Was the Amazon forest a permaculture project?

I was captivated by the luxurious vegetation of the Amazon while very young, and its pockets of mysterious happy people. My memory is not perfect but I remember reading that next to a very desirable fruit tree, with a very thorny trunk, the indians planted palm trees, so they could climb them and catch the desirable fruit.

Another piece of intriguing information was a book claiming that the water ways of the amazon, the sinuous river banks were man made, the intricate curving and curving of the rivers was altered, created  slowly by men to irrigate the land better.

Here is an article that speaks about the trees in the jungle, and how men shaped the jungle into the luxurious garden it became 500 years ago.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untouched-amazonian-rainforest-was-actually-shaped-humans-180962378/

8 million people lived in the Amazon, what a feat for an ancient culture!

https://www.newhistorian.com/man-made-amazon-theory-support/8122/

Man made waterworks PREDATED the Amazon rainforest.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/mysterious-human-made-ditches-predate-amazon-rainforest-n150141

Did you guys know this and I am coming late to the party???

In 2006 I read Mann's book 1491 where he relates that the Amazon was planted by it's human inhabitants.  I can't recall his sources for this, but it certainly predates his book.  As Brazil's new leadership seems to support clearing more forest it makes me consider moving there to help retain the ancient permaculture systems that are still at least partly there.  What a treasure!  Thank you for your good post on this Ella.

Many parts of the Amazon have been human occupied for thousands of years so it isn't, or shouldn't be, that surprising that those people would plant trees they wanted where they wanted them.

Many of the Amazonian peoples have wonderful stories of how the forest became so full of medicinal plants, food plants and shelter supply plants and they even talk about where some of the items came from in the beginning.
I personally don't find it as "unbelievable" as some of my colleges have seemed to think it is. Trade must have gone on way back when, how else could plants found further north only, have gotten into the basin area?
Rivers are always the original highways in the areas where there are rivers and most people will build their villages where they have easiest access to all the things they need to live well.

Don't look at everything you read from scientific theories as being absolute either, science people make mistakes and thinking that just because they say something is so, doesn't always end up being correct or completely correct.
While we have good evidence of some areas being impacted by humans, to correlate that to the whole of the millions of acres that make up the basin would be making assumptions based on little areas of the whole.
That is usually how things start to go wrong in the scientific world. Just as the discovery of terra preta, which was found in one location, not everywhere in the amazon basin.

Redhawk

I don't know whether the origin was due to human involvement or simply nature working right, but...

I saw a documentary where they dug into the amazon soil, expecting to find the best "black gold" stuff ever.  It was for a few inches, but after that, nothing but white sand!

Turns out the system is so efficient that almost all of the biomass is in live, standing plants, not the soil!  Interesting!
Now, that's one remarkably efficient system, if you think about it.  Nothing wasted in the amazon.

Also turns out that was bad news for the cattle ranchers who were burning the forest for land.  Bye, bye, biomass.  What they thought was going to be this amazing, fertile, land literally went up in smoke.
It would be tempting to call it poetic justice if it wasn't all so stupid and tragic.

Yes indeed, the main problem with stripping any rainforest is that the soil beneath the trees is very poor soil with the forest detritus being the main source of minerals and other nutrients the whole system of plants survives on.
Cut down the forest and it can not regrow without many amendments being made to get the system going again.  
Man in all his glory, has a habit of cutting down forest to create "farm land", very rarely does this end up being the good idea man thought it was.
Then they simply move on to repeat the craziness, expecting a different result (this is the definition of insanity), so what happens is eventually there will be no more land to farm.
The Loess area of China is the perfect example of this insanity, it is now being recovered but it takes a lot of hard work and time to get a plot viable for growing plants again, it is also proof that we can do it.

Redhawk

I'm going to say that no, the Amazon was not a permaculture project.

Many of the elements of the Amazonian landscape might be familiar to permies, but that does not make it permaculture.

Fundamentally, permaculture is a form of intentional design. A permaculture practitioner observes their environment and makes decisions for intervention based on extensive theoretical and practical knowledge of what has and has not worked in other different and similar situations. There is a huge degree of scientific understanding underpinning our perspective of the world, even if it is not made explicit in our thought processes and decision making.

I think a permie might have many things in common with an Amazonian tribesman when it comes to how they plan and use their environment. But it is more akin to convergent evolution; two paths arriving at similar destinations.

For a start, permaculture is a choice for most of us. But for the Amazonian it was simply the only way that they knew worked in their environment. The people who took risks with their "primitive" agriculture either  succeeded or died. And you can bet that given a straight up choice between their way of life and modern lifestyles many would have jacked it in in a heart beat. We are blessed with incredible individual and societal wealth, and yet we look back with rose tinted glasses on tribesmen whose lives we will never have a hope of understanding. People who fought their environment day by day to survive and used inherited knowledge of certain "recipes" that worked. "If you plant breadfruit near your village you will have more breadfruit." And every now and then a tribe gets the idea to start clearing forest to plant crops and a few generations later you end up with a dust bowl and the tribe dies out.

A permaculturist in that same situation would be able to predict the longer term implications of their actions. They would understand that clearing land in that environment was likely to be harmful. They would understand the significance of soil nutrients and leeching by rain water, and plan accordingly. They might plant the same trees, but their thought process is totally different.

good point Michael, Permaculture came into being in the 1920's and 30's while the Amazon planters were working around 1000 BC and earlier so technically they could not have been practicing permaculture but sustainable forestry and sustainable agriculture.

To me any person/family that grow/self forage most of their fish/egg/chicken/vegetables/fruits/tubers is permaculture.
If they are building their house without fossil fuel/electricity (because it did not "exist") that is permaculture
If they are "composting" their waste onsite and it doesn't have plastic/fossil fuel in it, that is permaculture.
If they are not spraying the earth with *cides to kill plant/animal life, that is permaculture.
If they are not doing feedlot animal husbandry, that is permaculture.

I think that most of what people have been doing before the past 150yrs of human history qualify as permaculture. People knew which plants/cultivars like swampy/wet area and which plants grew okay in drier/hotter areas.

Right now the 95% of people (in USA) who have less than half an acre to far,. is taking permaculture farming courses and asking if the people who farmed 150yrs ago (which is 90% of the entire population), knew how to use hand tools and to make animals do the work. I think the answer is yes.


As a current city dweller, I consider myself a permie because I have three fruit trees, which is an improvement and I have lots of dream. But the truth is that my food, heating, water, sewer, housing, etc is not really sustainable. My carbon footprint is more than 90% of the rest of the world. I am living a lifestyle that is more sustainable/permaculture than the avg person from 150yrs ago or 1000 years ago.

Given their waste-disposal methods involved open smoldering heaps of debris - I would argue that they were neither permacultural nor sustainable.

Permaculturists use thousands of modern scientific facts from various disciplines to inform their judgement. Sustainability can only be known with complex models that measure and account for the myriad inputs and outputs of human and natural systems.

The knowledge that allows sustainable, efficient living is a recent development and I think we should celebrate it as the futuristic lifestyle that it is.

