Within the thin literature on Latin American environmental history, the strongest work has been done on Brazil and Mexico. Historians of Mexico have always taken the countryside seriously, but the extraordinary ecological transformations of Mexico City in recent times have inspired some Mexicanists to study urban environmental history. Lane Simonian is perhaps the first scholar to analyze the history of environmental thought, policy, and politics in Mexico.
Simonian’s book mainly treats the intellectual and political aspects of biological conservation. Other aspects of environmental conservation figure only now and again. The chronological scope extends from precolumbian times to the early 1990s, although a bulk of the book deals with the twentieth century. The first sixty pages examine indigenous peoples’ attitudes toward nature as expressed in religious and literary texts, as well as state policies from the colonial period through the Porfiriato; the remaining 160 pages focus on the years after the...