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Published in:
2014 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
The Myth of the Humanized Pre-Columbian Landscape
Author : Dave Foreman
Published in: Keeping the Wild
Publisher: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics
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Abstract
GEOGRAPHER WILLIAM M. DENEVAN of the University of Wisconsin is a leading researcher of what he calls “The Pristine Myth.” He claims that “the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large.”1 Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus echo this assessment: “Scientific findings indicate that virtually every part of the globe, from the boreal forests to the humid tropics, has been inhabited, modified, or managed throughout our human past.”2 J. Baird Callicott similarly claims that “the wilderness idea is woefully ethnocentric. It ignores the historic presence and effects on practically all the world’s ecosystems of aboriginal peoples.”3