Guest Entry: A short story on Brazil's colonial forests

By: Diogo Cabral

Are there any positive aspects of deforestation? Well, since humanity spent most of its time on Earth devastating forests, there must be! Historians tends to be very careful when judging past human actions. Indeed, for pre-modern humans, the forest had to be used. We can imagine the astonishment with which those men and women would react to the idea of preserving the forest. With the exception of a tiny intellectual elite – in fact, only a small portion within that elite – the conversion of forest was not seen as something bad.

Most people conceived of clearing and burning the forest as the inevitable progress of the great human "home". Snakes, scorpions, spiders, mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, ants and other forest dwellers can be just minor annoyances when one has nylon tents, rubber boots, mosquito repellent, and antidotes to poisons; but not when one’s only weapons are scythes, firebrands and the faith in the Creator. Clearing the forest was not necessarily "destruction", but a natural transition from a dark, messy and dangerous space to a lighted, orderly and reliable place.

In fact, when one speaks of forest destruction or degradation, one misses much of the bigger picture. The “declensionist narrative” – as it is known in the historiographical community – flows in an one-way street: this kind of account tells the story of the decaying forest or that the forest environment was devastated but misses the wider implications. More fruitful is to view deforestation as a two-way street or, to use more philosophical terms, as a dialectical process.

Deforestation is not only an effect suffered by the forest because the deforesters themselves change along the way; conceptions about nature and abundance were transformed; techniques were modified and capital was created; cultural identities and boundaries were recreated; social inequalities were softened or hardened; the world, after all, is hardly the same after deforestation. This is not to say that nothing bad stemmed from past deforestation or that “this is the way things had to happen”. The environmental-dialectical vantage point only stresses that historical events do not occur in isolation but in networks or totalities. It's a more comprehensive approach to write history.

This conception can help us understand more completely the implications of different uses of the forest in the past. Of special importance is the study of the fortunes of the forests of less developed countries like Brazil. “Deforestation is a tragedy”, wrote the American historian Shawn Miller, “deforestation is an unmitigated disaster if little or no benefit is taken in the process”. He was referring to the process of economic appropriation of Brazil’s coastal forests. Unlike the United States or Canada, Brazil did not develop a vibrant timber industry in the colonial period. Most of the tropical rain forest was burned and not timbered. Colonists burned the woods to obtain biomass ashes, a powerful fertilizer for the soil. In fact they obtained huge profits raising sugarcane using this method.

At the end of eighteenth century, the Portuguese America, with half the settled area of British America, exported roughly the same value in commodities. The problem – although not a problem to the colonists themselves at the time – is that sugar plantations generated less economic linkages (or development) than timber exploitation. Because of the gigantic land lots, only the later sugar plantations were driven to market to obtain firewood. So small demand did not encourage competition and entrepreneurship in the timber sector. So capital investment and technological advancement in the milling industry were not present. So the production of iron – an indispensable raw material to the building of sawmills – was not encouraged inside the colony. And so on.

It must be said, however, that the small commercial harnessing of the Brazilian timber was not only due to the workings of sugar plantations. The forest itself posed serious difficulties to the establishment of a staple timber economy. The main problem was that, unlike temperate hardwoods and conifers, tropical hardwood species are pretty much scattered across the landscape. It is very difficult to find a cluster of, let’s say, rosewood. An all extractive economy, by definition, is built on a homogeneous basis of natural resources. In fact, all early modern extractive economies were organized upon large spatial concentrations of resources: animal skins, fish, wood and all kinds of "spice".

Standard products are especially important in international timber markets where demand in most cases is for very specific uses. Ironically, because of their greater wealth, the forests of the tropics provided very little incentive to commercial exploitation on a large scale.

Diogo Cabral is a visiting PhD student in Environmental History at UBC. He is visiting from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.