A few years ago I found a book that I did not finish as it was very dense, in it they seemed to say that the actual water ways had been intentionally made by the people in the last 100 years or so. Because the new ways of farming the Amazon are so damaging, cutting the trees allows the rain to wash away the fertile terra prieta leaving only the red sand underneath, I was not so interested in the book.

What the research indicates to me is that about 2000 years ago, the people who lived in this plain started changing the ecosystem. That they made the water slow down and take detours, so it would irrigate more land and stay longer in the soil, they created soil, they planted trees, so eventually what was grassland became a intricate food forest. The trees brought in the rain, and the climate changed.

If this is true, the the Amazon´s rainforest is a man made rainforest, I think its permaculture at its best. Even the terra preta that gives such a fertility to the area was man made.

I was in Kenya and saw the Massai Mara, the reason there is only grass and plain animals and there is not agriculture is that the soil is sand, and only very adapted type of grass grows there. I am thinking that the Amazon was a similar place, sandy soil, so more grasses than trees. If the Massai had been able to change the soil like the Amazon Indians, they would have had trees, and the trees would have brought more rain or kept the humidity longer. The neighbors of the Massai, the Kikuyus, are all farmers, the soil in their area is more fertile.

What if the people of the Amazon created the Amazon by changing the sand into good soil, planting trees, and deviating and slowing the brooks and small rivers? The pollen changed from grass to trees very quickly.

Think about that.Mind blowing.

Michael Cox wrote:I'm going to say that no, the Amazon was not a permaculture project.

Many of the elements of the Amazonian landscape might be familiar to permies, but that does not make it permaculture.

Fundamentally, permaculture is a form of intentional design. A permaculture practitioner observes their environment and makes decisions for intervention based on extensive theoretical and practical knowledge of what has and has not worked in other different and similar situations. There is a huge degree of scientific understanding underpinning our perspective of the world, even if it is not made explicit in our thought processes and decision making.

I think a permie might have many things in common with an Amazonian tribesman when it comes to how they plan and use their environment. But it is more akin to convergent evolution; two paths arriving at similar destinations.

Michael, my perspective is different on this one.  If someone learned to hunt, they were hunters.  If someone learned to fish, they were fisherman.  If someone did what we think of as permaculture, they were permaculturists.  They wouldn't have used the word, but we do so that's what we would call them.  Also, the people of the Americas seem to have had very high culture developed over a very long time.  Their mastery or plant breeding and landscape modification make them masters of these arts compared to us.  I feel like after 500 years of effort we might start to approach their skills....maybe.  It might take 1000 years to catch up?  We shall see (if we last that long).  When one of us takes a wild low yield weed and turns it into something akin to corn then we can begin to compare ourselves.  I really hope we can get there...we've taken a lot of poor paths to get to our current state.  

I really like Paul's husp thought experiments concerning how we might start to get there.

Bryant RedHawk wrote:Many parts of the Amazon have been human occupied for thousands of years so it isn't, or shouldn't be, that surprising that those people would plant trees they wanted where they wanted them.

Many of the Amazonian peoples have wonderful stories of how the forest became so full of medicinal plants, food plants and shelter supply plants and they even talk about where some of the items came from in the beginning.
I personally don't find it as "unbelievable" as some of my colleges have seemed to think it is. Trade must have gone on way back when, how else could plants found further north only, have gotten into the basin area?
Rivers are always the original highways in the areas where there are rivers and most people will build their villages where they have easiest access to all the things they need to live well.


Redhawk

Redhawk,

Here is the book, I found it in my library. Page after page I found anecdotal information of how the river is being changed by man. It was too dense for me to read but I just opened it and landed on page 18, where a couple talk about the, watch this: 2 mile channel they dig to bring the river to their farm. In page 19, there is a note on a new river that was made around 1960, etc etc etc.

What does that tell us?

It tells me that humans can not only revert but improve and create. The Amazon basin had sun and rain, but a poor sandi soil that allowed mostly grasses. Then the pollen profile changed rapidly about 2000 years ago, from annual grasses that could stand drought to perennials that need continuous humidity. I am thinking the weather changed with the plant profile, and that it is the trees planted and the waterworks, and the man made terra preta, which are brining in even more rain than before.

These people continue changing the river profile, expanding it, slowing it.


My imagination is on fire. What this is making me think is that whatever we are doing with permaculture today is not the standard, we have not yet imagine all that is possible.

What do you think?

hau Ella, It is always wonderful to see a person arrive at their "AH Ha" moment, no matter what that moment is focusing on. It is especially gratifying to see someone's eyes sparkle with their focus on rejuvenating our earth mother.

Any time we look at the indigenous peoples, of any area, we should study their ways of doing things and learn from them, these ways are developed over thousands of years by observation, trials and the errors are thrown out, keeping only what works best for them.
Too bad that "modern" man only follows the paths of the European style mind set, where artificial production of food is thought to be the best method instead of working with nature this mind set is always fighting nature, that makes it a loosing battle, all the time.

I think that people are finally starting to wake up and that awakening is bringing changes in thought patterns, recognition of what isn't working and making the changes needed to be more in tune with nature rather than be in constant battle with the unstoppable forces of the earth mother.

(that is a wonderful book and worth taking the time to read over and over to glean all the knowledge it contains).

Redhawk

I think, as mentioned earlier, that technically they would have been practicing elements of what we now call permaculture. I would term theirs, or anything that happened before Mollison coined the term as "proto-permaculture." There wasn't really a baseline, or anything to compare it to.

It's like calling my grandmother's grandmother's farming practices back in Poland, VORP. It may have qualified, but not only did it precede the term's invention by a century or more, it was also all there was at the time, so the distinction is meaningless.

I don't think open-pit burning disqualifies the ancient amazonians from having practiced proto-permaculture. There was much less harm possible than today, by virtue of the lower population numbers, and the lower negative impact of their lifestyles. No dioxins being produced, no ecological disasters caused by putting dams where they'd kill off downstream ecosystems, no mining, no tilling, no slash-and-burn agriculture.

Personally, and I know this isn't a popular opinion, I have never been fond of Paul's HUSP analogy. It still feeds into the whole "noble savage" archetype of first nations people, which I don't think anyone in anthropological and historical circles clings to any longer.

I hope that anyone with more specific knowledge than I can correct any inaccuracies, but my reading of history suggests a diversity of societies over the course of thousands of years, some coming together in large, centralised societies, some of which experienced calamity (in two cases, driven by climate change, and in one of those, exacerbated by poor forest management), and some living semi-nomadically, adopting practices that hardened them for seasonal times of dearth.

I have read stories about groups who adapted and thrived, and those who didn't and barely survived, or didn't. I have also read stories about conflicts between different groups of people on the land, just as in other societies, stories of ego and hubris, stories just like countless others around the world.

I think I don't like the HUSP analogy because it suggests that there was something that could have been done by the First Nations people that could have saved their continent from invasion, and that they failed to act, when the issues of conflicting disease environments essentially rendered any action that could have been taken moot. When disease wipes out 90% of the population on the ground, what is there that could possibly be done?

There is also the issue of politics. In Mann's book, 1491, he describes a scenario where the europeans, who were known quantities owing to exchanges with fishermen over the years, were kept at arm's length, so to say, until some opportunistic coastal dwellers tried to get the newcomers to solve some political situations of theirs.

