The lie of the land

The rupturing power in seismic shifts, juttering earthquakes, scraping glaciers and bombastic volcanoes shape the landscapes which characterise our horizons. This is the foundation for the springing up of sprouting vegetation, accompanied by a myriad of organic organisms. Physical process driving biological diversity. But a landscape can also be a product of a collision between nature and culture, with the lie of the land, and the corresponding community of creatures unfurling like text on a rumpled parchment. By reading the signs, we can come to learn that rather than virgin vistas, a pristine myth, our land is also a product of long gone human settlement.

For European cultures, this idea is less surprising, given the dramatic reshaping of the Mediterranean earths as a result of Roman expansion, extraction and expulsion, followed by feudal furrows and enparcelment of crops. But what of the Great Green of the neotropics: Amazonia, Indonesia, and the Congo Basin, the last bastions of a non-human heartland? Beneath the buttress roots of a towering fig tree, the sprawling canopy of a dipterocarp, lie the remains of a flint here, a charcoal fire there. Buried by an accumulation of vegetation, by the sands of time, but not completely hidden are traces of monumental human civilisations.

And now for one more shock to the system. Contrary to our current role as the horseman of the apocalypse, harbingers of a natural necropolis, what if our actions paved the way for the flourishing diversity we see before us today? Research has shown that human societies of neotropical lowlands, as a result of expansive subsistence activities, remodelled soil fertility and reconstructed landform heterogeneity. From the earthworks of Eastern Bolivia, the forest islands of Guinea Bissau, a blossoming of diversity as a result of human intervention.