Historicizing Climate Change and Unnatural Disasters in the Andes. A Review of Mark Carey's <em>In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society</em> (New York: Oxford UP, 2010)

Authors

  • Emily Wakild Wake Forest University

Keywords:

climate change, disasters, melting glaciers

Abstract

Climate change is among today’s foremost environmental concerns but it sits in a paradoxical academic space. It is not a new phenomenon yet it has scarcely received the attention it merits from historians. What historians have written for the region of Latin America is largely relegated to price histories, examinations of droughts and famines, and studies of demographic changes of the early modern world. Mark Carey rectifies this situation with a rigorous, meticulous, and engaging study set in the remote Andean peaks and valleys of northern Peru in the latter half of the twentieth century. The book takes a timely topic and historicizes it in unexpected and gratifying ways, namely through the examination of a series of glacier melt-triggered disasters resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of human lives and massive amounts of property including entire towns.

Author Biography

Emily Wakild, Wake Forest University

Emily Wakild enseña en el Departamento de Historia en la Universidad de Wake Forest. Obtuvo su doctorado en historia en la Universidad de Arizona en 2007. Entre sus publicaciones más recientes están “Naturalizing Modernity: Urban Parks, Public Gardens, and Drainage Projects in Porfirian Mexico City,” Estudios Mexicanos/Mexican Studies, 23:1(2007) y “Border Chasm: International Boundary Parks and Mexican Conservation, 1935-1945” Environmental History 14:3 (2009). Actualmente está completando un libro sobre la creación de los parques nacionales en México revolucionario.

Published

2011-01-01

How to Cite

Wakild, E. (2011). Historicizing Climate Change and Unnatural Disasters in the Andes. A Review of Mark Carey’s <em>In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society</em> (New York: Oxford UP, 2010). A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 8(2), 416–421. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/475

Issue

Section

Reviews: Nature, Society, and the Environment