Guillermo Castro Herrera[1]
I
In the course of one generation, Latin America has deeply changed in its realities as well as in the dominant perceptions about its own future, going from an exulted optimism about its possibilities for social and economic progress to a dark mood of pessimism and uncertainty. Today, many different sources coincide in considering that what started in 1982 as a simple economic crisis has become a virtual crisis of civilization, which synthesizes our societies' difficulties in successfully facing the new challenges derived from the ongoing transformations of the world as we once knew it. For our societies, the main issue at stake in this situation is the persisting combination of economic growth (although mediocre most of the time) with social deterioration and environmental degradation, in a context of exacerbation of what may be called a "plundering economy", whose roots go at least to the 16th century. Particularly, it can be said that the problems affecting the region are the consequence of the ways our societies have been organized to fulfill some specific functions within the really existing international system for the last one hundred and fifty years, at least. This kind of situation should be the most adequate for the development of a Latin American environmental history, conceived in the most essential as a discipline dealing with the transformations produced in the natural world by humans, through socially organized work, and with the impact of those transformations in human development. The fact is, however, that it has not been so, and that scarcity more than plenty is the problem to be faced here.
In order to face that problem, it is useful to remember that, as in any other field of interest for history, it is necessary to differentiate what is studied from those who study it. This means that the environmental history of Latin America should be considered a different object of study than Latin American environmental history, meaning by this the tendencies and problems of this study as done (or not) by Latin Americans. In the first instance, the works of Elinor Melville (1994) and Antonio Brailovsky and Dina Foguelman (1991) can be considered in the same analytical level, while in the second we are most interested in the works of Brailovsky and Foguelman as operating within their regional cultural tradition and interacting with their regional peers. From this last standpoint, it can be said that by the late ’70s a growing interest in the environmental problems of the region already existed in international development organizations as well as in some academic institutions of Latin America — mostly in the economic and social sciences — within which the usefulness of an analysis of those problems from a historical perspective began to be discussed.
In 1978, for instance, the Chilean geographer Pedro Cunill (1978, 10) pointed to the necessity of establishing a historical horizon for the analysis of environmental problems going back al least to the 16th century, and in 1980 Nicolo Gligo and Jorge Morello published their (brief) article “Notas para una historia ecológica de América Latina”, as part of the two volumes anthology Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo en América Latina, which synthesized the state of the debate on the issue in the region, edited by Gligo himself, a sociologist, and Osvaldo Sunkel, an economist, both working then for the United Nation’s Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLAC). In 1983, the publishing house Nueva Imagen, relevant at that time for the region’s social democratic left, published Luis Vitale´s Hacia una Historia del Ambiente en América Latina, which in an important measure was a reply to Sunkel and other social scientists linked with ECLAC with respect to the environmental impact of development in the region. In 1987, Ortiz Monasterio et al. published Tierra Profanad: Historia Ambiental de México, mostly a denunciation and manifesto against the plundering and destruction of that country’s natural resources since the European conquest. And then this promising start seems to choke off in a prolonged silence.
The ’90s witnessed a more sustained activity when a phase of renovation began under the renewed official interest on the problems of the environment associated with the preparations of the 1992 World Conference on Environment and Development, to be held in Rio de Janeiro. In 1990, the United Nations Environmental Program and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation published in Madrid Desarrollo y Medio Ambiente en América Latina: Una visión evolutiva, which attempted an historical analysis of the region’s problems to be considered at Rio 92, under the coordination of the Mexican environmentalist Fernando Tudela. That same year and with the same perspective but more in connection with liberation theology, Fernando Mires published in Costa Rica El Discurso de la Naturaleza: Ecología y política en América Latina,. In 1991, Elio Brailovsky, an economist, and Dina Foguelman, a biologist, both active in environmental issues since the ’70s, won an Editorial Sudamericana Award with Memoria Verde: Historia Ecológica de la Argentina, reedited many times since then in that country. In 1994, Guillermo Castro’s Naturaleza y Sociedad en la Historia de América Latina received the Casa de las Américas Award in Habana, Cuba. In 1996, the Colombian historian Alberto G. Florez Malagón published the theoretical essay “La historia ambiental: hacia una ubicación disciplinar”, where he attempted to define environmental history as a discipline, and to evaluate its possibilities for development in Colombia’s academy. In 1995 and 1999 Cunill once again published works of historical geography relevant for the environmental history of the region. And in 1999 Bernardo García and Alba González Jácome published in Mexico the anthology Estudios sobre Historia y Ambiente en América, containing 13 essays on the environmental history of Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and Paraguay — mostly from the 16th to the 19th centuries — from 16 authors, 13 of them Latin American including two from the editors.