Kola Redhawk, have you had the chance to read Charles C. Mann's 1491, or the sequel, 1493? I would love to get your take on those books, as well as on Paul's HUSP concept.

To be clear, it's mostly been the politicking and the human part of the equation that lays the groundwork for the whole HUSP concept with which I have had issue. My understanding of the Pocahontas incident suggests that she used a tradition of vouching for an outsider to keep John Smith from being killed, and later was essentially sold into marriage by her father and was taken back to Europe, where after two years being shown off as an anthropological curiosity, she died. I have nothing against her, personally, but I always felt that the political entities of North America deserved more consideration than a young girl whose compassion, while it proved her mettle, probably changed little, and could have effected less.

I have little data on this, and would love more. I have always wanted to know if the bones of resistance could have existed, and if the First Nations people could have repelled the European invasion.

I know that the situation further south, with the Spanish conquering the Maya, lasted up to two centuries, in some locales, and that the way the Spanish managed it concerned dismantling the Mayan political structure as much as introducing the European disease environment, which was to say that Old World technology was less of an advantage than most today would believe.

Sorry to threadjack.

I don't know if terra preta would have been developed had the ancient amazonians not disposed of their detritus by burning and then burying the burnings, come to think of it. Where would that leave them in terms of permaculturality?

-CK

I don't think open-pit burning disqualifies the ancient amazonians from having practiced proto-permaculture. There was much less harm possible than today, by virtue of the lower population numbers, and the lower negative impact of their lifestyles. No dioxins being produced

Open-pit burning releases dioxins. Smoldering fires and burning green material (which they used to control temperature and oxygen levels) releases more dioxins than a typical dry fire.
I don't think it's fair to write off their pollution as acceptable given their population numbers. By the same token the modern lifestyle generates acceptable levels of pollution, there are just a few billion too many people.

I'm the first to get hot under the collar over terra preta, but I like to be cautious about viewing historical indigenous lifestyles through rose-coloured glasses.
History is equal parts accident and intent - while we are primed to see the shadowy hand of agency, we often later find that a natural phenomenon or a happy accident was the cause.

Does digging a '2 mile channel' out from a river qualify as slowing it down and improving it? How does it compare to a swale high up on a hill?
I would think that with such a powerful river, diversions would only increase erosion and reduce flows over time.

I don't know much about the South American landscape but I do know that a lot of the North American landscape was intentionally cultivated. There are many reports of it looking like a magical garden, about how it could somehow provide for the needs of people much better than wild landscapes in Europe, etc. The manner of farming/landscaping that native peoples in Canada practiced was different from the manner practiced in Europe but it was still there and it was still very important. The indigenous people were quite intentionally selecting towards the plants that were edible or otherwise useful and away from those that weren't.

I do think we have to keep in mind that the historical mindset towards intentional cultivation would be different to the modern-day one. Most historical people wouldn't have as much understanding towards what would damage or protect our current ecosystem; but to say that people from this era didn't care about biological continuity seems very unfair. They were doing the best they could do under difficult circumstances, and in most cases they actually did pretty well.

I personally think a big part of permaculture and sustainable living is ensuring that you're not producing more children than you can personally care for. As far as I know, the indigenous people in my area had no issue with that, but nowadays there are an awful lot of non-indigenous people who have kids without really thinking about it. In my life, I see a lot of people having kids that they don't know how to raise without abusing them physically or verbally. Nowadays if you don't know how to have children without causing issues, I think you should wait to have children until you're in an environment where you can trust. It's not that complicated.

Well, just speaking on behalf of my ancestors, it was intentional. One can, intentionally, choose a social system which does not harm the earth for future generations. It is not hard. And yes, of course it includes not having more children than the earth can support.
We resisted colonization in the most profound way we could imagine, namely by resisting the violent intent, and the violent thought structures which gave rise to the intention.  We still do, one compost heap at a time. The story is not over yet :) Who is to say our methods are not working?

You are far from the first to get hot under the collar about the byproducts of combustion related to the production of charcoal for inoculation as biochar.

I don't think the burning that took place historically is anything compared to your average backyard barrel burn in the States, primarily because of what was being combusted. They had no plastics, and the chief reason they couldn't do dry burning, I suspect, was the humidity.

In addition, not all dioxins are created equal. I don't know if the classes of dioxin created by the low-temperature burn conditions of a green, damp pit-burn of organic matter-based middens, which is likely what we're discussing, has anything on those produced by low-temperature combustion of plastics, but I suspect that the dioxins from plastic burning are more easily produced in quantity,  and might be more persistent, and might even be biologically worse than those derived from green organic matter.

As to slowing down the Amazon, that would have the effect of reducing flow rate, which would reduce the size of particle that the flow could carry away. As to whether a swale would be better, that would depend on the subsoil topography. If digging down through the relatively thin and fragile soil layer increased water infiltration overmuch, everything up slope of the swale might dry out.

Slowing the Amazon probably had the effect of making it more able to support a greater population and diversity of smaller life forms, which in turn probably helped support greater numbers of larger species.

Also, because it was a natural system being augmented,  there was no drought being created upswale, only a diversion of water from the ocean into the groundwater.

-CK

Meg Mitchell wrote:
I personally think a big part of permaculture and sustainable living is ensuring that you're not producing more children than you can personally care for. As far as I know, the indigenous people in my area had no issue with that, but nowadays there are an awful lot of non-indigenous people who have kids without really thinking about it. In my life, I see a lot of people having kids that they don't know how to raise without abusing them physically or verbally. Nowadays if you don't know how to have children without causing issues, I think you should wait to have children until you're in an environment where you can trust. It's not that complicated.

Children in poor societies fulfill very different roles to modern wealthy societies.

In developing countries children are an investment in future security for the parents. By having lots of children they get cheap labour now, and they get a decent chance that when they are old their children will care for them. Thus there is a strong incentive to have lots of children.

In an affluent developed society children are a net drain on family resources. They cost a lot of money to house, feed, clothe and educate. They are not typically used for manual labour. And ultimately there is little expectation that they will care for parents in old age. Hence as wealth rises the number of children and birth rate typically falls.

I'm not sure where a "permaculture family" would fit into this spectrum.

Slowing the Amazon probably had the effect of making it more able to support a greater population and diversity of smaller life forms

On land, certainly, but within the waterway?
Turbidity, oxygenation and insufficient cleansing-flows are often limiting factors in water biology.
It's also a landscape that would be particularly impacted by increased erosion, with it's thin soils and heavy rains.

I don't know if the classes of dioxin created by the low-temperature burn conditions of a green, damp pit-burn of organic matter-based middens, which is likely what we're discussing, has anything on those produced by low-temperature combustion of plastics

The most harmful of dioxins, TCDD, is created by the incomplete combustion of organic material. It's why unventilated indoor fires can be so harmful.
It's the low temperature of the midden-burn that makes it so toxic - if your fire is hot enough, it will cleanly burn off the pollutants before they do harm.

The difference of pollution outputs between amazonian burns and modern biochar retorts is night and day.
It's also an argument for banning 'Average Joes' from making their own biochar and restricting it to highly regulated commercial enterprise, just like we do with municipal waste incineration.

