Can Extractive Reserves Save The Rainforest

This title was first published in 2003: Despite their growing political significance, the linkages between local resource management and the global political economy are often poorly understood. This book addresses these linkages in a grounded analysis of extractive reserves : areas in Brazil set aside for local populations who depend on natural resources for their livelihood. Extractive reserves are the result of the struggle of the rubber tappers for control over their natural resources and worldwide concern with the conservation of the Amazon Rainforest. The author examines their significance for Brazil as a pioneering legislative and policy initiative to combine conservation with productive use of natural resources, to recognize common property rights to natural resources, and to support traditional populations’ modes of production. Extractive Reserves in Brazilian Amazonia examines the formation and institutional sustainability of the reserves, and in so doing provides a valuable insight into the relationship between local institutions and the wider socio-political and economic context with regard to forest management.

From the Introduction: Hundreds of South American organizations are defending the Amazon and its inhabitants, but most do not even know there are people in the North deeply concerned about the issue. Those who do know have their own questions: "How can we get support around the world? Is it true that North American and European organizations get millions of dollars to save the rainforests? How do they spend all that money? Who are the people behind these groups like the Rainforest Action Network? What are other organizations doing in the rest of the Amazon?" This Action Guide was born of the need to address just such questions. It is designed and an organizing tool to help people and groups who are about to plunge into Amazonian work for the first time. The bulk of the guide is a directory of more than 250 organizations who are working on the issue, from the most remote parts of the jungle to the lobbying offices of Washington and London. But the Action Guide is more than addresses and fax numbers. Unless the social and political complexities of life in the Amazon are understood, all the international campaigns and good intentions in the world will not keep a single tree standing. This guide, then, spotlights the grassroots movements of Amazon's indigenous peoples, rubber tappers, and other forest dwellers. No other people have worked so hard and as long to defend the forest. No other people understand as well the meaning-and importance-of sustainable development and conservation. With this in mind, the Action Guide staff, for the first time, asked Amazonian grassroots organizations what they wanted the world to know about their goals, strategies, and special needs to make their work more effective. The information for more than 100 profiles was compiled from a series of questionnaires and from interviews conducted by Monti Aguirre and Glenn Switkes during their filming of AMAZONIA: Voices from the Rainforest, a documentary for which this publication is intended as a companion guide. Some 150 activist organizations working on Amazonian issues in Latin America, Europe, North America, and in the Asia/Pacific region, as well as resource groups of funders, researchers, and technical specialists responded to similar questionnaires.

The international perspective for this book is the unprecedented level of concern over deforestation, recognized by the meeting of world leaders at the 1992 Earth Summit, in Rio do Janeiro, and culminating in the appoint ment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF), under the auspices of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. The wide range of issues covered by the authors in this volume reflects the breadth of the interna tional debate, from national policies and activist campaigning, through eco nomic and social objectives, to the sustainable management of forest and soil resources. Since the conservation campaigns of the 1980s, the focus of international concern has widened from tropical rain forests to all forest formations, in all regions, with increased recognition of global values and common responsibil ities. However, while forest cover in some temperate countries is increasing, irrational deforestation, at historically unprecedented levels of damage to biodiversity and to other environmental values, remains most acute in tropi cal countries, where the need to use the natural resources for sustainable development is greatest, and the capability weakest. While accepting the urgency of the situation, and the need for greater coherence of action at a global level, the 1997 report of the IPF to the UN Commission emphasized the powers and responsibilities of national governments, and the importance of National Forest Programmes, but with the fuller participation of local communities, and with enhanced access to international assistance.

-- Thomas Lovejoy, The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.

Essential reading for undergraduate students of conservation biology and living natural resource management.

In ‘Reclaiming Nature’, leading environmental thinkers from across the globe explore the relationship between human activities and the natural. This is a bold and comprehensive text of major interest to both students of the environment and professionals involved in policy-making.