Vox Meditantis

Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894) published Rural Hours in 1850 – four years before Thoreau’s Walden – establishing herself as the first woman to publish a major work of environmental natural history in America. Through meticulous daily observations recorded in journal format, she documented the flora, fauna, and seasonal rhythms of the Otsego Lake region around Cooperstown, New York, providing detailed botanical classifications and ecological insights that would later inform climate science. When Charles Darwin encountered her work, he was so impressed by her understanding of invasive species that he wrote to botanist Asa Gray asking, “Who is she? She seems a very clever woman”. Yet despite this recognition and her pioneering calls for forest conservation that predated both Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh, Cooper has been largely erased from environmental history – overshadowed by her famous father, novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and diminished by the 19th-century convention that required her to publish anonymously as “by a lady”. ​

Cooper’s contribution to science extends beyond beautiful prose. Her phenological records – the careful documentation of seasonal timing in plant and animal life cycles – provide invaluable baseline data for modern climate change research. Her warnings about deforestation and unsustainable resource extraction spoke directly to consequences we now recognise as the foundations of our current environmental crisis. In an era when women’s intellectual labour was systematically devalued, Cooper built a body of environmental observation and advocacy that deserves recognition alongside the canonical male nature writers who have eclipsed her legacy. Today, as we confront environmental grief and biodiversity loss, her voice returns to us across nearly two centuries, reminding us that the work of bearing witness to a changing world has always required both scientific rigour and moral courage. ​

Miss Cooper, thank you for speaking with us today. I’d like to begin by acknowledging something remarkable: when you published Rural Hours in 1850, Charles Darwin himself read your work and was so struck by your observations that he wrote to the botanist Asa Gray asking about you. How does it feel, looking back, to know that one of history’s greatest scientific minds took notice of your work?

It is a curious thing, to learn of one’s influence only long after the fact. When I set down those observations in my journal, I had no expectation that they would travel so far, or be received by minds I held in such regard. I wrote simply as one who walks – who looks – who records what is seen. That Mr Darwin should have found value in my notes on the battle between our native plants and the invaders from the Old World, the thistle and dock that followed European settlement as surely as our own footsteps, this speaks perhaps to the universality of these changes. They are not confined to one lakeshore in New York. They are the signature of an age.

And yet, I confess, there is a bitterness in knowing that whilst my observations reached him, my name did not. Published “by a lady,” as was proper for a woman of my station, I became a question mark, a curiosity. Who is she? A clever woman, he said. But not a woman whose name was permitted to stand alongside her work.

That anonymity you mention – publishing as “by a lady” – seems to have had lasting consequences for your recognition. Can you speak to that decision, and what it meant to work within those constraints?

The decision, if one can call it that, was scarcely mine alone. It was the custom of the time, and custom has a weight that few of us possess the strength to shift. A woman might write, yes, but she must do so modestly, without the presumption of authority. To attach one’s name to a work of natural philosophy – particularly one that dared to critique the practices of men in their dominion over the land – would have been seen as unseemly, as a violation of the sphere allotted to our sex.

I do not say this without resentment. The work was mine. The hours spent in the field, in all weathers, observing the opening of the hepatica in spring, the departure of the warblers in autumn, the slow encroachment of foreign weeds upon our meadows – these were my hours, my observations. Yet the world would know me only as “a lady,” as though I were any lady, interchangeable, my particular knowledge of no account.

It is a peculiar form of erasure, is it not? To be acknowledged whilst remaining unknown. To be praised whilst remaining nameless.

Let’s talk about your formative years and how you came to natural history. I understand both your grandfathers played significant roles in shaping your scientific interests. Can you tell me about those early influences?

My education in the natural world began, as the best educations do, not in a schoolroom but in the out-of-doors. My maternal grandfather, John Peter DeLancey, was a gentleman farmer of considerable learning, and he possessed a particular devotion to botany. From the time I was quite small, he would take me on instructive drives through the countryside near Mamaroneck, where his estate, Heathcote Hill, commanded a fine prospect. He taught me to observe – not merely to look, but to see. To note the shape of a leaf, the arrangement of petals, the time when certain flowers appeared. He would quiz me gently: what family does this plant belong to? What are its properties? When shall we see it bloom again? ​

These lessons were not frivolous accomplishments, like the watercolours young ladies were expected to paint. They were rigorous training in classification, in the discipline of attention. My grandfather believed that knowledge of the natural world was both a moral duty and a practical necessity, particularly for those who would steward the land.

My paternal grandfather, Judge William Cooper, who founded Cooperstown, was of a different temperament but shared certain convictions. He was a man of considerable ambition and energy, a land speculator and developer who transformed wilderness into settlement. Yet even he understood, in his way, that this transformation carried responsibilities. He authored one of the first articles advocating for the careful conversion of wild lands into agricultural use, with some consideration for what was being lost. I do not think he went far enough – his vision was still one of dominion, of the land serving human purposes – but there was at least an acknowledgement that the process must be thoughtful, not merely rapacious. ​

Between these two men, I absorbed a fundamental understanding: that land has a history, that its creatures have their seasons and requirements, and that we who inhabit it are participants in something larger than our immediate wants.

You spent time in Europe as a young woman, studying in Paris. How did that formal education in botany and zoology differ from the informal instruction you’d received from your grandfathers?

