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.”
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