American Environmental History E-Book
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: Blackwell Readers in American Social and Cultural History
- Sprache: Englisch
Explore how the peoples of America understood and changed their natural environments, remaking their politics, culture, and societies
In this newly revised Second Edition of American Environmental History, celebrated environmental historian and author Louis S. Warren provides readers with insightful examination of how different American peoples created and reacted to environmental change and threats from the era before Columbus to the COVID-19 pandemic.
You'll find concise editorial introductions to each chapter and interpretive interventions throughout this meticulous collection of essays and historical documents. This book covers topics as varied as Native American relations with nature, colonial invasions, American slavery, market expansion and species destruction, urbanization, Progressive and New Deal conservation, national parks, the environmental impact of consumer appetites, environmentalism and the backlash against it, environmental justice, and climate change.
This new edition includes twice as many primary documents as the First Edition, along with findings from related fields such as Native American history, African American history, geography, and environmental justice.
Ideal for students and researchers studying American environmental history and for those seeking historical perspectives on contemporary environmental challenges, this book will earn a place in the libraries of anyone with an interest in American history and the impact of American peoples on the environment and the world around them.
Louis S. Warren is the W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History at the University of California, Davis. He is a two-time winner of the Caughey Western History Association Prize, a Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Albert Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association and the Bancroft Prize in American History.
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Blackwell Readers in American Social and Cultural History
Series Editor: Jacqueline Jones, Brandeis University
The Blackwell Readers in American Social and Cultural History series introduces students to well-defined topics in American history from a socio-cultural perspective. Using primary and secondary sources, the volumes present the most important works available on a particular topic in a succinct and accessible format designed to fit easily into courses offered in American history or American studies.
Popular Culture In American History
edited by Jim Cullen
American Indians
edited by Nancy Shoemaker
The Civil Rights Movement
edited by Jack E. Davis
The Old South
edited by Mark M. Smith
American Radicalism
edited by Daniel Pope
American Sexual Histories
edited by Elizabeth Reis
American Technology
edited by Carroll Pursell
American Religious History
edited by Amanda Porterfield
Colonial American History
edited by Kirsten Fischer and Eric Hinderalter
Movies And American Society
edited by Steven J. Ross
Slavery And Emancipation
edited by Rick Halpern and Enrico Dal Lago
American Environmental History
edited by Louis S. Warren
American Environmental History
Second Edition
Edited by Louis S. Warren
This second edition first published 2021
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Edition History
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1e, 2008)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Louis S. Warren to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Warren, Louis S., editor.
Title: American environmental history / edited by Louis Warren.
Description: Second edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020046894 (print) | LCCN 2020046895 (ebook) | ISBN 9781444339390 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119477051 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119477075 (epub) | ISBN 9781119365969 (obook)
Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology--United States--History. | Nature--Effect of human beings on--United States. | United States--Environmental conditions--History.
Classification: LCC GF503 .A445 2021 (print) | LCC GF503 (ebook) | DDC 333.720973--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046894
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046895
Cover image: © Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images
Cover design by Wiley
Set in 10/12.5pt Plantin by Integra Software Services Pondicherry, India
for my students
Contents
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What Is Environmental History?
Chapter 1: The Natures of Indian America Before Columbus
Article
: William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492”
Documents
Richard Nelson, “The Watchful World”
Gilbert Wilson, Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden
Images of Florida Indians Planting and Making an Offering of a Stag to the Sun
Map of Bitterroot Forest Reserve
Chapter 2: The Other Invaders: Deadly Diseases and Extraordinary Animals
Article
: Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics”
Documents
Frank Givens, “Saynday and Smallpox: The White Man’s Gift”
Rethinking Virgin Soil Epidemics: COVID-19 Death Rates by Age and Race
Thomas James, “Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans”
John C. Ewers, “Horse Breeding”
George Catlin, “Wild Horses at Play”
Chapter 3: Colonial Natures: Marketing the Countryside
Article
: William Cronon, “A World of Fields and Fences”
Documents
Robert Cushman, “Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America”
Lion Gardener, “Livestock and War in Colonial New England”
Spanish Priests Joseph Antonio Murguía and Thomaís de la Peña Explain Indian Frustration with Settler Livestock in Colonial California
Chapter 4: Slavery and the South Through Environmental History
Article
: Mart Stewart, “Towards an Environmental History of the US South”
Documents
Newspaper Advertisements for African Slaves “from ‘The Rice Coast’ of West Africa, with knowledge of rice growing”
Wilderness Songs of Enslaved People: William Francis Allen, “Slave Songs of the United States”
Testimony from Former Slaves
Frederick Law Olmsted, “The Rice District”
Chapter 5: Frontier Expansion and Waste
