Amazon Rainforest, Explanations for Erosion in Amazon - Essay Example

[Supervisor Amazon Rainforest A effect of deteriorating environments, hazards present a threat to people worldwide and to their forecast for development. Alarming accounts of hazards often evoke the commonness of human concern about deterioration. Yet a growing body of studies suggests differences in peoples views of the nature of environmental deterioration and its relation to growth. From water pollution in Boulder, Colorado, to deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, the causes of environmental decline tend to be perceived differently. In many cases, distinct groups of people and institutions have drawn on contrasting perceptions of cause as they try to shape policies and programs dealing with the environmental impacts of development. Yet the importance of perceptual (emic-type) differences among social groups and progressive institutions has not been addressed in the growing corpus of work worried with environment-development issues. The present study examines miscellaneous perceptions of the causes of soil corrosion among inhabitants and institutions in Amazon Basin. According to recent accounts, soil erosion in the Amazon "heartland" and several other flat terrain regions of Brazilian Amazon Basin constitutes a unhelpful environmental hazard that degrades farm and grazing lands and increases flooding, desertification, and dust storms. Estimates indicate that 64 percent, or 790 square kilometres, of the land surface in Amazon is at least reasonably eroded, and approximations of annual soil erosion vary between 50 and 150 tons per hectare, well above rates of soil formation. These figures indicates an erosion dilemma that exceeds even the harsh national situation: a recent report released by the Brazilian Ministry of Peasant Agriculture and Ranching (RACA), and published in two major newspapers, estimates that between 35 and 41 percent of the country at present display moderate or extreme soil erosion. For many people and institutions in Brazil, soil erosion has become an issue of considerable alarm. Articulated perceptions (discourses) of the causes of soil erosion assess here include three groups of residents and institutions in Brazil: government institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), peasants in their individual perspectives, and rural trade unions. Each group has articulated concern about the recent erosion dilemma, its impacts and possible solutions. The articulated perceptions typical of each group are represented in informal accounts made in 1991 and in published and unpublished documents. These were assembled in field research undertaken in July 1990 and between February and December 1991. The present study, apart from where indicated, is based on personal notes and comments, including conversations. The research topic addressed in this study resembles the "perception of natural hazards" (de Janvry 396) tradition in human geography, but integrates major reformulations by building on three criticisms posed in previous critiques of the "perception of natural hazards" (LeBaron 201) tradition and by advancing two additional perspectives. In terms of previous reformulations: (1) As distinct from the "naturalness of hazards," (LeBaron 203) the creation, or at least the worsening, of many hazards is anthropogenic, with soil erosion clearly fitting the latter characterization. (2) Whereas traditional research did not consider in depth the historical, social, or political contexts of hazards, the present study emphasizes the contextual character of soil erosion and constructs the problem within a regional spatial scale (the Amazon region) and a historical time frame (primarily since 1970, with minor references to periods as early as the sixteenth century). Near-exclusive focus on individuals in traditional research often diverts attention from social forces conditioning hazardous situations and the hazard-related behaviour of people. The present study redresses this underemphasise by delimiting groups, each with a characteristic viewpoint on the causes of soil erosion, shaped by social and political economic forces related to development. In addition, the present study proposes two additional bases for the consideration of environmental hazards. First, it focuses attention on the personal views of soil erosion expressed by local inhabitants during informal conversations, thereby departing significantly from the "perceptions of natural hazards" tradition. The traditional approach examined artefacts of perception, at first focusing on textual and graphic depictions by scientists, scholars, explorers, writers, and artists. As the approach concentrated on present-day problems, standardized questionnaires, in some cases similar to psychological testing instruments, were adopted. Applied to contemporary settings during a six-year research effort in 24 countries, the investigators relied on such methods as sentence completion tests and choice questionnaires. Ensuing criticisms showed those methodologies to be ethnocentric, narrowly scientific, obsessed with normal-type behaviour, and geared toward technocratic management. Efforts at representing views of local peoples subsequently diminished in the "perceptions of natural hazards" tradition. In the present study, personal views on the causes of soil erosion in Amazon were gained through open-ended conversation with local inhabitants. This approach partly enabled Amazon peasants "to speak for themselves," a rhetorical strategy referred to as giving "voices to the voiceless" (Hewitt 231). By representing numerous "little voices" speaking about environmental deterioration, this study reworks the