European colonialism entailed material and conceptual landscape transformations that continue to define the parameters for postcolonial development. The major conceptual landscape transformation, termed the "pristine myth" for the Americas, remains a cultural foundation for the binary categorization of the world into a rationally progressive West versus an irrationally traditional non-West, thus driving the social and environmental contradictions of postcolonial development efforts. Despite much evidence that contradicts the pristine myth-the myth in postcolonial development-it retains a pernicious grip on the Western popular imagination because attempts to falsify it have not demonstrated its emergence through a colonial process that materially and conceptually transformed landscapes while simultaneously obscuring such transformation. Study of sixteenth-century landscape transformation in the environs of the port of Veracruz demonstrates the significance of a material-conceptual, positive-feedback process in the emergence of a myth of increasingly rational land-use over the course of the colonial and postcolonial periods, when, in fact, the opposite transformation has occurred. That landscape served as the beachhead for the Spanish colonization of North America and thus influenced the initial conceptualization of New Spain, as well as undergoing some of the earliest material transformations due to disease and livestock introductions. Although this occurred early in the process of global colonization, a detailed database of land-grant documents enables reconstruction of interactions among population, vegetation, livestock, and categories of land use, cover, and tenure. Identification of such key variables in a positive-feedback process that simultaneously transformed landscape and obscured that transformation tentatively provides the basis for a more general falsification of the myth in postcolonial development.
Despite a congenital relationship between colonization and geographic scholarship, and despite the significance of colonial landscape transformation to current social and environmental challenges, a comprehensive geographic theory of colonialism and landscape remains incipient at best. In this article, a historical sketch provides some basic perspective on the scope appropriate to such a theory by outlining how the goals of scholarship on colonial landscape transformation have changed over the last century in relation to social and environmental context. The subsequent analysis compares and contrasts prior and existing conceptualizations of colonialism and landscape, each emphasizing particular elements and relationships at the expense of others but all thus jointly delineating what a more comprehensive framework must include. That analysis provides a preliminary basis for elaborating a comprehensive geographic theory of colonialism and landscape with an immediate focus on the Americas.
In recent years, a new type of determinist environmental thinking has emerged. It can be understood to be one strand in a much broader realm of ‘environment talk’. Many human geographers have expressed a combination of scepticism and surprise at the apparently inexorable rise of the neo-environmentalist arguments which differ from early twentieth-century environmental determinism yet continue to draw upon biologistic accounts of human culture. Although geography has in recent years been at the forefront of the academic discussions of environmental change in relation to science, institutional context, political costs and human impacts, the discipline nevertheless has to contend with a widespread misperception of the place of environment in human affairs and the world’s future. This Forum discusses the context for the rise of, and consequences of, determinist accounts.
Regional, Holocene records hold particular relevance for understanding the reciprocal nature of global environmental change and one of its major human dimensions: "sustainable agriculture", i.e., food production strategies which entail fewer causes of and are less susceptible to environmental change. In an epoch of accelerating anthropogenic transformation, those records reveal the protracted regional causes and consequences of change (often agricultural) in the global system as well as informing models of prehistoric, intensive agriculture which, because of long tenures and high productivities, suggest strategies for sustainable agricultural in the present. This study employs physiographic analysis and the palynological, geochemical record from cores of basin fill to understand the reciprocal relation between environmental and land-use change in the Gulf of Mexico t~:opical lowland, focusing on a coastal basin sensitive to sea-level change and containing vestiges of prehistoric settlement and wetland agriculture. Fossil pollen reveals that the debut of maize cultivation in the Laguna Catarina watershed dates to ca. 4100 BC, predating the earliest evidence for that cultivar anywhere else in the lowlands of Middle America. Such an early date for a cultivar so central to Neotropical agroecology and environmental change, suggests the urgency of further research in the study region. Moreover, the longest period of continuous agriculture in the basin lasted nearly three millennia (ca. 2400 BC-AD 550) despite eustatic sea-level rise. Geochemical fluxes reveal the reciprocity between land-use and environmental change: slope destabilization, basin aggradation, and eutrophication. The consequent theoretical implications pertain to both applied and basic research. Redeploying ancient agroecologies in dynamic environments necessitates reconstructing the changing operational contexts of putative high productivity and sustainability. Adjusting land use in the face of global warming and eustatic sea-level rise necessitates understanding sediment influxes to coastal basins which, in turn, depend on vegetation, climate, and land use in watersheds.
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