What holistic farming? Indigenous populations at least in South and Eastern North America practiced severe slash and burn farming. Spanish ships remarked about how smoke covered the NA continent was. This is in addition to the very common wild fires that ravaged the continent constantly. We have more natural forest now than there was when colonists landed. It was also one of the reasons Europeans were able to colonize and put in fields so easily, the land was already cleared. Then they combined that with the more advanced farming techniques they knew about at that point and they were able to multiply quickly and improve the land. Then they got stupid and we ended up with the great dustbowl but that's 400 years later.
Its a pretty proven theory now that the Mayan empire fell because they screwed up the environment to the point it couldn't sustain the population any more.