Drawing together a remarkable array of information in one compact volume, Sea and Land provides an excellent synthetic survey of the environmental history of the Caribbean. Capacious, fascinating, and eminently readable, it also represents the best available overview of the current state of the field, highlighting the plethora of new scholarship on the topic; its voluminous bibliography, for example, primarily cites titles that have been published since 2000. At the same time, its authors have cast a wide interdisciplinary net to include relevant works from the realms of archaeology, biology, ecology, climatology, geology, biogeography, marine biology, botany, zoology, entomology, and epidemiology.
Prior to this book’s publication, someone interested in understanding how environmental conditions in the Caribbean changed over time would have had to cobble together multiple studies that focused narrowly on individual islands, specific periods, events, or natural phenomena. The highly fragmented nature of that existing scholarship stemmed, in large...