Article
: Alan Taylor, “‘Wasty Ways’: Stories of American Settlement”
Documents
James Fenimore Cooper, “The Wasty Ways of Pioneers”
John J. Audubon, “The Wonder of the Passenger Pigeon”
Reporting on Passenger Pigeons
Frederick J. Haskin, “One Bird Survives Millions”
Edwin Bryant, “What I Saw in California”
Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery”
Chapter 6: Environmental Reform in City and Factory
Article
: Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866”
Documents
The Conquest of Pestilence in New York City
Underground Life – Health Officers Clean Out a Dive San Francisco Fire, 1850s
Los Angeles Crowd Welcomes Water Arriving in Aqueduct and Dynamited Portion of LA Aqueduct
Alice Hamilton Explains the Perils of the Industrial Environment
Chapter 7: Where the Wild Things Went: Emerging Markets and Vanishing Animals
Article
: Dan Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy Redux: Another Look at the Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850”
Documents
Billy Dixon, “Memories of Buffalo Hunting”
Curing Hides and Bones
Drake Hotel, Thanksgiving Menu, 1886
Plundering the Sea: Baleen and the Destruction of Whales
Charles H. Stevenson, “Whalebone: Its Production and Utilization”
Advertisement for Thomson’s Glove-Fitting Corset
Destroying Birds to Make Hats
Cruelties of Fashion: Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds
Chapter 8: The Many Uses of Progressive Conservation
Article
: Benjamin Heber Johnson, “Conservation, Subsistence, and Class at the Birth of Superior National Forest”
Documents
Gifford Pinchot, “The Meaning of Conservation”
Mr. A. A. Anderson, Special Supervisor of the Yellowstone and Teton Timber Reserves, Talks Interestingly of the Summer’s Work
Women Activists Take on Bird Hat Fashion: Celia Thaxter, “Woman’s Heartlessness”
Charles Askins Describes Game and Hunting Conditions in the South
Ben Senowin Testifies about Being Apprehended for Game Law Violations
Chapter 9: National Parks and the Trouble with Wilderness
Article
: William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”
Documents
John Muir on Saving Hetch Hetchy
Peter Oscar Little Chief Requests Permission to Hunt in Glacier Park
The National Parks Act (1916) and The Wilderness Act (1964)
Chapter 10: Conservation and the New Deal: Nature and Nation in Crisis
Article
: Neil M. Maher, “A New Deal Body Politic: Landscape, Labor, and the Civilian Conservation Corps”
Documents
Ann Marie Lowe, Farmer’s Daughter, Describes the New Deal
Russell Moore, “Roosevelt Riddles”
Photo Gallery – Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange Capture the Dust Bowl
Eli Gorman and Deneh Bitsilly Remember New Deal Livestock Reduction in Navajo Country
Chapter 11: Something in the Wind: Radiation, Pesticides, Air Pollution and Population
Article
: Robert Gottlieb, “Reconstructing Environmentalism: Complex Movements, Diverse Roots”
Documents
Stephen M. Spencer, “Fallout: The Silent Killer”
Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring”
Monsanto Corporation, “The Desolate Year”
Hugh Moore, “The Population Bomb”
The Air Pollution Control Act (1955), and the Clean Air Act, with amendments (2001)
United Farm Workers, “Pesticides: The Poisons We Eat”
Chapter 12: Environmental Protection and the Environmental Movement
Article
: J. Brooks Flippen, “Richard Nixon and the Triumph of Environmentalism”
Documents
The National Environmental Policy Act (1969)
The Endangered Species Act (1973)
Daniel Yankelovich, “The New Naturalism”
Gaylord Nelson, “Earth Day”
David Hendin, “Black Environmentalists See Another Side of Pollution”
Paul Ehrlich, “The Population Bomb”
Chapter 13: Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice
Article
: Eileen Maura McGurty, “From NIMBY to Civil Rights: The Origins of the Environmental Justice Movement”
Documents
Lois Gibbs on Toxic Waste and Environmental Justice
United Church of Christ, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States”
The Letter that Shook a Movement
Flint Water Advisory Task Force, “Final Report”
Chapter 14: Global Consumers and Global Environments
Article
: Matt Klingle, “Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History”
Documents
Paul C. Standley Reports on Bananas in Honduras
Impact of Coffee Farming on Indigenous Peoples
State of Denial – California’s Appetite for World Resources
Chapter 15: Backlash Against the Environmental Movement
Article
: James Morton Turner, “The Specter of Environmentalism: Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right”
Documents
Map of US Federal Lands
Tim Peckinpaugh, “Special Report – The Specter of Environmentalism: The Threat of Environmental Groups”
Joe Lane (National Cattlemen’s Association) and Larry Echohawk (Shoshone and Bannock Tribes of Idaho) Testify about the Sagebrush Rebellion
Carl Pope, “The Politics of Plunder”
S. Fred Singer, “The Costs of Environmental Overregulation”
Mark Douglas Whitaker, “‘Jobs vs. Environment’ Myth”
Chapter 16: Shifting Scale: Climate Change and Global Peril
Article
: Mike Hulme, “Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism”
Documents
Ben J. Wattenberg, “The Population Explosion Is Over”
United Nations, “World Population Prospects”
Economic Growth and Air Emission Trends
The Relentless Rise of Carbon Dioxide
The Acid Rain Experience: Sulfur Dioxide Air Quality, 1980–2018
The Triumph of Diplomacy? Atmospheric CFC Concentrations
California Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 2000–2017616
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Maps
Chapter 1
Map 1.1 Selected features of the prehistoric cultural landscape. Some cit…
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Drawn from specimen made by Yellow Hair. Length of specimen, f…
Figure 1.2 Drawn from specimen made by Buffalo Bird Woman. Length of wood…
Figure 1.3 Method of tilling the ground and sowing seed. The Indians cult…
Figure 1.4 The offering of a stag to the sun. Every year, a little before…
Figure 1.5 Map of Bitterroot Forest Reserve showing burned areas by J. B.…
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 COVID-19 death rates by age and race.
Figure 2.2 Wild horses at play.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 The Conquest of Pestilence in New York City.
Figure 6.2 “Metropolitan Board of Health Suppressing Nuisances,”.
Figure 6.3 “Underground Life and Health Officers Clearing Out a Div…
Figure 6.4 Fire in San Francisco, 1850s.
Figure 6.5 The crowd celebrating at the Owensmouth Cascades, near Sylmar,…
Figure 6.6 A dynamited portion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 1927.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Curing hides and bones.
Figure 7.2 Bundles of whalebone as received at the factory.
Figure 7.3 Cruelties of fashion: fine feathers make fine birds.
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 Graph of economic growth and air emission trends. Between 197…
Figure 16.2 Graph of atmospheric CO
2
concentration, 1958–2020.
Figure 16.3 Global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, 800,000 BP…
Figure 16.4 Atmospheric CFC concentrations, 1977–2019.
Guide
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Dedication
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Series Editor’s Preface
The purpose of the Blackwell Readers in American Social and Cultural History is to introduce students to cutting-edge historical scholarship that draws upon a variety of disciplines, and to encourage students to history themselves by examining some of the primary texts upon which that scholarship is based. Each of us lives life with a wholeness that is at odds with the way scholars often dissect the human experience. Anthropologists, psychologists, literary critics, and political scientists (to name just a few) study only discrete parts of our existence. The result is a rather arbitrary collection of disciplinary boundaries enshrined not only in specialized publications but also in university academic departments and in professional organizations. As a scholarly enterprise, the study of history necessarily crosses these boundaries of knowledge in order to provide a comprehensive view of the past. Over the last few years, social and cultural historians have reached across the disciplines to understand the history of the British North American colonies and the United States in all its fullness. Unfortunately, much of that scholarship, published in specialized monographs and journals, remains inaccessible to undergraduates. Consequently, instructors often face choices that are not very appealing – to ignore the recent scholarship altogether, assign bully readers that are too detailed for an undergraduate audience, or cobble together packages of recent articles that lack an overall contextual framework. The individual volumes of this series, however, each focus on a significant topic in American history, and bring new, exciting scholarship to students in a compact, accessible format. The series is designed to complement textbooks and other general readings assigned in undergraduate courses. Each editor has culled particularly innovative and provocative scholarly essays from widely scattered books and journals, and provided an introduction summarizing the major themes of the essays and documents that follow. The essays reproduced here were chosen because of the authors’ innovative (and often interdisciplinary) methodology and their ability to reconceptualize historical issues in fresh and insightful ways. Thus, students can appreciate the rich complexity of an historical topic and the way that scholars have explored the topic from different perspectives, and in the process transcend the highly artificial disciplinary boundaries that have served to compartmentalize knowledge about the past in the United States. Also included in each volume are primary texts, at least some of which have been drawn from the essays themselves. By linking primary and secondary material, the editors are able to introduce students to the historian’s craft, allowing them to explore this material in depth; and draw additional insights – or interpretations contrary to those of the scholars under discussion – from it.
Jacqueline JonesBrandeis University
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all the friends and colleagues who helped in the making of this edition, especially Lissa Wadewitz, as well as Matthew Booker, Mark Fiege, Matt Klingle, Neil Maher, Ruth Oldenziel, Cindy Ott, Jenny Price, Mart Stewart, Paul Sutter, Julie Sze, and Mike Ziser. Rachel St. John was, as usual, the perfect consultant and frequent provocateur; the book is better for our conversations.
I extend a huge thank you also to the then-graduate students, now PhDs, who provided critical research and feedback: Nick Perrone, Miles Powell, Mary Mendoza, Lizzie Grennan Browning, Cori Knudten, and Rebecca Egli. At John Wiley and Sons, Jennifer Manias and Andrew Minton were a huge help in navigating the complicated process of compiling, permitting, and finally publishing this book. Many, many thanks.
During the research, writing, and editing of this book, I have been especially grateful to have had the generous fellowship support of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany; the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University; the Bill Lane Center of the American West, Stanford University; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; and small grants from the Faculty Research Grants program at the University of California, Davis.
Introduction
What is environmental history? At its most fundamental level, environmental historians explore the changing relations between people and nature. Such a broad definition can be more of a hindrance than a help, however. So let’s be more specific. Environmental historians study how people have lived in the natural systems of the planet, and how they have perceived nature and reshaped it to suit their own ideas of good living. They examine, too, how nature has changed in response to human action, and how nature, in changing, has required people to reshape their cultures, economies, and politics to meet new realities. As we’ll see in the pages that follow, such processes are not without social friction and unrest. People in history have battled mightily and often over how best to live in nature.
As a field of study, environmental history has been around for more than a generation. To many, it is most familiar as the history of the environmental movement. Obviously, the kinds of relations and processes I am discussing here go far beyond that, but, to be sure, the history of environmental reform and politics is central to the field.
The articles and documents in this volume illuminate how people have made themselves at home in the natural systems of the American landscape since before the time of Columbus to the present day. Read with enthusiasm and care, they will provide some startling and illuminating new perspectives on American history. The early centuries of American history were a period of enormous transformations. We shall see how American Indians lived on the earth and worked both to change it and to maintain its abundance. The coming of European colonists brought new organisms to the Americas, with consequences both disastrous and liberating for Indians. We shall read how colonists introduced the natural products of America’s ecosystems to the insatiable demands of the Atlantic market system, and how early American settlers sought to turn forests into lumber, pasture, plantation, and farm to escape their poverty. For white people, Native Americans could be shunted off the most productive land and left to starve on the margins of fertile settlements, while slave bodies, consigned to lifetimes in malarial lowlands and cotton fields shimmering with summer heat, could be destroyed virtually at will. Enslaved people carved out their own relations with the natural world, as we shall see. Nonetheless, dark bodies became a buffer between white bodies and environmental peril, a characteristic of Americans’ ideas of race that would shape natural and social relations of race down to the present day.
