THE ORIGINAL AMERICAN HORTICULTURALISTS
The Wild Amazon Basin
Elizabeth Linhart
Garden vs. Chainsaw
Ask anyone what place on earth best represents untamed wilderness at peril from the hands of men, and most will answer: The Amazon Basin. Home to 60% of the world’s rainforests, it covers an area the size of the continental United States. Its biological diversity is without parallel and many of its inhabitants - both animal and human - are yet unknown to the outside world.
The fight for its survival is likewise legendary. Collectively, we are alarmed when we hear statistics like: 137 animal, plant and insect specie are lost everyday at the current rate of deforestation; and that 55% of the rainforest will be gone by 2030. It is one of our great David and Goliath narratives that pits untamed wilderness against the chainsaws eager to turn it into rangeland. But what if I were to tell you that the Amazon itself was in fact a creation of man?
Rethinking 1491
When we imagine America moments before Columbus stepped ashore the sandy beaches of Hispaniola, we see a world where people lived within the boundaries of an unadulterated landscape. This urwelt, or primeval earth, includes the crush of mountains stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; the arid expanses of the Sonora, Mojave, Atacama, and Patagonian Deserts; and the continents’ broad swaths of forest and grasslands. In our collective mind’s eye, pre-Colombian America was largely unpopulated and playing entirely by nature’s rules. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite. 
Historians and archeologists estimate that the population of the Americas at first contact was proportionally the same to the rest of the world as it is today. Some even suggest that the number could be as high as 18 million people. Furthermore, many of these early Americans built dense cities that extended up the wide Mississippi, designed ornamental gardens (something unknown in Europe) in the Aztec metropolis of Tenochtitlan, and planted terraced fields that fed the Incan Empire.
Sadly, when Columbus arrived, he brought more with him than just horses and guns. European diseases such as small pox, the measles, and influenza disembarked too. They quickly infected the indigenous population, who had been biologically isolated from the rest of the world since their ancestors crossed the Bering Land Bridge 20,000 years before. Spreading like wildfire, disease is credited with decimating much of the continents’ native inhabitants. So efficient was its destruction, that less than a hundred years later, Pizarro found a weakened Incan Empire fraught in a war of succession after its leader, Huanya Capac, and most of his family succumbed to small pox; and the passengers on the Mayflower discovered an empty coast where deserted Indian settlements provided the corn caches that ensured the Pilgrims’ survival. It is estimated that since 1492 over 90% of the Native America pre-Colombian population has been destroyed.
Garden of Eatin’
Before war and disease did their nasty work, the indigenous inhabitants were busy both building great civilizations, and shaping the natural environment beyond the scope and scale of anywhere in the world, most notably Europe. Frequently using fire, many American peoples shaped their habitat to promote biodiversity and good hunting grounds for their communities. The Great Plains of North America is the grandest monument to their efforts, where forests were pushed back to create vast prairies where bison would flourish.
Potting Soil and Chocolate Orchards
In the southern continent, we look to the Incan ruins and their terraced gardens sculpting the lush highlands as evidence of humanity’s hand upon the land. But just over the spine of the Andes, in the vast canopied Amazon Basin, America’s horticultural might reached its apex.
The Amazon has long been assumed to be founded upon thin soil that could barely sustain its threadbare population, but in Para, one of Brazil’s northern states, local villagers mine a nearby plot of land for its terra preta, rich fertile black earth. The villagers are careful not to remove too much soil, however, knowing that it will miraculously regenerate itself, as it has for a millennium. Located near a 4,000-year-old settlement that once grew as many as 140 different types of crops, the soil was long ago inoculated with good microorganisms and bacteria that transformed it into rich earth that rebuilds itself. Early  Amazonians throughout the basin actively worked to change the composition of the soil to sustain their blossoming agriculture. Today, it is estimated that 10% of the Amazon Basin is rooted in this terra preta.
Much of what was planted in this crafted soil were fruit bearing trees to feed the growing settlements. Lacking the metal tools to clear land for grain or row crops as was common in other parts of the world, Amazonians planted trees, which provided fruit for twenty or thirty years in exchange for just one season of hard labor. Among exotic fruits like the Abiu whose pale flesh has been compared to the flavor of flan or caramel, these arborists also gave us cashews, Brazil nuts, and cocoa.
We often hold the indigenous Americans in high regard, crediting them with giving us environmental ethics and a sense of responsibility for future generations, but we must never forget that they also gave us the Snickers Bar.
[PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION]
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