Afterword: more complete stories and better explanations for a renewed worldview

The past is mostly nonhuman: we humans came into the picture really late, and even later to the Americas. But more-than-human includes the human, so, in the case of what recently came to be called Latin America and the Caribbean, we are talking about roughly 15,000 years, a fraction of the history of humankind, mammals or life on earth. Yet, usually, when we refer to the history of this region we narrow it down quite considerably to the last 500 years, for history is defined by a methodology that privileges written documents. Thus, history departments like the one I work in in Bogotá have specialists in the twentieth and nineteenth centuries, and in the colonial past, which spanned 300 years. The millennia before are reserved, for very understandable methodological reasons, to archaeologists. The disinclination historians in general feel towards studying bones or pieces of ceramic has led most to confuse the reach of their expertise with the past, producing the odd outcome on shrinking time, at least in their minds. Those studying Latin America and the Caribbean became the champions of this dubious form of magic.

The lack of acknowledgement of deep time (and even of not-so-deep time) is closely related to another form of blindness that makes it difficult for social scientists and humanists to see the interconnections between nonhuman elements and the kind of topics that we study. If besides seeing social classes and identities we remember that we are a species that has a very long evolutionary history, it becomes harder to set ourselves apart from everything that surrounds us and co-constitutes the world. This issue is again related to methods: since we cannot master the expertise of geologists or biologists, we assume that their objects of study – mountains, animals and trees – simply do not exist. Well, to be more precise, they are mostly erased from the universe of elements to be seriously considered within our disciplines, because – of course – those of us who have dogs not only acknowledge their presence but somehow organise our lives partly around it, or, in the case of those of us who live in Bogotá, we are totally aware of the mountains that that allow us to distinguish north from south.

This book calls our attention to the potential of recognising that human pasts are more-than-human. But we may well ask if that is not precisely what environmental history set out to do half a century ago. This subdiscipline has been telling all sorts of stories that involve what we call the environment or nature, thus taking history explicitly beyond the human. During these decades, it has grown and gained recognition, more so in the United States than elsewhere. While this approach is much more recent in Latin American and Caribbean history, where it still needs to carve a more secure place for itself through further contributions, it has made significant inroads. This book does not solely seek to expand those inroads with good case studies; it wishes to make environmental history more significant for understanding Latin American pasts by pointing out and analysing various ways in which nature has affected human trajectories. In other words, the editors and authors of this volume propose to expand the array of actors and actresses that played in the dramas that have made our history, to include drought, earthquakes, mules and water, to name a few examples. For our region, such an approach is not entirely novel, and has behind it the weight of what has come to be called post-humanism and multi-species studies, among other relatively new scholarly trends, but it is certainly a way of doing history that has been rarely explored and holds the promise of helping us compose more complete historical narratives and devise better explanations.

That this proposal is to a large extent a novelty has to do with the history of environmental history and the conundrums of our time. This area of research emerged tied to the concerns of the environmental movement and thus emphasised how people and the social institutions within which they operate have degraded nature. It has since moved in many directions, among them more nuanced ways of assessing transformations that include but go beyond mere harm. We came to understand places as complex ‘organic machines’, to borrow the expression Richard White used in 1996 to refer to the highly transformed Columbia River, inextricable amalgamations of nature and society. In this manner, environmental history has played a key role in questioning and overcoming the nature–culture divide that so profoundly defines how we think. Despite its variegated expressions, some core elements have remained throughout, recently reinforced by the pressing challenges that geoscientists have made us aware of. As climate change became a serious concern throughout the globe, reinforced by the notion that we are in a geological era – the Anthropocene – defined by the human imprint on the planet, environmental history has had to continue reconstructing and explaining how human actions have so profoundly shaped every corner of the globe. Thus, just as in any other branch of history, human actions have remained usually unchallenged and alone at the centre of the stories.

More-Than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean is a call to accept that nature has not only been a part of human history but that it has helped make that history. For such a proposition to be considered, it was necessary to scare away the ghosts of environmental determinism, a mindset that prevailed long before the emergence of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century, and from which these needed to break away in order to carve a place of their own. One influential way in which environmental determinism operated was considering that climate defined the character of different peoples and ultimately their fate. Within this tendency to subsume the social into the natural, social thought had to find social causes for social affairs – a move that allowed for the development of the valuable analytical tools that we have for examining the convoluted world we live in. But every advance has its costs, and this one led to separating the social from its connections to the natural world. Environmental history could emerge and blossom by revealing human ways of shaping the environment; moving into natural causation meant treading into discredited terrain. Geography opened a similar path many decades before history did, in a successful effort to shake off the entrenched influence of environmental determinism.

