Comparative Histories of Scientific Conservation:
Nature, Science, and Society in Patagonian and Amazonian South America
South American nations were among the first to create parks, they protect the highest number of large reserves, and they retain the highest percentage of protected areas with people living inside. But little comparative work has contextualized their declaration, evolution, and societal meaning. As a result, generalizations are starting to be made about parks globally that overlook the role of scientists in transforming the landscape. My new project asks how the development of natural field sciences led to the establishment, maintenance, and promotion of national parks in Amazonia and Patagonia. Understanding the past more clearly will provide context for more fully considering science’s role in shaping what places are and are not conserved.
My research merges a history of science approach to understanding technical research with environmental history’s insights into social, political, and cultural influences within and across societies. As a comparative study, it will use the long twentieth century (1870s to present) to chart the contours of scientifically-informed conservation through attention to six park groups in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru.
Recently, scholars have critiqued conservation globally for the imperialistic marginalization and disempowerment of rural groups and the eviction of indigenous peoples. While there have been struggles, such general assertions are ahistorical for South America for at least two reasons. First, unlike Africa or South Asia, South American countries had been independent nations for nearly one hundred years when they began creating parks. National politicians and institutional leaders played a much larger role in park administration and evaluation than did external organizations for the first decades of their existence. Issues of sovereignty, indigenous rights, and rural incorporation played out differently in Latin America amidst revolutions for internal status decades after colonial power transfers. Second, from early on, national scientists (i.e. Argentine geologists, Chilean botanists, Peruvian zoologists, Brazilian ethnographers) played important roles creating parks, placing parks adjacent to national borders, and accelerating their expansion. Moreover, many of these early scientists recognized the rights of native peoples to remain in the parks and often advocated on their behalf to larger policy making bodies.
A deeper look into the past century reveals surprising patterns of interaction between science and society, among people and parks, and across climatic regions. In short, these cases were neither colonial nor disempowering but artifacts of historical processes that can be understood in their complexity. A regional analysis of internal and international actors involved in conservation mitigates generalizations about the external drivers of conservation work and the social and political relationships involved. This can move conservation debates past false dichotomies of preservation versus development or international organizations versus local communities.
In addition to their fellow citizen scientists, Peruvian farmers, Argentine frontierswomen, Chilean fisherman, and Brazilian telegraph workers had a hand in creating a legacy of conservation that etched aesthetic sensibilities onto the landscape, transcribed understandings of ecosystem functions into holistic use and protections, and constructed and reconstructed methods for making sense of the natural world in practical and tangible ways.
Please contact me if you would like to hear more.
My research merges a history of science approach to understanding technical research with environmental history’s insights into social, political, and cultural influences within and across societies. As a comparative study, it will use the long twentieth century (1870s to present) to chart the contours of scientifically-informed conservation through attention to six park groups in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru.
Recently, scholars have critiqued conservation globally for the imperialistic marginalization and disempowerment of rural groups and the eviction of indigenous peoples. While there have been struggles, such general assertions are ahistorical for South America for at least two reasons. First, unlike Africa or South Asia, South American countries had been independent nations for nearly one hundred years when they began creating parks. National politicians and institutional leaders played a much larger role in park administration and evaluation than did external organizations for the first decades of their existence. Issues of sovereignty, indigenous rights, and rural incorporation played out differently in Latin America amidst revolutions for internal status decades after colonial power transfers. Second, from early on, national scientists (i.e. Argentine geologists, Chilean botanists, Peruvian zoologists, Brazilian ethnographers) played important roles creating parks, placing parks adjacent to national borders, and accelerating their expansion. Moreover, many of these early scientists recognized the rights of native peoples to remain in the parks and often advocated on their behalf to larger policy making bodies.
A deeper look into the past century reveals surprising patterns of interaction between science and society, among people and parks, and across climatic regions. In short, these cases were neither colonial nor disempowering but artifacts of historical processes that can be understood in their complexity. A regional analysis of internal and international actors involved in conservation mitigates generalizations about the external drivers of conservation work and the social and political relationships involved. This can move conservation debates past false dichotomies of preservation versus development or international organizations versus local communities.
