| My dissertation, "The Low Green Prairies of the Sea: Economic Usage and Cultural Construction of the Gulf of Maine Salt Marshes" explores the environmental, cultural, and economic definitions New Englanders attached to salt marshes from the colonial period through the present. The study argues that salt marshes were altered constantly by human use and perceptions. Colonists relied on the natural grasses as a ready supply of fodder for their livestock. This meant that salt marshes helped to shape white settlement patterns in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, and subsequently in New Hampshire and Maine. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, farmers viewed the marshes and their nutritious grasses as commodities for reclamation and sale, respectively. Late nineteenth-century artists and writers, however, developed yet another interpretation of this landscape: a natural refuge from the urban problems in nearby Boston, Portsmouth, and Portland. The twentieth century brought still other interpretations. Naturalists and ecologists, for instance, endeavor to preserve salt marshes for posterity, authors of hiking-trail guides portray them as attractive and restful destinations, and restaurant owners and micro-brewers commodify them on their menus and beer bottles as selling points for their products. |
