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.For anyone in-clined to caricature environmental history as "environmental determinism,"the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide auseful antidote.Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies,but the societies' responses also make a difference.So, too, for better or forworse, do the actions and inactions of their leaders.This chapter will begin by tracing the differing trajectories of politicaland economic history by which the Dominican Republic and Haiti arrivedat their current differences, and the reasons behind those different trajecto-ries.Then I shall discuss the development of Dominican environmentalpolicies, which prove to be a mix of bottom-up and top-down initiatives.The chapter will conclude by examining the current status of environmen-tal problems, the future and hopes of each side of the island, and theireffects on each other and on the world.When Christopher Columbus arrived at Hispaniola during his first trans-atlantic voyage in the year A.D.1492, the island had already been settled byNative Americans for about 5,000 years.The occupants in Columbus's timewere a group of Arawak Indians called Tainos who lived by farming, wereorganized into five chiefdoms, and numbered around half a million (the es-timates range from 100,000 to 2,000,000).Columbus initially found thempeaceful and friendly, until he and his Spaniards began mistreating them.Unfortunately for the Tainos, they had gold, which the Spanish cov-eted but didn't want to go to the work of mining themselves.Hence theconquerors divided up the island and its Indian population among indi-vidual Spaniards, who put the Indians to work as virtual slaves, accidentallyinfected them with Eurasian diseases, and murdered them.By the year 1519,27 years after Columbus's arrival, that original population of half a millionhad been reduced to about 11,000, most of whom died that year of small-pox to bring the population down to 3,000, and those survivors graduallydied out or became assimilated within the next few decades.That forced theSpaniards to look elsewhere for slave laborers.Around 1520 the Spaniards discovered that Hispaniola was suitable forgrowing sugar, and so they began importing slaves from Africa.The island'ssugar plantations made it a rich colony for much of the 16th century.How-ever, the Spaniards' interest became diverted from Hispaniola for multiplereasons, including their discovery of far more populous and richer Indiansocieties on the American mainland, particularly in Mexico, Peru, and Bo-livia, offering much larger Indian populations to exploit, politically moreadvanced societies to take over, and rich silver mines in Bolivia.HenceSpain turned its attention elsewhere and devoted little resources to Hispan-iola, especially as buying and transporting slaves from Africa were expensiveand as Native Americans could be obtained just for the cost of conqueringthem.In addition, English, French, and Dutch pirates overran the Carib-bean and attacked Spanish settlements on Hispaniola and elsewhere.Spainitself gradually went into political and economic decline, to the benefit ofthe English, French, and Dutch.Along with those French pirates, French traders and adventurers builtup a settlement at the western end of Hispaniola, far from the eastern partwhere the Spanish were concentrated.France, now much richer and politi-cally stronger than Spain, invested heavily in importing slaves and develop-ing plantations in its western part of the island, to a degree that the Spanishcould not afford, and the histories of the two parts of the island began todiverge.During the 1700s the Spanish colony had a low population, fewslaves, and a small economy based on raising cattle and selling their hides,while the French colony had a much larger population, more slaves (700,000in 1785, compared to only 30,000 in the Spanish part), a proportionatelymuch lower non-slave population (only 10% compared to 85%), and aneconomy based on sugar plantations.French Saint-Domingue, as it wascalled, became the richest European colony in the New World and con-tributed one-quarter of France's wealth.In 1795, Spain finally ceded its no-longer-valuable eastern part of theisland to France, so that Hispaniola became briefly unified under France.After a slave rebellion broke out in French Saint-Domingue in 1791 and1801, the French sent an army that was defeated by the slave army plus theeffects of heavy losses to diseases.In 1804, having sold its North Americanholdings to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase, France gave up andabandoned Hispaniola.Not surprisingly, French Hispaniola's former slaves,who renamed their country Haiti (the original Taino Indian name for theisland), killed many of Haiti's whites, destroyed the plantations and theirinfrastructure in order to make it impossible to rebuild the plantation slavesystem, and divided the plantations into small family farms.While that waswhat the former slaves wanted for themselves as individuals, it proved inthe long run disastrous for Haiti's agricultural productivity, exports, andeconomy when the farmers received little help from subsequent Haitiangovernments in their efforts to develop cash crops.Haiti also lost human re-sources with the killing of much of its white population and the emigrationof the remainder.Nevertheless, at the time Haiti achieved independence in 1804, it wasstill the richer, stronger, and more populous part of the island.In 1805 theHaitians twice invaded the eastern (former Spanish) part of the island, thenknown as Santo Domingo.Four years later, at their own request, the Span-ish settlers reassumed their status as a colony of Spain, which however gov-erned Santo Domingo ineptly and with so little interest that the settlersdeclared independence in 1821.They were promptly reannexed by theHaitians, who remained until they were expelled in 1844, after which theHaitians continued to launch invasions to conquer the east into the 1850s.Thus, as of 1850 Haiti in the west controlled less area than its neighborbut had a larger population, a subsistence farming economy with little ex-porting, and a population composed of a majority of blacks of African de-scent and a minority of mulattoes (people of mixed ancestry) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]