The fate of the forest: developers, destroyers, and defenders of the Amazon PDF
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Praise for The Fate of the Forest "This is a powerful book, elegantly written and well informed ... excellent analysis ... an important, timely and moving analysis of the fate of the Amazon rainforests, one of the vital issues of our times." -JOHN HEMMING, London Times Literary Supplement "Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn provide a comprehensive and scholarly. .. political and economic history of tropical South America .... They offer, at last, an overview of the situation .. .in the context of a South American history few Norte Americanos, including conservationists, know anything about." -DAVID GRABER, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Hecht and Cockburn interpret the Amazon struggle as those of peoples under threat and they see social injustice with unerring vision." -HOLMES ROLSTON III, Newsday "This book will surely become seminal to the literature concerned with the fight for the survival of the Indians." -Geographical Magazine "A work that challenges the standard assumptions of the pro development forces-and even of many environmentalists." Detroit Metro Times -DAVID FINKEL, "By putting into SOCIal context for North Americans the previously murky motives of Brazilian generals, seringuerios and cattle ranch ers, Fate of the Forest locates the Amazon struggle for the first time within a recognizable history" -ANDY FEENEY, The Guardian "The Fate of the Forest is this year's most important environmental book. By cutting through the myths that obscure the political real ities, Hecht and Cockburn show how our fate is tied to the fate of the forest." -JERRY D. MOORE, Pioneer Press Dispatch ii PREFACE EUCLIDES DA CUNHA, 1907 Preface to Alfredo Rangel, Inferno Verde Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon susanna hecht and alexander cockburn Updated Edition The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London To Ilse Wagner Hecht, who raised me in exile and who encouraged, cajoled, and financially supported some of the research herein described; also to my grandfather Hans Hecht, who wrote paeans to coffee and monkeys on an Amazon he never saw. SH To the memory of my mother, Patricia Cockburn, who traveled through the Ituri rainforest of the eastern Congo in 1937, making a language map for the Royal Geographical Society, and to her sister Joan Arbuthnot, who was a garimpeira and would-be aviadora on the Barima River in Amazônia in 1931. AC The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Copyright © 1990 by Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn All rights reserved. University of Chicago Press edition 2010 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN: 978-0-226-32272-8 (paper) ISBN: 0-226-32272-6 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hecht, Susanna B. The fate of the forest : developers, destroyers, and defenders of the Amazon / Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn. — Updated ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-32272-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-32272-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Deforestation—Amazon River Region. 2. Forest conservation—Amazon River Region. 3. Rain forest ecology— Amazon River Region. 4. Amazon River Region. I. Cockburn, Alexander. II. Title. SD418.3.A53H43 2010 333.750981’1—dc22 2010020415 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Preface to the 2010 Edition vii Acknowledgements xi 281 319 Afterword, 2010 345 Index 375 xvi Indian sketched by Midship- man Gibbon, who accompanied Lieutenant Herndon on a voy- age of exploration down the Amazon, under orders from the US government to determine the navigability of the Ama- zon basin and the “character and extent of its undeveloped commercial resources, whether of the field, the forest, the river or the mine.” By the time of Herndon’s trip the Indian pop- ulation had already been deci- mated. Three centuries earlier Orellana’s party had marveled at the extensive indigenous population established along the rivers. Preface to the 2010 Edition The Fate of the Forest has engaged readers for the past twenty years, and over those two decades it has become one of the landmark narratives of Amazonian social history. The story we told in 1990 arose after Amazônia’s first great pulse of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centu- ries, the “scramble for the Amazon” whereby European and American rivals vied for tropical New World colonies. Most coveted were the lands of the western Amazon where the largest and finest rubber forests flourished. The transfer of Hevea seeds to Asia collapsed the rubber monopoly, and with it the Amazon economy. Amazônia had been a clamorous and cosmopolitan zone perennially visited with wars, revo- lutions, and speculative manias. But when the dust settled, most of Amazônia was definitively Brazilian. The state had marked its boundaries and claimed its