The Fascinating Story of Human-made Forests
The Quest for (black) Gold
In 1541, Gonzalo Pizarro, the feckless half-brother of Francisco Pizarro, staggered in to the Ecuadorian city of Quito, barely dressed in rags, half-starved, sick with tropical fevers, and raving mad at his crew for abandoning him to perish in the wilds of the Amazon jungle. A few months prior, the intractable Gonzalo had been dispatched by Francisco, who was struggling to maintain control of the Inka he had "conquered" in Cusqo, on a mission to find the legendary El Dorado — a lake filled with gold.
Gonzalo's treasonous crew, now led by Francisco de Orellana, blundered on without him, floating haplessly down the bewilderingly vast Amazon. The chaplain, Gaspar de Carvajal, kept a log of the journey, recording frequent skirmishes with the wary inhabitants of the forest. These inhabitants, according to Carvajal, were hardly the small bands of primitive people you might expect. No, these people, not yet ravaged by the smallpox and influenza the interlopers (and their pigs) carried, were numerous, ornately dressed, and lived in "very large settlements and very pretty country and very fruitful land.” Carvajal noted a city “that stretched for five leagues without there intervening any space from house to house" and "from village to village not even a crossbow shot.”
To the stupefied Spaniards, it defied logic that such large populations could flourish in a hot, humid, nearly impenetrable forest, replete with man-eating fish and ravenous blood-sucking insects. How did they do it? Had Orellana and his crew been searching for a different type of gold, black gold, they would have found an answer.
How the Rainforest works
Even today, the Amazon rainforest inspires visitors with awe. There is the howling, buzzing, chirping, screeching diversity of wildlife, the dense tangle of trees and vines, and the fantastic array of exotic fruits, some weighing eighty pounds or more. Bending to the soil, expecting to see the soft dark earth that indicates fertility, you might be puzzled to find a fragile skin of topsoil barely covering a hard red clay reminiscent of the construction backfill you'd find in your own city or suburban lot.
Wait a minute, you might be thinking. How can the soil be so poor in such an abundantly diverse forest? Because deforestation?
Well, yes and no, to varying degrees. Tropical and sub-tropical soils are notoriously poor, even without the effects of deforestation. If you live with cold and snowy winters, you might think of winter as a bleak time, but it is actually a time of rejuvenation for the soil. Under the blanket of snow, autumn leaf fall shelters and feeds insects and microbes that digest organic matter and process it into rich humus. In the tropics and sub-tropics, winter means rain, driving and relentless rain. Fast moving rivers swell rapidly, overflowing their banks, sloughing off the soil, and eventually depositing it in the ocean.
For an intact rainforest, this isn’t a problem. In spite of the sparse topsoil, the riot of plant life goes on. The gigantic ferns, the dangling vines, the alien-looking orchids — all exist in an exuberant mossy tangle despite the thin-skinned earth below. How?
To see one reason, look up: the canopy. Many who have explored the Amazon extolled not its praises, but complained of the fetid green gloom that permitted only the faintest glimmers of sun from above. To Europeans who had already deforested most of their own continent cutting down trees for naval ships, the lack of open space and constant drone of insects drove many to despair. As a North American transplant to the equator, I can relate: the jungle can be disconcerting at first. What the colonizers didn’t realize was how integral the sheltering canopy is to the rainforest ecosystem.
As the tightly interwoven branches filter the sunlight down to a dim green flicker, they also serve to intercept the pounding raindrops. Rainwater pools in large leaves, then moves downward in drips, slow pours, and trickles, seeping softly into the ground.
For another key to understanding the rainforest ecosystem, now look down. Let’s focus on that rain seeping softly into the ground. It seeps, and doesn’t run off in muddy rivulets, for several reasons. The trees themselves hold much of it in place with their wide spreading root systems. The soft green carpet of shade-loving groundcover plants serves as a hyper-efficient exchange network that quickly funnels available nutrients from the wet soil into their stems and leaves. When these short-lived plants die to be replaced by others right behind them, they are rapidly digested by the insect and microbe life in the soil, serving up a fresh meal to the next round of plants and whatever germinated saplings are racing toward the light above. Strange fungi and colonies of bacteria set upon fallen leaves and branches with gusto, transforming rot into plant food.
In a healthy rainforest — or even a regenerating one — these complex processes happen incredibly fast. I can recall many times walking through a tree-covered patch on our land and thinking, Wait, wasn't there a big fallen branch here? And then I realize, yes there WAS a big fallen branch here… and the soil life had a feast.
I can also tell you from my personal experience of living on land that once was a mature rainforest that the effects of removing the trees from this intricately balanced ecosystem are devastating. Without a protective canopy of branches above and the network of groundcover and roots below, rain hits the delicate soil like a blitzkrieg, making a muddy slurry, leaching out nutrients, and washing them away. The remaining subsoil is pounded into compacted cement-like mass that cracks in the sun. Too many times to count, I whacked at this hardened clay with a spade only for the tool to bounce back at me. Newly planted saplings would wither as their roots struggled to find a foothold in the hard ground. Without the diverse soil biome of the forest to feed plants, it's little wonder why so many farmers here rely on chemical fertilizers.