The list could be longer and never exhaustive, of course, but the main point here consists in the dispersion and disconnection of the intellectual communities involved in it, in space as well as in time. This has to do not just with the fact of the size and diversity of the region, but mostly with its cultural traditions, as well as its social and political evolution. On the academic side, political, social, cultural and economic history are fields more or less connected within the region, as are other disciplines such as anthropology, archeology, geography, economics and sociology. Emerging fields, particularly if linked to areas of academic activity traditionally separated, such as the natural and the social sciences, face hard times in getting a place of their own in Latin American universities and research institutions. On the sociopolitical, environmentalism in the region has evolved under the heavy shadow of the nation-state and the international financial organizations, with very weak linkages with society and the public interest.[2]
Anyhow, some distinctive characteristics can be identified in the evolution of environmental history in Latin America in the ’80s and ’90s of the 20th century. In the absence of a significant internal cultural demand for a historical approach to the environmental problems of the region, environmental history has been developed by making use of the opportunities created “from the outside” by international institutions such as ECLAC and the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), which tend to emphasize the structural over the temporal in their analysis of the problems of the region, and to subordinate the treatment of the environmental issues to the necessities of economic policy. This could explain the successive moments of effervescence in the late ’70s, late ’80s and late ’90s, all near to international conferences on the environment, where a space opens for the participation of scholars interested in the historical dimension of environmental problems. This could also explain the absence of a labor of theoretical systematization and methodological development, as that done by Donald Worster in his well-known essay “Transformations of the Earth” (1990), this being the more notable in a region where theoretical and epistemological debate in the social sciences has a rich tradition.
Two main sources for an historical approach to our environmental problems seem probable in this context. The first one has to do with a tradition of denunciation and criticism of the plundering of the region’s natural resources by corporations from the North Atlantic world. This tradition, with deep roots in literature and investigative journalism, has a strong articulating component in works such as Eduardo Galeano’s Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina (1972). It is also closely related to the “Dependency Theory”, widely known in the economic and social sciences since the ’70s, which facilitates its external connections with North Atlantic currents of thought and research that paid important attention to environmental issues, such as those represented by authors like Immanuel Wallerstein, James O’Connor and Joan Martínez Alier. The second source has to do with the more traditional ways of organization of our educational institutions in the field of the Humanities. Here, a growing interest in the environment as an academic issue is slowly arising, initially sustained by historical geography and social and cultural history. Of particular importance here is the environmentally oriented re-exploration of authors considered classic in the formation of a Latin American culture between the 16th and 19th centuries, from Bernardino de Sahagún to José Martí and Euclides Da Cunha. It can be said of this second source that it is a more “specialized” one, with “outside” connections through the North Atlantic academic world and organizations such as the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, of the Organization of American States, which supported the edition of the García–González Jácome anthology already mentioned.
What is evident beyond any doubt is the extraordinary weakness of the Latin American institutional organization for an historical approach to the environmental problems of the region. This is probably the most important factor in to the trend, dominant today in the region, to structure the field of environmental history through the North Atlantic institutional system. In the first of the sources mentioned above, for instance, this becomes evident in the decisive influence of issues and debates characteristic of the “green” movements in North America and Western Europe, from the criticism on dams and the demand for special legislation to protect natural resources, to the promotion of recycling. In the second, more related to our academic institutions, this structuring from the outside makes itself felt in the influence in our academic institutions of the visions of our region constructed in the “other” America, including the premises, methods and values in use to organize the study of environmental history from “this” America.[3] In both cases, this tendency to structuring from the outside has already produced valuable results, as the abovementioned Mires’ El Discurso de la Naturaleza, UNEP’s Desarrollo y Medio Ambiente: Una vision evolutiva, and Lise Sedrez’s web site at Stanford. This trend also facilitates the linking of the labor being done in Latin America with that of scholars in Asia and Africa, which also communicates between themselves through the North Atlantic academic system, Environment & History being a good example of this. This could represent an invaluable resource in the struggle against the characteristic provincialism of ample sectors of cultural life in the underdeveloped world, and for the construction of the kind of global perspective indispensable to an adequate comprehension of the environmental problems of our time.
