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The Amazon, dark clouds on the horizon (c) 2018 Planet Earth Foundation<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Ten.<\/b><\/p>\n \u201cNative Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they will have to find it within themselves to create the world\u2019s largest garden.\u201d \u2013\u00a0Charles C. Mann, 1491, The Atlantic Magazine, March 2002<\/em><\/p>\n As we have noted throughout our reflections, sometimes we have to look back in order to look forward, much less to see clearly where we are.<\/p>\n Today is Columbus Day in the US, a federal holiday set on the second Monday of October, and a national holiday in many countries of the Americas and elsewhere which officially celebrates the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492.<\/p>\n It is a controversial holiday, for good reason. Many states and cities observe it as a “Day of Observance” or “Recognition” and a number of states and cities observe it as \u201cIndigenous Peoples’ Day.\u201d<\/p>\n This leads into today\u2019s reflection.<\/p>\n First a brief note on current events in the US.<\/p>\n Last week we wrote: \u201cExtraordinary is an understatement for the political and social convergence of issues and events that occurred last week in the US related to the senate confirmation hearings for the US Supreme Court. As we wrote a week ago: \u2018Numerous issues are at critical junctures that will play out further in unknown ways as we write.\u2019”<\/p>\n The above concluded in dramatic fashion over the weekend. \u201cThe political and social convergence of issues and events\u201d are multidimensional and will continue to play out. We will comment about this in the depth it requires at some point in the future.<\/p>\n Our focus last week was the role of the Supreme Court, and all legal systems in the world, in the evolution of human rights, economic, social and environmental issues and global governance.<\/p>\n This week, we go back to the creation moment when a connected world was born, and all that has flowed from it. When Western civilization was influenced at least as much by the indigenous civilizations it encountered and colonized as the other way around.<\/p>\n Terrible and amazing things have happened ever since 1492. Everything changed then. Most people don\u2019t truly understand this. Or the context of indigenous civilizations going back thousands of years. Or the relationship since to virtually every aspect of Western civilization.<\/p>\n Most importantly, 1492 was the year that we became one world.<\/p>\n There are countless reasons to wish it had never happened. Conversely, it was always inevitably going to, one way or another, and in the evolution of our species, aspects of it were going to be awful, one way or another. No excuses, but terrible reality, until we are citizens of the planet as one species, with basic needs, rights, rules and responsibilities for all with global governance.<\/p>\n It is quite possible that the population of indigenous peoples who created advanced civilizations disconnected from the rest of the world was larger than the population of Europe in 1492. Their relationship to the environment was complex and as with all people in response to their basic needs. As it was, they may well have, through their ingenuity, created the Amazon in no small part, the linchpin on the planet to a significant extent upon which every breath we take depends.<\/p>\n The food crops that Europeans and much of the world came to depend on were developed by indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n The fate of indigenous peoples in the Americas was sealed the moment Columbus landed. The huge majority were not killed by European weapons but by disease, pandemics perhaps historically unequaled. The Europeans apparently had little to no idea what was happening in the main at first\u2013one person or animal could start the process that destroyed populations over time after the initial European incursions moved on (the paths of disease, years between Eurpoean incursions and places they occured helped engender the myth of wilderness)\u2013and had every reason to want large populations of indigenous peoples to survive to be used as labor (although had the huge majority survived, it is quite possible that even with their weaponry, Europeans would have been overwhelmed and their weapons technology adopted–in which case history may have taken a very different course.) Because of the decimation of indigenous populations, Europeans looked to Africa for slave labor in the Americas.<\/p>\n Make no mistake about it, Europeans were more than willing to consciously commit genocide and did, along with every imaginable crime against humanity. Their interest was their own security, wealth and power (although to remind of the connectedness of all things, some were themselves virtual serfs or were fleeing tyranny, persecution and deprivation). In the US as throughout the Americas, the original sin was not slavery (although that was the abominable crime that tore the US apart from the start for many reasons). The first sin, the first great crime, was committed against indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n But the situation was far more complex as it unfolded over half a millennium than was, or still is, understood by many. The degree of the tragedy is minimized by not acknowledging the size of the populations and civilizations destroyed. And the lack of understanding as to the contributions made by indigenous peoples that in many ways were more advanced than Europeans, and that ended up benefiting Europeans and the whole world, adds to the degradation and racism endured by indigenous peoples. The cruelest irony and greatest tribute may be that humanity and all life on earth may owe our future survival in significant measure to them.<\/p>\n Today, we go back to The Atlantic, which just re-posted its landmark March 2002 article, \u201c1491\u201d, by Charles C. Mann, which led to his best-selling book of the same name.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the most read article as we write. It\u2019s arguably one of the more important articles ever written on the history of humanity and the planet. It’s a long-read article that reads like a knife through butter.<\/p>\n The first time we read it, 16 years ago, we were floored. We were aware of much of its content, but not all, and it had never been put together in such a manner. Utterly brain-exploding and perspective-altering on who we are as humans on the planet. Reading it again today was like reading it for the first time with the events of the past decade and a half since amplifying its importance.<\/p>\n Mann next wrote the follow-up book, 1493<\/i>. Taken together, the two books are a before and after view of the moment the entire history of the world was changed.<\/p>\n As Ian Martin wrote in the Sunday New York Times book review of 1493<\/i> in 2011, \u201cSeeds, Germs and Slaves\u201d:<\/p>\n \u201cIt was one world, ready or not.\u201d<\/p>\n Mann\u2019s newest book, The Wizard and the Prophet<\/i>, was reviewed in the Sunday New York Times in February this year.<\/p>\n By Bill McKibben, who wrote The End of Nature,\u00a0<\/i>30 years ago, about climate change.<\/p>\n (The usual reminder here\u2014we don\u2019t agree with everything Mann writes\u2014nor does McKibben, who rightly admires his work nonetheless. His most recent book leaves out important factors and issues on the subjects he addresses, subjects that have a relationship to our work over the years. Nevertheless, Mann\u2019s work is important, what he does focus on he does with welcome precision, and his research, observations and writing skill in 1491\u00a0<\/i>and 1493\u00a0<\/i>are extraordinary, about exceptionally momentous historical events.)<\/p>\n Which takes us to the event today that may in part have informed the decision by The Atlantic to re-post \u201c1491\u201d.<\/p>\n On August 7, our reflection in this series focused on the book-length article taking up the entire New York Times Magazine, \u201cLosing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change\u201d, itself a \u201cwork of history\u201d as editor Jake Silverstein noted, \u201cbased on 18 months of reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-convened coalition of climate scientists from around the world, released a new report on climate change.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve got about a decade for radical change, just to survive a rough future already guaranteed by lack of action, to change radically, or face unequivocal catastrophe.<\/p>\n The Guardian editorial today, \u201cThe Guardian view on climate change: a global emergency\u201d, covers why this report is different and will likely be seen as a last chance call to action in the view of history:<\/p>\n \u201cClimate change is an existential threat to the human race. This may seem an absurd or alarmist statement, since we have been conditioned by unparalleled growth to expect that there are no catastrophes that are insurmountable. \u2026 But the threat is real.\u201d<\/p>\n Then an echo of what has been written on these pages for many years\u2014\u201cshort-term selfishness can\u2019t be overcome only by appeals to unselfishness or to solidarity. Only long-term self-interest can be stronger: perhaps the fear that international anarchy must ultimately lead to international war in an age of nuclear and biological weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n And finally: \u201cWe must also work to strengthen the kind of political structures that will enable, and if needed compel, the cooperation that is the only alternative to destructive anarchy.\u201d<\/p>\n Remember these words from one of the centers of progressive journalism that generally takes a non-interventionist position:<\/p>\n If needed compel.<\/i><\/p>\n Otherwise, contemplations such as ours on the end of civilization as we knew it will be of no consequence, because there will be no civilization left.<\/p>\n The Amazon has been referred to as the lungs of the world and depending on what happens to it, a place decisive in what happens next in climate change. The Amazon represents over half of the planet’s remaining rainforests, with sixty percent of it in Brazil.<\/p>\n Brazil is the largest economy in South America and the fourth largest democracy in the world.<\/p>\n Brazil is likely about to elect as president an extreme right-wing supporter of the former fascist military dictatorship, Jair Bolsonaro. It seems impossible to comprehend after Brazil and most of Latin America overcame such regimes and were part of the global democratic revolution of 1989 with the end of the Cold War. Many of those in the resistance, generally on the left, were elected over time to lead governments in these nations.<\/p>\n But now, as in other places, regression. In some cases, a natural democratic balance of center-left and center-right rotations has occurred. Brazil at this point, and others, are a different story. Former President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, now in prison for corruption, was the most popular candidate in August before the courts ruled he could not run. Power corrupts and he and his successor appear guilty of corruption (as were those in the opposition), although the politics of the situation are complex. Brazil\u2019s federal police have just recommended to prosecutors that President Michel Temer (who replaced Lula\u2019s successor and ally Dilma Rousseff who was impeached because of alleged corruption) be charged with taking bribes and money laundering (charges have been blocked so-far by allies in Brazil\u2019s congress, but Temer will soon have no protection of office.) Temer has a one-digit approval rating with the huge majority of the country wanting him to resign almost since the moment he became president.<\/p>\n Bolsonaro has filled the void left by the major parties being tainted by corruption. He will amp-up development in the Amazon, leave the Paris climate agreement and abolish the ministry of environment, in addition to other odious policies. Oddly, he believes climate change is real and dangerous. He sees the cause as deforestation because of overpopulation (apparently deforestation by rich developers is magically okay). He believes in family planning to reduce population growth. He\u2019s not wrong about this (although its proven family planning won\u2019t work without also alleviating hunger and poverty thereby lowering infant deaths)\u2014but as a racist who wants to eliminate laws protecting indigenous people, talk of population control has potentially ominous implications.<\/p>\n The clearest lessons regardless are: 1) economies depending on oil (the state oil company was the center of the corruption scandal) are unsustainable (price fluctuation, production factors\u2014ask the leftist dictatorship in Venezuela\u2014even though Brazil\u2019s current weak economy could well be boosted again by oil, then bust, etc.) and are primary causes of climate change; and 2) beginning to eliminate poverty as Lula did, and not finishing the job of sustainably guaranteeing basic needs for all, will turn stability to instability to rage, which will find the outlet available.