P. 15 While material consumption is certainly falling in post-industrial nations like the Us and UK, on the other side of the world, in the countries whence Americans and Britons import most of their goods, it is rising at breakneck speed. … in 2019… we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950. .. you could have said the precisely the same thing about every year since 2012… out appetite for raw materials continues to grow, up by 2.8% in 2019, with not a single category of mineral extraction, from sand and metals to oil and coal, falling.”

p. 67 “geologists … estimated that the amount of sand, soil and rock we humans mine and quarry and dredge each year is some 24 times greater than the amount of sediment moved each year by Earth’s natural erosion processes.. Humans, in other words, are a considerably bigger geological force than nature itself, and have been, according to the data, ever since 1955… by 2020 the total weight of human-made products … was greater than the total weight of every natural living thing on the planet…. The sum total amount of material that we have dug out of the ground in the past century … 6.7 teratonnes (or to be even more precise, 6,742,000,000,000 tonnes). .. for every human-made object on this planet, every building, plane, train, car and phone, try to picture a pile of earth, sand and dirt six times its weight. And the pile of moved material is getting bigger with every year that passes.”

p. 70 “Sand is serious business. According to the UN Environment Programme, if we are to avert a ‘sand crisis’ we should be treating it not as a commonplace resource but as a strategic mineral, something to be uttered in the same breath as metals like copper or even battery materials like lithium.” (Fibre optic cables eg)

p. 75 The recipe for the cement we mostly use today was patented in 1824 by a man called Joseph Aspdin. He called it Portland cement, because its colour resembled the Portland Stone quarried in Dorset. In truth, however, there were all sorts of vying recipes around the same time, and no one is quite sure whether ASpidin, a slightly shady character, really won the race or actually purloined his blueprint from somebody else.”

p. 82 Cement production accounts for a staggering 7-8% of all carbon emissions. At the time of writing, those emissions were split roughly 60:40 between the chemical reaction occurring in chalk or limestone as it burns off its carbon in the process of becoming cement, and the energy needed to heat the kiln. The latter is relatively easy to resolve .. but the chemical reaction is a far harder nut to crack.”

p. 108 better known as the main production hub for a company whose name is emblazoned in red on the buildings, TSMC. This is Fab 18 – the most advanced factory in the world .. founded in 1987 …a business whose sole purpose is to manufacture the processors dreamed up by Apple or Tesla or ‘fabless’ chip companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm… pushing the boundaries of physics… over a 3-year period from 2021, TSMC was budgeting to invest $135 billion”

p. 116 China spends more money on importing computer chips these days than it does importing oil … import costs as of 2017 were greater than Saudi Arabia’s total revenue from oil exports, or for that matter the global trade in aircraft.”

p. 128 Steve Sherlock, 6,000 years ago in Britain, Street House “the late Stone Age … the saltern – salt factory – here was up and running, churning out salt and cheese and possibly other products too, a thousand years before Stonehenge’s standing stones were even erected. .. the people who worked here – who are thought to have come across from mainland Europe, possibly from France – had brought with them knowledge about how to turn natural resources into a product before selling or trading it onwards.”

p. 133 “As early as AD 523 when the Ostrogoths ruled what was once the Western Roman Empire, their administrator Cassiodorus wrote to the Venetians that: “All your energies are spent on your salt-fields; in them indeed lies your prosperity and your power to purchase those things which you have not. For though there may be men who have little need of gold, yet none live who desire not salt”

p. 174 Today it is estimated that around half the nitrogen in our bodies was fixed from the air via the Haber-Bosch process…. But in these earliest years, the main use these nitrates were put to was creating explosives for the German army.”

p. 203 “there is about 32 billion tonnes of steel out there in the world … you could build seven high-speed rail tracks between the earth and the sub. Or, were you to divide it between every person on the planet, you would end up with about 4 tonnes per person. Given you already know there are around 15 tonnes per person in the developed world, that underlines another important point: the stocks of iron around the world are very unequally distributed. .. the average person in China today has roughly 7 tonnes of steel. The average person living in sub-Saharan Africa has less than a tonne of steel per capita.”

p. 216 “The ore is rock rich in iron oxide, essentially granulated rust, and turning that into a metal means ripping the oxygen atoms away from the iron atoms. And that, ultimately, is what this enormous furnace is here for: to provide an environment where the oxygen can leave the iron and bond with the carbon from the coal.”

