...This chapter shows how the early American plantation-based tropics, especially the West Indies, came to epitomize unsustainability and how racial homogeneity became a defining feature of agrotopias. For Thomas Jefferson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, the tropics were unsustainable...

...Consciousness of tropical biodiversity exploded onto the scene in the 1980s following the 1986 National Forum on BioDiversity. Biodiversity was not a new concept to biologists, however. U.S. scientists’ engagement with life in the tropics already stretched back a century. During this time...