Charles C. Mann’s “1491” in this month’s Atlantic covers a growing movement in the earth and human sciences that recognizes the active role Native Americans played in shaping their own landscapes — in some cases, even inventing the conditions for landscapes using bacteria cultivation — to a degree never imagined by contemporary romantic enviromentalists; what conservationists like to think of as erstwhile “pristine” is instead, it turns out, a kind of ancient installation art:

[The phrase ‘cultivated landscapes of the Americas’] still provokes vehement objection — but the main dissenters are now ecologists and enviromentalists. The disagreement is encapsulated by Amazonia, which has become the emblem of vanishing wilderness — an admonitory image of untouched Nature. Yet recently a growing number of researchers have come to believe that Indian societies had an enormous impact on the jungle. Indeed, some anthropologists have called the Amazon forest itself a cultural artifact — that is, an artificial object.

[…]Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream environmentalists want to preserve as much of the world’s land as possible in a putatively intack state. But ‘intact,’ if the new research is correct* means ‘run by human beings for human purposes.’ Environmentalists dislike this, because it seems to mean that anything goes. In a sense they are correct. Native Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they will have to find it within themselves to create the world’s largest garden.

Fascinating stuff, but unfortunately not yet available online (though Richard Bennett’s post in Omphalas provides additional highlights and insights, as do the comments in The Atlantic’s “Post and Riposte“). One tidbit from the article I found particularly eye opening: the U.S. Government owns 33% of the land in this country. One third! Yet, conservationists still clamor for additional “protected” lands, in essence, demanding that land be used in the way they recommend as a society we use it; if the arguments Mann presents are correct, however, then conservationists — far from acting as champions of some metaphysically preferred ecological condition — simply represent a particular viewpoint on the question of how the land should be “run by human beings for human purposes.” For conservationists, the goal is to re-create an ecotopia that, it turns out, is largely mythic and romanticized.

*The argument goes like this: as diseases introduced into the “New World” by Europeans and their livestock (smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, measles) wiped out huge numbers of Native American populations (some estimates put the attrition rate as high as 98% — though this seems doubtful), carefully cultivated ecosystems traditionally maintained by Native cultures fell into disrepair, leading to explosions in the numbers of once contained species — both plant and animal. As Mann writes, “Throughout eastern North America the open landscape seen by the first Europeans quickly filled in with forest […] When Europeans moved west, they were preceded by two waves: one of disease, the other of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to quiet down. Far from destroying pristine wilderness, European settlers bloodily created it. By 1800 the hemispher was chockalock with new wilderness. If ‘forest primeval’ means a woodland unsullied by the human presence…there was much more of it in the late eighteenth century than in the early sixteenth.”

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