Native Views of the Environment in Amazonia

Abstract

Amazonia is that region drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries together with adjacent lowlands. It represents about 4% of the earth’s land surface. It is roughly the size of the contiguous 48 U.S. states or the island continent of Australia. But Amazonia far exceeds both those comparable regions in terms of the biotic and linguistic diversity of its varied landscapes. Landscapes refer not to nature paintings or manicured lawns and gardens in Euro-American tradition, but rather to distinctive juxtapositions of living species in spatial contexts that are verifiable empirically by soil, light, temperature, and historical conditions. In Amazonia, swidden fields produced by slash-and-burn horticulture, anthropogenic old-growth fallow forests of the terra firma, and dooryard gardens found in the context of Native American villages and camps, among other definitive zones, constitute landscapes in this sense. The environment to native Amazonians is virtually never a monolithic entity, encompassing ecosystems and ecospheres; rather, almost everywhere it represents a heterogeneous association of landscapes, each having a different character and different index of its essence. Ample diversity of native languages also exists: Amazonia has about 300 languages in 170 different family groupings.