The New Wild by Fred Pearce

Author:Fred Pearce
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807033692
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2015-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

MYTHS OF THE PRISTINE

Take a journey up the Amazon and you are soon floating past riverbanks festooned with primeval rain forest unchanged for millions of years. So say guidebooks and many conservationists. Except that you aren’t. There is jungle, for sure. Despite the large areas of forest that have been cut down in recent decades, most of it remains. But little of it is primeval. Certainly not along the riverbanks, which, until European explorers first came here five hundred years ago, were centers of trade, agriculture, and urban settlement. In thinking otherwise, we have succumbed to the myth of the pristine.

When the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana sailed the Amazon in 1542, his chronicler, Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, wrote of a place some seven hundred miles upstream, near the junction with the Rio Negro:

There was one town that stretched for 15 miles without any space from house to house, which was a marvellous thing to behold. There were many roads here that entered into the interior of the land, very fine highways. Inland from the river to a distance of six miles more or less, there could be seen some very large cities that glistened in white and besides this, the land is as fertile and as normal in appearance as our Spain.1

That city was never seen again by outsiders. Later explorers reported finding only small bands of Indians hiding deep in the jungle. But Carvajal’s chronicle was no jungle dream. In recent years, archaeologists have discovered hundreds of large earthworks in the Amazon rain forest that they conclude were urban centers that flourished until the conquistadors came, bringing European diseases and European rule. Anna Roosevelt, an archaeologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, called them “one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements of the New World.”2 Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida said they showed the presence of a “highly elaborate built environment, rivaling that of many contemporary complex societies.” Far beyond the city limits, the jungle had been transformed. Most of this “primeval” forest had been cleared at least once, and perhaps several times, for farming. It was a living landscape. What is today one of the largest tracts of rain forest in the world was, until less than five hundred years ago, a chunk of tropical suburbia.3

It is now estimated that before 1492, there were more than fifty million people in the Americas, half of them in South America. They were spread widely and used the land extensively. They burned vegetation to encircle animals for hunting and to increase the productivity of grasslands. And they certainly didn’t spare the rain forests. Clark Erickson of the University of Pennsylvania told me he has found tens of thousands of miles of raised banks across the Bolivian Amazon that he believes were dug by farmers to keep their maize, manioc, and squash crops clear of seasonal floodwaters and highland frosts. They were interspersed with causeways and islands that may have been human settlements, and certainly contain many human remains.

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