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Chapter 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: "The Artificial Wilderness"
Chapter 10 contends that the "wilderness" experienced by Europeans was an effect of the lapsed, large-scale environmental maintenance Indian societies had practiced. Borrowing from hypotheses from historians and anthropologists, Mann suggests that the pandemics that ravaged native civilizations in the 16th and 17th centuries led to a dramatic shift in the environment, creating the conditions European settlers were to experience in the New World. In this paradigm, as Europeans moved west, disease preceded them, sometimes by years. The effects of these pandemics weakened and suspended existing systems of environmental control, such as controlled burns, hunting, and terraces. This, in turn, created what Mann describes as "pathological" phenomena; that is, phenomena that occur through some breakdown of the system, rather than naturally. Two examples of these from Chapter 10 are the colossal herds of bison and flocks of passenger pigeons that dominated portions of the North American landscape. While these species were numerous prior to the establishment of Europeans on the continent, Mann hypothesizes that their numbers were controlled by hunting and farming. The decline and in some cases extinction of these species, Mann writes, were a result of the instability created by the sudden replacement of these large-scale environmental-management practices.
Chapter 10 Analysis
Chapter 10 attempts to answer some of the blind spots and contradictions in accounts of the New World and its ecology. The chapter offers a hypothesis for the relative wilderness encountered by European conquistadors, explorers, and settlers. Mann's argument is that this "wilderness" was artificial and a result of the recent pandemics among native populations, which suspended their ongoing ecological modifications. Essentially, Mann's argument is that the idea of the "pristine wilderness" is a result of Europeans’ relative ignorance of both the extent and reach of native civilizations, but also of the microbes they unwittingly carried to the New World. The argument casts a new picture of what the Americas looked like before the arrival of Europeans; Mann contends that it was an environment characterized and shaped by its human inhabitants. This theory is significant because it dispels myths which, in attempting to portray natives as more ecologically-conscious than Europeans, minimizes and trivializes the abilities of their communities, societies, and civilizations. Mann's emphasis on the destructiveness of the pandemics of the 15th-17th centuries provides a better historical context for the full ramifications of European arrival to the continent. However, as the author adds in the close of the chapter, this hypothesis isn’t proven, nor it is received with consensus.
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