What A Jungle Can Support

"How does one make farms on unproductive earth, on lateritic soil, which, being stirred and work one time too many, will violently revolt against this rape and set up like cement so that overnight it becomes like rock into which a nail cannot be driven? The ecology of the Amazon jungle, fifty times more subtle and complicated than the intricate balancing of a Calder mobile, operated for centuries when each human who inhabited it had ten square miles to roam in and to harvest from; this was what the jungle could support. The land is poor and leached from the incessant rains, so poor in fact that almost its entire richness has gone into the trees that stand up on it. It was the unproductive nature of the Jungle that determine the essential nature of the people who once owned it; they were small tribes not much more than family size, and they were Nomads who claimed enormous territories." 

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers