incremental growth indigenous knowledge hybrid industry sustainability resource extraction
ResEx the entropic landscape of the Amazon basin infrastructure | light extraction networks by víctor muñoz sanz
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. Reservas Extrativistas (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 ( Iniciativea para la Integración de la Infraestructura Regional Suramericana – 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. 1 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. 2 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 potential of being connected to the world economy. This is a
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