II
Even so, an external articulation emerging from our weaknesses, and not from our strengths, pose risks that have to be attended. Those risks include, for instance, an even greater delay in the construction of vision of our own; the indiscriminate importation of problems and alternatives constructed from the visions of others; a permanent fragmentation of the field of study, in space as well as in time, and the loss of true, useful contact between this field and others of doubtless importance — in themselves and for the environment — in which Latin America has already achieved results of great value, such as political, social, economic and cultural history.
In our academic culture, with its French and German roots, the notions of system and structure receive great attention, to the point that we are used to thinking of all phenomena as the expression of the relations underlying to them. To be objective, in this sense, means essentially to be logically loyal to the "objet d'étude" we previously defined as a "constellation of relations" that for cultural reasons happens to be meaningful for the researcher. In this approach, the "constellation" to be studied makes real sense only in its relations with the whole "galaxy" of knowledge pertinent to the field of study we are working in. Characteristic of this approach is also the tension between the construction of specific concepts and the necessity of producing open results, able to be incorporated into holistic "visions" of reality[4], as happens with the (most useful) concept of "environment" developed by Osvaldo Sunkel (1980), meaning "the natural biophysical ambit and its successive artificial transformations, as well as the spatial deployment of these". Starting from here, and conceiving environmental history as the research on the processes of artificial transformation of “the natural biophysical ambit” in successive styles of development in a given region, it is possible to distinguish three fields of relations, one interacting with another: those of nature, society and production, culture being inherent to all of them in the way the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci described it as "a vision of the world with an ethic system in accordance with its structure". Operating along time, environmental history emerges from that interaction as a part of culture, as does science too, which is not something difficult to conceive in our culture, where the old French division of the sciences in the fields of the "human" and of the "natural" still survives as a positive value.
This way of thinking offers suggesting points of contact with authors like Donald Worster, who conceive the historical process as the interaction of three basic dimensions of reality: nature; the use of it by humans through social and political structures; and culture, understood as systems of values and modes of perception with important ethical implications for social behavior toward the natural world. Each of these dimensions has its own legitimacy, but none of them is really understandable without the other two, and environmental history's field came to be defined at the point where they interact. Anyhow, it is evident that even an author like Worster tends to conceive environmental history from the perspective of a society that, although sharing a common planet with those of our region, has come to be very different from them. We can agree with the author of The Vulnerable Earth when he says "If each of us now has two countries to care about, we also have two histories to write, that of our own country and that of ‘planet Earth’. And it is high time we began asking what that second history has been, began pursuing not merely the history of this people or that living in isolation from all others... but the history of all peoples colliding and cooperating with one another on a shrinking island in space". But, even so, it must be said that countries do not relate directly with one another on a planetary scale, but through regional mid-levels that function as instances of central, peripheral and semiperipheral articulation in a world system.
This notion of a world system could be of great importance for the development of a planetary history. Thinking about the ways nature, culture and production interact over time in societies that share a common historical era, it is my impression that the differences resulting from this could be explained by refering to the regional "times" that coexist and give form to another, "global" time. It can be said, for instance, that within this common world system, the same processes that had made the societies of the developed world more and more homogeneous had made ours more and more heterogeneous and conflictive, both at the regional and the national level. In Latin America up to these days, non-capitalist visions and social practices coexist in conflict with — and do not merely precede — capitalism, in a way that allows Joan Martínez-Alier to talk about an "ecology of the poor", acting outside and against the market economy in many of these countries, and contributing one of the factors that makes relative at best the equilibrium between, market and culture.