territories once and for all. What went on within those boundary tracings was another question. Brazil’s Amazon scramble was a nineteenth-century form of nation building replete with explorers, freebooters, specu- lators, fraudulent maps, spies, plenipotentiaries, competing and contradictory court judgments, and romantic revolu- tionaries. Once the final maps were drawn and the rubber monopoly broken, the world—previously transfixed by the Amazonian drama—turned its gaze elsewhere, leaving the basin as a torpid backwater, with dilapidated opera houses and Eiffel ironworks the signage of a failed enterprise, and in some ways, a national embarrassment. Brazil’s midwives into twentieth-century modernity were its dictatorships. The Republic began in 1889 with a military coup and was periodically roiled by other coups for most of the next century. Getulio Vargas, who ruled on and off viii PREFACE from the 1930s until 1954, equated industrialization with the national project and cast a yearning eye to the north, to the Amazon, which reminded the country of its larger territorial destiny in the great tropical forests. Vargas inspired a gen- eration of military men who, if they could not invade other countries, could at least occupy their own national terrains. The Authoritarian Period, from 1964 to 1985, evolved into a new kind of modernist nation building. From the very first days of the first military strongman, Castello Branco, Amazônia had been on the agenda. Brazil at the time was still largely inward looking, but the new geopolitics of the cold war imbued domestic politics with the fear of sedition, and inspired a new manifest destiny, necessary because Amazônia was seen as empty, and easily annexed economi- cally, ideologically, and perhaps even territorially. In this context, massive state-sponsored programs were launched: the roads, the Grand Projects with their dams and develop- ment poles, large-scale ranches, enormous mineral parastatal schemes (all lubricated with highly subsidized state capital), and the colonization programs targeting hapless peasants from the impoverished northeast, south, and center west. All were mustered to integrate what was imagined as an empty vastness into the dynamic hub of Brazilian identity and economy. This was the new authoritarian statecraft, the remaking of what was viewed as a pathetic extractive econo- my into an extension of Brazil’s modernist nationalism. Thus was unleashed enormous environmental destruction and a low-intensity civil war that shaped Amazônia’s competing political ecologies. What opened up—along with the roads, the rapidly degrading pastures, and the large mineral digs— were, much to the surprise of all, the spaces of insurgent citizenship. The Fate of the Forest is about the ecology of justice. It is about the rise and the role of these very humble inhabitants: indios, seringueiros, caboclos, quilombolas (beautiful Portuguese words for natives, tappers, peasants, and descendents of fu- gitive slaves—traditional peoples of all kinds) and their al- lies: anthropologists, geographers, scientists, and other Bra- zilians exhausted by the destruction they were observing in PREFACE ix Amazônia. They all joined together to form that amorphous thing called civil society, in creating a democratic alterna- tive to the jackbooted authoritarian capitalism that actively destroyed forests, forest livelihoods, and forest futures. Their concerns were echoed in the industrial heart of Brazil, as metal workers and labor organizers like Ignacio “Lula” da Silva—who would later become Brazil’s president—consol- idated a network that stretched from the iron cauldrons and robotic factories of São Paulo to the most remote seringal of the Purús River. In some cases, this relation would reflect mere realpolitik, a convenient political moment, but more often the ideas of the Forest Peoples’ Alliance have had re- markable sway in Amazonian, and indeed Brazilian, nation- al development. The Fate of the Forest describes a new type of social poli- tics that arose from the most unlikely sources, from a lost and invisible populace, into a politics of citizenship that has sought to protect political rights and, amazingly, Nature herself. Even more remarkable, this vast political enterprise was successful. Forest people’s movements are profoundly revolutionary because they take the questions of Nature and social justice as ineluctably tied together, not as a con- sumerist green “add-on” to another agenda, but as the deep heart of the story. In fact, the modern map of Amazônia in- scribes this position, perhaps as durably as Brazil’s territo- rial boundaries. Today more than 40 percent of Amazônia is in some kind of conservation designation, and of these, some 80 million hectares (60 percent) are protected as in- habited landscapes and are the framework for reimagining tropical development in the context of both neoliberal and neo-environmental frontiers. Our final chapter outlines this story into the present.
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