The "Pristine Myth" Revisited

The genesis of my 1992 article entitled "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492" and a group of related articles was the formulation by Stanley Brunn, then editor of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, of a special issue in recognition of the Columbian Quincentennial, that issue later being titled The Americas before and after 1492. To recruit manuscripts, the editor appointed a committee consisting of Karl Butzer, B. L. Turner II, Brian Harley, and myself. Ultimately Butzer became the guest editor. The authors of the special issue were under tight time constraints. They conceived the contents in mid-1991, drafted manuscripts by early 1992, and revised them in the spring. The association had scheduled publication for a September date but wanted the issue available for the 27th International Geographical Congress in Washington, D.C. in August. Thus publication was actually in early August--one of the fastest Annals assembled in recent times. This was despite Harley's intervening death after he had drafted a long and rough article with dozens of illustrations. Butzer reduced this to manageable size and coherence in addition to writing his own two-and-one-half articles and editing everything else in the issue. Congress attendees received free copies, so that issue received a greater distribution than usual. I chose to write on the pristine myth, given my long awareness of pre-1492 human impacts, reflecting my own Berkeley influences from Carl Sauer, Erhard Rostlund, and James Parsons as well as my own research, plus my emerging belief that a pristine myth does indeed exist. Certainly I was motivated when, in Meriter Hospital for surgery in Madison in the summer of 1991, I was given Kirkpatrick Sales 1990 best seller The Conquest of Paradise. A major point of the book is that the colonial Europeans transformed nature in the Americas, whereas the Indian impact had been benign or nonexistent. I thought, loaded with morphine, "Such innocence!" The expression "pristine myth" is mine, as far as I am aware. I do not recall how I came up with it. Certainly this catchy title phrase is a key to the widespread attention the article has received. However, the article does not contain anything new; it is a synthesis of the work of numerous people, many of whom I cited. I also presented the term "humanized landscape," which I took from a 1979 article by Butzer: "The landscape had been humanized by the first Americans" (p. 148; also see Butzer 1990,48). Wilbur Zelinsky had used the term earlier: In The Cultural Geography of the United States he wrote that the United States was "a partially humanized land. ... The territory entered by explorer and homesteader was not covered by the forest primaeval but had already been grossly modified by aboriginal hunting, burning, forestry, and planting" (1973,16). In the "Pristine Myth" article I maintained that by the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World its environment had been modified to varying degrees in most places by the settlement, subsistence, burning, and other activities of Native Americans and that this has not been acknowledged by most of the educated public or by many scholars, except, of course, for the densely populated areas of the Andes, Central Mexico, and Central America. In this essay I briefly revisit my 1992 article and present some of the many responses to it and to related studies and statements, with a partial bibliography of a large literature. RESPONSES "The Pristine Myth" quickly received considerable comment and controversy in and out of academia, in numerous newspapers including the New York Times, also in Newsweek, and there were several radio interviews. However, at least eight other articles on the topic also appeared in 1992, including those by the geographers Martyn Bowden on "invented tradition" (1992a), Turner and Butzer in Environment (1992), and Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee (1992); by the anthropologist Steven Simms on "Wilderness as a Human Landscape" (1992); and by the biologists Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus in BioScience (1992; see also Gastang 1992; Gomez-Pompa 1992). …