Cultural Legacies in Western Landscapes
As promised [here], we have posted (in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: History of Western Landscapes) a recent report by Michael J. Heckenberger and co-workers entitled The legacy of cultural landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon: implications for biodiversity [here].
Heckenberger’s research indicates that Amazonia is not a primordial wilderness but instead has been home to sophisticated civilizations for thousands of years. Those “polities” have significantly altered the Amazonian environment and added to (not detracted from) the biodiversity found there.
Research from the southern margins of closed tropical forest, in the headwaters of the Xingu River, are highlighted as an example of constructed nature in the Amazon. In all cases, human influences dramatically altered the distribution, frequency and configurations of biological communities and ecological settings. …
The idea that any sustained human presence, even indigenous peoples with simple tools, is destructive or even invasive of biodiversity, is not only questionable in many cases but also backwards, since it was cultural forces, in significant part, that were responsible for patterns of biodiversity in the first place.
The implications are that dehumanizing the Amazon would be destructive to exactly the ecological diversity that popular Western culture is so enamored with. And equally tragic is the discounting and elimination of the native cultures that shaped the landscape in the first place.
That Amazonian landscapes are richly historical and constructed makes them no less natural or interesting, or tainted in terms of biodiversity. Many aspects of indigenous and folk resource management provide ready-made alternatives to imported and far more destructive development strategies and technologies. As Laurance et al. (2001, p. 439) suggest: ‘Rather than rampant exploitation, an alternative and far superior model for Amazonian development is one in which agricultural land is used intensively rather than extensively and ‘high-value’ agroforestry is valued and perennial crops are favoured over fire-maintained cattle pastures and slash-and-burn farming plots.’ Indeed, this is precisely what it seems some indigenous groups were doing. Indigenous practices limit deforestation and lasting partnerships between indigenous and rural peoples in the region will maintain standing forests and potentially even restore tropical forest degradation (Lamb et al. 2005; Nepstad et al. 2005). …
Heckerberger’s conclusions, like Susanna Hecht’s [here], are that native cultures and their sustainable agricultural practices are essential elements in protection and conservation of Amazonia, from a socio-political perspective as well as an ecological one. Our landscapes do not benefit from dehumanization, which is an exploitation (of environment and people) just as much as wholesale deforestation by axe or fire.
The new paradigm thinking is that humanity cannot and should not be divorced from the landscape. Wise stewardship, informed by history and environmental science, is that which incorporates traditional ecological knowledge and native and rural claims to land.
[A]s a hotspot in terms of genes, species and the overall ecosystem(s), as well as in terms of local, national and world heritage, issues of human agency, dynamic change in coupled human–environmental systems and human rights loom large in questions of conservation or sustainable development. In this regard, understanding indigenous systems of management, including those that are only or largely apparent archaeologically, may hold critical keys to future approaches to land use and land rights.
