Introduction: Latin America and the Caribbean’s more-than-human pasts

In early May 1901, the colonial authorities in Kingstown, capital of the island of St Vincent, then a British colony in the Lesser Antilles, were taken by surprise by requests from the Carib populations living on the flanks of Mount La Soufrière to be removed to the south of the island. They were afraid of the increasing frequency of small earthquakes in the area. Stories had been circulating about the volcano being on the verge of going off, which the colony’s government treated as mere hearsay and superstition.¹ Mild tremors were common in the region, thus, for colonial authorities and the white population in general, there was nothing to worry about. (On the other hand, Afro-descendent workers in the sugar economy were very concerned about the Caribs’ warnings.) This came amid a deep economic crisis. Most of the island’s approximately 41,000 inhabitants lived in poverty, the sugar sector – by far the biggest employer – was in decline and land was concentrated in the hands of just five companies. Four years earlier, a massive hurricane swept through the island, leaving 225 people dead and nearly half the island’s population homeless. The catastrophe had helped the colonial government put into practice an ambitious agricultural diversification plan that had not yet yielded results.²

Mild tremors continued to be felt throughout the first quarter of 1902 until, on 13 April, a very intense shake was felt in the village of Owia at the island’s northern end. Towards the end of the month, the tremors became more frequent and severe; eighteen of them came to be felt in just twenty-four hours. Furthermore, alarming news arrived from other places in the Caribbean and surrounding areas. Tremors were known to be occurring in Martinique, a French colony less than 200 kilometres to the north. Finally, on 23 April, Mount La Pelée became active, with its small eruptions fuelling debates about whether or not to evacuate the capital, St Pierre.³ From the mainland, just over 3,000 kilometres to the west, came news of a strong and mysterious earthquake on 18 April, destroying towns and cities between Quetzaltenango and San Marcos, Guatemala, and claiming hundreds of lives.⁴ Even so, authorities in St Vincent did not see any connection between these occurrences and the signs of La Soufrière activity, seeing the news only as a negative influence on the mood of the local population. Despite the authorities’ scepticism, the Indigenous people of Morne Ronde had begun to prepare for a possible mass flight.

On the morning of 6 May, authorities in Kingstown began to be inundated with reports coming from various locations in the north of the island about the sounds of explosions, flashes in the sky, earthquakes and steam clouds, among other signs that the volcano had, indeed, awakened. The town of Chateaubelair, south of Morne Ronde, began to receive hundreds of Indigenous and black refugees fleeing an alleged eruption. At first, these people were ridiculed by the sceptical townspeople. By late afternoon, however, scepticism would give way to perplexity: the city dwellers could observe two large explosions accompanied by ash columns. Authorities in Kingstown only recognised La Soufrière’s activity the following morning, when the explosions became more extreme, being felt even in the capital. Later that day, a colossal blast provoked widespread panic, and the boiling water overflowing from the rivers stopped many who tried to flee. The entire northern part of the island was hit by pyroclastic flows, causing 1,295 deaths, according to the official count.⁵ The next day, it was La Pelée’s turn to explode powerfully, destroying the burgeoning capital, St Pierre, leaving only two survivors among its 28,000 inhabitants.⁶ In October, the Guatemalan volcano Santa María also exploded, ruining the coffee economy and killing over 5,000 people.⁷ Maya-Mam communities like San Martín found protection in their traditional practice of combining resources from different altitudinal zones, taking refuge in the lowlands that were part of the village’s territory.⁸ These three eruption events (La Soufrière, La Pelée and Santa María) are among the strongest and deadliest in the twentieth century and may have induced the cooling of the Americas’ climate in the following years.⁹

How should one interpret the Indigenous and Afro-descendant inhabitants’ prescience of the eruption? Visiting St Vincent and Martinique a few weeks after the blasts under a Royal Geographical Society commission, the photographer Tempest Anderson and the geologist John Smith Flett could not decide whether it was ancestral knowledge arising from a long experience (the last eruption had occurred in 1811) or an intuition based on direct sensory contact.¹⁰ There is no evidence to support the former. Unlike earthquakes, storms, landslides and other environmental phenomena, volcanic eruptions did not elicit the development of any specific Carib lexicon. They were – and still are – too infrequent, occurring at intervals that hamper the creation of an intergenerational tradition.¹¹ Whatever its origins, the Caribs’ premonitory ability suggests a different conception of and relationship to volcanoes – and everything else Europeans deemed ‘natural’, for that matter. In his study of hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean, Stuart Schwartz remarks how colonial-age Spaniards would generally despise (and fear) the Indigenous inhabitants’ capacity to detect the signs of upcoming hurricanes. For pragmatic reasons, the colonisers learned with them, for example, that ‘on the approach of a hurricane, the birds had certain uneasiness and flew away from the coast and toward the houses’.¹² Constructed in partnership with nonhumans, Caribbean and Latin American Indigenous cultures were based on what the political scientist Jane Bennett called ‘enchantment’, in reference to how humans are struck, crossed and shaken by the ‘extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday’.¹³ However, as Schwartz shows, the Europeans themselves retained much of this enchantment. It was firmly rooted in their popular cultures and conducive to a complex hybridisation with Indigenous ways of knowing. In this regard, it is suggestive that it was the Kingstowners – not the Caribs – who described the eruption ‘as having a long, drawn-out, weird, unearthly character, recalling the roar of a wounded animal in intense pain’.¹⁴

This book draws inspiration from these ‘animist’ ways of looking at and relating to the nonhuman world to tell stories very different from those found in the historiography about Latin America and the Caribbean, including significant parts of the environmental historiography.¹⁵ In this Introduction, we set the stage for the upcoming chapters by taking up three tasks. First, we discuss the pertinence of this book’s spatial assumption, namely that Latin America and the Caribbean make up a geographical region with a discernible and shared socio-natural history. We argue that the regional character of Latin America is defensible as long as one maintains a radically relational perspective about it. Second, we review the literature to establish how past historians of the region have portrayed ‘nature’ and its influence on human trajectories. This reveals several attempts to engage with the notion of an agential nonhuman world in various theoretical hues. Finally, we examine the rationales informing the writing of the upcoming chapters, putting them in conversation with recent theoretical and methodological developments. Drawing on Philip Howell’s typology of animal agency, we briefly discuss the approaches and findings of each chapter, pointing to intellectual genealogies and prospects for further research.

It might be illuminating to begin by remembering that Latin America and the Caribbean are supposed to be a region. According to classic geography, regions are defined by two interconnected conditions: they (1) differ from adjoining regions by (2) having a certain unique combination of features. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geographers defined regions as assemblages of people and biophysical environments mutually adjusting over time. Paul Vidal de La Blache, one of the most important among these scholars, wrote that ‘Every region is a domain where many dissimilar beings, artificially brought together, have subsequently adapted themselves to a common existence’.¹⁶ Some Latin American geographers echoed this perspective, but almost always in studying specific countries. For example, describing the processes that shaped the colonial territory that would become Brazil, Milton Santos and Maria Laura Silveira observed that ‘Men, plants and animals from three continents, under the empire of the Europeans, met and, in their obligatory coexistence, created a new geography in this part of the planet’.¹⁷ Space intensifies relationships and transformations, imposing an inevitable conviviality that alters beings and things arriving from other parts. These mutual adaptations shape landscape patterns discernible cartographically, meaning regions have spatial boundaries.

Does Latin America and the Caribbean fit La Blache’s definition? Is there any evidence that Latin America, as a loosely defined cluster of nation states, expresses a distinct amalgam of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’? There have been some positive answers to these questions. For example, in 1950, palaeontologist George Simpson opened his article on the ‘History of Latin American Fauna’ by noting the awkwardness of using boundaries ‘defined by human linguistics and culture’ to delimit the historical study of nonhuman creatures spatially. ‘The animals inhabiting this area’, he remarked, ‘can hardly have foreseen that the dominant languages of the twentieth century would here be Spanish and Portuguese or that the European cultural elements imported here would come mainly from Latin Europe’. However – and in this lies the real puzzle – there is, indeed, a clear distinction between the faunal assemblages north and south of Mexico, especially the northern part of the country, which functions as a sort of transitional zone. Current biogeographical regionalisations tend to corroborate this by having the northernmost inroads of the Neotropics reach no farther than southern Sonora. While ‘[e]xact correspondence of native fauna and imported culture would be a miracle’, Simpson argued, the influence of environmental factors explains the spatial overlap, as both faunas and cultures would have been demarcated by climate.¹⁸

Simpson was certainly right to point out the substantial spatial overlap between Latin America and the Neotropics, one of the ‘kingdoms’ of tropical biogeography – the one found in the ‘New World’, as opposed to the ‘Old World’ one. Except for Patagonia and the Chilean Andes, the Neotropics encompass all of South America, extending northwards to include Central America and the Caribbean, most of Mexico, and the southern tip of Florida. Although the reasons are still hotly debated, it is now generally agreed that this region’s biodiversity is much higher than that of Africa and Southeast Asia. To get an idea, compared to these other tropical regions taken together, the Neotropics have more species of vascular plants, butterflies, amphibians and snakes.¹⁹ This astounding biological richness has been noted and praised since the visit of the earliest biogeographers, such as Alexander von Humboldt and Alfred Russell Wallace. In fact, it was instrumental in creating a regional identity, especially in the eyes of Europeans (and neo-Europeans). Most of these observers, especially those arriving after the collapse of the great Amerindian empires, conflated what was to become Latin America with ‘nature’, taken as the opposite of ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’. While it is evident that colonial politics played a major role in shaping this attitude, the complex ecological history accounting for the staggering Neotropical biodiversity also influenced how Europeans conceptualised Latin America. As we will see, this landscape-based identity – or at least certain versions of it – was eventually embraced by Latin Americans themselves, including influential intellectuals.

In any case, let us not leave any room for doubt: geography is not ‘destiny’. To say that landscape diversity and dynamics played a role in shaping regional identities does not imply the defence of any biophysical determination of human social life. Instead, it means broadening the concept of history, seeing it as ‘a maze of contingent series, which converge, coalesce, dissolve, and bifurcate on the basis of their constituent events and movements’,²⁰ human and nonhuman, in different spatiotemporal scales. In this regard, it can’t be stressed enough that the Neotropics are themselves historical. ‘This static picture’, wrote Simpson himself, ‘is the result of a long and dynamic historical process’ unfolding in geological time.²¹ Prominent in this story is the 50-million-year-long isolation of South America since its tectonic breakup from Africa, which helps explain the uniqueness of the continent’s life forms. This ‘splendid isolation’, as Simpson would call it in a later work,²² began to end around 2.8 million years ago when combining geological and atmospheric events produced a permanent land bridge between South and Central America – the Isthmus of Panama.²³ This allowed for the dispersal of countless species, especially mammals, with the vast majority of successful migrants coming from the north rather than the other way around. Known as the ‘Great American Biotic Interchange’,²⁴ about 40 per cent of South America’s extant mammal families stem from this asymmetric exchange.²⁵ Evidently, biophysical processes like these are ongoing and will continue to shape the Neotropics in the future. How will the region react to Anthropocenic climate change? Neotropical forests seem to have thrived – and even expanded – during past periods of global warming,²⁶ but the conditions now are different, especially considering wholesale human encroachment on habitats. Be that as it may, the Neotropics are far from the ‘steady, unchanging geographic element’²⁷ that some early twentieth-century environmental determinists sought.

This historicity puts Simpson’s hypothesis of nature–culture overlap in a tight spot. Will Latin American nations expand northward when the Neotropics do the same in the next few decades and centuries in the trail of global warming? This is, of course, very unlikely, especially if one assumes a strict biophysical form of causation. Deterministic claims about the past are equally puerile. The argument that English (or Northern European) colonisation was incompatible with Neotropical climatic conditions does not withstand the simplest empirical verifications. How could one explain, for example, that so many Caribbean islands – some of which, like Barbados, became key centres of sugar production – were taken by the English from the Spaniards from the early seventeenth century onwards? As Alfred Crosby argued in Ecological Imperialism, it is true that in long-term demographic terms, northern European colonisers were much more successful in areas ecologically similar to their homeland. Here one can, indeed, speak of climatic influences on cultural geography. But contrary to how thinkers like Montesquieu would have described it, this was not an impact of climate on culture via human physiology. Instead, the link was what Crosby famously called ‘portmanteau biota’, or the nonhuman companions Europeans brought in their ships, which needed suitable habitats. It was in the climatically temperate areas of the Americas, Oceania and Africa that Europeans managed to replace local Indigenous populations and their agricultural systems with their own people and domesticated plants and animals. Success in tropical areas was partial, according to Crosby, as the demand for labour had to be met with enslaved Africans, whom the Europeans often sought for mates – more often than not in nonconsensual ways – the same happening with Amerindians.²⁸ In any case, there is no physiological incompatibility between Europeans and the tropics, or even epidemiologically. For example, compared to adult Europeans travelling to the New World for the first time, genetically ‘European’ – or mixed-heritage – individuals born in America were more likely to be immune to yellow fever because they had probably contracted the disease in childhood.²⁹

