Downscaling Anthropocene Concepts to Small Island Settings – The Case of St. John-US Virgin Islands

Carlos E Ramos-Scharrón

Dept. of Geography & the Environment and Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

Like most other islands of the Caribbean, St. John has undergone severe changes since European colonization. With the exception of itinerant groups of Arawak indigenous populations, the island remained mostly uninhabited until 1718 when the Danish Crown began relying on its natural resources to support a sugarcane-based plantation economic system. The inevitable collapse of the sugar economy occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century, which led to a peasant-based economy. This shift signified a decline of human dominance over the landscape that lasted until the mid-20th century when, under the U.S. flag, speculators first saw the island’s potential for high-end real-estate development and a tourism-based economy centered on a national park. Natural resource use during the post-WWII era has combined elements of land development, conservation, and scientific documentation that includes a significant portion of the last twenty years of my research productivity and community-based watershed restoration work. In this talk, I will explore how the natural resource history of St. John and my own work fit within concepts used to describe the ‘Anthropocene’ at the global scale.