methodological and epistemological foundations of earlier studies that attributed roles only to relevant "great actors and subjects" (Hewitt 234) (the nation-state, leaders of political parties, government officials), a casting of social life and history that has remained almost unchallenged until recently. The present study, in contrast, sought perceptions on erosion causes articulated in conversation and during open-ended interviews in the local language (Quechua) with the "little voices” of 34 inhabitants. Taped and transcribed with their consent, our 30 to 90 minute dialogues furnished a basis for understanding personal perspectives. The second conceptual basis proposed in this study concerns the relation between articulated perceptions of soil erosion and social power steering development in Amazon. It, too, departs from the traditional approach toward "perceptions of natural hazards." Discourses on the causes of erosion are seen here not as mere reflections of experience, culture, and development history in the region, but instead are recognized as constitutive of past and present power relations. Articulated perceptions of soil erosion, elucidated through the theoretical perspective of Giddens (1979), figure into even broader concerns. Contention, resistance, and accommodation evident in these viewpoints have been situated by the three groups within wide-ranging beliefs about development, modernization, and conservation and, no less importantly, about the related roles of the peasantry, the state, and development agencies (including nongovernmental organizations). As well as contrasting viewpoints between the three groups, viewpoints on erosion within each group have rarely coalesced in unvarying or harmonious accord. The main focus of this study lies in similarities and differences among and within the major explanations of soil erosion expressed in Amazon since 1970. During this period, similar viewpoints expounded by distinct groups have been crucial in justifying conservation policies related to development programs. The first noteworthy similarity matched the majority of development institutions and many peasants in their personal perspectives, with both groups attributing the causes of soil erosion exclusively to peasant behaviour. A similar emphasis, although implicit, probably lay behind the absence of the erosion dilemma among issues addressed by rural trade unions prior to the mid-1980s. This widely shared explanation was at first uncontested. Yet it eventually confronted a second, and quite distinct, group of viewpoints on the causes of soil erosion emerging among younger peasants. Forming personal perspectives under distinct environmental, social, and political circumstances, many young peasants sought to identify the political and economic conditions of worsened soil erosion and rural underdevelopment. Young peasants extended their personal discourses on the causes of soil erosion into the broad-based social movement represented by revitalized rural trade unions. Unlike earlier positions, recent trade-union explanations of the erosion dilemma have considered the extra-regional political economy together with concerns based on local concepts of space and time. Explanations for Erosion in Amazon The long-term history of soil erosion in Amazon resembles that of other highland regions in present-day Brazilian Amazon Basin. Covering 38 percent of the national territory, highland landscapes were centres of political power and population prior to invasion and conquest in the fourteenth century by the Altiplano-based Aymara. Subsequently Amazon became an agricultural heartland for the Cuzco-based Inca, who organized more than 14,000 agricultural workers on state farms producing economic surpluses. Although the number of agriculturalists in Amazon decreased with the onset of Spanish rule, colonial policy of the Spaniards nonetheless pressured inhabitants to provision agricultural goods and labourers in general and for crown mining centres such as Potosi in particular. The same economic orientation persisted following political independence of Brazilian Amazon Basin in 1825. While peasant agriculturalists in Amazon were able to gain land at the expense of large landlords in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intensified production caused environmental deterioration. As early as the 1920s, observers noted the unwelcome spread of deforested and eroded expanses where once there had been productive range and agricultural land. Yet aggravated soil erosion in Amazon did not draw the attention of government officials responsible for policy on rural land use until the mid- twentieth century because of several factors. For one, Brazilian Amazon Basin and other Latin American states differed from Asia and Africa insofar as the colonial government had not established agencies for soil conservation. Moreover, once independent in 1825, the Brazilian state was weak and chronically unstable. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, governments in Brazilian Amazon Basin permitted international assistance in agricultural planning and development, provided particularly by the United States, which sought to influence Brazilian political and economic policy. Involved directly with Brazilian agriculture at least as early as 1943, the United States Department of Agriculture chose Amazon sites for several projects aimed at modernization. The agricultural projects implemented by the USDA and other United States agencies through the mid-1960s addressed neither soil erosion nor conservation. The development institutions of the Brazilian government also paid little attention to worsening soil erosion. Although the national Agrarian Reform Law of 1953 listed natural resource conservation among six fundamental objectives, this legal statute did not guarantee action. In fact, a review of the reform law 15 years later concluded that the government devoted little attention to environmental conservation and allocated even less fiscal support. The apparent failure of the decree on environmental conservation accords with the emphasis of reform policies that overall favoured commercial agriculture on the relatively flat, fertile, and well- watered alluvial soils of the lowlands. Nearly 300,000 inhabitants of the highlands received land titles through the 1953 agrarian reform statute, but they gained few other benefits. Most development incentives benefited large-scale agriculture in Santa Cruz, where large farmers and ranchers, granted 60 percent of the land adjudicated in the agrarian reform, expanded crop and livestock production several fold under the added impetus of unprecedented credit and price policies. Highland agriculture, on the other hand, received little stimulus, and even policies and projects designated for agricultural development in the highlands tended mostly to benefit large land holders cultivating irrigated bottomland tracts.. Beginning in the 1960s, a number of academic researchers and scholarly observers have given considerable attention to soil erosion in Brazilian Amazon Basin. Geographer David Preston, carrying out field work during 1966 and 1967 on a multi-agency project, found invigorated gully incisions due to accelerating soil loss. Subsequent research organized through the U. S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) decried damaging erosion throughout much of the next decade. Many Brazilian learned of the erosion dilemma through a popular and insightful book entitled Brazilian Amazon Basin: The Despoiled Country. Similar warnings were sounded with the publication of The Wasted Country: The Ecological Crisis in Brazilian Amazon Basin, while a large international audience was introduced to the Amazon Inhabitants soil erosion crisis in Losing Ground. By the mid-1970s, soil erosion in Brazilian Amazon Basin had indeed been widely publicized at home and abroad. As awareness grew in the region during the 1970s and 1980s, three prominent perspectives on the erosion situation could be identified: those of governmental and nongovernmental institutions; those of peasants in their personal perspectives; and those of rural trade unions. Development Institutions: Blaming the Peasants The development institutions of the Brazilian government did little to support soil conservation despite the accumulating accounts of catastrophic erosion in Amazon and other highland regions. None of several governments ruling during the 1970s and 1980s established a national policy or program on soil conservation, a source of consternation for various consultants contracted by the United States. When agencies in the national government did assess soil erosion, they blamed the perceived backwardness of peasant farmers and herders. A report on "Renewable Natural Resources" by the Ministry of Peasant Agriculture and Ranching, for instance, claimed that the primary cause of soil erosion could be found in a failure of land users to employ modern techniques. Such reports asserted that the transfer of proper tools and techniques to ill-equipped and erosion-inducing peasants would stem erosion. Market signals and articulation of the peasant economy with agricultural businesses, it was thought, would induce the necessary innovations and transfer modern technologies. But capacity of the peasant sector in Amazon to generate market demand for modern technologies declined steadily during the 1980s, and agribusiness integration remained restricted to small areas within the overall peasant economy. National economic restructuring implemented since August 1985, in accord with a neo-liberal model recommended by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, dashed remaining hopes that market-induced technological change would aid in the reduction of soil erosion. With sect oral, social, and spatial inequalities engendered by new economic policies, highland production exerted little demand on input markets. Countering the prior paucity of government interest in erosion, some state agencies called for assistance programs to aid in the transfer of modern agricultural tools and techniques for conservation purposes. In a 1987 "National Meeting on Natural Renewable Resources," governmental institutions, together with representatives of major international aid agencies, recommended establishment of a national soil conservation program. Yet even as these national agencies expressed urgent need for conservation measures, such programs lay beyond government finances, and arguably outside its overall will, in the restructured economy. As the financial and administrative capacity of the Brazilian state weakened, soil conservation devolved almost entirely on international aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations. Beginning in the 1970s, these institutions advocated the provision of technical assistance to peasant producers. U.S. AID, for instance, sponsored various studies of soil erosion and conservation in peasant communities within larger projects aimed at "modernizing" Amazon Basin agriculture. The Swiss Technical Corporation supported a range of soil conservation programs, most notably in the form of small-scale forestry projects. By the late 1980s, over 300 NGOs had initiated assistance programs in Brazilian Amazon Basin and more than 80 clustered in Amazon, where many sponsored studies and small projects designed to abate erosion. Causes of soil erosion identified by other development