Environmental History of Modern Migrations

Marco Armiero, Richard Tucker, Marco Armiero, Richard Tucker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138843172
• eBook ISBN: 9781317550976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Economics

In the age of climate change, the possibility that dramatic environmental transformations might cause the dislocation of millions of people has become not only a matter for scientific speculation or science-fiction narratives, but the object of strategic planning and military analysis.

Environmental History of Modern Migrations offers a worldwide perspective on the history of migrations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provides an opportunity to reflect on the global ecological transformations and developments which have occurred throughout the last few centuries. With a primary focus on the environment/migration nexus, this book advocates that global environmental changes are not distinct from global social transformations. Instead, it offers a progressive method of combining environmental and social history, which manages to both encompass and transcend current approaches to environmental justice issues.

This edited collection will be of great interest to students and practitioners of environmental history and migration studies, as well as those with an interest in history and sociology.

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Part I

Changing natures

The authors of the following chapters have dealt with the idea of Changing natures from different perspectives. Some of them have stressed the impact of immigrants on external nature (MacLennan; Eunice Nodari; and Miguel Carvalho); others have focused on the changing natures immigrants have found where they settled (Sokolsky). Other authors have analyzed how immigrants per se were changing natures blending their own bodies with the environments where they settled (Armiero, and Valisena and Armiero). Talking of human/environment relationships can be a tricky business. One can very easily fall into the usual dichotomist trap of placing culture vs. nature. An environmental history of migrations is interested in understanding how immigrants have affected the places where they settled. This kind of approach is rather strong in several of the chapters gathered in this part of the volume. We will learn about the making of the Hawaiian landscape as a stratification of various ethnic groups (MacLennan) and about the deforestation of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest due to Germans’ and Italians’ economic activities (Eunice Nodari and Miguel Carvalho). Armiero will illustrate how the US landscape was made of the work of various immigrant groups both in the rural as well as in the urban space. It might be said that the chapters collected in this part deal with the ways in which immigrants have shaped the environment around them. Though it has the beauty of a clear argument, limiting the theme of Part I to the immigrants’ effects on the environment is misleading. It risks reproducing the dichotomist vision of humans vs. nature. In some of the following chapters the authors argue that immigrants were also nature, their bodies were nature imbricated in a mutual relationship with the matter which makes both themselves and the world—what the ecocritical scholar Stacy Alaimo has called transcorporeality. This is the case of the Italian miners who were part of the metabolism of coal, producing both bodies and landscapes (Valisena and Armiero). Armiero also illuminates the porosity of the immigrant’s body in his chapter on the United States. However, not only is the body nature; the chapters in this section also show that nature is never just “natural.” The capitalistic organization of plantations and agriculture, the discipline of labor in the factories and in the mines, even the forms of the urban segregation of spaces and people were not “natural” at all.

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1 Waves of migration

Settlement and creation of the Hawaiian environment

Carol MacLennan

Abstract

Three major waves of human migrants mark the major alterations in the Hawaiian environment: Polynesians, Europeans and North Americans, and Asians, primarily from China, Japan, and the Philippines. In this chapter I will explore the phases of landscape transformation produced by those immigrants and how the interactions among them shaped the modern environment. In understanding those ecological transformations, it will become clear that they have also implied major changes in human history of production, political development, and social organization.