<\/p>\n Another article in The Guardian posted tonight (tomorrow in London), \u201cAmazon at risk from Bolsonaro’s grim attack on the environment\u201d, illuminates the dark clouds on the horizon.<\/p>\n The US is currently the enabler-in-chief of policies that increase the damage of cllmate change, among other harmful global policies (with China in competition for this title, and others as runners-up).<\/p>\n As Mann points out in “1491”, it is indigenous civilization predating that pivotal year that we need to learn from on how to create and maintain the Amazons of the world.<\/p>\n The will to do this, is, again, up to all of us. Which means requiring our governments to do so. Which means voting and ongoing participatory democracy where that option exists, and other activism to create it, or the equivalent citizen pressure on authoritarian governments. Challenging to risky. But not as risky as not doing so. As we\u2019ve said so often, mirrored in today\u2019s editorial in The Guardian, global anarchy and the imminent prospect of nuclear war and other forms of global destruction will hopefully concentrate our minds before it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n We conclude with posting the following below:<\/p>\n \u201c1491\u201d in The Atlantic.<\/p>\n \u201cSeeds, Germs and Slaves\u201d in The New York Times.<\/p>\n \u201cTo Respect the Earth\u2019s Limits \u2014 or Push Them?\u201d\u00a0in The New York Times.<\/p>\n \u201cAmazon at risk from Bolsonaro\u2019s grim attack on the environment\u201d in The Guardian.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Guardian view on climate change: a global emergency\u201d in The Guardian.<\/p>\n . . .<\/b><\/p>\n \u201c1491\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Charles C. Mann, The Atlantic, March 2002 Issue, re-posted October 8, 2018<\/p>\n Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought\u2014an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact<\/i><\/p>\n The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for north-central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only evidence of human settlement was the cattle scattered over the savannah like jimmies on ice cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.<\/p>\n Below us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province\u2019s northern rivers, which are sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright-green vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was what had drawn the researchers\u2019 attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on earth inhabited by people who might never have seen Westerners with cameras.<\/p>\n Clark Erickson<\/a>\u00a0and William Bal\u00e9e, the archaeologists, sat up front. Erickson is based at the University of Pennsylvania; he works in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, whose seat in the plane I usurped that day. Bal\u00e9e is at Tulane University, in New Orleans. He is actually an anthropologist, but as native peoples have vanished, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. The two men differ in build, temperament, and scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with identical enthusiasm.<\/p>\n Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson\u2019s belief that this entire landscape\u201430,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways\u2014was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. Bal\u00e9e, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.<\/p>\n Erickson and Bal\u00e9e belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high<\/p>\n school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. My son picked up the same ideas at his schools. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Bal\u00e9e would be to say that in their opinion this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind.<\/p>\n Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the recent scholarship is especially controversial. To begin with, some researchers\u2014many but not all from an older generation\u2014deride the new theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness. \u201cI have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni,\u201d says\u00a0Betty J. Meggers<\/a>, of the Smithsonian Institution. \u201cClaiming otherwise is just wishful thinking.\u201d Similar criticisms apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that \u201cyou can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything you want,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s really easy to kid yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n More important are the implications of the new theories for today\u2019s ecological battles. Much of the environmental movement is animated, consciously or not, by what William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin, calls, polemically, \u201cthe pristine myth\u201d\u2014the belief that the Americas in 1491 were an almost unmarked, even Edenic land, \u201cuntrammeled by man,\u201d in the words of the\u00a0Wilderness Act of 1964<\/a>, one of the nation\u2019s first and most important environmental laws. As the University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively natural state is, in the view of environmentalists, a task that society is morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore nature?<\/p>\n The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building up the Beni mounds for houses and gardens, Erickson says, the Indians trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. Indeed, he says, they fashioned dense zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs between the causeways. To keep the habitat clear of unwanted trees and undergrowth, they regularly set huge areas on fire. Over the centuries the burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species dependent on native pyrophilia. The current inhabitants of the Beni still burn, although now it is to maintain the savannah for cattle. When we flew over the area, the dry season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already on the march. In the charred areas behind the fires were the blackened spikes of trees\u2014many of them, one assumes, of the varieties that activists fight to save in other parts of Amazonia.<\/p>\n After we landed, I asked Bal\u00e9e, Should we let people keep burning the Beni? Or should we let the trees invade and create a verdant tropical forest in the grasslands, even if one had not existed here for millennia?<\/p>\n Bal\u00e9e laughed. \u201cYou\u2019re trying to trap me, aren\u2019t you?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Like a Club Between the Eyes<\/b><\/p>\n According to family lore, my great-grandmother\u2019s great-grandmother\u2019s great-grandfather was the first white person hanged in America. His name was John Billington. He came on the\u00a0Mayflower<\/i>, which anchored off the coast of Massachusetts on November 9, 1620. Billington was not a Puritan; within six months of arrival he also became the first white person in America to be tried for complaining about the police. \u201cHe is a knave,\u201d William Bradford, the colony\u2019s governor, wrote of Billington, \u201cand so will live and die.\u201d What one historian called Billington\u2019s \u201ctroublesome career\u201d ended in 1630, when he was hanged for murder. My family has always said that he was framed\u2014but we\u00a0would\u00a0<\/i>say that, wouldn\u2019t we?<\/p>\n A few years ago it occurred to me that my ancestor and everyone else in the colony had voluntarily enlisted in a venture that brought them to New England without food or shelter six weeks before winter. Half the 102 people on the\u00a0Mayflower\u00a0<\/i>made it through to spring, which to me was amazing. How, I wondered, did they survive?<\/p>\n In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford provided the answer: by robbing Indian houses and graves. The\u00a0Mayflower\u00a0<\/i>first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a recently deserted Indian settlement. The newcomers\u2014hungry, cold, sick\u2014dug up graves and ransacked houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. \u201cAnd sure it was God\u2019s good providence that we found this corn,\u201d Bradford wrote, \u201cfor else we know not how we should have done.\u201d (He felt uneasy about the thievery, though.) When the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they set up shop in another deserted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had \u201cdied on heapes, as they lay in their houses,\u201d the English trader Thomas Morton noted. \u201cAnd the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle\u201d that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be \u201ca new found Golgotha\u201d\u2014the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem.<\/p>\n To the Pilgrims\u2019 astonishment, one of the corpses they exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair. A French ship had been wrecked there several years earlier. The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a few survivors. One of them supposedly learned enough of the local language to inform his captors that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic (probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, an archaeologist at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, the director of clinical research at the Medical College of Virginia) took years to exhaust itself and may have killed 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. It made a huge difference to American history. \u201cThe good hand of God favored our beginnings,\u201d Bradford mused, by \u201csweeping away great multitudes of the natives \u2026 that he might make room for us.\u201d<\/p>\n By the time my ancestor set sail on the\u00a0Mayflower<\/i>, Europeans had been visiting New England for more than a hundred years. English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the coastline, trading what they could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. New England, the Europeans saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges\u2014British despite his name\u2014tried to establish an English community in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better organized. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians, the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to my ancestor and his ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened.<\/p>\n Faced with such stories, historians have long wondered how many people lived in the Americas at the time of contact. \u201cDebated since Columbus attempted a partial census on Hispaniola in 1496,\u201d William Denevan has written, this \u201cremains one of the great inquiries of history.\u201d (In 1976 Denevan assembled and edited an entire book on the subject,\u00a0The Native Population of the Americas in 1492<\/a><\/i>.) The first scholarly estimate of the indigenous population was made in 1910 by James Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution. Combing through old documents, he concluded that in 1491 North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Mooney\u2019s glittering reputation ensured that most subsequent researchers accepted his figure uncritically.<\/p>\n That changed in 1966, when Henry F. Dobyns published \u201cEstimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques With a New Hemispheric Estimate,\u201d in the journal\u00a0Current Anthropology<\/i>. Despite the carefully neutral title, his argument was thunderous, its impact long-lasting. In the view of James Wilson, the author of\u00a0The Earth Shall Weep<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(1998), a history of indigenous Americans, Dobyns\u2019s colleagues \u201care still struggling to get out of the crater that paper left in anthropology.\u201d Not only anthropologists were affected. Dobyns\u2019s estimate proved to be one of the opening rounds in today\u2019s culture wars.