p. 217 “Iron is a fossil fuel product. Each year we empty staggering quantities of coal – more than a billion tonnes … into the thousand or so blast furnaces operating around the world. The iron that comes out the other end may not have much carbon embedded in it, but its production entails the creation of enormous quantities of CO2 – around 7-8 percent of the global total.”

p. 221 “In 1800, 95% of Britain’s energy came from coal; at the very same point, almost all of France’s energy – over 90% – still came from burning wood.”

p. 225 “Around 70% of the world’s niobium = a rare earth element that helps harden steel for use in jet engines, critical pipelines, superconducting magnets, and the skeletons of bridges and skyscrapers – comes from a single mine in Brazil. During the Second World War, the Germans and British vies for the affections of neutral Turkey, in part because it produced nearly all of the chromium the Nazis used in their weapons and machinery.”

p. 230 “low-background steel … completely uncontaminated with radionucleotides … essential for the production of sensitive equipment like Geiger counters and some medical devices… the only way … is to find a source of the metal that dates back before those first nuclear tests in 1945. Old sunken battleships are a particularly popular source. .. there is a roaring trade in metal piracy from old warships, especially in the South China Sea.”

p. 287 “The flipside of getting ever more effective at mining ever poorer copper ores is that we displace ever more amounts of the planet in our bid to do so. Between 2004 and 2016 Chilean miners increased annual cooper production by 2.6%. Yet the amount of ore they had to dig out of the ground to produce this marginal increase in refined copper rose by 75% ,,, the numbers … show up in no environmental accounts of material flow analysis, which count only the refined metal. When it comes to even the United Nations’ measure of how much humans are affecting the planet, this waste rock doesn’t count.”

p. 340 “Engine knock was one of the great early challenges faced by the motor industry. In an effort to outdo its rivals at Ford, GM began in the 1920s to look for a way to quiet the engines in its Cadillacs. One of its engineers, a man called Thomas Midgeley, discovered that a drop of tetraethyl lead in gasoline would miraculously increase octane levels and stop all the pinging. And so began one of the most shameful stories of pollution in modern history … everyone knew the risks of putting lead in petrol right from the start. .. rather than seek a way to remove lead, GM simply removed the word from the chemical’s brand name, they called it ‘Ethyl”. There were warning signs from the start, with a spate of illnesses at a refinery in New Jersey shortly after it entered the market. Men were quite literally going mad, hallucinating and then working themselves up into a frenzy. Six men died who all worked in the same place, the section of the refinery where they synthesised tetraethyl lead … some states banned the use of leaded gasoline … but then, in an extraordinary stunt, the inventor, Thomas Midgley, held a press conference where he wasted his hands in a solution of tetraethyl lead and spent a minute inhaling its fumes … unbeknownst to the journalists witnessing it, Midgley had just spent a period in Florida recuperating from lead poisoning itself. GM and its lawyers suggested the men who died must have fallen victim to their own negligence .. This was the Roaring Twenties where anything went, and state by state the bans were revoked and the age of leaded petrol began.”

p. 352 polyethylene … “by the late 1930s, ICI came up with a system for mass prodicing the plastic… When war broke out shortly afterwards, this wonder substance was rapidly co-opted for the national effort. After Japan took control of Malaysia and all its rubber plantations, suddenly polyethylene was of critical importance . Production went into overdrive … the Royal Air Force could use it to cut the weight of its radar systems just enough to fit them inside its planes … pretty much every ton of polyethylene produced up to 1945 went into those radar cables, but once the war ended ICI was left with a sudden glut of the plastic, so it went looking for buyers. This would soon become a recurrent theme. Cheap plastic toys, beads, jewellery and other such trinkets often owed their existence less to consumer appetites than to a surplus of supply”.

p. 385 “Australia … has overtaken Chile as the world’s biggest lithium producer, though nearly all of their spodumene is actually shipped off to be processed in China …. It means Australia need not take responsibility for all the emissions produced when they are refined, which is rather a lot.”

