In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  One hundred years later and a few thousand miles south, this is Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier stripped of manifest destiny.5 For many of today’s commentators, both within and outside Brazil, the naturalized trope of the Amazon frontier signifies a negative dialectic, the violation of noble savage and pristine nature by a degenerate, downwardly spiraling Civilization.6 That the frontier—implying linear spatialities, discrete social systems, and the inevitability of incorporation—is a rather unhelpful metaphor with which to make sense of contemporary regional complexities is perhaps beside the point.7 More important is its assumption of an irresistible historical trajectory: a tragic narrative of resolutely non-Messianic time that traces the inexorable corruption of Edenic nature and its indigenous stewards.8

  The absoluteness of the frontier metaphor also contains an appeal to a politics of protection, one liberal response to Turnerian triumphalism. Anthropologists of the region, still struggling with the legacies of Julian Steward and Claude Lévi-Strauss, have long been familiar with this type of premature nostalgia and its expression in the idiom of salvage.9 Such notions may be out of fashion in a discipline that now favors processual and open-ended reworkings of the culture concept, but they have emerged reinvigorated in popular discourse preoccupied with the metanarratives of globalization. Natural scientists, for their part, have been largely untroubled by the naturalization of culture as endangered and the associated conflation of environmental and social agendas that continues to drive much green activism.10 Instead, they have effectively participated in the figuring of the social upheaval in Amazonia since the 1960s as an environmental crisis, one that enables their casting as both archivists of a disappearing world and its defenders, successfully fomenting a public rhetoric that generates political urgency around their work. In contrast, anthropologists, floundering in the attempt to communicate broadly a nuanced notion of culture, have been disabled by the sheer obviousness of the notions we seek to displace.11

  The south of Pará is branded with the emphatic materiality of the obvious. For one thing, it is entirely too obvious that this is a frontier, and it is similarly obvious that there is urgent salvage work to be undertaken here. “You know,” a longtime resident informed me helpfully, “this used to be part of Amazonia.” And, for environmentalists, the area offers a chilling glimpse of the hellfire already licking at the edges of what is left of the region.

  Watching the unexpectedly domesticated landscapes slide by the spattered window of the overnight bus, I felt the view haunted by specters of comparison: the neatly whitewashed ranch houses, the low exposed hills, the empowering aesthetic of prospect enabled by the clear-cut, all was immediately reminiscent of the colonial-era paintings of coffee estates hanging in the Museu de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro.12 This is an aspirational landscape, a landscape that people I know in Amapá, way up on the other side of the Amazon River, would enthusiastically call linda and limpa and bonitinha, né? breathing deeply their relief from the claustrophobic indeterminacies of the forest gloom. Yet, this must also be an ugly landscape, a despoiled landscape of the not-there—a landscape produced through an overdetermining narrative that my fieldnotes confirm: massively cleared and charred, choked with thorny scrub and sprouting babassu palms, interrupted here and there by statuesque forest remnants, exuberant yellow-flowered ipê and full-crowned Brazil nut trees, pitiful memorials, living dead.13

  We know the obvious as a form of Gramscian common sense, discursive practice that reiteratively constitutes subjectivity.14 If the traveling social scientist, trained to resist the allures of environmentalist dreamworlds, is disoriented by the specter of an absent forest long gone, how much more visceral must be this encounter for Amazonianist ecologists, heirs to that rich lineage of natural historical thinking that produces this region as the heritage site of planetary biodiversity?

  FAZENDINHA

  Paul had driven the white Ford pickup in from Fazendinha and was waiting at the bus station as promised. Trained in the same graduate school, we had known each other for years but crossed paths with less frequency as our interests diverged, and I had found my way through the social sciences and he had realized that the roomiest space for a modern-day naturalist was under the sign of ecology.

  It was working in the Amazon that drew us together. This present reunion rehearsed another, several years earlier, when Paul, less of a novice in Pará than myself, had met my plane from New York at the airport in Belém and helped with my critical initial negotiation of that disarming city. Over long beers in a backstreet bar, he mapped for me the politics of the local conservation community, and we commiserated with each other in what I now know to be standard pandisciplinary rituals around fieldwork anxiety.