The Paris schooling gave structure to what had been instinct, and names – proper Latin names – to what I had known by common designation. We studied with some rigour: the Linnaean classification, principles of plant morphology, the habits of insects. I kept notebooks filled with drawings and observations, attempting to capture with pen and watercolour what I saw through the microscope and in the herbarium. ​

But I will tell you what European study did not provide: it did not teach me to see my own place. The plants we studied were often European specimens, collected and dried, removed from their native ground. The approach was one of cataloguing, of possession, of bringing the world’s diversity under one taxonomic roof. There is value in this, certainly. Science requires such ordering. But it can also distance us from the particular – from the way bloodroot emerges in a certain hollow in early April, from the specific quality of light through maple leaves in October.

When I returned to Cooperstown, I found myself possessed of both languages: the formal Latin of scientific nomenclature and the vernacular poetry of place. I needed both. The farmer knows his land by one set of names, the botanist by another. To speak to both, to make natural history accessible whilst maintaining scientific accuracy, became my aim.

Let’s discuss the technical methodology behind Rural Hours. For our scientifically-minded readers, could you walk us through how you conducted your observations? What were your protocols, your tools, your daily practice?

The work was both simpler and more demanding than one might suppose. I kept no elaborate apparatus – this was field observation, not laboratory experiment. My tools were these: a good pair of eyes, a walking costume suited to all weathers, a small notebook and pencil carried always in my pocket, and a collecting basket for specimens. At home, I maintained a somewhat more extensive toolkit: botanical reference works, principally, a herbarium press for preserving specimens, watercolours for illustration, and a thermometer whose readings I recorded with some regularity. ​

The discipline lay in consistency. I walked nearly every day, regardless of weather, and I walked the same paths throughout the seasons so that I might observe change. This is essential – you cannot understand phenology, the timing of seasonal events, without repeated observation of the same ground. When does the shadbush bloom? Not “in spring” but on precisely which dates, and how does this vary from year to year? When do the first warblers arrive? When do the maples begin to turn? These patterns reveal themselves only to patient, repeated attention.

I recorded temperatures at regular intervals, noting how they corresponded to biological events. A hard frost in late spring might kill the apple blossoms – this has consequences for the autumn harvest, for the birds and insects that depend upon the fruit, for the families whose subsistence includes those apples. Everything connects.

For plant identification, I relied upon accurate description: leaf shape and arrangement, flower structure, seed pods, bark characteristics, the time and manner of blooming. I noted not only what species I observed but their relative abundance and the particular environments they favoured. The yellow violet grows in open meadows, the white violet in moister woodland shade – these distinctions matter. Over time, I began to detect patterns of change. Certain native wildflowers that had been abundant in my childhood were becoming scarce. European imports – the invasive species, though we did not use that term – were spreading aggressively. I documented these shifts as carefully as I could, though I confess I did not fully comprehend at the time how valuable such baseline data might prove to be. ​

That baseline data is actually one of your most important contributions to modern science. Climate researchers today use historical phenological records like yours to understand how seasonal timing has shifted with warming temperatures. Did you recognise at the time that you were creating a scientific record of lasting value?

I understood that I was witnessing change, and that change of a certain magnitude should be recorded. Whether future generations would find value in my notes – that was beyond my capacity to judge. I wrote initially for myself, to sharpen my own observation, to deepen my knowledge of the place I inhabited. Later, when publication became a possibility, I wrote for my contemporaries, hoping to foster in them a more attentive relationship with the natural world surrounding them.

But you suggest that these records now serve climate science, that they provide evidence of warming, of shifts in the timing of blooming and migration? This does not surprise me, though it saddens me. We were already witnessing disruption in my lifetime. The springs seemed to arrive differently than in my grandparents’ time. Certain birds appeared earlier or later, or failed to appear at all. The ice on Otsego Lake formed later, broke up earlier. ​

I documented what I saw with as much precision as I could muster, but I had not the tools to measure what you now measure – the gradual accumulation of heat, the parts per million of gases in the atmosphere. I could only observe the consequences: the phenological changes, as you term them, that signalled something fundamental was shifting in the relationship between the earth and its seasons.

If my small records now provide evidence, if they help to establish what has been lost or altered, then I am glad. Though it is a melancholy gladness, to be proven right about destruction.

You wrote, “It is not surprising, perhaps, that a man whose chief object in life is to make money should turn his timber into bank-notes with all possible speed.” This was an extraordinarily direct critique for 1850. Where did that moral clarity about environmental destruction come from?

From observation, and from inheritance. My grandfathers understood stewardship, even if imperfectly. My father, for all his preoccupation with literary fame, had an abiding love for these forests, for this lake. He had known them when they were vaster, wilder. I had known them in my childhood when they were already diminished, and I watched them shrink further still with every passing year. ​

The forests around Cooperstown were magnificent – great groves of pine and hemlock, maples centuries old. These trees had stood when the Mohawk people tended these lands. They had sheltered creatures beyond counting. And in the space of a single generation, they were being felled with astonishing speed, the timber floated down the Susquehanna to market, converted – yes – into bank-notes, into mere currency. ​

The critique you quote was not particularly bold on my part. It was simply truthful. When a man values a living forest only for its monetary equivalent, when he cannot see the intricate community of life it sustains, when he gives no thought to the future beyond his own immediate profit, then he is a kind of thief – stealing not only from the future but from the present, from all the other creatures who depend upon that forest for their existence.

