The Sahel drought of the 1970s and 1980s was among the most devastating of the twentieth century. Its history sheds light on the topic of anthropogenic climate change, which partly caused the drought, as well as its impact on human societies in the modern era. Drought had a shaping influence on the trajectory of Burkina Faso’s revolution (1983–87), especially when the state intervened to reduce mass vulnerability in the face of environmental and subsistence crisis. Although the enduring image of the Sahel drought has been one of helpless famine victims and the largesse of Western donors, this interpretation belies both the resiliency of local agrarian peoples and the proactive response of the revolutionary state as it fought to address the drought. Moreover, the widely acclaimed international donor generosity concealed US and French efforts to use aid as a political tool to contain the nascent revolutionary movement in Burkina Faso, which was viewed as a threat to French neocolonial interests in the region.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Brazilian military dictatorship struggled to reconcile its ambitious dam-building plans with environmentalism, which was then permeating the multinational banks it was borrowing from. The military regime favored programs that would showcase an environmental conscience without derailing project designs or timelines, such as dramatically rescuing animals trapped by rising floodwaters. The rescue missions generated favorable publicity and temporarily satisfied lenders but failed to protect most animals and did nothing to mitigate other impacts. These campaigns were thus an early and ostentatious example of greenwashing, a term coined in the late 1980s to describe insincere environmentalism. In Brazil, “for the English to see” is a popular idiom that alludes to widely ignored nineteenth-century slave trade laws and is used to describe anything done for appearances only. The dictatorship’s animal rescues were “environmentalism for the English to see,” and such greenwashing had devastating consequences for the communities it neglected.

In the twentieth century, American capitalists launched a variety of conservation projects in the Caribbean. Built on public-private partnerships, the development of national parks and conservation projects more broadly promoted white European Americans’ particular form of natural aesthetics and advanced the economic interests of so-called nonprofit elites from the mainland at the expense of local Afro-Caribbean populations. Prominent among them was the Rockefeller family, which played an important role in the development of Virgin Islands National Park, a conservation initiative that might be understood as neo-green imperialism. Although the park and its subsequent tourism increased incomes for some local islanders, the park was essentially the product of a peculiarly exclusionary form of white mainlanders’ conservation values, and its subsequent functioning did not seriously attend to the islanders’ history and social outlook.

As American artists experimented with new forms in the early twentieth century, they established art colonies in New Mexico where abundant sunshine and Indigenous cultures captivated a growing number of white tourists. Artists in Santa Fe and Taos developed a style of American modernism entwined with a Southwestern aesthetic beginning in the 1900s. Their paintings rendered diverse landscapes legible as a coherent region to a national audience. Decades after federal Indian policy, warfare, and settler expansion transferred Indigenous homelands to agrarian colonists, the sky above New Mexico continued to function as a space of possession, inhabited and promoted by artists and their representations. This article examines skyscapes by Ernest Blumenschein, Victor Higgins, Lafayette Maynard Dixon, and Georgia O’Keeffe to argue that the scale of Western skies compelled innovations in style as artists lowered horizons and lengthened sight lines to create a new genre of Southwestern environmental imagery.