About the Author

Erik Reardon is visiting assistant professor of history at Bates College.

Reviews

“Reardon persuasively argues for the importance of river fish for the ecology of the watershed, Native Americans, and early settlers. He also makes a case for their importance to the world today.”—John T. Cumbler, author of Cape Cod: An Environmental History of a Fragile Ecosystem

“Managing the River Commons shows how central river fish were to rural/agrarian New England prior to industrialization and how farmer-fishermen sought conservation and sustainable resource use. It goes beyond this by suggesting that river restoration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century shares a basic environmental ethos with those farmer-fishermen of preindustrial New England.”—Brian J. Payne, author of Fishing a Borderless Sea: Environmental Territorialism in the North Atlantic, 1818–1910