The landscapes of the Greater Caribbean have been undergoing a process of ecological globalization since the arrival of European explorers and settlers in the late fifteenth century. The character of this ecological globalization has changed over time. Models of commodity-led economic development drove, directly or indirectly, the neo-Columbian exchanges of the long nineteenth century (roughly 1720–1930). The neo-Columbian exchanges differed from the Columbian exchanges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in several key ways: They were increasingly mediated by imperial and transnational scientific institutions. The geographical scope of the exchanges grew, and the Greater Caribbean saw many new direct introductions of people, plants, and animals from Asia and the Pacific, as well as from the eastern part of the Atlantic World. A parallel movement of pathogens from Asia and the Pacific also introduced new epidemic diseases—especially crop diseases—to the Greater Caribbean. The neo-Columbian exchange drove the region's dramatic expansion in agricultural production, but this constructed abundance came at the expense of ecological impoverishment and fragility.

Northern Veracruz has experienced dramatic transformations in its landscape over the longue durée. Geological forces shaped it into the northernmost tropical rain forest in the Americas. Paleolithic humans appeared as early as 7600 BCE and tinkered with it, exploiting it for their own survival for thousands of years. Their ecological footprint was light enough until the communities grew and adopted agriculture. At that point, around 2500 BCE, the landscape of the Huasteca Veracruzana became more humanized, but the survival of the rainforest was not at risk, even when the first towns formed in the first centuries of the Common Era. Urbanization and civilization were highly localized, collapsing for reasons not well understood. The rainforest thus endured to confront Spanish colonialism in the 1500s. Changes in the land were uneven under the Spanish, however, and the rainforest outlasted colonial rule as well as the turmoil of nineteenth-century national politics. Transformation came in the twentieth century, as a result of oil extraction. Under the oil barons, the Huasteca experienced the full impact of capitalism and industrialization. Between 1900 and 1940, the oil industry eliminated the rainforest, leaving the Huasteca open to further environmental change. In the aftermath of oil, the landscape shifted to grasslands and monocrop agriculture. Oil remained present but largely in disguise: as petrochemical inputs to force poor soils to sustain citrus production and cattle ranching.

The United Nations describes aquaculture as the fastest-growing method of food production, and some industry boosters have heralded the coming of a sustainable blue revolution. This article interprets the meteoric rise and sudden collapse of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in southern Chile (1980–2010) by integrating concepts from commodity studies and comparative environmental history. I juxtapose salmon aquaculture to twentieth-century export banana production to reveal the similar dynamics that give rise to “commodity diseases”—events caused by the entanglement of biological, social, and political-economic processes that operate on local, regional, and transoceanic geographical scales. Unsurprisingly, the risks and burdens associated with commodity diseases are borne disproportionately by production workers and residents in localities where commodity disease events occur. Chile's blue revolution suggests that evaluating the sustainability of aquaculture in Latin America cannot be divorced from processes of accumulation.

Conservation-development interactions intensified as a consequence of environmental and land-use changes in Latin America during the 1985–2008 period. This study examines predominant changes in five countries (Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia). Multifold increase of protected areas for environmental conservation occurred together with agricultural growth and intensification. Conservation and agricultural trends were fraught with conflicts and contradictions, yet they also showed partial compatibility in the search for sustainability. Conservation, indigenous, and social movement organizations operating at multiple scales (local, national, and international) contributed to distinctly configured national conservation “booms” and sustainability discourses in the five countries. Neoliberal governments and global organizations sanctioned protected-area conservation via increased state institutions, national and subnational administrative mechanisms, widely publicized sustainability rationales, expanded territorial management and a property rights focus, spatial devolution, and official multiculturalism—the 1990s were a heyday of these activities. Subsequently Latin American conservation and sustainability efforts have evolved both as a global center of governance through payment for environmental services and under increased and diverse social agendas.

In recent decades, the impacts of climate on society and on human well-being have attracted increasing amounts of attention, and the forecasts that predict such impacts have become more accurate. Forecasts are now distributed and used more widely than they were in the past. This article reviews three cases of such use of forecasts in Latin America. It shows that in all cases, the users are concentrated in particular sectors and regions (agriculture in the Argentine pampas, fisheries on the Peruvian coast, water resources in northeastern Brazil) and that the forecasts are distributed not by government agencies but by intermediate organizations—semistatal organizations or nongovernmental organizations. It draws on the concept of environmental citizenship to discuss these cases and assesses them for such attributes of citizenship as equity, transparency, accountability, and promotion of collective goals. It traces the implications of these cases for the current era of global warming.

In the past few decades, a new era of socioenvironmental institutions and policies has promoted experimentation with alternative proposals for managing land and resources in the Amazon region. The rubber tappers' home state of Acre was transformed by the florestania policies of the “forest government” regimes that built on the rubber tappers' identity and history to promote forest-based development and to extend citizenship rights. Beginning in 1999, the state became a laboratory for experimentation with new approaches to development, at a time of rapid changes among both urban and rural populations. This article uses data from household surveys in the capital city of Rio Branco, as well as extensive secondary literature, to trace the evolution of these new policies and projects and their ambiguous implications for citizenship and sustainable development.

This article analyzes two sets of narratives that describe the area contained within the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Araripe Basin Geopark, the first such geological preserve in the Americas. The first group includes scientific-sounding accounts of fossils, sediments, and geological formations. The second is a series of “folk” stories that describe the sacred geography of a part of the northeastern Brazilian backlands best known for their economic backwardness and religious mysticism. Although at first glance the two sets of narratives appear wholly divergent, both treat the natural world as ancient, fluid, composed of interrelated elements, mysterious, and deeply worthy of protection. These shared conceptions have important policy implications in strategizing a sustainable tourism that will preserve the region's geological and cultural heritage while bringing economic benefits to the local population.

Deforestation in Latin America, especially in the Amazon basin, is a major source of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that contribute to global warming. Protected areas play a vital role in minimizing forest loss and in supplying key environmental services, including carbon sequestration and rainfall regulation, which mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change amid a rising tide of economic development in the region. The area of protected forest has expanded rapidly since 1980 to cover one-fifth of Latin America and more than two-fifths of Amazonia, a region whose rain forest captures some 40 percent of Latin America's carbon emissions. The reserve sector has traditionally suffered from severe underfunding, but the possibility of new resources being generated through financial compensation for “reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD) or “avoided deforestation” under a new Kyoto protocol after 2012 could help strengthen the environmental and social roles of protected areas. However, a number of major implementation and governance challenges will need to be addressed.