<\/p>\n Dobyns began his exploration of pre-Columbian Indian demography in the early 1950s, when he was a graduate student. At the invitation of a friend, he spent a few months in northern Mexico, which is full of Spanish-era missions. There he poked through the crumbling leather-bound ledgers in which Jesuits recorded local births and deaths. Right away he noticed how many more deaths there were. The Spaniards arrived, and then Indians died\u2014in huge numbers, at incredible rates. It hit him, Dobyns told me recently, \u201clike a club right between the eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n It took Dobyns eleven years to obtain his Ph.D. Along the way he joined a rural-development project in Peru, which until colonial times was the seat of the Incan empire. Remembering what he had seen at the northern fringe of the Spanish conquest, Dobyns decided to compare it with figures for the south. He burrowed into the papers of the Lima cathedral and read apologetic Spanish histories. The Indians in Peru, Dobyns concluded, had faced plagues from the day the conquistadors showed up\u2014in fact, before then: smallpox arrived around 1525, seven years ahead of the Spanish. Brought to Mexico apparently by a single sick Spaniard, it swept south and eliminated more than half the population of the Incan empire. Smallpox claimed the Incan dictator Huayna Capac and much of his family, setting off a calamitous war of succession. So complete was the chaos that Francisco Pizarro was able to seize an empire the size of Spain and Italy combined with a force of 168 men.<\/p>\n Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618\u2014all ravaged the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.<\/p>\n His argument was simple but horrific. It is well known that Native Americans had no experience with many European diseases and were therefore immunologically unprepared\u2014\u201dvirgin soil,\u201d in the metaphor of epidemiologists. What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so.<\/p>\n Peru was one example, the Pacific Northwest another. In 1792 the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. He found a vast charnel house: human remains \u201cpromiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers.\u201d Smallpox, Vancouver\u2019s crew discovered, had preceded them. Its few survivors, second lieutenant Peter Puget noted, were \u201cmost terribly pitted \u2026 indeed many have lost their Eyes.\u201d In\u00a0Pox Americana,<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(2001), Elizabeth Fenn, a historian at George Washington University, contends that the disaster on the northwest coast was but a small part of a continental pandemic that erupted near Boston in 1774 and cut down Indians from Mexico to Alaska.<\/p>\n Because smallpox was not endemic in the Americas, colonials, too, had not acquired any immunity. The virus, an equal-opportunity killer, swept through the Continental Army and stopped the drive into Quebec. The American Revolution would be lost, Washington and other rebel leaders feared, if the contagion did to the colonists what it had done to the Indians. \u201cThe small Pox! The small Pox!\u201d John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. \u201cWhat shall We do with it?\u201d In retrospect, Fenn says, \u201cOne of George Washington\u2019s most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of \u201978.\u201d Without inoculation smallpox could easily have given the United States back to the British.<\/p>\n So many epidemics occurred in the Americas, Dobyns argued, that the old data used by Mooney and his successors represented population nadirs. From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died\u2014the worst demographic calamity in recorded history.<\/p>\n Dobyns\u2019s ideas were quickly attacked as politically motivated, a push from the hate-America crowd to inflate the toll of imperialism. The attacks continue to this day. \u201cNo question about it, some people want those higher numbers,\u201d says Shepard Krech III, a Brown University anthropologist who is the author of\u00a0The Ecological Indian<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(1999). These people, he says, were thrilled when Dobyns revisited the subject in a book,\u00a0Their Numbers Become Thinned<\/i>\u00a0(1983)\u2014and revised his own estimates upward. Perhaps Dobyns\u2019s most vehement critic is David Henige, a bibliographer of Africana at the University of Wisconsin, whose\u00a0Numbers From Nowhere<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(1998) is a landmark in the literature of demographic fulmination. \u201cSuspect in 1966, it is no less suspect nowadays,\u201d Henige wrote of Dobyns\u2019s work. \u201cIf anything, it is worse.\u201d<\/p>\n When Henige wrote\u00a0Numbers From Nowhere<\/i>, the fight about pre-Columbian populations had already consumed forests\u2019 worth of trees; his bibliography is ninety pages long. And the dispute shows no sign of abating. More and more people have jumped in. This is partly because the subject is inherently fascinating. But more likely the increased interest in the debate is due to the growing realization of the high political and ecological stakes.<\/p>\n Inventing by the Millions\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n On May 30, 1539, Hernando de Soto landed his private army near Tampa Bay, in Florida. Soto, as he was called, was a novel figure: half warrior, half venture capitalist. He had grown very rich very young by becoming a market leader in the nascent trade for Indian slaves. The profits had helped to fund Pizarro\u2019s seizure of the Incan empire, which had made Soto wealthier still. Looking quite literally for new worlds to conquer, he persuaded the Spanish Crown to let him loose in North America. He spent one fortune to make another. He came to Florida with 200 horses, 600 soldiers, and 300 pigs.<\/p>\n From today\u2019s perspective, it is difficult to imagine the ethical system that would justify Soto\u2019s actions. For four years his force, looking for gold, wandered through what is now Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas, wrecking almost everything it touched. The inhabitants often fought back vigorously, but they had never before encountered an army with horses and guns. Soto died of fever with his expedition in ruins; along the way his men had managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing the Spaniards did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice\u2014bring the pigs.<\/p>\n According to Charles Hudson, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia who spent fifteen years reconstructing the path of the expedition, Soto crossed the Mississippi a few miles downstream from the present site of Memphis. It was a nervous passage: the Spaniards were watched by several thousand Indian warriors. Utterly without fear, Soto brushed past the Indian force into what is now eastern Arkansas, through thickly settled land\u2014\u201dvery well peopled with large towns,\u201d one of his men later recalled, \u201ctwo or three of which were to be seen from one town.\u201d Eventually the Spaniards approached a cluster of small cities, each protected by earthen walls, sizeable moats, and deadeye archers. In his usual fashion, Soto brazenly marched in, stole food, and marched out.<\/p>\n After Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi Valley for more than a century. Early in 1682 whites appeared again, this time Frenchmen in canoes. One of them was R\u00e9n\u00e9-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. The French passed through the area where Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted\u2014La Salle didn\u2019t see an Indian village for 200 miles. About fifty settlements existed in this strip of the Mississippi when Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. By La Salle\u2019s time the number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably inhabited by recent immigrants. Soto \u201chad a privileged glimpse\u201d of an Indian world, Hudson says. \u201cThe window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?\u201d<\/p>\n The question is even more complex than it may seem. Disaster of this magnitude suggests epidemic disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of the contagion was very likely not Soto\u2019s army but its ambulatory meat locker: his 300 pigs. Soto\u2019s force itself was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his 600 soldiers long before they reached the Mississippi. But the same would not have held true for the pigs, which multiplied rapidly and were able to transmit their diseases to wildlife in the surrounding forest. When human beings and domesticated animals live close together, they trade microbes with abandon. Over time mutation spawns new diseases: avian influenza becomes human influenza, bovine rinderpest becomes measles. Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in close quarters with animals\u2014they domesticated only the dog, the llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig, and, here and there, the turkey and the Muscovy duck. In some ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-milk-drinkers, one imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating milk-giving animals. But this is guesswork. The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. Swine alone can disseminate anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, taeniasis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can transmit diseases to deer and turkeys. Only a few of Soto\u2019s pigs would have had to wander off to infect the forest.<\/p>\n Indeed, the calamity wrought by Soto apparently extended across the whole Southeast. The Coosa city-states, in western Georgia, and the Caddoan-speaking civilization, centered on the Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated soon after Soto appeared. The Caddo had had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After Soto\u2019s army left, notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between Soto\u2019s and La Salle\u2019s visits, Perttula believes, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500\u2014a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today in the population of New York City would reduce it to 56,000\u2014not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. \u201cThat\u2019s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,\u201d says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. \u201cEverything else\u2014all the heavily populated urbanized societies\u2014was wiped out.\u201d<\/p>\n Could a few pigs truly wreak this much destruction? Such apocalyptic scenarios invite skepticism. As a rule, viruses, microbes, and parasites are rarely lethal on so wide a scale\u2014a pest that wipes out its host species does not have a bright evolutionary future. In its worst outbreak, from 1347 to 1351, the European Black Death claimed only a third of its victims. (The rest survived, though they were often disfigured or crippled by its effects.) The Indians in Soto\u2019s path, if Dobyns, Ramenofsky, and Perttula are correct, endured losses that were incomprehensibly greater.<\/p>\n One reason is that Indians were fresh territory for many plagues, not just one. Smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough\u2014all rained down on the Americas in the century after Columbus. (Cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever came later.) Having little experience with epidemic diseases, Indians had no knowledge of how to combat them. In contrast, Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. They boarded up houses in which plague appeared and fled to the countryside. In Indian New England, Neal Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, wrote in\u00a0Manitou and Providence<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(1982), family and friends gathered with the shaman at the sufferer\u2019s bedside to wait out the illness\u2014a practice that \u201ccould only have served to spread the disease more rapidly.\u201d<\/p>\n Indigenous biochemistry may also have played a role. The immune system constantly scans the body for molecules that it can recognize as foreign\u2014molecules belonging to an invading virus, for instance. No one\u2019s immune system can identify all foreign presences. Roughly speaking, an individual\u2019s set of defensive tools is known as his MHC type. Because many bacteria and viruses mutate easily, they usually attack in the form of several slightly different strains. Pathogens win when MHC types miss some of the strains and the immune system is not stimulated to act. Most human groups contain many MHC types; a strain that slips by one person\u2019s defenses will be nailed by the defenses of the next. But, according to Francis L. Black, an epidemiologist at Yale University, Indians are characterized by unusually homogenous MHC types. One out of three South American Indians have similar MHC types; among Africans the corresponding figure is one in 200. The cause is a matter for Darwinian speculation, the effects less so.