Mauro William Barbosa de Almeida

Conservation and Development in Amazonian Extractive Reserves: The Case of Alto Jurua´

Abstract Extractive reserves constitute an innovative approach to match conservation and development objectives, which were originally envisaged as part of a land struggle by forest dwellers in Brazil. In spite of the ideas popularity and the attempts to apply the concept to different tropical regions, there has been little analysis of the combined conservation and development performance of extractive reserve programs. We present a detailed analysis of deforestation and demographic and socioeconomic changes in Alto Juruá, the first extractive reserve created in Brazil in 1990. Forest cover has remained fairly stable. Population has declined slightly, with some internal displacements. The cash economy base has shifted from the original rubber production to a diversified portfolio of agriculture and livestock, and there has been a dramatic rise in nonagrarian income. We conclude that the Reserve represents a very dynamic setting with positive conservation and development outcomes during its first decade.

Direitos à floresta e ambientalismo: seringueiros e suas lutas

The Amazonian rubber-tappers were invisible in the national scene in the 1970s. They started to organize themselves as an agrarian movement early in the 1980s and in the 1990s they obtained national recognizance, having the first Extractive Reserves being implemented right after Chico Mendess assassination. Thus, these peasants of the tropical forest went from invisibility to paradigms of sustainable, participatory development in just two decades. This article narrates this historical episode by studying the trajectories of leaders, as well as the strategies employed by them in order to obtain visibility for the social movement both in national and international scale, connecting their agrarian claims to environmental issues of more general interest.

Local Struggles with Entropy: Caipora and Other Demons

The goals of sustainable development and of climate-change oriented policies, while important, are not the only, or the main agenda for anthropological activity. The specific contribution of anthropology to sustainable development lies in its peculiar ability to describe the diversity of human worlds and their interaction with non-human modes of existence. This task involves an active role in sustaining and promoting the production of diversity as well as the search for principles of justice which cut across different worlds.