Elinor Melville – A Plague of Sheep

“1 – biological and social regimes”
12-13 – environment as active variable
13 – indigenous agricultural proficiency belied the fragility of the landscape — spanish thought it was ripe for greater exploitation because indigenous agriculture was producing well from it, not realizing that it appeared so bountiful and ripe because of indigenous agri-horticultural regime
20 – conquest by despoilment – control landscape to control subjects
39 – double correlation between presence of indigenous population in valle de mezquital and fertility/productivity of landscape — and — decimation of indigenous population and aridity of landscape
55 – temporal and spatial commensurability of ungulate irruption
72 – overgrazing, runoff, erosion, denudation dominoes
84 – two types of data on environmental change
- Self-conscious descriptions
- “Throw-away” data gleaned from other sources
117-19 – underlying commons/exclusive commons/private property debate that does not explicitly tie to larger conversations about the commons including garrett hardin
120 – key difference in new world land use was an iniquity between conquering and conquered populations… spanish used same attitude to land use, but results were different because in spain, pastoralists were also often agriculturalists with mutually considerate economic interests, in the new world, however, spanish were, in the main, pastoralists while indigenous population were agriculturalists (having had no prior access to grazing animals). This colonial dynamic (of course paired with the population dynamics of irruption) allowed the spanish to overgraze agricultural land, even doing so when it was occupied by crops.
136 – viceroy velasco may have inadvertently hastened environmental degradation by grazing by protecting indigenous settlements and lands from grazing, thereby pushing the spanish pastoralists into the unoccupied hills and grasslands
153 – large landholding, or haciendas, was not the cause of land degradation, but the result of it. The degradation of the land and the consequent decrease in its carrying capacity incentivized a shift from small intensively exploited holdings to large extensively exploited holdings
154 – “Grazing was uncontrolled despite — or perhaps because of — the common grazing. Then as today, common grazing only works when all parties agree to the rules governing the use of specified areas of land . . ..”
157 – “Transformation of the Valle del Mezquital from a fertile and productive agricultural region into a mesquite-dominated badlands, the shift from common grazing to exclusive access, and the evolution of private holdings, suggest a cause-and-effect relationship between overgrazing the commons, environmental degradation, and the privatization of property rights.”
- Paragraph about garrett hardin’s tragedy of the commons
158 – more commons talk, plus the claim that degradation was caused by ignorance of the durability of the range

Tags: Latin American Environmental History

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Elinor Melville – A Plague of Sheep

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