What’s pristine? Nature’s most unspoiled landscapes were crafted by people

The morning air is poignant, warm with the scent of dry leaves. I meander down a path in the Fred Stanback Jr. Ecological Preserve in Salisbury, North Carolina, rolling hickory nuts underfoot. Each time one pops with my weight a sweet smell wafts up on my face. When I bend to collect a particularly clean nut, a light pulls my attention to a small gully drowned in leaf litter. A Bud Light can, nearly stripped of its blue. As I turn to collect the can, it pops up and swims through the leaf litter sea. Eventually, a striped brown head surfaces and a chipmunk scrambles across the leaves to gather one of the hickory nuts from the path, with such fervor it tosses pit gravel at my legs. The chipmunk does not stash the large nut in its cheeks — rather, it methodically attempts to wedge it into the gnawed opening of the can. I can now see that the beer can’s sides are bulging with other goods this creature has collected.

Animals constantly interact with humans and the litter of our lifestyles. I am a little worried that this chipmunk might slash itself on the aluminum’s sharp edges. And plastics like the flaking casing on the can are some of the most pervasive pollutants on earth. They leach chemicals into the soil and degrade into microplastics that permeate the land and our bodies, possibly for as long as both will exist. Sometimes I briefly catch myself wishing these areas were pristine, humans absent, so that the trees, plants, and animals can go about their lives as if viewed in a nature documentary. But I am wrong, I remind myself, a product of the occasional John Muir reading and countless PBS nature documentaries. Except for the most remote, inhospitable places on the planet, for both good and bad, humans have been part of nature since our species arose. It is commonly accepted, almost a cliché, that in order to maintain stable, functioning, “pristine” environments, we must preserve untouched lands in parks and wild spaces. But this may be one of the largest myths in the history of conservation, and increasingly, shown to be ill-effective in protecting the Earth.

Pristine environments have become synonymous with “untouched,” the places where human hands have not intruded into the natural progression of life. This is no coincidence — European colonialism was driven by an extractive mindset, viewing the world as something to be conquered, collected, compartmentalized, and parceled. Abundant “new frontiers” rife for the creation of a country could only be visualized as such if the societies already living on them were dehumanized and repressed. Efforts of both cultural and physical genocide attempted to erase Indigenous peoples from landscapes. Additionally, European disease ravaged Indigenous communities and crept quietly and quickly from the coast through the trade of goods and the movement and interactions of people. Many of the land’s inhabitants perished from Europe’s diseases before having ever met Europeans. Therefore, when colonists reached the beautiful, unspoiled lands of the continent’s interior, they marveled at a wilderness newly absent of humans.

While the modern, Western worldview often divides nature and society into two distinct constructs, with the former dominated or harmed by the latter, it is clear that human’s interaction with their environment is not always negative. A pervasive idea in conservation and environmental sciences is that we must section the world into parts: lands for humans and resources, and untouched lands set aside for biodiversity and the maintenance of wild habitats.

Nevertheless, mounting evidence shows that intentionally managing ecosystems can be an important step in fighting climate change, mitigating the biodiversity crisis, and attaining equilibrium with the nature that surround us. This is something that many repressed cultures have known for millennia.

The forested, wetland preserve where I stand is new, only about twenty years old, full of thin, energetic trees. It is also riddled with invasive plants and choking brush, despite our best efforts. Just a little ways North in Ahoskie, NC, similar, but ancient wetland forests have been systematically cleared for the wood pellet industry and new maps show South’s largest wood pellet exporter Enviva has some of our most valuable forests in its crosshairs. Trees that are replanted will be feeble, poor photosynthesizers and carbon sequestrators, and will only get to live a fraction of their potentially long lifespan before being cleared once again. The land where both of these forests reside was likely once food-rich forests managed by Indigenous people.

The Keyauwee Tribe, Occaneechi Tribe, and Catawba Nation (Iswa) historically lived in and managed the area. The Catawba Nation now resides on lands in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Many Indigenous groups engineered forested ecosystems to be abundant in food, materials, and habitat for animals. Regular burning decreased small woody growth, protected hardwoods, and replenished soil for herbaceous understory plants that were forage material for deer and other animals. Groups along rivers and wetlands cultivated massive cane breaks from river cane and switch cane — remnants of which can be seen in small patches scattered about the Stanback Ecological Preserve and tucked in niches along nearby power lines.

River cane and switch cane are native bamboos that create habitat for birds and other wildlife. They also form dense networks of rhizomes and photosynthesize nearly all year long, making them perfect plants for carbon sequestration, thus mitigating climate change. Increasing evidence shows that Indigenous peoples crafted and managed lush forest gardens, some of which remain in small pockets across the continent. Researchers in British Columbia working with First Nation groups found that areas that once were gardens have more plant species overall, and that seed bearing plants produce seeds twice as large. Edible plants like hazelnut, fruits, wild ginger, and northern rice are more abundant than in the surrounding forests.

Not only are the garden forests healthier, but they have been able to persist long after those who originally managed and modified them are gone. This is an effect of the high functional diversity — which is how an ecosystem operates and maintains itself — that was cultivated by the historical Indigenous populations in the are. New research shows that even the lush forest-maze of the Amazon has been inhabited and meticulously stewarded by people for thousands of years. In conservation science, there is a term for organisms that shape the environment in ways that increase biodiversity and environmental stability: keystone species. Like the beaver and wolf, humans, in some contexts, are a keystone species.

The gravel is cold beneath me, but I sit and watch the chipmunk for at least thirty minutes, as it drags its beer can through leaf litter and over the path. It scrapes a snake-like trail through the pit gravel. When the chipmunk reaches the other side, it starts to shake nuts and seeds out of the can by rolling it against a stump, and shoving those that come out into a hole left in the moist earth by a frog. Maybe next year, they will be forgotten and sprout. Nearby, a Carolina wren inspects a birdhouse tucked behind some brambles. I doubt she is interested in living there — possibly, she was lured by the spiderwebs hanging in the peephole. As she flits and creeps along the outside, hesitant to enter, her droppings fall into the leaf litter and disappear. Perhaps they contain seeds that will bring bayberry or sumac to this side of the woods.

A simple fact exists: humans are animals. We share 61% of our DNA with the fruit fly, 50% with giant trees, and 26% with yeast. But unlike other organisms, some of us have managed to imagine ourselves separate from the very environment from which our every material and resource comes. This, along with the myth of human-devoid pristine nature, has been inculcated into our society. It is imperative that we unlearn what we have believed our entire lives, for us as a species and for the species our extractive behaviors affect. Although “modern” science more often than not refuses to listen, through time and ancestral knowledge, Indigenous peoples across the world have crafted careful, location-specific science that guides us in how we should manage the land for its prosperity. It is long past time for scientists to recognize Indigenous management practices and for Native peoples to regain sovereignty over their lands and ways of stewardship, such as granting permission for controlled burns and clearing for forest gardening. Perhaps humans can function not as an invasive or destructive species, but once again become a keystone species that works within our environments to foster biodiversity and stability.

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RCC Fellow — Willow Gatewood — Catawba College

Willow Gatewood is a junior at Catawba College studying Environment and Sustainability, with minors in Creative Writing and GIS. She is also an intern and work-study for the Catawba College Center for the Environment and involved in environmental and climate advocacy groups.

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