Environmental history is not just about the countryside. It encompasses also the tangled relations between people and nature at the heart of the city. Thus, we shall explore how concentrating people in nineteenth-century cities with close trade links to Eurasia brought new and dangerous disease environments, especially cholera, as well as increasing fire and sanitation risks. We shall see how Americans ameliorated those conditions, sometimes with controversial measures that stigmatized immigrants, the poor, and racial minorities and linked city to countryside in new ways.
The nineteenth century was a period of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Together, these two trends underwrote huge changes in America’s natural systems, many of them destructive. The passenger pigeon disappeared, the bison edged toward extinction, and a host of other species followed. To address the increasing pace and scale of destruction, the progressive conservation movement arose at the turn of the twentieth century. The history of conservation provides a window on dramatic environmental and social change. The movement drew inspiration partly from fear that a dissipated nature would harm centers of culture, the cities. Conservationist solutions entailed radical approaches to allocating nature’s bounty, and new ways of determining who was entitled to game, lumber, and water, and to how much. Through the work of prominent reformers the movement also encompassed industrial reforms to bring some margin of safety to the toxic, often lethal factory workplace.
Environmental history offers not just new ways of thinking about history, but new ways of thinking about nature, too. Perceptions of nature have changed over time. In exploring how, historians question many of the most pervasive and popular understandings of nature around us. Thus, we shall see how Americans went from abhorring the wilderness as the home of Indians and wild animals to loving it once it had been largely dispossessed of Native inhabitants. In the late nineteenth century, national parks emerged in part to valorize the “uninhabited wilderness” as a national landscape, a kind of natural badge of American identity. We shall ask whether the new regard for wilderness did not come with a host of other problems, some of which may have created new obstacles to environmental protection.
Calamitous events are often the birth pangs of new thinking. The Great Depression plunged millions into poverty. The Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the programs devised to address it, instilled new appreciation for the landscape and helped democratize conservation, which had been an elite movement, bringing newfound support from working people and the middle class by the end of the 1930s. Shortly thereafter, World War II and the Cold War together brought a revolution, or perhaps several revolutions, in environmental thought. The modern environmental movement, with its beginnings in various strands of conservation in the early twentieth century, reached maturation after 1945 in public anxieties over insidious new environmental hazards such as radiation, pesticides, and air pollution. Amidst these concerns, environmentalism rose to such heights that politicians from across the political spectrum competed with one another for environmentalist support, with the result that the 1960s and 1970s saw a blizzard of environmental legislation with bipartisan sponsorship.
Almost as soon as it had begun, the environmental movement attracted critics. Among the most persuasive of these came from the political left, alleging that the movement was overwhelmingly concerned with securing quality of life for America’s most powerful people, middle- and upper-class whites, while ignoring living and working conditions of the poor and peoples of color. In 1982, the civil rights activist Benjamin Chavis coined the term “environmental racism” to describe the disproportionate allotment of environmental risk, especially pollution, on minority communities. Obviously, the problem has roots that reach back to colonial days, when war against Indians and seizure of their lands, and the enslavement of Africans to work those lands, expressed a core faith in the justice of shunting dark-skinned people into environmental danger to guarantee the wellbeing of white-skinned people. Continuing attempts to address the problems of environmental racism have done much to transform the environmental movement in recent years. Environmental concern and racial prejudice arguably have reinforced one another at times, a tendency that helps explain historical genesis of the movement for environmental justice.
A very different critique of the environmental movement hailed from the political right. The successes of the environmental movement were followed, in the 1980s, by a backlash which has become an enduring political sub-movement. By the end of the twentieth century, environmentalism was under frequent attack from conservatives, who saw it as an obstacle to efficient government and traditional economic opportunity and entrepreneurialism.
In our final chapter, we discuss “the mother of all environmental problems,” climate change and global warming. We shall consider ways to think about climate change and ways not to think about it. Environmental history proves remarkably helpful in highlighting previous international and even global efforts to address atmospheric pollutants that created acid rain and the ozone hole, and how these efforts succeeded to a remarkable degree.
For all the vehemence of anti-environmental critics in the last few decades, Americans in general retain a pervasive belief in the need to protect clean air, clean water, and environmental systems. It may be that these beliefs are now a central feature of American culture – yet another example of how our ideas about nature continue to evolve. Now two decades into the twenty-first century, as concerns about global warming and other ominous threats continue to grow, the discipline of environmental history provides key insights into environmental relations and problems of the past. It can teach us how we might better understand our current predicaments. But more than that, in instructing us about how people once saw nature, it offers powerful insights into how they saw themselves and one another. In illuminating how Americans have “perceived, changed, and been changed by nature,” environmental history teaches us how Americans have understood and shaped their politics, culture, and society.
1 The Natures of Indian America Before Columbus
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.
Indian Numbers
The size of the native population at contact is critical to our argument. The prevailing position, a recent one, is that the Americas were well-populated rather than relatively empty lands in 1492. In the words of the sixteenth-century Spanish priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, who knew the Indies well:
All that has been discovered up to the year forty-nine [1549] is full of people, like a hive of bees, so that it seems as though God had placed all, or the greater part of the entire human race in these countries.
