| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape. Edited by Thomas Vale. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002). xv + 315 pp.; figures, boxes, tables, maps, bibliographies, index. Cloth $50.00, paper $25.00.

In April 1933, the pre-eminent American ecologist Victor Shelford, who at the time chaired the Ecological Society of America's Committee for the Study of Plant and Animal Communities, wrote in a short essay in Ecology that "Primitive man ... is probably properly called a part of nature." So far, so good; properly, so are we all. But then—and here Shelford would articulate a view that two succeeding generations of ecologists and environmental thinkers took to heart—he went on that America was "probably not much affected by these primitive men. That is the argument for leaving them out of the picture." It's also the argument that eventually would get those ecologists and conservation biologists down the time-line in a heap of trouble when environmental historians and ecological anthropologists came along with new techniques for estimating pre-Contact human populations, and considerable documentary evidence of Indian manipulation of the world around them. As we know, this has fueled a most interesting debate that's functional in modern ecological restoration: Were the Americas' wilderness settings shaped purely by "natural" forces? Or (the newer view out of the historical record), had 12,000 years of human inhabitation/manipulation made the continents "managed" places much as Europe or Africa were?

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