This is the story of Cuba's forests.In this award-winning environmental history of Cuba since the age of Columbus, Reinaldo Funes Monzote emphasizes the two processes that have had the most dramatic impact on the island's landscape: deforestation and sugar cultivation. During the first 300 years of Spanish settlement, sugar plantations arose primarily in areas where forests had been cleared by the royal navy, which maintained an interest in management and conservation for the shipbuilding industry. The sugar planters won a decisive victory in 1815, however, when they were allowed to clear extensive forests, without restriction, for cane fields and sugar production. This book is the first to consider Cuba's vital sugar industry through the lens of environmental history. Funes Monzote demonstrates how the industry that came to define Cuba - and upon which Cuba urgently depended - also devastated the ecology of the island.The original Spanish-language edition of the book, published in Mexico in 2004, was awarded the UNESCO Book Prize for Caribbean Thought, Environmental Category. For this first English edition, the author has revised the text throughout and provided new material, including a glossary and a conclusion that summarizes important developments up to the present.

About the Author
Reinaldo Funes Monzote is associate professor of history at the University of Havana.||Alex Martin is an independent translator living in Maryland

Reviews
"Writing with erudition, but also with an attention to narrative, Funes Monzote demonstrates how, in a colonial context, the search for profits from sugar brought about an irreparable transformation in the ecology of a large, wooded tropical island. - Rebecca J. Scott, University of Michigan"



Book Information
ISBN 9780807858585
Author Alex Martin
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint The University of North Carolina Press
Publisher The University of North Carolina Press
Weight(grams) 510g