Environmental Impacts

Being an environmental studies major, this week seemed to be the most influential in providing details about the early environment and how it was impacted by native peoples. William M. Denevan's article about early environmental impacts had many facts which I had previously not known. I couldn't believe that some fifty-three million people had been situated across the Americas and even more to my surprise was the fact that nearly all tribes lost over ninety percent of their populations amongst the European arrival. Mass extinctions of this magnitude are hard to believe and it must say something about how diseases will always find ways to complicate situations. Prior to taking this class I had a very narrow viewpoint on how the natives could have changed the land, mainly because I didn't know just exactly how many people there were but also because the natives were extremely well informed on agricultural techniques and were quite effective at clearing the land. This brought up the point in Denevan's article where upon exploration of Panama, Ferdinand recorded heavily populated coastlines in 1502 and when the same coastlines where seen again later in 1681, a significant changed had occurred in the vegetation around the area. I found this most interesting and really points out the environmental aspect of secondary succession which probably took place after the outbreaks of disease and decline in native populations. For only having a small amount of knowledge over the environmental impacts of natives, this week has shown me that like our current day problems with the environment, natives most likely knew and went through very similar problems.