An Environmental History of Latin America (review)

Shawn William Miller has written a terrific short introduction to the environmental history of Latin America. Engagingly written, carefully researched and just 257 pages long, An Environmental History of Latin America will long be read by anyone interested in environmental studies and the history and anthropology of the lands south of the Rio Grande.

Although the book tips its hat to the Americas’ ancient past, its focus is on the ecological tumult set off by Columbus’s voyage: five centuries of contact, conquest, colonialism, and capitalistic growth. Admirably, Miller covers both Spanish-and Portuguesespeaking societies and devotes time to the Caribbean. Neither Europeans nor Indians are treated as perfect saints or unmitigated sinners; nor does Miller wallow in unthinking, sloshy relativism. General statements are illustrated with wry, sometimes unexpected examples; the Peruvian guano trade, the catastrophic Spanish attempts to remake Mexico City, the role of yellow fever in the Haitian revolution and the Louisiana Purchase. Disparate as the book’s parts are, it is unified, as Miller says, by an overriding concern: “whether the project of tropical civilization has been sustainable.”

Anyone writing a short, accessible introduction to a vast subject must decide what to omit. Important concepts are perforce left, as it were, on the cutting-room floor. According to their sense of the field, different readers will lament the absence of different points. For myself, I would have liked Miller to have devoted more than a single chapter to the pre-Columbian Americas. In that chapter, moreover, he focuses on the Aztec and Inca empires, both relatively late and short-lived. The net effect, to my taste, is to shortchange the long-lasting ecological impact of earlier societies like the Maya, Wari and the Santarém culture. Other readers may differ, though.

Similarly, a short book does not have space to lay out both sides of arguments in detail; the author therefore must choose and summarize one interpretation of events. Rather than rehearsing the arguments for and against the proposition that Aztec and Tupi societies practiced cannibalism, for example, An Environmental History of Latin America simply says (correctly, to my way of thinking) that the bulk of evidence supports this view, and then goes on its way. Whether an individual reader thinks that Miller has successfully negotiated these areas of disputation will depend on how much the reader agrees with Miller’s take on the subject. I thought he did a superb job, but this may indicate no more than that I largely agree with his point of view. A drawback is the relative lack of scholarly apparatus, presumably for reasons of space and readability; here and there, I came across an assertion which made me wonder, “Why is he saying this?”

I have two substantive reservations with this fine book. First, Miller is clearly aware, as he says, that “humans are nature too.”(5) But from time to time he seems less aware that the converse is also true—that nature is human, too. Far from encountering an almost untouched wilderness, the first European voyagers arrived in landscapes that been modified by human activity for millennia. In a widely cited article, William Denevan called the common, tenaciously held image of the pre-Columbian Americas as a primeval land the “pristine myth.” Miller acknowledges the inaccuracy of the Pristine Myth, noting as an example that the deep tropical forests of the Brazilian coast “had been felled, burned and abandoned many times over” by their Tupi inhabitants. (15) And he describes with appropriate awe the radical transformations wrought by native peoples in the Andes and Mexico. All of this makes problematic the notion of “nature” as a baseline condition or nonhuman force. But An Environmental History of Latin America nonetheless is peppered with references to the need to “protect nature” or to “conserve nature,” as if there were some easily understood environmental state that could be used as a baseline.

The second reservation...