An environmental history of Latin America

This book, in a series of short historical episodes, narrates the mutually vital and reciprocally mortal relationship between tropical nature and human culture in Latin America. Covering a period that begins with ancient Amerindian civilizations and concludes in today’s pulsating cities, work offers an original synthesis of the current scholarship on Latin America’s environmental history and argues that tropical nature has played a central role in shaping the region’s historical development. Human attitudes and appetites, from Aztec cannibalism to more contemporary forms of conspicuous consumption, figure prominently in the story. However, characters such as hookworms, whales, hurricanes, bananas, dirt, butterflies, and guano make more than cameo appearances. Recent scholarship has overturned many of our egocentric assumptions about humanity’s preeminent role in history. Seeing Latin America’s environmental past from the perspective of many centuries illustrates that former American civilizations were more powerful than previously thought, and that current civilizations are potentially as vulnerable.

Tropical diseases

That environmental determinism brushed in such large strokes proved imaginary and excessively fatalistic does not mean that the american tropics did not present substantial challenges to culture. Nature decided neither race nor intelligence, nor did it determine the region's ultimate cultural sucess or failure, but it did profoundly shape the contours of Latin American civilization, just as it did others. The same climate that permitted the harvesting of multiple crops each year and that indeed made it possible to grow such export crops as sugar, coffee, and bananas, also presented culture with diseases, insects, weather extremes, and natural disasters that plagued human bodies, attacked plant tissues, destroyed urban infrastructure, and even influenced geopolitics. It bears repeating that little of this led to inevitabilities. Both nature and culture are too irrepressibly clever to be entirely determined by the other, and altogether too doggedly tenacious to fail to transform one another appreciably. What remains difficult to quantify is whether tropical nature. Recent work on disasters, diseases, and agriculture in temperate climes seems to suggest that the term temperate may be a misnomer. But there is little question that tropical America offered entirely different challenges than those faced by Turner's North American frontiersmen, and the European settlers' lack of tropical experience must of placed them at some disadvantage.