The risk of reducing the social to just a part of the natural created – and still creates – resistance, more so in a context in which the social sciences and the humanities have to continually prove their worth. But for several decades now, factoring in any kind of environmental causation raised a red flag in many corners; the idea that everything is socially constructed reinforced this tendency. Saying that nature has agency, which is what ultimately the call for more-than-human history entails, may sound just like environmental determinism striking back in a new guise. The word agency generates apprehension, for we associate it with deliberate action. How can one exercise power or influence, or accomplish anything (to follow the dictionary’s definition of agency), without doing something purposefully to that effect? And, well, it is problematic, to say the least, to affirm that rivers flow with an intent or that cows eat to provide juicy meat for Homo sapiens. However, as Gary Shaw has argued, not all human actions that have consequences are deliberate or were meant to produce the outcomes they ultimately had.¹ Therefore, if unintended human actions can play a historical role, so, too, can the behaviour of mules, viruses and storms. Plus, in fact, animals, diseases and disasters caused by extreme climate conditions are mentioned in many historical accounts as doing something, even though authors often do not stop to think what that means in terms of historical agency.

Ascribing agency to non-acting elements of nature (or to those that in human temporalities seem inert) is a harder step to take. However, if we put aside the word agency and focus on the ability of nonhuman elements to affect the course of events, more-than-human history can have quite an extensive reach and encompass minerals, trees and soils. But that reach has limits, for not every meadow, every butterfly or every element in the periodical table can demand historians’ attention. For parts of nature to acquire historical visibility they need not merely to exist but to cross paths with social realities in a meaningful way.

Take the case of so-called natural disasters. If a storm destroys houses and infrastructure, bringing death, sorrow and mighty challenges, it enters history. But if it crosses an uninhabited island, it does not, even if the resulting landscape looks ruinous to us. Similarly, if infrastructure has been built to withstand storms, a new one might not make it into history; for the storm to have historical importance it needs a favourable social setting. However, to continue with the previous example, the predecessors of a non-devastating storm would have gained their place in history books, because they set in motion a major change, such as that recounted in Magdalena Gil’s excellent chapter about Chile’s earthquakes. This assertion is certainly far from implying that disasters only have human causes; it means that nature can only act in conjunction with society to have an impact on human lives and historical trajectories.

Elements of nature much less conspicuous than storms and earthquakes have always intersected history. Take the case of precious metals, which have been embedded in Latin American geology for millions of years and became major protagonists of history when a people obsessed with them organised a society around their extraction. The locations and kinds of deposits contributed to shape the colonial world. That Cerro Rico had the richest silver mines in the world is the ultimate reason that Potosí, one of the largest cities that existed in the sixteenth century, was built in a most inauspicious location: at 4,000 meters above sea level, where everything had to be brought in from afar. Furthermore, the attraction that gold and silver exert over so many people, and their wide use as means of exchange, is possible due to the very particular traits these metals have, which include their durability, lack of toxicity, and melting temperature. This is just one example, mentioned rather than thoroughly developed. Reading Timothy LeCain’s The Matter of History helped me understand the meaning and reach of this kind of thinking, so, for non-believers or those who are simply puzzled, I would recommend the brilliant explanations that this book offers on how cows, caterpillars and copper have made our world.²

Explicitly accepting that elements of nature can be historical players leads to the question of how Latin American and Caribbean histories have been shaped by these often-unacknowledged forces. This book gives us some good examples, from which I want to highlight three kind of potential contributions. I will start, first, with the two chapters on colonial climate, one on extreme cold and rains in Chile and Argentina and a second one on droughts in Guatemala and Mexico. Being aware of the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum (of solar activity), leads Margarita Gascón – in detective mode – to uncover a variety of events caused by climatic anomalies in the early decades of colonisation in the Southern Cone. Rather than connecting different kinds of incidents with climate, Luis Alberto Arrioja Díaz Viruell and María Dolores Ramírez Veja shed light on drought, which caused more noticeable and thus better-known episodes of hunger in the eighteenth century. In the end, these researchers help insert climate, in particular its extremes, as a factor that needs to be considered to understand a period, as well as agriculture and hunger, and other less obvious topics such as war. The basis for these contributions relies on leaving our comfort zone by looking into climate and trying to understand and reconstruct it. Their work can encourage others who examine the same period and localities to make connections that have escaped them, for not everyone is willing to tread into unknown territory. Putting into focus questions that are not in the radar of many should ultimately help compose a better understanding of bygone eras. Brad Skopyk and Katherine Mora Pacheco have published books that illustrate the possibilities that this path brings.³

A second kind of contribution is exemplified by Lise Sedrez and Bruno Capilé’s chapter, which nicely reconstructs the many entanglements nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro had with water. To do this thoroughly, the authors, among other things, travel upstream along the creeks that made Rio possible, and downstream to the Guanabara Bay, to follow the labour of the waters that drained into the capital and of those that provided a much-needed sanitary service. Through their careful reconstruction the authors make the reader realise that the geomorphology of the creeks and the tides were crucial to the way the city functioned. In their story, waters are not only subjected to people’s labour and designs, but they in themselves play a key role in bringing to life that beautiful and unequal city. This second kind of contribution is not centered on causation but in entanglements, of which nature as an agent is a part.

