"The predominant landscape type on this continent was one that was managed..."
Well, looking at the explorers' records, we find a consistent pattern, absolutely consistent pattern. The letters and the chronicles and the reports that went back to Europe talk about an abundant landscape where deer were abundant, there were chestnut trees in the east, just loaded. The chestnut, before its demise, before they died out or were killed out by disease, on average 35 percent of the eastern forest was in chestnuts, for example. So there's beautiful food, there's fish in the stream, there's deer, there's a lot of plants, a lot of trees, a lot of great trees to make ship masts out of, and all kinds of things like that. When you go to New York or Georgia or the West Coast, or the California coast, the descriptions of the explorers were always consistent. They talk about this abundant landscape, and they describe it as a park land or a park-like environment. If not using that word, again, they describe an area that is large, sparsely distributed trees, there's a few big trees on the landscape with a lot of grasses and flowers and herbs in the understory. What you're really seeing is something like a savannah in the majority of cases where these ecosystems were described. Now, if you go to those same areas today, 500 years later, a little over 500 years, you discover that they're not park-like, you don't have abundance of understory vegetation, you don't have abundance of deer, you don't have abundance of a lot of these resources. And we can track—I'll call it the degradation—of that historic environment.
...within a hundred years after the removal of the native people, and therefore a change in environmental practices, you don't have a park land anymore. The trees come in, and anywhere you have a prairie, trees—there's always kind of a struggle between trees and meadows. The trees are always trying to encroach on the meadow. The meadow is, of course, always trying to keep the trees out. The conclusions I've gotten, some of the conclusions I've reached based on all this kind of historical analysis, is that the predominant landscape type on this continent was one that was managed, the habitats or the environments of North America was a managed landscape at the time of Columbus. And even though the Europeans didn't recognize it as a landscape that was managed, they assumed this was just Eden. They assumed it was pristine. And that word is still plaguing native communities all over the place. Because the idea was that when the Europeans arrived in North America, it was a pristine landscape. Pristine means people weren't there, people weren't having an influence.
...to me it's no longer an assumption, but it's a fact, that native people were in fact living on these landscapes on the plateau, they were quite high in population. The population was high enough to disrupt or destroy or over-harvest the resources, but again, if you look at human populations, what humans tend to do, if we do in fact wipe out a resource and suffer because of it, we learn from the experience and pass on some sort of ideas and knowledge to the next generation of how not to do that in the past.