Waters, wetlands, forests, grasslands, streams, ponds, beaches and dunes and maritime scrub — these were the dominant habitats in a patchwork mosaic. (Each of these can be broken down into smaller eco-communities—55 on pre-colonial Manhattan alone, as documented in Sanderson’s book.) When Hudson arrived on these shores, the landscape had already been altered, managed for millennia by the Indian dwellers in the land, the Lenapes. They used fire in controlled burns to create fields for their crops, maintain grasslands, and open up forests. Naturally, they cut down trees for fuel and building material. But there was a big difference in the way they used the land and its resources compared to what would come after European settlement. They did not engineer the land. They did not drain and fill in marshes and ponds and streams, or level hills, or build out shorelines with rubble to create new land. Such radical engineering of the land came with the Europeans.