The burning of plastic has other issues in addition to dioxins, depending on it's manufacture. Particulate matter and cyanide being two of many potential outputs.

Bryant RedHawk wrote:hau Ella, It is always wonderful to see a person arrive at their "AH Ha" moment, no matter what that moment is focusing on. It is especially gratifying to see someone's eyes sparkle with their focus on rejuvenating our earth mother.

Yes, yes, it was an aha moment, a big one! You are very perceptive. I wonder, was it a aha moment or was it really really something the people did there? Because if the Amazon were to be the result of the Native people, not the result of a plan and a vision per se, but the magnificent result of the appropriate cumulative practices, it would be much more than my little armchair farmer aha moment, don't you think?

Bryant RedHawk wrote: Any time we look at the indigenous peoples, of any area, we should study their ways of doing things and learn from them, these ways are developed over thousands of years by observation, trials and the errors are thrown out, keeping only what works best for them.

Yes, yes, Redhawk. Some people in America had achieved an amazing atunement with nature, and a way of life that was very harmonious and happy (not all, not all, not all, but some).

Bryant RedHawk wrote: Too bad that "modern" man only follows the paths of the European style mind set, where artificial production of food is thought to be the best method instead of working with nature this mind set is always fighting nature, that makes it a loosing battle, all the time.

Always fighting nature, yes, that was my impression too. That didn't agree with me. I guess I searched and observed and one time I read something about apple trees, that a Japanese man had observed that the apples were all sick because the transplanted trees main root was damaged and the visible part because disorganized, apples in the shade got moldy and pesticides were applied... while the apple tree from seed was as beautifully organized above earth than bellow, and I was hooked.

Now I have a few acres and I think and think about what to do with it, but I got the bug, and am looking at a little piece of desert to do water play. How much terrain is need to affect the microclimate on an area?

Hi Chris,

Chris Kott wrote:I think, as mentioned earlier, that technically they would have been practicing elements of what we now call permaculture. I would term theirs, or anything that happened before Mollison coined the term as "proto-permaculture." There wasn't really a baseline, or anything to compare it to.

Yup, what I am trying to communicate is a paradigm change. We no longer see the Amazon jungle as a pristine forest inhabited by small bands of indigenous people that given their small numbers do not damage their ecosystem and basically learn to live in harmony with the jungle they found when they arrived, and to which they adapted.

No no no no no... what the data is suggesting is mind bloggling, the story that the ancient pollen is telling, for the first time, is a song, the song is saying that first, the Amazon had rain and sand, and it was a poor land that naturally had grasses, grasses that had adapted to the poor, unsatisfying terrain, in which torrential rains alternated drought... just like vast areas of East Africa right now, from Ethiopia to Tanzania.

Now, men came to this grassland, and in a few centuries CHANGED the grassland into a PERMANENT JUNGLE. That is big. Lets not give religious reverence to words like "Mollison" or "Permaculture", because if what the pollen is telling is true, permaculture is a very small example of what has been done.

Think of it, if men made the Amazon, do you realize the implications? This goes beyond what a bunch of farmers are dreaming to do here. Lets dream bigger then.

Meg Mitchell wrote:I don't know much about the South American landscape but I do know that a lot of the North American landscape was intentionally cultivated. There are many reports of it looking like a magical garden, about how it could somehow provide for the needs of people much better than wild landscapes in Europe, etc. The manner of farming/landscaping that native peoples in Canada practiced was different from the manner practiced in Europe but it was still there and it was still very important. The indigenous people were quite intentionally selecting towards the plants that were edible or otherwise useful and away from those that weren't.

I do think we have to keep in mind that the historical mindset towards intentional cultivation would be different to the modern-day one. Most historical people wouldn't have as much understanding towards what would damage or protect our current ecosystem; but to say that people from this era didn't care about biological continuity seems very unfair. They were doing the best they could do under difficult circumstances, and in most cases they actually did pretty well.

I personally think a big part of permaculture and sustainable living is ensuring that you're not producing more children than you can personally care for. As far as I know, the indigenous people in my area had no issue with that, but nowadays there are an awful lot of non-indigenous people who have kids without really thinking about it. In my life, I see a lot of people having kids that they don't know how to raise without abusing them physically or verbally. Nowadays if you don't know how to have children without causing issues, I think you should wait to have children until you're in an environment where you can trust. It's not that complicated.

Hi Meg, you raise a lot of interesting points. I vaguely heard that this area of New York was plentiful with birds and fish. There is a suspicion that it was not an accident. It was not that it was  naturally occurring abundance as we think of a virgin area that man arrives and depletes its natural riches fist, and then it is necessary to carefully preserve that reflection of brilliance. The land had been invigorated by the people, was not a indigenous person who said that we had to think 7 generations ahead? I head the plains were man made, with fires, to produce grassland so the bison could thrive. This is all I know. But it forms an intriguing concept I can not shake off my head. What else do you know? Are there any sources?

If the indigenous people created the plains, what should we protect, the plains with the bisons or the primordial forests? Or do we agree that if we can plant trees and grow forests, natural forests everywhere and as much as we can, the better? (I am a tree person and my origins are from the mountains so forests do it for me). Preserve means something is dwindling, how about push forward and invigorate?

Ella Irati wrote:I heard the plains were man made, with fires, to produce grassland so the bison could thrive.

The North American Prairie was not man-made, but made by a partnership of grass, fire, bison and humans.

Tyler Ludens wrote:

Ella Irati wrote:I heard the plains were man made, with fires, to produce grassland so the bison could thrive.

The North American Prairie was not man-made, but made by a partnership of grass, fire, bison and humans.

Thanks, who do you know? Could you indicate any worthy source?

Some of these conclusions rest on a number of unqualified assumptions. But let's look at it for a second.

What, then, were the predominant biomes here in the Americas before the arrival of the First Nations' ancestors? To what extent were they all engineered? Or would it have been more of a tweaking than a massive redesign?

Was the grassland so unproductive that the jungle that replaced it was an ecological step-up? Why would that have been, when grassland ecosystems have been shown to be healthy, diverse, and capable of sequestering truly massive quantities of carbon?

As to the severity of dioxin production, I wonder how extensively samples of terra preta have been tested for dioxins. If the negative impact was so severe, surely there would be evidence left of it. Perhaps not, though, as the half-life of dioxins in sub-soil is, on the outside, 100 years. Still, that should leave something after all this time.

As to the negative effect on aquatic life of the waterway, again, I don't think that would have been an issue. The changes would have taken human generations, and many more animal generations, meaning there was time for adaptation. Those creatures that needed additional oxygenation probably sought out those areas where the terrain features oxygenated the water.

As stated above, if you slow down the water, you decrease the size of particle the current is able to carry, meaning that the rate of erosion is greatly slowed with the flow rate of the current. At the same time, the heavy rains and percolation through the surrounding vegetation likely accounts for a great deal of oxygen entering the aquatic system; I don't think a little meander and a little extra distance affected much.

Also, if jungle enclosed a watercourse formerly surrounded by grassland, the added shade upon the waterway might have decreased the average temperature of said water, thereby increasing its oxygen-carrying capacity, and as we all know, oxygen is one of the chief limiting factors in any aquatic system.

