Early settlers drained marshy US landscape - earth - 17 January 2008 - New Scientist Environment

New Scientist has article about how our idea of the "natural" landscape of eastern North America may be radically wrong

Early settlers drained marshy US landscape - earth - 17 January 2008 - New Scientist Environment: "Standard notions of the 'natural' eastern US landscape with its meandering ribbon-like streams may be misguided, suggests historical research."

This is part of growing historical evidence that both early settlers and Native Americans made drastic alterations to the natural landscape of North America. However, due to a quirk of how history is recorded, our ideas of what the "untouched" natural environment is are only what happened to be the conditions when the first literary evidence was recorded.