how does Annie develop these theme:
#1
JF: In reading Barkskins, I was struck by how use of landscape in North America emerges so much out of a Christian idea of God and the dominion the Bible promises over Nature.
AP: You touched on something that nobody else has—the clue to the book is in the epigraph. Christianity is underneath our chopping of the forest and our doing what we feel we can do. Anything wild. Anything in the natural world. Wherever it is. Place has always been an interest of mine. I have a small library of books on place.
#2
JF: I had always been aware that global trade was very old—that it existed even before the Dutch East India Company. But Barkskins makes a sharper point on that score: that the growth of capitalism has always depended on the destruction of the environment.
AP: Yep. They are teammates.
JF: Was that something you knew well before you started to write this book and the research for it or was it something you began to read more about the history?
AP: I was well aware of it, believe me.
JF: As, having lived the life you had, read the books you have?
AP: I’m an observer. I was trained as a historian and landscape has been an interest for many years. You think, of course, “How did this get like this?” To look at paintings and landscape paintings of an early era—any place, Australia, the Hudson river, this part of the country—they weren’t making it up. That’s what they were seeing. And to think of what [the landscape] is now and how we got from point A to point X is rather terrifying. You could turn it into a story, which is essentially what happened there