Setting the scene

Humans settled the Hawaiian archipelago in the Central North Pacific relatively late in human history. Polynesian navigators from the Marquesas and Tahiti began voyages to the islands around AD 1000, followed by two additional sizable migrations of people from Asia and from the temperate climates of North America and Europe. For nearly one thousand years these waves of migrants arrived and settled the islands introducing plants, animals, insects and human cultures that layered one upon the other to create an island society that is urban, agricultural, and militarized. One cannot understand the physical character of Hawai‘i today without peeling away the waves of human migrations and settlement among the six major islands—Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Maui, Molokaʻi, Lanaʻi, and Hawaiʻi Island. Known as high volcanic islands in the Pacific, the archipelago of settled and uninhabited islands rise over 13,000 feet (Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on Hawaiʻi Island) at the southerly end where Kilauea Volcano is still active. Underwater seamounts mark the northerly end of the Hawaiian–Emperor Seamount Chain, eroded ancient volcanoes that inhabit the ocean floor to the south of the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific. Slowly colonized over millennia by only one mammal (a bat) and primarily by birds and insects, Hawaiʻi’s environment was characteristic of “remote” islands with limited diversity composed of mostly endemic species. Human habitation in the valleys and along the fertile volcanic coastal soils created a cascade of consequences that altered every niche of the complex wet and dry ecosystems.

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Three major waves of human migrants mark the major alterations in island ecology: Polynesians who introduced agriculture, new species, and populated the islands with 250,000 to 800,000 individuals¹ between AD 1000 and 1780 created a highly stratified state society based upon intensive agricultural production. Europeans and North Americans arrived in the North Pacific in the late eighteenth century, initiating a slow but powerful wave of migration of seamen, merchants, missionaries, and their families, that settled and aggressively strove to apply their agricultural and cultural norms to the sub-tropical environment. Asians, primarily from China, Japan, and the Philippines arrived in Hawaiʻi primarily to work on sugar and, later, pineapple plantations. Many became permanent settlers, while others returned home or migrated to California.

Peeling back the layered environment produced by migrants over one thousand years, I will examine the phases of landscape transformation produced by Polynesian, Euro-American, and Asian immigrants, and how the interactions among them shaped the modern environment. It becomes clear that multiple migration histories record not only the transformation of landscapes but also major changes in human history of production, political development, and social organization. As we trace one thousand years of migration settlement in Hawaiʻi we also witness the major transformations in global society as etched on the Hawaiian landscape.

Polynesian arrival and settlement

Around AD 900–1000 Polynesian navigators launched long voyages from the Marquesas and Society Islands in central Polynesia, settling Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) sometime between AD 1000 and 1200.² Later, they extended their range to Aotearoa (North Island of New Zealand), thus completing what today we call the Polynesian triangle. An astounding feat, the voyaging expeditions utilized star charts and expert readings of currents and animal migrations. Polynesians sailed the Pacific in double-hulled canoes that carried families, animals, plants, and food thousands of miles on their quest for new settlements. For a period of time, until around 1400, regular voyaging back and forth from Hawaiʻi to the Marquesas and Society Islands continued, indicating that Hawaiʻi was discovered and settled not by accident but by design. Hawaiʻi’s isolation is a major factor in its environmental history. Part of what archaeologists call Remote Oceania, the islands have unique evolutionary histories prior to human arrival. As the first wave of migrants, Polynesians introduced environmental changes during the first several hundred years that produced a type of feedback loop between humans and ecosystems and set the stage for human migrations from subsequent eras.

Polynesians traveled with their food staples and animals to their new homes. Hawaiʻi supplied little in the way of plant food except for ferns, but fish, shellfish, and limu were abundant. Along the coastal regions, and particularly in the wet, wide windward valleys, Hawaiians added their chickens, pigs, dogs, taro, yams, breadfruit, bananas, kava, and sugar cane. The Pacific Rat, as a stowaway on the canoes, also populated the islands with consequences for ground-nesting birds and native coastal trees. The older, western islands of Kauaʻi and Oʻahu, surrounded by coral reefs, were the likely first homes of the colonizers (Kirch 2012, 83).

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The early Polynesians altered the coastal landscapes with their wet and dry agricultural systems. Evidence of fire in lowland forests indicates Polynesian clearing of vegetation to introduce their imported plants (Athens 1997, 267). Gradually settlers occupied the windward valleys on the major islands and slowly expanded their population. Archaeologists have determined that extensive changes to the lowlands occurred within two to three hundred years after canoes landed in Oʻahu. Soil erosion was a major factor of landscape change, as cleared lands released soils downslope, filling bays and estuaries (Allen 1997, 241). Birds, such as the flightless moa nalo (extinct gooselike duck) disappeared quickly; palm (Prichardia) forests more slowly; and the landscape became one of “managed organization” (Kirch 2012, 111).

