In this Book
- American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science
- Book
- 2017
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- Series: Why read?
summary
Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research. From these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American "tropical biologists" developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity.
Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.
Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Illustrations, Maps, and Table
- pp. vii-viii
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xii
- Abbreviations in the Text
- pp. xiii-xiv
- Chapter Two: Making Biology Tropical
- pp. 58-96
- Chapter Three: Jungle Island
- pp. 97-130
- Chapter Four: The Question of Diversity
- pp. 131-171
- Chapter Five: A Global Resource
- pp. 172-205
- Epilogue: Postcolonial Ecology
- pp. 206-218
- Bibliography
- pp. 267-310
Additional Information
ISBN
9781469635620
Related ISBN(s)
9781469635590, 9781469635606, 9781469635613, 9798890852557
MARC Record
OCLC
1005353678
Pages
336
Launched on MUSE
2018-01-03
Language
English
Open Access
No