I observed the consequences with my own eyes: the soil washing away where tree roots no longer held it, the streams running turbid with sediment, the birds disappearing as their nesting habitat vanished, the climate itself becoming more severe – hotter in summer, colder in winter – as the moderating influence of the forest was removed. ​

This was not abstract philosophy. This was documentation of loss. And it made me impatient with the pieties that justified such destruction – the language of “improvement” and “progress” that masked what was, in essence, plunder.

Speaking of documentation of loss, you wrote poignantly about the decline of passenger pigeons, noting that the vast flocks you’d seen in earlier years were already diminishing by the late 1840s. Of course, we now know the species went extinct by 1914. What was it like to witness the beginning of that extinction in real time?

I remember the year – it must have been 1842 or thereabouts – when the pigeons came through the valley in such numbers that the sky was darkened by them. Vast unbroken flocks, several miles in extent, one succeeding another for hours. The sound of their wings was like wind through the pines, or distant thunder. It was a sight to inspire awe – and, I confess, a certain disquiet, for there was something almost terrible in such abundance. ​

But even then, the older inhabitants would say, “This is nothing to what we once saw.” The flocks, it seemed, had already been diminishing for years. And by the time I wrote Rural Hours, they no longer came in such numbers. I noted this decline with concern, though I did not – I could not – foresee complete extinction. ​

You tell me they are gone entirely now? This knowledge sits heavy. I knew them to be persecuted – shot in great numbers, netted, suffocated while roosting, taken by the barrel-load to market. I knew the forests where they nested were being cut. But to imagine a creature so numerous, so seemingly inexhaustible, utterly extinguished – this speaks to a capacity for destruction I underestimated, I think, even in my gloomier assessments.

What was it like to witness this? Heartbreaking. Enraging. And, above all, clarifying. It confirmed what I already suspected: that abundance is not immunity, that no species is so numerous it cannot be obliterated if we pursue it with sufficient intensity and thoughtlessness. The passenger pigeon was a canary in the mine – though we did not save the canary, did we? We simply noted its silence and continued digging.

You mentioned your father several times. James Fenimore Cooper was one of America’s most celebrated novelists, and you served as his secretary and amanuensis for many years. How did that relationship shape your own work – and did it ultimately constrain your career?

My father was a brilliant man, a difficult man, a man of enormous energy and equally enormous need for assistance in managing his literary affairs. He encouraged my writing, my artwork, my study of natural history. In this, I was fortunate – many fathers would have considered such pursuits a waste of time for a daughter, or worse, unseemly. ​

But encouragement and true equality are not the same thing. I became his amanuensis because it was expected, because he needed me, because there was no other role available to me. What else was an unmarried daughter of my station to do? I could not attend university. I could not pursue a profession. I could manage my father’s correspondence, organise his notes, assist in editing his manuscripts. This work was valuable – I do not diminish it – but it was his work, in service of his legacy.

When he died in 1851, shortly after Rural Hours was published, I might have devoted myself more fully to my own writing. Instead, I became the keeper of his literary estate. Again, this was expected. Again, I complied. I edited anthologies of his work, wrote biographical sketches, defended his reputation. Years – decades – passed in this labour of preservation. ​

Did this constrain my own career? Yes. Undeniably. I might have written more, written differently, established my own distinct identity as a naturalist and author. Instead, I remained “the daughter of James Fenimore Cooper,” my own accomplishments perpetually in his shadow. Even Rural Hours, which enjoyed considerable success in its time – nine editions whilst I lived, praised by William Cullen Bryant as “one of the sweetest books ever printed” – even this was received partly as the interesting production of a literary daughter, not as the serious contribution to environmental science that it was. ​

I do not blame my father for this. He did not create the structures that limited me. But neither did he help me escape them. And after his death, when I might have claimed more space for my own voice, I chose – or felt compelled to choose – to amplify his voice instead. This is a pattern repeated endlessly amongst women of intellectual capacity: we become the secretaries, the amanuenses, the editors of men’s works. We enable genius whilst being denied the time and recognition to fully develop our own.

Late in life, you devoted yourself to charitable work – founding the Orphan House of the Holy Savior, which grew to house over a hundred children, and helping establish Thanksgiving Hospital. Was there a connection in your mind between environmental conservation and social welfare?

The connection is intimate. Both concern stewardship, responsibility, the proper care of what is vulnerable. A forest cannot defend itself against the axe. A child without parents cannot defend itself against poverty and neglect. In both cases, those who possess power and resources have obligations toward those who do not. ​

I saw the same rapacious disregard in both spheres. The man who would strip a hillside of its timber without thought for what comes after, who would turn living community into dead currency – such a man will also regard children as economic units, workers to be exploited or burdens to be discarded. The mentality is the same: extraction without responsibility, use without care, profit without regard for consequence.

The orphanage work consumed much of my later years, and I do not regret it. Those children needed immediate, practical help – shelter, food, education, a chance at decent lives. But I confess there were moments when I resented the division of my energies. Why must it be the province of charitable women to mend the social fabric that men’s economic ambitions tear? Why must we be the ones to preserve, to nurture, to maintain, whilst others are free to destroy in pursuit of wealth?

The same question applies to natural history. Why must a woman’s gentle observations be dismissed as amateurish sentiment, whilst men’s exploitation of nature is celebrated as enterprise and progress? The work of caring – for children, for forests, for the intricate web of life – is diminished because it is seen as feminine, as softer than the masculine work of dominion and extraction.

