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THERE is a popular myth that when the Europeans first arrived on American shores, they found a chaste, Edenic landscape unscathed by the indigenous peoples who inhabited the land. This image fits nicely with another figment of the western imagination: that the Native American was the original environmental conservationist.

The truth is less romantic. Certainly from the 16th century onwards rapacious transformers from Europe ran roughshod over nature. Yet their ecological transgressions were against landscapes that had already been considerably altered by Native Americans, who used fire extensively to manage plants and animals. They did not always manage it successfully, sometimes creating blazes that spread uncontrollably.

“So-called ecological practices were opportunistic rather than prudent”

In Tending the Wild M. Kat Anderson, who is in the department of plant sciences at the University of California, Davis, tries to get to grips with these subtleties. It is an ambitious work that explores the relationship between people and plants, and specifically between the Native Americans of California and their environment. It is also a study of indigenous land management, offering impressive details of harvesting methods, pruning, coppicing, sowing, tilling, transplanting and insect control.

Unfortunately, the book plays into the cultural stereotype that valorises indigenous and damns non-indigenous environmental practices. The “Old Ways”, as they are called, are thought to encompass the virtues of harmony, biodiversity, conservation and sustainability. But how can we be sure they did? Anderson relies on the oral history of Native Americans, assuming that it uncomplicatedly reveals pre-European behaviour, when we know that conversations with today’s Native Americans are not a safe way of learning about the behaviour of their ancestors hundreds and thousands of years ago. Memory lapse, the dangers of projecting present onto past, and politics make oral history unreliable. And even when we agree that Native Americans have “tended” the land with beneficial effects, how can we know whether the results were intended or unwitting? Conservation is by design, not by accident.

What is certain is that Native Americans not only altered the landscape, they also did considerable damage to animal populations – something most academics, including Anderson, have ignored. In California, native hunters depleted populations of mammals including elk and deer and fish such as sturgeon. They killed a disproportionate number of female and young seals and sea lions. They eliminated mainland pinniped rookeries. It is no great surprise that animal and shellfish numbers were highest when human populations were lowest – after the epidemics that devastated indigenous people, for instance. All this hints that the so-called ecological practices of Native Americans were opportunistic rather than prudent predatory strategies.

Anderson clearly believes, as many others do, that indigenous wisdom is the key to a more humane relationship with the natural world. Nature should be used, not just set aside for passive enjoyment. But there are two models of indigenous management: the common ideology that the native way is kind and gentle to nature, and the alternative version of opportunistic predation. Which one should we use as a basis for modern ecology? Anderson clearly favours the idea that the Old Ways were a good model for sustainable management, and she calls for botanical gardens, natural history museums, schools and other public institutions to get involved in advancing it. Fair enough – but she might also call on modern casino-owning Native Americans, with their considerable economic clout in California, to share the burden.