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Book Review
| Estudios sobre Historia y Ambiente en América II: Norteamérica, Sudamérica y el Pacífico. [Studies of History and Environment in America II: North America, South America, and the Pacific.] Edited by Bernardo Martínez García and María del Rosario Prieto. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 2002. ix + 336 pp. Illustrations, notes, index.
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| The study of Latin American environmental history has flourished in the past few years. More and more panels at conferences and journal articles in this field are appearing than ever before. Two international conferences (in Chile in 2003, and in Cuba in 2004) dealt specifically with the topic. Thus, a new series translated as Studies in History and Environment in the Americas fits nicely into this developing field and reflects the diversity of research within it. |
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According to the publishers, the goal is to "unite various studies that have in common their interest in discovering and understanding the connections between human history and nature" (p. 337). While the first book in the series dealt with Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Mexico, the second, under review here, expands on the region and offers a useful theoretical essay on "Space, Time, Environment, and Scale." Surprisingly, five essays in this second volume appeared in the first. The reason for this editing decision is unclear. The common theme among the contributions is change over time—climate, landscape, ecosystem, and agricultural changes, and their effects on the human history of the region. The strength of this approach is in the diversity of research, as the authors come from backgrounds in history, geography, physical sciences, and anthropology—an interdisciplinarity that truly speaks to what environmental history is. |
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The opening four chapters discuss climatic changes: The first, by Ricardo García Herrera, et al., entitled "The Manila Galleon and the Climate of the Pacific Ocean during the Seventeenth Century," the second, by Jorge Amador, on climatic variability in twentieth-century Costa Rica, the third, by María del Rosario Prieto and Roberto Herrera, on climate and economy in late colonial Alto, Peru, and the fourth by Hortensia Castro on the environmental history of droughts and flooding in northern Argentina. |
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The next two chapters deal with ecosystem histories. Chapter 5, by Juan Carlos Garavaglia, studies the pampas, and Chapter 6, by Graeme Wynn, considers the environmental history of North America's northeastern pine forests. Following those are three essays on landscape change: Pedro Cunill Grau's on environmental degradation resulting from pioneer movements and political upheaval in Venezuela, Alfred Siemen's analysis of landscape interpretation of Los Tuxtlas on Mexico's Gulf Coast, and Alba González Jácome's on the "landscapes of the past" in Tlaxcala, Mexico. And finally, three chapters deal with agricultural change and their ramifications: Stuart McCook's essay "Liberal Epidemics: Agriculture, Environment, and Globalization in Ecuador (1790–1930)," Bernardo García Martínez's on cattle trails and dessicated pastures in colonial New Spain, and José Pádua's on agriculture and environmental change during the last decades of the Brazilian monarchy. This thematic organization of the book works well, even if chronologically it seems to skip around too freely. The book deals primarily with the colonial and early national eras; hopefully future volumes in the series will look at such twentieth-century issues as conservation, tourism, and the changes caused by neoliberal economic policies in an increasingly globalized economy. |
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As in all edited collections, each essay has its own strengths and weaknesses, but each is well researched and written. Some have useful illustrations and maps. The book is in Spanish, which will go far in helping to spread the study of environmental history in the Hispanic world but which will significantly limit its use elsewhere. Students and scholars of Latin American environmental history anywhere, however, will find this book to be a valuable resource for their collections and classes. |
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Reviewed by Sterling Evans, Humboldt State University. Evans's interests are in conservation and agricultural history of Latin America and the North American West. He is the author of The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica (Texas, 1999), and the forthcoming Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico, the United States, and Canada, 1890–1950. |
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