But I tell you this: the work of care, of preservation, of attention to what is vulnerable, this is the work upon which all else depends. Without it, there is no future. There are only bank-notes and orphans and silent forests.

Let’s turn to something I’m curious about – the technical aspects of your botanical work. You mentioned using both common and Latin names for plants. Can you walk us through a specific example of how you documented a species, and what you considered important to record?

Consider the bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, one of the earliest spring wildflowers in our woods. I observed it year after year, and each year I recorded when it first emerged and bloomed. The timing varied somewhat with weather – an early warm spell might bring it forth in late March, a cold spring might delay it until mid-April – but the sequence remained consistent. Bloodroot always preceded the trillium, the hepatica appeared at nearly the same time, and the violets followed a few weeks later. ​

When documenting bloodroot, I noted: the location where I found it – moist woodland, partial shade, rich humus soil. The physical description – the distinctive lobed leaf wrapped around the flower stalk when it first emerges, the white petals (usually eight, though this varies), the yellow stamens, the root’s orange sap that gives the plant its common name. The blooming period – brief, just a few days for each flower, though the plants in a colony would bloom in succession over perhaps two weeks. The companions – what else grew nearby, for plants have their preferred associations.

I also recorded abundance and any changes over time. Bloodroot was common enough when I began my observations, but it is a plant that dislikes disturbance. As areas were cleared or heavily trampled, it disappeared. This too needed documentation. ​

The Latin name was essential for precision – many plants share common names, or the same plant may be called different things in different regions. But the common name carried its own knowledge. “Bloodroot” tells you something immediate about the plant’s properties, its use by native peoples as a dye and medicine. This vernacular wisdom should not be dismissed in favour of academic nomenclature alone. Both have their place.

I also made watercolour illustrations when possible. These required close attention to detail – the exact curve of a petal, the number and arrangement of leaves, the colour variations. This kind of drawing is not merely aesthetic; it is a form of analysis, forcing you to observe more carefully than you might otherwise. ​

You mentioned changes in abundance over time. This gets at something modern ecologists call “shifting baseline syndrome” – each generation accepts a degraded environment as normal because they didn’t experience the richer conditions of the past. Did you encounter this in your own observations?

I did not have a term for it, but yes, I observed this phenomenon acutely. The older inhabitants of Cooperstown, those who had arrived with my grandfather in the 1780s and 90s, would describe forests that were scarcely imaginable to those of my generation. Trees of such immense girth that it took several men with outstretched arms to encircle them. Unbroken canopy stretching for miles. Elk, wolves, panthers – creatures that had entirely vanished by my time, but which they remembered as common. ​

My generation saw diminishment and thought it natural. The younger generation, born in the 1830s and 40s, saw further diminishment and knew nothing else. Each cohort accepted a lesser version of what had been, not through any failure of imagination but simply because direct experience is limited to one’s own lifetime.

This is why documentation matters so urgently. Memory fails, anecdotes are dismissed, but written records persist. If I recorded that a certain meadow held seventeen species of wildflowers in 1848, and someone fifty years hence finds only eight, the loss is demonstrable. Without such documentation, the later observer might think, “This meadow is quite diverse,” never knowing what had been lost.

The tragedy is that we have no baseline for the original abundance. The accounts of the first Europeans to see these lands speak of richness beyond measure, but they were explorers and settlers, not naturalists. They described what awed them but did not document with scientific precision. By the time trained observers arrived, much had already been altered.

We are always working from insufficient knowledge, accepting as normal what is actually already compromised. This makes it easier to justify further degradation – if the forest is already much reduced, what harm in taking a bit more? But there is a threshold beyond which recovery becomes impossible, and we do not know where that threshold lies until we have crossed it.

Looking back now, with the knowledge of how your work has been received – the initial success, then the decades of obscurity, and now scholars rediscovering you – what would you change about how you approached your career, if anything?

I would have insisted on my name. I would have refused anonymity, however improper that refusal might have seemed. The cost of modesty was too high.

I would have written more, written faster, claimed time for my own work instead of giving it so freely to my father’s legacy and to charitable obligations. Both were worthy, but they need not have consumed me so entirely.

I would have sought out other women engaged in similar work – there must have been others, scattered about, making their own observations, writing their own notes. We might have formed networks, shared knowledge, supported one another’s claims to authority. Instead, we worked in isolation, each of us a solitary “clever woman,” a curiosity rather than part of a tradition.

And yet – I do not know if I could have done otherwise. The constraints were real, not merely imagined. To defy convention carries consequences. An immodest woman, a woman who pushed too hard for recognition, risked dismissal not only socially but intellectually. Her work would be judged not on its merits but through the lens of her presumption. Better perhaps to remain anonymous and be read than to insist on credit and be ridiculed into silence.

This is the calculation women must always make: how much can I claim without losing everything? And it is exhausting. Men do not have to make these calculations. They simply do the work and expect recognition as their natural due.

There’s been scholarly debate about why your work was forgotten while Thoreau’s was canonised. Some suggest it’s because your prose was more descriptive and observational, less philosophically self-conscious than his metaphor-laden approach. Do you think the literary style itself contributed to your erasure?

There is an irony in this criticism, is there not? The very qualities that make my work scientifically valuable – precise observation, careful description, attention to particular detail rather than grand metaphor – are the qualities for which it was dismissed as “simple” or “merely descriptive” by later critics. ​

Thoreau wrote himself into his observations. His work is as much about his own consciousness, his philosophical development, his individual response to nature as it is about the nature itself. This appeals to a certain scholarly sensibility – it provides rich material for interpretation, for essays about transcendentalism and American individualism and the construction of the self. There is, I suppose, more to “say” about such work.