The third and last contribution I would like to highlight is that in which understanding the agency of nature can dramatically alter historical narratives, such as in the case of Magdalena Gil’s chapter. While earthquakes have long been recognised as a defining feature of Chile, historians have not tended to take them seriously. Gil proposes that since the beginning, the formation of the Chilean republican state, which has long been held up as a regional example, was to an important degree crafted in response to the threat of earthquakes. The movements of the earth led to the development of state responsibilities and institutions, and to citizens demanding and accepting these new powers. Furthermore, she mentions that tsunamis were often deadlier than the earthquakes themselves, something that makes Chilean geography an actor, for it is the existence of that long coast and narrow territory that made tsunamis possible.

Such potent re-readings of major historical processes based on taking nature’s agency seriously are hard to come by, but they are not entirely novel. John McNeill provided a superb case in Mosquito Empires, where he explains how the sugar industry set the scene for yellow fever and its vector, Aedes aegypti, to together become a major player in siege war, altering the fate of a region in which European powers fought one another.⁴

With these various contributions, this book suggests new avenues of enquiry. The reader may well ask themself what defines Latin American nature and physical geography, as earthquakes define Chile, to examine how these have helped shape history in large and modest ways. Forests, for instance, that covered over three-thirds of the region’s territorial expanse, appeared abundantly in early Latin American environmental history as vanishing nature, victims of broadaxes and chain saws, government policies, and market dynamics. Conversely, they figure prominently in conservation areas, contributing to another form of state building. Additionally, they probably played a part in the extension of the organic energy regime, which was replaced by oil, sidestepping a coal phase. Similarly, the region’s water abundance is fundamental to explain why hydraulic infrastructure serves as a major source of electricity in contrast to most of the rest of the world. Forests are the most salient of native ecosystems, which partly because of their tropical location are very diverse, and largely due to low population density had – and still have – a prominent presence. Their existence, exuberance and power helped shape ideas of bountiful nature as well as related practices, while they also provided rural folk with food, medicine and construction materials, contributing to livelihoods, and associated social relations such as labour regimes.

Animals are another a case in point, and a growing and promising area of research. Animal history does not necessarily include nonhuman animals as historical actors in their own right; it can revolve around what happens to them or to the institutions, people and landscapes associated with them, as my own efforts attests.⁵ However, these creatures who fascinate us for being similar to us, yet so impossible to fully decipher, and who cross our paths throughout history in so many different ways, are a powerful source of stories. Cows and mules, for instance, have been absolutely key in forging Latin America into what it is. Mules’ resolve, physical resistance and shrewdness were fundamental to transportation for several centuries, just as cows’ innate ability to turn grass into muscle (meat), skin (hides), dung (fertiliser) and meat, as well as to walk to market, made them invaluable assets behind the development of private property and landscape transformation. Susanna Hecht, decades ago, and Shawn Van Ausdal and Robert Wilcox, more recently, have pointed at how the characteristics of cows are fundamental to understand their historical role.⁶ What these geographers have done in relation to cows serves as an example of what still needs to be done with mules, following the steps taken by Sedrez and Capilé in their article about Rio.

This book is therefore an invitation to alter the way we do history. It is an ambitious project, reflected in the wide time-frame and in the varied geographies examined, which show that there is a very broad scope for implementation. Further evidence is found in its inclusion of anthropologists, a geographer, a sociologist and a literary scholar among the authors and editors, which brings me to my last point.

Recognising the agency of the natural world ultimately implies a deep change, epistemological, but also ontological; it encourages examining our way of being in the world, something that goes well beyond history and knowledge production. It is ultimately a stance for living in the Anthropocene that implies recognising thoroughly that we are part of a wider natural world, that we have affected it deeply and perilously, but that it also shapes us, that there is just one world co-constituted by everything it holds. That is why André Vital is fascinated with animations, and why the book closes with Hannah Regis’s study of Jason Allen Paisant’s poetry. Fiction and art are forms of expression where we more easily recognise the agency of the natural world, or some sort of fusion with it. Scholarly works are not fiction; while they can be highly imaginative, they are bounded by sources and reality.

However, our work as scholars can and should find inspiration in films and poems, and also in Indigenous ontologies, which have a place in this book, for these do not draw a stark line separating the realms of nature and of human culture and society. However, as Marisol de la Cadena brilliantly conveys in Earth Beings, we can only have partial understandings with those for whom mountains are, in a non-metaphorical sense, beings who – as such – contributed, for instance, to Peru’s agrarian reform.⁷

Most historians and social scientists working on Latin America might find it easier to relate to novels than to shamans transforming into jaguars, just as it is more likely that their imprecise concern about climate change opens a window to affect their mental exclusion of what we tend to consider nature, rather than reading Bruno Latour, no matter how masterful his work is. My eighty-six-year-old father, who is an accomplished sociologist, is very concerned about the planetary environmental crisis, and he got there through his personal experience, plus the media and other readings, not through scholarly considerations. Well-crafted and convincing historical narratives can present an alternative way of thinking with the potential to mould both life and scholarship. That is why it is worthwhile engaging with the stories and histories that this book brings together.