In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  20. Information on the MST can be found at either their Portuguese- or English-language Web sites (www.mst.org.br and www.mstbrazil.org). Powerful commentary on the situation of the landless in this country with the most skewed land distribution in the world is provided by the photographer Sebastião Salgado in Terra: Struggle of the Landless (London: Phaidon, 1997).

  21. Or, at least, under the cover of this explanation. Media reporting of the MST’s campaign of land invasions has highlighted the cutting and selling of timber on occupied land. This figure is from Adalberto Veríssimo, Paulo Barreto, Ricardo Tarifa, and Christopher Uhl, “Extraction of a High-Value Resource in Amazonia: The Case of Mahogany,” Forest Ecology and Management 72, no. 1 (1995): 39–60.

  22. For a historical account of this methodology, see Henry E. Lowood, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany,” in The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 315–42.

  23. And the extraction of large trees removes a disproportionate amount of germplasm from the forest—as larger/mature individuals produce an exponentially greater number of flowers and seeds.

  24. On this, see Alfredo Kingo Oyama Homma, Extrativismo vegetal na Amazônia: Limites e oportunidades (Brasília: EMBRAPA-SPI, 1993); idem, “The Dynamics of Extraction in Amazonia: A Historical Perspective,” in Non-Timber Products from Tropical Forests: Evaluation of a Conservation and Development Strategy, ed. Daniel C. Nepstad and Stephen Schwartzman (New York: New York Botanical Garden, 1992), 23–32. For the paradigmatic tale of Amazonian rubber, Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  25. See, for example, Ana Cristina Barros and Adalberto Veríssimo, eds., A expansão da atividade madeireira na Amazônia: Impactos e perspectivas para o desenvolvimento do setor florestal no Pará (Belém: IMAZON, 1996); Veríssimo et al., “Extraction of a High-Value Resource”; Ana Cristina Barros and Christopher Uhl, “Logging Along the Amazon River and Estuary: Patterns, Problems and Potential,” Forest Ecology and Management 77, nos. 1–3 (1995): 87–105; Jennifer Johns, Paulo Barreto, and Christopher Uhl, “Logging Damage During Planned and Unplanned Logging Operations in the Eastern Amazon,” Forest Ecology and Management 89, nos. 1–3 (1996): 59–77; Paulo Barreto, Paulo Amaral, Edson Vidal, and Christopher Uhl, “Costs and Benefits of Forest Management for Timber Production in Eastern Amazonia,” Forest Ecology and Management 108, nos. 1–2 (1998): 9–26; Adalberto Veríssimo, Carlos Souza Jr., Steve Stone, and Christopher Uhl, “Zoning of Timber Extraction in the Brazilian Amazon,” Conservation Biology 12, no. 1 (1998): 18–36.

  26. Yrjö Haila, “Measuring Nature: Quantitative Data in Field Biology,” in The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences, ed. Adele E. Clark and Joan H. Fujimura (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 233–53, 240.

  27. Appendix II is the second-most restrictive of the three available listings under the Convention. For detailed descriptions, visit www.cites.org/CITES/eng/index.shtm. Background to the failed 1994 proposal to list bigleaf mahogany under CITES—a repeat of the campaign of 1991, and an attempt to prevent the extraction of the species from unmanaged forests—is discussed by John Bonner, “Battle for Brazilian Mahogany,” New Scientist 144, no. 1948 (1994): 16–17. For more recent developments, see “Compromise on Mahogany Reached,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1997, A9.

  28. On the scientist as modest witness, see Stephen Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); also Donna J. Haraway, Modest Witness@Second Millennium. FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997).

  29. An argument made by technically minded observers for some time. In addition to the work of the IMAZON researchers cited above, see John R. Palmer, “Forestry in Brazil—Amazonia,” Commonwealth Forestry Review 56, no. 2 (1977): 115–30, an early critical analysis of regional practices by a British forester.

  30. Veríssimo et al., “Extraction of a High-Value Natural Resource.” A useful discussion of the early phases of this process can be found in Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon, 91–93.

  31. The range of bigleaf mahogany is huge: a continuous swathe from Tampico, Mexico, as far south as Pará and west across the entire Amazon basin to Bolivia. See F. Bruce Lamb, Mahogany of Tropical America: Its Ecology and Management (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), figs. 5 and 6, 53–54.

  32. See, as a well-known example, P. A. Sanchez, D. E. Bandy, J. H. Villachica, and J. J. Nicholaides, “Amazon Basin Soils: Management for Continuous Crop Production,” Science 216 (1982): 821–27, and the self-critical revision in P. A. Sanchez and J. R. Benites, “Low-Input Cropping for Acid Soils of the Humid Tropics,” Science 238 (1987): 1521–27.

  33. For an early attempt to map such circulations, see Ann Hawkins, “Contested Ground: International Environmentalisms and Global Climate Change,” in The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz and Ken Conca (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 221–45. As an overview of competing positions on the mahogany debate and a sense of the official U.S. position, see Ariel E. Lugo, “Point-Counterpoints on the Conservation of Big-Leaf Mahogany” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, 1999).