On the other hand, the case of differential immunity to yellow fever is a fine example of La Blache’s concept of regions as melting pots. In his study of the role of yellow fever and malaria in the geopolitical history of the Caribbean, John McNeill nicely captured the concept – even without engaging directly with La Blache – by referring to the ‘creole ecologies’ created by European colonisation. McNeill described them as ‘motley assemblage[s] of indigenous and invading species, jostling one another in unstable ecosystems’.³⁰ Indeed, Latin America has been commonly described in the historiography as resulting from encounters and mixings – both cultural and biological – of Amerindian, European and African populations and species.³¹

But while this is a common theme throughout the region, the specific collisions and combinations varied widely. Sometimes even regions of the same colony and empire, such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, differed markedly in terms of social makeup due to different inputs of enslaved Africans. Furthermore, what Marshall Eakin called the ‘powerful Iberoamerican tradition’ – consisting of the spiritual conquest by the Catholic Church, the racial and cultural mixture of Iberian, Amerindian and African peoples, slavery, and profound social inequities – slowly gave way in many of the Caribbean islands as they were gradually transformed by their English, Dutch and French conquerors from the early seventeenth century on.³² Thus, while the theme of the socioecological crucible lends some support to the thesis of Latin America as a region, other elements need to be considered.

To a large extent, the idea of Latin America – developing out of the notion of a ‘Latin race’– emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in reaction to American imperialism. Unravelled by historian Michel Gobat, this is the story of the complex confluence of the rise of American overseas expansion (especially the 1856 William Walker episode in Nicaragua, with the US president Franklin Pierce eventually recognising the ‘piratical’ regime), the democratisation of electoral participation in several Latin American countries, the crushing of the 1848 revolutions in Europe and the sprawling ideologies of whiteness. Economic concerns linked to the plundering of natural resources and the destruction of native industry also informed the concept. For example, in 1862, the Bolivian journalist Benedicto Medinaceli published Proyecto de Confederación de las Repúblicas Latino-Americanas, in which he envisioned Latin America as an economic unit standing against the expansion of North Atlantic capitalism.³³ As in any process of regional identity construction, proud allusions to the landscape appeared early on. In his famous 1856 poem ‘La Dos Américas’, José María Torres Caicedo talked of a ‘Beautiful continent’ blessed by God, a ‘Virgin who stands between two oceans lulled to sleep and shaded by the high Andes’.³⁴ This attachment to landscapes and the nonhuman world would live on in what might be called the ‘Latin American canon’, in which the 1891 essay ‘Nuestra América’ by the Cuban writer José Martí stands out. To demarcate the region, Martí used the Rio Bravo in the north and the Strait of Magellan in the south as ‘horizontal’ boundaries, while the Andes and their silver veins served as a ‘vertical’ boundary. More importantly, he praised the ‘natural man’ shaped by intimate contact with the land and who has the knowledge necessary for good government, which was ‘nothing more than the balance of the country’s natural elements’.³⁵

Therefore, if regions are understood as what scientists call ‘natural kinds’ (that is, grouping of things that reflect the world as it is, without the interference of human interests and biases), then, clearly, Latin America is not one. However, if we accept the geographic precepts about the power of space to amalgamate and transform everything that it forces to coexist – including people’s feelings – then it is possible to treat Latin America as a region. Evidently, this interweaving happens historically. ‘Space’ itself is not an empty receptacle but a mesh of bodies and their mutual constitutive relationships established over time. The Neotropics are as historical as European colonisation, economic underdevelopment and the very idea of Latin America. Even in its effort to include other forces and agencies – or perhaps precisely because of it – a non-anthropocentric environmental history must recognise the historical contingency of regional entanglements. At the same time, this does not mean that nonhumans and their doings are mere products of human representation, or that Latin America is a fanciful ‘invention’ of culture and politics. Latin America is a precarious and transitory assemblage of people, animals, plants, soils, water, microorganisms, air and ocean currents, among other elements, which came together in/from different places and timeframes and eventually adapted to each other but remain in tension, always ready to break free.

How has Latin American historiography approached the nonhuman world? For the analyst of the contemporary era, it is relatively easy to conclude that it exacerbated the anthropocentrism that has often characterised the historical discipline. This is explained by the strong influence of Marxism and nationalism, making Euro-American imperialism a central thread in most regional historical narratives. These are stories about how ‘places privileged by nature have been cursed by history’, as Eduardo Galeano put it in his classic Open Veins of Latin America, originally published in 1971. Echoing dependency theory and the ‘resource curse’ debate that had emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the book’s main themes is the ‘wealth which nature bestows and imperialism appropriates’.³⁶ Reflecting the broader intellectual climate in the region’s political and academic left, Galeano’s account portrays ‘nature’ as a generous Mother Earth whose gifts attracted the covetous eyes and powerful claws of northern powers. In this guise, ‘nature’ – as opposed to ‘history’, conceived as the domain of human agency – acts only passively, that is, by being seized, spoiled and devastated.

To this day, most environmental historians from Latin America ‘present nature as something “out there,” something that people and the global economy destroy’.³⁷ For example, Stephania Gallini was one among many scholars to argue that the nineteenth-century material ‘progress’ in the region was based on the exploitation of natural resources, especially through primary exports.³⁸ But one should not exaggerate the association of this ‘paradigm’ with Latin American scholars, as it also informs recent works by foreign authors (or mixed-origin co-authorships). For example, John Soluri, Claudia Leal and José Augusto Pádua’s A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America might be argued to frame ‘nature’ in this traditional way. The material phenomena analysed seem secondary in relation to human actions and intentions (whether of historical characters or of historians themselves), thus leaving the impression that it is nonhuman life that takes place in its irremediable immersion in human culture, politics and economy – not the other way around. Another example is David Pretel’s paper on the Caste War, in which he argues the Maya Forest acted within the conflict, especially by offering marketable natural resources (timber, henequen, chicle) to the rebels. Moreover, Pretel eventually comes to the conclusion that, in the end, the forest was little affected by the outcome of those long years of struggle.³⁹

