From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History Since 1492

摘要

Humans have cleared forests to make way for their crops and domestic animals ever since the invention of agriculture. In many areas, the industrial revolution sped this process along by introducing technologies that made it easier to open the woods and created new incentives for doing so. As the Cuban scholar Reinaldo Funes Mozonte shows in this detailed analysis, however, the speed and scale that sugar displaced Cuban forests, which once constituted one of the world's great ecosystems, have few parallels elsewhere in world history.