By AD 1500 there was virtually nothing left of the lowland forests. Besides agricultural clearing and fire, other factors at work depleted the endemic vegetation and birds. Rats introduced by the newcomers had a hand in the extinction of native palms and some ground-nesting bird species.

In the tradition of ancient Polynesia (Hawaiki—the Hawaiians’ Polynesian homeland), chiefs ruled society, and individuals held rights to home and land through their ancestors. Genealogy was important for identity and land rights. This began to change in the early fifteenth century about the time that voyaging ceased. First on Oʻahu, then on the other islands, one chief rose to power. Land claims were organized in a hierarchical order under an ahupuaʻa, a self-sufficient economic unit made up of smaller districts, which included coastal, valley, and mountain resources all in one slice. According to Kirch (2012, 139–142), this marked the first steps toward the transition from a chiefdom to a kingship. Within three hundred years, on the eve of contact with Europeans, Hawaiʻi had become a society of island states based upon divine kingship (Kirch 2010).

During this time of political transformation, the population expanded significantly and agricultural production intensified. The islands of Maui and Hawaiʻi hosted new settlements and agriculture expanded into the dry leeward sides of islands. New districts such as Kohala (Hawaiʻi) and Kahikinui (Maui) developed into zones of dryland cultivation, characterized by cropping cycles of taro, sweet potatoes, yams, and sugar cane in bounded fields. Fishpond aquaculture emerged in harbors and bays using lava rock for walls and constructed gates for cultivation of ‘Amaʻama (mullet) and Awa (milkfish). In the older valleys, new irrigation systems were applied to the earlier wet-agriculture locations, expanding the food supply and populations of these original settlements. Maui and Hawaiʻi populations expanded exponentially over three to four centuries under the new agroecosystems, particularly with the intensification of the rain-fed dryland cultivation (Kirch 2012, 198–201). Between AD 1400 and 1600 the Hawaiian population grew at a rate of 1.2 percent annually, after which it stabilized until contact with Europeans (Kirch 2007).

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As Hawaiians expanded their agrosystems to all islands and new powerful chiefs arose to control land and production, the ecological consequences also mounted. The surpluses produced within the ahupuaʻa for a new class of aliʻi (ruling chiefs) by makaʻāinana (farmers) utilized multiple ecological zones and spread the expanding population over all available agricultural land. Dryland cultivation, vulnerable to rains, had been pushed to maximum expansion by the eighteenth century. Famines were not uncommon when rains were late. Evidence from interdisciplinary research of archaeologists and ecologists shows a measurable decline in soil quality over time in the Kohala fields (Kirch 2012, 200). Hawaiian mammals (especially feral pigs) penetrated the forests of upland zones with their routing habits that damaged fragile volcanic soils. Tree and fern species that had not co-evolved with island mammals other than bats proved vulnerable to soil disruption and drying, adding to further deforestation (Cuddihy and Stone 1990). Hawaiian feathered capes that adorned the aliʻi came from brightly colored endemic birds, of which some were hunted to extinction. By the arrival of Captain James Cook on the third of his famous Pacific voyages, virtually the entire lowland forest (dry and wet) below 1,500 feet on Hawaiʻi’s main islands had disappeared (Athens 1997).

The rise of archaic states in Hawaiʻi is notable for several reasons. It represents an interesting experiment in social evolution because of Hawaiʻi’s isolation. Unlike continental examples of archaic state formation where cultural developments were subject to continual modification from contact w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Environmental History of Modern Migrations
• Praise
• Routledge Environmental Humanities
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Migrants in Environmental History
• PART I Changing Natures
• PART II Racializing Natures
• PART III Naturalizing Causes
• Index