Latin American historians have devoted considerable attention to the study of the region’s coffee industries, although few of them have dwelt on coffee’s rich environmental history. Stefania Gallini’s new Historia ambiental del café en Guatemala focuses particularly on coffee’s environmental history. Like other classic coffee histories, such as Stanley Stein’s Vassouras, Gallini has written a fine-grained analysis of one coffee region, with an eye to larger trends in the coffee industry. Her study focuses in particular on the Costa Cuca in southwestern Guatemala, which by the end of the nineteenth century was one of the most dynamic coffee regions in the country. Gallini deftly situates her study in the context of the best recent Anglo-American, European, and Latin American writing on environmental history.Gallini has chosen an innovative way of writing this environmental history of coffee. She devotes seven of the book’s eight body chapters to the decades leading up to the coffee boom. This approach is deliberate, and makes the important historiographic point that coffee farms in the Americas were almost never constructed upon empty, virgin landscapes. Rather, the Costa Cuca and coffee zones like it were ecologically and culturally constructed over long periods of time. Gallini begins with a geographical overview of the Bocacosta in Southwestern Guatemala, a region that connected the humid coasts and the cooler highlands. The indigenous Mam people who inhabited the Bocacosta, argues Gallini, practiced a form of vertical complementarity, cultivating complementary crops in the highlands (tierras altas) and the lowlands (tierras bajas).While there were significant transformations in the region’s landscapes during the colonial period, Gallini argues that the most significant ecological transformations took place in the nineteenth century. The Bocacosta’s ecosystems were reconstructed by a stream of modernizing influences. Gallini devotes an entire chapter to one of these influences, the land surveyors (agrimensores). This is arguably one of the most innovative chapters in the book. Gallini argues convincingly that surveyors helped determine “the expansion of territoriality, the capitalization of land as a factor of production, and the construction of agro-export economies,” all factors in the construction of the modern Guatemalan state (p. 86). To simplify Gallini’s much more complex and nuanced argument, the maps that these surveyors produced constructed new ways of conceiving and using territory. In the nineteenth century, measuring and mapping the land became an essential step to claiming possession of it. These maps also helped consolidate the concepts of private property and permanent cultivation, both of which marginalized the indigenous ideas and practices of land tenure and land use that had prevailed in the region until then and helped make the coffee boom and the construction of the “Costa Cuca” possible.Between 1850 and 1880 Ladinos from the highlands and their cattle began to move into the region. Like many other parts of Latin America, the region also experienced a revolution in transportation and communication with the construction of highways, railways, the telegraph, and the postal service. These processes, coupled with the legal and administrative processes described above, helped transform the Mam ejidos (farmlands owned communally by indigenous communities) into state-owned baldíos (“uncultivated” common lands) that could then be sold to the highest bidder. Ultimately, highland and lowland Mam communities became disarticulated. This process left the surviving ejidos ecologically (as well as socially and politically) marginal; Gallini stresses that this process led to a decline not only in the quantity of land held by Mam communities but also in its ecological (and agricultural) quality.The coffee boom of the 1870s and 1880s thus represented the culmination of a longer process. In the chapter devoted to the coffee boom (which accounts for about a quarter of the book), Gallini explores the ecological and social transformations it wrought. The conversion of ejidos and forests to coffee fincas did not lead to deforestation in the technical sense. But Gallini argues convincingly that the coffee boom promoted a degradation of the region’s forests, in terms of their biological diversity, their flora and fauna, and the soils and waters. By the end of the century, the degradation had reached a point that even the state authorities had begun to express concern for the region’s productive capacity and had made tentative protectionist measures. Environmental forces brought this coffee boom to an abrupt end in 1902, when a volcano and mudslide wiped out many of the Costa Cuca’s coffee farms. This is also where Gallini brings her narrative to a close.Gallini’s study offers an innovative approach to writing the environmental history of tropical commodities by situating commodity booms in the context of broader, long-term historical processes. She gives agro ecological processes their due without overstating their role, while weaving together environmental, social, economic, and political history into a coherent narrative about the transformation of a community and its landscapes.