This news story caught my eye yesterday. Short version: the Amazon rainforests are rewilded territory. Six hundred years ago, the area was rammed with fifteen-mile-wide cities, plazas, canals, terraced fields and managed orchards. The Europeans showed up with diseases and guns, and as many as fifty million people either died or returned to the deep bush. There is no “pristine” Amazonia — only a largely unrecorded civilisation that collapsed, and the jungle grew over it like a shroud.
I suggested some while ago that the idea of a “wild” Britain is absurd, given that the landscape has been interfered with for thousands of years. Not being a great student of South America, I was surprised and oddly delighted to learn that the Amazon rainforests, always presented to me as some perfect bubble of unmanaged wilderness, contains the same human history, and the same human mystery.