Anthropogenic forests

Forests are composed not just of plants, but of soils, waters, rocks, minerals, animals, sounds, colors, and flavors, as well as the human beings who live there. Human inhabitants imbue these forests with symbolic meaning and make practical use of the resources they offer, and in the process shape their very essence. 
  
In the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the effect of human intervention is illustrated in the fact that there is a greater diversity of plants growing around ancient sites than in regions of natural dispersion and selection. The Amazon, too, is a garden more than a forest, modified and shaped over millennia by human interaction. As archaeologist Eduardo Neves notes, “What we see today as ‘pristine’ forest in the Amazon is in fact a cultural landscape, a result of conscious human management or unconscious human activity over thousands of years. The continuing conscious and unconscious environmental management by contemporary Amazonian Indians increases, rather than reduces, ecological diversity.”