(calm music) (birds singing) - In 1800, the population of New York State was less than 600,000 people for the entire state.

By 1860, it was just under 4 million.

So you can see in that 60 years a continual increase in population, and a lot of that was due to immigration.

New York is, you know, the center of so much of this economic revolution and industrial revolution, but also transportation revolution.

So Robert Fulton and the steamboat really opened the Hudson and connected New York City to Albany and all the places along the Hudson, and really made travel along the Hudson much easier, much quicker, much more accessible.

So that's kind of like step one, right?

Instead of using, you know, more primitive methods of sail, or rowing, or other types of, you know, boating up and down the Hudson, you're able to use a steamboat, and go against the current, and do it in a much faster way.

And then the Erie Canal was the first major big, you know, I think, game changer, so to speak.

- Thomas Cole moved to the United States in 1818 which was one year after the beginning of construction on the Erie Canal.

The Hudson River School, which is this art movement that he played a big role in founding, began in 1825 which is exactly when the Erie Canal opened.

- As a result of the Erie Canal really did attract not only people that worked on building the canal, but others who would benefit from the trade.

So merchants and business people began settling in the cities along the canal, including Buffalo and Rochester.

And that really made New York, the center of this trade from the west and the new western states that were being developed in the country.

That trade was able now to go across New York on the canal and down the Hudson and to New York Harbor, which by the 1850s New York City was the largest city in the country.

It was the first city to have more than a million people.

- Thomas Cole's work has something to do with forging that national identity and national aesthetic which has a lot to do with wilderness.

And the Erie Canal discourse, the way that we often talk about the Erie Canal through time, and it's a very powerful history, is that the Erie Canal transformed wilderness into the industrial empire of New York State which is the Empire State.

- One of the things that is often missed out of the narrative is the land, the words that we used to describe the land.

So wild, untamed, savage even.

Those words were also used to describe the original inhabitants of the land.

I think the reason those terms are used from the onset of colonization is because when you know you have people coming over, whether it was for religious freedom, or to start new lives, or what have you, they came onto shores of a land that was already inhabited by hundreds of millions of people, but it was people who worked in one with the land.

So when settlers start coming in, they're working against the land.

The land is wild, it's covered in trees.

How are we gonna create these new cities if we have all of these trees around here?

So you have to, you know, cultivate the land in a way that promotes progress.

- There were huge environmental impacts to all of these changes, but the primary one at the foundation of all of this is the dispossession of Haudenosaunee lands.

Because when we're talking about the development and the progress of New York State, we have to ask who is this development for?

Who designed this development?

What does this mean?

And a lot of Thomas Cole's paintings work in tension with that because he also, he was conflicted about the industrial changes happening in New York, and he was concerned about their environmental impact.

- He looked at this view every day, starting in the 1820s, and then the 1830s when he lived here, and then into the 1840s.

And during that time period, it was dramatically changed.

It was cleared of trees.

There was industry moving in.

There was the tanning industry that cleared the hemlocks.

They used the bark of the hemlock trees to tan leather.

The railroads came through.

He couldn't believe that in a, you know, I call the civilized nation there could be such destruction and such thoughtless destruction.

- When Thomas Cole talked about the scenery of American landscape, he was making very serious claims about whose land they were on, whose scenery this is.

And he made claims that this is our land, this is our scenery to enjoy.

- I would love to have seen the area when my ancestors were here and to not see, you know, all the buildings, skyscrapers, and the polluted water that we now have.

It would've been completely different back then.

So while I understand what Cole is saying in wanting to protect the land from industry and all of that, in a way you're again leaving out the people who originally took care of it.

Because if you're talking about it in a way that the land was virtually untouched, we cared for the land as if it was a living relative of ours.

We're taking what we need, being stewards of it, replenishing when needed.

So of course, we were taking care of the land in a way that looked amazing.

- A lot of the American environmental movement has centered around one perception of how to relate with nature, and that has been shaped by Thomas Cole.

- [Narrator] Sponsored in part by Albany Medical Health Systems and by Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi.

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