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Texas Agriculture Archive

July 5, 2002

The myth about pristine America

By Stewart Truelsen

The myth that America was a Garden of Eden until white settlers arrived to spoil it is a basic tenet of the environmental movement and wilderness preservation. Henry David Thoreau and other early American writers contributed to the myth. Thoreau wrote in his journal that seeing a tree felled by man made his eyes ache. A tree knocked down by the wind was a far better sight.

Lately though, more and more scholars are attacking this myth. Some of the research was pulled together in an Atlantic Monthly article titled simply "1491." Author Charles Mann says, "Indians were here in greater numbers than previously thought, and they imposed their will on the landscape. Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind."

One of the most important scholars writing on this is University of Wisconsin cultural ecologist William Denevan. In his paper, The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492, Denevan says "Agricultural fields were common as were houses, towns and roads and trails. All of these had local impacts on soil, microclimate, hydrology and wildlife." Fire was an important tool for the Indians in converting forests to grassy openings, probably making them the first Americans to contribute to global warming.

"Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment," says Mann. "Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer and bison." In South America, they appear to have planted part of the Amazon rain forest to grow a diverse assortment of trees, fruits, nuts and palms.

Indians retooling ecosystems and planting the rain forest? That doesn't sound like what we learned in school. American history has led us to believe that the New World was mostly empty and undeveloped. Nature, not indigenous people, managed the landscape. New analysis of early civilizations suggests otherwise. Denevan figures the population of North and South America at the time of Columbus was 43 to 65 million people. Some estimates are even higher. There may have been more people living in the New World than in Europe.

But that wasn't to last. Diseases brought by the first white men were a disaster for the native population. Millions of Indians died from small pox, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps and other communicable diseases. As a result, most of their landscape changes disappeared over time. Forests expanded and wildlife populations grew because of less hunting pressure. The passenger pigeon is probably one example. Mann says colonists were shocked by the huge flocks of these dumb birds, and they wasted no time in harvesting them. But archaeological digs of pre-Columbian Indian sites find little evidence of their bones.

Mann concludes that if environmentalists want to return America to its pre-1492 condition then it is not a wilderness they are seeking, but what was perhaps the world's largest garden. Pristine America, a wilderness untrammeled by man, may all be part of our folklore.

Stewart Truelsen is the director of broadcast services for the American Farm Bureau Federation.