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Book Review
| An Environmental History of Latin America. By Shawn William Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. New Approaches to the Americas series. xiii + 257 pp. Maps, photographs, illustrations, bibliography, and index. Paper $22.99
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| This concise text, based mostly on recent secondary materials (books, book chapters, journal articles, and dissertations), is slated to become the reference on the matter for some time. It is thoughtfully crafted around well-chosen topics and focused on just enough societies/locations. It is dense, informative, engaging, and reads easily. |
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On pages 4–7, Miller explains his analytical framework. He examines the "sustainability" of many societies living in current Latin American lands along four dimensions—"population, technology, attitudes towards nature and attitudes towards consumption." This approach allows the effective examination of society-nature interactions. |
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The first three chapters deliver the thrust of Miller's arguments. The remaining four simply cannot surpass their impact. Chronologically, this means that the strongest points are made about precolonial and early to mid-colonial times. Miller establishes first that human societies in America had long made the "new" world (to European eyes) into quite an old and worn one. He then shows how European occupation of American lands amounted to two centuries or more of a grim continental depopulation. Death rates and displacement among natives soared (due to wars, diseases, slavery, religious conversion), while the accretion of Europeans was at most meager. In some areas only the introduction of African slaves made overall population figures grow at all, although not necessarily to precontact levels (p. 55). The narrative about this calamity and its consequences for the partial recovery of natural landscapes is compelling, even for well-informed readers. |
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