The Pristine Myth: The Atlantic runs a fascinating interview with Charles C. Mann, who wrote a piece in the March issue of that magazine, discussing the Indian population in the Americas at the time of the European invasion. It's hard, maybe impossible, to know the population of the Americas in 1491 (there was a good piece on this last year -- I think -- in Skeptic magazine), and so hard to know what the state of the environment was. Mann points out that this has implications for environmental policy.
Problem is, this new generation of anthropologists and archaeologists is saying that as a matter of cold, hard fact the Americas in 1491 were not a wilderness. They were a huge, special garden, planned and maintained by the active efforts of a wildly diverse range of societies. Environmentalists tend not to like this line of argument, because to them it implies that there is no preferred "natural" state—so let the bulldozers rip. And to be fair a lot of anti-green commentators have drawn just this implication. Personally, though, I believe both sides are wrong. Knowing more about what the Indians accomplished suggests that human beings can have a large, long-lasting impact on the landscape without wrecking everything. To me, at least, that seems an incredibly hopeful notion to carry along into tomorrow.
Thinking about this, reminds me that I've read more than several articles in the Atlantic that I've really enjoyed in the past year or so, both in the print and online versions. They seem to be doing a good job of making the two versions complement each other. In this case, as in the case of the religions artilce in the February issue, they run onoline an interview with the author of a major work.
10:10:30 PM 
|
|
