An Environmental History of Latin America (review)

Shawn Miller has done us a great favor. He has synthesized the Latin American environmental history literature from the past fifteen years, without leaving earlier works behind, to produce the first general text of its kind. The book serves as a primer for environmental history in the region from pre-Hispanic civilization to Cuba’s Special Period. It should find an audience in any classroom tackling the topic. Miller takes a fruitful approach: tracing the history of interaction between nature and culture, without detaching the later from the former, without resorting to binary oppositions nor reducing nature to “props and scenery” (p. 1). In the process he introduces the reader to a plethora of concepts: sustainability, progress, built environment, soil fertility, wilderness, degradation, ecotourism, conservation, environmentalism and more. Miller also maintains an informative comparative perspective with the United States, anticipating readers’ questions contrasting both areas, particularly in the chapters on environmental movements and environmental protection. His argument is that “culture changes nature; nature changes culture: it has been an active dialectic since the arrival of the human species” (p. 164).

Four factors shape the narrative through seven chapters: population, technology, and attitudes toward nature and consumption. Miller follows the history both chronologically and thematically. He analyzes pre-Columbian America, including the latest archaeological evidence about soil management and degradation, further debunking the myth of the ecological Indian which might no longer be current in the academy but still lingers in the popular imagination and, presumably, in the minds of undergraduates. Nature comes most alive in the second chapter, when Miller persuasively and to some slight degree humorously argues that those who benefited most from the Columbian Exchange were microbes. Here, and also in the section on natural disasters in the fourth chapter, he comes close to a philosophical argument about the utter indifference of nature vis-à-vis humanity, but pulls back. I foresee interesting classroom discussions on this topic alone. The colonial period goes beyond the devastation of peoples and environments we are familiar with to reach some intriguing conclusions: that in some cases, colonial monopolies actually protected nature in the long term. Miller can argue this point in retrospect, that is, given what occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As other historians have done, he concludes that the twentieth century was indeed different: humans shifted the power relation between them and their environment to become the determinant force. Weighing the evidence for improved human quality of life in a severely compromised ecology, Miller strikes a note of urgency at the end. Without wanting to finish with a declensionist narrative, he nevertheless points to the gravity of the situation. In a planet where fossil fuels permeate agriculture, will the future look like North Korea, with its starving majorities, or like Cuba, the first post-petroleum society experimenting with organics on a countrywide scale?

I only have two quarrels with the text. One is that the big countries tend to absorb most of the analysis—Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Peru. The Caribbean receives substantial discussion largely in relation to the epidemics and sugar production in the colonial period; the same is the case for Central America in reference to banana plantations since Independence. That is no fault of the author, however. His coverage reflects the historiography, which is far richer for the larger nations. The second point is that at times the generalizations about humans are too broad, echoing a deep ecology view. That approach obscures social power relations that also determine interactions of peoples in/and their environments. If we are to mitigate the mess we have, we ought to discern who made decisions; that is, we ought to debate the politics of it all. But one book cannot cover everything, although this one almost does.