(Las Casas, in MacNutt 1909, 314)
Las Casas believed that more than 40 million Indians had died by the year 1560. Did he exaggerate? In the 1930s and 1940s, Alfred Kroeber, Angel Rosenblat, and Julian Steward believed that he had. The best counts then available indicated a population of between 8 and 15 million Indians in the Americas. Subsequently, Carl Sauer, Woodrow Borah, Sherburne F. Cook, Henry Dobyns, George Lovell, N. David Cook, myself, and others have argued for larger estimates. Many scholars now believe that there were between 40 and 100 million Indians in the hemisphere (Denevan 1992). This conclusion is primarily based on evidence of rapid early declines from epidemic disease prior to the first population counts (Lovell 1992).
I have recently suggested a New World total of 53.9 million (Denevan 1992, xxvii). This divides into 3.8 million for North America, 17.2 million for Mexico, 5.6 million for Central America, 3.0 million for the Caribbean, 15.7 million for the Andes, and 8.6 million for lowland South America. These figures are based on my judgment as to the most reasonable recent tribal and regional estimates. Accepting a margin of error of about 20 percent, the New World population would lie between 43 and 65 million. Future regional revisions are likely to maintain the hemispheric total within this range…. In any event, a population between 40 and 80 million is sufficient to dispel any notion of “empty lands.” Moreover, the native impact on the landscape of 1492 reflected not only the population then but the cumulative effects of a growing population over the previous 15,000 years or more.
European entry into the New World abruptly reversed this trend. The decline of native American populations was rapid and severe, probably the greatest demographic disaster ever (Lovell 1992). Old World diseases were the primary killer. In many regions, particularly the tropical lowlands, populations fell by 90 percent or more in the first century after contact. Indian populations (estimated) declined in Hispaniola from 1 million in 1492 to a few hundred 50 years later, or by more than 99 percent; in Peru from 9 million in 1520 to 670,000 in 1620 (92 percent); in the Basin of Mexico from 1.6 million in 1519 to 180,000 in 1607 (89 percent); and in North America from 3.8 million in 1492 to 1 million in 1800 (74 percent). An overall drop from 53.9 million in 1492 to 5.6 million in 1650 amounts to an 89 percent reduction (Denevan 1992, xvii–xxix). The human landscape was affected accordingly, although there is not always a direct relationship between population density and human impact (Whitmore et al. 1990, 37).
The replacement of Indians by Europeans and Africans was initially a slow process. By 1638 there were only about 30,000 English in North America (Sale 1990, 386), and by 1750 there were only 1.3 million Europeans and slaves (Meinig 1986, 247). For Latin America in 1750, Sánchez-Albornoz (1974, 7) gives a total (including Indians) of 12 million. For the hemisphere in 1750, the Atlas of World Population History reports 16 million (McEvedy and Jones 1978, 270). Thus the overall hemispheric population in 1750 was about 30 percent of what it may have been in 1492. The 1750 population, however, was very unevenly distributed, mainly located in certain coastal and highland areas with little Europeanization elsewhere. In North America in 1750, there were only small pockets of settlement beyond the coastal belt, stretching from New England to northern Florida (see maps in Meinig 1986, 209, 245). Elsewhere, combined Indian and European populations were sparse, and environmental impact was relatively minor.
Indigenous imprints on landscapes at the time of initial European contact varied regionally in form and intensity. Following are examples for vegetation and wildlife, agriculture, and the built landscape.
Vegetation
The Eastern Forests
The forests of New England, the Midwest, and the Southeast had been disturbed to varying degrees by Indian activity prior to European occupation. Agricultural clearing and burning had converted much of the forest into successional (fallow) growth and into semi-permanent grassy openings (meadows, barrens, plains, glades, savannas, prairies), often of considerable size. Much of the mature forest was characterized by an open, herbaceous understory, reflecting frequent ground fires. “The de Soto expedition, consisting of many people, a large horse herd, and many swine, passed through ten states without difficulty of movement” (Sauer 1971, 283). The situation has been described in detail by Michael Williams in his recent history of American forests: “Much of the ‘natural’ forest remained, but the forest was not the vast, silent, unbroken, impenetrable, and dense tangle of trees beloved by many writers in their romantic accounts of the forest wilderness” (1989b, 33). “The result was a forest of large, widely spaced trees, few shrubs, and much grass and herbage …. Selective Indian burning thus promoted the mosaic quality of New England ecosystems, creating forests in many different states of ecological succession” (Cronon 1983, 49–51).
The extent, frequency, and impact of Indian burning is not without controversy. Raup (1937) argued that climatic change rather than Indian burning could account for certain vegetation changes. Emily Russell (1983), assessing pre-1700 information for the Northeast, concluded that: “There is no strong evidence that Indians purposely burned large areas,” but Indians did “increase the frequency of fires above the low numbers caused by lightning,” creating an open forest. But then Russell adds: “In most areas climate and soil probably played the major role in determining the precolonial forests.” She regards Indian fires as mainly accidental and “merely” augmental to natural fires, and she discounts the reliability of many early accounts of burning.
