Environmental history of Latin America

The environmental history of Latin America has become the focus of a number of scholars, starting in the later years of the twentieth century. But historians earlier than that recognized that the environment played a major role in the region's history.

Early scholarship

Works by geographers and other scholars began focusing on humans and the environmental context, especially Carl O. Sauer at University of California, Berkeley.^[10][11] Other early scholars examining humans and nature interactions, such as William Denevan, Julian Steward, Eric Wolf, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In terms of impact, however, Alfred W. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange (1972) was a major work, one of the first to deal with profound environmental changes touched off by European settlement in the New World. It examines a range of impacts of Europeans on Latin America, especial Page information ly during the period of European Contact, including epidemic disease and the importation of Old World animals and plants and the development of large-scale ranching and agriculture. He further developed the argument in Ecological Imperialism (2004).^[12] Archeologists such as Richard MacNeish conducted fieldwork uncovering the origins of agriculture in Mesoamerica and in the Andes, giving a long timeline for the human-wrought changes in the environment before the arrival of the Europeans.^[13] William Denevan specifically argued against the "pristine myth" of lack of human impact on the environment prior to 1492.^[14]

Indigenous land use before European contact

Environmental historians have been criticized for what is called “recentism,” that is examining twentieth-century environmental issues.

were domesticated. While llamas could carry burdens of up to 50 kilos, they were not harnessed for agricultural work. Both were sources of dietary protein. In areas not suitable to sedentary agriculture, there were usually small bands of people, often extended kin groups, who pursued hunting and gathering on a gendered basis. There were no domesticated large animals suitable for domestication that could be used as beasts of burden or transportation. When the Spaniards introduced horses in desert and semiarid regions, they were acquired by many indigenous groups, transforming their ways of life.

Environmental transformations, ca. 1500-1825

Indigenous peoples had shaped the environment and utilized its resources, but Europeans even more significantly changed the environment with large-scale resource extraction, especially mining, as well as the transformation of agriculture to cultivation of crops to feed urban populations and the introduction of livestock, used for food, leather, wool, and tallow. Deforestation increased at a rapid pace and water resources were appropriated by Europeans.

Disease and demographic collapse

With the deliberate importation of Old World plants and animals and the unintentional spread of diseases brought by the Europeans (smallpox, measles, and others) changed the natural environment in many parts of Latin America. European diseases devastated indigenous populations. The demographic catastrophe of natives on islands first settled by the Europeans prompted their exploration of others in the Caribbean and slave raiding, with consequences for the overall demography of the Caribbean. Then as Europeans explored and settled further, the demographic catastrophe was further replicated in the sixteenth century. Recently, scientists have been considering whether the population loss had an impact on carbon dioxide levels, which might well have led to the "Little Ice Age."^[21]

Commodities and the environment in the early colonial era

The search for a high value export product also resulted in Spaniards introducing

and on Caribbean islands that other European powers seized from Spain.

Silver mining and mercury

The hopes that Europeans had of finding easily exploitable sources of precious metals were dashed in the Spanish occupation in the Caribbean.

mining using forced indigenous labor did yield relatively small amounts of gold and did not have a huge deleterious environmental impact to the landscape, but the cost to the indigenous populations was considerable. Overwork contributed to their rapid demise. Starting the 1540s, silver became the major precious metal exploited by Spanish mining entrepreneurs under crown license. There were several mining sites in northern New Spain, particularly Guanajuato and Zacatecas, both outside the zone of dense indigenous settlement. In the highland Andes, there a single mountain, the Cerro Rico, in Potosí, Upper Peru (now Bolivia) was rich with veins of silver. In both Mexico and Peru, deep shaft mining required large numbers of laborers, but the footprint on the environment was not primarily caused by the mines themselves. Processing the pure silver from silver ore required considerable environmental costs. Around mining sites, there was massive deforestation, since early processing was by heating ore separating out molten silver. The early silver boom ended, in good part because the fuel to process the ore was exhausted through deforestation.^[25] In both Mexico and Peru, the introduction of mercury amalgam to process ore resulted in the revival of mining and more insidious and long-term environmental impacts.

