What Happened After Columbus Arrived

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 166-169

166 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

What Happened After

Columbus Arrived

By Oliver Houck

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbu s Created, by Charles

Mann. Alfred A. K nopf. 560 pages.

From the March/ April 2012 issue of The Environmental Forum .

Let us suppose that before the creation,

God was subject to NEPA and required

to write an environmental impact state-

ment, describing what would happen to the

world He so carefully created. Suppose, too,

that He could predict with precision all t hat

followed and is unfolding now. His statement

completed, would He go forward?

Of the questions t hat arise while reading

Charles Mann’s new book, 1493: Uncovering

the New World Columbus Created, this is the

most frequent, and it is probably quite unin-

tended. Mann does not pose the question. His

task is to a ssemble from bits and pieces the

story of what happened to the world—not just

America, the entire world—after Columbus’s

arrival in the Ca ribbean islands in 1492.

In an earlier work, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,

Mann described the (surprising) population numbers and social diversity

that pervaded the Americas prior to Columbus, millions of people soon on

their way to oblivion via (in Jared Diamond’s phrase) germs, gu ns and steel.

It was not a pretty story, but neither was it new.

Mann’s sequel is more ambitious. In the wake of Columbus, chains of

dominoes fall in endless directions, rebounding on themselves, all leading

to what Mann calls the homogenocene, reduction by globalization of eco-

nomic and biological systems. Everything morphs, on every continent. Tiny

things have large consequences, most of them without design, many without