After 1492: Nature Rebounds

Abstract

Postapocalypse stories about human survival and rebound of nature following mass disaster are a familiar genre. A major real world example is the demise of most Native Americans after 1492. This essay is a review of some of what is known about the subsequent return of forests and the explosion of wildlife numbers in the neotropics and in North America. The belief by many early Europeans in the New World, including influential postcolonial writers, that the bounty they observed had preceded them, was mostly false.

Key words:

• California
• eastern North America
• forest rebounds
• neotropics
• wildlife irruptions
• world without people

Notes

1. The argument that pre‐Columbian nature was modified by human action nearly everywhere has been controversial until recently but is now generally accepted, with the caveat that impacts were often relatively minor (Vale 2002; Denevan 2011; Foreman 2014; Meine 2015).

2. For theories of forest resurgence, see Hecht 2014.

3. Ramenofsky (1987) has indicated that epidemics reached the middle Missouri by 1600, some 100 years before the first European reports, and probably elsewhere in North America by decades or more. Smallpox reached Peru before the first Spaniards did in 1528 (Cook 1998).

4. On resilience theory, see Stallins and others (2015), regarding Vale (1982).

5. A recent article in Science examined 100 time series from biomes across the Earth and found that species diversity at the local level was not usually altered by ecological change and disturbance, in contrast to changed species composition (Dornelas and others 2014).

6. For recent discussions of this debate, see Kloor (2015) and the articles in The Social Lives of Forests (Hecht and others 2014), Keeping the Wild (Wuerthner and others 2014), and After Preservation (Minteer and Pyne 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William M. Denevan

Dr. William M. Denevan is the Carl O. Sauer Professor Emeritus of geography at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706; [[email protected]].