Mine was humbler in its aims. I sought to direct attention outward, toward the things themselves – the birds, the trees, the turning of seasons. I included myself only as the observer, the recording consciousness. The “I” in Rural Hours is present but not the centre. The centre is the place, the living community I was documenting.

This approach, which I would call a kind of ecocentric rather than egocentric observation, was ahead of its time in some ways and behind it in others. It did not fit the emerging literary taste for the philosophical essay, the personal revelation. And because it was written by a woman, it could be dismissed as merely pleasant nature notes, the gentle observations of a genteel lady, rather than serious natural philosophy. ​

But I ask you this: which approach has proven more useful to science? Thoreau’s introspective meditations, beautiful as they are, or my detailed phenological records? Which gives climate researchers actual data? Which provides the baseline for understanding ecological change?

The answer, of course, is both have value. But the fact that his work was celebrated whilst mine was forgotten suggests that literary criticism was never really about the quality or usefulness of the observations themselves. It was about who was permitted to speak with authority, and about what kinds of knowledge were valued. The woman’s voice, even when scientifically rigorous, could not command the same attention as the man’s, even when his was philosophically speculative.

You’ve lived long enough now to see the environmental consequences you warned about in 1850 fully realised – climate change, mass extinction, deforestation on a global scale. What would you say to today’s environmental scientists and activists who are working to address these crises?

I would say, first, that your grief is valid. To witness the diminishment and destruction of the living world, to feel the weight of that loss – this is not weakness or sentimentality. It is appropriate moral response. I felt that grief in my own time, and I know it haunted me all my days. You are not the first generation to mourn what is vanishing. ​

But grief alone accomplishes nothing. It must be married to action, to documentation, to the patient work of bearing witness and demanding change. You have advantages I did not have: your observations can reach millions almost instantaneously through your technologies. You have networks, organisations, the language of rights and justice. Use these tools. Do not let despair silence you.

Continue the work of documentation. The data you gather now will be essential for understanding what comes next, for measuring both damage and recovery. Every observation matters. Every record of what was here, what was lost, what persisted – this builds the case for protection and restoration.

And to the women and those marginalised in your own time who are doing this work: claim your space. Do not wait for permission. Do not publish anonymously, do not cede credit, do not allow your labour to be subsumed into others’ legacies. Insist on recognition. It is not immodest to demand that your contributions be acknowledged. It is justice.

I lost decades to modesty, to service, to the expectation that I should enable others rather than fully inhabit my own authority. Do not make the same mistake. The work is too important, the time too short. The forests do not have time for you to wait your turn. The migrating birds do not have time for you to be properly modest. The climate does not have time for you to worry whether you are claiming too much space.

Do the work. Claim the credit. Build the networks. And remember that paying attention – truly seeing what is before us, recording it with care and honesty – this is not a small thing. It is the foundation of everything else. You cannot protect what you do not see, cannot mourn what you do not know, cannot fight for what you have not loved.

Watch the bloodroot emerge in spring. Note when the warblers arrive. Record what is here, what changes, what endures. This is not escapism. It is revolutionary work. It was revolutionary in 1850, and it remains revolutionary today.

Thank you, Miss Cooper. One last question: if you could choose one observation from Rural Hours, one passage that you feel best represents your life’s work and vision, what would it be?

There is a passage I wrote about the forest – not the wild forest, which was already mostly gone, but the groves that remained, the trees that had been spared. I wrote that we should approach these with humility and gratitude, recognising that we are temporary inhabitants of a world much older and more complex than our brief lives. ​

I observed that the earth is the common home of all – not merely all humans, but all creatures. We are not its owners but its tenants, and tenants have obligations. They must maintain what they inhabit. They must consider those who will come after. They must not extract every possible resource for their own immediate comfort, leaving nothing but wreckage for the future. ​

This was the heart of my work: the insistence that we are part of something larger, that we have duties that extend beyond our own survival and profit, that the living world around us deserves not merely utilitarian calculation but moral consideration and affectionate attention.

I documented the particular – the bloodroot, the warbler, the maple grove – because the particular matters. Each species, each place, each season has its own integrity, its own value that cannot be reduced to human use. But through the particular, I was always reaching toward something larger: an understanding of our place within the community of life, and the responsibilities that come with that place.

I did not always succeed in making this vision clear. My voice was quiet, my claims modest, my influence limited. But I tried. I watched, I recorded, I warned. I offered what I could: the evidence of my eyes, the testimony of my days, the witness of one woman who loved a place and tried to see it truly.

If that work matters now, if it helps you understand what has been lost and what must be protected, then I am content. The bloodroot still emerges, does it not? Spring still comes? There is hope in continuance, even diminished. Hold to that. And keep watching. Always, keep watching.

Letters and emails

Since publishing this conversation, we’ve received dozens of letters and emails from readers around the world who want to know more about Susan Fenimore Cooper’s methods, her perspective on the landscapes she loved, and what guidance she might offer to those carrying forward her environmental work today. We’ve selected five particularly thoughtful questions that open new ground – technical, philosophical, and deeply personal – and invited Miss Cooper to respond.