<\/p>\n In 1966 Dobyns\u2019s insistence on the role of disease was a shock to his colleagues. Today the impact of European pathogens on the New World is almost undisputed. Nonetheless, the fight over Indian numbers continues with undiminished fervor. Estimates of the population of North America in 1491 disagree by an order of magnitude\u2014from 18 million, Dobyns\u2019s revised figure, to 1.8 million, calculated by Douglas H. Ubelaker, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian. To some \u201chigh counters,\u201d as David Henige calls them, the low counters\u2019 refusal to relinquish the vision of an empty continent is irrational or worse. \u201cNon-Indian \u2018experts\u2019 always want to minimize the size of aboriginal populations,\u201d says Lenore Stiffarm, a Native American-education specialist at the University of Saskatchewan. The smaller the numbers of Indians, she believes, the easier it is to regard the continent as having been up for grabs. \u201cIt\u2019s perfectly acceptable to move into unoccupied land,\u201d Stiffarm says. \u201cAnd land with only a few \u2018savages\u2019 is the next best thing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMost of the arguments for the very large numbers have been theoretical,\u201d Ubelaker says in defense of low counters. \u201cWhen you try to marry the theoretical arguments to the data that are available on individual groups in different regions, it\u2019s hard to find support for those numbers.\u201d Archaeologists, he says, keep searching for the settlements in which those millions of people supposedly lived, with little success. \u201cAs more and more excavation is done, one would expect to see more evidence for dense populations than has thus far emerged.\u201d Dean Snow, the Pennsylvania State anthropologist, examined Colonial-era Mohawk Iroquois sites and found \u201cno support for the notion that ubiquitous pandemics swept the region.\u201d In his view, asserting that the continent was filled with people who left no trace is like looking at an empty bank account and claiming that it must once have held millions of dollars.<\/p>\n The low counters are also troubled by the Dobynsian procedure for recovering original population numbers: applying an assumed death rate, usually 95 percent, to the observed population nadir. Ubelaker believes that the lowest point for Indians in North America was around 1900, when their numbers fell to about half a million. Assuming a 95 percent death rate, the pre-contact population would have been 10 million. Go up one percent, to a 96 percent death rate, and the figure jumps to 12.5 million\u2014arithmetically creating more than two million people from a tiny increase in mortality rates. At 98 percent the number bounds to 25 million. Minute changes in baseline assumptions produce wildly different results.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an absolutely unanswerable question on which tens of thousands of words have been spent to no purpose,\u201d Henige says. In 1976 he sat in on a seminar by William Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer. An \u201cepiphanic moment\u201d occurred when he read shortly afterward that scholars had \u201cuncovered\u201d the existence of eight million people in Hispaniola.\u00a0Can you just invent millions of people?<\/i>\u00a0he wondered. \u201cWe can make of the historical record that there was depopulation and movement of people from internecine warfare and diseases,\u201d he says. \u201cBut as for how much, who knows? When we start putting numbers to something like that\u2014applying large figures like ninety-five percent\u2014we\u2019re saying things we shouldn\u2019t say. The number implies a level of knowledge that\u2019s impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n Nonetheless, one must try\u2014or so Denevan believes. In his estimation the high counters (though not the highest counters) seem to be winning the argument, at least for now. No definitive data exist, he says, but the majority of the extant evidentiary scraps support their side. Even Henige is no low counter. When I asked him what he thought the population of the Americas was before Columbus, he insisted that any answer would be speculation and made me promise not to print what he was going to say next. Then he named a figure that forty years ago would have caused a commotion.<\/p>\n To Elizabeth Fenn, the smallpox historian, the squabble over numbers obscures a central fact. Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million died, she believes, the pall of sorrow that engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable. Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams\u2014entire ways of life hissed away like steam. The Spanish and the Portuguese lacked the germ theory of disease and could not explain what was happening (let alone stop it). Nor can we explain it; the ruin was too long ago and too all-encompassing. In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding is not that many people died but that many people once lived. The Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia. \u201cYou have to wonder,\u201d Fenn says. \u201cWhat were all those people\u00a0up\u00a0<\/i>to in all that time?\u201d<\/p>\n Buffalo Farm<\/b><\/p>\n In 1810 Henry Brackenridge came to Cahokia, in what is now southwest Illinois, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis. Born close to the frontier, Brackenridge was a budding adventure writer; his\u00a0Views of Louisiana<\/a><\/i>, published three years later, was a kind of nineteenth-century\u00a0Into Thin Air<\/i>, with terrific adventure but without tragedy. Brackenridge had an eye for archaeology, and he had heard that Cahokia was worth a visit. When he got there, trudging along the desolate Cahokia River, he was \u201cstruck with a degree of astonishment.\u201d Rising from the muddy bottomland was a \u201cstupendous pile of earth,\u201d vaster than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Around it were more than a hundred smaller mounds, covering an area of five square miles. At the time, the area was almost uninhabited. One can only imagine what passed through Brackenridge\u2019s mind as he walked alone to the ruins of the biggest Indian city north of the Rio Grande.<\/p>\n To Brackenridge, it seemed clear that Cahokia and the many other ruins in the Midwest had been constructed by Indians. It was not so clear to everyone else. Nineteenth-century writers attributed them to, among others, the Vikings, the Chinese, the \u201cHindoos,\u201d the ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, lost tribes of Israelites, and even straying bands of Welsh. (This last claim was surprisingly widespread; when Lewis and Clark surveyed the Missouri, Jefferson told them to keep an eye out for errant bands of Welsh-speaking white Indians.) The historian George Bancroft, dean of his profession, was a dissenter: the earthworks, he wrote in 1840, were purely natural formations.<\/p>\n Bancroft changed his mind about Cahokia, but not about Indians. To the end of his days he regarded them as \u201cfeeble barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political connection.\u201d His characterization lasted, largely unchanged, for more than a century. Samuel Eliot Morison, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, closed his monumental\u00a0European Discovery of America<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(1974) with the observation that Native Americans expected only \u201cshort and brutish lives, void of hope for any future.\u201d As late as 1987\u00a0American History: A Survey<\/i>, a standard high school textbook by three well-known historians, described the Americas before Columbus as \u201cempty of mankind and its works.\u201d The story of Europeans in the New World, the book explained, \u201cis the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed.\u201d<\/p>\n Alfred Crosby, a historian at the University of Texas, came to other conclusions. Crosby\u2019s\u00a0The Columbian Exchange: Biological Consequences of 1492<\/a><\/i>caused almost as much of a stir when it was published, in 1972, as Henry Dobyns\u2019s calculation of Indian numbers six years earlier, though in different circles. Crosby was a standard names-and-battles historian who became frustrated by the random contingency of political events. \u201cSome trivial thing happens and you have this guy winning the presidency instead of that guy,\u201d he says. He decided to go deeper. After he finished his manuscript, it sat on his shelf\u2014he couldn\u2019t find a publisher willing to be associated with his new ideas. It took him three years to persuade a small editorial house to put it out.\u00a0The Columbian Exchange\u00a0<\/i>has been in print ever since; a companion,\u00a0Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900<\/a><\/i>, appeared in 1986.<\/p>\n Human history, in Crosby\u2019s interpretation, is marked by two world-altering centers of invention: the Middle East and central Mexico, where Indian groups independently created nearly all of the Neolithic innovations, writing included. The Neolithic Revolution began in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. In the next few millennia humankind invented the wheel, the metal tool, and agriculture. The Sumerians eventually put these inventions together, added writing, and became the world\u2019s first civilization. Afterward Sumeria\u2019s heirs in Europe and Asia frantically copied one another\u2019s happiest discoveries; innovations ricocheted from one corner of Eurasia to another, stimulating technological progress. Native Americans, who had crossed to Alaska before Sumeria, missed out on the bounty. \u201cThey had to do everything on their own,\u201d Crosby says. Remarkably, they succeeded.<\/p>\n When Columbus appeared in the Caribbean, the descendants of the world\u2019s two Neolithic civilizations collided, with overwhelming consequences for both. American Neolithic development occurred later than that of the Middle East, possibly because the Indians needed more time to build up the requisite population density. Without beasts of burden they could not capitalize on the wheel (for individual workers on uneven terrain skids are nearly as effective as carts for hauling), and they never developed steel. But in agriculture they handily outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas.<\/p>\n Maize, as corn is called in the rest of the world, was a triumph with global implications. Indians developed an extraordinary number of maize varieties for different growing conditions, which meant that the crop could and did spread throughout the planet. Central and Southern Europeans became particularly dependent on it; maize was the staple of Serbia, Romania, and Moldavia by the nineteenth century. Indian crops dramatically reduced hunger, Crosby says, which led to an Old World population boom.<\/p>\n Along with peanuts and manioc, maize came to Africa and transformed agriculture there, too. \u201cThe probability is that the population of Africa was greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops,\u201d Crosby says. \u201cThose extra people helped make the slave trade possible.\u201d Maize conquered Africa at the time when introduced diseases were leveling Indian societies. The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the British were alarmed by the death rate among Indians, because they wanted to exploit them as workers. Faced with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The continent\u2019s quarrelsome societies helped slave traders to siphon off millions of people. The maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let the awful trade continue without pumping the well dry.<\/p>\n Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world\u2019s largest cities. The Aztec capital of\u00a0Tenochtitl\u00e1n<\/a>\u00a0dazzled Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe\u2019s greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren\u2019t ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was \u201cso planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people \u2026 [that] I would rather live here than any where.\u201d<\/p>\n Smith was promoting colonization, and so had reason to exaggerate. But he also knew the hunger, sickness, and oppression of European life. France\u2014\u201dby any standards a privileged country,\u201d according to its great historian, Fernand Braudel\u2014experienced seven nationwide famines in the fifteenth century and thirteen in the sixteenth. Disease was hunger\u2019s constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts \u201clike common dung\u201d (the simile is Daniel Defoe\u2019s) and trundled through the streets. The infant death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was 88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule of law arbitrary. The gibbets poking up in the background of so many old paintings were, Braudel observed, \u201cmerely a realistic detail.\u201d<\/p>\n The Earth Shall Weep<\/i>, James Wilson\u2019s history of Indian America, puts the comparison bluntly: \u201cthe western hemisphere was larger, richer, and more populous than Europe.\u201d Much of it was freer, too. Europeans, accustomed to the serfdom that thrived from Naples to the Baltic Sea, were puzzled and alarmed by the democratic spirit and respect for human rights in many Indian societies, especially those in North America. In theory, the sachems of New England Indian groups were absolute monarchs. In practice, the colonial leader Roger Williams wrote, \u201cthey will not conclude of ought \u2026 unto which the people are averse.