So I would love to see evidence of dioxins in samples of terra preta. That might give us an actual idea of how bad their practices were. I wager they were nothing compared to any post-industrial household output, to be sure, and I suspect a great deal better. I wonder, also, what the archaeological record has to say about changes in sedimentation along the course of the Amazon during the period in question.

Fascinating, in any case.

-CK

Addendum: I found an interesting article here discussing exactly the issue of dioxins with regards to natural fire events. Here's a quote regarding terra preta:

Many soils worldwide contain large amounts of historically produced char and other fire-derived organic matter that could potentially contain dioxins (even today a large proportion of dioxin emissions come from wildfires). Up to 40% of the total soil organic matter (SOM) in grasslands and boreal forests may be fire-derived. Anthropogenic soils such as the Amazonian Terra Preta contain large amounts of pyrolyzed organic matter. Toxic effects from these soils have not been observed.

Which is not to say that dioxins were never created or present, only that the type of dioxin created didn't have the shelf-life or persistent toxicity required to be an issue.

The same article explains fairly early on that not all dioxins are created equal, and that a system that breaks it down to equivalent toxicities is used to compare them.

Still fascinating, though.

-CK

Also, I found this article for any who had doubts about the environmental impact of people at whatever technical level of development on climate.

-CK

Hi permies,
I’m so excited to share excerpts of this article with you that a friend of mine wrote about traditional Amazonian peoples and their horticultural systems. In his own words...

Loxley wrote:I have been curious about Amazonian indigenous people’s lifestyles & the size of the pre-Western contact Amazonian population for several years now after I caught a glimpse of recent findings on the topic when I read Charles C. Mann’s book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Since then, in order to better understand the primary source material myself, I had been searching for good, lengthy excerpts of the first European account of the Amazon River Basin written by Spanish explorers in 1542. I looked all over for an English translation of the book Account of the recent discovery of the famous Grand river which was discovered by great good fortune by Captain Francisco de Orellana, written by Gaspar de Carvajal, but alas I couldn’t fine one. However, I did find several digitally scanned copies of the book in old Spanish that had been uploaded online. Driven by curiosity & a desire to help tell the story to a wider audience, I finally bit the bullet & read the whole thing in Old Spanish.

I wrote this article based largely on what these Spaniards saw nearly five hundred years ago. It was quite the slog to brush off my rusty Spanish & I had to use several dictionaries to get through the Account, but alas, I did it! Not only that, I also brushed off my rusty research skills I gained from getting a history degree some years ago. It was through obtaining that degree that I learned how to find high-quality, trustworthy sources & properly cite them. As a result, you will find no less than sixty-six endnotes accompanying this article should you wish to pursue further knowledge on any of the subjects brought up in the article. I read so many articles & watched several video presentations & documentaries on this subject in order to complete this article in addition to reading Gaspar de Carvajal’s 1542 book. And yet, there is still plenty more out there to read on this topic & in fact I could easily write an entire book on my hypothesis with what I had to leave out!

The article, first published by Permaculture Design Magazine Emergent Design issue #115 February/Spring 2020, gives an astonishing depiction of pre-Western contact Amazonian civilization which more & more scientists are finding evidence to support. The implications – particularly in the fields of agriculture & horticulture – are inspiring. I hope you enjoy reading it! And please let me know what you think.

The following are excerpts of the article:

Forests or Deserts: a Choice
by Loxley Clovis



JULY 1542 COMMON ERA, AMAZON BASIN
The scout’s legs were churning at full speed, feet pounding the well-worn, wide road into town from the river banks, adrenaline racing down his spine. It was his duty to let his superior know immediately of any consequential, unplanned activity occurring on the river. As he approached town, armed guards nodded at him and parted to make way as he sprinted towards commander Arripuna’s headquarters. Arripuna, the leader of an enormous, populous, forested area, was just finishing his final town meeting of the day when he saw his scout approaching, so he beckoned him forward to speak. The scout, despite severe shortness of breath from the miles-long run, began to recount what he had just seen rowing down the mighty river: a watercraft unlike any other with a wide hull and outfitted with tree-sized masts and several rowing oars on each side. The men aboard this unusual vessel wore reflective armor that glared in the light of the sun and was as inflexible as turtle shell. Arripuna furled his eyebrows skeptically at some of the more outrageous details as his scout still gasped for breath. The strangers were making their way downstream as fast as the rapid currents and their oars could take them, the scout added. As the sun set and the evening wore on, Arripuna's disbelief of his initial scout’s report began to fade as more accounts began to trickle down from upstream -from the great towns of the Omagua- corroborating similar events as well as physical encounters with the oddly dressed newcomers.

MAY 1543 COMMON ERA, SPAIN
Brother Gaspar de Carvajal stood beside Captain Francisco de Orellana in a marble courtyard, lending the moral authority of the Church as they both defended themselves against charges of rebellion, desertion, and treason brought by the Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies and Charles I, the King of Spain.(i) King Charles’ mood swung from vengeance to wonder as he listened to the Spanish explorers who had recently returned from the rich lands across the ocean West of Portugal. They told stories of vast cities in the tropical jungle of the South American continent along a river so large that at times one could not even see the other bank(ii), an unbelievable abundance of food: birds, fish, turtles, corn bread, yuca, too many kinds of fruit to list(iii), artistic enameled pottery of very vivid colors and beautiful drawings(iv), and an entire town lead by warrior women.(v) While some court members chuckled at the mention of women warrior leaders, the court scholar duly noted this fact. Europeans would later liken these warrior women to the so-called Amazon warrior women of the ancient Grecian mythological stories and dub the river that Orellana and his men traversed Amazonas. The Council of the Indies perused Brother Gaspar de Carvajal's hand written book on the journey, Account of the Recent Discovery of the Famous Grand River which was Discovered by Great Good Fortune by Captain Francisco de Orellana, as he spoke. Carvajal had presented it to the Council at trial as evidence that he and his fellow travelers were still loyal to the crown. His account included exhaustively detailed notes concerning the dense population of people they encountered along the banks of what came to be known throughout the world as the Amazon River. At one point on the river, the men encountered over five hundred miles of continuous population, including "very large cities".(vi) Ultimately, the king and Council were so convinced by the sincerity of Carvajal and Orellana, as well as the evidence they presented, that they named Orellana governor of the Amazon region and sent him back to the river with two new boats and hundreds of men.(vii)

…(excerpt, get the full article here in the permies Digital Market | Forests or Deserts: a Choice)...

But what did the first European in the region see? Here is Brother Gaspar de Carvajal's 1542 first-hand account of Amazonian pottery:

Gaspar de Carvajal wrote:In this town were houses of pleasing interiors with much stoneware of diverse forms. There were enormous pitchers and vases, and many other smaller containers, plates, silverware, and candlesticks. This stoneware is of the best quality that has ever been seen in the world, and even that of Malaga does not equal it. It is all enameled with glass, of all colors and the brightest hues. Some are drawn to frighten, but on others, the drawings and paintings are delicate depictions of nature. They craft and they draw everything like the Romans.(viii)

...


