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Deforestation
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Deforestation has been a feature of Amazonian landscape since long before the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s. Indeed, no forest in the region can be considered “virgin” in the sense of being unaffected by past human activities. Prior to decimation of their populations by disease and violence from the Europeans, indigenous peoples maintained extensive areas of agriculture and they enriched the surrounding forest with useful species such as Brazil nuts. These human influences would be merged with forest regrowth during the lapse of three centuries before non-tribal populations reached levels sufficient to begin exerting significant pressure on the forest. Contrary to the claims of some, this history of past human disturbance in no way diminishes the rationale for conserving Amazonian forests today. Likewise, the exuberant forests that now stand on formerly cleared areas do not justify the myth of a future recovery-that forests being cleared today may one day regrow to their former stature.
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Deforestation is the complete removal of a forest ecosystem and conversion of the land to another type of landscape. It differs from clear-cutting, which entails complete removal of all standing trees but leaves the soil in a condition to regrow a new forest if seeds are available. Humans destroy forests for many reasons. American Indians burned forests to convert them to grasslands that supported big game animals. Early settlers cut and burned forest to convert them to croplands. Between 1600 to 1909, European settlement decreased forest cover in the United States by 30%.
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Deforestation has had a significant impact on indigenous cultures too. Six to nine million indigenous people inhabited the Brazilian rain forest in 1500. Today less than 1% of Brazil's 177 million people are full-blooded indigenous Indians (Source: US State Department). The loss of indigenous cultures destroys a wealth of knowledge about the environment in which they lived.
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Deforestation has a multitude of uses that are not being given enough publicity. Like, for example, getting rid of all those damn trees near that Amazon river allowed a lot of people who never knew how to farm to try make a living out of growing crops on a land that never knew how to grow crops. They eventually got frustrated and moved out, leaving the land bare, desolate, even poisoned with the dozen fertilizers they tried, but experience matters, right? They told others, who promptly ignored them and continue the cycle to this day.
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Deforestation in Amazonia has proceeded with a succession of different forces in different periods. The Amazon rubber boom lasted from the invention of the pneumatic tire in the 1880s to the beginning of commercial rubber production from plantations in Southeast Asia in 1914. During this period “agricultural colonies” such as those in the 35,000-square-kilometer (km2) Zona Bragantina near Belém, in the state of Pará, supplied the rapidly growing urban centers, and, to a certain extent, the population engaged full-time in exploitation of the natural rubber trees in the Amazonian interior. Much of the agricultural land was abandoned to secondary forest when the rubber boom collapsed. More recent clearing surges occurred with the opening of the Belém-Brasília Highway in the late 1950s, and especially the Transamazon Highway in 1970 (the event often taken as the beginning of the “modern” period of Amazonian clearing). The Transamazon Highway was settled by small farmers, many of whom were brought from other parts of Brazil by the federal government and settled in official colonization projects.
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Deforestation in the Amazon began in the late 50s with the construction the Belem-Brasilia Highway (Moran 1993). But it was in the 80s that deforestation reached the highest rates. The assertion by J. Terborgh (in Place 1993) that population growth was the chief cause of deforestation, has been deemed inaccurate in repeated occasions. Moran (1993) cites a plan from 1966 that gave priority to large-scale operators in the occupation of the Amazon, as the main responsible for deforestation in the Southeastern Amazon. This initiative made possible for investors not to pay taxes to the Federal Government, to receive a three dollar rebate for each dollar invested, and to keep all four dollars and capital gains tax-free (Moran 1993). In a posterior paper, Moran and others propose a study to quantify the effects of policy shifts in deforestation, and to determine what forms of credit are associated with more and less destructive policies (Moran et al., 1994).
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Deforestation