Insatiable Appetite: The United States and Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (review)

Insatiable Appetite: The United States and Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World. By Richard P. Tucker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+551. $45.

Insatiable Appetite is a rich and informative synthesis of ecological, technological, business, and political history that explores the relationship between American markets for tropical goods and ecological degradation in the tropical world. Richard Tucker's deliberate use of the term "degradation" (rather than an apparently more neutral choice, like "change") makes his opinion of the results of American involvement in the tropics clear. Yet in the diverse case studies that comprise this volume, Tucker never stoops to polemic, instead favoring an approach that thoughtfully explores the complexities of the political and business ties that so affected the ecological and social history of Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States.

Tucker's central concern is environmental history, as shown by his organization of the book into sections defined by ecological categories: croplands, including studies of sugar, coffee, bananas, and rubber; pasturelands, which focuses on cattle ranching; and forestlands, which examines timber extraction practices. Within each chapter he compares American involvement in several regions, providing a broad overview that exposes the reader to the results in varied political and social settings. For example, in two chapters on sugar he examines Hawaii, the Philippines, and Cuba, as well as taking a briefer look at the smaller Caribbean sugar producers.

Although Tucker focuses on environmental change, historians of technology will find much of interest here, as he pays close attention to the technical organization of production and extraction and to the scientific research that sometimes influenced technological decision making. While the crux of each study is the influence of the American market, Insatiable Appetite provides a deeper historical background on each area that helps readers unfamiliar with all the regions to situate American involvement in a larger history.

While the large number of case studies make it impossible for Tucker to go into great depth in each comparison (a characteristic more than compensated for by his excellent bibliography), his approach opens up rich analytic territory and resists the oversimplification that might result from focusing on only one region. He analyzes such factors as the varied natural sites, migrations, technologies of production and processing, the politics of land distribution, the pull of the American market, and labor organization. For example, Tucker concludes that the success of the labor movement in Hawaii, social stability, and planters' investments in irrigation infrastructure and a strong agricultural research program all contributed to making Hawaiian sugar plantations rather less destructive (if not completely harmless) than American-owned plantations in Cuba. In Cuba, planters increased output not through technologically driven intensification but by expanding the land under production and exploiting an impoverished and increasingly restive labor force. Arguably the greatest strength of this book is the comparative presentation of complex cases like these side by side.

Tucker provides another useful comparative dimension by breaking down the idea of American influence itself. For example, while banana plantations were frequently supervised by American or American-trained overseers, few Americans directly managed coffee production. American ideas about efficiency and improvement of agricultural land directly shaped the banana regions of Central America, while in the coffee regions U.S. influence was limited to reinforcing systems that most cheaply fed demand. Yet the social and ecological consequences of American influence were remarkably similar in banana and coffee regions. Presenting us with both cases, Tucker shows that "influence" itself was differentiated, and the intensiveness of American involvement was not the sole determining factor for ecological change. In each case, ecological consequences come from a complicated chain of events and circumstances, not reducible to technological, political, or ecological factors alone.

With his attention fixed on the sites of production, Tucker has little to say about how an "insatiable" American market came to be constructed. Given the frequency with which he...