Report
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the Caribbean islands and coastal Brazil were transformed from dense forests, filled with a diversity of life, into seas of sugar cane. The monocrop plantation produced fabulous wealth, but left the environment and the people impoverished to this day.
After World War II, the remaining primal lowland tropical forests of Central America were razed to make way for cotton, and with it, an ever-accelerating spiral of erosion and pesticide abuse.
From the moment Columbus set foot on Hispaniola, mining replaced food security as the organizing principal of American societies, setting the stage for environmental devastation that only accelerated with time.
BEFORE COLUMBUS, AMERICA WAS A LAND of dense ancient forests covering coast and moun- tain alike, which included thousands of plant and animal species unknown today. Until Europeans began to colo- nize the world, no permanent physical change affecting the whole earth had occurred in half a billion years.
The temperate forest in the southern Andes is being destroyed and valuable ecosystems are are at high risk.
Since Columbus encountered the New World, the state of the forest in Latin America has gotten drastically worse. The remainder of the environment, which is directly linked, has also been hit very hard.
Deforestation, erosion, and soil depletion were the results of the nineteenth-century coffee boom. Ever more forests were felled, only to be routinely abandoned to pasture a few decades later.