The myth of the pristine Amazon rainforest | Hacker News Reader

The myth of the pristine Amazon rainforest

mpg.de

83 pointsupen27 comments

This article is an absurd misstatement of the research. Pretty much no-one is pushing the notion of a "pristine" pre-colonial Amazon. As the Nature article that also talks about this paper (both linked in another top level comment) points out, it's an open question "how much of an influence human activities have had on the Amazon" — not whether or not there's been an influence at all.

I've spent a lot of time in the Peruvian Amazon, and have talked (language limitations notwithstanding) with Shipibo-Conibo and Mestizo villagers about their relationships with the forest, specifically including their understanding of how that relationship might have been in the past.

That they engaged with it as both stewards and beneficiaries of its bounty should be a surprise to precisely no-one who has paid the slightest bit of attention.

EDIT: Contrasting that pre-historical dynamic with the way many treat the forest today, having internalized Western economic values, is tragic. Clear-cutting; illegal logging; and slash-and burn, deplete, and move on to the next patch, are all examples of treating the forest as a resource, instead of as, for lack of a better word, a partner. And it shows. The place is slowly dying. Every time I go back, I can see more of the sand that lies mere inches under the staggeringly fecund topsoil blowing around, and getting into everything.

>Pretty much no-one is pushing the notion of a "pristine" pre-colonial Amazon.

Growing up I was taught the pre-colonial Amazon was pristine, and it has been only in recent years I have started to hear a different story. I bet most people in the US still believe the pristine idea.

I have no idea how old you are, but it's not at all surprising to me that a narrative like that is the one that propagates through the broader culture. Among other things, it speaks to how the enlightened Europeans brought civilization and what-not to the benighted savages of the New World. We like those narratives...

AFAIK, though, among the people who actually study this, or have cared to look into these matters for themselves (for whatever reason), that idea has no traction.

I generally agree with what you are saying. My problem was that when you said "nobody" I thought you meant people in general, not just the researchers in the field.

Furthermore, you seemed to be saying that articles like this shouldn't be published because people already know these facts. But I say they are good to publish because they help correct the views of the general public. Would you agree?

Oh, totally, there should be articles correcting the common notion, for the people who'd care enough to read them. This site didn't strike me as targeted at lay audiences, though.

> That they engaged with it as both stewards and beneficiaries of its bounty

Sorry, but no, you might be thinking of Avatar.

They were just like us, they did whatever to it that they thought would be most beneficial to themselves, except more short term thinking than current society and with less technology and numbers so less damaging.

The question here is, did the do structural improvements for themselves (unlikely) or did they make large changes from how they lived like clearing and burning over lots of years (more likely)

It's cute how you try to apply a Western way of seeing the world to a radically different cultural mindset. The people I'm talking about believe, in all seriousness, that the plants have spirits, with whom you can communicate, and to whom you owe deference and respect, because they — and you — are part of a larger system that benefits from, even depends upon, a cooperative mode of co-existence.

That kind of thinking suffuses their culture. It is a premise to how they engage with their world. Short-term, "I can burn this down if it serves my immediate needs," thinking is inimical to the traditional way of life of Amazonian tribal societies — or at least the ones with which I've interacted. "Cut it down and turn it into money" is, necessarily, a new phenomenon, since "money" wasn't even a thing for these people until we introduced it to them.

So, yeah. It is, in fact, rather like Avatar, your snark notwithstanding. You can dismiss that kind of thinking as animistic, primitive, or whatever else you want, to your heart's content. But denying its existence to someone who's spoken with these people, and seen the sincerity and reverence with which they hold those beliefs, is ... well, it's very reductively Western, for starters.

EDIT: It's also patently absurd to call that kind of thinking "short-term" in light of the clear-cutting, slash-and-burning, &c, that so many people there commit these days, just to get by — let alone to call it more short-term than the ways people engage today. That makes absolutely no sense to me.

It can also be patronizing to say that non-western and non-eastern people have no agency, that only westerners and easterners have universality.

As if Mayans could not commit ecological mistakes or clearcut land for more farming. I'm not saying that All rainforests people clearcut or had disregard for nature, but it's rather odd to think that while human they could not commit the same kind of "savagery" westerners or easterners can commit.

As some fist peoples are humorously fond of exaggerating, we burned more land, killed more animals than any european ever did, that to make a point that they too can do bad things, that they too are human just like everyone else and can do have agency.

I guess between the murder, gang raping and war they might have respected plants and stuff, I just have my doubts.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23758087

So, your counter-argument is to say that they are also as human as the rest of us?

Even the article itself stresses that the findings should not be used to downplay or "excuse" damage done by industrial exploitation:

> Indigenous activities cannot be compared to contemporary damage.

[...]