\u201d<\/p>\n Pre-1492 America wasn\u2019t a disease-free paradise, Dobyns says, although in his \u201cexuberance as a writer,\u201d he told me recently, he once made that claim. Indians had ailments of their own, notably parasites, tuberculosis, and anemia. The daily grind was wearing; life-spans in America were only as long as or a little longer than those in Europe, if the evidence of indigenous graveyards is to be believed. Nor was it a political utopia\u2014the Inca, for instance, invented refinements to totalitarian rule that would have intrigued Stalin. Inveterate practitioners of what the historian Francis Jennings described as \u201cstate terrorism practiced horrifically on a huge scale,\u201d the Inca ruled so cruelly that one can speculate that their surviving subjects might actually have been better off under Spanish rule.<\/p>\n I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today\u2014a fallacy disparaged as \u201cpresentism\u201d by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian. Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with the Indians. My ancestor shared their desire, which is what led to the trumped-up murder charges against him\u2014or that\u2019s what my grandfather told me, anyway.<\/p>\n As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they often viewed Europeans with disdain. The Hurons, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed \u201clittle intelligence in comparison to themselves.\u201d Europeans, Indians said, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the Aztec desire for personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the \u201cSavages\u201d were disgusted by handkerchiefs: \u201cThey say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.\u201d The Micmac scoffed at the notion of French superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?<\/p>\n Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks\u2014they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? \u201cThe answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so\u201d after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, \u201cand for some regions right up to the present time.\u201d<\/p>\n When scholars first began increasing their estimates of the ecological impact of Indian civilization, they met with considerable resistance from anthropologists and archaeologists. Over time the consensus in the human sciences changed. Under Denevan\u2019s direction, Oxford University Press has just issued the third volume of a huge catalogue of the \u201ccultivated landscapes\u201d of the Americas. This sort of phrase still provokes vehement objection\u2014but the main dissenters are now ecologists and environmentalists. The disagreement is encapsulated by Amazonia, which has become\u00a0the<\/i>\u00a0emblem of vanishing wilderness\u2014an admonitory image of untouched Nature. Yet recently a growing number of researchers have come to believe that Indian societies had an enormous environmental impact on the jungle. Indeed, some anthropologists have called the Amazon forest itself a cultural artifact\u2014that is, an artificial object.<\/p>\n Green Prisons<\/b><\/p>\n Northern visitors\u2019 first reaction to the storied Amazon rain forest is often disappointment. Ecotourist brochures evoke the immensity of Amazonia but rarely dwell on its extreme flatness. In the river\u2019s first 2,900 miles the vertical drop is only 500 feet. The river oozes like a huge runnel of dirty metal through a landscape utterly devoid of the romantic crags, arroyos, and heights that signify wildness and natural spectacle to most North Americans. Even the animals are invisible, although sometimes one can hear the bellow of monkey choruses. To the untutored eye\u2014mine, for instance\u2014the forest seems to stretch out in a monstrous green tangle as flat and incomprehensible as a printed circuit board.<\/p>\n The area east of the lower-Amazon town of Santar\u00e9m is an exception. A series of sandstone ridges several hundred feet high reach down from the north, halting almost at the water\u2019s edge. Their tops stand drunkenly above the jungle like old tombstones. Many of the caves in the buttes are splattered with ancient petroglyphs\u2014renditions of hands, stars, frogs, and human figures, all reminiscent of Mir\u00f3, in overlapping red and yellow and brown. In recent years one of these caves, La Caverna da Pedra Pintada (Painted Rock Cave), has drawn attention in archaeological circles.<\/p>\n Wide and shallow and well lit, Painted Rock Cave is less thronged with bats than some of the other caves. The arched entrance is twenty feet high and lined with rock paintings. Out front is a sunny natural patio suitable for picnicking, edged by a few big rocks. People lived in this cave more than 11,000 years ago. They had no agriculture yet, and instead ate fish and fruit and built fires. During a recent visit I ate a sandwich atop a particularly inviting rock and looked over the forest below. The first Amazonians, I thought, must have done more or less the same thing.<\/p>\n In college I took an introductory anthropology class in which I read\u00a0Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(1971), perhaps the most influential book ever written about the Amazon, and one that deeply impressed me at the time. Written by Betty J. Meggers, the Smithsonian archaeologist,\u00a0Amazonia<\/i>says that the apparent lushness of the rain forest is a sham. The soils are poor and can\u2019t hold nutrients\u2014the jungle flora exists only because it snatches up everything worthwhile before it leaches away in the rain. Agriculture, which depends on extracting the wealth of the soil, therefore faces inherent ecological limitations in the wet desert of Amazonia.<\/p>\n As a result, Meggers argued, Indian villages were forced to remain small\u2014any report of \u201cmore than a few hundred\u201d people in permanent settlements, she told me recently, \u201cmakes my alarm bells go off.\u201d Bigger, more complex societies would inevitably overtax the forest soils, laying waste to their own foundations. Beginning in 1948 Meggers and her late husband, Clifford Evans, excavated a chiefdom on Maraj\u00f3, an island twice the size of New Jersey that sits like a gigantic stopper in the mouth of the Amazon. The Maraj\u00f3ara, they concluded, were failed offshoots of a sophisticated culture in the Andes. Transplanted to the lush trap of the Amazon, the culture choked and died.<\/p>\n Green activists saw the implication: development in tropical forests destroys both the forests and their developers. Meggers\u2019s account had enormous public impact\u2014Amazonia<\/i>\u00a0is one of the wellsprings of the campaign to save rain forests.<\/p>\n Then\u00a0Anna C. Roosevelt<\/a>, the curator of archaeology at Chicago\u2019s\u00a0Field Museum of Natural History<\/a>, re-excavated Maraj\u00f3. Her complete report,\u00a0Moundbuilders of the Amazon<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(1991), was like the anti-matter version of\u00a0Amazonia<\/i>. Maraj\u00f3, she argued, was \u201cone of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements of the New World,\u201d a powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years, had \u201cpossibly well over 100,000\u201d inhabitants, and covered thousands of square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Maraj\u00f3\u2019s \u201cearth construction\u201d and \u201clarge, dense populations\u201d had\u00a0improved<\/i>\u00a0it: the most luxuriant and diverse growth was on the mounds formerly occupied by the Maraj\u00f3ara. \u201cIf you listened to Meggers\u2019s theory, these places should have been ruined,\u201d Roosevelt says.<\/p>\n Meggers scoffed at Roosevelt\u2019s \u201cextravagant claims,\u201d \u201cpolemical tone,\u201d and \u201cdefamatory remarks.\u201d Roosevelt, Meggers argued, had committed the beginner\u2019s error of mistaking a site that had been occupied many times by small, unstable groups for a single, long-lasting society. \u201c[Archaeological remains] build up on areas of half a kilometer or so,\u201d she told me, \u201cbecause [shifting Indian groups] don\u2019t land exactly on the same spot. The decorated types of pottery don\u2019t change much over time, so you can pick up a bunch of chips and say, \u2018Oh, look, it was all one big site!\u2019 Unless you know what you\u2019re doing, of course.\u201d Centuries after the conquistadors, \u201cthe myth of El Dorado is being revived by archaeologists,\u201d Meggers\u00a0wrote last fall<\/a>\u00a0in the journal\u00a0Latin American Antiquity<\/i>, referring to the persistent Spanish delusion that cities of gold existed in the jungle.<\/p>\n The dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it has featured vituperative references to colonialism, elitism, and employment by the CIA. Meanwhile, Roosevelt\u2019s team investigated Painted Rock Cave. On the floor of the cave what looked to me like nothing in particular turned out to be an ancient midden: a refuse heap. The archaeologists slowly scraped away sediment, traveling backward in time with every inch. When the traces of human occupation vanished, they kept digging. (\u201cYou always go a meter past sterile,\u201d Roosevelt says.) A few inches below they struck the charcoal-rich dirt that signifies human habitation\u2014a culture, Roosevelt said later, that wasn\u2019t supposed to be there.<\/p>\n For many millennia the cave\u2019s inhabitants hunted and gathered for food. But by about 4,000 years ago they were growing crops\u2014perhaps as many as 140 of them, according to Charles R. Clement, an anthropological botanist at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazonian Research. Unlike Europeans, who planted mainly annual crops, the Indians, he says, centered their agriculture on the Amazon\u2019s unbelievably diverse assortment of trees: fruits, nuts, and palms. \u201cIt\u2019s tremendously difficult to clear fields with stone tools,\u201d Clement says. \u201cIf you can plant trees, you get twenty years of productivity out of your work instead of two or three.\u201d<\/p>\n Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In a widely cited article from 1989, William Bal\u00e9e, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin\u2014directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. \u201cI basically think it\u2019s all human-created,\u201d Clement told me in Brazil. He argues that Indians changed the assortment and density of species throughout the region. So does Clark Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. \u201cSome of my colleagues would say that\u2019s pretty radical,\u201d he said, smiling mischievously. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, \u201clots\u201d of botanists believe that \u201cwhat the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.\u201d The phrase \u201cbuilt environment,\u201d Erickson says, \u201capplies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLandscape\u201d in this case is meant exactly\u2014Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists\u2019 claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of\u00a0terra preta\u2014<\/i>rich, fertile \u201cblack earth\u201d that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings.<\/p>\n Terra preta<\/i>, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn\u2019t leach nutrients from\u00a0terra preta<\/i>\u00a0fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of\u00a0terra preta<\/i>\u00a0quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that\u00a0terra preta<\/i>\u00a0is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. \u201cApparently,\u201d Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, \u201cat some threshold level \u2026 dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate\u2014even\u00a0regenerate<\/i>\u00a0itself\u2014thus behaving more like a living \u2018super\u2019-organism than an inert material.\u201d<\/p>\n In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined\u00a0terra preta<\/i>\u00a0in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly\u2014suggesting to Woods that\u00a0terra preta<\/i>\u00a0was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.<\/p>\n When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like \u201cwow\u201d and \u201cgosh.\u201d Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind. Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians\u00a0fixed<\/i>\u00a0it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.<\/p>\n Scientists should study the microorganisms in\u00a0terra preta<\/i>, Woods told me, to find out how they work. If that could be learned, maybe some version of Amazonian dark earth could be used to improve the vast expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa\u2014a final gift from the people who brought us tomatoes, corn, and the immense grasslands of the Great Plains.<\/p>\n \u201cBetty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this,\u201d Woods told me. \u201cDeep down her fear is that this data will be misused.