The environmental history of Latin America has become the focus of a number of scholars, starting in the later years of the twentieth century. But historians earlier than that recognized that the environment played a major role in the region's history. Environmental history more generally has developed as a specialized, yet broad and diverse field. According to one assessment of the field, scholars have mainly been concerned with "three categories of research: colonialism, capitalism, and conservation" and the analysis focuses on narratives of environmental decline.Carey Mark. "Latin American Environmental History: Current Trends, Interdisciplinary Insights, and Future Directions." Environmental History, April 2009, Vol. 14, No. 2 (APRIL 2009), p. 221 There are several currents within the field. One examines humans within particular ecosystems; another concerns humans’ cultural relationship with nature; and environmental politics and policy.
General topics that scholars examine are forestry and deforestation; rural landscapes, especially agro-export industries and ranching; conservation of the environment through protected zones, such as parks and preserves; water issues including irrigation, drought, flooding and its control through dams, urban water supply, use, and waste water. The field often classifies research by geographically, temporally, and thematically.McNeill, J.R. and Erin Stewart Mauldin, eds. A Companion to Global Environmental History. Wiley-Blackwell 2015.
Much of the environmental history of Latin America focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but there is a growing body of research on the first three centuries (1500-1800) of European impact.Soluri, John, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Pádua, "Finding the 'Latin American' in Latin American Environmental History" in A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America, eds. Soluri, John, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Pádua. New York: Berghahn 2019, pp. 1-22. As the field established itself as a more defined academic pursuit, the journal Environmental History was founded in 1996, as a joint venture of the Forest History Society and the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). The Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History (SOLCHA) formed in 2004.Funes Monzote, Reinaldo. "The Latin American and Caribbean Society of Environmental History." Global Environment 1 (2008): 244–9. Standard reference works for Latin American now include a section on environmental history.Walkild, Emily. "Environment and Environmentalism" in A Companion to Mexican History and Culture. Wiley-Blackwell 2011, pp. 518-537.Sedrez, Lise. "Environmental History of Modern Latin America" in A Companion to Latin American History, ed. Thomas H. Holloway. Wiley-Blackwell 2011, pp. 443-460.
Early scholarship Works by geographers and other scholars began focusing on humans and the environmental context, especially Carl O. Sauer at University of California, Berkeley.Kent Mathewson and Martin S. Kenzer, eds. Culture, Land, and Legacy: Perspectives on Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School of Geography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Geoscience Publications 2003.Sauer, Carl O. The Early Spanish Main, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1966 Other early scholars examining humans and nature interactions, such as William Denevan, Julian Steward, Eric Wolf, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In terms of impact, however, Alfred W. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange (1972) was a major work, one of the first to deal with profound environmental changes touched off by European settlement in the New World. It examines a range of impacts of Europeans on Latin America, especially during the period of European Contact, including epidemic disease and the importation of Old World animals and plants and the development of large-scale ranching and agriculture.
Crosby further developed the argument in Ecological Imperialism (2004).Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Archeologists such as Richard MacNeish conducted fieldwork uncovering the origins of agriculture in Mesoamerica and in the Andes, giving a long timeline for the human-wrought changes in the environment before the arrival of the Europeans.MacNeish, Richard S. "The origins of New World civilization." Scientific American 211.5 (1964): 29-37. William Denevan specifically argued against the "pristine myth" of lack of human impact on the environment prior to 1492.Denevan, William, "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 369-385
Indigenous land use before European contact Environmental historians have been criticized for what is called “recentism,” that is examining twentieth-century environmental issues.Sluyter, Andrew. "Recentism in environmental history on Latin America." Environmental History 10(1) January 2005:91-93 Works by archeologists and historians focusing on the colonial era in Latin America (1492-1825), which were not called “environmental history” at the time, are a rejoinder to that criticism. Human activity shaped the environment of Latin America long before the arrival of Europeans in the late 1400s. In central Mexico and the highland Andes, settled indigenous civilizations were created because indigenous groups could produce agricultural surpluses of native carbohydrates, maize and potatoes. These surpluses allowed for social differentiation and hierarchy, large settlements with monumental architecture, and political states that could demand labor and tribute from growing populations. There was significant altering of the natural landscape in order to create more arable and productive land. Agriculture in Mesoamerica (the region of central and southern Mexico and Central America), was characterized by intensive agricultural methods to boost their food production and give them a competitive advantage over less skillful peoples.Dunning, N.P., Luzzadder-Beach, S., Beach, T., Jones, J.G., Scarborough, B., Culbert, T.P., 2002. "Arising from the Bajos: the evolution of a Neotropical landscape and the rise of Maya civilization." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92,267–283. These intensive agricultural methods included canals, terracing, raised fields, ridged fields, chinampas, the use of human feces as fertilizer, seasonal swamps or bajos, using muck from the bajos to create fertile fields, dikes, dams, irrigation, water reservoirs, several types of water storage systems, hydraulic systems, swamp reclamation, swidden systems, and other agricultural techniques that have not yet been fully understood.Demarest, Arthur, Ancient Maya: the rise and fall of a rainforest civilization. Vol. 3. Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 130–147Sabloff, Jeremy A. The new archaeology and the ancient Maya. Henry Holt and Company, 1994, pp. 81–84, 139–140 Maize was the center of the indigenous diet.