There has to be another way to rebuild fertility here, we thought. Turns out, there are multiple ways, and not surprisingly, they all work together— just like a system should. Let's start at the ground and work our way up.
Terra Preta de Índio
Despite the punishing rains and yearly floods, a deeper exploration of the Amazon reveals a surprise. Streaking like black ink through the red clay are large deposits of a very different soil: moist, dark, and friable — gardener's gold. This is terra preta de índio, black Indian earth. Many of these caches are over a thousand years old and are still actively farmed today. Because terra preta is always found accompanying millions of pottery shards, lumps of charcoal, and other signs of human habitation, archaeologists and soil scientists agree: Terra preta de índio literally is "the black earth of the Indians." They didn't find it already there. They made it.
The first terra preta deposits likely began as "garbage" piles. Amazonians heaped up kitchen waste, bone, and excrement with palm leaves and other vegetation. To reduce the size of the piles, they burned them in controlled smoldering fires. The smolder produced chunks of blackened organic matter called biochar. Today, soil scientists are studying and documenting the remarkable abilities of biochar to hold nutrients in soil. The forest inhabitants likely based their conclusions on observation. They noticed that the seeds germinating in these smoldered piles grew into bigger healthier plants. Hmm, let's keep doing that and see what happens...
The effects are still impressive. Terra preta deposits range in size from 10 to 700 acres and 1 to 6 feet in depth. Many archaeologists believe that large deposits could have helped to support populations of 200 to 400 thousand people, nourished on food from black earth.
The existence of terra preta is much more than esoteric history. It has exciting implications for regenerative agriculture today. Terra preta is an outstanding example of how careful human intervention can improve soil fertility, in contrast to extractive farming methods that destroy it. The techniques that produce terra preta are relatively simple, accessible, very inexpensive, and often free. Anyone from the backyard organic gardener to the large-scale regenerative farmer can do it. And, as we have found repeatedly over the past four years on our land, they really work.
The Original Forest Gardeners
Even with the remarkably fertile soil they cultivated, the vigorously populated forest settlements along the Amazon encountered by Gonazalo Pizarro’s ragtag gang needed more than the food they grew in terra preta mounds to feed themselves. We can liken these heaped up mounds of improved soil to an intensively cultivated garden just outside a modern kitchen. These were the gardens where people grew greens, gourds, peppers and roots like taro and cassava. But their staple sustenance came not from the fertile black earth below, but from the trees above and the river itself.
Prior to “conquest” by diseases brought by Europeans, the original inhabitants of the tropical forests crept through the undergrowth along the great Amazon and Orinico rivers. They dug roots from the ground, sifted through the leaf litter to find good-smelling herbs, plucked berries from low bushes, fruits from overhanging branches, gourds and legumes from vines snaking up the trees, and waited for the towering canopy to rain edible nuts and seeds.
They tested and observed. Some things were good to eat, some things were better than others. Devising methodologies that would have impressed Nikolai Vavilov himself, they kept and planted the seeds of the better tasting things. Over generations, these people gradually replaced areas of forest with other forests, self-sustaining ecosystems that provided food, building material, animal fodder, and natural fertilizer.
Whether because the indigenous people of the forest recognized the importance of maintaining the tree canopy, or because clearing large swaths of forest with stone axes (the rainforest has no metal) was simply too much work, research has made it increasingly apparent that they were able to produce enough food to sustain vigorous populations without deforestation. Instead, the indigenous population cultivated what many archaeologists and botanists consider the world’s largest food forest.
Now, before you imagine an Eden of fruitarians, first know that Amazonians relied on much more than the foods we think of first as fruit— bananas and mangoes and such. Robust societies cannot function solely on sugar; people also need proteins and fats to thrive.
Amazonians modified their environment to provide the necessary sustenance. They built extensive earth mounds to get above the floodwaters and connected them with causeways. Around the mounds they constructed intricate systems of weirs, zigzagging canals to trap fish. Moving the amount of earth required to build this infrastructure without machinery would have required extensive manpower with ample energy. The trees they cultivated provided this energy with an abundance of calorie-rich foods beyond sugary carbohydrates.
Living here in a wet equatorial climate, I am continuously impressed by the vast array of nutritious things to eat that grow on trees completely unabated by intensive inputs of fertilizer or even manpower. Unlike annual grain or vegetable crops like corn or wheat that need to be planted every year, perennial tree crops just keep coming. While the initial planning and planting phase is labor intensive, once the trees are established the amount of labor actually decreases year after year — while the trees actually rain down harvests of food.