As we see, it could be of great help for a planetary history to get nature, society, and production as analysis levels for environmental history, in explicit contact with the factor that made them "planetary" and open to comparison, that is, the way the world system effectively works. Alfred Crosby has already made very important contributions in this direction, and one can also find many other very valuable elements moving in this direction, but the possibility of applying some of the theoretical, methodological and historical concepts developed by environmental historians in the North Atlantic world to the definition of environmental history as a new field in Latin America demands the contrasting of experiences derived from realities that are quite different, since both societies belong to a global capitalist world system within which their differences exist and interact. So, we in Latin America need to re-create the other face of the world system, contributing to the debate on the differential effects brought on by the different ways our societies relate with those of other regions through the world-system we share.
In trying to face this need, a most valuable source is Jean Brunhes’ La Geographie Humaine (1910), where the author made use of the concept of raubwirtschaft or "plundering economy" to analyze what he called the "destructive use" of natural and human resources in a most intense manner in the case of the colonial countries of his time, which seems to be a fundamental axis along which capitalism developed in Latin America in the past, so defining a first specificity for the environmental history of this region. A second one has to do with the fact that the "raubwirtschaft" developed as a general mode of relation with nature under the hegemony — financial, technological and cultural, but not necessarily political —- of foreign capital, that is, subordinated to the needs, interests, demand and prices generated in the North Atlantic societies, particularly Great Britain from the 1870's through 1914[5], and the U.S. afterwards. To these two, a third should be added, in the political realm. Different from the case of Africa and most of Asia, Latin American nation-states were created and basically organized and defined as institutionalized systems of internal power relations in the first half of the 19th century. So, when North Atlantic capitalism began to give shape to the world market in the way we know it today, it found already organized political counterparts in most of our countries, mostly in the form of oligarchies of landlords eager to associate with foreign capital, offering abundant "undeveloped" land and resources and plenty of cheap labor in exchange for investment capital, technology, and access to the world market.[6]
Donald Worster's Nature's Economy is especially useful to understand this, and to identify a fourth specificity of the environmental history of Latin America, in the cultural realm. The process of creation of the basic conditions for the development of capitalism in this region — a market for land and a market for labor — happened through the violent expropriation, from around the 1850s, of very important non-capitalist sectors of our societies, mostly Indian and peasant communities, and of land held in non-capitalist forms of property by the Catholic Church. These non-capitalist producers, after being expropriated, were partially converted into free workers, and partially expelled to the worst lands, so that the better ones could be used for the development of monoculture of exportable goods. [7] This means that capitalism was developed in Latin America, from its very start, without the presence of medium and small-scale rural capitalist producers, and of the middle class intellectuals associated with the cultural and political needs of this social group, which in the North Atlantic societies provided so important services to the development of environmentalism.
From this also resulted a fifth difference, in the economic and technological realms, with important implications in the socio-cultural one: the re-emergence of newly excised societies, differentiated and articulated along historical fractures of nearly geological persistence, which were at the same time obscured for the most part behind the turmoil of the conflict between modernity and tradition or, what is the same, between "liberals" and "conservatives" within the oligarchic sector of those societies.[8] The subsequent coexistence within our societies of two different, virtually antagonistic, ways of relating with nature, and two different visions of the role of nature in the life of society, defines a sixth difference to consider in this analysis: in contrast with the conflictive interaction between "arcadian" and "imperial" visions of nature within the North Atlantic societies since the 18th century, as described in Nature's Economy, the "imperial" vision reigned alone in Latin America since the late 19th century and virtually up to today, vehemently and many times violently excluding from the realm of culture — as understood by the oligarchical elite — what in other circumstances might have evolved as alternative, legitimate visions of nature, elaborated upon the experiences of the non-capitalist sectors — native, mestizo, Afro and Iberian — of our societies.
