BEFORE COLUMBUS, AMERICA WAS A LAND of dense ancient forests covering coast and moun- tain alike, which included thousands of plant and animal species unknown today. Until Europeans began to colo- nize the world, no permanent physical change affecting the whole earth had occurred in half a billion years. The spread of European technology and ideology over the past 500 years is comparable, as Alfred W. Crosby, Jr. points out in this report, to an increase in the influx of cosmic rays or the raising of whole new chains of Andes and Himalayas. Practically nothing remains the same. The second of our series marking the five-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Europeans in this hemisphere traces the ways in which such vast changes occurred. The natural history of Latin America, like its political history, is a story of conquest and foreign domination. Columbus and those who followed him did not come alone. They brought with them plants, animals and bacte- ria, which faced few or no natural predators and propa- gated with an amazing rapidity. Within fifty years, Crosby explains, the process of wiping out indigenous life forms — beginning with native peoples but hardly ending there– was irreversible. European pigs, cows and horses literally trampled American species out of existence. European crops, and the sugar, coffee and bananas which Europeans introduced, drove native plants onto marginal lands, where they fought and lost the battle with European weeds. The “Europeanization” of American flora and fauna was not the unintended by-product of contact between the Old World and the New. It was a central objective of the Conquest: to provide the conquistadors with the foods and beasts of burden to which they were accustomed; to weaken the resistance of native peoples; and most impor- tantly, to supply Europe with the goods it coveted. The plantation was the organized form this process took: land was cleared, a foreign species introduced where natural predators did not exist, all species not conducive to the monocrop economy were persecuted and often exterminated. To produce sugar, the elaborate coastal plain ecosystems of the Caribbean islands and Brazil were devastated by deforestation and irrigation. To grow cof- fee, the piedmont forests of Colombia, Venezuela, Cen- tral America, the Caribbean islands, and the plateau of Slo Paulo were razed and “reforested.” Cattle grazing– even in the great grasslands of northern Mexico and central North America, the South American pampa and the Venezuelan Ilanos-had a similarly drastic effect. After World War II, the coastal forests of Central America VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1991) 5 were demolished to make way for cotton. In their articles on sugar, coffee and cotton respec- tively, Sidney W. Mintz, William Roseberry and Daniel Faber demonstrate that the plantation economy was eco- logically sustainable only through constant expansion. As soils were rapidly exhausted and water resources con- taminated, ever more forest was felled, leaving behind an environment that remains impoverished to this day. N MEXICO, PERU, BOLIVIA AND LATER IN BRA- zil, Chile and elsewhere, mining was the major cause of environmental change. Elizabeth Dore writes of forests cut to provide timber for shafts and pasture for draft animals. The ancient irrigation networks and terraced fields that once held precious topsoil in place were aban- doned, as entire native communities vanished into the death camps the mines had become or into a long exodus from that fate. The widespread use of mercury after 1570 saturated the rivers and poisoned the food chain and the soil. By early this century, toxic emissions from smelters and refineries were leaving large areas virtually sterile. By 1960 mining was literally moving mountains, divert- ing enormous rivers, creating entire cities in depopulated jungles, and causing pollution on a mammoth scale. Hastened by the need for dollars to pay foreign credi- tors and by corporate flight from environmental regula- tions in this country, Latin America is spraying chemi- cals, felling forests and digging minerals with abandon. Dense clouds of poison envelop cities from Mexico to Santiago. Clearcut logging and slash-and-burn agricul- ture are consuming the Andes and the Amazon. Toxic waste is dumped freely across the continent. Natural history was never entirely independent of political history. Today the scale and pace of human activity have made the two inseparable. The conquest of Nature and that of America are two aspects of the same ongoing process. Similarly, in recent years the struggles to end national and class domination and those which seek to avert the eco-catastrophe on Latin America’s horizon are coming together. In the wake of the debacle of the East, the Left is showing signs of abandoning its devel- opmentalist dreams, which in the end were another mani- festation of the conquistador mentality. Grassroots move- ments of native peoples, peasants and urban poor are increasingly adopting an explicitly environmental agenda. Perhaps, then, we can inject a note of hope into this somber tale. For only such counter-politics could bring 500 years of conquest to an end.
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