The food itself is truly incredible in flavor, versatility, and richness of nutrients — veritable superfoods like cacao and açaí. Yes, there are coconuts, avocados, and jackfruit — that new darling of trendy vegan restaurants. But there are also crops that hold tremendous potential for nourishment as the unsustainability of industrial animal farms becomes a pressing issue for climate change mitigation.
Take the peach palm for example, more commonly known as chontaduro here in Ecuador and pejibaye in Perú. At first glance, the small hard fruits appear inedible. But boiled until soft and served with a little salt and hot sauce, they are a satisfying dish, rich in oil, beta carotene, and protein. Then there is the sacha inchi, a vine producing star-shaped pods that yield highly nutritious nuts packed with a complete profile of Omega-rich fats. And my personal favorite: the roasted seeds of the frutipan or breadfruit that I can easily grind to a delicious high protein gluten-free flour meal and add to almost anything. The sweet custard-like flesh of the fruitpan is a desert by itself.
Even today, the Amazon basin boasts at least 138 edible plant species; over half of them grow on trees. “These old forests, called fallows, have traditionally been classified as high forest (pristine forest on well-drained ground) by Western researchers,” William Balée of Tulane University claimed in 2003. But they “would not exist” without “human agricultural activities.”
From data collected in exhaustive plant inventories of Ka’apor-managed forests in eastern Brazil, Balée also concludes that almost half of the ecologically important species are those humans use for food. In forests where humans have not actively cultivated the edible species it’s more like one-fifth. Researchers vary in their estimates of how much, but a growing contingent are certain that a good portion of the Amazon forest is anthropogenic—made by humans. Charles R. Clement of Brazil’s National Institute for Amazon Research boldly asserts, “I basically think it’s all human created.”
Such talk alarms many environmental activists who cling to the pristine myth of the rainforest untouched by human hands. What’s to stop the developers, they say, if we promote this idea that the rainforest is largely man-made? In one regard, I certainly find this fear understandable. The recent track record of humankind in tropical forests is dismal indeed. Clearly, we cannot continue on the path of rampant deforestation without grave consequences for the planet--and us--as a whole.
But to stake off the rainforest as a no-man’s land does not solve the problem at hand, nor does it acknowledge the rich history of civilizations thriving in a seemingly inhospitable jungle — while maintaining the delicate balance of the ecosystem. To dismiss the possibility that people can learn what the past has to teach us simply does not seem right to me. I’m here, and I’m learning not only from the past and my present experience, but also from a whole new generation of forest gardeners doing exactly what we are doing here.
Moreover, to say that in order to preserve nature, people have to stay out of it implies that people — living, breathing, eating, reproducing, interacting people — are somehow unnatural. If we are ever going to get anywhere in our current struggle to come to terms with climate change and take the right actions, exposing this false dichotomy between man and nature is the first step. The second is healing the divide with real, action-able solutions like careful, deliberate and regenerative ways to grow food.
Listen to the words of Guillermo Roja, director of sustainable development and indigenous peoples for the prefecture of the Pando:
“We have to take care of this place. These people apparently developed a set of tools that let them take charge of the environment while not ruining it for the future—for us. We have much to learn here. Who knows what else we might find out?”
Acknowledgements:
In addition to my own experience of living and working in a subtropical rainforest, I am indebted to my fascinated and repeated reading of Charles C. Mann’s groundbreaking book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, 2nd edition (Vintage Books, 2011). I have enthusiastically summarized Mr. Mann’s extensive research in this article and am much obliged to give credit where due. Anyone who is interested in learning more in detail about the emerging re-invention of the Americas before Columbus as a complex spectrum of civilizations should read Mr. Mann’s eye-opening work.
I am also grateful to my friend and long-time SdV Patreon supporter Steve Schultz, who one day a few years ago saw a picture of me planting turmeric in the shade of an avocado tree and recommended reading 1491 to me.
I also am indebted to the friends in regeneration I have made here in Ecuador at the Reservas Mashpi Shungo, Chontaloma, and Pambilño Bosque Escuela for their knowledge and shared experience. And,of course, my steadfast partner Juan who like me learns to appreciate this incredible biosphere we call our home more every day.
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At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,
--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building, year-round soil cover with plants and the use of agroforestry methods.
That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and community.
Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation fund OR make a monthly pledge on our Patreon.
Thank you.
Kristen Krash is the director and co-founder of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative agroforestry farm, education center, nature reserve in Ecuador’s Chocó Andino Cloudforest. Prior to moving, Kristen was known for her guerrilla gardens — productive green spaces she created in any available space. Now an urban transplant in the South American rain forest, she has adapted her urban gardening and sustainability skills to large-scale reforestation of degraded land. She takes a practical and accessible approach to helping others achieve more balance and self-sufficiency in their lives.
Kristen’s articles and interviews have been featured on popular sustainability platforms like Abundant Edge and The Mud Home, and in the Rainforest Regeneration Curriculum at the Ecological Restoration Camps.