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Reviewed by:
  • Estudios sobre historia y ambiente en America. II: Norteamérica, Sudamérica y el Pacífico
  • Myrna Santiago
Estudios sobre historia y ambiente en America. II: Norteamérica, Sudamérica y el Pacífico. Edited by Bernardo García Martínez and María del Rosario Prieto. Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2002. Pp. ix, 336. Illustrations. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $18.00 paper.

This exciting new collection is the second in a series edited by the same scholars. As the title explains, the umbrella that covers the essays selected is the study of history and the environment. As such, the pieces reflect a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interests, from geography to science to history. Likewise, the articles span a substantial period of time, from the pre-Columbian era to the mid-twentieth century, although a cohort of five essays focus on the nineteenth century. There is a wealth of available source material for that specific century across the continent, and that should yield more scholarship in the future. The geographical breath is also impressive, from the Great Lakes in the Canada-U.S. border to the Argentinean pampas. Mexico claims four articles, with Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Brazil represented as well. Of the small mainland Latin American countries, only Costa Rica appears, while the Caribbean is not included at all. Hopefully that means there will be a third volume dedicated to Central America and the numerous American island-nations in the future.

The topics the scholars address are similarly diverse. Five articles, for example, investigate climate in its various aspects—from oceanography to floods and droughts—and its affects on maritime travel between Acapulco and Manila in the seventeenth century, the transport of cattle to market in eighteenth-century Mexico, and agricultural production in the Andean region in the eighteenth century, among others. Three other articles trace changes in the landscape and environmental destruction or degradation through the nineteenth century: the logging of forests in Eastern Canada and the United States (1700-1900); the disappearance of Venezuelan rainforests through colonization and plantation agriculture (coffee, cacao) in the nineteenth century; and a fascinating study of Brazilian "predatory" agricultural practices at the end of the monarchy. What makes this last article stand out is that the author relates how a group of influential Brazilians documented and publicly decried the environmental damage their fellow well-heeled countrymen inflicted upon the nation, particularly in the coffee sector. As the author, José August Pádua, points out, it is important to acknowledge that environmental critiques of current practices in Brazil have local histories and are not "recent and imported" concerns brought from the outside (p. 295). As the interest in environmental history grows, undoubtedly more scholars will unearth similar histories of homegrown environmental critiques across the continent, thus enriching our collective knowledge and adding complexity to contemporary debates over ecology and development policy.

A collection such as this one reveals that despite difficulties, there is a treasure trove of sources to explore in reconstructing our environmental pasts. In addition to traditional sources such as travel accounts, trade journals, newspapers, and official documents, the scholars in this volume made use of aerial photography (to locate pre-Columbian settlements), computer simulations (to recreate weather patterns in [End Page 139] the Pacific Ocean), and records of private meteorological stations (to track rain patterns in Argentina), for instance. Many did a careful combing of well-thumbed official documents that had formerly been used largely for their political and economic content. Others, as well, applied current scientific notions and knowledge back in time, judiciously and critically crossing interdisciplinary boundaries. Both history and science can only benefit from such continued efforts.

The collaboration across institutions, national boundaries, and language translation that this volume attests to should be commended. Not only does the book give us a taste of the "boomlet" of scholarly activity taking place in Latin American environmental history, but also it gives great hope of future collaborative efforts across disciplinary and national boundaries. Nature, as these pieces and the nightly news amply demonstrate, knows no human boundaries. It would surely greatly benefit our collective understanding if humans, or homo academicus at least...

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