breitsprecher lands he planted two decades earlier now bear sturdy trees that could become valuable timber in another thirty or forty years. This evidence persuades the board to think in decades rather than months or years. The change does not erase the company’s profit motive, but it sets long-term cultivation against the quick depletion of old forests.

Competing Definitions of a Forest

The contrast between exploitation and renewal finally becomes a dispute over what counts as a forest. Charley Breitsprecher describes a true woodland as an interdependent system of air, intertwined roots, ferns, lichens, insects, disease, soil, water, and weather: a forest living for itself, rather than existing for human benefit. Dieter answers with a different model, in which managed land supplies revenue, jobs, shade, and pleasure, and wild forests are cut and replaced with trees that can be grown as a crop. He invokes the forestry argument that cultivated timber can be renewed while controlling erosion and sustaining supply.

These competing definitions give the novel’s ecological history its central tension. Natural regrowth is real: stumps sprout, roots send up shoots, and planted trees become mature timber over time. But regeneration does not make each replacement woodland equivalent to the forest that was removed. Species succession changes after cutting; extensive clearing converts woods and marshes to farms; burning and waste destroy more than merchantable trees; and wildlife and Indigenous access to food and medicine diminish. The belief in endless forests mistakes the capacity of some trees to return for the permanence of an entire ecological world.