A narration of the mutually mortal historical contest between humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a
period that begins with Amerindian civilizations and concludes in the region's present urban agglomerations, the
work offers an original synthesis of the current scholarship on Latin America's environmental history and argues
that tropical nature played a central role in shaping the region's historical development. Human attitudes, populations,
and appetites, from Aztec cannibalism to more contemporary forms of conspicuous consumption, figure prominently
in the story. However, characters such as hookworms, whales, hurricanes, bananas, dirt, butterflies, guano, and
fungi make more than cameo appearances. Recent scholarship has overturned many of our egocentric assumptions about
humanity's role in history. Seeing Latin America's environmental past from the perspective of many centuries illustrates
that human civilizations, ancient and modern, have been simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable than previously
thought.