Forman and Russell (1983, 5) expand the argument to North America in general: “regular and widespread Indian burning (Day 1953) [is] an unlikely hypothesis that regretfully has been accepted in the popular literature and consciousness.” This conclusion, I believe, is unwarranted given reports of the extent of prehistoric human burning in North America and Australia (Lewis 1982), and Europe (Patterson and Sassaman 1988, 130), and by my own and other observations on current Indian and peasant burning in Central America and South America; when unrestrained, people burn frequently and for many reasons. For the Northeast, Patterson and Sassaman (1988, 129) found that sedimentary charcoal accumulations were greatest where Indian populations were greatest.
Elsewhere in North America, the Southeast is much more fire prone than is the Northeast, with human ignitions being especially important in winter (Taylor 1981). The Berkeley geographer and Indianist Erhard Rostlund (1957, 1960) argued that Indian clearing and burning created many grasslands within mostly open forest in the so-called “prairie belt” of Alabama. As improbable as it may seem, Lewis (1982) found Indian burning in the subarctic, and Dobyns (1981) in the Sonoran desert. The characteristics and impacts of fires set by Indians varied regionally and locally with demography, resource management techniques, and environment, but such fires clearly had different vegetation impacts than did natural fires owing to differences in frequency, regularity, and seasonality.
Forest Composition
In North America, burning not only maintained open forest and small meadows but also encouraged fire-tolerant and sun-loving species. “Fire created conditions favorable to strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, and other gatherable foods” (Cronon 1983, 51). Other useful plants were saved, protected, planted, and transplanted, such as American chestnut, Canada plum, Kentucky coffee tree, groundnut, and leek (Day 1953, 339–40). Gilmore (1931) described the dispersal of several native plants by Indians. Mixed stands were converted to single species dominants, including various pines and oaks, sequoia, Douglas fir, spruce, and aspen (M. Williams 1989a, 47–48). The longleaf, slash pine, and scrub oak forests of the Southeast are almost certainly an anthropogenic subclimax created originally by Indian burning, replaced in early Colonial times by mixed hardwoods, and maintained in part by fires set by subsequent farmers and woodlot owners (Garren 1943). Lightning fires can account for some fire-climax vegetation, but Indian burning would have extended and maintained such vegetation (Silver 1990, 17–19, 59–64).
Even in the humid tropics, where natural fires are rare, human fires can dramatically influence forest composition. A good example is the pine forests of Nicaragua (Denevan 1961). Open pine stands occur both in the northern highlands (below 5,000 feet) and in the eastern (Miskito) lowlands, where warm temperatures and heavy rainfall generally favor mixed tropical montane forest or rain forest. The extensive pine forests of Guatemala and Mexico primarily grow in cooler and drier, higher elevations, where they are in large part natural and prehuman (Watts and Bradbury 1982, 59). Pine forests were definitely present in Nicaragua when Europeans arrived. They were found in areas where Indian settlement was substantial, but not in the eastern mountains where Indian densities were sparse. The eastern boundary of the highland pines seems to have moved with an eastern settlement frontier that has fluctuated back and forth since prehistory. The pines occur today where there has been clearing followed by regular burning and the same is likely in the past. The Nicaraguan pines are fire tolerant once mature, and large numbers of seedlings survive to maturity if they can escape fire during their first three to seven years (Denevan 1961, 280). Where settlement has been abandoned and fire ceases, mixed hardwoods gradually replace pines. This succession is likely similar where pines occur else-where at low elevations in tropical Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico.
Midwest Prairies and Tropical Savannas
Sauer (1950, 1958, 1975) argued early and often that the great grass-lands and savannas of the New World were of anthropogenic rather than climatic origin, that rainfall was generally sufficient to support trees. Even nonagricultural Indians expanded what may have been pockets of natural, edaphic grasslands at the expense of forest. A fire burning to the edge of a grass/forest boundary will penetrate the drier forest margin and push back the edge, even if the forest itself is not consumed (Mueller-Dombois 1981, 164). Grassland can therefore advance significantly in the wake of hundreds of years of annual fires. Lightning-set fires can have a similar impact, but more slowly if less frequent than human fires, as in the wet tropics.
… Most ecologists now believe that the eastern prairies “would have mostly disappeared if it had not been for the nearly annual burning of these grasslands by the North American Indians,” during the last 5,000 years. A case in point is the nineteenth-century invasion of many grasslands by forests after fire had been suppressed in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and elsewhere (M. Williams 1989a, 46).
The large savannas of South America are also controversial as to origin. Much, if not most of the open vegetation of the Orinoco Llanos, the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia, the Pantanal of Mato Grosso, the Bolívar savannas of Colombia, the Guayas savannas of coastal Ecuador, the campo cerrado of central Brazil, and the coastal savannas north of the Amazon, is of natural origin. The vast campos cerrados occupy extremely senile, often toxic oxisols. The seasonally inundated savannas of Bolivia, Brazil, Guayas, and the Orinoco owe their existence to the intolerance of woody species to the extreme alternation of lengthy flooding or water-logging and severe desiccation during a long dry season. These savannas, however, were and are burned by Indians and ranchers, and such fires have expanded the savannas into the forests to an unknown extent. It is now very difficult to determine where a natural forest/savanna boundary once was located (Hills and Randall 1968; Medina 1980).
Other small savannas have been cut out of the rainforest by Indian farmers and then maintained by burning. An example is the Gran Pajonal in the Andean foothills in east-central Peru, where dozens of small grasslands (pajonales) have been created by Campa Indians – a process clearly documented by air photos (Scott 1978). Pajonales were in existence when the region was first penetrated by Franciscan missionary explorers in 1733.