  It turned out that Paul and I were inspired by similar, and perhaps peculiarly Amazonian, paradoxes. We had both stumbled across something we felt to be of tremendous importance, yet of which almost nothing was known in the scholarly worlds in which we moved. I had encountered the anthropogenic streams of Igarapé Guariba. Paul was becoming involved with bigleaf mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla), the most valuable tropical timber species in the world, the most rapidly disappearing, and, in relation to its considerable socioeconomic significance, a tree still poorly known in its habitat.15 The life history of Amazonian mahogany, he told me, was almost unknown because, once located, trees were never left standing long enough to study. Soon after, in a moment of prescient symmetry, we found ourselves at the busy bus station, gesturing good-byes as he embarked on his first exploratory trip to the south.

  As you might expect, mahogany of any significant size is hard to come by in the south of Pará these days. And, even though ranching and the massive state support given to corporate colonization is widely acknowledged to have provided the dynamic for much forest conversion in the 1970s and 1980s, relatively little attention has been paid to the tight political, economic, and personal connections that facilitated the synergistic collaboration of cattle and timber money.16 Ranchers did not just slash and burn. They worked closely with loggers who sent in their spotters to locate mahogany—its distinctive crown clearly visible from low-flying planes. Indeed, while it was the construction of the road our buses took—the BR-316 from Belém to Brasília—that created the conditions for the radical transformation of the area’s landscape and the rapid extraction of its most valuable trees, it was the aggressive coalition of loggers and ranchers chasing state subsidies along advancing transport corridors that kept the swiftly multiplying local sawmills working day and night.17 As Paul wrote after a visit to Pará in 1995:

  The scale and rate of this process can only be appreciated from the air: little forest remains 50–100 km either side of any significant road, and enormous swathes of newly felled forests, commonly cut in geometrically regular shapes covering many thousands of hectares, await dry season burns and broadcast seeding for pasture formation. Undisturbed forest is rare—if it exists at all—east of the Kayapó and Cateté Indigenous Areas, and even on those reserves mahogany extraction in the late 1980s and early 1990s left a vast network of forest roads and skidtrails. The east-west corridor bisecting these two reserves, along the BR-279 from Xinguara to São Felix, has been essentially cleared of forest. Ranch and colonist expansion is currently directed north from Tucumã and São Felix, following logging roads that penetrate Indigenous Areas three to four hundred kilometers distant.

  By 1995, there were only two potential locations of forest stands of mahogany remaining in south Pará.18 One, as suggested here, was within the Kayapó Indigenous Area, where significant remnant mahogany populations had survived the extensive cutting that took place just prior to the 1992 federal moratorium on the logging of Indian territories (a gesture to the UNCED Conference in Rio).19 The other was on land held privately by ranchers and timber merchants who were keeping their standing stock as a form of equity. However, with the growing militancy of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), the landless workers’ organization, this strategy wa
s becoming more risky.20 Its most brutal possibilities were seen in April 1996 at Eldorado de Carajás, just a few hours north of Redenção, when nineteen posseiros (land occupiers) were massacred by military police (ten executed point-blank with bullets in the head or neck, others hacked with machetes). As a further discouragement to invasion—a pre-emptive move to lower the value of their land—many landowners, then as now, were hurrying to cash in their remaining mahogany, which, by the early 1990s could generate up to U.S. $700 per cubic meter.21 By this time, however, IBAMA—the understaffed and often ineffectual Brazilian federal environmental agency—had begun requiring logging companies to set aside a portion of their land for mahogany management and conservation. For a relatively minor inconvenience, the payoff could be substantial, with the IBAMA imprimatur leading directly to increased export quotas and relaxed federal scrutiny.

  Driving north from Redenção, it takes about forty-five minutes to reach Fazendinha and its strip of whitewashed storefronts that break the potholed monotony of PA-150. Fazendinha is a company town built around a sawmill that stands apart, set above the low-grade worker housing stretching back on either side of the highway. This town was built by mahogany and owned by Fazendinha Madeiras S/A (FAMASA), a local timber company whose fortunes, like those of its diminishing number of employees, is on the wane now that madeira de lei, first-grade timber, and the cash it brings are harder to find.