Nurul Azizah, 34, Environmental Data Scientist, Jakarta, Indonesia
You mentioned keeping temperature records and correlating them with biological events like blooming times. I’m curious about the actual mechanics of your data collection – how did you organise and analyse your observations before computers or statistical software? Did you create charts or tables by hand? And looking at your methods now, do you think citizen scientists today, armed with smartphones and apps, might actually be losing something important about the quality of observation that your slower, more deliberate approach required?

Miss Azizah, your question goes to the heart of what made natural history both rigorous and laborious in my time. Without your computing machines, organisation required physical discipline and considerable space. I kept multiple notebooks – field books for rough observations made outdoors, often in pencil that might smudge or fade, and fair copies maintained at home where I would transcribe and expand upon my notes each evening whilst memory remained fresh. This double recording was tedious but essential; many a promising observation was lost when a sudden rain shower rendered field notes illegible.

For data analysis, I created tables by hand, ruled with straightedge and pen. I had columns for dates, temperatures, weather conditions, and phenological events – first blooming observed, first bird arrival, that sort of thing. Year by year, these tables grew, and patterns would emerge if one had patience enough to look. I could compare, for instance, that the hepatica bloomed on 8 April in 1846, 3 April in 1847, and 15 April in 1848, and correlate this with temperature records and snow melt. It was painstaking work, prone to error, and limited by the fact that one could only hold so much information in one’s mind at once.

Charts I did attempt, though my artistic training was better suited to botanical illustration than to graphical representation of data. I sketched simple diagrams showing the progression of blooming through the season, or the relative abundance of species in different habitats. These were crude compared to what professional naturalists at universities might produce, but they served to clarify patterns I observed.

As to your second question – whether modern observers might lose something – I believe you are correct, though it pains me to suggest that easier methods have hidden costs. When observation required physical effort, when one had to walk several miles in uncertain weather to reach a particular grove, when recording meant sitting still with cold fingers carefully forming letters, there was a quality of attention that difficulty enforced. You could not merely glance and move on. You had to stay, to look long enough that the subject revealed itself properly.

Your smartphone, I gather, can capture an image instantaneously and record location and time automatically. Marvellous, certainly. But does the observer truly see? Or do they merely collect, mistaking accumulation for understanding? The slowness I endured was not romantic – it was frustrating, limiting. Yet it created intimacy. I knew my plants as individuals, not data points. I recognised particular hepatica colonies year after year, noticed when one thrived and another failed. This was not efficiency, but it was relationship, and relationship yields insights that rapid collection may miss.

Niko Janssen, 41, Museum Curator specialising in 19th-century scientific instruments, Amsterdam, Netherlands
I’m fascinated by the material culture of field naturalists in your era. Beyond the notebook and collecting basket you described, were there other tools you wished you’d had access to – perhaps instruments you’d seen in European collections or read about in scientific journals but couldn’t obtain in rural New York? And how did you preserve and store your botanical specimens long-term? I imagine humidity and insects were constant threats to a herbarium kept in a domestic setting rather than an institutional one.

Mr Janssen, you ask a question that stirs both longing and frustration. Yes, there were instruments I coveted but could not obtain. Chief among them was a proper compound microscope of the quality used by European naturalists. I had access to a simple hand lens, which served well enough for examining flower structures and leaf characteristics, but the hidden world of pollen grains, of cellular structure, of the minute organisms living in water droplets – this remained largely closed to me. Such instruments were fearfully expensive and difficult to procure in rural America. One might order from London or Paris, but the cost, the shipping time, the risk of damage in transit – these barriers were considerable for a woman without independent wealth.

I also wished for better tools for measuring atmospheric conditions beyond simple temperature. A proper barometer would have allowed me to correlate weather patterns with biological events more precisely. Instruments for measuring humidity, rainfall amounts with accuracy, wind speed – these would have enriched my observations immensely. I made do with general descriptions: “a heavy rain,” “quite humid,” “a brisk north wind.” Imprecise, I know, but one records what one can measure.

Regarding specimen preservation, you are quite right about the challenges. I maintained my herbarium in a series of wooden cases lined with paper, the specimens carefully pressed and dried, then mounted on sheets with notation. The great enemies were indeed moisture, which encouraged mould, and insects – particularly the small beetles that would devour dried plant material with alarming enthusiasm. I used camphor and occasionally tobacco as deterrents, changing these regularly. The specimens were kept in a dry room, away from the dampness of the kitchen and laundry areas.

But domestic settings offered no climate control, no institutional consistency. In humid summers, I would check the collection frequently, watching for any signs of deterioration. Some specimens I lost despite all precautions – a bitter thing, to lose not merely a dried plant but the record of a particular day’s observation, a particular location’s flora.

I envied institutional collections their space, their dedicated keepers, their resources. Yet there was also freedom in the domestic herbarium. It was mine, organised according to my own logic, available whenever I wished to consult it. No permissions required, no set hours. I could work late into the evening, comparing specimens by lamplight, arranging and rearranging until patterns became clear. The museum curator has advantages of preservation; the amateur has advantages of access and autonomy. Each situation offers something the other lacks.

Mariana López, 28, Restoration Ecologist, Oaxaca, Mexico
You witnessed the introduction of invasive European species into American ecosystems and documented their spread. This makes me wonder: did you ever struggle with conflicting feelings about these plants? Some of them – like the wildflowers settlers brought from their home gardens – must have carried emotional significance for your community, even as you recognised them as ecological threats. How did you navigate writing about invasion and displacement when your own family were also colonisers of Indigenous lands? Did you make connections between botanical invasions and human ones?

