Charles C. Mann Quote

Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In the country inhabited by the Ka’apor, on the mainland southeast of Marajó, centuries of tinkering have profoundly changed the forest community. In Ka’apor-managed forests, according to Balée’s plant inventories, almost half of the ecologically important species are those used by humans for food. In similar forests that have not recently been managed, the figure is only 20 percent. Balée cautiously estimated, in a widely cited article published in 1989, that at least 11.8 percent, about an eighth, of the nonflooded Amazon forest was anthropogenic—directly or indirectly created by humans. Some researchers today regard this figure as conservative. I basically think it’s all human created, Clement told me. So does 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. Some of my colleagues would say that’s pretty radical, he said. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, lots of researchers believe that what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia. The phrase built environment, Erickson argued, applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.