How Coal Kept My Valley Green: Forest Conservation, State Intervention, and the Transition to Fossil Fuels in Mexico

For many nineteenth-century Westerners, including Latin Americans, deforestation represented the largest environmental threat of their time. Deforestation was associated with detrimental local effects on climate, decreased rainfall and agricultural productivity, rapid soil erosion, and worsening human physical and mental health. The onset of industrialization and the widespread adoption of steam engines, which often ran on wood, resulted in rapid and pervasive forest clearance in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In response, many conservationists and successive Mexican governments turned to fossil fuels (coal and oil) as a way of reducing overexploitation of forests while still promoting industrial growth. This approach to conservation helped to steer the country down a path of fossil-fuel dependency. By the 1940s, Mexico had made fossil fuels the basis of its economy and society. Ironically, such fossil fuel dependence created the conditions for explosive urban and demographic growth in the second half of the twentieth century that destroyed much of the forest the transition initially aimed to protect. The study thus insists on the decisive role that environmental concerns and state policies played in developing Mexico's modern fossil fuel energy regime, as well as the relevance of a historical perspective when considering the long-term environmental consequences of this shift.