In addition to their fellow citizen scientists, Peruvian farmers, Argentine frontierswomen, Chilean fisherman, and Brazilian telegraph workers had a hand in creating a legacy of conservation that etched aesthetic sensibilities onto the landscape, transcribed understandings of ecosystem functions into holistic use and protections, and constructed and reconstructed methods for making sense of the natural world in practical and tangible ways.
Please contact me if you would like to hear more.
Landscapes of Promise and Decline:
Climate Change in the Valley of Mexico
My second new project takes up the role of climate change as an influential factor on the organization of public works in the basin of Mexico City throughout the nineteenth century. Located in a tropical region but at an altitude that renders it temperate, Mexico City’s two-season weather cycle has long proved a puzzle for inhabitants and visitors. Foremost among the attributes receiving commentary were the fluctuations of water in the valley, most notably in the city’s lakes and wetlands. Visitors remarked on the vision of a city assertively inhabiting islands on glistening water surrounded by snow-capped peaks and verdant hills. Observations of just how many lakes filled the valley, where they resided, and how they fluctuated hint at the changing climatic patterns that echoed in the unpredictable order of early national Mexico. In 1803, Alexander von Humboldt remarked that the city had ‘a most suitable climate,’ yet the subsequent century hosted scores of events that suggest the climate was far from stable. Droughts, floods, and dust storms vexed conventional urban life. Repeated wars and rapacious logging leveled the forest reserves that formed the city’s fragile watershed. Railroads carved up ridges and devoured trees while the associated erosion increased unpredictability in the lives of residents. In response, federal engineers undertook dramatic measures to stabilize weather-induced vulnerabilities. Indeed, the era’s largest public works project was the Gran Desagüe,(1886-1901) which sought to finalize the work of desiccating the lakes that had shaped the city’s environs for centuries.
Permanently corralling these waters and turning an island landscape into a built environment was a part of the political project to consolidate power and manifest a new reliance on science and engineering. Yet, we know much less about how this and other landscape changes influenced the city’s climate or how people responded to the visible changes. Scholars have examined the relationships between climate—particularly drought—and rebellion during the colonial period yet they stop prior to this period of crucial social, cultural, and political change. The sculpting of the urban environment that occurred in tandem with changing understandings of science and meteorology helps us to understand not only how the climate changed, but what people perceived to be happening. Drawing on popular sources, such as calendars and almanacs, and emerging scientific discourses in journals, this project will inquire into the ways in which inhabitants changed their understanding of the city’s climate over the course of the nineteenth century. The gradual desiccation of the lakes is a well-recognized backdrop to the development of the valley. The lakes make up one aspect of the dynamic environmental geography around the capital city but other precipitation related events—especially droughts, floods, and dust storms—more immediately vexed conventional urban life. But more than a passive landscape, the disappearance or transformation of the lakes and the result—ridding the valley of its island domains and watered landscape—was one part of a major shift in the valley’s climate and the subsequent understandings of the region’s environment.
Permanently corralling these waters and turning an island landscape into a built environment was a part of the political project to consolidate power and manifest a new reliance on science and engineering. Yet, we know much less about how this and other landscape changes influenced the city’s climate or how people responded to the visible changes. Scholars have examined the relationships between climate—particularly drought—and rebellion during the colonial period yet they stop prior to this period of crucial social, cultural, and political change. The sculpting of the urban environment that occurred in tandem with changing understandings of science and meteorology helps us to understand not only how the climate changed, but what people perceived to be happening. Drawing on popular sources, such as calendars and almanacs, and emerging scientific discourses in journals, this project will inquire into the ways in which inhabitants changed their understanding of the city’s climate over the course of the nineteenth century. The gradual desiccation of the lakes is a well-recognized backdrop to the development of the valley. The lakes make up one aspect of the dynamic environmental geography around the capital city but other precipitation related events—especially droughts, floods, and dust storms—more immediately vexed conventional urban life. But more than a passive landscape, the disappearance or transformation of the lakes and the result—ridding the valley of its island domains and watered landscape—was one part of a major shift in the valley’s climate and the subsequent understandings of the region’s environment.