Natural Histories of the Anthropocene

Twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals from the provincial interior, often combining in their professional and intellectual lives different forms of expertise ranging from the humanities to medicine and the natural sciences, developed a prescient and idiosyncratic way of reflecting on the extractive frontiers advancing from the region’s political and economic centers. Taking as its sample case the essayistic writings from the 1930s of two authors from the Argentine Northwest—Bernardo Canal Feijóo and Orestes Di Lullo—this chapter argues that, in their attempt to reflect the social and cultural impact of deforestation, soil erosion and drought, these provincial intellectuals came up with a prescient and hybrid mode of writing and thinking, the urgency of which we are only beginning to understand today: a natural history of the Anthropocene. Thus, the chapter also argues for a re-appraisal of Latin American regionalism as an indispensable reference for a political ecology in our time.