Europeans experienced the plantation landscape’s disappearance as an environmental catastrophe

Evidence

But what for ex-slaves was a new beginning was for many whites, haunted by the specters of the vanished plantations, nothing but loss and darkness. A Polish soldier sent to Saint-Domingue in 1803 captured this sense eloquently. “The air here is most unhealthy,” he wrote, “especially since the time of the black revolt twelve years ago.” It was as if the uprising that had shaken the colony in 1791 had literally transformed the environment, the very air, making it deadly to Europeans. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 808

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the moral-panic habit of reading social revolution as corrupting the very air and climate, echoing themes in the reader’s climate/noise work. — connects to: Mercantile capitalism, not population growth, drove forest decline after 1500. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 316