Climate change in southern colonial Spanish America

GABRIEL GARNERO

Climate Change - Handbook of the Anthropocene in Latin America IV

Bielefeld University Press

Lugar: Bielefeld; Año: 2024; p. 30 - 60

The analytical area of Climate Change confronts a thematic challenge in various aspects: in terms of the factor of time, one must distinguish between the phase of natural climate variability and the phase of anthropogenic climate change throughout the eras proposed in our project. Secondly, we confront the question of how “climate” and “climate change”- or the variability of the climate - manifests itself for local societies in different regions of Latin America. How does one perceived and how does comprehension of the processes change throughout the long period of time that we cover in this volume? At the conceptual level, these questions include a dialectical perspective of the human-nature relation: on the one hand, climate and climactic extremes appear as conditional factors of societies (precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial); on the other hand, through diverse cultural practices and historical processes, we see humans as shapers of the climate. These practices and processes include specifically the transformations of agriculture and livestock (changes in land use), extractivism, the evolution of energy use, and urbanization. This requires a historization of the concept of climate that will connect our temporal division of the “protoanthropocene” and the Anthropocene with the phase of natural climatic variability that we set roughly throughout the “protoanthropocene” and the phase of anthropogenic climate change that, for the Americas, we begin to see with the “Great Acceleration” in the 1950s. Observing the climate and its changes during the “protoanthropocene” means, therefore, exploring, at first, how Latin American societies have interacted and adapted to specific environments and how colonial societies, often disjointedly, reacted to the frequent climate extremes that threatened the colonial livelihoods and diets (for example, Arrioja Díaz Viruell 2016, 2019; Mora 2019; Rohland y García Acosta 2020). How did they make sense of the droughts, hurricanes, and prolonged flooding, often influenced by the phenomenon of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)? Did they learn to confront the recurrent threats, and. if so, how did they do so? Finally, how did they lead these societies with such climatic anomalies generated by global phenomena like the Little Ice Age, which, as has been studied in the case of Mexico, generated agrarian transitions, floods, prolonged droughts, epidemics, epizootics, and recurrent agricultural crises that destabilized human health and provoked high rates of death (Skopyk y Melville 2018)? In this volume “Climate Change”, we connect the Little Ice Age to the overall epochal structure of the project as a pertinent climatic-historic epoch. From this point of view of the aforementioned periodization, the Little Ice Age pertains to a phase of natural climatic variability and, from the point of view of our project, to the phase of the Protoathropocene. The challenge of observing these socio-environmental processes in the temporal scale goes hand in hand with the spatial scale, the change of vision between the local and the global, as well as the planetary levels.