Mercury mined in Almadén, Spain and shipped to Mexico in leather bags and transported to mining sites by mule. Like silver, mercury was a crown monopoly, so that the crown expected to reap maximum wealth from this resource. Costs of mining, transatlantic transportation, and the overland transport added to the costs to mining entrepreneurs. High costs for mercury often resulted in the abandonment of mining sites, since it had an impact on profitability. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish crown calculated that lowering the cost of mercury to miners in Mexico would result in higher silver output. The respite of the environment of Northern Mexico from mercury poisoning ended and the eighteenth century saw a boom in silver production. In Peru, there was a local source of mercury, the Huancavelica mine, making production costs cheaper, but with a far higher cost to the human and natural environment in the region. The toxicity of mercury was known at the time, although the science of it was not.^[26] When mercury was discovered in significant amounts at Huancavelica, Peru's silver mining industry could regain its previous levels of output. Forced indigenous labor was directed toward mining mercury, which the indigenous rightly considered a death sentence. Spanish officials also knew the impact on human populations, but did not modify their forced labor policies, since they rightly identified mercury as the key to continued silver production and wealth of the Spanish Empire.

The environmental degradation was significant. Deep shaft mining of mercury put miners in direct contact with the element and they were its first victims. However, since the mercury was volatilized in silver ore processing and only partially recaptured, its impact on larger human and animal populations was more widespread since it can be absorbed by breathing. Mercury made its way in to the watershed as well, poisoning water supplies. The toxic impact results in nerve damage, inducing muscle deterioration and mental disorders, infertility, birth defects, asthma, and chronic fatigue, to name just a few. Huancavelica produced approximately 68,000 metric tons of mercury, which went into the air and water of Potosí.^[27]

Water issues

Ethnic conflicts

As European populations increased in areas with existing indigenous settlement and agriculture, conflicts over access to water increased. In colonial Puebla, Mexico, European elites increasingly appropriated water indigenous communities needed for their agriculture, with deleterious results to those communities.^[28]

Urban flooding

In general, the presence or absence of sufficient water was a major determinant of where human settlement would occur in the pre-industrial Latin America. Large-scale irrigation projects were not undertaken in the colonial era. However, the major hydraulic project to drain the central lake system in the Basin of Mexico, known as the Desagüe, was undertaken to try to control flooding in the vice-regal capital of Mexico City. Tens of thousands of indigenous men were compelled to work on the project, which diverted their labor from agricultural enterprises.^{[29][30][31][32]} Although the project absorbed massive amounts of forced human labor, it was not until the late nineteenth century when the drainage project was completed.

Aqueducts

Aqueducts were constructed to supply urban centers with drinking water. Before the Spanish conquest in 1521, the Aztecs had constructed an aqueduct from a spring at Chapultepec (“hill of the grasshopper”) to Tenochitlan to provide freshwater to the urban population of nearly 100,000. It had dual pipes so that maintenance of the aqueduct would not cut off the Aztec capital's water supply. The aqueduct was constructed using wood, carved stone, and compacted soil, with portions made of hollowed logs, allowing canoes to travel underneath.

. Although many aqueducts were built in the colonial era, there have been no studies of their impact on their local watersheds.

Agriculture and ranching

Much of the environmental literature on the post-1492 expansion of agriculture and ranching of cattle and sheep falls into the category of environmental degradation or destruction, what environmental scholars call “declension.” An early study of the introduction of sheep into Mexico found that the environmental impact of sheep grazing in colonial Mexico is the subject of a study of the Mezquital Valley, which went from a thriving area of traditional peasant agriculture to one devoted sheep grazing. Sheep were one of the animals introduced to Spanish America with important consequences for the environment. Since sheep graze vegetation to the ground, plants often do not grow back. Wool was a major economic resource for the domestic cloth market in Mexico, so sheep ranching expanded during the colonial era, in many cases leaving ecological destruction.[34] Antedating Melville's study on a particular place in colonial Mexico is a study by the transfer of cattle and sheep to New Spain, as well as a subsequent study.^[35][36] Research by Ligia Herrera in Panama indicates that tropical rainforest transformed into pastures from 1950 to 1990 exceeded the total amount lost from 1500-1950.^[37][38]

Spanish crown and conservation

The Spanish crown was concerned with conservation of resources it deemed vital, asserting right of eminent domain over territory it conquered On the island of Cuba, the crown attempted to regulate the cutting of trees needed for ship building and repairs, especially masts. Although sugar was a valuable and expanding agro-export crop, the crown kept its expansion in check for much of the colonial era because of deforestation.^[39]

