The term “Green Revolution” invokes the controversial array of programs and policies that brought high-yield seeds, intensive irrigation techniques, farm mechanization, pesticides, and petrochemical fertilizers to parts of the developing world during the second half of the Twentieth Century. That understanding of the term ignores an even earlier Green Revolution. Between the 1840s and the 1930s, Peru and Chile exported millions of tons of nitrogen-rich guano and sodium nitrate from remote parts of South America’s west coast to places as far flung as California, North Carolina, Prussia, and Great Britain. For farmers in North America and Europe, crop yields exploded during the latter phases of the Industrial Revolution, helping to diversify and shape the rapidly expanding global economy. Today, we are witnessing the emergence of yet another Green Revolution. Farmers across the developing world are currently searching for new techniques for increasing crop yields, maintaining soil fertility, and revitalizing marginal lands. This lecture examines these revolutions and their patterns over the course of three centuries. In doing so, it offers new ways of using global environmental history to better understand changing land-use practices, shifting labor regimes, and long-term geopolitical transformations.

     Dr. Edward Melillo is an assistant professor of History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2006 and his B.A. from Swarthmore in 1997. He has held a range of prestigious fellowships and appointments over the course of his young academic career, including visiting professorships at Franklin and Marshall College, and Oberlin, and research fellowships at University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim, the Huntington Library, and the Chilean National Library and National Archives.

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