  The day Paul arrived, Umberto Fischer, the owner of FAMASA, had his sawmill manager take him out for the first time to the Projeto de Manejo, the Fazendinha Management Project (FMP). They followed the unpaved road as it veered west across the flattened landscapes. They crossed ranches, stopping to swing open and close the heavy wooden gates, throwing up blankets of red dust as they hurtled past the men repairing miles of wire fencing on these blindingly hot days. Then, one more gate, and they left the glare of pasture behind. Pitching along the dried and rutted mud tracks, suddenly hemmed in all around by the humid crush of broad-leaved trees, palms, and the fragrance of vines.

  The FMP was FAMASA’s IBAMA-mandated set-aside, a 4,400-hectare rectangle, a forest island in a sea of pasture. In mid-1995, when Paul showed up, IBAMA and FAMASA had already bulldozed a grid of roads that divided the Project into 12 metric tracts or talhões, each a more or less 1-kilometer slice off the top of the area’s 3-kilometer width. These units had been subdivided in turn by narrow trails hand-cut at 200-meter intervals, every 350-hectare talhão therefore being divided into 16 equal 22-hectare sections.22 Inside the 12 talhões, IBAMA had instructed FAMASA to nail aluminum tags to selected mahogany “seed trees” (matrizes), and the logging team was directed to spare a selection when it came through the area in subsequent years.

  Gridded and mapped since 1992, the Project was, in Paul’s phrase, “a template awaiting application.” But it was also what he would often describe as a “beat-up” forest, and one indelibly marked by the historical specificities of location. Of the 815 mahogany trees in talhões 1 through 6 recorded by the FAMASA team during demarcation, 640 had been logged by the time Paul arrived. These, of course, included nearly all the large individuals.23

  Guided by IBAMA, FAMASA had made a significant investment here. As well as the initial disciplining of the site, they set up a small number of 0.5-hectare experimental plots in which they removed all of the understory, creating an airy park-like ambience. They maintained a permanent crew of four men on hand to keep the trails clean and prevent human invasion, and the general sense was that management goals were being met through the simple preservation of the 175 surviving mahogany seed trees.

  An interesting narrative of contingency was about to unfold. Although we might expect Umberto, the owner of FAMASA, to feel content with this arrangement—low investment, minimal overheads, relatively high returns—his treatment of the North American visitor was exceptional. Along with his manager and resident agronomist, Umberto gave Paul a tour of the sawmill and associated nursery, and then, as we know, he sent him out over the rough dirt tracks that led to the Project.

  That this convergence was based on more than formal politeness would quickly become clear. A room in Umberto’s ranch house was soon serving as Paul’s base off-site, and Umberto himself became the active sponsor of the Project’s redesign. For the first five months of operation, it was his logistical support that enabled Paul to assemble a small team of workers and start building a functional camp. On a weekly basis, Umberto trucked in quantities of food and water (for consumption, and also to maintain a seedling nursery), and he went to the not inconsiderable trouble and expense of having the roads out to the camp graveled so they would be passable through the rainy season.

  Of course, there were compensations. Within a short time, the FMP had become an established research site, backed by some prestigious U.S. institutions and worked by a range of North American and Brazilian biologists. And, not long after, the BBC dropped in to film a segment in which the sawmill operator represented responsible mahogany management in the midst of regional disaster.

  Yet, given the widespread ambivalence of the Amazonian timber industry toward the ecological imaginaries of foreign researchers, the level of Umberto’s commitment requires further explanation. With commercial stocks of madeira de lei virtually extinguished in the south of Pará, the strategies available to the calculating logger are limited. One obvious response is to move out to new areas of extraction—a standard solution to shortage that is currently sending cutting crews and small-scale sawmills west toward Acre. Another—a familiar trajectory once export markets have been secured, although one with a checkered history in the region—is to experiment with the transfer of valuable species to plantation culture.24 With additional land deep in the southwest of Pará, and a 350-hectare plantation and nursery adjacent to the Fazendinha sawmill, Umberto was already covering his angles.

