The Day Before America: Changing Nature of a Continent

In a beautifully written meditation, Eco contributing editor MacLeish charts the ecological devastation and societal upheaval wrought by Spanish, French, English and Dutch colonizers of the New World. Drawing on interviews with ecologists, archeologists, prehistorians and anthropologists, as well as his own travels, he lyrically evokes the lush pre-Columbian Americas, where herds of caribou, mammoths and camels roamed in the late Pleistocene as glaciers melted. He also delineates a wide diversity of native cultures, such as the Calusa whale-hunters of the Pacific Northwest, the peoples who built huge burial mounds from Alabama to Ohio arund A.D. 1000, and the Chaco Canyon, N.M. housing-complex dwellers circa A.D. 500. MacLeish closes his highly personal essay with reflections on the destructive impact of contemporary Americans' high-consumption lifestyle. Illustrations. (Sept.)