institutions-- primarily international aid agencies and most NGOs--coincided, for the most part, with recent assessments by Brazilian government institutions described above. Peasant ignorance was assumed in numerous reports by international aid agencies and NGOs, such as the "Environmental Profile of Brazilian Amazon Basin," where the authors allege that "land users were not at all aware of the soil erosion problem". Other reports supported by U.S AID averred that worsened erosion originated in the "cultural backwardness" of rural inhabitants. In a similar indictment of peasant ignorance, the director of the Centre for Forestry Development (CDF) in Amazon held that "men cause soil erosion where they do not know better". Arising from this cultural unawareness, erosion-inducing techniques and technologies employed in land use were seen as the major problems. Designs of numerous soil conservation projects in Amazon have been based on assumptions of the inappropriate techniques and underlying ignorance of peasant farmers. Educational pamphlets and seminars intended for peasant farmers are common in these projects. Because the ignorance of farmers is assumed, the conservation projects frequently prescribe highly publicized solutions without assessing present practices or their rationales. Life circumstances that shape land use practices and alterations in them are largely ignored. The Peasants: Diverging Perspectives Amazon peasants also put the blame for soil. Erosion on themselves. But their viewpoints are distinct from those of development institutions in two ways: (1) many Amazon peasants reveal a partial understanding of soil erosion, utilizing a complex lexicon from the local language (Quechua) to discuss diverse Eros ional landforms, and relating erosion to soil types and agricultural and grazing practices; and (2) they invoke the supernatural world of religious beliefs and customs in the causation of soil erosion. In both regards, a distinguishing characteristic of peasant perceptions of soil erosion is the vivid sense of prolonged historical time and local space. Historical illustration of these characteristics is found in judicial depositions dealing with peasant efforts to defend rights to land, water, and forest resources. Numerous records filed during the nineteenth century, currently housed in the Municipal Archive of Amazon, indicate that the distinct temporal and spatial aspects of contemporary perspectives on erosion were frequently expressed. For example, in 1832 Isidoro Ayllita, a local authority in the Amazon countryside (the Cacique of Colcapirgua), defended his rights to irrigate with waters of the river Collpa. Ayllita justified his right on the basis of traditional use: "we have possessed these waters of the Collpa since time immemorial . . . and we have used them continuously . . . since the creation of the world". Similar to concepts expressed by many present-day environmentalists, Ayllita argued that sustained use over time evidenced his propriety. By referring to various local places, he rendered a highly personal and familiar knowledge of the resource. A personalized and long-term view of resources continues to infuse conversational accounts offered by Amazon peasants. In our discussions, most attributed erosion to the increased frequency and intensity of torrential downpours, referred to as "crazy rains". This may seem to blame nature, but the ultimate responsibility for "crazy rains" was in fact seen as personal. Neglect of ritual obligations toward the main non- Christian deity -- the climate-controlling "Earth Mother"-- brought on recent worsening of "crazy rains." As 35-year-old Leocardia said: When I was a child my parents made offerings to the "Earth Mother" [Pachamama], they cooked special foods that they buried in the soil along with maize beer [aqha]. They did all this so that they would be looked on favourably by her. But today these practices arent common although we still make offerings on Carnival and on Saint Johns Day and when we start to plant. But its less than before; perhaps for this reason shes angry with us and maybe thats why there are so many "crazy rains". (Larson 35) Personalized reciprocity is envisioned as the basis for obligations to the "Earth Mother." This customary reciprocity appears to form the basis of a peasant conservation ethic, according to indigenous anthropologists in Amazon. Yet, while soil erosion is often attributed to ritual neglect, this transgression is not the sole origin of divine wrath and subsequent erosion. Transgressions in the realm of social reciprocity are considered by some Amazon peasants as provoking the wrath of the earth deity, the heightened onset of "crazy rains," and ensuing soil erosion. According to this causal sequence, erosion originates in the breakdown of customary social rights and obligations. Works Cited Adams, K. 1980. 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On the poverty of theory: Natural hazards research in context. In Interpretations of calamity, ed. K. Hewitt, 231-62. Boston: Allen and Unwin. International Institute for Development and the Environment (IIDE) and United States Agency for International Development (U.S. AID). 1986. Kates, R. W., and Burton, I. 1986. Geography, resources, and environment: Selected writings of Gilbert F. White, vols. 1-2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Larson, B. 1988. Colonialism and agrarian transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, 1550-1900. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. LeBaron, A.; Bond, L. K.; Aitken P. S.; and Michaelsen, L. 1979. Explanation of the Bolivian highlands grazing-erosion syndrome. Journal of Range Management 32 (3):201-08. Read More