Miss López, you have asked the question I have spent a lifetime both asking myself and avoiding in equal measure. Yes, I struggled with precisely the contradictions you name. The English daisy, the dandelion – these plants carried associations of home for the settlers, reminders of gardens left behind in Europe. I watched women cultivate them deliberately, then watched those same plants escape cultivation and spread aggressively into native meadows, displacing our own wildflowers. How could I condemn what brought comfort to the lonely and homesick? And yet, how could I not document the ecological consequence?

I wrote carefully about this, perhaps too carefully. I noted the spread, I observed the displacement, but I softened my language when discussing the human dimension. I did not wish to seem unfeeling toward those who found solace in familiar blooms. This was cowardice, in part. A clearer voice might have said: your comfort costs the land something it cannot afford to pay.

As to your second, more difficult question – whether I connected botanical invasion to human colonisation – I confess I did not make this connection explicitly in my published work, though I could not have failed to perceive it at some level. The parallel was there to be drawn: European peoples and European plants, both arriving, both displacing what had been here, both altering the fundamental character of the place. The Haudenosaunee and Oneida peoples who had inhabited this region were, by my time, largely removed or confined to diminished territories. Their ecological knowledge was vanishing along with them, and I did pitifully little to preserve it.

I walked through forests my grandfather had obtained through methods I chose not to examine too closely. I documented flora on land that had been taken. My family’s presence here, our very town of Cooperstown, was built upon dispossession. I knew this. One could not fail to know it. Yet I wrote around it, noted it obliquely, did not confront it squarely.

This is perhaps my greatest failure – not of scientific observation but of moral courage. I could see the ecological consequences of invasion clearly when the invaders were plants. I was far less willing to reckon with consequences when the invaders were my own people, my own family. I told myself I was a naturalist, not a political philosopher, that my sphere was the natural world, not questions of justice and sovereignty.

But the natural world is never separate from questions of justice. The land remembers who tended it and how, who was displaced from it, who claimed it by what means. I documented what was vanishing without adequately acknowledging who had been made to vanish first.

Carter Ramirez, 52, High School Biology Teacher, Austin, Texas, USA
Imagine you’d been born in 1950 instead of 1813. With access to Rachel Carson’s scientific network, university education, research grants, and the emerging environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s – but also facing the “women can’t do science” attitudes that persisted well into the late 20th century – do you think you would have achieved more recognition, or do you suspect you might have faced different but equally limiting barriers? Would you have chosen academic research, activism, or something else entirely?

Mr Ramirez, what a curious exercise, to imagine oneself born into a different age. If I had come of age in the 1960s rather than the 1830s, with access to university education and scientific networks – I confess the prospect both thrills and troubles me. The barriers would have been different, yes, but I suspect equally formidable in their own fashion.

From what you tell me of that era, women were admitted to universities but often treated as interlopers, their presence tolerated rather than welcomed. They faced professors who believed female minds unsuited to rigorous science, colleagues who dismissed their contributions, institutional structures designed to accommodate men’s lives rather than women’s. This sounds grimly familiar. The specific mechanisms of exclusion may have evolved, but the fundamental resistance to women’s authority in scientific matters – this persists across your centuries as it did in mine.

Yet the advantages would have been considerable. To pursue formal credentials, to have one’s work peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals rather than dismissed as the charming observations of a literary lady – this would have granted legitimacy my work never achieved. Access to research funding, to laboratory equipment, to field stations and collaborative networks – these are not trivial things. I might have contributed to the emerging field of ecology in ways my amateur status prevented.

But I wonder whether I would have been permitted to work as I did – roaming freely, following my own questions, publishing for a general audience rather than solely for academic specialists. Academic science has its own constraints, its own hierarchies and gatekeepers. I might have gained institutional recognition only to lose the very qualities that made my work distinctive: its accessibility, its moral dimension, its refusal to separate natural observation from questions of stewardship and responsibility.

If I am honest, I think I would have chosen a path between academic research and public advocacy – something akin to what you describe this Rachel Carson accomplished, though I know little of her save what you suggest. Writing for both scientific and general audiences, using rigorous observation to inform public understanding and policy. This would have suited my temperament and my sense of purpose.

Would I have faced discrimination? Undoubtedly. Would I have achieved more recognition than I did in my own time? Perhaps, though I am not convinced the 20th century was dramatically more hospitable to women who challenged male authority. But I might have had allies, networks of other women scientists. That alone would have been transformative. We cannot do this work in isolation. I tried, and the isolation nearly silenced me entirely.

Selam Tesfaye, 39, Traditional Medicine Practitioner and Ethnobotanist, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
You wrote about bloodroot’s use by Indigenous peoples as dye and medicine, and you clearly valued both scientific nomenclature and vernacular knowledge. But I notice you don’t discuss learning directly from Native American women who would have been the primary holders of botanical knowledge in your region. Was this an opportunity you pursued but couldn’t access, or a limitation of your own perspective at the time? How do you reflect now on the relationship between settler naturalists like yourself and the Indigenous ecological knowledge systems that were being actively suppressed even as you were documenting the landscape?