Interestingly enough, however, nonhuman agency has always been difficult to ignore when a volcano eruption, a destructive earthquake or the consequences of extreme climate (to name a few but decisive events) were in command of human history. Take the example of the nineteenth-century Chilean historian Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna, who, in 1877, published Ensayo histórico sobre el clima de Chile. His aim was to prove that climate fluctuations had altered the country’s routine since pre-Hispanic times, so at the centre of the story was the climate, indeed, but, in the end, he could not completely get rid of the anthropocentric perspective that prioritises human will above natural constraints. He confessed that he wanted to show to some of his contemporaries who were complaining about devastating floods and extreme weather that Chileans had always faced similar difficulties. Maybe the best pre-1980s debates stressing nonhuman agency come from some Peruvian archaeologists and historians. In 1972 John Murra cemented the role of a vertical control of ecological niches to understand the reciprocity and complementarity displayed by Indigenous societies.⁴⁰ In a way, Murra unearthed ideas dating back to the 1930s when the geographer Carl Troll, following in the footsteps of his conational Alexander von Humboldt, travelled the Andean areas of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. Between 1926 and 1929 Troll’s observations reinforced Humboldt’s ideas of an Andean ‘vertical zonification’. Similarly, for the archaeologist Augusto Cardich, originally trained as an agricultural engineer, to understand most Andean communities one needed first to understand the Andes’ nature. The rule is quite simple. Food availability depends on the thermic spectre of the Andean flora and fauna, making environmental conditions such as altitude and water accessibility influence the exchanges among Indigenous communities living in different environments.⁴¹ But Peru has around eighty ecological zones, so when Murra proposed his model, he sparked controversies. But even though many historians soon found gross inadequacies when the model was applied to southern and coastal Peruvian societies, the debate helped to foreground nonhuman agencies.⁴²

There were important discussions about the role of the nonhuman world in the history of Brazil, too. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a particularly prolific period, with authors such as Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and Henry Buckle exerting a strong influence on Brazilian thought. For example, in his history of national literature, Sylvio Romero referred to the climate as an ‘agent’ that – alongside other forces – forged a new people from diverse ethnic elements (Europeans, Amerindians and Africans). Acting more directly on literary expression, the climate would have helped to provoke the ‘sentimental effusion’ of Brazilian lyricism.⁴³ In the second and third quarters of the twentieth century, there were several authors who approached nonhumans as agentic without slipping into environmental determinism. Foreshadowing Braudel in many ways, in 1936, the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre developed an eco-regional approach to the human–nonhuman entanglements shaped by sugar plantations in Northeast Brazil.⁴⁴ Cassiano Ricardo’s Marcha para Oeste was published in 1942, proposing an ambitious interpretation of Brazilian history from a frontier perspective à la Frederick J. Turner (who is oddly not cited). Although an in-depth study of this two-volume magnum opus remains to be done, environmental historians today will find abundant food for thought, including some conceptual foreshadowings, such as the notions of ‘grafted’ landscapes (similar to Crosby’s idea of portmanteau biota) and ‘production of spaces’. Even more importantly for us here, Ricardo explores human–environment hybridisations with a rare analytical sensitivity that includes something like the strategic anthropomorphism advocated by Jane Bennett.⁴⁵ Sérgio Buarque de Holanda was another brilliant analyst of colonial frontiers. With rare brilliance and erudition, Holanda examined frontiers as the sites where humans and nonhumans, Europeans and Amerindians, clashed and transformed one another, often in contexts of asymmetrical power.⁴⁶ Informed by his geoscience expertise, geographer Aziz Ab’Saber traced the influences of soils and landforms in human adaptation to regional environments.⁴⁷

In the 1980s and 1990s, the writing of Latin American history profited from the long-lasting and highly influential scholarship of gifted historians such as Alfred Crosby, Elinor Melville and Warren Dean. Pioneering a path towards the complex historical research on the colonial and postcolonial Americas, these scholars taught us how to master a multilayer approach to the relations between humans and nonhumans in those early days of conquest and colonisation. Historical explanations were missing the point, as Crosby suggested, because ‘the success of European imperialism has a biological, an ecological component’.⁴⁸ Following in his footsteps, Melville’s A Plague of Sheep created a fresco of sixteenth-century Mezquital Valley, in Mexico. True, sheep changed the environment and consequently induced societal changes, but they did that as domesticated animals, thus as instruments of human will, rather than full-fledged agents. Yet her richly textured narrative does suggest here and there the existence of an independent natural world, one that has always managed to pursue autonomous development.⁴⁹ For South America, Dean was one of the first scholars to call attention to the importance of the ‘ecological conditions of production’ in the region’s agricultural history. His Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History is an underacknowledged monograph-length pioneer in showing how nonhuman environmental dynamics – in this case, the emergence of fungal epidemics – shaped regional history.⁵⁰

Only latent in that book is the unremitting outrage towards humanity’s destructiveness that Dean was to fully reveal in his subsequent monograph, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. In a sweeping judgement, he affirmed that ‘The aggrandizement of our species has been based upon the destruction of forests that we are ill equipped to inhabit’.⁵¹ In a previous short essay, he had espoused the same fatalistic view by arguing that environmental degradation is ‘the most consequential of human activities’. But alongside his strong moral indignation with human short-sightedness, Dean entertained a more general perspective about the ‘interaction with the environment’ being ‘the central issue in human history’, rather than a ‘side-effect of other, supposedly more decisive activities such as class struggle, capital accumulation, the spread of imperialism, the triumph of science and technology, or the subjection of women’.⁵² Indeed, his two environmental history monographs contain some of the boldest nonhuman agency arguments put forward in Latin Americanist historiography up to the mid-1990s. In With Broadax and Firebrand, for instance, Dean claimed that the Atta leaf-cutting ants – locally known as saúvas – and their voracious harvesting of introduced crops had been one of the single most important factors in shaping the transfer of European and African agricultural systems to South America:

if an effective means had existed, during Brazil’s first 450 years to combat saúva, its agriculture, and consequently its history, would have been very different. That an insect can deflect human designs is an abhorrent idea, surely more abhorrent than the pest itself, because it questions the hegemony of our species.⁵³

By the beginning of the present century, the extra-human world was already firmly established in Latin Americanist historical-environmental analysis as an array of beings, things and forces not only subdued and manipulated by humans but also imposing conditions on their ‘making of history’. As Steve Marquardt wrote in a 2001 essay on the Panama disease’s impacts on Central American banana economies, human–environment relations were not to be ‘reduced to a simple, unidirectional narrative of corporate planters degrading the environment. Ecological changes were indeed shaped and accelerated by the replacement of species-diverse tropical rainforest with a genetically uniform crop, but the processes set in motion themselves affected the subsequent human history of the plantation’.⁵⁴ The first synthesis to appear in the field, Shawn W. Miller’s An Environmental History of Latin America, shows how consolidated this view was later in that decade. Laying out his approach, Miller observed:

The stage for the human drama, we suppose, is stocked with culture’s props but is barren of nature’s scenery. Until recently, there have been few beasts, creeks, food crops, dirt clods, or raindrops in our histories. Yet nature is more than mere backdrop to the human drama, more than the resource that sustains it. Nature’s troupe – vegetable, animal, and mineral – forms part of the production’s cast, actors whose agency rivals that of the human players. […] Humans will remain at center stage in our drama lest environmental history shade into natural history; however, the stories of nonhuman life and of the inanimate resources on which life depends will be given place in our plots. In addition to Indians, colonists, slaves, industrialists, peasants, urbanites, and tourists, our cast will include soils, smallpox, sugar, mercury, egrets, butterflies, guano, whales, hurricanes, and reefs.⁵⁵

One can still contend – and this is betrayed by Miller’s ultimate refusal to decentre people – that nonhuman doings remain somewhat reactive to human actions and designs. In order to redistribute historical agency, it is necessary to envision negotiation, which always runs the risk of incompleteness and imbalance; different actors leave different traces of their entanglement with changing environments. Moreover, the reconstruction of the past allows for multiple interpretations. An example is the volume edited by Margarita Gascón, Vientos, Terremotos, Tsunamis y Otras Catástrofes Naturales: Historia y Casos Latinoamericanos. The label itself points out that ‘natural disasters’ (or ‘catastrophes’) are the result of a human-centred mindset. Thus, it mirrors the classic ecological model that sees humans as disturbing agents in ecosystems: the focus is on human societies as socio-economic, political and cultural systems that are now and then disrupted and challenged by ‘natural’ events. Methodologically, these anomalous occurrences – anomalous only from a human perspective, rightly understood – function as breaking points that paradoxically reveal the normal workings of human societies. ‘The catastrophe served as a magnifying glass’, pointed out Gascón, ‘because the emergency and reconstruction make the behaviours, tendencies and tensions that had been hidden by routine and daily life more noticeable’.⁵⁶ According to Gascón, there has been a complex relationship between natural disasters and the evolution of colonial societies in southern South America.⁵⁷

The same is true for the colonial Caribbean basin, where hurricanes and severe tropical storms are impossible to disregard. They came to symbolise all that was unique and dangerous in the region.⁵⁸ Several works explored the role of the tempestuous Caribbean climate in human historical developments. In 2001, Louis A. Pérez published Winds of Change, a groundbreaking study about the role of the hurricanes of the 1840s in the national formation of Cuba. Pérez’s pioneering approach traced the influence of hurricanes, which he saw as factors ‘shaping the options and outcomes to which huge numbers of people were obliged to respond’, in the strategies of economic development, labour organisation and the construction of a national feeling of belonging.⁵⁹ Michael Burn showed a significant relationship between Spanish shipwrecks and tree-growth suppression, both parameters and proxies for past hurricane activity.⁶⁰ Alexander Berland, Georgina Endfield and Sherry Johnson are among those who have consistently researched the multiple impacts of extreme weather beyond damages to urban infrastructure and rural production.⁶¹ More recently, drawing on Greg Bankoff’s work on the Philippines, Stuart Schwartz and Matthew Mulcahy suggested that hurricanes and other hazards were ‘agents of culture formation’ in the premodern Caribbean, as ‘Architecture, religious practices, mentalities, and economic and political concerns all reflected to varying degrees the reality of living in a space subjected to routine […] disasters’.⁶²

In the last decade, a few works set out to centre nonhumans as historical agents. At least at the level of intentions, this is the case of Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici’s 2013 edited volume Centering Animals in Latin American History. However, the mere inclusion of animals as topics – even if central ones – is no guarantee of a nonhuman-agential interpretation. As the editors themselves admit, ‘the mere analytical and figurative presence of animals – their visibility – by no means automatically centers them’.⁶³ This problem plagues most of the volume’s chapters, where agency is still understood in its modern anthropocentric sense. Martha Few’s paper on locusts in colonial Guatemala is an honourable, though still partial, exception. She argues that locusts were not only shaped by human social processes, ‘but also helped to shape them’, which makes them important historical players: ‘it is possible to show that locusts, by periodically joining to creating mass streamways and travelling hundreds of miles, have played a significant role in the history of colonial Guatemala’.⁶⁴ But however keen Few is to acknowledge the insects’ place in shaping history, she still equates agency with symbolic intentionality – or, as she called it, ‘sentience’.⁶⁵

Several other works highlight the agency of insects in Latin American history. Locusts and ants are the nuisances most alluded to in the Caribbean historical records. According to entomologist Edward Wilson, the tropical fire ant Solenopsis geminata arrived in 1516 along with sugarcane, imported from the Canary Islands. The plague badly hit the fledgling Spanish settlements on Hispaniola. Matthey Mulcahy and Stuart Schwartz stressed the long-term consequence of the episodes in the 1760s and 1770s, when swarms of ants and other hymenopterans devastated sugar fields in Martinique, Grenada, Barbados and several other islands. Not surprisingly, combating insects became an important goal for planters and entomology emerged as a necessary science of empire. Luis Alberto Arrioja Diáz has shown how the droughts of the late colonial period created the environmental conditions for locusts to swarm and sweep through Guatemala voraciously, provoking all kinds of human responses – from prayers to administrative measures.⁶⁶ However, all these works stop short of exploring the subjective world of insects, thus portraying them as obstacles for human enterprises.⁶⁷ As Diogo de Carvalho Cabral has pointed out, such an obstacle is not ‘a part of the historical pathway; it is something alien, radically different from those agents/characters whose march supposedly “makes history”’.⁶⁸ This limits the breadth of historical interpretation, as animal agency can in fact be analysed in terms of sentience or – more appropriately termed – perception and semiosis. In a more recent paper, de Carvalho Cabral has urged historians to treat landscapes as multispecies negotiations, bringing to light the diverse meanings that each kind of organism attaches to material features.⁶⁹

Although many other works could be included, this review cannot be exhaustive for reasons of space. In any case, it seems to us that the sample of historiography discussed here is representative of the major trends and lines of interpretation. From the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, there were many attempts to analyse ‘nature’ as an agent in history. Some departed from deterministic – or at least biologistic – premises, while others sought to preserve human ‘cultural’ creativity. In the post-war period, a strong anthropocentrism dominated the scene, with nature portrayed as a victim of human projects, especially hegemonic and foreign economic projects. In the late twentieth century, some environmental historians introduced new frameworks, mainly based on the notion of ‘unintended (environmental) consequences’. More recently, an increasingly varied historiographical mosaic has emerged. On the one hand, declensionist stories continue to be told, something absolutely understandable (and necessary) in a climate emergency context. On the other hand, researchers have been experimenting with new approaches in intense dialogue with other disciplines, such as climatology and anthropology. To end this Introduction, we now turn to the present book’s chapters, trying to situate them in the context of contemporary theoretical and historiographical debates.