p. 1. Few were as far apart as the authors of this book when they first met in the 1970s. At  that time, a split was appearing in the practice of science. Traditionalists were persevering with the reduction of whole systems into their constituent parts, an approach that had led to the triumphs of the decipherment of the genetic code and the new science of genomics. A different way of thinking was combining science and new social movements. Post-normal science was beginning to accept that, for complex issues such as planetary climate change and global food security, scientists needed to practise their art where facts were uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent. The authors met, 45  years ago, in the Department of Zoology at The  Australian National University (ANU). Chris Bryant was then a  reader, with a flourishing research group in parasite biochemistry. He had remained a reductionist, focusing his attention on the subcellular mechanisms of respiration in anaerobic organisms. Val Brown, having raised a family, was a mature-age PhD student working in the then-new field of holistic thinking as applied to the human sciences. She was already a fan of Lovelock’s space-engendered view of the Earth as a self-maintaining and self-organising planetary system he named ‘Gaia’.

p. 77 Reductionism has proved to be a useful tool in science, which progresses by accretion of knowledge, so that arguments improve as more of the unknowns become known. The contrasting view to reductionism is wholism: the idea that things can have properties as a whole (emergent properties) that cannot be understood from a simple knowledge of their individual parts. Even a quick look at evolutionary history suggests that the evolutionary process is a series of emergent phenomena. Emergent properties are generally the properties of complex systems, whose complexity is the consequence of many simple, reiterated, recursive interactions. Every major evolutionary event has led to consequences that a contemporary observer, from Mars, say, could not have predicted. … The whole of the biosphere, including human social systems, is an emergent consequence of the appearance of the first cell. To do them justice, many reductionists understood this phenomenon, but chose to ignore it in the process of studying what was possible, given the state of science at the time. Up to the middle of the twentieth century, the study of biological and human systems as a ‘whole’ was difficult, unreliable and time-consuming. It created an unfortunate but pragmatic situation, where things were studied more because they could be studied, rather than because they necessarily should be.

p. 78 The advent of genomics, the study of the highly variable genetic kit owned by all organisms (see, for example, Lesk 2017), brought about another wave of scientific reductionism. Readily available ‘cookbooks’ gave the simple and detailed instructions for gene sequencing and manipulation. Graduate students were exploited as intelligent workhorses to do the menial task of gene and protein sequencing. The cynical slogans ‘one polypeptide chain, one PhD’ and later, as techniques evolved, ‘one gene, one PhD’ were current around the turn of the twentieth century! The past is indeed a foreign country and, as LP Hartley remarked, they certainly did things differently there. The sense of the connectedness of things was lost during the Enlightenment when the scientific method of destructive analysis became de rigeur. Philosophers believed that understanding came from dissection, and much understanding did come. By unweaving the network of knowledge into its component threads, the philosophers of the time were so intoxicated by their so-called objective discoveries that they lost sight of the whole.

p. 94 Even a quick look at the evolutionary history in Chapter 3 suggests that the evolutionary process is built on a series of emergent phenomena. Although  emergent phenomena are commonplace, we rarely see them as such. Mistakenly, we tend to look at a whole as a static system – a  reductionist view – whereas in a dynamic system, wholes are consequences of the influences of other wholes. Recurrence of a different spring in the northern and southern hemispheres is a consequence of the spin of a planet with a tilted axis in a solar system. Individual plants and animals are consequences of a fertilised ovum. Humans are the consequence of a particular pattern of DNA expressed in a social and physical context. Microscopic examination of either an unknown seed or a fertilised egg gives no clues to its final destiny. WB Yeats wrote: O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? The nut that is planted becomes the ‘tree’ and the ‘tree’ is all of the things listed by Yeats in the one living form. One cannot know the ‘dancer’, nor the ‘dance’, by simply studying the choreography. ‘Dancers’ may be changed and the new ones master the same choreography with different interpretations, while the dance itself will be influenced by different settings.

p.120 , let us simply talk about cells, for the first modern cells are themselves tri- or tetra-symbionts: the interaction between two or more different cells living in close association, to the benefit of all parties. We now have a definition that includes the whole of biological creation. Individual animals and plants become symbiotic associations of cells.