Miss Tesfaye, your question cuts to a wound I have carried quietly. You are correct – I wrote of Indigenous botanical knowledge as something observed from a distance, recorded secondhand, treated as historical artifact rather than living practice. I did not seek out Native women as teachers, did not attempt to learn directly from those who held generations of plant wisdom. This was both a failure of imagination and a reflection of the profound barriers that separated our communities by the time I came to consciousness.

By the 1830s and 40s, when I was conducting my observations, the Oneida and other Haudenosaunee peoples had been largely displaced from the Cooperstown region. Those who remained occupied a drastically diminished space, socially as well as geographically. The structures of settler society – structures my own family helped establish – created walls between us. For me to have sought instruction from Native women would have required crossing boundaries that seemed, at the time, nearly impassable. Not impassable because they were natural or necessary, but because colonial relations had made them so.

I tell you this not as justification but as explanation. I was complicit in a system that simultaneously depended upon Indigenous knowledge and worked to erase the people who held it. I benefited from plants that Native peoples had cultivated, landscapes they had shaped through careful burning and harvesting, yet I wrote as though I were observing pristine wilderness or land transformed only by European settlement. This was a lie, though one I did not fully comprehend at the time.

There were moments when the lie revealed itself. I would note in my journals that a certain plant was “said to have been used by the Indians for such-and-such purpose” – passive voice, past tense, vague attribution. As though this knowledge had simply appeared, untethered from living people with names and families and continuing presence. I recorded what I could learn through books and through conversations with old settlers who claimed to remember what they had been told, but I did not – and here is the honest truth – I did not consider Native women as authorities I should properly consult. I saw them, when I saw them at all, as subjects of anthropological curiosity rather than as fellow naturalists, as peers.

This represents not merely a gap in my scientific method but a moral failure. The most sophisticated ecological knowledge of this landscape resided with people my society was actively dispossessing, and I participated in that erasure even as I lamented the loss of forests and wildflowers. I mourned the disappearance of plants whilst remaining largely silent about the displacement of peoples. These violences were connected, and I failed to make that connection explicit.

Reflection

Susan Fenimore Cooper died on 31st December 1894, at the age of 81, in the same Cooperstown home where she had spent most of her life documenting the natural world around Otsego Lake. She lived long enough to see some of the environmental consequences she had warned about in 1850 come to devastating fruition – the passenger pigeon in catastrophic decline, the old-growth forests almost entirely gone, the climate visibly altered by deforestation. Yet she also lived long enough to see her own literary legacy overshadowed by her father’s, her scientific contributions dismissed as the pleasant observations of a genteel lady rather than recognised as the pioneering environmental work they represented.

Throughout this conversation, Cooper returned repeatedly to themes of erasure and complicity, visibility and silence. Her candour about the constraints of anonymous publication, about the decades lost to managing her father’s literary estate rather than building her own, about the ways domestic and charitable obligations consumed time that might have been devoted to further scientific work – these reflections illuminate not just one woman’s experience but a pattern that held countless women back from full participation in scientific discourse. Her acknowledgement of moral failures, particularly regarding Indigenous displacement and knowledge erasure, goes beyond what we find in her published writings, where such critiques remain muted or entirely absent. This speculative voice allows her to reckon more honestly with contradictions she may have sensed but never fully articulated during her lifetime.

The historical record surrounding Cooper remains frustratingly incomplete. We know Charles Darwin read her work and inquired about her, but the full extent of their potential correspondence, if any existed, remains unclear. We know Rural Hours achieved commercial success with nine editions, yet details about her writing process, her scientific networks, and her daily routines are sparse. Scholars continue to debate whether her descriptive style represented a deliberate methodological choice or a gendered constraint – whether she wrote as she did because she valued ecocentric observation or because philosophical assertiveness would have been deemed inappropriate for a woman author.

What remains indisputable is her scientific legacy. Contemporary climate researchers use her phenological records as baseline data for measuring ecological change across nearly two centuries. Her warnings about deforestation and unsustainable resource extraction, published four years before Thoreau’s Walden, mark her as one of America’s first conservation voices. The 21st-century rediscovery of her work – with scholarly editions, academic conferences, and projects like the Rural Hours Project retracing her observations – represents a reckoning with how thoroughly women’s contributions to environmental science have been erased.

Cooper’s story reminds us that scientific progress depends not only on what we discover but on who is permitted to make discoveries and claim credit for them. As we face environmental crises she foresaw, her voice returns across time with urgent clarity: pay attention, document what you see, speak truth about what is being lost, and never let modesty silence you when the stakes are this high.

Who have we missed?

This series is all about recovering the voices history left behind – and I’d love your help finding the next one. If there’s a woman in STEM you think deserves to be interviewed in this way – whether a forgotten inventor, unsung technician, or overlooked researcher – please share her story.

Email me at voxmeditantis@gmail.com or leave a comment below with your suggestion – even just a name is a great start. Let’s keep uncovering the women who shaped science and innovation, one conversation at a time.

Editorial Note: This interview is a fictional dramatisation created for educational and commemorative purposes. While Susan Fenimore Cooper was a real person whose contributions to environmental natural history writing are documented in historical sources, she could not have participated in a contemporary interview. Her responses have been carefully constructed based on her published writings, particularly Rural Hours (1850), biographical records, scholarly analyses of her work, and the historical context of 19th-century women in science. Where her views on certain topics – particularly regarding Indigenous knowledge and colonial complicity – remain uncertain or unrecorded, we have allowed this speculative voice to explore questions she may have contended with privately but never addressed publicly.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved. | 🌐 Translate