The Fate of the Forest. - book reviews

This is the first of a whole forest of new books to look at the Amazon after the death of Chico Mendes, whose murder suddenly cast rubber tappers on center stage as the true guardians of the rain forest. After exploring what has made the Amazon such a hot topic lately - according to Hecht and Cockburn it is "the symbolic content of the dreams it ignites" - The Fate of the Forest lays out a clear, concise history of the political economy of the Amazon.

Popular myths of why the Amazon is going up in smoke are soundly debunked - it's not due to exporting cattle or timber, it's not because of multinationals, and it's not because of Brazil's huge debt. The authors show how the Brazilian military's dream of occupying the Amazon spawned a feeding frenzy of tax credits and incentives for deforestation for wealthy companies and individuals from the developed south of Brazil. But they take pains to clarify that fire is an essential part of tropical agriculture and that cattle can be a rational hedge against inflation for settlers and forest dwellers in an economy where banks mean nothing and money means less everyday.

Hecht and Cockburn also give a most accurate rendering of Brazil's grassroots struggle to save the Amazon, a fight more for justice than ecological preserves. They don't flinch at portraying Chico Mendes as the "extremely radical political militant" that he was as a rubber-tapper union organizer. It's a pity, though, that in their effort to reduce the hopes of the Amazon to "socialist ecology," the authors lean too heavily on a tiresome class analysis and, to my disappointment, invoke messianic Brazilian rebellion that ended in massacres in the past, as if they should be models for the fate of the forest. They leave me fearing for the new martyrs who will fall for the cause.

Fire is essential to the management of humid tropical forests for human purposes. Only an American generation brought up on the ursine caveats of Smoky the Bear would find anything odd about this. . .

The issue in the rainforest is not fire itself, but its purposes. Does its use in a particular instance inhibit regeneration, diminish the diversity of species and waste nutrients, or is it part of a process through which this diversity is enhanced, nutrients recaptured in new vegetation, and regeneration encouraged?

Land in the Amazon became a vehicle for capturing incentives, cheap credits, and itself assumed the form of a speculative instrument and an object of exchange rather than being an input into agriculture.

COPYRIGHT 1990 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group