Is there any truth in the statement that native americans lived in harmony with nature? I remember watching documentaries about it where they said that some native tribes for example burned down forests to create grass fields for animals and that some tribes that died out died because famine struck them extremely hard and that said famine was so brutal because the natives had cut down the forests close to them. Did the native americans really live in harmony with nature or were they as wasteful as the rest of the world?
First of all, please recognize that there were a couple of thousand individual native groups in North and South America at the time of contact. To generalize about all of them is a fools errand.
Natives throughout the new world significantly modified the natural environment. They built cities with huge earthen and stone monuments (think pyramids), rerouted streams, cleared and terraced land and burned, it seems, almost everywhere. In the Amazon Basin natives modified their habitat to the point of actually creating fertile soil to enhance agriculture - see terra preta. For more on the Amazon basin civilizations see this post by /u/Reedstilt in our FAQs. A very accessible read on the subject of native environmental modification is available in Charles Mann's 1491.
Whether they lived "in harmony" with nature is ambiguous. Many natives had very well documented norms about how they interacted with the natural world. Many of those norms would be seen as having a conservationist bent. Many others did not.
Some anthropologists/historians believe that the notion of "Indians in harmony with nature" is an offshoot of the noble savage idealization of indigenes. Others (see Richard White as quoted in Mann (pg.420)) believe that the notion of Natives as environmentally benign is related to white condescension:
In North America, whites are the bearers of environmental original sin, because whites alone are recognized as laboring. But whites are thus only, by the same token, the only real bearers of history. This is why our flattery... of 'simpler' people is such an act of immense condescension. For in a modern world defined by change, whites are portrayed as the only beings who made a difference.
So, if by "in harmony with the land" you mean that they all shared some sort of notion of maintaining environmental sustainability, I think the answer is clearly no. Many New World groups actively pursued activities that significantly modified their environs and many activities (like urbanization), were not environmentally friendly.
Some good resources include:
William Cronon, Changes in the Land; Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England, 1983
Charles Mann, 1491. 2011