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If you watch any of the nature TV shows long enough you will eventually find an episode about the Amazon Rain Forest in which the entire place is described as "untouched", or "pristine", or even "ancient" as if the forest has always been the way it currently is and if left alone it will always remain in its current form. This view has become a piece or orthodoxy among the world's environmentalists which carries nearly religious devotion but is it true? People visiting the Amazon often notice how tropical fruit trees seem to grow every where and biologists have been stunned to notice that up to 25% of all the trees in the forest are fruit trees. How is it the forest happens to have so many fruits which humans find tasty?
I just finished reading the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann which details the latest understanding of what the Americas were like the year before Columbus sailed. It is a fascinating read (the best book I've read since Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel) and I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in history or human civilizations. It deals not only with the various cities and civilizations of the new world, and there were a lot more then most people know about, but also details how the land was intensively managed & altered by humans in order to bend it more to their liking. Far from living in harmony or balance with nature Native Americans were actively terraforming and modifying the landscape throughout the Americas.
Today much of the eastern portion of North America is thickly growing forests yet when the first Europeans arrived they described and open park like land with scattered mature trees surrounded by grassland and native farming villages. Most of the Mayan homeland has salt in the groundwater and is subject to regular El Nino associated droughts so the only way to get reliable irrigation water is to dig reservoirs (by hand since no draft animals were available) and then line those reservoirs with clay layers to prevent salt water intrusion. Thousands of these clay lined artificial lakes were created. The Andean cultures terraformed virtually every hillside with artificial terraces in order to maximize the productive farmland but all of these seem to pale in comparison to the modification Natives conducted in the Amazon basin.
Today the few remaining Native groups in the Amazon live as either hunter gathers or as slash and burn farmers who scrap out a living for a few years before exhausted soils force them to relocated every 2-4 years. Few people realize that the Amazon was one of only a few places on Earth where farming was independently created and at on time the whole region was dotted with medium to large sized permanent settlements. The first Europeans to sail down the Amazon noted that the region was densely populated and that large permanent settlements were often constructed on hills near the river which were high enough not to flood in the annual rainy season.
For centuries westerns have said this was impossible since tropical soils were so poor and because normal seasonal crops have such a hard time growing in such depleted soils. There is also the problem that the constant rains pack the soil into a hardpan once the trees are removed thus turning the land into a virtual desert where nothing can grow. The Indians seemed to solve these problems in ways which modern peasant farmers have not been able to do so. Instead of seasonal crops like maize or wheat they planted large numbers of fruit trees, various types of fruit palms, and in between the trees they planted root crops like cassava. The Indians also created artificially fertilized farm fields by composting human waste, charcoal, organic waste (fish bones, animal bones, etc), and (critically) pieces of broken pottery. The pottery contains a great deal of nitrogen plus the clays swell and contract during the cycle of wet & dry seasons helping to loosen the soil and prevent compaction. These areas of dark soil are called terra preta which are entirely unlike the natural red clay like soils found in the rest of the Amazon yet they can be found over large areas of Amazon. Many of these terra preta fields cover dozens of square miles.
By most accounts some where between 25% and 10% of the entire Amazon basin is covered with these ancient Indian enriched farm fields. That would be an area larger then France and Spain combined which used to be under cultivation in this supposedly ancient forest. Also biologists have noticed that the percentage of fruit trees in the Amazon (currently about one tree out of four in the entire forest) has been declining for centuries. Supposedly natives planted vast sections of the Amazon with fruit orchards however when old world diseases killed 95% of the native population the towns and early cities all ceased to exist and the few remaining survivors reverted to hunter gathering since they no longer had the man power needed to build irrigation canals and other improvements needed to maintain an advanced agricultural society.
I find it fascinating that a very large part of what we now consider wilderness has actually been intensively shaped by man made activities.
I just finished reading the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann which details the latest understanding of what the Americas were like the year before Columbus sailed. It is a fascinating read (the best book I've read since Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel) and I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in history or human civilizations. It deals not only with the various cities and civilizations of the new world, and there were a lot more then most people know about, but also details how the land was intensively managed & altered by humans in order to bend it more to their liking. Far from living in harmony or balance with nature Native Americans were actively terraforming and modifying the landscape throughout the Americas.
Today much of the eastern portion of North America is thickly growing forests yet when the first Europeans arrived they described and open park like land with scattered mature trees surrounded by grassland and native farming villages. Most of the Mayan homeland has salt in the groundwater and is subject to regular El Nino associated droughts so the only way to get reliable irrigation water is to dig reservoirs (by hand since no draft animals were available) and then line those reservoirs with clay layers to prevent salt water intrusion. Thousands of these clay lined artificial lakes were created. The Andean cultures terraformed virtually every hillside with artificial terraces in order to maximize the productive farmland but all of these seem to pale in comparison to the modification Natives conducted in the Amazon basin.
Today the few remaining Native groups in the Amazon live as either hunter gathers or as slash and burn farmers who scrap out a living for a few years before exhausted soils force them to relocated every 2-4 years. Few people realize that the Amazon was one of only a few places on Earth where farming was independently created and at on time the whole region was dotted with medium to large sized permanent settlements. The first Europeans to sail down the Amazon noted that the region was densely populated and that large permanent settlements were often constructed on hills near the river which were high enough not to flood in the annual rainy season.
For centuries westerns have said this was impossible since tropical soils were so poor and because normal seasonal crops have such a hard time growing in such depleted soils. There is also the problem that the constant rains pack the soil into a hardpan once the trees are removed thus turning the land into a virtual desert where nothing can grow. The Indians seemed to solve these problems in ways which modern peasant farmers have not been able to do so. Instead of seasonal crops like maize or wheat they planted large numbers of fruit trees, various types of fruit palms, and in between the trees they planted root crops like cassava. The Indians also created artificially fertilized farm fields by composting human waste, charcoal, organic waste (fish bones, animal bones, etc), and (critically) pieces of broken pottery. The pottery contains a great deal of nitrogen plus the clays swell and contract during the cycle of wet & dry seasons helping to loosen the soil and prevent compaction. These areas of dark soil are called terra preta which are entirely unlike the natural red clay like soils found in the rest of the Amazon yet they can be found over large areas of Amazon. Many of these terra preta fields cover dozens of square miles.
By most accounts some where between 25% and 10% of the entire Amazon basin is covered with these ancient Indian enriched farm fields. That would be an area larger then France and Spain combined which used to be under cultivation in this supposedly ancient forest. Also biologists have noticed that the percentage of fruit trees in the Amazon (currently about one tree out of four in the entire forest) has been declining for centuries. Supposedly natives planted vast sections of the Amazon with fruit orchards however when old world diseases killed 95% of the native population the towns and early cities all ceased to exist and the few remaining survivors reverted to hunter gathering since they no longer had the man power needed to build irrigation canals and other improvements needed to maintain an advanced agricultural society.
I find it fascinating that a very large part of what we now consider wilderness has actually been intensively shaped by man made activities.
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