An Environmental History of Latin America (review)

Environmental historians draw upon a wide range of disciplines, in both social and ecological sciences, as they broaden traditional fields of history and historical geography to deal systematically with the intricate interactions between societies and their natural resources. The subject matter of environmental history is difficult to delimit. Fine-grained studies of limited locations and time periods have one set of challenges to meet; broad syntheses such as Miller’s survey have another.

The field of Latin American environmental history, which hardly existed ten years ago, is developing rapidly now, with publications in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and other European languages. A one-volume survey, such as Miller’s lucid and provocative book, has long been needed. His earlier monographic work on colonial Brazil established him as one of the most innovative historians of Portuguese America. Brazil as subject matter virtually required him to work deeply in both anthropological and ecological history, as well as more traditional forms of political, social, and intellectual history.¹ His new work builds on those strengths to encompass the entire range of Latin America.

One admirable quality of this survey is its balanced articulation of several major controversies, starting with the “pristine myth” of indigenous cultures before European contact. Carefully surveying the recent literature on population, agriculture (the most vital aspect of pre-industrial cultures’ relations to nature), and cities, Miller portrays major population pressures on land in both mountain and lowland ecosystems. He avoids a common trap in environmental history writing, the declensionist theme of steady ecological degradation through history. In both pre-contact times and the demographically devastating sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Miller points up the ebb and flow of human pressures on natural systems.

In “The Colonial Balance Sheet,” the author surveys the intensive Iberian sugar plantations, and the human and natural exploitation around the silver mines of Mexico and Bolivia. These short essays are as vivid and provocative as any in print, in part because he is adept at presenting the nuts and bolts of productive systems. Then, in a chapter on the local and global dimensions of post-independence Latin America in the early industrial age, he describes massive water-management projects and the mining of nitrogen-rich guano for world agriculture. He balances this topic with a chapter on urban environmental history, provocatively entitled “Asphyxiated Habitats.”

Both resource depletion and massive pollution led to the rise of environmental awareness in Latin America, including recent trends in citizens’ environmental action and national legislation, which Miller surveys in the last chapter, “Environmentalism.” He adds a provocative epilogue about the transformations of Cuban agriculture in the aftermath of both American and Soviet imperial power. Finally, his “Suggested Readings” is an excellent survey of a rapidly changing field.