This exclusion of the non-capitalist experience from the realm of the dominant culture had other important consequences for us. Our oligarchical elites appropriated for themselves the role of representatives of civilization in the region in a most peculiar way, perceiving themselves at the wrong side of Worster’s "yawning gulf between savagery and civilization", and destined to lead their societies along the path of progress, and to defend that path in a fiercely "competitive struggle for existence" against a nature defined as the environment of savagery. Considering this, it is tempting to say that there is a seventh specificity in the environmental history of Latin America, to be noted in the role that politics and its most extreme instrument, violence, has played and is playing in the continuous reorganization of nature and societies in my region. But this may be an even ampler phenomenon, whose roots are traceable long before the European conquest, in events like the Mesoamerican and Andean transitions from the coexistence (antagonistic or not) of agricultural communities, to the emergence of tributary empires. And in its very amplitude, this role of politics is probably common to the history of the relations of every human society with its natural world.[9]
Anyhow, although middle class intellectuals of the kind of Gilbert White and Henry David Thoreau have never existed in our region, that did not excluded the possibility of developing alternative visions of our own. In the creation of a non-oligarchical vision of Nature in Latin America, for instance, a very important part is due to the Cuban philosopher and revolutionary politician José Martí, who lived in exile in New York beginning in 1881, making occasional trips to Washington, D.C. and Florida, before leaving that country to fight and die for the independence of his country in 1895. The importance of Martí for an environmental history of Latin America has just started to be understood.[10]
Martí was an acute and well-informed observer of life and culture in the United States and Western Europe in those years, and was very familiar with the works of authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, Henry George, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Charles Darwin. Mostly inspired by his American sources and sympathies, he was probably the most important of the very few voices critical of the oligarchical vision of nature in Latin American newspapers of the late 19th century. He closely linked his own vision of nature, on the political side, with his struggle for self-determination for the Latin American nation-states. In his most important essay, Nuestra América, simultaneously published in New York and Mexico City in January 1891, "nature" becomes a political concept by saying, for instance, that there was not a real conflict between civilization and barbarity in our countries but, instead, another one between "false erudition, and nature". Largely legitimized today as a fundamental source for our cultural identity as a region, his ideas about nature, self-determination, and what the current environmental debate would call "sustainable development", offer a fertile ground for the collaboration between the cultures and societies of North and South America, without which the environmental problems of our Hemisphere will never be solved.
III
A first task for the creation of an environmental history in Latin America must be that of developing itself not in isolation, but in a simultaneous dialogue with both its counterparts in other places of the world and its own societies in the region. It will be only by working with the world, and not against it nor without, that we will be able to create a new kind of public awareness about our environmental problems, coming from the people and not as dependent on the approval and support of governments and international financial organizations as the one existing today. The regional specificities of that common ground of understanding will be of decisive importance in the design of the strategies for social action and cultural change necessary to guarantee the efficiency of political action, and the economic transformations that are indispensable to face the socio-environmental crisis that is affecting the Hemisphere as part of the world, in a moment in which, as never before, our destiny coincides with that of the rest of our species.
This is specially so since, at the beginning of the 21st. century, the presence of ecology and the environment in Latin America’s cultural and political life reproduces, once again, the results of the already old difficulties known by our societies in integrating themselves. From that results a dominant vision of nature in our societies that proclaims as "natural", not historical, the reduction of nature to the condition of a set of resources to be “managed” as efficiently as possible, under the rule of market demands. This being so, a second task for a Latin American environmental history must be that of questioning that "natural" image, making clear how every re-organization of nature for human purposes comes hand in hand with a reorganization of human society, so making it evident that our current environmental problems will be prolonged in the future unless the mechanisms of “raubwirtschaft” operating in the region since the 16th century are finally dismantled. The questioning of the imperial vision from within our societies, by revaluating the contemporary environmental significance of authors such as Martí and the contributions of what Joan Martínez Alier calls “the ecology of the poor”, past and present, in connection with the emerging environmental awareness and struggles in the region, are key areas for this.
These tasks, on the other hand, will only have success if they are done with a clear understanding of their relation with the problems of a global order posed by the current environmental crisis. At this wider level, a Latin American environmental history can make a significant contribution, for instance, to the debate on the concept of sustainable development, which is today the most important space at our disposition for the creation of a new North-South consensus on the definition of the means necessary to face the global deterioration of the biosphere. This should facilitate the understanding of the historical character of the debate itself. That could be one of the most effective ways for pushing it beyond its current tendency to face the problem as one of more efficient management of natural resources, rather than as one of a better comprehension of the origin and rationality of the ways of relation with the natural world that sustain the model for economic growth within which our region is seen mostly as an "economic frontier" with unlimited resources.