  Paul’s alliance with Umberto emerged from some hard thinking. As one of a group of mostly Brazilian conservation-oriented ecologists working out of IMAZON, a Belém-based non-governmental organization (NGO), his practice was based on dialogue with the very actors who had traditionally been cast as the demonic figures in the Amazonian passion play. As with others in the group, Paul framed his research as an appeal to the instrumentalism of the regional logging industry.25 Although such Faustian politics are troubling to environmental absolutists, in this respect, at least, the IMAZON team was working within a well-established lineage. As Yrjö Haila has pointed out, ecology has long been a worldly science. Indeed, “nearly every ecologist active at the turn of the [twentieth] century was involved in solving practical problems in such diverse fields as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, demography and life insurance statistics.”26 Despite his own emotional investments, Paul publicly distanced himself from activists campaigning for a logging moratorium, and he took a tactically agnostic position on the acrimonious disputes between extraction and conservation advocates over the listing of mahogany under Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).27 Despite his personal commitments, his public self-fashioning—expressed in proposals, field reports, and presentations—was as the modest technocrat, disinterestedly producing the facts necessary for an apolitical adjudication.28

  It was the loggers, Paul argued, who had most to gain from the life-history data on phenology, pollination, seed dispersal, and seedling response to manipulation that he was collecting. Despite the radical short-termism of their practice, they were, he pointed out, the only significant regional actors with both a stake in protecting long-term forest cover and the capacity to do so.29 Twenty years after the ferocious clearances of south Pará—in which mahogany stems as slender as 30 centimeter diameter breast height (dbh) or less were taken—there was still no possibility of a profitable second cut. Moreover, the standard trajectory was to wholesale conversion to pasture, burning the now sought-after madeira branca, the second-quality timber, along with material of no commercial value.30 Conveniently located high-value timber n
o longer existed in quantity, and the lower-grade woods were being brought in from considerable distances.

  It was, then, a favorable conjuncture for strategic alliance. By providing the basic data that would enable some fairly simple changes to the timing and intensity of harvesting—synchronizing extraction with seed production and seedling growth, for example—Paul offered Umberto the prospect of shifting mahogany logging onto a cyclical regime structured around elements of longer-term, albeit lower-intensity, productivity. In the context of international pressure for a ban on mahogany logging, this was a proposition worth entertaining—at least until it impinged on normal business practice.

  Despite the palpable sense of gathering crisis, both ecologist and logger knew that the exhaustion of bigleaf mahogany remained spatially restricted. Although they were fairly safe in predicting the tree eventually becoming so rare at valuable sizes as to be commercially extinct outside plantations, not only was that not yet the case, but improved transport infrastructure and enhanced industry mobility meant that loggers’ fields of activity were fully expandable across this adaptable species’ entire range.31 Moreover, as Paul and his colleagues knew, their appeal to an economic rationality mediated by an ethic of sustainability and a notion of evenly unfolding time was of limited force in a world of prolonged primitive accumulation, quite particular cultural and political-economic logics, and perpetual crisis. For one thing, as we have seen, while struggles over land ownership, occupation, and life itself remained so volatile and fluid in Amazonia, neither ranchers, loggers, nor poor colonists were much inclined to think in terms of forest-based futures.

  There is, though, little naïveté here. Compared to an earlier age of applied ecological research in the Amazon (when experts blithely encouraged farmers to adopt impossibly high-input agricultural practices as a means of stabilizing “frontier expansion”),32 contemporary natural scientists and their interlocutors operate in a world of decided realpolitik, forging collaborations where they may. Much of this pragmatism is enforced by the politics of negotiating multiple publics. For Paul and Umberto, mahogany is possessed of a transformative translocality. This is a tree that travels, a tree that creates anew those with whom it comes into contact, and that does so through its—and thus their—interpellation in a set of debates that can be lively to the point of violence. Thanks to mahogany, it is around the FMP that diverse and overlapping sets of human actors get drawn together: officials of IBAMA and the U.S. Forest Service, NGO activists, timber industry advocates, journalists, academic researchers, and multiply positioned residents of south Pará. Their exchanges are shot through with the crisis-driven rhetorics of biodiversity and habitat conservation, the combative confidence of the neoliberal assertion of entrepreneurial rights, and the authoritative expansion of natural scientific expertise into the realm of social policy.33