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Garry Peterson is an ecologist at the intriguingly-named Stockholm Resilience Centre, looking at how we a might effectively manage the environment; not simply for the state of the ecosystem itself but also for our continued well-being as inhabitants of that ecosystem. He also writes for Faculty of 1000, having been a Faculty Member since January 2006.

He recently evaluated an article looking at how farmers before the Spanish colonization of South America got the best out of their agricultural system, and how the local ecosystem itself preserved aspects of that human activity. Garry has blogged about the paper at Resilience Science, posting some fascinating images (from the paper’s supplementary information) of five hundred year old Guianan farms:

Combining archeology, archeobotany, paleoecology, soil science, ecology, and aerial imagery, we show that pre-Columbian farmers of the Guianas coast constructed large raised-field complexes, growing on them crops including maize, manioc, and squash. Farmers created physical and biogeochemical heterogeneity in flat, marshy environments by constructing raised fields.

It’s at times like this I wish I could see what our landscape will look like in 500 years’ time. Our intensive methods may or may not change the landscape (semi-)permanently, and whether or not that’s a good thing I just don’t know. And that’s even before we start thinking about resilience and sustainability, the human effect on the global climate, etc. Hopefully people like Garry will be able to start giving us some answers!