Here is not the place to review the extensive theoretical literature on the notion of historical agency. Suffice it to point out that agency outside the human domain has sometimes been acknowledged, even by historians with no connection to any environmental interpretation lens. For example, in his 1993 The Structures of History, Christopher Lloyd observed that ‘All complex systems that are characterized by evolutionary or historical forces, such as ecosystems, insect and animal societies, and human societies, have agents for change within them’.⁷⁰ Later on, economic and military historians such as Bruce Campbell and Geoffrey Parker embraced climate dynamics as prime causative factors.⁷¹ Recently, there have been several moves towards writing histories more radically attentive to nonhuman causation, even though the underlying theoretical affiliations, as well as the labels chosen for these approaches, are diverse (‘more-than-human history’, ‘multispecies history’, ‘post-anthropocentric history’ are some of the existing labels).⁷² In one way or another, all these approaches agree with the foundational claim made long ago by environmental historians that humans produce history in coexistence with beings, forces and structures that they have not strictly created or controlled.⁷³ However, these newer frameworks tend to reject the nature–culture dichotomy, with important implications for how humans and their actions are described and interpreted. Rather than a priori subjects, people (and their inner ‘mental’ worlds) are more explicitly examined as emergent effects of broader material-semiotic relations that feedback into that mesh. As abstract as they seem, complex ideas and motivations – the bread and butter of traditional historiography – are claimed to be ‘inseparable from our material bodies and environments’.⁷⁴

In recent decades, the aspect of this material realm most thoroughly studied and theorised by historians and historical geographers has arguably been nonhuman animals. Despite some countering voices, the concept of animal agency is now widespread among animal historians.⁷⁵ Philip Howell developed a general classification of animal agency approaches which might be useful here. He identified three broad types: ‘ascribed agencies’, or accounts of how people in the past attributed certain powers to animals (which might be connected with the animals’ very being); ‘agonistic agencies’, or histories that portray animals (individually or collectively) as actors in themselves, mostly by resisting or refracting human projects; and ‘assembled agencies’, or approaches that consider animals’ agencies to emerge from specific meshes or networks of heterogeneous beings and things.⁷⁶ While embracing a broader spectrum of nonhuman beings and things, the approaches adopted in this book can be profitably linked to Howell’s types.

Some chapters use what can be considered a version of Howell’s ‘agonistic agencies’, one linked to a traditional theme of environmental history, namely ‘unintended consequences’. Richard White was one of the first to articulate it, noting that ‘Humans may think what they want; they cannot always do what they want, and not all they do turns out as planned’.⁷⁷ Indeed, operationalised through intense recourse to scientific findings, this approach has been at the heart of environmental history since the 1970s and 1980s – since Crosby’s and Donald Worster’s early work.⁷⁸ People’s doings are ‘bigger’ than they imagine because they are intertwined with landscapes and ecosystems of enormous complexity – individual humans being ‘ecosystems’ themselves. At the same time, this can blur the boundaries between ‘agonistic’ and ‘assembled’ types of agency. Especially where the unanticipated consequence proves beneficial for human initiators (for example, exotic pathogens emptying American native lands for European settlers), one might see an ‘ “embedding” or “distribution” of agency within heterogeneous assemblages’.⁷⁹ Conversely, when unforeseen outcomes work against human intentions, scholars tend to talk of ‘resistance’. Like in Dean’s arguments about fungi and ants, these beings’ agencies arise mostly as inadvertent consequences of humans’ interventions in ‘natural’ systems they understood only poorly. This resonates with a view of environmental history as ‘a kind of cultural history that analyzes the capacity of our species, under differing circumstances, to understand and manage its relationship with its natural environment’.⁸⁰ Therefore, in a sense, it is more about human ignorance, inexperience and myopia than the autonomy, vibrancy and power of earthly things. Be that as it may, such an ecological indeterminacy – that is, the practical impossibility of knowing certain things in advance, such as the effects of biological transfers – can be seen as an expression of nonhuman agency.⁸¹

Labelling a nonhuman agency claim as ‘agonistic’ or ‘assembled’ is also a matter of narrative emphasis. For example, in his chapter ‘Human–insect relations in Northeast Brazil’s twentieth-century sugar industry’, José Marcelo Marques Ferreira Filho focuses on insects’ role in shaping sugar plantations. However, it is clear that insects acted in close association with viruses and the broader landscape (including, of course, human agriculture and the environmental transformations it brought about), among other intervening elements. As Ferreira Filho himself observes, ‘The human social history of sugar is inseparable from its botanical history, which, in turn, is inseparable from the history of the insects that affect both people and plants’. Thus, Ferreira Filho repositions human history within the web of material life by exploring the role of insects in the sugar economy through the heavy use of scientific literature. It is interesting to observe that there is a temporal distinction establishing the status of these sources individually: he tends to use scientific findings ‘from the past’ – that is, from the same time of the events examined – as evidence, while those ‘from the present’ provide him with the overall explanatory models. As in many other studies – including in this book – there is an implicit progressivism that assumes that current scientific knowledge is more reliable and, therefore, extrapolatable to the past. Although bringing some epistemological impasses, it is necessary to recognise that this is the methodological model that initially boosted environmental history in the 1970s and 1980s. In this sense, Ferreira Filho’s study descends from an already long lineage going back to Crosby and Woster, for whom, ‘with the aid of modern science’, environmental history aims ‘to discover some fresh truths about ourselves and our past’.⁸²

In turn, the chapter ‘Water labour: urban metabolism, energy and rivers in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’ by Bruno Capilé and Lise Sedrez leaves no room for doubt. The authors themselves emphasise their theoretical affiliation to a ‘networked’ conception of agency mostly inspired by Bruno Latour’s work. Investigating the role of rivers in the urban history of Rio de Janeiro, Capilé and Sedrez pay particular attention to how those moving bodies of water entangled themselves with other producers of labour/energy, such as the pack animals that transported materials for plumbing works and the grasses they fed on. Reminiscent of Richard White’s approach to studying the Columbia River in his classic The Organic Machine, Capilé and Sedrez follow the complex chains of energy transformation centred around the rivers flowing into (and out of) Brazil’s nineteenth-century capital city. The richly textured image that emerges from this historical tracing is that of networks precariously assembling water, people, animals, plants, soils and the technosphere into urban life in the periphery of the capitalist world system. In this ontological metabolism, one can hardly distinguish ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, as entities become historically in their constant mingling and transgressing. More than just physical things, rivers become a ‘starting point for undertaking the archaeology’⁸³ of messy socio-natural relations.