  34. Allan Carman, Monarch of Mahogany Visits Schmieg-Hungate & Kotzian, Being The History, Travels and Eventual Life of Perhaps the Oldest Living and Grandest King of the Wood of Woods (New York: Scribner, 190?).

  35. Ibid., 10.

  36. The brief account that follows is drawn from the following sources: William Farquhar Payson, ed., Mahogany Antique and Modern: A Study of Its History and Use in the Decorative Arts (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1926); B. J. Rendle, Commerical Mahoganies and Allied Timbers, Forest Products Research Bulletin No. 18. Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (London: HMSO, 1938); Samuel J. Record and Robert W. Hess, Timbers of the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943); George N. Lamb, The Mahogany Book, 5th ed. (Chicago: Mahogany Association Inc., 1946); Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Decorative Wood Labeling and Use of the Term “Mahogany,” Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce (House of Representatives. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964); Lamb, Mahogany of Tropical America; Jan de Vos, Oro verde: La conquista de la Selva Lacandona por los madereros tabasqueños (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988).

  37. Of these, particular energy was directed against the so-called Philippine mahogany (Shorea spp., a Dipterocarp).

  38. The initial binomial was bestowed by Linnaeus: Cedrela mahogani. Cedrela, denoting the cedars, was soon revised. But mahogani stuck. Apparently a corruption of the Yoruba for African mahogany that was used by slaves to denote the Jamaican relative, “mahogany” became the specific name for the Cuban Swietenia and the common name denoting Swietenia and its allies.

  39. A particular irony here is that in this period tropical nature is conventionally figured as sensuously feminine. Of course, in this case, the king’s masculinity—given the inevitability of his conquest—only serves to heighten the achievement of his master. On “tropicality,” see Arnold, The Problem of Nature; Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); and the papers collected in the special issue of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21, no. 1 (2000).

  40. Payson, Mahogany Antique and Modern, 3.

  41. Ibid., 5.

  42. Notable contributions to what is now a large and expanding literature on the historical intersections of conservation and colonialism include David Anderson and Richard Grove, eds., Conservation in Africa: People, Policies, and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); John M. MacKenzi
e, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990); Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origin of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, eds., Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); William Beinart and Peter Coates, Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995); Roderick P. Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

  43. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 31–32.

  44. Although Bruno Latour has more confidence in commensurability and less interest in constitutive “context” than I am proposing here, his “The ‘Pédofil’ of Boa Vista: A Photo-Philosophical Montage,” Common Knowledge 4, no. 1 (1995): 144–87, offers a brilliantly precise account of the logic and practice of translation in a similar setting.

  45. That is, where the individual tree stands in the cycle of leaf shedding, flush, and subsequent flowering.

  46. For varied and insightful histories, see Sharon Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Joel B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank: The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  47. On this, see S. H. Hurlbert’s hugely influential “Pseudoreplication and the Design of Ecological Field Experiments,” Ecological Monographs 54, no. 2 (1984): 187–212, and, inter alia, the creative response from W. W. Hargrove and J. Pickering, “Pseudoreplication: A sine qua non for Regional Ecology,” Landscape Ecology 6, no. 4 (1992): 251–58. In drawing attention to the sloppiness of much of what passed for replication in ecology, Hurlbert’s essential point was that the discipline had to tighten up its statistics if it wanted to be taken seriously. The effects of this argument can be seen in the current emphasis on experimental design and data handling. Thanks to Greg Balza for drawing my attention to this literature.

  48. At certain times, replicates can effectively enable the elimination of experimental noise. But, at others, they merely multiply the possibilities.

  49. On the emergence and proliferating significance of quantitative precision as an agent of state-making and in social and scientific life, see the essays collected in M. Norton Wise, ed., The Values of Precision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

  50. At the time, one Brazilian real was more or less equivalent to U.S. $1. The payment applies to all trees found and marked. All marked trees are cut and the explorador is paid whether these yield useful timber or not. Productive and mature seed trees that are, for example, split and of little commercial value, are therefore also marked and felled.

  51. On the history of Conceição, see Schmink and Wood, Contested Frontiers, 141–63.

  52. The classic statement here is Bruno Latour’s Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).

  53. The convergence may be less harmonic than the social science commentators would wish (see n. 57 below). Non-equlibrium ecology continues to emphasize a holistic approach to an albeit heterogeneous ecosystem; it retains a commitment to experimental method, and, as I describe here, it is still highly parsimonious in its criteria of relevance.

  54. See David M. Smith, The Practice of Silviculture: Applied Forest Ecology, 9th ed. (New York: Wiley, 1997); Harold K. Steen, David M. Smith and the History of Silviculture: An Interview (Durham: Forest History Society, 1990). The key statement of the Hubble Brook research is F. Herbert Bormann and Gene E. Likens, Pattern and Process in a Forested Ecosystem: Disturbance, Development and the Steady State (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1979), a book that closes with a discussion of its implications for landscape management.

  55. For a comprehensive temperate study that uses non-equilibrium and processual models of forest patchiness as a basis for the development of detailed silvicultural practice, see Chadwick D. Oliver and Bruce C. Larson, Forest Stand Dynamics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990).