In colonial Mexico, the crown set up an official body, the Council of Forests, to conserve them from destruction from unregulated cutting. The main fuel in the colonial era was wood, often transformed to charcoal. There was an increasing demand from mining regions as well as cities and towns, so that as trees were cut down entirely rather than cut allowing them to regrow, forest resources further from these sites were vulnerable to deforestation. The crown saw deforestation as a threat to silver mining, the motor of the empire's economy, so that establishing regulations was a matter for the state.^[40]

Commodity boom and environmental impact, 1825-present

With Spanish American and Brazilian independence from Spain and Portugal in the early nineteenth century, independent nation-states initiated a new era of resource utilization, which transformed Latin America, a "second conquest."^[41] The Spanish Empire and the Portuguese Empire had kept other powers at bay, but now many new sovereign states sought financial benefit from private enterprise, foreign and domestic, in exploiting the environment.

Nitrates

For Peru, huge deposits of bird

.

Sugar and deforestation

Europeans had overseen the development of cane sugar cultivation since the 1520s, using African slave labor. Demand for sugar continued to climb. Brazil's coastal forests were systematically destroyed to expand the amount of land for sugar cultivation. Warren Dean's 1997 book With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest was written as an environmental history of Brazil.^[43] Expansion of sugar cultivation on the island of Cuba followed the Haitian Revolution, which saw the destruction of sugar plantations of France's former colony of Saint-Domingue on Hispaniola. Cuban sugar cultivation on a massive scale saw crown protection of forests give way from pressure of sugar planters.^[44]

Coffee

As Brazil lost market share of sugar production, it expanded into another agro-export product, coffee. Coffee grows best on uplands, so that deforestation in Brazil proceeded there. There were multiple sites of coffee cultivation in Brazil, in the Paraiba River Valley;

. Keith turned land he got in compensation for building the railway to banana cultivation, which became the country's major industry. The prerequisite for both industries was clearing of forests to make way for plantation agriculture.

Rubber

Trees (Hevea brasiliensis) producing natural latex grew wild in Amazonia, but rubber did not become a major export product until industrialization created a demand for rubber tires for vehicles. Starting around 1850, trees growing in the wild were tapped for their rubber in a highly exploitative form of labor. Trees were deliberately cut and the latex sap was collected in buckets tended regularly by poorly paid laborers. Although exploitative of labor, the industry was a form of resource extraction that did not result in deforestation or destruction of the trees, which could tolerate the latex tapping. The maintenance of the forest was required to keep the industry viable.^[49] It did produce wealth in Brazil for those who controlled the industry, with territories with trees divided into private domains, (seringais). Exploitation of the jungle had previously stayed close to rivers, but the rubber trees inland gave owners incentives to penetrate further. A major industry developed that linked wild trees, to exploited labor, to owners of tracts of land, to local commercial agents, to Brazilian companies dealing in trade with foreign companies, to international shipping companies.^[50][51][52] Brazil was eventually displaced as the world's major source of rubber following the 1876 theft by a Briton, Henry Wickham, who smuggled 70,000 Amazonian rubber tree seeds from Brazil and delivered them to the royal botanical gardens at Kew, England. Some 2,500 germinated and were then sent to British colonies in India, British Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and British Malaya, among others, where extensive plantations were established. Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) was later to become the biggest producer of rubber.^[53] Brazil's rubber boom came to an end, but the conservation of the forests that kept the industry viable meant that Brazil's Amazonian rain forest kept its original density until deforestation was initiated in the 1970s.^[54]

Bananas

Bananas are a tropical plant that has become a major export crop from tropical regions of Central and South America at the end of the nineteenth century. Bananas are relatively easy to grow in the tropics where there is sufficient water, but it could not become a major export crop until it could be brought to market quickly and sold cheaply to consumers. It first developed as an industry at the end of the nineteenth century in Costa Rica by American entrepreneur