What about extreme environmental events like droughts and earthquakes? Can they also be framed as agents resisting human projects or else taking part in heterogenous agentic assemblages, such as Ferreira Filho’s insects and Capilé and Sedrez’s rivers? There seems to be an essential difference in scale here. Faced with climate dynamics (and here we are thinking specifically of the pre-modern period) and plate tectonics, humans found themselves entangled in telluric histories moved by forces that greatly supersede the scales of action available in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even for the most powerful empires. As Pérez argued about Cuba’s hurricanes, they ‘loomed as forces of vast proportions, larger than human effort and negating the proposition of humans as the center and measure of all things’.⁸⁴ Here, the ‘agonistic agents’ are people, who often seem like tragic characters in a plot whose driving forces are far beyond their control. Nowhere is this more evident than in Margarita Gascón’s chapter ‘Under a weak sun at the southern rim of South America (1540–1650)’. Due to magnetic factors not yet fully understood, the radiation emitted by the sun fluctuates over time, affecting the earth’s climate. Gascón shows how these oscillations – activated by cosmic processes 150 million kilometres away – combined with El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and human developments such as warfare and agriculture during Chile and Argentina’s Little Ice Age (LIA). Methodologically, her approach is to detect and narrate the complex embranglements of climatic anomalies in multiple human storylines by searching convergences – or at least inferable relations – between scientific findings and the events extractable from written records. Similar to accounts centred on nonhuman ‘resistants’, here one sees people often engulfed in emergent, not-fully-controllable dynamics that reframe their horizons of possibilities and fields for action.

To a large extent, Gascón’s and other similar studies of how past peoples resisted or adapted – to use a more usual term – to nonhuman forces endowed with their own historicities descend from a parallel intellectual lineage that predates the emergence of environmental history in the US. Initiated by Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch and others in the 1920s, the so-called Annales school sought, among other innovations, to incorporate then-recent conceptual developments in the field of geography to study collective human trajectories in their biophysical contexts.⁸⁵ This search led to an emphasis on the long duration of the human experience of environments, a perspective that Fernand Braudel took to its ultimate consequences in the 1940s. As part of his triad of temporal layers, Braudel theorised the nonhuman world as a ‘geographical time’ that, in its friction with ‘social’ and ‘individual’ temporalities, proved almost immobile. While acknowledging that ‘everything changes, even the […] elements of physical geography’, the changes he included in his pathbreaking account of the Mediterranean were mostly cyclical, not directional. ‘So the climate changes and does not change’, he observed, as ‘it varies in relation to norms which may after all vary themselves, but only to a very slight degree’.⁸⁶ In any case, Braudel’s concept of ‘geohistory’ profoundly influenced the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a third-generation representative of the Annales tradition. He argued vehemently against the ‘anthropocentrism’ of explaining human epochal crises and processes by recourse to climatic cycles and vagaries, proposing instead the historical study of ‘meteorological factors in themselves: temperature, rainfall, and then, where possible, wind and barometric pressure, sunshine and cloud’. In other words, he was interested in examining ‘nature for its own sake’, which, according to him, has its ‘own special time’. Drawing an analogy with geography and its two subfields (human and physical), Ladurie advocated for a ‘physical history, a history of natural conditions’ written through historians’ traditional archival methods. Written records should be ‘critically examined and duly translated into quantitative terms’. Only after a solid baseline of climatic processes had been established would historians be able to move on to analyse their meaning for humans – the climate ‘as it is for us’, Ladurie wrote, ‘as the ecology of man’.⁸⁷

The weight of this intellectual heritage is particularly noticeable in Luis Alberto Arrioja Díaz and María Dolores Ramírez Vega’s chapter ‘Extreme weather in New Spain and Guatemala: the Great Drought (1768–73)’. Following Ladurie’s methodological guidelines, the authors invest in quantification, compiling 162 drought events from various written sources. First, they use this method, including a qualitative ranking of drought intensity, to analyse an extended period between the mid-seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, showing significant correlations with the Maunder Minimum and the Maldá and Dalton Oscillations. Next, they shift their focus to a short period in the late LIA (1768–73) that witnessed complex entanglements of planetary-scale atmospheric phenomena and regional zoogeographical dynamics (locust plagues), among other factors. Here, Arrioja Díaz and Ramírez Vega shift to a qualitative-narrative approach – even though resorting to numbers now and then – to show how the climatic changes translated into societal dynamics. Reactions to the drought were of many types, from the most instinctive (and sometimes horrific), such as migration and cannibalism, to the most elaborate (and socially cruel), such as laws forcing the commoners to plant food under pain of banishment. Some measures against the drought ended up aggravating it, such as reclaiming marginal land for plantings, which often resulted in failed crops and less pasture for animals.

Like the sun and the clouds above our heads, the earth under our feet has its own way of being in time. Of course, that includes soil, the earth’s topmost layer of degraded, friable rock and decomposed organic matter formed over millennia in which we grow most of our food. However, if we go further down, we find an even more uncanny historical reality comprising continent-sized blocks of integral rock brought together and moved around by turbulent lava currents below. Forming and dismantling over geological time, these blocks or ‘tectonic plates’ move at a speed of a few centimetres per year, but every now and then the rearrangements of the unstable edifice of rocks and their fissures at the border of two plates generate terrible accelerations up on the surface. Magdalena Gil’s chapter discusses how these dynamics helped shape the history of Chile, one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries. Here, too, there is the tragic sense of humans struggling against a larger and more powerful reality. However, Gil’s approach to earthquakes – reminiscent of Pérez’s study of hurricanes in Cuba – makes room for cultural creativity that arises precisely from environmental fragility: the construction of state institutions. Among other competencies, the legitimacy of modern states is based on the management of a bounded territory. But rather than abstract geopolitical entities, territories are the nations’ ‘natural bodies’ defined by ecological contents and dynamics that pose concrete challenges to human communities. Simply put, earthquakes – like volcanic eruptions, droughts and hurricanes – do not happen in (or to) a territory but are themselves (intrinsic components of) territories. Gil argues that Chilean public authorities learned this early on, which strongly shaped the country’s institutional makeup since the political independence, especially from the early twentieth century. From seismological agencies and building codes to a more general predisposition to intervene in civil society’s affairs, Gil shows how earthquakes embedded themselves in Chile’s sociopolitical (and cultural) fabric.

