Читать книгу American Environmental History - Группа авторов - Страница 14

Given that so many people believe that America before Columbus was a version of the Garden of Eden, the history since then is usually understood as a fairly straightforward story, which goes like this: when Indians dominated America, the place was beautiful and natural. When Europeans arrived, they trashed the place.

The truth is far more complicated and interesting, however. William Denevan explores pre-contact Indian America with an eye to seeing how Indians shaped and changed the natural worlds around them. To be sure, most Indians did not impose nearly as great a strain on natural environments as subsequent non-Indian settlers or modern industrial capitalism eventually would. But nonetheless, they did alter the earth around them in important ways. This points to a key insight of environmental history: all peoples change nature to achieve their notion of the good life. To suggest that any people does not do this – that some people are part of nature without being willing or able to change it – is to remove them from history and to dehumanize them.

As you read Denevan’s article, ask yourself how Native changes to the natural environment before 1500 differed from the kinds of alterations, modifications, and wholesale changes in nature that your society makes today. Is there any way in which they were similar? How does it change your perception of American history to consider that Indians did not live in a Garden of Eden?

The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492

William M. Denevan

(Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82(3) 1992: 369–385.)

This is the forest primeval …

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (Longfellow 1847)

What was the New World like at the time of Columbus? …

Scholarship has shown that Indian populations in the Americas were substantial [in 1492], that the forests had indeed been altered, that landscape change was commonplace. This message, however, seems not to have reached the public through texts, essays, or talks by both academics and popularizers who have a responsibility to know better ….

The evidence is convincing. By 1492 Indian activity throughout the Americas had modified forest extent and composition, created and expanded grasslands, and rearranged microrelief via countless artificial earthworks. Agricultural fields were common, as were houses and towns and roads and trails. All of these had local impacts on soil, microclimate, hydrology, and wildlife. This is a large topic, for which this essay offers but an introduction to the issues, misconceptions, and residual problems. The evidence, pieced together from vague ethnohistorical accounts, field surveys, and archaeology, supports the hypothesis that the Indian landscape of 1492 had largely vanished by the mid-eighteenth century, not through a European superimposition, but because of the demise of the native population. The landscape of 1750 was more “pristine” (less humanized) than that of 1492.