| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2

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."	4
When the Portuguese entered the Rio Negro in the seventeenth century, they brought with them a new cultural tool kit and links to the global economy that forever upset the presumed equilibrium the indigenous inhabitants had achieved with nature. From then on, extractivism meant producing commodities for the global market place: wood, oils extracted from various plants, "butter" rendered from turtles for lamp fuel, and medicinal products. Of course the Portuguese themselves did not do the extracting. That idea "never entered their minds," writes Leonardi. Rather, they used the labor of the indigenous people, treating them as another forest product to be "extracted" through slavery.	5
Predictably, the Portuguese misused the forest's resources and ultimately undermined their economic base. Their brutal treatment of the indigenous people, combined with devastating epidemics, decimated their indigenous labor force. The survivors fled back into the forest, which Leonardi points out was not, for them, "a step backward...but rather salvation." By the mid-nineteenth century, the area's population had fallen to less than it had been a century earlier. Meanwhile, destructive harvesting practices wiped out valuable plant species, caused a precipitous drop in the turtle population, and turned large areas of forest into fuel for steamboats. Airño was facing a crisis.	6
But Airño and the Rio Negro forests were to have one last economic fling. New rubber processing technologies made natural latex a valuable commodity, and the first two decades of the twentieth century saw Brazil emerge as the world's leading rubber producer. But then, plantations in Malaysia flooded the market with cheaper rubber, and Airño definitively entered what rural Brazilians call the "time of thin cattle."	7
Leonardi's analysis raises a second major issue relevant to conservation policy makers. The remains of Airño today sit on the margins of Jaú National Park. But while the town is depopulated, the forest is not. Some one thousand caboclo (mixed race) successors to the original indigenous people currently live in the park. This would be unthinkable in the United States. But in much of the tropics, people are allowed to remain in parks, either because it is too difficult or politically uncomfortable to remove them, or because they and their way of life are considered compatible with the aims of biodiversity protection. Leonardi repeatedly makes the point that the present Jaú National Park has a rich human history. It was never without people or their impacts on the natural environment. Is the presence of human settlements antithetical to the objectives of a protected area, or is it part of nature?	8
The story of Airño can be read at a number of different levels, most of them sad. Many would point the accusing finger at the evils of "civilization." But this is "absurd," writes Leonardi. What left Airño in ruins "was not western civilization—science, technology, art, literature, philosophy," he writes, "but the slave traders... and the representatives of a greedy and spendthrift belle époque." The actual reason for Airño's downfall, he concludes, was the "lack of civilization." Presumably, we now enjoy a greater degree of civilization, or at least have the benefit of more historical reflection. Unfortunately, Leonardi missed an opportunity to turn his insights into specific policy recommendations for conservationists and policy makers. How can today's extractive reserves avoid the spectacular failures of previous attempts at extractivism? How can the people living in Jaú National Park continue to live in harmony with their environment despite the cultural and economic pressures of the twenty-first century?	9
Despite these minor criticisms, Leonardi's story of Airño is a valuable addition to the literature illustrating the dialectical relationship between a population center and the region from which it draws its economic sustenance. It also is an example of a growing body of scholarship in developing countries on topics that deserves to be brought to the attention of readers in the English-speaking world.	10
Roger Hamilton is editor of the magazine of the Inter-American Development Bank. He reports and writes extensively on biodiversity conservation in Latin America.

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