\u201d Indeed, Meggers\u2019s recent\u00a0Latin American Antiquity<\/i>\u00a0article charged that archaeologists who say the Amazon can support agriculture are effectively telling \u201cdevelopers [that they] are entitled to operate without restraint.\u201d Resuscitating the myth of El Dorado, in her view, \u201cmakes us accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation.\u201d Doubtless there is something to this\u2014although, as some of her critics responded in the same issue of the journal, it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats \u201cperusing the pages of\u00a0Latin American Antiquity<\/i>before deciding to rev up the chain saws.\u201d But the new picture doesn\u2019t automatically legitimize paving the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time big chunks of Amazonia were used nondestructively by clever people who knew tricks we have yet to learn.<\/p>\n I visited Painted Rock Cave during the river\u2019s annual flood, when it wells up over its banks and creeps inland for miles. Farmers in the floodplain build houses and barns on stilts and watch pink dolphins sport from their doorsteps. Ecotourists take shortcuts by driving motorboats through the drowned forest. Guys in dories chase after them, trying to sell sacks of incredibly good fruit.<\/p>\n All of this is described as \u201cwilderness\u201d in the tourist brochures. It\u2019s not, if researchers like Roosevelt are correct. Indeed, they believe that fewer people may be living there now than in 1491. Yet when my boat glided into the trees, the forest shut out the sky like the closing of an umbrella. Within a few hundred yards the human presence seemed to vanish. I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted. If that place was not wilderness, how should I think of it? Since the fate of the forest is in our hands, what should be our goal for its future?<\/p>\n Novel Shores<\/b><\/p>\n Hernando de Soto\u2019s expedition stomped through the Southeast for four years and apparently never saw bison. More than a century later, when French explorers came down the Mississippi, they saw \u201ca solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man,\u201d the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman wrote. Instead the French encountered bison, \u201cgrazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river.\u201d<\/p>\n To Charles Kay, the reason for the buffalo\u2019s sudden emergence is obvious. Kay is a wildlife ecologist in the political-science department at Utah State University. In ecological terms, he says, the Indians were the \u201ckeystone species\u201d of American ecosystems. A keystone species, according to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, is a species \u201cthat affects the survival and abundance of many other species.\u201d Keystone species have a disproportionate impact on their ecosystems. Removing them, Wilson adds, \u201cresults in a relatively significant shift in the composition of the [ecological] community.\u201d<\/p>\n When disease swept Indians from the land, Kay says, what happened was exactly that. The ecological ancien r\u00e9gime collapsed, and strange new phenomena emerged. In a way this is unsurprising; for better or worse, humankind is a keystone species everywhere. Among these phenomena was a population explosion in the species that the Indians had kept down by hunting. After disease killed off the Indians, Kay believes, buffalo vastly extended their range. Their numbers more than sextupled. The same occurred with elk and mule deer. \u201cIf the elk were here in great numbers all this time, the archaeological sites should be chock-full of elk bones,\u201d Kay says. \u201cBut the archaeologists will tell you the elk weren\u2019t there.\u201d On the evidence of middens the number of elk jumped about 500 years ago.<\/p>\n Passenger pigeons may be another example. The epitome of natural American abundance, they flew in such great masses that the first colonists were stupefied by the sight. As a boy, the explorer Henry Brackenridge saw flocks \u201cten miles in width, by one hundred and twenty in length.\u201d For hours the birds darkened the sky from horizon to horizon. According to Thomas Neumann, a consulting archaeologist in Lilburn, Georgia, passenger pigeons \u201cwere incredibly dumb and always roosted in vast hordes, so they were very easy to harvest.\u201d Because they were readily caught and good to eat, Neumann says, archaeological digs should find many pigeon bones in the pre-Columbian strata of Indian middens. But they aren\u2019t there. The mobs of birds in the history books, he says, were \u201coutbreak populations\u2014always a symptom of an extraordinarily disrupted ecological system.\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout eastern North America the open landscape seen by the first Europeans quickly filled in with forest. According to William Cronon, of the University of Wisconsin, later colonists began complaining about how hard it was to get around. (Eventually, of course, they stripped New England almost bare of trees.) When Europeans moved west, they were preceded by two waves: one of disease, the other of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to quiet down. Far from destroying pristine wilderness, European settlers bloodily\u00a0created<\/i>\u00a0it. By 1800 the hemisphere was chockablock with new wilderness. If \u201cforest primeval\u201d means a woodland unsullied by the human presence, William Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the late eighteenth century than in the early sixteenth.<\/p>\n Cronon\u2019s\u00a0Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(1983) belongs on the same shelf as works by Crosby and Dobyns. But it was not until one of his articles was excerpted in\u00a0The New York Times<\/i>\u00a0in 1995 that people outside the social sciences began to understand the implications of this view of Indian history. Environmentalists and ecologists vigorously attacked the anti-wilderness scenario, which they described as infected by postmodern philosophy. A small academic brouhaha ensued, complete with hundreds of footnotes. It precipitated\u00a0Reinventing Nature?<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(1995), one of the few academic critiques of postmodernist philosophy written largely by biologists.\u00a0The Great New Wilderness Debate<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(1998), another lengthy book on the subject, was edited by two philosophers who earnestly identified themselves as \u201cEuro-American men [whose] cultural legacy is patriarchal Western civilization in its current postcolonial, globally hegemonic form.\u201d<\/p>\n It is easy to tweak academics for opaque, self-protective language like this. Nonetheless, their concerns were quite justified. Crediting Indians with the role of keystone species has implications for the way the current Euro-American members of that keystone species manage the forests, watersheds, and endangered species of America. Because a third of the United States is owned by the federal government, the issue inevitably has political ramifications. In Amazonia, fabled storehouse of biodiversity, the stakes are global.<\/p>\n Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream environmentalists want to preserve as much of the world\u2019s land as possible in a putatively intact state. But \u201cintact,\u201d if the new research is correct, means \u201crun by human beings for human purposes.\u201d Environmentalists dislike this, because it seems to mean that anything goes. In a sense they are correct. Native Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they will have to find it within themselves to create the world\u2019s largest garden.<\/p>\n Charles C. Mann, an Atlantic contributing editor, has been writing for the magazine since 1984. His books include 1491, based on his March 2002 cover story, and The Wizard and the Prophet.<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cSeeds, Germs and Slaves\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n By Ian Morris, Sunday New York Times, August 21, 2011<\/p>\n 1493<\/p>\n Uncovering the New World Columbus Created<\/p>\n By Charles C. Mann<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a chain of events in this best of all possible worlds,\u201d Dr. Pangloss says at the end of Voltaire\u2019s \u201cCandide.\u201d \u201cIf you hadn\u2019t been caught up in the Inquisition, or walked across America . . . you would not be here eating candied fruit and pistachio nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTrue,\u201d Candide answers. \u201cBut now we must tend our garden.\u201d<\/p>\n Voltaire would have loved Charles C. Mann\u2019s outstanding new book, \u201c1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.\u201d In more than 500 lively pages, it not only explains the chain of events that produced those candied fruits, nuts and gardens, but also weaves their stories together into a convincing explanation of why our world is the way it is.<\/p>\n Going one better than Voltaire, Mann\u2019s book opens in a garden as well as closes in one. The first is Mann\u2019s own in Massachusetts; the second, a Filipino family plot in Bulalacao. Despite being half a world apart, the two gardens grow many of the same plants, hardly any of which are native to either place. This, Mann tells us, is the hallmark of the ecological era we live in: the \u201cHomogenocene,\u201d the Age of Homogeneity.<\/p>\n \u201c1493\u201d picks up where Mann\u2019s best seller,\u00a0\u201c1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0left off. In 1491, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were almost impassable barriers. America might as well have been on another planet from Europe and Asia. But Columbus\u2019s arrival in the Caribbean the following year changed everything. Plants, animals, microbes and cultures began washing around the world, taking tomatoes to Massachusetts, corn to the Philippines and slaves, markets and malaria almost everywhere. It was one world, ready or not.<\/p>\n Mann generously acknowledges how much of this story line comes from Alfred W. Crosby\u2019s classic \u201cEcological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900,\u201d first published a quarter of a century ago. This book has had a huge influence in academia (it was one of the main inspirations for Jared Diamond\u2019s Pulitzer Prize-\u00adwinning\u00a0\u201cGuns, Germs, and Steel\u201d<\/a>), but Mann has long felt it needed updating. When he met Crosby, he nagged the historian to write a new edition. Finally Crosby told him: \u201cWell, if you think it\u2019s such a good idea, why don\u2019t\u00a0you<\/i>\u00a0do it?\u201d<\/p>\n And so Mann did. \u201c1493\u201d is much more than just \u201cEcological Imperialism\u201d warmed over, however. Mann takes the argument into new territory by suggesting that only by understanding what Crosby called \u201cthe Columbian Exchange\u201d \u2014 the transfer of plants, animals, germs and people across continents over the last 500 years \u2014 can we make sense of contemporary globalization. The lesson of history, Mann argues, is that \u201cfrom the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains\u00a0and<\/i>\u00a0ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains.\u201d<\/p>\n With admirable evenhandedness, he shows how the costs and benefits of globalization have always been inseparable. We cannot have one without the other. Bringing the potato to Europe made it possible for the Irish famine to kill millions when the potatoes were stricken by blight, but it also kept other millions of half-starved peasants alive. Bringing malaria to the Americas depopulated some parts of the New World, but it also kept European armies out of other parts. Mann can even see the point of view of the chainsaw-\u00adwielding loggers who deforested the Philippines so that Americans could have cheap furniture: \u201cThese agents of destruction were just putting food on the table.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n Mann has managed the difficult trick of telling a complicated story in engaging and clear prose while refusing to reduce its ambiguities to slogans. He is not a professional historian, but most professionals could learn a lot from the deft way he does this. The book takes a roughly chronological approach, beginning in 1493 and continuing to 2011, and ranges across almost every continent. It is thoroughly researched and up-to-date, combining scholarship from fields as varied as world history, immunology and economics, but Mann wears his learning lightly. He serves up one arresting detail after another (who knew that \u201cNo Potatoes, No Popery!\u201d was an English election slogan in 1765?), always in vivid language (as in his description of inland Brazil in the 1970s \u2014 \u201cbad roads, poor land and lawless violence: \u2018Deadwood\u2019 with malaria\u201d).