ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines shifting views, focusing on recent and ongoing studies that seek to discover folk and native Amazonians cognitive and behavioural treatment, and transformation, of the environment within which they live. The image most people still hold of heterogenous forests with hundreds of species per hectare is not wrong, but it fails to describe adequately most of the Amazon Basin. While it is attractive to think of the Amazon Basin as pristine or virgin forest, such a view says more about the people need to have pristine landscapes to establish a link with a long-lost ecological past than it describes the Amazon. Moreover, it is important to note that of the thirty most frequent plants in a plot of fallowed forest, fourteen were significant food species for indigenous populations of the area, as compared with only six in the high forest plots. The range of indigenous alteration of forest species composition is probably quite large.
