Hudson Ice
Ice harvesting on the Hudson during the 19th century fascinates me because, unlike any other industry I can think of, no groups or individuals in society seem to have been disadvantaged by it. Its beauty was in how perfectly it worked out for so many; as naturalist John Borroughs put it, "No man sows yet many men reap a harvest from the Hudson." Farmers harvested the ice in the late winter when there was a lull in their normally busy lifestyles. They cut ice with an horse-pulled saw; the equipment was cheap given the large volume of ice they could sell, mostly to tenements in New York City. Ice was a commodity that everyone wanted and nature made it available with little investment.
Ice harvesting was different from other resource harvesting in that it didn't have a significant negative impact on the environment. While logging and mining destroy the landscape, pollute groundwater, and take many years to regenerate (if ever), harvesting ice capitalized on a resource that didn't pollute, had little impact on the ecosystem, and renewed itself each year. The concept of working with nature instead of against it is an idea that we should take a lesson from. For example, though we will run out of oil and coal, wind is a resource that will remain bountiful for as long as we can conceive. The cost of fossil fuels will inevitably increase as supply gets smaller; it is in our best interest to invest in wind now because we are sure of its long term availability.
The information in this post about ice harvesting is from "The Hudson" by Tom Lewis.
posted by Emma Stewart @ 8:38 PM
3 Comments:
I found this post to be very interesting in several ways. First, your statement asserting that no groups were disadvantaged in ice harvesting is great point but led me to wonder if many people died during the presumably rigorous work. Although I could not find any staggering statistics about horses and people falling through the ice (or any information on the dangers of ice harvesting at all really) I did come upon a few interesting sites. http://www.iceharvestingusa.com/iceharvestingusa.html is a site created by a teacher and his first grade class so it is not difficult to read. It is particularly pertinent to our studies because it includes several very interesting articles from the 1800's describing ice harvesting of the time (there is a link to an article from 1881 on ice harvesting on the Hudson in particular) as well as links to other sites some really great pictures of the process. I also found a site (http://www.theheartofnewengland.com/LifeInNewEngland-Ice-Harvesting.html) that gives the history of ice harvesting as a whole including some staggering statistics ("By 1900,
over 10,000,000 tons of ice was used annually"). The history of the collapse of ice harvesting (which came about, not surprisingly, after the invention of the electric refrigerator) also led me to wonder if one day the resources that you mention, such as oil and coal, that we rely so heavily upon, may one day just disappear with some new miraculous invention as the ice harvest did in the early 1900's.
Perhaps solar and wind power might be the new "ice".
Bottled water (spring or mineral) is another example of a modern ice. Ironic - we pay for "desirable" water by the bottle as we destroy and refuse to clean-up local waterways.
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