Hecht and Cockburn’s The Fate of the Forest<\/i> compiles and analyzes the history of the evaluation, use and exploitation of the Amazon Basin’s natural resources. A major theme in the work is the history of the dominant agricultural land uses in the region. The contrast between the agricultural practices of the pre-Columbian cultures and the agriculture imported by European settlers is remarkable. In keeping with the theme of the book, the projection of a foreign mindset onto new terrain has disastrous consequences. Both are traditional practices, but the European tradition developed in a different environment, and that made a tremendous difference. <\/p>\n
The native agriculture was integrated into the local ecology. It involved small, diverse plots cultivated by hand through a life cycle of stages, tied in to the surrounding ecosystems. Its processes are skill and labor intensive. In contrast, the imported agricultural practices involve large scale monoculture plots, perpetually producing the same outputs without a year to year development process, divorced from local biosystems. It makes less use of labor and particularly of skilled labor.<\/p>\n
The most critical difference between the two practices in terms of their ecological effects is the differing attitudes towards the surrounding ecosystem. In the native agriculture, the existing ecosystem is used, cultivated and viewed as the basis for productivity. In the imported agriculture the rain forest is viewed as a barrier to productivity. In the imported system, wealth is associated with land ownership, and ownership is associated with a particular use pattern of the land. The land isn’t truly “owned” until the trees are removed and cattle are ranging there. The land used for ranching is also far less productive than the land used in the native agriculture. Destroying the native ecosystem and planting an ecosystem adapted to very different conditions in its place is a formula for disaster.<\/p>\n
Cattle ranching is perhaps the most drastic example of economic practices with ecologically disruptive consequences imported to the region, but there are others. The monocropping of rubber trees, the destruction of forest by extractive logging, and the polluting mining for gold are others. All serve a specialized notion of wealth, commodities extracted for their high trade value in some distant location. And so common local interests are subordinated to extraction. <\/p>\n
These are two starkly different systems of land management and production. The imported approach with an interest in the short term, as opposed to an approach which cultivates existing resources for long term local community use. It uses large stretches of land and small labor inputs as opposed to intense labor on smaller plots of land, concentrating benefits in the hands of a few as opposed to creating a wider sufficiency. The question of whether an approach that blends the benefits of both approaches could be made viable remains open. Examining local practices and cultivating a sensitivity to the environmental context is important. But the imported economic system does have important advantages, particularly in terms of the productivity of labor. We have neglected the goal of finding a way for workers to make a decent living while maintaining or improving environmental quality, and so it has become the principle item we should pursue to improve quality of life, rather than objectified wealth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}