p. 121

Rabbits make up for having a small, rabbit-sized intestine by eating their own faeces. This process is called coprophagy. At night rabbits produce soft, green, partially digested faeces and eat them, giving the microbes in their intestine a second go at breaking down cellulose. Important nutrients are synthesised by symbionts in the posterior, large intestine while absorption occurs in the anterior small intestine. What else can a poor rabbit do but recycle? Coprophagy also happens in rodents and it has been observed in koalas, ringtail possums, piglets, foals, dogs and nonhuman primates. Pigs regard human faeces as an excellent source of nutrition

p. 122 One truly remarkable mollusc, the sea slug Elysia, consumes algae and then makes use of their chloroplasts which go on photosynthesising for a considerable time, relocated in the skin of the sea slug and turning it into a ‘crawling green leaf’ (Mujer et al. 1996,

p. 123 The pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) has an endosymbiont bacterium called Buchnera; its primary role is to synthesise essential amino acids that the aphid cannot acquire from plant sap (Wilson et al. 2010). The tsetse fly Glossina has an endosymbiotic bacterium that is called, rather grandly, Wigglesworthia, a name that also commemorates a famous entomologist. Wigglesworthia synthesises vitamins that the tsetse fly cannot get from the blood it feeds on (Soumana et al. 2014). Without its endosymbiont, the tsetse fly could not survive – and the world would be free of the scourge of sleeping sickness

p. 124 Riftia is a marine worm that lives its strange life in close proximity to black smokers. Riftia lacks a gut and so relies for nutrition on endosymbiotic bacteria that can deal with this extreme environment (Bandi et al. 1999).

p. 143

One possible reason why the rate of change of mitochondrial DNA is greater than that in the nuclear DNA is because oxygen is dangerous stuff (Baker and Orlandi 1995). Mitochondria have to interact intimately with oxygen as it is used in energy metabolism. In making ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the ‘energy currency’ of the cell, they transfer electrons to oxygen to yield a molecule of water. In this process, highly reactive intermediate oxygen products that react with almost anything, including DNA, are produced. Damage to DNA is a constant possibility that must be avoided and there are protective molecules ready to scavenge the dangerous oxygen radicals. Even so, some of the highly reactive oxygen compounds do escape to do damage to important molecules and subcellular structures. Plants have to deal with the perils of oxygen in two systems; chloroplasts as well as mitochondria. Chloroplasts once were free-living anaerobic photosynthesisers producing oxygen as an end product of photosynthesis, and therefore have a much longer history of dealing with toxic oxygen than mitochondria. Perhaps they are better at it. They too have their antioxidants to deal with reactive oxygen. In any event, modern cells successfully crossed this barrier to symbiosis and the rest is all about you

p. 180

An Australian magpie of our acquaintance has taken the first step towards superstition. It has learned that it will probably get a morsel of food if it knocks on the window. Many birds do that, but this one hops down, waits until you open the door and then rapidly turns around on the spot. The number of turns, up to four, is a rough measure of its eagerness and appetite. It has been doing this for several years now, a behaviour that probably occurred accidentally on first acquaintance is now considered essential by the bird. It is in the position of the person who is an unfortunate performer of ritual behaviour to ensure a favourable outcome in a specific situation. Professional sportspersons often show this behaviour – footballers who insist on wearing the same socks for every game, cricketers who, when batting, perform a specific sequence of actions adjusting their armour before receiving the next delivery. It is not a great step from this to communities lighting ritual fires to ensure the Sun returns at the end of the winter. Such people – and, presumably the magpie – have an imaginary tiger by the tail. They dare not let go.

– p. 217

Studies have shown that infants in orphanages may die without emotional care before they are six years old. If they do not hear a language spoken before they are nine, they will never develop speech. If they do not use their hands (feet can replace them) as they grow, their thinking capacity will be limited. The conclusion is that humans are inherently social animals, co-dependent on opportunities for learning, and needing manual as well intellectual stimulation for growth. They learn to integrate with their social groups and learn of the rewards of cooperative behaviour.

p. 219

Genes for lactose tolerance have also spread rapidly through the British population in the last 2,000  years, presumably reflecting the historical growth of dairy farming. The introduction of milk in the diet had at least one unfortunate repercussion – the spread of tuberculosis (consumption) in Victorian England. In 1924 free milk (now tuberculin tested) in schools was introduced, and so a change of behaviours and increased health followed the first impact of the incorporation of a new component to the human diet; social evolution at its best.

p. 221

‘Survival of the fittest’ always conjures up in the popular mind the idea of competition. And that usually means, to the average farmer or gardener, competition between their crop plants and invading weed species. There is a famous cartoon from Punch of a beautiful cottage garden and a plaque on the cottage wall quoting TE Brown’s ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot’. The proud gardener is leaning on his wall and remarking to an admirer ‘You shoulda seen the mess it was in when God had it to hisself!’ A well-kept cottage garden (or farm) is so far out of natural equilibrium that it is indeed a battlefield requiring constant supportive assaults from gardener or farmer.