Environmental factors are now considered crucial in the “collapse” when monumental architecture ceased to be erected in the southern Maya region. Deforestation was caused by human activity. Drought might have been a factor arising from the deforestation.Demarest, Arthur. Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004.Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking 2005, pp. 157-177. By the time Spaniards began exploring Central America in the early sixteenth century, there were 600 years of jungle growth and only ruins of the monumental structures, but the human populations persisted in smaller numbers and scattered settlements, practicing subsistence agriculture. These decreased Maya populations proved more resistant to European conquest and consolidation than their conquest of the Aztec Empire.
The Maya people did not disappear, but adapted often more sustainably to nature. In the Andes, terracing of steep hillsides brought land into cultivation, with potatoes being the main source of carbohydrates. Llamas and alpacas were domesticated. While llamas could carry burdens of up to 50 kilos, they were not harnessed for agricultural work. Both were sources of dietary protein. In areas not suitable to sedentary agriculture, there were usually small bands of people, often extended kin groups, who pursued hunting and gathering on a gendered basis. There were no domesticated large animals suitable for domestication that could be used as beasts of burden or transportation. When the Spaniards introduced horses in desert and semiarid regions, they were acquired by many indigenous groups, transforming their ways of life.
Environmental transformations, ca. 1500-1825 Indigenous peoples had shaped the environment and utilized its resources, but Europeans even more significantly changed the environment with large-scale resource extraction, especially mining, as well as the transformation of agriculture to cultivation of crops to feed urban populations and the introduction of livestock, used for food, leather, wool, and tallow. Deforestation increased at a rapid pace and water resources were appropriated by Europeans.
Disease and demographic collapse
With the deliberate importation of Old World plants and animals and the unintentional spread of diseases brought by the Europeans (smallpox, measles, and others) changed the natural environment in many parts of Latin America. European diseases devastated indigenous populations. The demographic catastrophe of natives on islands first settled by the Europeans prompted their exploration of others in the Caribbean and slave raiding, with consequences for the overall demography of the Caribbean. Then as Europeans explored and settled further, the demographic catastrophe was further replicated in the sixteenth century.
Recently, scientists have been considering whether the population loss had an impact on carbon dioxide levels, which might well have led to the "Little Ice Age."/ “America colonisation ‘cooled Earth's climate” 31 January 2019 accessed 24 August 2020
Commodities and the environment in the early colonial era
Placer mining of gold in the Caribbean did not have a major impact on the natural environment, but it did have a devastating impact on the indigenous populations. Europeans sought indigenous labor for placer mining to the exclusion of other activities, including tending crops. The Europeans initiated slave raiding elsewhere in the Caribbean. Venezuela and the islands of Cubagua and Margarita Island was found to have rich deposits of pearl oysters. Natives of the region had long harvested them, and traded them with Europeans. The Europeans’ demand for pearls increased and the careful and selective indigenous methods gave way to Spaniards’ wholesale destruction of the oyster beds with dredges. The Spanish crown intervened to try to prevent further destruction, banning dredges and attempting to keep the oyster fisheries sustainable. Unknown to them was the environmental conditions that pearl oysters needed for produce their treasure – proper salinity and temperature of the water and the optimal type of sea bottom. But the unsophisticated harvesting of pearls clearly destroyed the oyster beds’ sustainability.Warsh, Molly A. "Political Ecology in the Early Spanish Caribbean." The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 4 (October 2014), pp. 517-548