A different approach to nonhuman agency stems from a more ‘intimate’ stance, so to speak, towards how people ascribe powers and capabilities to the world around them. This concerns what is now widely referred to in the anthropological literature as ‘ontology’, or the study of ‘reality’ as constructed by semiotic selves (human and nonhuman).⁸⁸ The first is Luisa Vidal de Oliveira and Denise Maria Cavalcante Gomes’s ‘Performative objects: Konduri iconography as a window to precolonial Amazonian ontologies’, which closely dialogues with so-called Amerindian perspectivism. One of the most impactful theoretical perspectives in the humanities today – including environmental history – this theory was initially developed by ethnographers and anthropologists philosophically informed by Indigenous knowledge itself. Amerindian perspectivist theorists promote nothing short of an ontological implosion. According to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, its first and main articulator, Amerindian communities do not separate nature from culture, or material from immaterial (spiritual) forms; for them, what exists is a multiplicity of corporeal forms (multinatures) that see themselves as human, while other spatial elements are also culturally elaborated and defined in metaphysical continuity.⁸⁹ In a radically interdisciplinary fashion, Oliveira and Gomes combine Indigenous ethnology, archaeology and history to analyse Konduri ceramic artefacts from precolonial Amazonia. These are interpreted as indices of relationships that connect the visible and the invisible, the natural and the supernatural, with the artefacts themselves having agency. In other words, these are not representations but performative figurations of complex entanglements in continuous transformation processes. Challenging ‘representationist’ classification schemes, the artefacts demonstrate their ritual potential as a ‘shamanic technology’, reflecting and fostering different nonhuman perspectives.

The other chapter addressing Howell’s ‘ascribed agencies’ is Olivia Arigho-Stiles’s ‘ “We are the air, the land, the pampas …”: campesino politics and the other-than-human in highland Bolivia (1970–90)’. Using an interdisciplinary framework (history, environmental sociology and multispecies studies) to analyse print and audio sources, Arigho-Stiles offers a fascinating account of the influence of Katarismo on the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Unified Syndical Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia – CSUTCB) in the historical process that led to the formation of an other-than-human politics. Katarismo emerged in Bolivia in the 1960s, combining ideas that reinforced Aymara ethnic consciousness with theories of racial and class exploitation and renewing the struggle against colonial oppression by the Bolivian state. Arigho-Stiles shows how the ontologies of Indigenous peoples and Bolivian peasants were crucial to the emergence of nonhumans in the political arena. In helping to shape the CSUTCB’s claims, the recognition of the agency of land itself constituted a critical dimension of the struggle against neoliberalism.

Both these chapters touch on one of the most challenging and contentious issues today in animal and more-than-human history: to what extent are human attributions of agency shaped by the nonhumans themselves? Howell contends that ‘representation’ and ‘agency itself’ are ‘always inseparable’. Citing literary criticism scholars, he goes on to posit that ‘animals have the power to enter the space of human consciousness […] rather than their animality merely being colonised and constructed and coded by cultural forms’.⁹⁰ But, if this is so, how can one access the animals – or, more generally, nonhuman beings and things – ‘themselves’, that is, apart from their human representations? Perhaps this is neither possible nor desirable. Instead, it may be that we should look for humans and nonhumans in our sources not detached from one another but inextricably conjoined – something about which Oliveira and Gomes have important things to say. Based on Amerindian perspectivism, they address their artefactual sources as amalgams of human and nonhuman standpoints, not mere products of human representation. This is in line with recent framings of written sources as resulting from embodied encounters between humans and animals.⁹¹ Arigho-Stiles, too, takes this cue by suggesting that the 1982 El Niño left its mark on the CSUTCB’s debates. Thus, one could argue that the anti-neoliberal movement she studies is an assemblage of people and climatic events rather than a purely human construction.

Another way still to explore nonhuman agencies (some of which arguably of the ‘ascribed’ kind) is by drawing on the environmental humanities. This transversal and recently institutionalised field brings together ecocriticism, environmental psychology, environmental communication and environmental philosophy, among other disciplines and approaches. Despite the effort to create interdisciplinary dialogues, only a few works connect, for example, environmental history, ecocriticism and environmental communication. A possible way forward is to be open to experimentations based on the concepts and objectives common to all these disciplines, in addition to drawing more intensely on philosophy, especially the new materialisms/realisms and critical post-humanism.⁹² In Latin America, these experiments are on the rise with the study of plays, TV series, comic books and, especially, literary works.⁹³ They have demonstrated the analytical centrality of imploding the nature–culture binary, emphasising the strength of nonhumans in inducing feelings and perceptions – thus ‘co-producing’ the artworks.

Hannah Regis’s chapter ‘Tongues in trees and sermons in stones: Jason Allen-Paisant’s ecopoetics in thinking with trees’ exemplifies this trend in Latin America. Analysing poet Jason Allen-Paisant’s Thinking with Trees, Regis emphasises the agency, resilience and intersections between race, class and environment in the Caribbean space, where black bodies not only resist but proliferate in communion with the forest, despite all the colonialist violence throughout Jamaican history. Thus, bridging environmental history and ecocriticism, the study shows how Allen-Paisant’s poetry rejects European anthropocentrism in favour of an empathetical relationship with nature and, by extension, with the human self that is also nature. On the other hand, ‘Animating the waters, hydrating history: control and contingency in Latin American animations’ by André Vasques Vital brings environmental communication and environmental history closer together through an analysis of the water ontologies in the environmental animations Abuela Grillo (2009), by Denis Chapon, and Nimbus, o Caçador de Nuvens (2016), by Marco Nick and Matheus Antunes. Vital shows that the animations highlight the active role of water in the constitution of historical reality, whether through indifferent cooperation, challenge or the disruption of human meanings, intentions and actions.

Taken together, these chapters provide a complex, nuanced picture of how encounters between humans and nonhumans historically shaped Latin America and the Caribbean. Whether prosaic earthly companions like water, forests and insects, or distant and magnanimous forces like the sun or tectonic plates, nonhuman beings and things acted on varied spatial and temporal scales to constrain and enable not only the actions but the very thinking of those who came to define themselves as Latin Americans. Contrary to first appearances, this does not mean any neglect of ethical considerations on the part of students of the past. It just means that the domain of ethics must be extended to include the moral obligations that arise from humans’ vital dependence on other forms of existence. Therefore, this is not about giving up analysing human responsibilities in creating injustices and inequalities, but examining how these ‘social constructions’ include other entities – some of them sentient – and not only as objects of destruction and degradation. It is crucial to be attentive to how people suffer in their friction with the material world, that is, how they are born and grow, reproduce and die, idealise and realise in unavoidable transactions with the rest of the cosmic fabric. After all, as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa observed, ‘How could we affect the worlds we want to change if we consider ourselves untouched by them?’⁹⁴ Most likely, it was their openness to being touched by the nonhuman world – their openness to the possibility that it overflows towards us humans in a way that communicates their ways of being – that enabled the Indigenous peoples of St Vincent to presage La Soufrière’s eruption months before it happened.