Historian Richard W. Judd, PdD, Adelaide & Alan Bird Professor of History at University of Maine, explores the mix of ecological process and human activity that shaped that history over the past 12,000 years, in this Arnold Arboretum talk on Sunday, November 1 beginning at 2 pm in the Hunnewell Building. He traces a succession of cultures through New England’s changing post-glacial environment down to the 1600s, when the arrival of Europeans interrupted this co-evolution of nature and culture. A long period of tension and warfare, inflected by a variety of environmental problems, opened the way for frontier expansion. This in turn culminated in a unique landscape of forest, farm, and village that has become the embodiment of what Judd calls “second nature”— culturally modified landscapes that have superseded a more pristine “first nature.” Judd will relate significant cultural and ecological changes that have influenced the evolution of the New England landscape over time. Free for Arboretum members, $10 nonmembers.

Register at my.arboretum.harvard.edu or call 617-384-5277.