We’re near the end of the eight-year bicentennial of the creation of the Erie Canal. In 2017, two centuries after the canal’s groundbreaking, I published a book about the canal and the key figure in getting it built, DeWitt Clinton, who was governor of New York among other positions, and an ancestor of my wife and son. The 200th anniversary of the canal’s opening will be marked on October 26 when a replica of the Seneca Chief, the boat on which Clinton traversed the canal, will be docked in the Hudson off lower Manhattan.
The canal connected Albany to Buffalo, and thus ultimately the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes, since a boat could go up the Hudson from New York City and then head west at Albany (or make the trip in reverse); people, goods and ideas henceforth could move much faster between the Eastern Seaboard and the Midwest. This was a major step in the U.S. becoming a vast, powerful nation and a world leader in commerce and technology.
That wasn’t good for everybody; the impact on Native-Americans of the Erie Canal’s construction and the westward movement it enabled is rightly getting attention. But the underground railroad and the spread of abolitionism were also expedited by the canal, as was the industrialization that enabled the North to win the Civil War. Another idea that flowed along the waterway was women’s suffrage, with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Yet another was the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, which spread like a forest fire such that portions of upstate New York were called the “burned-over district.”
History is complicated, despite simplifying distortions by left and right. The President has issued an order to “ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.” It’s a demand for bullshit.
Natural history is complicated too. At a recent panel discussion at the Simons Foundation, microbiologist Arpita Bose and paleoclimatologist Jessica Tierney brought different perspectives to changes that have occurred on Earth over “deep time.” The respective roles played by microbes and geological processes in sparking shifts in atmospheric composition and temperatures over long stretches are subject to debate. The problem with current, anthropogenic, climate change is that it’s happening much faster, outrunning the capacity of the biosphere to adapt. Bose used to think that microbes “didn’t care” what humans did, as they could adjust to resulting environmental changes, but it seems microbes are challenged as well. On a brighter note, her lab’s research raises possibilities of microbes producing biodegradable plastics and other environmental solutions.
“We need more bogs,” said the panel’s moderator, Quanta magazine senior biology editor Hannah Waters, in response to Tierney and Bose’s noting the importance of locking carbon away into environments where it won’t readily return to the atmosphere. Quanta is an excellent publication that focuses on the cutting edge of science and math and generally avoids wading into politics. But adverse developments have impelled the magazine’s notice. “Since taking office, the Trump administration has taken siege to the U.S. research ecosystem, with a particular focus on undermining the quest to track Earth’s climate,” wrote contributor Zach Savitsky in a recent article. “Decades of work is on the line as the administration strips funding, guts agencies, scrubs resources and buries datasets.”
DeWitt Clinton was active in science as well as politics. He collected botanical specimens along the Erie Canal route (the wildflower genus Clintonia is named for him) and published papers on the natural history of New York state. In an 1823 speech to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, he said: “Pleasure is a shadow, wealth is vanity, and power a pageant; but knowledge is ecstatic in enjoyment, perennial in frame, unlimited in space and indefinite in duration. In the performance of its sacred offices, it fears no danger, spares no expense, omits no exertion. It scales the mountains, looks into the volcano, dives into the ocean, perforates the Earth, wings its flight into the skies, explores sea and land, contemplates the distant, examines the minute, comprehends the great, and ascends the sublime.”