<\/p>\n Most impressive of all, he manages to turn plants, germs, insects and excrement into the lead actors in his drama while still parading before us an unforgettable cast of human characters. He makes even the most unpromising-\u00adsounding subjects fascinating. I, for one, will never look at a piece of rubber in quite the same way now that I have been introduced to the debauched nouveaux riches of 19th-\u00adcentury Brazil, guzzling Champagne from bathtubs and gunning one another down in the streets of Manaus.<\/p>\n All historians struggle to get the balance between human will and vast impersonal forces just right. \u201cShould part of the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation be assigned to malaria?\u201d Mann asks, and while I\u2019m sure he\u2019s right to answer that \u201cthe idea is not impossible,\u201d this claim (and one or two others) seems a stretch. But that is part of the book\u2019s appeal. Almost everyone will find something that challenges his assumptions.<\/p>\n As well as making humans share the stage with other organisms, Mann also wants Europeans to surrender more of the limelight to the rest of humanity. In the 1960s, historians began to flip from casting Europeans as heroic adventurers who created the modern world to casting them as wicked exploiters. But they continued nonetheless to put Europeans in the main roles. Mann repeatedly emphasizes that the numbers do not bear this out. \u201cMuch of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world,\u201d he observes, \u201cwas less a meeting of Europe and America than of Africans and Indians.\u201d As late as the 19th century, Europeans were still in a distinct minority in the New World.<\/p>\n Mann might be faulted for sometimes seeming to forget that since 1492 it has overwhelmingly been Europeans (not Africans or Native Americans) who have put animals, plants and microbes into motion, but his larger points still stand. In setting off the Columbian Exchange, humans rarely knew what they were doing. Once begun, the process ran completely out of human control. And now that it has hit its stride, every animal, plant and bug in the world is caught up in it. Back in the 1870s, for instance, the British government, worried about its rubber supplies, offered to buy every rubber seed that could be smuggled out of Brazil. People didn\u2019t ask what this would mean for Laos \u2014 why would they? But 140 years on, the chain of events they set off has brought social upheaval and the threat of ecological collapse to this remote corner of the world. There is nowhere to hide from globalization.<\/p>\n Mann shows that Dr. Pangloss was right: Candide\u2019s run-ins with the Inquisition and America\u2019s natives were not just random events. The Columbian Exchange has shaped everything about the modern world. It brought us the plants we tend in our gardens and the pests that eat them. And as it accelerates in the 21st century, it may take both away again. If you want to understand why, read \u201c1493.\u201d<\/p>\n Ian Morris is the author of \u201cWhy the West Rules \u2014 for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cTo Respect the Earth\u2019s Limits \u2014 or Push Them?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n By\u00a0Bill McKibben, Feb. 4, 2018, Sunday New York Times book review<\/p>\n The Wizard and the Prophet<\/p>\n Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow\u2019s World<\/p>\n By Charles C. Mann<\/p>\n In \u201cThe Wizard and the Prophet\u201d Charles C. Mann tries something tricky: to illuminate contemporary debates about the environment by examining the lives and philosophies of two men, long dead and mostly forgotten thinkers who had competing visions for the Earth\u2019s future. It\u2019s an ambitious sort of book, one that, to be completely successful, requires two things. One is a command of sprawling detail, with the ability to see parallels among events across time and distance and to explain the complex with ease. The second is an analytical device that takes all those parts and molds them into something novel and useful.<\/p>\n On the first count, Mann succeeds magnificently. William Vogt and (particularly) Norman Borlaug are brought to splendid, quirky life. Vogt, mostly unread these days, is a writer whose 1948 book, \u201cRoad to Survival,\u201d Mann credits with helping birth modern environmentalism with its sense that humans should respect natural limits \u2014 he is the title\u2019s \u201cProphet.\u201d Borlaug is the Nobel-winning Midwest agronomist whose patiently bred strains of wheat kicked off the Green Revolution, and is here Mann\u2019s \u201cWizard,\u201d imbued with a technological worldview that seeks always to overcome Earth\u2019s limits. One can argue with the choices \u2014 the \u201climits\u201d argument might have been better served if personified by the more profound Aldo Leopold or Rachel Carson \u2014 but not with the results of his historical research, which provides one charming (and telling) anecdote after another.<\/p>\n Vogt, for instance, turns out to be the man who figured out how to get Roger Tory Peterson\u2019s pioneering bird guide published. His own love of birds got Vogt a job on the Chincha islands off Peru, where he was supposed to advise the company that owned cormorants on how to get them to increase production of the valuable fertilizer guano. Instead, after careful study of the way that the periodic El Ni\u00f1o warmings drove fluctuations in the cormorant population, he ended up advising the owners to leave well enough alone \u2014 they could not \u201caugment the increment of excrement,\u201d but instead should \u201chelp conserve the balance between species continually sought by nature.\u201d<\/p>\n This notion of balance, of limits that should not be pushed, would undergird the increasingly shrill alarms Vogt issued in his books and articles, and from various insecure perches in the global conservation hierarchy, where his disdain for economic growth cost him one post after another. He committed suicide in 1968, thinking his cause lost, just as Paul Ehrlich published \u201cThe Population Bomb,\u201d Earth Day drew millions into the streets in 1970 and a groundbreaking 1972 report, \u201cThe Limits to Growth,\u201d firmly established the argument he\u2019d helped pioneer.<\/p>\n Borlaug\u2019s story is more epic, even in its condensed form. A classic product of the Midwest land-grant colleges that are one of America\u2019s greatest successes, he found his way to a dusty plant-breeding station in a desolate part of Mexico, where he figured out how to breed wheat that combined high yields with resistance to the ancient plague of stem rust. The new varieties made full use of fertilizers and other inputs \u2014 harvests soared first in South America and then, crucially, in India. (The story of getting the seed to the subcontinent, amid wars between India, China and Pakistan, is a fine Cold War saga.) What followed were honors, and also questions \u2014 the Green Revolution did raise yields, at least for a while, but it also wrecked much of peasant agriculture, driving poor people to the big cities and polluting farmlands with pesticides.<\/p>\n As he showed in his earlier books \u201c1491\u201d and \u201c1493\u201d Mann\u2019s storytelling skills are unmatched \u2014 the sprightly tempo with which this book unfolds, each question answered as it comes to mind, makes for pure pleasure reading. But you may find yourself troubled a little along the way by the analytical framework he\u2019s imposed on the material, the division between the technologically minded Wizards and the limits-embracing Prophets. His distinction works pretty well when he applies it to food (GMOs vs. organics) and water (dams and desalination vs. drip irrigation) but it starts to break down when we reach climate and energy, perhaps the planet\u2019s central problems.<\/p>\n Mann gives a typically brief but enchanting history of the solar panel (the 1904 World\u2019s Fair in St. Louis featured a solar array built by a Portuguese priest so powerful that it fried birds flying 40 feet above) and then he assigns the technology to the sandal-wearing Prophets on the grounds that it is distributed, not centralized like coal-fired or nuclear power plants. \u201cIt is small-scale, flexible and respectful of environmental limits; it fosters community control and democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n Fair enough, but in straightforward terms a solar panel seems pretty wizardly. I mean, you point a sheet of glass with some inlaid silicon at the sun, and out the back flows cold, light and communications. That\u2019s pure Hogwarts. What\u2019s more, it can be deployed (as Mann notes) in giant centralized arrays as well as house by house \u2014 so much sunlight falls on the Earth that in theory an area smaller than Texas would suffice to power the whole planet. Mann\u2019s analysis of solar power also shows the inevitable danger of writing a book that takes several years when the subject is changing so quickly: He refers to renewable energy as \u201csurprisingly expensive\u201d and finds only one installation, in Nevada, that provides reliable round-the-clock power. But the price of panels and batteries has continued to plummet. In the past few months, bids for new solar farms in Mexico and Saudi Arabia have produced the cheapest electrons ever generated on the planet, and Elon Musk (who seems an unbreakable alloy of Borlaugish wizardliness and Vogtian alarmism) has built (in less than 100 days) the world\u2019s largest battery, turning South Australia\u2019s abundant sun into a 24\/7 source of power.<\/p>\n This analytical muddle doesn\u2019t matter greatly because Mann refuses to say which set of solutions he thinks holds most promise for the future. \u201cIn our internet era, there are entirely too many pundits shouting out advice,\u201d he writes, which seems inarguable. \u201cI believe I stand on firmer ground when I try to describe what I see around me than when I try to tell people what to do.\u201d Safer ground, anyway.<\/p>\n He confines what may be his most controversial points to a pair of appendixes, one on just how bad we can expect global warming to be, and the other in which he explains that the most reputable scientific bodies have by now agreed that genetically modified food is safe to eat. That\u2019s an important fact, but as he acknowledges, it doesn\u2019t satisfy critics\u2019 main objections to the technology: \u201cWhether the current version of industrial agriculture can, with the addition of new technologies, provide for a world of 10 billion in a long-lasting way \u2014 or if the perils involved (ecological, economic, spiritual) are large enough to require it to be radically revamped.\u201d<\/p>\n The great virtue of Mann\u2019s book \u2014 and much of his journalism over many years \u2014 is that it raises very large questions like these that are usually either ignored or answered in slogans. He provides detail enough, and simplicity enough, that anyone who is struggling with these puzzles will be enlightened and informed. And entertained, which, given the subject matter, is no small feat.<\/p>\n Bill McKibben is an environmentalist and the author, most recently, of \u201cRadio Free Vermont,\u201d as well as a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cAmazon at risk from Bolsonaro\u2019s grim attack on the environment\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Fabiano Maisonnave, Climate Home, Guardian Environment Network, 9 Oct., 2018<\/p>\n Threats to the rainforest and its people and an end to the Paris agreement are among the promises of Brazil\u2019s presidential hopeful<\/i><\/p>\n No more Paris agreement. No more ministry of environment. A paved highway cutting through the Amazon.<\/p>\n Not only that. Indigenous territories opened to mining. Relaxed environmental law enforcement and licensing. International NGOs, such as Greenpeace and WWF, banned from the country. A strong alliance with the beef lobby.<\/p>\n In a nutshell, this is what Jair Bolsonaro,\u00a0who is sailing towards Brazil\u2019s presidency<\/a>\u00a0after taking a near-majority in a first round vote on Sunday, has promised for the environment.<\/p>\n An enthusiast for torture and the 1964-85 military dictatorship, the retired army captain is famous for racist, homophobic,\u00a0authoritarian and misogynistic rhetoric<\/a>. But his views on how to manage Earth\u2019s largest tropical rainforest are just as grim and appalling.<\/p>\n Bolsonaro has galvanised voters in urban centres who are disillusioned with the political establishment\u2019s corruption scandals and attracted to his \u201ctough-on-crime\u201d positions amid rising criminality rates. He received 46% of the vote on Sunday and now faces a 28 October run off with the\u00a0Workers Party\u2019s Fernando Haddad<\/a>, who polled 29%.