p. 223 Recently, a paper entitled ‘Gaia 2.0’, by Lenton and Latour (2018), put forward a plausible mechanism by which Gaia herself might evolve. It is derived from observations on automata that reset, or ‘reboot’ themselves. Each time they reboot, they tend to move to a condition of greater stability. Gaia has suffered half a dozen ‘great’ extinctions – or reboots – and 20-odd ‘lesser’ extinctions, in each case leading to a new period of stability during which complexity appears to have increased. Thus, each reboot is a resetting, as long as it is not a total extinction event, and Gaia can build on what has gone before. The evolutionary tendency is thus towards stability. Based on this, the so-called Anthropocene is merely a harbinger of a new steady state.

p 52 The islands, representing just 0.15 percent of the world’s land surface are home to over 2% of the world’s endemic plant species, 3% of the world’s amphibians, 5% of the world’s land snails and 6% of the world’s reptiles. Of the approximately 13,000 plants presently found in the Caribbean, about half are indigenous and unique to the region. The two continental islands of Trinidad and Tobago, sharing much with the mainland, harbour almost 7,000 plant species. Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, has the richest flora and about half of its approximately 6,000 species of flowering plants are unique to the island.”

p. 56 On a rather uninviting island such as Barbuda – low and flay, and made largly limestone, with thin soils and limited fresh surface water – the Amerindians cleared land through regular burnings. In addition to the nutrient bonanzas for their fields, they exploited lignum vitae, a drought-resistant hardwood spexies, and greenheart and torchwood, for fuel and house construction. They engaged in these practices for 14 centuries before abandoning their homeland ca 1300CE. When the Europeans arrived a few centuries later, the vegetation had rebounded. What seemed untouched and unoccupied was in fact secondary growth and a modified landscape.”

p. 57 Not n the scale of the Guianas and not generally in swampland, Native Americans in other parts of the Caribbean engaged in conuco agriculture – constructiving mounds, some as high as a meter and about 3 metres in circumference, in which they planted a mixture of crops – which helped preserve soil fertility and protected against erosion. Arranged in regular rows, the mounds improved drainage, permitted more lengthy storage of mature tubers in the ground, and made it easier to weed and harvest the crops. Even in places where soils were shallow and the limestone bedrock lay close to the surface, indigenous farmers enhanced their gardens and plots on which they grew cotton and food crops by adding nutrient-rich red clays and mxing it with organic matter to increase fertility. ALso Amerindian farmers allowed their lands to regenerate after a fairly short period of cultivation.

Following the Amerindian example, Europeans cleared land by burning the vegetation, but they did so on a massive scale. One early observer noted that “all the earth is black with cinfers”. The resulting rich soil was of course decieing. The assumption was that fertility was boundless, indinite … contemporaries occasionally expressed disquiet at the rapidity and extent of the destruction. Compared to the Caribs “who wisely left shady groves standing in the midst of their fields,” an observer on St Kitts in 1625 botes “the French cut and slashed right and left, intent on only clearing the ground as rapidly as possible, and without a thought of future protection against the sun.”… Europeans engaged in commercial monoculture that quickly exhausted soils; their sugar boiling houses introduced lead and mercury into the ground; increased mining, coal combistion and waste incineration have rise to the emissions of metals into the atmosphere… introducing livestock into a region with no previous history of large mammals, allowing them to roam and breed at will, led to soil compaction and considerable soil runoff.”

p. 59 The shoares, mangrove swamps and waterways … teemed with aquatic birds – tens of millions, it has been estimated, but home to fewer than 2 million today. “

p. 63 Among introduced mammals, dogs stand apart. In archaeological depoist they are found as fragmented, burned bone, indicating that Amerindians ate them, but they also appear in burials, both alone and associated with human remains. At one site in Guadelope, 16 dogs were found buried among 30 humans, four were interred at an individual’s feet, one was buried with four shell beads around its neck, another witha Queen Conch shell on the pelvis, and almost all of the dogs were buried with their pegs pulled together, as if bound. Most of the dogs were not from the island in which they were buried, and their diet was not dissimilar to humans, suggesting they fed on scraps and leftovers. In contrast to those found in burials, specimens found in middens are of larger stature, suggesting the possibility of distinct dog types that served dedicated purposes – some as hunting com[anions, others as food. Columbus duing his first voyage reported two types of dogs in the Bahamas: one akin to a larger mastiff, the other to a smaller terrier. He also encountered “dogs that never barked” on the north coast of Cuba… Archaeologists have noted the frequent absence of the fourth mandibular premolar in Caribbean dogs, which may represent the intentional removal of teeth to facilitate tethering by the mouth… According to Fray Ramon Pane, the Taino revered a canin zemi, Opiyelguobiran, the guardian spirit of the dead, as their guide to the underworld.”

