One of the most memorable American television images is a 1970s Ad Council ((“The Ad Council is a private, non-profit organization that marshals volunteer talent from the advertising and communications industries, the facilities of the media, and the resources of the business and non-profit communities to deliver critical messages to the American public.” Among its public service announcements are Smokey Bear’s “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires,” McGruff the Crime Dog’s “Take A Bite Out of Crime,” “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk,” and the United Negro College Fund’s “A Mind is a Terrible Thing To Waste.” See “About Ad Council,” Ad Council Website, http://www.adcouncil.org/default.aspx?id=68 (accessed July 1, 2008).)) close-up of an old Indian ((Iron Eyes Cody)) shedding a tear when trash thrown from a passing car landed at his feet. ((Warren Berger, “Source of Classic Images Now Struggles to Be Seen,” New York Times, November 20, 2000, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E2DD1F38F933A15752C1A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all (accessed July 1, 2008).)) It reflected what University of Wisconsin geographer William Denevan called “the pristine myth,” the view that America was essentially wilderness before Columbus and his European band landed in the Bahamas. ((Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 326.)) It fit the perspective of American naturalist John Muir, who wrote; “Indians walked softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels …” ((Quoted in Gary Paul Nabhan, “Cultural Parallax in Viewing North American Habitats,” in Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence, 2nd ed., ed. Richard G. Botzler and Susan J. Armstrong (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 265.)) But that view has been challenged in recent years, notably in Charles C. Mann’s book, 1491, which describes the vast amount of Native-American civil engineering in place before Columbus arrived in 1492.
Not surprisingly, this book and a range of sympathetic articles have played a substantial role in the ongoing debate over environmentalism. For just as the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau built social and political theory on his notion of the “noble savage unspoiled by civilization,” many contemporary environmentalists employ a romantic notion of the Native American to condemn capitalism, land development, and even Christianity. They regret the way “we conceive of the land in terms of ownership and use,” ((N. Scott Momaday, “A First American’s View,” in Botzler and Armstrong, 256.)) they yearn for the time when once again, “the Earth may be referred to as Mother, or Grandmother” in “quite literal terms,” and they welcome “the idea of the Earth as a living, conscious being.” ((Annie L. Booth and Harvey M. Jacobs, “Ties That Bind: Native American Beliefs as a Foundation for Environmental Consciousness,” in Botzler and Armstrong, 259.))
Animism notwithstanding, the natives were admirably industrious–and industrial. As ethnobiologist Gary Nabhan observed, North American Indians “variously burned, pruned, hunted, hacked, cleared, irrigated, and planted in an astonishing diversity of habitats for centuries.” ((Nabhan, 268.)) For example, the Hohokam tribe “constructed over seventeen hundred miles of prehistoric irrigation canals along the Salt River in the Phoenix basin . . .” ((Ibid., 267.)) 1491 is full of similar examples: Dutch settler Adriaen van der Donck noted that Indians of the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys regularly set fire to “the woods, plains, and meadows . . . [to] thin out and clear the woods of all dead substances and grass, which grow better the ensuing spring”; ((Quoted in Mann, 249.)) in the Mississippi River valley near present-day St. Louis, the Indian city of Cahokia had “a four-level earthen mound bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza…” ((Ibid., 252-253.))
To the south lay the great Mayan ruins of the Yucatan Peninsula. The largest was discovered only in the 1930s and was untouched by archaeologists as late as the 1980s:
Calakmul . . . had once housed as many as fifty thousand people and sprawled across an area as big as twenty-five square miles . . . The downtown area alone had six thousand masonry structures: homes, temples, palaces, and granaries, even an eighteen-foot-high defensive wall. Lacing through the buildings was a tracework of canals and reservoirs, many apparently stocked with fish. Thousands of acres of farmland extended beyond. ((Ibid., 267.))
To be fair, Europeans arriving in 16th- and 17th-century America saw little of this buildup. By that time, eighty million Indians had already died of disease, ((Ibid., 94.)) much of it spread inadvertently by explorers such as Hernando DeSoto, whose pigs fatally infected 96% of the Caddo people. ((Ibid., 98-99.)) But, today, there is no excuse for claiming that the Indians were blood brothers of environmental extremists averse to sprawling development. Like their European counterparts, also members of Adam’s race, Indians were trying to “fill and subdue the earth, ruling over living creatures.” And like the Europeans, they did it more or less well, sometimes with great success, sometimes with disastrous consequences. But in the end, they were fallen men wrestling with fallen Creation, just like the English and Spanish, responsible to God for the stewardship of what He had given them.