<\/p>\n In the Amazon, illegal loggers, miners, land-grabbers, as well as large land owners have rallied to his banner. Here, they don\u2019t expect Bolsonaro to enforce the law. On the contrary, the hope is that he fulfils his promise to obliterate nearly all environment and pro-indigenous legislation. He won massive support in rural central western states and all but one Amazonian state.<\/p>\n In August, Bolsonaro raised eyebrows internationally when he\u00a0pledged to join Trump\u2019s US<\/a>\u00a0and withdraw Brazil from the Paris agreement. That means the country would no longer be committed to curb its emissions from the deforestation of the Amazon, which is here a bigger source of greenhouse gas than the burning of fossil fuels.<\/p>\n Bolsonaro accepts the climate is changing dangerously. CHN asked him about this during a press conference in April. He said the solution was in controlling the growth of the world\u2019s human population.<\/p>\n \u201cThis explosive population growth leads to deforestation,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause you will not grow soy on the terrace of your building or raise cattle in the yard. So we have to have a family planning policy. Then you begin to reduce the pressure on those issues that lead, yes, in my opinion, to global warming, which could be the end of the human species.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet he praised president Trump\u2019s policy on the Paris deal and implied that it was part of a UN plot to strip Brazil\u2019s sovereignty over the Amazon.<\/p>\n \u201cCongratulations to Trump. If it were good for them, [the US] wouldn\u2019t have denounced it,\u201d he said, adding that a concept for a \u201c136m-hectare ecological corridor\u201d that would be \u201cunder world\u2019s control, not ours\u201d had \u201cbeen discussed\u201d. \u201d I don\u2019t know how deeply,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Brazil\u2019s current environment minister Edson Duarte said: \u201cInstead of spreading the message that he will fight deforestation and organised crime, he says he will attack the ministry of environment, Ibama and ICMBio [Brazil\u2019s federal environment agencies]. It\u2019s the same as saying that he will withdraw the police from the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking to the O Estado de S.Paulo newspaper, Duarte said: \u201cThe increase of deforestation will be immediate. I am afraid of a gold rush to see who arrives first. They will know that, if they occupy illegally, the authorities will be complacent and will grant concordance. They will be certain that nobody will bother them.\u201d<\/p>\n Bolsonaro\u2019s environment policies are tied to racist attitudes toward minorities and Brazil\u2019s indigenous peoples. In a\u00a0speech<\/a>\u00a0last year, he said: \u201cMinorities have to bend down to the majority \u2026 The minorities [should] either adapt or simply vanish.\u201d<\/p>\n Expressing a view common to military circles, he has claimed, without evidence, that indigenous land rights are part of a western plot to create separatist Amazonian states supported by the UN.<\/p>\n \u201cSooner or later, we will have dozens of countries inside [Brazil]. We won\u2019t have any interference in these countries, the first world will exploit the Indians, and nothing will be left for us,\u201d he said last year.<\/p>\n Bolsonaro has promised to open indigenous lands to mining and other economic activities. About 13% of Brazil\u2019s territory is recognised indigenous lands, most of them in the Amazon. They are a major barrier to protect the forest, only 2% of rainforest deforestation has occurred inside indigenous territory.<\/p>\n The law protects indigenous rights. Article 231 of the 1988 Constitution states that indigenous peoples have \u201coriginal rights over the lands that they have traditionally occupied\u201d, although the land belongs to the state and they have no ownership rights over minerals.<\/p>\n But there are concerns about whether Bolsonaro will respect these laws.\u00a0Several analysts<\/a>\u00a0have warned<\/a>\u00a0Brazil could slip towards authoritarian rule. These fears have increased in the past weeks. His running mate, general Ant\u00f4nio Mour\u00e3o,\u00a0has argued<\/a>\u00a0for a new constitution without popular participation and raised the possibility that Bolsonaro could proclaim a self-coup.<\/p>\n Both Bolsonaro and Mour\u00e3o have defended the excesses of Brazil\u2019s military dictatorship, which displaced and killed (intentionally or through diseases) thousands of Indians in the Amazon, amid an effort to build roads and hydroelectric dams in the forest. The armed forces have never recognised any wrongdoing.<\/p>\n \u201cIf he wins, he will institutionalise genocide,\u201d says Dinamam Tux\u00e1, the national coordinator of Brazil\u2019s Association of Indigenous Peoples, in a phone interview with Climate Home News. \u201cHe has already said that the federal government will no longer champion indigenous rights, such as access to the land. We are very scared. I fear for my own life. As a national leader, I am sure I will be punished by the federal government for defending the rights of the indigenous peoples.\u201d<\/p>\n During the campaign, Bolsonaro promised he will abolish the ministry of environment and transfer its functions to the ministry of agriculture. The agriculture portfolio will be handed to politicians from the \u201cbeef caucus\u201d, a conservative group of lawmakers who control about one third of Congress and have opposed indigenous land demarcations and advocated for the reduction of conservation units, among other measures, to expand the agriculture frontier. Last week, they formally endorsed Bolsonaro.<\/p>\n In several speeches, he said he would end the \u201cfine industry\u201d run by Ibama and ICMBio, to control illegal mining, deforestation and logging. On Sunday he used his first post-election statement to vow to neuter Ibama.<\/p>\n This is personal for Bolsonaro. In 2012, he was caught fishing illegally inside a federal reserve off the coast of Rio de Janeiro and was issued a $2,700 fine. Since then as a member of Brazil\u2019s chamber of deputies, he has targeted Ibama, going as far as presenting a bill that forbids its agents to carry weapons, even though they operate in some of the most dangerous areas of the country.<\/p>\n Ibama will be stripped of its environmental licensing powers,\u00a0he said during the campaign<\/a>. These will be redistributed to other official agencies. That means, for instance, that federal agency will no longer be able to contain controversial projects such as the reopening of the disused BR-319, an 890km highway that cuts from one of the most preserved areas of the Amazon, and S\u00e3o Luiz do Tapaj\u00f3s, a giant hydroelectric plant planned to be built in an area inhabited by the Munduruku indigenous group and river dwellers.<\/p>\n BR-319, which connects Manaus to Porto Velho, is specially troublesome, as it will allow for secondary roads. According to a\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0by NGO Idesam, an area as big as Germany and Belgium combined is under its influence and will become more vulnerable to land-grabbers and deforestation. Recent attempts to pave it have been barred by Ibama.<\/p>\n \u201cHe names Ibama and ICMBio as his number one public enemies and has given several messages that he will reverse environment and social laws,\u201d said Andr\u00e9 Guimar\u00e3es, director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. \u201cHowever, one thing is what he says during the electoral campaign. Another thing is what he will be able to do if he takes office.\u201d<\/p>\n Guimar\u00e3es said that recently the beef caucus has tried to relax environmental and slave labour legislation, but failed in most of the attempts due to strong opposition.<\/p>\n \u201cHe will try and he is obstinate, but it\u2019s up to the civil society to react against it. It will be a scenario with intense and almost permanent disputes,\u201d he said. \u201cWe must be indignant.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Guardian view on climate change: a global emergency\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n The consequences of catastrophic warming will be political and even military, not just environmental<\/i><\/p>\n Climate change is an existential threat to the human race. This may seem an absurd or alarmist statement, since we have been conditioned by unparallelled growth to expect that there are no catastrophes that are insurmountable. Even apocalyptic science fiction deals with bands of survivors who have, by definition, survived. And we always imagine ourselves as among the survivors.<\/i><\/p>\n But the threat is real.\u00a0The latest report<\/a>\u00a0of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that there are only a dozen or so years in which to change our economies radically if we are to keep the effects of the warming already under way to manageable proportions. That would require the countries of the world to\u00a0live up to the most ambitious of the goals<\/a>\u00a0of the Paris climate change agreement, and keep the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. A rise of even half a degree above that, to 2C, will have effects that are very much worse. Already this seems much more likely. All corals will disappear, as will many insects and plants.<\/p>\n The disappearance of plants, and in particular the deforestation of tropical regions, is doubly dangerous, because it converts carbon sinks (which living trees are, because they absorb carbon dioxide) into producers of carbon. That is only one of the many\u00a0possible tipping points<\/a>\u00a0which may lead to a sudden and violent escalation of the rate of change as malign feedback loops are formed.<\/p>\n All these risks make it quite credible that we will end with a warming of 3C, 4C or even worse \u2013 and the consequences will be globally terrible, and everywhere unavoidable. Hundreds of millions of people may die through droughts on land, and flooding at the coasts, through the loss of marine species due to acidification of the oceans, and probably through the disruption of long-term weather patterns around which the world\u2019s agriculture has been shaped. These victims will not\u00a0passively await their fates<\/a>. Among the tipping points that we cannot foresee in any detail is the prospect of historically unprecedented refugee migrations as whole populations who have no choice but to starve or move set out for land where they can live. The political and indeed the military consequences are unlikely to be small.<\/p>\n None of this will only be the product of vast impersonal forces, any more than our present crisis is. There are always political and economic choices that explain our actions.\u00a0A recent study<\/a>\u00a0identified 90 different organisations, ranging from states to private companies, that were between them responsible for nearly two-thirds of carbon emissions since 1864. They all behaved as rational, profit-seeking actors without any external responsibilities, and so brought us to the brink of catastrophe. This kind of twisted rationality exacerbates the dangerous physical effects of climate change.<\/p>\n The election of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil now seems overwhelmingly likely, and he is committed, like Donald Trump, to withdrawing his country from the Paris accords. His policies in the Amazon basin will greatly accelerate deforestation. In Australia, the government of\u00a0Scott Morrison<\/a>\u00a0must deal with the reality of climate change in the form of droughts and wildfires, but is at the same time denying any responsibility for the effects of its own actions when they worsen the situation.<\/p>\n This kind of short-term selfishness can\u2019t be overcome only by appeals to unselfishness or to solidarity. Only long-term self-interest can be stronger: perhaps the fear that international anarchy must ultimately lead to international war in an age of nuclear and biological weapons.<\/p>\n It is not the direct effects of climate change alone but their indirect effects on the political and economic structures of the world that make it a genuinely existential threat. As individuals in the rich world, we should all eat less meat and use less fossil-fuel energy. But\u00a0individual action<\/a>\u00a0will never be enough. We must also work to strengthen the kind of political structures that will enable, and if needed compel, the cooperation that is the only alternative to destructive anarchy.<\/p>\n . . .<\/b><\/p>\n To be continued.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Amazon, dark clouds on the horizon (c) 2018 Planet Earth Foundation The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Ten. \u201cNative Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4847"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4847"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5347,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4847\/revisions\/5347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}