Faces of Latin America by Duncan Green

Author:Duncan Green [Green, Duncan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Latin America, General
ISBN: 9781583673263
Google: RdFlAQAACAAJ
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2013-12-15T01:51:28+00:00

The Conquest of Nature

The Conquest of the Americas lessened one kind of environmental pressure, but introduced many new ones. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that indigenous agriculture in Mexico and the Andes was in a state of crisis when the Spaniards arrived, as population pressure and soil erosion combined to produce a food crisis that may have been an important factor in enabling the Spaniards to win against the odds. The ensuing collapse of the indigenous population, through disease and forced labor, did much to ease the immediate pressure on the ecosystem. The population of Latin America did not return to pre-Conquest levels until the nineteenth century.

However, the subsistence economies of the great indigenous civilizations were replaced by a colonial gold-rush mentality that aimed to plunder Latin America’s resources, whether mineral or agricultural, as quickly as possible and send them abroad. When one resource was exhausted, another was found, with no attempt to build long-term sustainability. The philosophy was even applied to people: when indigenous laborers began to die out on Brazil’s sugar plantations, the plantation owners chose to ship in Africans to do the job, rather than try to reduce the death rate among the indigenous population. As the centuries have passed, and Latin America has become ever more enmeshed in the world economy, natural resources have been raided to pay for imports of manufactured goods.

In the twentieth century, an urban environmental crisis took off following the aggressive industrialization programs introduced in the 1930s and 1940s. As cities sprang up, sucking the rural poor into shantytowns with few facilities, unregulated industry has poured effluents into the air and water, and millions of dilapidated cars have choked the cities with carbon monoxide.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.