Cattle ranching

Brazil expanded and transformed cattle ranching, starting at the turn of the twentieth century. Traditional cattle ranching counted on extensive pasturage and few human interventions, so that cattle were feral and bred without animal husbandry. The importation from South Asia of zebu, a resilient cattle breed suited for the tropics, was a significant investment, not just for the animals themselves, but for the development of a managed cattle industry in a part of Minas Gerais.^[58][59]

See also

• Agroecology in Latin America
• Forests of Mexico
• Deforestation in Brazil
• Latin American economy
• List of environmental issues

References

Further reading

General

• Boyer, Christopher R., ed. (2012) A Land Between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2012.
• Carey Mark. "Latin American Environmental History: Current Trends, Interdisciplinary Insights, and Future Directions." Environmental History, April 2009, Vol. 14, No. 2 (APRIL 2009), pp. 221–252.
• Carruthers, David V., ed. (2008) Environmental Justice in Latin America: Problems, Promise and Practice. MIT Press.
• Crosby, Alfred W. (1972)
  The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
  . Greenwood Publishing Co.
• Crosby, Alfred W. (1986) Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge University Press.
• Davis, M. (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso.
• Faber, Daniel. (1993) Environment Under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological Crisis in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Gade, D. (1999) Nature and Culture in the Andes. University of Wisconsin Press.
• Grove, Richard H. (1995). Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Leal, Claudia, José Augusto Pádua, and John Soluri (eds.), “New Environmental Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean,” RCC Perspectives 2013, no. 7. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/5921.
• Martínez-Alier, Joan. (2002) The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar.
• McNeill, J.R. (1999). "Ecology, Epidemics, and Empires: Environmental Change and the Geopolitics of Tropical America, 1600-1825." Environment and History 5 (1999): 175–84.
• McNeill, J.R. (2000) Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. WW Norton
• Miller, Shawn William. (2007). An Environmental History of Latin America. Cambridge University Press.
• Ouweneel, Arij. (1996) Shadows over Anáhuac: An Ecological Interpretation of Crisis and Development in Central Mexico, 1730-1800. University of New Mexico Press.
• Roberts, J. T. and N.D. Thanos. (2003) Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and Environmental Crises in Latin America. Routledge.
• Sedrez, Lise. (2011) “Environmental History of Modern Latin America” in A Companion to Latin American History, ed. Thomas H. Holloway. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Soluri, John, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Pádua, eds. (2019). A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America, eds. Soluri, John, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Pádua. New York: Berghahn.
  ISBN 978-1789-205138
• Sutter, Paul (2003) "What Can U.S. Environmental Historians Learn from Non-U.S. Environmental Historiography?" Environmental History 8, no.1 (Jan. 2003): 109-129
• Wakild, Emily (2011) “Environment and Environmentalism” in A Companion to Mexican History and Culture, William H. Beezley, ed. Wiley Blackwell.

Mining and other resource extraction

• Bakewell, Peter J. (1971) Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700. Cambridge University Press.
• Bakewell, Peter J. (1984) Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor at Potosí, 1545-1650. University of New Mexico Press.
  ISBN 978-0826349002
• Cushman, Gregory T. Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History. New York: Cambridge University Press 2014.
  ISBN 978-1107655966
• Gootenberg, Paul.(1989) Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru. Princeton University Press.
• Robins, Nicholas A. (2011) Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes. University of Indiana Press.
• Santiago, Myrna. (2006) The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938. Cambridge University Press.
• West, Robert. The Mining Community of Northern New Spain: The Parral Mining District. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949.

Water issues

• Buckley, Eve. Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2017.
  ISBN 978-1469634302
• Candiani, Vera. 2012. "The desagüe reconsidered: Environmental dimensions of class conflict in colonial Mexico." Hispanic American Historical Review 92.1 pp. 5-:
• Candiani, Vera. Dreaming of a Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2014.
• Tortolero Villaseñor, Alejandro. (2004) "Transforming the Central Mexican Waterscape: Lake Drainage and Its Consequences during the Porfiriato," in Territories, Commodities and Knowledges: Latin American Environmental Histories in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Christian Brannstrom (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, pp. 121–147.
• Wolfe, Mikael D. Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press 2017.

