Imperfect Balance: Landscape Transformations in the Precolumbian Americas (review)

We all occasionally miss something that we shouldn't. I say "we" trusting that I am not the only one who has experienced the chagrin of discovering an important publication that slipped under his or her proverbial radar. Indeed this is exactly what happened in the case of this Imperfect Balance, a book that came to my attention more than 10 years after its publication. I could take responsibility for this oversight and admit to being remiss. I won't, however, because I continue to be baffled by the number of scholars I meet who should know of a book I published in 2000, but do not. Accordingly, I lay full responsibility for my not knowing about this book square on the shoulders of the marketing department of the publisher. Those folks clearly did not do a good job of advertising and promoting their product. Shame on them!

This is a magnificent volume. It consists of 15 chapters that provide uniform and total coverage of the Americas. A few of these are topically and regionally broad, emphasizing biophysical environments with limited acknowledgment of human presence. Chapters 3 and 11, for example, barely mention people as either agents or victims of change. The former by Andrew M. Greller, and the latter by James L. Luteyn and Steven P. Churchill, deal with vegetation in North and Central America, and the Andes, respectively. David A. Hodell, Mark Brenner, and Jason H. Curtis authored Chapter 2 which discusses climate change in the northern American tropics and subtropics since the last ice age. It devotes only three pages to the human element and part of this explores future implications.

Six chapters are of a local or regional nature and deal with one of my favorite topics—agricultural landscapes. A finer set of authors, each a distinguished scholar in her or his own right, could not have been found. Progressing from South to North are contributions by Clark Erickson on the Titicaca Basin, Charles Spencer on Venezuela, Nicholas Dunning and Timothy Beach on the Yucatan, Emily McClug de Tapia on the Basin of Mexico, Suzanne K. Fish on the Sonoran Desert, and Gayle J. Fritz on the Mississippi River Valley.

Three chapters on South America are particularly interesting individually and in concert. Terence N. D'Altroy portrays land use in the Andes using a standard classification system, but also deals with the exchange of products between sub-regions, and ends with some insightful comments on cultural ecology and cultural ideology. Lowland tropical vegetation is discussed with some interesting twists. Its coauthors, Douglas C. Daly and John D. Mitchell, include sections on folk classifications, structures, inclusions, and transitions. Finally, Anna C. Roosevelt's contribution, Chapter 15, will need some revision given the abundance of recent research on terra preta, or dark earth, but I like her argument that the lower Amazon is a dynamic human habitat.

Saving the best for last, or nearly so, my two favorite chapters (4 and 8) deal with anthropocentric food webs, and silviculture and forest management, respectively. In the former, David L. Lentz provides an abundance of data, much of them in tabular form, for what I have dubbed the husbandry of wild plants. Some of these were the ancestors of domesticated crops, some of them were not. With an emphasis on the importance of weeds and pioneers, this chapter surely would meet with the approval of the late Jack Harlan, one of my domestication heroes. The enrichment of useful species, the management of forests and fallowed plots, and home gardens are topics that comprise Chapter 8 by Charles M. Peters.

As with any edited volume, this collection of specially-authored works begins with a chapter outlining concepts and providing definitions, and ends with a summary and conclusions. Although only one chapter was written by geographers (Dunning and Beach), Imperfect Balance bears a geographical imprimatur, in the form of a Foreword...