There is a lot of accumulating evidence for very extensive landscape engineering, you could call it terra-forming, by native American civilizations going back thousands of years, in the Amazon, the Andes, the Valley of Mexico, the Sonora desert, the eastern woodlands of North America and elsewhere.
For me, this evidence raises some Big Questions about what benefits we may gain for the present and future.
Although some large projects, the building of dams, canals and monuments, must have required complex social organization, it seems that most of the work was accomplished by individual peasant farmer house-holds, each improving their own holdings generation by generation.
Gardeners' improvements to soil and flora in their village neighborhoods enabled early civilizations to feed millions at subsistance level, but do not scale well for application to modern, industrial agriculture. At this moment, for example, productive fruit and nut orchards in the Brazilian Amazon are being bulldozed to create pasture for industrial cattle ranching. The accumulated capital of hundreds of generations of peasant labor is being squandered, and can never be re-created. But in some places, local communities are reclaiming these long abandoned resources for household-based production.
Historically, peasant communities have been unwilling to leave their land. Only the most brutal social engineering (Stalin, Mao, the Irish potato famine, Enclosure in Britain) has been able to move a peasantry en mass into cities to become an industrial labor force, and clear their land for agri-business.
Perhaps we should re-think the social benefits of complete industrialization for every society? Perhaps we should re-think the benefits of agriculture carried out by a prosperous peasant class, kulaks, vs. complete industrialization of food production?
One book I recently read on this subject is David L. Lentz, Editor Imperfect Balance/Landscape Transformations in the Pre-Columbian Americas, c. 2000, Columbia University Press, New York, ISBN 0-231-11157-6. This collection of academic papers surveys landscape engineering prior to European contact in many regions of the Americas. It's a thick book, dry in style and I had to plow through it, but I thought it was worth the effort.
Charles C. Mann 1493/How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth c. 2011, Granta Publications, London, ISBN 978-1-84708-049-3, is a popular history with a broader subject, but also introduces the topic of landscape engineering in the pre-Columbian Americas. It's a good place to start.
worries about not losing his rules stuff.
