oliation has become the defining stream in how we think about American environmental history.What's wild was tamedWilderness is certainly the wrong word for what early America was. It's the wrong word because it's Eurocentric and it obscures more than it reveals. What is obscured is that the garden doesn't have to be free of the human touch to still be a garden.At the time of contact between Europe and the Americas, at least 350 generations (probably more) of men and women had been at work living in and transforming North America over a time span of well over 100 centuries. Multiply that out based on the recent estimates of pre-Columbian population and it means that over the last 500 years before contact the supposed "virgin" landscape of the present United States had been home to 150 million people.As geographer William Denevan argued in an article he called "The Pristine Myth," the ecological changes that many people could produce over that full span of occupation could only mean that North America when Europeans first saw it was a managed landscape, much of its look and ecology the product of the human presence.Indians had cleared forests, drained swamps, engineered significant water diversions and highway systems. They had built public works in the form of earthen mounds that for two centuries were larger construction projects than anything the Europeans attempted in America.Indians had also engaged in environmental modifications that in our Eurocentric guilt we tend to associate only with industrial societies. Their ancestors had played at least some role in the extinctions of the megafauna of the Pleistocene, ecologically the most significant transformation to occur in the West since humans have been here. Indian farmers had introduced dozens of domesticated exotic plants to the West, moved several native species around from one location to another. And the fire ecology they practiced had altered successional patterns and even flo...