p. 71 The Caribbean basin was the last region of the Americas to be settled. The earliest record of human habitation on the continental portion bates 16,00-14,000 BP in what is now Colombia and Venezuela, and 13,000-10,000BP elsewhere. About 10,000 BP bands of hunters and forgares frequented what became Trinidad prior to the island’s separation from the mainland following sea-level increase… attributed to its size, its proximity to the mainland, and its lack of hurricane destruction, since it lies on the margins of the tropical hurricane belt. These three factors help explain Trinidad’s high biodiversity, which served as another inducement to colonisation.

About 7,000 to 6,000 BP, other migrants left Central America and settled in Cuva and Hispaniola.

p. 73 “The motives of migrants … are hard to decipher. Population pressure, lack of food, limited carrying capacity, drastic environmental change and conflict situations may have played a role but do not seem pivotal. More likely the islands were attractive for settlement. Available land could support tropical agriculture. Abundant marine life more than compensated for the lack of terrestrial fauna.”

p. Archaic Antilleans were more than mobile hunters. Some communities set down roots and decame sedentary. Arhcaic Age Indians made pots long before the beginning of the so-called Ceramic Age. As early as 4,600 BP, Archaic Age communities in Cuba began using pottery in small quantites,. In addition, and array of plants, grains and fruit trees – sapodilla, wild avocado, yellow sapote, primrose and palms – have been idenitified in Archaic Age deposits. These earliest Antilleans also cultivated maize. They used tools, often made of shell, to feel trees, dig heavy soils and process plants. Since at least 3,300 BP in Puerto Rico, “the Antillean botanical trinity of manioc, sweey potatoes and maize” existed.”

p. 80 Since the last Ice Age glaciation, otherwise known as the Holocene epoch (11,700 years ago to the present), the Caribbean has experienced more mammalian extinctions than any other global region. Before humans arrived, the Antilles contained a remarkable 130-40 terrestrial species, including sloths, insectovores, primates, rodents and bats, but only 73, just over half, have survived… The end of the last glaciation produced significant environemntal change … but correlating the dates of extinction of native mammals and the presence of human demonstrates widespead overlap. On Hispaniola and Cuba, humans and sloths likely coexisted for more than 1,000 years. On Jamaica, a species of monkey persisted into the period of human occupation, making it likely that its extinction was antropogenically driven.”

p. 94 On Cuba, shipbuilding had a greater impact on forests than ranching. Because Cuban hardwoods proved so durable and value, local officials developed an interest in conserving them. As early as 1550, the Havana city council … prohibited enslaved blacks from cutting mahogany and cedar within a radius of 2 leagues around the city. Two years later, they banned nonreisndets and ships of foreign flags from felling and exporting trees… By the early 18th century, when Havanna was Spain’s most important shipyard, royal edicts reserved the best woodlands for ship building.”

p 98 “The true ecological maelstrom to hit the Caribbean involved the transformation to sugar. Barbados’s rapid conversion to a fully commercial sugar economy destroyed its forest cover within a generation.. sugar cultivation began in eanest in Barbados in the 1640s, and towards the end of the decade 40% of the island’s forests were gone; by the next decade, alarmed island authorities began restricting timber cutting; by then, it was too late. By the late 17th century, the island’s open landscape reverberated to the sound of turning windmills rather than burdsong… Soil erosion was such that one heavy downpour in 1668 carried hundreds of coffins from a local churchyard out to sea.”

p. 118 The green and hawksbill turtles are iconic Caribbean marine animals. One estimate of the pre-Columbian number of green tutleds … ranges from 33 million to 39 million; another calculates the population at 91 million adults, and a third, based on the carrying capacity of seagrass beds, is a startling 661 million. If these numbers seem esaggerated, recall that early Europeans spoke of the seas being “thick” with turtles and ships “bathing in them”. For hawkbills, the pre-Columbian estimates are from half a million to 11 million. The present day numbers are 300,000 and 30,000 respectively.”