Large funerary vessel. Marajo island, Brazil, Joanes style, Marajoara phase | Marie-Lan Nguyen | CC BY 2.5 | WikiMedia.org

For many years, soil scientists assumed that a winter season would be necessary to create such deep, rich soils. Their reasoning went as follows: the leaves and twigs from the trees in temperate regions would fall to the ground during the Autumn and rot during the Winter and turn into soil. In contrast, when organic matter falls from the trees in the tropics, the fungi on the forest floor almost immediately consume the material and make the nutrients available to the next living beings with no season of tree dormancy. According to this reasoning, deep, rich soils, therefore, do not develop in the tropics. All the biology essentially stays above ground. Thus, it has been widely believed for centuries that agriculture -which requires soil- is not possible in the tropics. And therefore, in the absence of food-surplus-generating agriculture, large populations cannot be reached nor sustained in the tropics. But new studies are unraveling this narrative. From a vast body of research that has recently emerged studying the origins of terra preta(ix), we now know that the people of the Amazon actually created this dark, fertile soil, and some -like the Kuikuro people- are still creating it to this day.(x) The process of creating it goes roughly like this; beginning nearly five thousand years ago(xi), people started throwing their food scraps, green yard waste, and broken pottery all together into large piles. Then, they would eventually char these piles using a charcoal creation technique. These charred earths became what is today considered one of the best possible soil amendments for growing large, healthy plants.(xii) Nowadays, soil scientists understand that microscopic open pockets are created in the charred plant matter, creating a habitat for a vast array of living soil microorganisms such as bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, protozoa and nematodes.(xiii) These microorganisms are so necessary for the sustainability of healthy, fertile organic soil, that they in fact define the difference between "soil" and "dirt". Dirt being simply sand, silt, and clay; essentially minuscule, sterile pebbles. While soil, on the other hand, includes organic matter, minerals, and an entire ecosystem in miniature: a complex, living food web of tiny critters that naturally work together in symbiosis to make nutrients available to plants. Scientists have started mapping where Brother Gaspar de Carvajal reported seeing Amazonian settlements in 1542 and searching for Amazonian dark earths in these locations. As it turns out, wherever Carvajal mentioned there being settlements, anthropologists and soil scientists have in fact found terra preta there.(xiv) Based on the currently discovered Amazonian dark earth sites, it is now estimated that an area twice the size of Britain was settled by Amazonian people before the arrival of Europeans to the region.(xv)

…(excerpt, get the full article here in the permies Digital Market | Forests or Deserts: a Choice)...


Soil profile of Anthrosol (Terra Preta) | Rockwurm | CC BY-SA 3.0 | WikiMedia.org

We must take into account the oral histories of surviving Amazonian peoples, study art history, soil science, geography, history, anthropology, and the ethnobotany of traditional agroforestry. One possible puzzle piece is that the sedentary Amazonian people may have been sophisticated forest gardeners.(xvi) They appear to have been domesticating various plant species by intentionally selecting them for their best traits.(xvii) Domesticated Amazonian plants include over eighty-five woody species such as brazil nut, ice-cream-bean, Amazonian grape, all manner of fruit-bearing palms such as açaí, as well as non-food agroforestry crops like the rubber tree and tropical cotton for clothing. Individual species could even serve for multiple uses as is the case with the maripa palm (Attalea maripa) which -in addition to having edible fruits- was used in the construction of darts for blowguns, sleeping mats, torches, kindling, as well as for use as thatching.(xviii) It has also been uncovered that oil from certain palm tree seeds and edible larvae cultivated in palm trunks are sources of protein for people.(xix) With such an emphasis on domesticating an impressive array of woody species, the people of the Amazon were likely cultivating vertically-stacked woody gardens around their homesteads. That is, they grew vertical polycultures with understory shrub plants -such as cassava- growing in the shade of overstory fruit trees, while spiritual plants -like the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi)- climbed up the tree trunks. This style of vertically-stacked woody gardening likely created a habitat for all sorts of animals to nest in the garden. Such an animal habitat in their woody gardens likely served as an additional source of protein, natural fertilizer, and possibly even companionship. In the same hemisphere, the benefits of the ancient polyculture horticultural technique of growing corn, beans, and squash together in the same spacial footprint - developed in North America and known as the Three Sisters - are today quite well understood.(xx) The three distinct species of plants, when planted together, mutually help one another out. While growing together, they form a beneficial, symbiotic companion planting. So it should therefore not come as much of a surprise to those who already know about Three Sisters that there are likely South American counterparts to this polyculture gardening practice.


Domesticated tree species of the Amazon basin, from the slide show Forests or Deserts: a Choice.

Designing gardens of productive perennial plants stacked in a vertical fashion is today practiced around the world as a category of advanced gardening known as permaculture. David Holmgren, the co-originator of the term, defines permaculture as "consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature to yield an abundance of food, fiber, and shelter for the provision of local needs"(xxi). After delving deeper into traditional gardening techniques of various peoples around the world, permaculturist Toby Hemenway described some types of traditional gardeners as "horticulturalists"(xxii) an additional category of how humans relate to their environment that he proposed to be added to the two traditional categories of “hunter-gatherers” or “agriculturalists”. According to Hemenway, these people may do some hunting and some gathering, and they may also practice some domestication -as the Amazonians appear to have also been growing domesticated corn according to Carvajal(xxiii)- but mainly, horitculturalists tend semi-wild plants and animals. They were not -and are not- so much hunter-gatherers, nor farmers as they were -and are- sophisticated gardeners. Carefully-curated, vertically-stacked, fauna-rich forest gardens might have been cultivated to grow nearly all of the food, fuel, timber, fiber, medicine, and spiritually significant plants together in the same relative footprint as a diverse polyculture garden. Such intentional, vertical stacking creates an enormous abundance of useful plant matter, possibly bountiful enough to sustain a large population. This horticultural system would likely have been perceived as simply wild jungle to Mediterranean Europeans and not the productive garden that it was, as Mediterranean agriculturalists were used to seeing their domesticated plants grown in vast monoculture crop farms, amber waves of grain from horizon-to-horizon. The cities that Francisco de Orellana and his men saw along the Amazon River in 1542 were likely what Heckenberger refers to as Amazonian "garden cities," cities which also included urban planning, earthworks, roads, and fishponds.(xxiv) Had Orellana stumbled upon a civilization of gardeners?

…(excerpt, get the full article here in the permies Digital Market | Forests or Deserts: a Choice)...


Forest garden diagram | Quercusrobur (Graham Burnett) | CC BY-SA 3.0 | WikiMedia.org

As the Amazonian people fled, their domesticated and semi-domesticated forest garden plots, full of plants which have had their evolution guided by the purposeful, human selection of certain traits, may have been spread by means of reconstruction by these horticultural refugees when they moved to other areas, as well as by mammals and birds that continue spreading the seeds of their forest garden plants to this very day. As the people of the Amazon Basin had focused on perennial plant propagation, such as the aforementioned eighty-five long-living, woody species, and because their curated forest plots were vertically stacked, mimicking the patterns of a natural forest, these plots harbored the potentiality of surviving without the help of humans far into the future. Some of the smaller forest garden plots may have been reclaimed by the untended, wild plants of the rainforest. Perhaps both scenarios, the spread of domesticated species into some areas and the reclamation of wild species into others, played out to varying degrees depending on the environmental factors of the area and the sizes of the original garden plots. Indeed, many of the once-tended Amazonian forest gardens are today feral, meaning they exist in the wild, yet they descended from domestication. One recent study "found that human influence is exclusively responsible for about half of the explained variation of the abundance, relative abundance, richness, and relative richness of domesticated species in the southwestern and eastern regions" of the Amazon.(xxv) As Clark L. Erickson puts it, "instead of viewing Amazonia as a pristine form of nature, it is therefore more accurate to conceive of it in the same way that we would conceive of a garden."(xxvi) Consequently, large swathes of what we today refer to as the Amazon Rainforest may in fact be feral, human-created forest gardens.(xxvii)

If you are a high school, college, university, or permaculture design course (PDC) teacher or student, please consider buying the “Forests or Deserts: a Choice” slide show presentation and notes here to learn and teach others more about this topic.