In a debate so historicized, a Latin American environmental history should have to face also the task of characterizing the differences between our environmentalisms and those of the North Atlantic societies, to facilitate the identification of new possibilities for the participation of our region in the search for mechanisms of global cooperation, and contributing to overcome the current Hemispheric conflicts that tend to further aggravate the crisis we share. As we have seen, there are still frontiers to be explored in the culture of Latin America, which may offer us visions where a far-sighted use of natural resources coexists in narrow association with the necessity of incorporating our social majorities to the solution of their own problems, particularly those of poverty and social exclusion. These constitute a still unknown reserve of elements necessary to facilitate the dialogue among us in Latin America, and with others who are facing problems and preoccupations of the same kind in their own regions. So, incorporating that cultural reserve to the current cultural debate has become a new task — as urgent as it is fascinating — that awaits the contributions of a wide array of disciplines in the Human and the Natural Sciences in my region.
All this means that a Latin American environmental history must still make much more to continue the pioneer efforts of authors like Nicolo Gligo y Jorge Morello, among us, and Alfred Crosby and Richard Grove, in the North Atlantic world, among many others, in the search for new ways of mutual understanding and collaboration between the Natural and the Human sciences, in order to combine them in a new kind of intellectual enterprise able to point to an even wider problem, and to a richer promise. The scholars from Latin America are not alone in their loss of that capacity for an ecumenical way of learning and thinking, characteristic in other times of men like Martí and Darwin. But the new kind of challenges we are facing today is rapidly creating a new circumstance, where we need more than ever before to start working together with those who may facilitate the access to what is still for us that hidden face of the ecological culture of the North, that affirms the necessity of confronting the fact that "despite so much rhetoric on the contrary, one cannot have life both ways — cannot maximize wealth and empire and maximize democracy and freedom too. And unwillingness to acknowledge that fact has been a characteristic American as well as western trait, one deriving from the innocence and dreaminess of youth. Now it can no longer be evaded. A clear-minded choice has to be made".[11]
So defined, this joint work would facilitate very much the identification of the obstacles and opportunities of a political and cultural international cooperation which could include the affected societies, and not just their governments. What it is about, in brief, is to make — and not just to write — a planetary history able to go beyond the tendency, currently dominant, of considering the biosphere as a mere context for the development of economical and political relations among human societies. As long as we are able to do what is within our reach and constitute the most essential of our duties — that is, acting as people of culture committed to the survival and the well-being of our societies — as the Latin Americans we are, we will attend in time to the warning made by Simón Bolívar in the context of another crisis, also decisive in our history: "Crime works under the shadows of ignorance". And there is no doubt that, already knowing at least how much is to be done, not to do it will be the greatest possible crime of our time.
Panamá, febrero–abril de 2001
References
Brailovsky, Antonio E., and Foguelman, Dina, 1997 (1991): Memoria Verde: Historia ecológica de la Argentina. Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires.
Brunhes, Jean, 1955: Geografía Humana. Editorial Juventud, Barcelona. Edición abreviada por Mme. M. Jean-Brunhes Delamarre y Pierre Deffontaines.
Castro, Guillermo, 1995: Los Trabajos de Ajuste y Combate: Naturaleza y sociedad en la historia de América Latina. Premio Casa de Las Américas 1994, CASA/Colcultura, Bogotá/ La Habana, 1995.
Cunill Grau, Pedro, 1999: “La geohistoria”, en Carmagnani, Marcello; Hernández Chávez, Alicia y Romano, Ruggiero (Coordinadores): Para una Historia de América I: Las estructuras. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Fideicomiso Historia de las Américas, México.
-- 1996 (1995): Las Transformaciones del Espacio Geohistórico Latinoamericano, 1930–1990. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Fideicomiso Historia de las Américas, México.
-- 1978: “Variables geohistóricas sociales en los procesos de degradación del uso rural de la tierra en América Andina”. TERRA, número 3, Caracas, apud Vitale (1983, 72).
