Spanish vs. British Views of the New World

 

In early environmental history scholarship: different colonial cultures had very different relationships with the land and its creatures. Many historians and ecologists have drawn this contrast between the Spanish colonial worldview (with its aesthetic, sometimes even spiritual awe of landscape) and the British colonial worldview (dominated by hunting, farming, and aggressive resource extraction).

---

Spanish vs. British Views of the New World

Spanish Colonials

• Awe and Wonder: Spanish explorers and chroniclers (like Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, or José de Acosta) often described the Americas in terms of astonishment — mountains, volcanoes, vast forests, and unusual animals.
• Aesthetic & Religious Framing: They interpreted landscapes as expressions of divine beauty and order. Natural wonders were catalogued, drawn, and described with a sense of reverence.
• Integration with Native Systems: In some regions, Spanish colonials relied heavily on Indigenous agricultural systems (terracing, irrigation, crops like maize and cacao), adopting them rather than simply replacing them.

British Colonials

• Hunting Ground Mentality: From the start, the English colonists saw the land as something to be subdued and harvested. Game was hunted for sport, meat, and commercial trade. Beaver, deer, and wildfowl were trapped and exported.
• Clearing and Cultivation: The English valued land only once it was “improved” — cleared of forests and wildlife, fenced, ploughed, and planted. What was wild was seen as wasted.
• Relentless Expansion: As settlement moved west, so did the destruction. The pattern was hunt → exhaust → move further west. This resulted in waves of extinction (passenger pigeon, bison) and ecological collapse (soil exhaustion, deforestation).

---

Classic Ecology Books 

Several classic ecology and environmental history books make this exact point. Some that match your memory include:

• George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (1864): Early recognition that European-style exploitation was degrading American environments.
• Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967): A classic environmental history that traces shifting European-American attitudes toward wilderness — from fear and conquest (English) to awe and preservation (more Spanish/French Catholic influences).
• Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (1986): Explains how Europeans transformed ecosystems as they colonized, especially the English with their agricultural “package.”
• Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977): A foundational text in the history of ecology, placing European colonization in a broader intellectual and ecological framework.

---

Why It Matters

The contrast between Spanish awe and British exploitation reveals that ecology is cultural as well as scientific. How colonizers saw the land determined how they treated it. The Spanish, though exploitative in their own ways (especially mining and forced labor), often preserved Indigenous systems of land use and expressed wonder at America’s natural beauty. The British, in contrast, imported a mindset that wilderness existed to be cleared, hunted, and turned into property — leaving behind extinction and environmental destruction as they marched westward.

---