Support Permaculture Design Magazine by subscribing & buying the back issue Emergent Design #115 February/Spring 2020.

Special thanks to the editor Rebecca Rhapsody of The Story Connective & the team at Permaculture Design Magazine for supporting & publishing this work. Thank you very much Loxley Clovis for letting me share your article & getting this important story out.

Citations (partial list, complete citations bibliography here):
i. Arre caballo! "Francisco de Orellana". https://arrecaballo.es/edad-moderna/conquistadores-espanoles/francisco-de-orellana/.
ii. Carvajal, Gaspar de. (1542). Relación del nuevo descubrimiento del famoso río Grande que descubrió por muy gran ventura el capitán Francisco de Orellana ("Account of the recent discovery of the famous Grand river which was discovered by great good fortune by Captain Francisco de Orellana"). pp.16, 18, 20-24, 33-34, 37, 39. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/descubrimiento-del-rio-de-las-amazonas--0/html/0039c0ae-82b2-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_7.html#I_1_.
iii. Carvajal, Gaspar de. (1542). Relación. pp. 6, 9-10, 17, 22, 24.
iv. Carvajal, Gaspar de. (1542). Relación. p. 23.
v. Carvajal, Gaspar de. (1542). Relación. pp. 31-32, 35-37.
vi. Carvajal, Gaspar de. (1542). Relación. pp. 33-34.
vii. Arre caballo! "Francisco de Orellana".
viii. Bates, Albert, "Orellana's Robots". https://medium.com/@albertbates/orellanas-robots-37c3e7b0578d.
ix. Lehmann, Johannes. (2019). "Terra Preta de Indio: Terra Preta – References". Cornell University, Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/research/terra%20preta/terrapretarefs.html.
See also: "Terra preta: References and External links." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta#References.
x. "Unnatural Histories – Amazon". BBC.
xi. Levis, C. et.al. (3 March 2017). "Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition." Science. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/925.
xii. Solomon, Dawit et. al. (25 February 2017). "Molecular signature and sources of biochemical recalcitrance of organic C in Amazonian Dark Earths". Elsevier.
xiii. Ingham, E. R.. (1999). The Soil Biology Primer. NRCS Soil Quality Institute, USDA.
xiv. "The Secret of El Dorado". BBC Horizon.
xv. Ibid.
xvi. As Erickson put it, "the romantic imagery of Amazonia as a natural wilderness belies a very different reality. Namely that of a land domesticated by humans. In Amazonia native peoples created a domestic landscape resulting from both intentional & unintentional actions. They managed the environment through a variety of techniques that included transplanting, culling, & controlled burning. Instead of viewing Amazonia as a pristine form of nature, it is therefore more accurate to conceive of it in the same way that we would conceive of a garden." Erickson, Clark L., (12 March 2015). Pre-Columbian Monumental Landscapes in the Bolivian Amazon.
xvii. Levis, C. et.al. (3 March 2017). "Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition." Science.
xviii. Henderson, Andrew; Gloria Galeano; Rodrigo Bernal (1995). Field Guide to the Palms of the Americas. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08537-4. Macía, Manuel J. (2004). "Multiplicity in palm uses by the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador". Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society. 144 (2): 149–59. Posey, Darrell Addison (1985). "Indigenous management of tropical forest ecosystems: the case of the Kayapó indians of the Brazilian Amazon". Agroforestry Systems. 3 (2): 139–58.
xix. Erickson, Clark L. (May 2008). Culture amidst the Pristine: The Anthropogenic Forests of the Bolivian Amazon.
xx. Mt. Pleasant, Jane (2006). "38". In John E. Staller; Robert H. Tykot; Bruce F. Benz (eds.). The science behind the Three Sisters mound system: An agronomic assessment of an indigenous agricultural system in the northeast. Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary approaches to the prehistory, linguistics, biogeography, domestication, and evolution of maize. Amsterdam: Academic Press. pp. 529–537.
xxi. Holmgren, David. (2002). Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. Holmgren Design.
xxii. Hemenway, Toby. (4 January 2013). "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture".  http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-with-permaculture/.
xxiii. Carvajal, Gaspar de. (1542). Relación. p. 22.
xxiv. Heckenberger borrows the term "garden city" from Ebenezer Howard. Heckenberger, Michael. (29 August 2018). Amazon Seminar – Indigenous knowledge and settlement patterns.
xxv. Levis, C. et.al. (3 March 2017). "Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition." Science.
xxvi. Erickson, Clark L., (12 March 2015). Pre-Columbian Monumental Landscapes in the Bolivian Amazon.
xxvii. Balée, William. (2013). Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and their Landscapes. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Great article, really interesting!

It would be neat if we had cities like that here one day.

Thanks Steve,
Agreed, it would be awesome to have Garden Cities! Glad there are many urban and suburban permaculturists working on that right now. :-)


Artist's conception of Kuhikugu - one of the many ancient garden cities of the Amazon - by Michael Heckenberger, Brown.edu.

Assuming terra preta was indeed human created and not some  anomaly resulting from specific unique environmental conditions (I lean towards the former, but it's hardly proven), it seems odd that this technology was completely lost.  It also was apparently (so far, we only know of one area) confined to a very small percentage of the Amazon basin.  The Spanish/Portuguese explorers may have found larger settlements than existed later (guessing Old World disease was the largest factor, but later extermination policies certainly played in, see Bandeirantes, for example), but we need to remember a large percentage of this area (2.7 million square miles) floods to significant depths (the tributary I grew up on flooded 20' or more every year, some years half again that) annually, and this means long periods where all the soil is anaerobic.  And lots of leaching.  And currents that literally sweep away soils.  The most fertile natural soils are on the downstream ends of the sandbars (very large sandbars often) that form in the less wet season. (Old Amazonian joke: we have two seasons, the wet season and the wetter season.)

A lot of the area is pretty low lying and in flood it becomes the largest freshwater "inland sea" in the world. There are strips of higher land referred to as "terra firma" (solid land or firm land) that rise above flood levels.  The terra preta area in Bolivia is above flood levels as I recall.

My point being that most of the peoples and civilizations the explorers of the area interacted with would have been on the river banks.  Overland explorations tended to disappear never to be heard from again.  So whoever/whatever resulted in terra preta agriculture was not the norm.

