Introduction

The Latin American and Caribbean Society of Environmental History (SOLCHA) has the honor to invite the scientific and academic community interested in the links between the social and the natural processes, throughout history, to its 4th Meeting, to be held at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, on May 28-30, 2008.

The objective of SOLCHA is to encourage research, the debate of ideas, and to promote education in the field of Latin American and Caribbean Environmental History, through an interdisciplinary perspective. By stimulating the contact among researchers who adopt this historical perspective, SOLCHA intends to contribute to the understanding of past and present environmental changes, as well as to cooperate for the construction of more egalitarian and sustainable societies.

We strongly recommend the participants enter proposals about the following issues:

• Environmental history, environmental politics and environmental management: the role of the past in the construction of the future;
• Theory and method of Environmental History: interdisciplinary approaches;
• Historical Geography;
• History of marine, coastal and freshwater ecosystems;
• Environmental History teaching and environmental education;
• Urban Latin American Environmental History;
• Environmentalism and Environmentalism Thought in Latin American and Caribbean;
• Environmental risks and natural disasters.

We hope that the 4th Meeting will deepen the contacts among the researchers into Latin-American and Caribbean Environmental History begun during the meetings at Santiago de Chile (2003), Havana (2004), and Sevilha (2006), thus strengthening SOLCHA´s activities.