American Tropics : The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science

Raby, Megan

ISBN 10: 1469635607 / ISBN 13: 9781469635606

Published by The University of North Carolina Press, 2017

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 29486162-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: American Tropics : The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469635607
• ISBN 13: 9781469635606
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research. From these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American “tropical biologists” developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity.

Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.

About the Author

Megan Raby is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.