That's not to say food forests of a sort could not/do not exist.  I visited inland tribes not yet in much communication with the outside world and their farming happened at least partly in the understory beneath trees.  Some of these planting could/do persist along edges, mostly shorelines, as inland the forest reclaims clearings in a matter of half a decade or so.  Things grow FAST in the tropics. They did clear land, burn it, and plant cassava and such in the clearing, then move on after a few years when the soil depleted.  Some of the paths I walked into their thatched hut camps (strong memory because I ignorant of the risks of handling them) were lined with Amazonian bird pepper plants.

I like that "area twice the size of Britain" line... Britain is dwarfed by the Amazon basin. It's 209k square miles vs 2.7 million square miles.   In other words. current estimates of the area supposed to be practicing creation of terra preta was under 10%, which is still a not insignificant area (just needs some perspective).  I don't know all of the areas included in the areas considered part of this figure, but I do know the Bolivian area is not as low-lying as most of the areas along the rivers. Maranhao is mentioned. That's on the east coast and mostly less prone to flooding, with actual highlands in the southern third.

I do know some of the natives in the upper Amazon basin produce a soil/soil amendment called pa-u (two syllable, accent on the u), which is rotted wood mostly.  Never actually worked with someone making it, don't know if they compost it or just look for rotting downed trees and harvest it.  This is used in planters (usually old dugout canoes up on stilts (floods, you know?)) for growing herbs, annuals, etc.  In the towns I lived in these planters were not common, but were around.  Saw them often on floating houses on the river though.  That's the closest I came to terra preta (to my knowledge) while living down there.  There might be some char in pa-u due to the common practice of slash and burn to this day.

But hopefully change is coming.  I like where syntropic agriculture is going.

I get a little interested (read: passionate) when the topic of the Amazon area comes up because so many who talk/write about it have very limited or no experience of actually living in it.

I suspect 1491 leads many to overestimate the actual situation.  I do suspect there are lost civilizations that used some technologies lost to us (agricultural ones, at least), but I doubt they permeated the whole area.  Seems there would be more residual evidence (residual and cultural) if that were the case.  That area in Bolivia certainly appears to have been one.

Thank you for the peer review.

The Kuikuro people of the Amazon still create terra preta to this day; so thankfully it is not a completely lost technology. As the Amazon is unfortunately being logged, more and more ancient terra preta sites are being uncovered.

Kuikuro village by Pedro Biondi

The flooding was handled by ancient peoples by building up their settlements on mounds and roads on raised causeways and using flood-retreat farming in the drier months and aquaculture in the wetter months. See Clark Erickson's "Culture amidst the Pristine: The Anthropogenic Forests of the Bolivian Amazon" and "Pre-Columbian Monumental Landscapes in the Bolivian Amazon" for more details. While this was a hallmark in Acre in the Western Amazon, there is also evidence of mound building above the floodplain in the East on Marajó according to Anna C. Roosevelt's Moundbuilders of the Amazon: Geophysical Archaeology on Marajó Island, Brazil.

Cylindrical vessel. Marajo island, Joanes style, Marajoara phase by Marie-Lan Nguyen

The accounts of the explorers certainly mentioned dense populations along the river banks (not surprising as in fact, humans have always settled along river banks and shorelines all over the planet throughout all of human history) as they rowed downstream in their boat in 1542:

Gaspar de Carvajal p.21 (paraphrased) wrote:"Machiparo's towns went on for more than 80 leagues... ...one town went on for 5 leagues."
"que tanto tardamos en salir de la población deste gran señor llamado Machiparo, que al parecer de todos duró más de ochenta leguas, que era toda una lengua, estas todas pobladas, que no había de poblado a poblado un tiro de ballesta, y el que más lejos no estaría media legua, y hubo pueblo que duró cinco leguas sin restañar casa de casa, que era cosa maravillosa de ver..." - Relación del nuevo descubrimiento...

Gaspar de Carvajal p.24 wrote:"There was a very large population; in just one day we passed more than 20 towns & that was just on one side of the river. The river was so large we couldn't see to the other side [possibly implying more towns on the other side]."
"Salimos de esta población y fuimos caminando siempre por muy gran poblado, que hubo día que pasamos más de veinte pueblos, y esto por la banda donde nosotros íbamos, porque la otra no la podíamos ver por ser el río grande." - Relación del nuevo descubrimiento...

Gaspar de Carvajal p.34 wrote:"In the Province of San Juan we encountered over 150 continuous leagues of population."
"esta provincia de San Juan, que tiene más de ciento cincuenta leguas de costa, pobladas de la manera dicha." - Relación del nuevo descubrimiento...

Francisco de Orellana and crew sailing the Amazon River in 1542

The explorers also mentioned roads going inland (note Erickson's raised causeway findings mentioned above) to more populated areas:

Gaspar de Carvajal p.22 wrote:"There were many large-sized roads that went inland..."
"Había muchos caminos que entraban la tierra adentro muy reales..." - Relación del nuevo descubrimiento...

Gaspar de Carvajal p.23 wrote:"[In the region of the Omagua] there were many large roads leading inland."
"Deste pueblo salían muchos caminos y muy reales por la tierra adentro: el Capitán quiso saber a dónde iban, y para aquesto tomó consigo a Cristóbal Maldonado y al alférez y a otros compañeros, y comenzó a entrar por ellos, y no había andado media legua cuando los caminos eran más reales y mayores; y visto el Capitán esto, acordó de se volver, porque vido que no era su cordura pasar adelante." - Relación del nuevo descubrimiento...

Gaspar de Carvajal wrote:"The further we went, the more thickly populated & better did we find the land, there were many roads here that entered into the interior of the land. Very fine highways. Land from the river to a distance of 6 miles more or less, could be seen some very large cities, with glistening white. In addition to this, the land is as fertile & normal in appearance as our Spain." -Relación featured in Unnatural Histories, Amazon, BBC.

Loxley wrote:Based on the currently discovered Amazonian dark earth sites, it is now estimated that an area twice the size of Britain was settled by Amazonian people before the arrival of Europeans to the region.

This quote from the article Forests or Deserts originates from a data point from an old 2002 source. Even in 2002, this was way more human-inhabited Amazonian land that previously thought. With more archaelogical work - as well as unfortunate logging - new sites are being uncovered all the time and the pre-European contact Amazonian population numbers continue to rise accordingly. Even the most conservative pre-contact population distrubution maps based on recent archaeology prove that Betty Meggers' acceptance of Alexander Rice's assertion that Amazonian people were merely "scattered tribes eeking out an existence" has decidedly been tossed to the dustbin of history. As far back as the 1990's reports were putting the pre-contact population of the Western Hemisphere above Europe's. With the last 20+ years of archaeological uncoverings, South America's pre-contact population number has risen dramatically.

Map of the Amazon's terra preta areas by Clement from 2015 (note: 5 years ago).

From the ever increasing uncoverings of terra preta, megaliths, ceramics, geoglyphs, forest island mounds, fisheries, and dozens of domesticated plant species there is now plenty of supporting residual and cultural evidence of large populations in the ancient Amazon. When the overwhelming evidence is considered, it turns out that the book 1491 - published back in 2005 - now appears to be an outdated underestimate considering all the latest field work of serious anthropologists such as Clark Erickson, Michael Heckenberger, William Balée, Carolina Levis and others.