Summary: The Iberian rediscovery of the mid-Atlantic islands in the late Middle Ages was accompanied by all kinds of utopian projections. However, within a hundred years, both human and animal populations were made extinct, and the rich forest cover was rapidly depleted for cash-cropping industries, primarily sugar. Historians view the migration of the international sugar industry from the mid-Atlantic islands to Brazil as an example of expanding economies of scale, but contemporary accounts indicate what now might be called widespread ecocide as a major contributing factor. This essay looks at the environmental ramifications of the sugar industry as well as other cultures, and assesses whether it is indeed appropriate to speak of ecocide in the context of the mid-Atlantic islands in the early modern period.

The neologism “ecocide” can be used to refer to any large-scale destruction of the natural environment, though the context into which the term was born turned on the catastrophic consequences to the environment unleashed by the Vietnam War with its extensive use of napalm. While the war moved Jean-Paul Sartre famously to equate colonialism with genocide, commentators quickly extended his declaration to ecocide. Ecocide became a primary accusation in the ongoing political struggle of the native North American Indians against petrochemical companies since 1978.