IMAGINE a land where forests are so rich in game they resemble zoo enclosures, and where, in season, rivers have more fish than water. Precise ecological and historical sleuthing by shows that such reports from colonists in North America, long dismissed as fantasy, were true: in the 16th century, the continent really was like this.
Modern disbelief that nature was far more abundant in the past, says Nicholls, comes not from ecological impossibility but from a mindset that insists that only today’s abundances are possible, while refusing to admit that we inhabit an ecologically impoverished landscape. Finely written and elegantly researched, Paradise Found is a chilling portent of how even today’s richnesses will seem a cornucopia to biologically bereft future generations.
Paradise Found: Nature in America at the time of discovery
University of Chicago Press