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The introduction features German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who visited the circum-Caribbean region for a number of years at the turn of the nineteenth century and wrote about it for the rest of his life. His observations and wide-ranging interests—especially his recognition of the binaries of land and sea, humans and animals, bewitching beauty and nightmarish horrors, exuberance and menace, utopian visions and dystopian realities, health and sickness—prefigure many of the themes of this book. His view of nature, confirmed and elaborated by his tropical sojourn, was that it was a web, in which all elements were connected. It was a living whole, a unified ecosystem, always prone to the dangers of environmental destruction, deforestation, and climatic shocks. The introduction then raises and provisionally answers the four key questions that animate this book: why focus on this part of the world, specifically? Who are the pioneers of Caribbean environmental history? How is the region defined geographically? Finally, what are the important chronological markers? The introduction emphasizes the mixing, movement, and displacement of peoples that led to intense sociocultural interaction and hybridity. The term for this moving and mixing is creole, which designates any person or thing born or created in the Caribbean, with an ancestry external to the region. The rest of the book elaborates on the emergence of this creole ecology resulting from the constant arrival, dispersal, and mingling of peoples, plants, pathogens, and products. |
