The Amazon Rainforest Is Not a Wilderness. It’s a 2,000-Year-Old Garden.
New lidar scans reveal that the Amazon rainforest is not a pristine wilderness but the overgrown remains of a vast ancient civilization that housed 3 million people in just 3% of the forest. This discovery shatters modern conservation myths and proves that dense human populations can coexist with—and even enhance—biodiversity. The real lesson: we need to revive indigenous land-management techniques, not exclude humans from nature.