A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America

John Soluri, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Pádua, eds. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2018. xi and 297 pp., index, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography. $120.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-78533-390-3), $34.95 electronic (ISBN 978-1-78533-391-0).

During the past twenty years, Latin American environmental history has matured as an interdisciplinary field that includes contributions by geographers, historians, and archaeologists, among others. Recent research has extended to nonhuman actors and urban themes. At the same time, new approaches are enlivening old debates such as the very category of Latin America as an arena of human and environmental interactions.

A Living Past chronicles environmental change in Latin America as related to broader political, economic, and social processes from the nineteenth century to the present. The book comprises eleven chapters, plus an introduction and an epilogue. The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Munich) supported the initial efforts that led to this publication. The genesis of this collective effort involving fifteen authors from seven countries, however, began at the Society of Latin American and Caribbean Environmental History conferences over the past decade and a half.

The introduction proposes four features to explain the distinctiveness of Latin America in environmental history scholarship. The chapters fall into two broad categories. Several chapters have national (Mexico and Brazil) or regional (Caribbean, the Andes, the Amazon) environmental orientation. In addition, new territorial formations are examined, including urban emergence and the creation of national parks. The second group of chapters shares thematic concerns regarding the history of specific actors, materials, and knowledges translated as resources into commodity chains. Two chapters follow the trajectories of maize, potatoes, beans, coffee, and cattle, exploring the exchanges and adaptations that have regularized their consumption. Chapter 9 discusses mineral and hydrocarbon extraction affected by state-led interventions and later by the neoliberal turn. Chapter 10 explores the role of the environmental sciences in facilitating the control of nature. The book closes with John McNeill's epilogue pointing to additional particularities of Latin American environmental history and future research topics.

All the chapters address to some degree most of the Latin American and Caribbean countries; however, some cases are more frequently discussed than others, as happens with Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Other countries are discussed to a lesser extent, such as Paraguay and Uruguay. The emphasis on the countries closer to the Equator sustains an interpretation where tropicality is pivotal to understanding Latin America. The biodiversity between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, which has led the United Nations to recognize six countries in the continent as megadiverse, has inspired colonial and republican dreams of richness and abundance. This exuberant nature, depicted as unruly and dangerous, has also shaped projections of the peoples that inhabit these lands as primitive. The material and cultural dimensions of tropicality have particular relevance to explaining the histories of Central American, Caribbean, and Andean-Amazonian nations.

Tropicality as a biogeographical and cultural construct explains some cases; nevertheless, its scope does not reach the austral regions of the continent. Here another feature provides a different angle to study a broader set of cases. The impress of colonial legacies is discussed in several chapters as the backbone with which nation-states developed specific ways to turn nature into manageable resources. The Spanish Empire built its economy on the minerals extracted from the Viceroyalties of New Spain, New Granada, and Peru. As the editors note, this activity transformed entire regions with migration, biomass combustion, and pollution as the pursuit of gold and silver increased across three centuries of colonial rule. Paradoxically, at the same time, the continent experienced an estimated 68 percent forest recovery due to the decimation of the native population. Latin America's energy regime was based on biomass, making it the only region in the world not to transition to a coal-based energy system before adopting hydropower in the twentieth century, what McNeill terms an “eccentricity.”

The colonial rule also reorganized territories and fixed new urban places that would turn into national capitals after independence. Overall, the relevance of colonialism to explain modern Latin American environmental history is paramount, yet it inevitably raises the question of whether other imprints of the past are equally far reaching. Of particular pertinence is the pre-Columbian cultural heritage that included plant and animal domestication and urban genesis. If we follow McNeill's suggestion in the epilogue, even the deep past should be accounted as relevant. How deep do we need to go to explain modern human–environment relations in Latin America? As far as necessary seems to be a likely answer that emerges from A Living Past.

Together with tropicality and the colonial legacy, the birth of nation-states is introduced as the third feature that characterizes Latin American environmental history. This process is distinctive when comparted with other wars of independence across the world, because of its precocity. By 1830, most of the Latin American nations had obtained their independence, giving them an early chance to exercise sovereignty claims and establish borders. As stated in the introduction, “the environment became national patrimony, not imperial plunder as was the case throughout most of Africa and Asia” (p. 7). Accordingly, one of the best explored practices in the book is the nationalization of nature. The authors excel in depicting a plural yet organized overarching endeavor across the continent to control and commodify nature. Examples include the enterprise of scientific commissions to take inventory of nature's abundance in national lands, the projection of narratives of savagery and unruliness to justify civilizing enterprises in threatening jungles, the nationalization of strategic resources like oil and mining, the interest to delimit the borders through the creation of national parks, or the adoption of new identity markers through emerging commodities.

A final feature pointed out by the editors is the transoceanic trade and ecological exchange, referring not only to the flow of commodities and products, like the well-known cases of minerals and grains exported since colonial times, but also to the different biota that settled in the continent and profoundly transformed environment and society. This process includes the flow of people throughout colonial and republican times, including Iberian colonizers, African slaves, and Chinese and Japanese migrants. Also, new species transformed diverse regions of the continent, including those commodities produced and sold on the world market like bananas, coffee, sugarcane, sheep, and cattle, and also the “hitchhiking biota” like rats, weeds, and the pathogens that crossed the ocean. Some of these elements quickly became part of the emerging national identities, useful both materially and symbolically to the relatively young nation-states. As Chapter 8 explains for the case of cattle, “those who handled cattle on a regular basis whether vaqueiro, gaucho, huaso or llanero, became central figures to the livestock industry, and sometimes to national culture” (p. 192). The authors also demonstrate how the Columbian exchange, first elaborated by Crosby (1972), was not necessarily symmetrical.

Although the book neatly illustrates the Columbian exchange, it also offers examples of intraregional exchange. For example, silver mining in Potosí during the colonial period was aided by mercury and migrant flows from the central Andes. Internal demand was also a crucial driver behind the expansion of new crops, as is the case of beans in Brazil, discussed in Chapter 7. Palacio (2012) more explicitly called for the meeting between environmental history and political ecology through the interface of the frontier to elucidate how north–south relations within the continent have also propelled dramatic eco-political changes. A Living Past underscores the importance of the United States as a market force determinant in land-use change in the south; for example, pointing to the “hamburger connection” (Myers 1981) to explain the influence of the international demand for meat in the deforestation of Central and South America. A Living Past depicts a Latin America in the making. Nature, in this exploration, is never a free gift nor an external variable separate from political and economic processes. It is intimately situated in the exploration, dissection, transformation, and interiorization of the modern nation-states.

ORCiD

Gisselle Vila Benites https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9238-6478