The kangaroo population in Australia has exploded since European farming methods were introduced. This is mainly because European technologies for clearing land and replacing it with grazing fields were highly effective. Kangaroos, and wombats for that matter, are grazing animals, and compete with Sheep and Cattle for the grass.

The Native American Indians and Aboriginals did not have the mastery of metallurgy as the Eurasians and Central Americans did. Their forest clearing method, and consequently their animal husbandry technology, was fire.

Charles Mann writes in 1491:

Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both.

Mann recounts the original settlers in Ohio being able to drive carriages through the trees like in English Parks. Rather than the thick over-grown, impenetrable and entangled forest of mythical lore, it was an open woodland with little undergrowth. Mann continues:

A creature of the prairie, Bison was imported to the East by Native Americans along a path of indigenous fire, as they changed enough forest into fallows for it to survive far outside its original range.

That migratory highway is the American Great Plains and Mid-west. One of the largest human-scaped ecosystems. I had not previously made the connection between a pre-metallurgical society's use of fire and animal husbandry on an ecological level of scale.

It makes perfect sense in Australia as well. Burning the bush off removes the undergrowth and provides greater grassland for grazing animals such as the Kangaroo - a staple of the Aboriginal diet.

The main issue for the Aboriginal people, and probably why there isn't a Great Plain in Australia, was the eucalypt tree. What a remarkably adaptive species which lives in desert, in snow, on the salt stained coast, and in rainforests. I have even seen them used for landscaping on the Arizonan Sonora Plain.

In terms of fire for increasing grassland, the eucalypt can take being burnt off, and come back strongly soon after. Which isn't news, every Australian has been amazed at how quickly the eucalypts recover from a bushfire.

The central theme to Charles Mann's 1491 is that what we call pristine wilderness today is a European creation. The landscapes of the North America, Central America and the Amazon were terrascaped by fire and farming. When small pox hit the indigenous populations it removed the inputs that the local humans had used to maintain a stable ecosystem. Without the US North-East being burnt periodically the mast farms disappeared. Without the slash and char (not burn) method of farming the Amazon forest grew back to cover up the human planted fruit forests under the canopy that spread across the Amazon.

A component of this is that there is no natural wilderness where humans have been. Humanity, and in particular its mastery of fire, is an active player in the ecosystem. Where humanity is there is no out of control nature - or what we call wilderness. As a species we are too technologically adept at maneuvering the landscape to our needs and advantage.

Mann argues that when the US colonists came to America they soon saw an ecosystem that was out of control. Small pox reduced the numbers of Native American Indians sufficiently that they were no longer the determinant body in managing the local ecosystem. The US colonists did not replace their methods of fire management in keeping tree growth from the plains or dense undergrowth from appearing in their mast plantations.

Additionally the smaller population numbers were no longer there to hunt species such as Bison, Elk etc. So those populations and others, such as Carrier Pidgeons, went out of control with the Indians no longer being active in the ecosystem. The European view of American Wilderness was actually an out of control system that was wildly fluctuating as it was no longer being managed by humans.

The Amazon is another interesting study in how the idealistic view of pristine wilderness is wrong. The slash-and-burn farming technique is one that appeared with the Europeans. Amazonians were stone age, and did not have metal tools. Stone axes are woefully inefficient at knocking down trees whereas it is a simple task with a metal axe - and they did not appear until European technologies arrived in South America. The Australian Aboriginies prized English axes for the same reason. They offered a massive productivity leap.

The Amazonians prior to 1491, and it seems from the book since about the 1100s practiced a method that produced terra pretta which was a charcoal rich soil that raised the productivity of the soil by approximately 800%. The method was to slow burn the undergrowth, make smoldering slow burn fires, so the charcoal would enter the soil and fix the nutrients that the poor soil of the Amazon basin lacked or were leached out by rain. It has the added effect of keeping carbon in the ground rather than being burnt off into the atmosphere as slash and burn does. Charcoal sequestration also makes the soil permanently more productive. The old terra pretta areas often get sold off for potting mix to the cities.

The towns and tribes of the Amazon forest modified the rainforest to their own needs planting large numbers of fruit trees under the canopy. Along with manoic they planted sapodillah, calabash, tucuma, babacu, pieapple, coco-palm, hat-palm, oil-palm, peach-palm etc, etc. Mann notes of the 138 domesticated species in the Amazon, half are trees. Mann writes:

Balee cautiously estimated ... that at least 11.8 percent, about an eighth, of the non-flooded Amazon forest was "anthropogenic" - directly or indirectly created by humans.

The result of this is that what we call pristine wilderness is mistaken. Humanity has been an integrated and active participant in the terran ecosystem for so long that the landscapes are a product of our presence.

The Town Hall political meetings of Sam Adam's time in Boston were liberal democracy at its most deliberate. Speeches were made, debated, interjections came from the crowd and bystanders, but in the end democratic consensus was formed. And that consensus was tight enough that the Town Hall system backed a revolution for American independence.

Charles Mann in the final chapter of the book 1491 argues that there was a cultural ethnogenesis between the North East Americans and the constitution and polity of the Native Indian Five Nations. Mann argues that this, along with the enlightenment, affected Massachusettean views of liberty and equality.

The Five Nations were a product of continuing warfare between the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk. The story goes that Deganawidah invited the powerful leader Tododoha to break a single arrow. Which he did. Deganawidah then bunlded five arrows together and asked Tododoha to do the same. He could not. Soon after a solar eclipse occurred, effectively sealing the fate of the tribes as independent by fulfilling Deganawida's prophecy of the tribes going into darkness if they did not join and stop the violence.

I do not know much about this, but it appears that the Haudenosaunee established a constitutional government under the Great Law of Peace as the Five Nations in around 1150 AD. The constitution included a constitutionally limited representative parliament where representatives would meet as sachems and then forge out a suitable outcome through unanimous agreement. The sachems, who were male, were chosen by women, who were the heads of the clans. Rather than the liberal view of political equality, there was a political distribution of power along sexual lines.

The northern American colonists came into contact with the Five Nations often and were admirers of their individual liberty, democratic forms and their social equality. Mann argues that ethnogenisis occurred here in the North, though not in the South were the Native American Indians were more hierarchical and autocratic in structure.

Mann argues that there was a free market in liberty where colonists could vote with their feet:

In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists' allegiances. Colonial societes could not become too oppressive, because their members, surrounded by examples of free life - always had the option of voting with their feet.

If is likely that the first British villagers in North America, thousands of miles from the House of Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy that characterised European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture.

Mann argues that when the Tea Party occurred and Bostonian dressed up as Mohawks tipped tea into the Harbour, the dressing up wasn't to deflect blame. It was a statement for the kind of liberty and social equality they saw in the culture of the Mohawks. They wanted it for America too.

Mann's chapter is contentious. But it is a fascinating challenge to how we view European colonisation of the new world.