The arrival of English colonists to New England fundamentally altered a huge swath of social, ecological, and political conditions of the system. A sustainable and resilient Native culture was replaced by an unsustainable focus on optimization and commodification through the process of colonization. Pay close attention to how values lead to actions in this system, and how ecological, social, and political events and feedback into each other.
The Postcolonial Transition maps how colonialism impacted the social, economic, political, and ecological conditions of New England. A key concept here to understand is thresholds. Complex systems have constantly changing conditions, but if conditions change and reach certain points, or "thresholds," this causes "regime" or "stable-state" shifts- changes to the default conditions of the social-ecological system that are extremely hard to reverse. Changes to the system brought about by colonization moved New England across social and ecological thresholds- into a degraded and unsustainable system that is very difficult to alter. It's important to recognize that sustainability is not just ecological, but rather is the result of a complex system of processes on multiple scales.