| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Os historiadores e os rios: natureza e ruína na Amazônia brasileira [The Historians and the Rivers: Nature and Ruin in the Brazilian Amazon]. By Victor Leonardi. Brasilia: Editora Universidade de Brasilia, 1999. Published in Portuguese only. 270 pp. Illustrations, references, index. $11.75.
Much of the serious scholarship done in Brazil today ponders the question of growth: how a big, dynamic country got that way, and how it can achieve its oft-quoted dream as "the country of the future." So why would a distinguished historian at the University of Brasilia make a meticulous study of a town that lived for three hundred years, and then sputtered and died?	1
The town's name was Airño, the successor to a community founded in 1694 as the first European settlement on the Rio Negro, tributary to the Amazon. For much of its existence, Airño was the major commercial hub for a vast area of rain forest. But in 1985 its last human inhabitant gave up and left. Today, trees and vines are reclaiming its crumbling churches, warehouses, homes and commercial establishments. Only wild animals traverse its once-proud Occidental Street.	2
Why is the story of Airño important? On a theoretical level, historian Victor Leonardi weaves a wealth of historical detail to illustrate themes of continuity vs. discontinuity and the concept of extinction as applied to human endeavors. At the same time, he challenges us to sharpen our thinking about key conservation and policy issues being debated in the Amazon and in the tropics worldwide.	3
One such issue is the concept of the extractive reserve, an area where local people can harvest natural products under carefully designed management systems. This seemingly simple idea touches on what Leonardi calls "the most dramatic questions that Brazilians are examining in recent years, [which are] whether or not a harmonious, self-sustaining relationship is possible... between man and nature in the Amazon."	. . .

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