Before Christopher Columbus and the European hordes swept across the Americas, destroying the natives and ravaging the environment, the land was a virginal, verdant Garden of Eden peopled by a folk who tended its bounty wisely, gently and harmoniously for the trust and blessing of all their generations.

It is wonderful to think so and would make a fine Kevin Costner movie. But-as recent articles in The New York Times and British journal Nature suggest-what is widely and wishfully believed is largely myth.

Scientists sifting through the layers of history increasingly are unearthing evidence that things were very different in pre-Columbian times, principally that what the explorers entered was not a primeval paradise occupied by careful stewards, but an environment that already had been dramatically altered-and created-by human incursion. Further, it appears that the landscape on a large scale had been changed more by the early civilizations than those that came later.

Whole forests were burned in the eastern United States by Indians to clear the way for the fabled grasslands, hunting and farming. Gouges of civilization were abundant-the topography reshaped for settlements, roads, trails and earthworks. Agricultural techniques, sometimes ingenious and still useful today on a small scale, also were highly destructive.

As a result, it is believed, entire civilizations destroyed themselves by the careless use of the land. There is ample evidence, as just one example, that the brilliant Maya doomed their empire by the slash-and-burn agriculture decried today in the tropical rain forests-touching off massive erosion that depleted the soil necessary to nourish their surging population.

In sum, though we have the means and numbers to be far more destructive today, the revered ancients were not so much smarter in understanding cause and effect and not exactly the noble guardians of nature.

What does it matter? In the first instance, if we are to learn from history, it often is necessary to strip away the myth and romantic illusion. In the second, it is precisely that we should learn from history-to gain knowledge from that which worked and was good, to guard against the harmful, reckless and careless.

And sometimes, fools that we mortals be, it is important to remember that it has been our condition, and perfection may yet lie ahead, not in the past.

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