p. 142 “The population debate carries major significance for the disease history of the Americas. The larger the estimates, the larger the disease catastrophe that befell Amerindians. The smaller the estimates, the more plausible it is to suppose that diseases played only a modest role and that vioence, starvation and other causes of death mattered more. Low counters often reject the notion that the pathogens might have run ahead of contact and killed large numbers of people who had never seen Europeans or africans.

p. 154 As late as a century ago, Polnesian populations still suffered terribly from infectious disease. In the sping of 1911, measles killed about 19% of the people on the island of Rotuma. On Samoa, 22% of the population succumbed to t he 1918 flu in a few weeks. The influenze pandemic killed the inhabitants of French Polynesia at 31 times the rate it killed people in France (15.5% vs 0.5%). Medical care had little impact on flue victims in 1918; a tender grandparent was just as effective as the best doctor, whether in Papeete or Paris. The difference lay partly in population density and partly in prior exposure to a wide variety of respiratory pathogens and the preparedness of immune systems.”

p. In 1647 yellow fever made its deadly debut in the Caribbena, signaling the advent of a new disease regime and a second syndemic. The yellow fever epidemic lasted five years, killing 15% of Barbados’s po;ulation and about 30-35% of Havanna’s, to take the best -documented cases, and faded out in 1652.But the new syndemic continued for two centuries. Several disease formed a cluster of infection, all of them made either possible or more prevalent by the social oppression characteristic of the Caribbean in the age of slavery. The architects of the new socioeconomic order accidentlaly built a paradise for pathogenms, and a hell on earth for humankind. The plantation regime helped shape the disease regime, while the disease regime helped shape the plantation regime.”

p. 253 Humboldt was correct in seeing that the colonial stsrem was fracturing even as the Caribbena region came under the influence of the rising new power to the north. Haiti proclaimed its independence from France in 2804; the rimland colonies of Venezuela, Colombia and Panama threw off the Spanish imperial yoke in 1819, and the Dominican Republic emerged from Haitan occupation in 1844. A sharpe critic of colonial exploitation, Humboldt was in favour of states conrolling their own destinies. ..he did not anticipated that the United STates, by both formal and infomal means, would repalce European nations as the hegemonic imperial power in the region.Through trade, investment and capital flows, as well as invasions, occupations and aquisitions, the United States came to dominate the region. As early as the mid 19th century, it was the single largest market for Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s exports (primarily sugar), absorbing almost half of their output; in 1851, the US consul in Havanna declared Cuba a de factor economic dependency of the US. As a result, the Caribbean areas has given rise to some of the longest-alsting examples of colonialism in world histroy.. Today Anguilla, the three Cayman Islands, and Montserrat are among the last colonies in the world; Martinique and Guadeloupe are oversease departements of France and Puerto Rico is an internally self-governing territory of the US, and as some would say, the oldest colony in the world.”

p. 258 Cuba was stripped of its vast forests in little over a century – the island was 80% forested in the early 19th century, but only about 15% remained in the early 20th – due to t he freedom private property owners had to fell their woodlands and the highly industrialised and mechanised form of sugar production that consumed vast amounts of lumber and firewood… Puerto Rico, where forest covered just 10% of the island in the 1940s, but recovered 40% a half-century or so later … largely a function of the scale of agricultural abandonement and secondary woodland replacement, which produced a more homogenized forest than ever before.. Haiti .. in the 1920s forest covered about 60% of the country; today, the percentage is contested but at best 30%. Accompanyiong this extensive land clearance has been major soil loss, gullying,, landslides and silting of streams.” (mostly fo charcoal as the primary source of domestic energy)

p. 259 Technological changes, such as the growing use of pesticides, have had negative consequences. Bauxite mining, significant in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Siriname and Guyana, is particularly damaging, leaving behind toxic red mud lakes and polluting groundwater aquifers. The introduction of alien animal species is no longer on the scale of the early arrival of deomsticated livestock, but has had enduring aftereffects. For example, the mongoose, a motably voracious predator, was transplanted in the late 19th century to eradicate canefield snakes, but went on to kill rice rates, nesting birds, and the Ciban solenodon. Extinctions have continued to mount in modern times: the Cuban red amcaw in 1864, the Martinique muskrate in 1902, the monk seal in 1952.”