This book narrates the mutually mortal historical contest between humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a period that begins with Amerindian civilizations and concludes in the region´s present urban agglomerations, the work offers an original synthesis of the current scholarship on Latin America´s environmental history and argues that tropical nature played a central role in shaping the region´s historical development. Seeing Latin America´s environmental past from the perspective of many centuries illustrates that human civilizations, ancient and modern, have been simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable than previously thought.