  56. See, for example, Karl Zimmerer, “Human Geography and the New Ecology: The Prospect and Promise of Integration,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, no. 1 (1994): 108–25, Ian Scoones, “New Ecology and the Social Sciences: What Prospects for a Fruitful Engagement?” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 479–507, and, as an earlier alert, Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). A less sanguine appraisal is offered by William M. Adams, “Rationalization and Conservation: Ecology and the Management of Nature in the United Kingdom,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers N.S. 22 (1997): 277–91. For a succinct summary of the non-equilibrium model, see Peggy L. Fiedler, Peter S. White, and Robert A. Leidy, “The Paradigm Shift in Ecology and Its Implications for Conservation,” in The Ecological Basis of Conservation: Heterogeneity, Ecosystems, and Biodiversity, ed. S.T.A. Pickett, R. S. Ostfield, M. Shachak, and G. E. Likens (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1997), 83–92. Influential and interesting as a detailed polemic for non-equilibrium theory is Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Clarendon Press, 1990) by Daniel Botkin, an ecological modeler who worked at Hubble Brook (and, for a sharp critique of Botkin’s bifurcated history, see Hagen, An Entangled Bank, 1–14, 189–97).

  57. See Bormann and Likens, Pattern and Process, 164–212. On Odum, see Peter J. Taylor, “Technocratic Optimism, H. T. Odum, and the Partial Transformation of Ecological Metaphor After World War II,” Journal of the History of Biology 21, no. 2 (1988): 213–44; and Peter J. Taylor and Ann S. Blum, “Ecosystems as Circuits: Diagrams and the Limits of Physical Analogies,” Biology and Philosophy 6 (1991): 275–94. Zimmerer and Scoones are absolutely correct to lament the baleful impact of systems ecology on environmental anthropology and its cognate fields. Odum’s influence persisted unacknowledged in the social sciences long after it was unpopular in ecology, to the extent that it provided theoretical architecture for the foundational texts of political ecology. See, for example, Piers Blaikie, The Political Economy of Soil Degradation in Developing Countries (London: Longman, 1987).

  58. For useful discussions of Hubbard Brook, see McIntosh, Background of Ecology, 204–8; and Hagen, An Entangled Bank, 181–88.

  59. This is well expressed by Laura Cameron in the context of non-equilibrium theories. See her “Histories of Disturbance,” Radical History Review 74 (1999): 4–24.

  60. As an increasingly familiar variant, work in Amazonian restoration ecology (in which the landscape is by definition an already vitiated site of human activity) offers the region as a corrupted space of nature. See, as an early and important example, Daniel Nepstad, Christopher Uhl, and E.A.S. Serrão, “Recuperation of a Degraded Amazonian Landscape: Forest Recovery and Agricultural Restoration,” Ambio 20, no. 6 (1991): 248–55.

  61. See Oliver T. Coomes, “Blackwater Rivers, Adaptation, and Environmental Heterogeneity in Amazonia,” American Anthropologist 94, no. 3 (1992): 698–701; and João Murça Pires and Ghillean T. Prance, “The Vegetation Types of the Brazilian Amazon,” in Key Environments: Amazonia, ed. Ghillean T. Prance and Thomas E. Lovejoy (London: Pergamon, 1985), 126–31.

  62. Viveiros de Castro, “Images of Nature and Society.” And see Chapter 2 above.

  63. On governmentality, see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchill, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 87–104; Nik
olas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On environmental regulation, see Adams, “Rationalization and Conservation,” and, for notions of “environmentality,” Timothy Luke, Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); and Arun Agrawal, “State Formation in Community Spaces? Decentralization of Control Over Forests in the Kumaon Himalaya, India,” Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 1 (2001): 9–40.

  64. For an example of this type of work, see Daniel C. Nepstad, Claudio R. de Carvalho, Eric A. Davidson, Peter H. Jipp, Paul A. Lefebvre, Gustavo H. Negreiros, Elson D. da Silva, Thomas A. Stone, Susan E. Trumbore, and Simone Vieira, “The Role of Deep Roots in the Hydrological and Carbon Cycles of Amazonian Forests and Pastures,” Nature 372, no. 6507 (1994): 666–69. For the definitive statement of the closed rain forest system, see Paul W. Richards, The Tropical Rain Forest: An Ecological Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), who describes a “closed cycle of plant nutrients” (219). Richards places much of the emphasis in his highly influential account on the thick root mat characteristic of nutrient-poor ecosystems. The concentration of tree roots near or on top of the soil surface confers a competitive advantage in relation to decomposer litter organisms, as well as increasing surface area to volume ratio between root surface and soil. In its most developed form the Amazonian root mat is composed of a complex of interlaced humus and feeder roots forming a surface layer up to 45 centimeters thick and consisting of over 35 percent of total root biomass. See Carl F. Jordan, ed., An Amazonian Rain Forest: The Structure and Function of a Nutrient Stressed Ecosystem and the Impact of Slash-and-Burn Agriculture (Paris: UNESCO, 1989); Carl F. Jordan and Gladys Escalante, “Root Productivity in an Amazonian Rain Forest,” Ecology 61, no. 1 (1980): 14–18.