The impact of the indigenous populations in Amazonia in pre-Columbian times can in no way be compared with the deforestation seen in the last decades. “Industrial utilisation has already destroyed one million square kilometres,” Florian Wittmann says. The figure corresponds to three times the surface area of Germany and around 20 per cent of the entire Amazon rainforest. “It is of vital importance that we protect the remaining areas better,” the scientist concludes.

I have not read the research, but I read the article and your comment. Your fifth word is absurd. There is really no need to use such hyperbole. The article is patently not absurd, though one might reasonably disagree with parts of it. I imagine you just reacted to the headline.

As far as I can tell, from reading the article: the researchers have determined - by identifying lower entropy in the distribution of trees useful-to-people - a higher probability than pure chance would allow, evidence of ancient cultivation. Especially around known architectural sites going back up to 8,000 years.

Is that a reasonable summary of the article / of the research?

Here is a better summary from Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/amazon-rainforest-was-shaped-by-a...

Here is the actual article (published on March 2nd): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6324/466

My takeaway: yes, humans may have aided in the dispersal of useful plants across the Amazon in pre-Columbian times, but other factors were more important. The authors also did a poor job (as they acknowledge) separating pre-Columbian effects from those in more recent times.

>The myth of the pristine Amazon rainforest - Indigenous inhabitants shaped the rainforest by domesticating tree species in pre-Columbian times

That's not, as it's invariably used time and again, an excuse to do the same meddling with the rainforest now -- when we have 10,000 times their resources and effectives in killing the rainforest that these people had.

It's like people don't understand differences of scale...

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair

Recommended reading: 1491 by Charles C. Mann.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...

Yes, plus one to this. I read it and found it be thought-provoking, and simultaneously incredibly sad and incredibly hopeful. It also really upended various preconceived notions, I, and I think a lot of people had about these civilizations, which has turned me into someone who rants about pre-Columbian civilizations at parties :).

Clearly someone (with deep pockets) needs to do a forest-as-infrastructure "startup".

I'm not kidding. If there are people who can make something like asteroid mining (Planetary Resources), this can totally be a thing...

...that's already sort of a thing (forestry), when you consider that's how tree farms work - only those are "optimized" for wood production.

Call it... "massively hetero-culture volumetric emergent agriculture", or something.

What I'd really like to see is autonomous drones that can harvest small berries, seeds, peas, leaves and root vegetables. You could develop permaculture gardens with extremely high yields and virtually no labour. The drones could even work to cultivate predatory insects such as ladybugs and wasps to keep pests under control.

That would be cool as hell. There's something oddly fascinating about autonomous drones flying around the wilderness harvesting/gathering resources, like some strange futuristic caricature of nature.

I think the wilderness should be primarily left completely alone with light-impact human leisure allowed in certain contexts.

I prefer the US public land approach where different lands are graded for different public uses, and certain areas are off-limits/prohibited to the general public because of practical concerns.

There is a 4300m mountain right by my hometown and while one can hike over much of the mountain and the range that surrounds it, certain areas are off-limits during seasons of the year because the mountain sheep drop and raise their lambs there.

Why not use your drones to turn your cities into gardens?

The article is almost about how the rainforests - long considered natural wonders of the world - are actually pretty heavily "engineered".

There is no doubt in my mind that, if we actually tried, we could make "batter" forests than "nature". More diversity, more vibrancy, more overall life.

A more local excellent example is the evidence that native north americans would do periodic burns, with many varied benefits for the different ecosystems that underwent such engineering.

We already have the technology. Many cultures have traditions of collecting nut caches from squirrels. They can harvest as much as 5kg per cache this way.

Agroforestry, permaculture, food forests... There are communities of folks already thinking in this vein. It's an increasingly urgent area of study, as we are increasingly aware of mainstream industrial agriculture's dramatic toll on ecosystems through topsoil degradation, habitat loss, threats to biodiversity, and so on.

But I don't believe a startup mentality fits an ecological approach to agriculture. Successfully shifting from the dominant model of agriculture is dependent on envisioning and creating alternative economic systems.

EDIT: Changed wording in last sentence for clarity.

The title (which seems to imply that the destruction currently underway in the Amazon is no big deal, basically) is at odds with the text of the article itself, which takes pains to say:

I saw this article awhile ago and was puzzled by it. Unknown ancient peoples planted productive trees thousands of years ago.

What does that mean with respect to the makeup of the forest thousands of years later? What does pristine even mean in this context?

The first Western chronicle of Gaspar de Carvajal [1] spoke of large cities and well-paved roads in a region which is now "pristine" jungle. These chronicles were dismissed for a long time as fabrication, but it seems now there is a lot of evidence that Carvajal was speaking the truth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspar_de_Carvajal

Reply on news.ycombinator.com