• 4 – A kind of forest history has been written in North America in which the forest appears as raw material for the timber trade, nothing more. The forest is a living stockpile of wood.
  • This is how monzote treats cuba
• 5 – Forest history, rightly understood, is everywhere on this planet one of ex-ploitation and destruction. Humans reduce the natural world to “land-scape”—domesticated surroundings trimmed and shaped to fit some prac-tical use or conventional aesthetic, or else, more chilling still, to “space” desert plains steamrollered and built upon to consecrate an extremity of species narcissism.
  • 4
• 6 – The anchoring of events to dates and the insistence on chronology presume that penultimate and ultimate events foretoken a proximate, satisfactory resolution of the contradictions inherent in these events. Without this conviction—of the Second Coming, the realization of the idea of liberty, equality, and frater-nity, the triumph of bourgeois hegemony, the inevitability of socialist rev-olution, the establishment of a new economic or political order—histori-ans, even the “scientific” historians who sense a need to disguise their temptation to predict, lose the thread. What is to be made of a history that does not—cannot—make us rejoice in our prospects, that reflects so strikingly our improvidence and parasitism? 
• Many already view uneasily the proximate extinction of the forests of the world. Perhaps, to clarify such notions and respond to such concerns, a memoir of the destruction of a particular forest, shaming and damning though it be, may be a useful thing to have at hand. That, at least, has been the author’s intention.
  • 4
• 39 – swidden as a time-space ballet
  • 3 – and the way it mirrored the “natural” disturbance cycles (those that don’t involve human intervention) of forests (i.e. the collapse of several trees at once during a storm, creating a clearing in the canopy and, thus, an opportunity for a new growth cycle in the forest
• 87-88 – It contributed thousands of words to Brazilian Portuguese, especially the lexicon of the natural world. The Portuguese bestowed, by analogy the names of familiar European plants and animals upon some of the species of the Atlantic Forest, but the rest were received from the indigenes. Two-thirds of the common names of the trees of the Atlantic Forest and of nearly all of its animals are Tupi-Guarani in origin. Neo-Brazilians preserved the names of innumerable natural formations—geological, edaphic, vegetational—and of natural features—rivers, mountains, valleys, estuaries. Often modern-day Portu-guese place-names are translations of the original Tupi. There were signs of the continuing vivacity of this lingua franca along the forest frontier, possibly into the middle of the nineteenth century. Well might contempo-rary indigenous representatives claim legitimate rights to a land they named.
  • 1 – knowing nature through the labor of naming it
• Soares de Souza’ judgment on the leaf-cutters was also a lament for the colony of settlement: “If it weren’t for them, many parts of Spain [Por-tugal was then united with the Spanish crown], would be emptied in order to populate Brazil, for everything that one might want will grow in it, but this damnation prevents it, so that men lose their taste for planting any more than they must in order to survive on the land.
  • 2
• 152 – fathers habitually favored sons-in-law and younger sons in their bestowal of their properties in an attempt to stave off as long as possible the inevitable transfer of control of the family and its resources to the younger generation. Sons-in-law, often immigrants valued for their commercial links and indubitably white skins, were even less likely than younger sons to challenge the authority of the aging paterfamilias. Elder sons were in subtle ways obliged or encouraged to move on and establish themselves along the frontier, remote from the family homestead. This manner of transferring land rights assured that proprietors, from genera- tion to generation, remained strangers to the land, first outcasts and usurp- ers, then epigones and arrivistes.
  • 1 – no one “knew” the land, between the alienation of unusual patrimony mentioned above, or by virtue of it being cheaper to petition for a new allocation of forest to denude and plant, rather than to manage responsibly one’s current homestead, no one came to know the land they cultivated
• 162 – The ipecac trade did not long survive these interlopers because they culled the plant before it set seed, leading to its local extinction. The trade began to move to Mato Grosso in the 1830s. There it lasted more than a century, apparently because a more rational method of locating the plant was adopted: Instead of picking it in flower, the gatherers waited until it seeded. A certain bird (Lipaugus vociferans) that feeds on ipecac seeds and disperses them was then followed to ipecac patches.
  • 2 
• 217 – The rapid increase in value of land planted in coffee was another reason for speculation. The speculator typically invested in plant-ing only a modest advance, paid to a sharecropper, who brought his own slaves to the property and was also allowed to interplant subsistence crops and sell the first year’s coffee harvest. At the end of four years, the grove reverted to the owner, who could sell it for several times his initial outlay.
  • 3 – commodities speculation in synced to the natural cycle of coffee maturation – this cycle, and the swidden cycle, caused economic cycles to map onto spatial land-use changes
• 274 – It is clear that extensive ranching and agriculture were over-whelmingly the causes of the disappearance of the Atlantic Forest, even in its latter days, when means were available to extract its wood. The largest and most relentless of the loggers of northern Espfrito Santo, Rainol Grecco, accurately described the logger as “the foot soldier of the cattle rancher.
  • 3 – same thing that we heard in From Forests to Cane Fields, that ranching, not agriculture, was the final stage of the forest lifecycle
• 308 – Civilian conservationists were capable of exacerbating their hosts’ en-during suspicion of foreign interests, as one environmental agency official demonstrated: “Supra-national forces … exert every pressure to maintain the undeveloped countries in this stage,” an idea axiomatic at the school, to which he annexed the corollary that this was accomplished “through environmental control”—influencing their governments in the direction of no controls or of excessively sophisticated controls.
  • Co-control – conservation, or a lack thereof, a device by the industrialized nations to control and keep in their place the developing nations
• 312 – These measures were mainly intended to benefit paper-pulp manufacture, because growing domestic and world demand for that product was forecast.
  • 3 – more capitalist commodity speculation
• 362 – “woods” [mata] has connotations suggestive of disrespect for na-ture. The word is pejorative there; to say of a place that “There’s only woods” is to condemn it. In the Escola Superior de Agricul-tura of Vigosa it was common during the forties to hear people tell a student that he came from the “woods” and obtain the reply: “No, my land is all developed.” This meant that there were no more woods.
  • Co-control – control of the landscape to control one’s status
• 363 – Should not the history textbook approved by the Ministry of Educa-tion begin: “Children, you live in a desert; let us tell you how you have been disinherited” 
  • 4

1. Knowledge politics and labor: how did different groups and individuals know nature through their labor (a la Richard White)? How did different actors develop knowledge and skills and what kinds of contests emerged among them over how to intervene in non-human nature? Who gets to decide what landscapes and waterscapes are produced? What were the consequences of these contests for nature itself?

2. Human-non-human-nature relationship: how do people produce nature? what role does non-human nature play in these stories? Is it an actor, acted upon, co-production?

3. Relationship between time and space.

4. Declensionism: early environmental histories were often declensionist narratives, often about deforestation. How have these environmental historians of Latin America attempted to move beyond declensionism since the 1990s?

—- David Fletcher, Flood Control Freakology