Amazonia

• Brannstrom, Christian. "Was Brazilian Industrialisation Fuelled by Wood? Evaluating the Wood Hypothesis, 1900-1960." Environment and History, Vol. 11, No. 4 (November 2005), pp. 395–430 Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20723552
• Bunker, S.G. (1985) Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State. University of Illinois Press.
• Cleary, David. (2000) "Towards an Environmental History of the Amazon: From Pre-history to the Nineteenth Century." Latin American Research Review 36:2, 64-96/
• Dean, Warren. (1997) Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History. Cambridge University Press.
• Hecht, Susanna and Alexander Cockburn (1990). The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon. New York: Harper Perennial.
• Hochstetler, K. and M. Keck (2007) Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society. Duke University Press.
• Radding, Cynthia. (2005) Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia. Duke University Press.
• Revkin, A. (1990) The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest. Houghton Mifflin.
• Weinstein, Barbara (1983) The Amazon Rubber Boom 1850–1920 Stanford University Press.

Conservation

• Boyer, Christopher. (2015) Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico. Duke University Press.
• Bray, David B., et al. (2005) Community Forests of Mexico: Managing for Sustainable Landscapes. University of Texas Press.
• Cushman, Gregory Todd. (2005) "The Most Valuable Birds in the World: International Conservation Science and the Revival of Peru's Guano Industry, 1909-1965." Environmental History 10:3 477–509.
• Evans, S. (1999) The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica. University of Texas Press.
• Keck, Margaret. (1995) "Parks, People, and Power: The Shifting Terrain of Environmentalism." NACLA Report on the Americas 28:5 (March/April 1995), 36–41.
• Miller, Shawn William. 2000. Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber. Stanford University Press.
• Simonian, Lane. (1995) Defending the Land of the Jaguar: A History of Conservationism in Mexico. University of Texas Press.
• Steen, Harold K and Richard P. Tucker, eds. (1992) Changing Tropical Forests: Historical Perspectives on Today's Challenges in Central and South America. Durham NC: Forest History Society.
• Wakild, Emily (2011) An Unexpected Environment: National Park Creation, Resource Custodianship, and the Mexican Revolution. University of Arizona Press.

Forests, agriculture, and ranching

• Bell, Stephen. Campanha gaúcha: A Brazilian Ranching System, 1850-1920. (Stanford University Press 1998).
• Cotter, Joseph. (2003) Troubled Harvest: Agronomy and Revolution in Mexico, 1880-2002. Westport CT: Praeger.
• Díaz-Briquets, Sergio and Jorge Pérez-López, Conquering Nature: The Environmental Legacy of Socialism in Cuba, (Pittsburgh University Press 2001).
• Dean, Warren. (1995) With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Funes Monzote, Reinaldo. From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba, An Environmental History Since 1492. (University of North Carolina Press, 2008
• Grandin, Greg. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. Picador Press 2010.
  ISBN 978-0312429621
• Melville, Elinor G.K. (1994) A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge University Press.
• Rosset, P. and S. Cunningham. (1994) The Greening of Cuba: Organic Farming Offers Hope in the Midst of Crisis. Institute for Food and Development Policy, Oakland CA.
• Scobie, James. (1964) Revolution on the Pampas: A Social History of Argentine Wheat, 1860-1910. University of Texas Press.
• Soluri, John (2005) Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. University of Texas Press.
• Sonnenfeld, David A. (1992) "Mexico's 'Green Revolution.' 1940-1980: Towards an Environmental History. Environmental Review 16:4: 29–52.
• Super, John C. (1988) Food, Conquest, and Colonialization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America. University of New Mexico Press.
• Topik, Steve and Alan Wells. (1997) The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850-1920. University of Texas Press.
• Wilcox, Robert W. "Zebu's Elbows: Cattle Breeding and the Environment in Central Brazil, 1890-1960" in Territories, commodities, and knowledges: Latin American Environmental History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Ed. Christian Brannstrom. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas 2004, pp. 218–246.
• Woolley, Christopher. "The Forests Cannot be Commons": Spanish Law, Environmental Change, and New Spain's Council on Forests. The Americas 77(1)January 2020, pp. 41–71.

Climate change

• Carey, Mark. In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society. New York: Oxford University Press 2010.

Medicine and public health

• Eric D. Carter, Enemy in the Blood: Malaria, Environment, and Development in Argentina, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012)
• McNeill, J.R. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press 2010.
  ISBN 978-0521459105

External links

• / Reframing History: Bananas National Public Radio accessed 8-29-2020