The impact of human activity is nicely illustrated by vegetational changes in the basins of the San Jorge, Cauca, and Sinú rivers of northern Colombia. The southern sector, which was mainly savanna when first observed in the sixteenth century, had reverted to rainforest by about 1750 following Indian decline, and had been reconverted to savanna for pasture by 1950 (Gordon 1957, map p. 69). Sauer (1966, 285–88; 1975, 8) and Bennett (1968, 53–55) cite early descriptions of numerous savannas in Panama in the sixteenth century. Balboa’s first view of the Pacific was from a “treeless ridge,” now probably forested. Indian settlement and agricultural fields were common at the time, and with their decline the rainforest returned.
Anthropogenic Tropical Rain Forest
The tropical rain forest has long had a reputation for being pristine, whether in 1492 or 1992. There is, however, increasing evidence that the forests of Amazonia and elsewhere are largely anthropogenic in form and composition. Sauer (1958, 105) said as much at the Ninth Pacific Science Congress in 1957 when he challenged the statement of tropical botanist Paul Richards that, until recently, the tropical forests have been largely uninhabited, and that prehistoric people had “no more influence on the vegetation than any of the other animal inhabitants.” Sauer countered that Indian burning, swiddens, and manipulation of composition had extensively modified the tropical forest.
“Indeed, in much of Amazonia, it is difficult to find soils that are not studded with charcoal” (Uhl et al. 1990, 30)….
The Amazon forest is a mosaic of different ages, structure, and composition resulting from local habitat conditions and disturbance dynamics (Haffer 1991). Natural disturbances (tree falls, landslides, river activity) have been considerably augmented by human activity, particularly by shifting cultivation. Even a small number of swidden farmers can have a widespread impact in a relatively short period of time....
Indian modification of tropical forests is not limited to clearing and burning. Large expanses of Latin American forests are humanized forests in which the kinds, numbers, and distributions of useful species are managed by human populations.
…There are no virgin tropical forests today, nor were there in 1492.
Wildlife
The indigenous impact on wildlife is equivocal. The thesis that “over-kill” hunting caused the extinction of some large mammals in North America during the late Pleistocene, as well as subsequent local and regional depletions (Martin 1978, 167–72), remains controversial. By the time of the arrival of Cortéz in 1519, the dense populations of Central Mexico apparently had greatly reduced the number of large game, given reports that “they eat any living thing” (Cook and Borah 1971–79, (3) 135, 140). In Amazonia, local game depletion apparently increases with village size and duration (Good 1987). Hunting procedures in many regions seem, however, to have allowed for recovery because of the “resting” of hunting zones intentionally or as a result of shifting of village sites.
On the other hand, forest disturbance increased herbaceous forage and edge effect, and hence the numbers of some animals (Thompson and Smith 1970, 261–64). “Indians created ideal habitats for a host of wildlife species … exactly those species whose abundance so impressed English colonists: elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail, ruffed grouse, and so on” (Cronon 1983, 51). White-tailed deer, peccary, birds, and other game increases in swiddens and fallows in Yucatán and Panama (Bennett 1968; Gordon 1982, 96–112; Greenberg 1991). Rostlund (1960, 407) believed that the creation of grassy openings east of the Mississippi extended the range of the bison, whose numbers increased with Indian depopulation and reduced hunting pressure between 1540 and 1700, and subsequently declined under White pressure.
Agriculture
Fields and Associated Features
To observers in the sixteenth century, the most visible manifestation of the Native American landscape must have been the cultivated fields, which were concentrated around villages and houses. Most fields are ephemeral, their presence quickly erased when farmers migrate or die, but there are many eye-witness accounts of the great extent of Indian fields. On Hispaniola, Las Casas and Oviedo reported individual fields with thousands of montones (Sturtevant 1961, 73). These were manioc and sweet potato mounds 3–4 m in circumference, of which apparently none have survived. In the Llanos de Mojos in Bolivia, the first explorers mentioned percheles, or corn cribs on pilings, numbering up to 700 in a single field, each holding 30–45 bushels of food (Denevan 1966, 98). In northern Florida in 1539, Hernando de Soto’s army passed through numerous fields of maize, beans, and squash, their main source of provisions; in one sector, “great fields … were spread out as far as the eye could see across two leagues of the plain” (Garcilaso de la Vega 1980, (2) 182; also see Dobyns 1983, 135–46).
It is difficult to obtain a reliable overview from such descriptions. Aside from possible exaggeration, Europeans tended not to write about field size, production, or technology. More useful are various forms of relict fields and field features that persist for centuries and can still be recognized, measured, and excavated today. These extant features, including terraces, irrigation works, raised fields, sunken fields, drainage ditches, dams, reservoirs, diversion walls, and field borders number in the millions and are distributed throughout the Americas (Denevan 1980; see also Doolittle 1992; Whitmore and Turner 1992). For example, about 500,000 ha of abandoned raised fields survive in the San Jorge Basin of northern Colombia (Plazas and Falchetti 1987, 485), and at least 600,000 ha of terracing, mostly of prehistoric origin, occur in the Peruvian Andes (Denevan 1988, 20). There are 19,000 ha of visible raised fields in just the sustaining area of Tiwanaku at Lake Titicaca (Kolata 1991, 109) and there were about 12,000 ha of chinampas (raised fields) around the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (Sanders et al. 1979, 390). Complex canal systems on the north coast of Peru and in the Salt River Valley in Arizona irrigated more land in prehistory than is cultivated today. About 175 sites of Indian garden beds, up to several hundred acres each, have been reported in Wisconsin (Gartner 1992). These various remnant fields probably represent less than 25 percent of what once existed, most being buried under sediment or destroyed by erosion, urbanization, plowing, and bulldozing. On the other hand, an inadequate effort has been made to search for ancient fields.
