On Site r evie w 27 peripheral urbanism 40 peripheral urbanism On Site r evie w 27 41 In the collective imagination, the Amazon rainforest might be
a remote land; an entelechy unable to hold any kind of man-made potentiality and in which protection relies on passive conservation. This Old World view makes of it just a supply for lowly-valued natural resources. Hard resource extraction-for-export models, dictated and controlled by external, urban, actors have a profound impact on local ecologies: monocultures, timber, minerals and oil extraction satisfy short-term mindsets and urban needs.
Extractive Reserves (RESEX) are forest conservation units in the Brazilian Amazon. RESEXs are not based on the notion of protection by keeping the landscape untouched. They acknowledge that the forest has been used and exploited for hundreds of years by local populations in a sustainable way. Studies on the way land management works in the reserves have revealed a model based on intricate networks, in which the forest as a whole is subdivided into a liquid patchwork of properties, trails and forest units. Reflecting on the potential of embedding such systems in the context of the current project of regional infrastructural integration in South America (IIRSA), reveals ways to achieve sustainable conservation of biodiversity, forests and local communities and traditions.
The rubber boom of the late nineteenth century brought an integrated extractive economy and hierarchically linked urban systems that relied on the Amazon River system as the spine for access and transport of goods. Global capital centres, national metropoli, regional nodes within the Amazon landscape, strategically located river ports, trading posts in small towns, and finally the farmsteads – which were at the centre of a network of trails that extended into the forest matrix, were articulated by political-economic power, capital flows and internal trade and labour migration patterns. With the collapse of the rubber economy in Brazil in the early twentieth century, these systems and the basis of that socio-economic and spatial dependency remained in place, but in the context of economical stagnation, deep rural poverty and demographic stabilisation.
After World War II, policies of national integration and infrastructure set the conditions for the occupation and development of the Amazon, bringing other ways of making profit off the land, such as large-scale cattle ranching. The global economy and the Amazon were now linked by a disarticulated system that substituted for previous relationships, others such
as free-trade zones, industrial poles and transportation hubs connected by highways and regional airports. (Browder and Godfrey 1997, 55-82)
The pressure of cattle ranching in the Amazonian state of Acre in southwest Brazil forced rubber tappers to struggle to protect their forest holdings. Deforestation was increasing exponentially and the rubber tappers saw their land and traditional way of living severely threatened. The assassination of their leader, Chico Mendes, in 1988 was the tragic spur that led to the creation of Extractive Resources in 1990. RESEXs were conceived as government-owned lands designed for the sustainable extraction of forest products and the conservation of the traditional way that natural resources are collected. Rubber, nuts, herbs, fruits, medicinal plants and other saleable goods are extracted using known harvesting techniques that have proved to be successful over approximately a century of continuous use. (Fearnside 1989, 389)
The system of land occupation and use in the reserves is the last node of the hierachical system of resource extraction that existed during the rubber boom and which linked these remote areas of the rainforest with the global capitalist markets. However, the dense forest cover hides an articulated and unusual system of rural land management and extraction, which also holds the
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potential of being connected to the world economy. This is a model based in camouflaged and decentralised networks, in which the forest as a whole is subdivided into an unmapped, invisible and fluid patchwork of properties, trails and forest units.
Reserves are divided into seringais (rubber estates) composed of colocações (farmsteads) scattered in the forest connected by a network of paths. These clearings in the Amazon, ranging from 1/2 to 15 ha, are the centre from which three to five rubber trails radiate into the forest. It takes approximately 100-125 ha of forest to create a single rubber trail about 6 km long. The trails define a 20m extractive forest strip, representing approximately 10% of the total forest, and they maximise encounters with the most lucrative species. Extractivists buy and sell the usage rights to these trails, allowing those who depend on more intense extractive activities to expand their pasture and cropland onto additional holdings without breaking the 10% deforestation rule that exists in the Reserves. The colocaçao and its trails form a fluid property system defined by its trees rather than by fixed polygons in Euclidean space (Vadjumec and Rocheleau 2009, 3) (Kainer and Duryea 1992, 411).
The interrelationship between the new infrastructure that is being deployed in the Amazon and the RESEXs is an opportunity to hybridise the postwar disarticulated pattern of extraction-mercantilism and the hierarchical networks of sustainable use of the forest resources. The remoteness of the Amazonian communities and their infrastructure deficiencies have, in the past, caused quite high extraction and production costs. However, new networks of IIRSA infrastucture and the strategic interest in bio-prospecting and company-community agreements in some sectors – mainly cosmetics and pharmaceuticals – will make these costs irrelevant when compared to the benefits received, both monetary and in terms of public image.
The role of the Amazonian forest in macro-ecological processes, such as the water cycle and the balance of gases that affect global climate, should be a reason strong enough to make conservation profitable. However, the RESEX model of light and connected decentralised extraction reveals new ways of re-imagining the Amazonian hinterland to achieve a more integral and sustainable relationship across production, infrastructure, landscape, urbanism and local knowledge, able to compete in the global capitalist economy.
bibliography
Browder, John D and Brian J Godfrey. Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, development, and globalization of the Brazilian Amazon. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997
Fearnside, Philip M. ‘Extractive Reserves in Brazilian Amazonia’. BioScience 39 (June 1989): 387-393
Kainer, Karen A., and Mary L. Duryea. ‘Tapping Women’s Knowledge: Plant Resource in Extractive Reserves, Acre, Brazil’. Economic Botany 46, no. 4 (1992): 408-425
Marchese, Daniela. Eu entro pela perna direita: espaco, representacao e identidade do seringueiro no Acre. Rio Branco: EDUFAC, 2005.
Vadjumec, Jacqueline M and Dianne Rocheleau. ‘Beyond Forest Cover: Land Use and Biodiversity in Rubber Trail Forests of the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve’. Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009).