Florez Malagón, Alberto G., 1997: “La historia ambiental: hacia una definición disciplinar”. Ambiente y Desarrollo, Año 4, No. 6 – 7, mayo de 1996 – diciembre de 1997, Instituto de Estudios Ambientales, Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia.
Galeano, Eduardo, 1992 (1972): Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina. Siglo XXI, México.
García Martínez, Bernardo y González Jácome, Alba (Compiladores), 1999: Estudios sobre Historia y Ambiente en América, I: Argentina, Bolivia, México, Paraguay. Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia / El Colegio de México, México, D.F.
Gligo, Nicolo, y Morello, Jorge, 1980: "Notas sobre la historia ecológica de América Latina", en Estilos de Desarrollo y Medio Ambiente en América Latina, selección de O. Sunkel y N. Gligo, Fondo de Cultura Económica, El Trimestre Económico, No. 36, 2 t., México.
Martí, José, 1975: Obras Completas. Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana.
Melville, Elinor G.K., 1999 (1994): Plaga de Ovejas: Consecuencias ambientales de la conquista de México. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México.
Mires, Fernando, 1990: El Discurso de la Naturaleza: Ecología y política en América Latina. Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, San José, Costa Rica.
Ortiz Monasterio, Fernando; Fernández, Isabel; Castillo, Alicia; Ortiz Monasterio, José y Alfonso Bulle Goyri, 1987: Tierra Profanada: Historia Ambiental de México. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Secretaría de Desarrollo Urbano y Ecología.
Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Medio Ambiente (PNUMA), Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional (AECI); Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Urbanismo (MOPU), 1990: Desarrollo y Medio Ambiente en América Latina: Una visión evolutiva. Madrid, Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Urbanismo.
Sedrez, Lise (ed.): Latin America Environmental History, www.stanford.edu/group/LAEH.
Vitale, Luis, 1983: Hacia una Historia del Ambiente en América Latina: De las culturas aborígenes a la crisis ecológica actual. Nueva Sociedad / Editorial Nueva Imagen, México, D.F.
Worster, Donald, 1992a: Nature's Economy: A history of ecological ideas. Cambridge University Press.
-- 1992b: Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West. Oxford University Press, New York Oxford.
-- 1990: "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History", in Journal of American History, March.
-- 1989: "The vulnerable Earth: toward a planetary history", in Worster, Donald (ed.), The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on modern environmental history. Cambridge University Press.
[1]Panamá, 1950. B.A. in Spanish-American Literature, Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, 1973. M.A. in Latin American Studies, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, UNAM, Mexico, 1979. Ph.D. in Latin American Studies, Faculty of Philosophy, UNAM, Mexico, 1992-1993.This paper could not had been possible without the kind help of Dr. Richard Warren.
[4] So, environmental history’s "constellation" should be found within a "galaxy" composed by fields of study like: 1. A characteristic form of organization of the human beings in order to produce and reproduce their own existence, which we usually call "society"; 2. A characteristic form of organization of the relations of production, exchange and consumption, internal and external to that society, which we usually call "economy"; 3. A peculiar form of institutionalization of the power relations arising from those social and economic forms of organization, which we usually call the "State"; 4. A characteristic form of exercising that power -or of struggling in order to achieve it- which we usually call "politics", and finally: 5. A characteristic form of organization and development of the relations between that society and its natural ambit, from which results -in this case and for this end-, what we use to call "the environment".
[5] And Germany and France in more specific cases, like the initial stages of the development of coffee monoculture in Guatemala, and the first attempt to build a transoceanic canal in Panama, in the 1880's.
[7] And the process has continued without interruption for the past hundred years, if the Argentinean historian Sergio Bagú is right in what he observes in his essay "Población, recursos naturales y neoarcaísmo organizativo en la economía latinoamericana del siglo XX". En: Florescano, Enrique (Compilador): Ensayos sobre el desarrollo económico de México y América Latina. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, 1a. reimpresión, 1987.
[10] In fact, even in 1975 most of his ideas on environmental issues were simply classified as "miscellaneous articles" in the fine Cuban edition of his complete works. Martí, José: Obras Completas, 27 tomos, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1975.
[11] Worster, Donald: Rivers of Empire, cit., p. 334.