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. 3 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).
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1 Browder and Godfrey 1997, pp55-82 2 Fearnside 1989, p389 3 Vadjumec and Rocheleau 2009, p3; Kainer and Duryea 1992, p411
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