Erosion
The size of native populations, associated deforestation, and prolonged intensive agriculture led to severe land degradation in some regions. Such a landscape was that of Central Mexico, where by 1519 food production pressures may have brought the Aztec civilization to the verge of collapse even without Spanish intervention (Cook and Borah 1971–79 (3), 129–76). There is good evidence that severe soil erosion was already widespread, rather than just the result of subsequent European plowing, livestock, and deforestation. Cook examined the association between erosional severity (gullies, barrancas, sand and silt deposits, and sheet erosion) and pre-Spanish population density or proximity to prehistoric Indian towns. He concluded that “an important cycle of erosion and deposition therefore accompanied intensive land use by huge primitive populations in central Mexico, and had gone far toward the devastation of the country before the white man arrived” (Cook 1949, 86).
Barbara Williams (1972, 618) describes widespread tepetate, an indurated substrate formation exposed by sheet erosion resulting from prehistoric agriculture, as “one of the dominant surface materials in the Valley of Mexico.” On the other hand, anthropologist Melville (1990) argues that soil erosion in the Valle de Mezquital, just north of the Valley of Mexico, was the result of overgrazing by Spanish livestock starting before 1600: “there is an almost total lack of evidence of environmental degradation before the last three decades of the sixteenth century.” The Butzers, however, in an examination of Spanish land grants, grazing patterns, and soil and vegetation ecology, found that there was only light intrusion of Spanish livestock (sheep and cattle were moved frequently) into the southeastern Bajío near Mezquital until after 1590 and that any degradation in 1590 was “as much a matter of long-term Indian land use as it was of Spanish intrusion” (Butzer and Butzer 1993). The relative roles of Indian and early Spanish impacts in Mexico still need resolution; both were clearly significant but varied in time and place. Under the Spaniards, however, even with a greatly reduced population, the landscape in Mexico generally did not recover due to accelerating impacts from introduced sheep and cattle.
The Built Landscape
Settlement
The Spaniards and other Europeans were impressed by large flourishing Indian cities such as Tenochtitlán, Quito, and Cuzco, and they took note of the extensive ruins of older, abandoned cities such as Cahokia, Teotihuacán, Tikal, Chan Chan, and Tiwanaku (Hardoy 1968). Most of these cities contained more than 50,000 people. Less notable, or possibly more taken for granted, was rural settlement – small villages of a few thousand or a few hundred people, hamlets of a few families, and dispersed farmsteads. The numbers and locations of much of this settlement will never be known. With the rapid decline of native populations, the abandonment of houses and entire villages and the decay of perishable materials quickly obscured sites, especially in the tropical lowlands.
We do have some early listings of villages, especially for Mexico and Peru. Elsewhere, archaeology is telling us more than ethnohistory. After initially focusing on large temple and administrative centers, archaeologists are now examining rural sustaining areas, with remarkable results. See, for example, Sanders et al. (1979) on the Basin of Mexico, Culbert and Rice (1990) on the Maya lowlands, and Fowler (1989) on Cahokia in Illinois. Evidence of human occupation for the artistic Santarém Culture phase (Tapajós chiefdom) on the lower Amazon extends over thousands of square kilometers, with large nucleated settlements (Roosevelt 1991, 101–02).
Much of the rural precontact settlement was semi-dispersed (rancherías), particularly in densely populated regions of Mexico and the Andes, probably reflecting poor food transport efficiency. Houses were both single-family and communal (pueblos, Huron long houses, Amazon malocas). Construction was of stone, earth, adobe, daub and wattle, grass, hides, brush, and bark. Much of the dispersed settlement not destroyed by depopulation was concentrated by the Spaniards into compact grid/plaza style new towns (congregaciones, reducciones) for administrative purposes.
Mounds
James Parsons (1985, 161) has suggested that: “An apparent mania for earth moving, landscape engineering on a grand scale runs as a thread through much of New World prehistory.” Large quantities of both earth and stone were transferred to create various raised and sunken features, such as agricultural landforms, settlement, and ritual mounds, and cause-ways.
Mounds of different shapes and sizes were constructed throughout the Americas for temples, burials, settlement, and as effigies. The stone pyramids of Mexico and the Andes are well known, but equal monuments of earth were built in the Amazon, the Midwest United States, and elsewhere. The Mississippian period complex of 104 mounds at Cahokia near East St. Louis supported 30,000 people; the largest, Monk’s Mound, is currently 30.5 m high and covers 6.9 ha (Fowler 1989, 90, 192). Cahokia was the largest settlement north of the Río Grande until surpassed by New York City in 1775. An early survey estimated “at least 20,000 conical, linear, and effigy mounds” in Wisconsin (Stout 1911, 24). Overall, there must have been several hundred thousand artificial mounds in the Midwest and South. De Soto described such features still in use in 1539 (Silverberg 1968, 7). Thousands of settlement and other mounds dot the savanna landscape of Mojos in Bolivia (Denevan 1966). At the mouth of the Amazon on Marajó Island, one complex of 40 habitation mounds contained more than 10,000 people; one of these mounds is 20 m high while another is 90 ha in area (Roosevelt 1991, 31, 38).
