American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science

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.

Author: Megan Raby
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 11/13/2017
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781469635606

About the Author
Raby, Megan: - Megan Raby is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.