“Without Regard to Season:” The Question of Extractivism in Modern Amazonia

• In Event: Frameworks for Speculation: Science, Economy, and the Uncertain Environment

Abstract

The idea of a spontaneous and uncontrolled nature has been an organizing concept in hegemonic visions about Amazonia. A paragon of “the tropics,” the world’s largest rainforest is often represented as a spectacularly productive but chaotic environment. During the nineteenth century, the emergence of nation-states, the advent of steam navigation, and the expansion of global commerce into the region added to these old tropes preoccupations about unexploited resources and geopolitical danger. The first strong burst of incorporation of Amazonian territories into the national economies of the young South American postcolonial countries came through the Amazon Rubber Boom of c. 1850-1920. The bonanza created by wild rubber tapping and exports allowed for the expansion of infrastructure, but, from the perspective of national rulers, it also created challenges. Emerging regional elites acquired extraordinary power, controlling enormous expanse of territory, often ruling viciously over Indigenous peoples. International conflicts erupted between neighboring nations, as the extractive frontier was ever-expanding, and national borders were at best porous. Foreign middlemen controlled critical economic sectors. Above all, the economics of the extractive boom were volatile and unpredictable, dependent on external market fluctuations: when the British established rubber plantations in their Asians colonies in the 1910s, they put Amazonian wild rubber out of the market, and Amazonia went bust. The reliance on cycles of extraction led to economic uncertainty. Like in Latin America as a whole, since the 1920s and especially after the Great Depression, in Amazonia the answer to this economic uncertainty was not to stop extracting, but to move from tapping wild forest produce towards farms and plantations; not to end mining, but to create industries to process mineral wealth; to turn cities from commercial entrepôts to development poles connected by highways. This paper explores this distinctively Amazonian critique of extractivism and the practices it unleashed.

Author

• Adrián Lerner, Churchill College, University of Cambridge